“Portland Tugboat has posted a photo of another Google mystery barge on their Facebook page. On October 27, CNET reported that a similar barge was docked in the San Francisco Bay. “Is it a floating Google data center? A floating Google Glass store? Or something else altogether?” asked Daniel Terdiman, writing for the tech media website. The barge is docked at a former U.S. Navy station on Treasure Island. On October 26, Tom Bell, writing for the Portland Press Herald, reported “a four-story windowless building” docked in the Portland Harbor. “Its purpose and its owner’s identity have been kept secret.” Fred Burton, vice president of Stratfor and a former senior State Department official, described Google as “doing things the CIA cannot do,” according to documents acquired by Wikileaks.”
CAPTCHA kaput? Software cracks “are you human” test
An artificial intelligence company says their algorithm can solve CAPTCHAs — those distorted jumble of letters used to prove you're not a bot — with 90 percent accuracy.
Microsoft's Kinect motion sensor has transformed from a novel gaming controller to a valued tool for robotics, and now is helping to interpret sign language in real time.
Civil Liberties: The news that Angela Merkel’s phone has been wiretapped by the USA exposes the biggest wiretapping lie ever – that mass surveillance is targeted at catching terrorists and pedophiles. The German Chancellor is rightfully furious, and she should be furious on behalf of her citizens, too. Mass surveillance was never about terrorists or pedophiles: it is a tool of pure and raw domination.
With the exposure of German Chancellor Merkel’s phone being wiretapped by the US surveillance agencies, the mass surveillance has received yet another spotlight. This is welcome as it intensifies the discussion on civil liberties and the freedoms of speech, assembly, opinion, and the press – and how these freedoms need to carry over into the online environment.
To some extent, it is sad that it takes a personal insult against a leading politicians for something as grave as a threat to democracy itself to come to light, but still, here we are. The mass surveillance has been rolled out en masse without much protest, due to leading politicians smoothing over any worries by using worse scarewords, a common tactic.
We have frequently and repeatably been told that mass surveillance and wiretapping is necessary to “catch terrorists”. Pedophiles are also mentioned from time to time. This is a complete and utter lie.
Here is a really good assessment of what is happening to the world's fisheries. It will all be pretty familiar if you read SR regularly. But it is particularly thorough, and well grounded. For the most part it is not a happy story. (See: Healing the Seas – Acknowledging the Impact of Humans on the World Ocean).
Although too polemic this essay mirrors my thinking. Obamacare will be better than what proceeded it. But it is still profit based, it is an illness profit system, not a wellness based system. A single payer system that places wellness first will be much cheaper and simpler. The French have the best healthcare in the world and pay about 11.4 per cent of GNP. We are 37th, and spent about 17 per cent.
I think it is very important to understand what this story is saying. As we approach becoming a majority minority nation, there is a certain part of the white community for whom that reality is unacceptable. This is big part of the Theocratic Right. And it is going to go into the next generation, as this report makes clear.
Bojan Radej, Network of Balkan Evaluators & Slovenian Evaluation Society, November 2013
Everybody has heard of Pythagoreans already in early school years. These ancient Greek hippies discovered delightful geometric rules, such as the one concerning the right-angled triangle: how Ms. Hypotenuse squares with two clashed brothers from the Sides family. Their discovery ledthem to a wonderful idea which has proved so impressive that many people stick to it even today. If rules of geometry really represent universal laws, and if these laws are as simple as the theorem of Pythagoras’ and as mutually consistent as geometrically obtained rules obviously are, then this implies something utterly astonishing: that our world is, in principle, as harmonious as an opera or symphony. For Pythagoreans, musical harmony was, much the same as geometry, an undeniable proof, both aesthetic and logical, that gods exist. They can also be understood, at least indirectly, through the most effective and logical way in which they organised their lowest basement, where we now so, oh so happily live – at least when we obtain all the needed knowledge of the rules of harmony.
Even though Pythagoreans presented themselves as saints of the universal harmony of skies and minds, they had been actually pretty upsetting guys. Their teaching had been annoying for manycitizens who lived their lives unblessed with higher truths. Like their vicious buddy Socrates a century later, Pythagoreans really pissed fellow citizens off a lot, so they needed to run from city to city quite regularly.
During one of such escapades, taking them across the Aegean see from mainland Greece to Sicily, a tragedy happened. It actually started with a wholly glorifying event, with the Eureka moment, when their comrade Hippasus of the Metapontum came to an important discovery. He found out, in geometry of course, that the universe is after all not harmonious at all. Simply, he showed that harmonic proportions are only part of the law of the universe. For instance, you can split an apple in 2, 3, of whatever equal parts, but you can not split it in Ö2 or π parts, simply because these two can not be defined in relational terms, so they are irrational numbers, behaving quite inharmoniously when observed in a conventional way.
Recently The Economist released a feature report on how innovation in emerging markets may be eclipsing innovation in North America. The report, The world turned upside down (click “Buy PDF” for a complimentary copy courtesy of BASF) reinforces the fact that globalization and disruptive innovation is no longer something that is “driven by the West and imposed on the rest.” The notion that we in the West are the harbingers of all things new and advanced and that “developing” markets are cheap sources of labor and less mature audiences for low-cost, dumbed-down versions of our products and services is false. In response to the question, “Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation?” The Economist answers, “The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams.” Of course, the real answer is far more complex.
In 2007, nGenera Insight began writing about what we call “hothouse innovators”—a new breed of global enterprises in Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe that are being built under fertile conditions for accelerated growth, including: A vast pool of low-cost, and increasingly highly-skilled labor; a rapidly growing group of wage-earning domestic customers with few preexisting expectations or brand loyalties; active government involvement in the private sector; and greenfield IT infrastructures that lack legacy complexities. By exploiting these conditions, global hothouse innovators are developing business models that allow them to move up the value chain, compete with firms in mature markets, and threaten the profit structure of incumbents in almost every industry.
The Economist article touches on all of these elements, but expands the argument by introducing additional factors worth discussing. Specifically:
John Bell, web developer, PhD student and lecturer at the University of Maine has published a useful cheat sheet synthesizing the best file formats to work with, provide access to, and to permanently archive digital artworks. The visual guide provides archival file format references for text, audio, video and image contents as well as suggestions for ideal formats to use also for both working and for providing accessing to such digital contents. Useful. Handy. Informative. 8/10 Original article: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/belljo/2013/10/28/digital-documentation-art-workshop-and-fighting-bit-rot Cheat Sheet (PDF): http://novomancy.org/john/digital_archiving_cheat_sheet_mica.pdf
