Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain in conversation
April 4, 6:00pm ET
Langdell Hall South, 272 Kirkland and Ellis Classroom
From Bruce Schneier:
What I've Been Thinking About
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.
Abstract: Societies have been increasingly disintegrating, despite improving prerequisites for social integration. For Durkheim, the society integrates in a mechanical and in an organic way. Individuals in their interactions gradually habituate new rules. These are institutionalised into system structures and so integrate society mechanically from the bottom up. When new rules are imposed they restrict behaviours from the top down. Structuralist explanation (Giddens) is circular and does not err in a description of a process that is circular in nature. However, it fails to explain what connects mechanic and organic integration, where they meet and how they really produce the integrative result.
In an attempt to fill this gap, integration problem is the first reorganised from dual to triadic concept. This is needed to accommodate the problem in a mesoscopic context. Meso is the perspective from where the modelling of social processes is the most tractable “a priori” (Easterling, Kok, 2002). The case is illustrated with evaluation of the national energy program's impact on the territorial cohesion of Slovenia. Three measures of social integration are derived. A strong balance is a measure of the mechanical integration which controls for system's stability between its internal oppositions. Weak cohesion is a correlative measure of organic integration and reflects sustainability of cooperative achievements in the society.
In social research, the relative comparisons are often more expressive than absolute ones. So it makes sense also to distinguish when cooperation achievements are due to the one-sided and alienated efforts, like on the market, or by altruist, from situations when they results from shared and mutually beneficial contributions of all parties involved. The balanced cohesion appears more productive for social integration compared to asymmetrically achieved cohesion with winners and losers on ever perfecting market. So the third component of social integration is weak balance which describes mutuality of organic relations. Circular interpretation is not rejected here. We only propose it is conceptualised in a triadic frame with a central meso category, which is of soft logic, intermediary by its function but radical in its transformative consequences.
“The Boston bomb squad clearly had advance notice of the presence of the bombs at the marathon, and they also had advance notice of the location of the bomb at the Kennedy Presidential Library.
The more I learn about GMOs (See The Great Experiment: Genetically Modified Organisms, Scientific Integrity, and National Wellness http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2812%2900222-4/fulltext) the more I am convinced that this is a vast planet wide animal study, and we are the animals. We must label the presence of these organisms in our foods. ! Sign every petition you can, donate, lobby. We are up against a very powerful corporate force, but our health depends upon our behavior
This is the latest on a slow motion nuclear accident taking place with almost no public awareness.
Obama has been a disappointment in many ways. The big three, in my view, are the failure to address climate change in a meaningful way; the failure to hold the corrupt financial sector accountable; and the failure to develop a foreign policy that was not just an extension of the Bush-Cheney policies.
One clearly sees the character of these corporations in times of disaster. They have obviously spent billions developing extraction technologies, and virtually nothing on how to cope with what happens if it all goes wrong. Here is as clear an example as anyone could provide.
Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill.
This week it will be three years since the first of 4.9 billion barrels of crude oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the scale of the ecological disaster unfolds, BP is appearing daily in a New Orleans federal court to battle over the extent of compensation it owes to the region.
Joo-il Kim believes the rhetoric is just a distraction
Rob Hastings
Independent, 14 April 2013
EXTRACT
While he agrees that the current stand-off is more serious than previous events, he remains confident there will not be conflict. “This current regime does not want a war,” he tells me through a translator. “The people don’t have anything, so they don’t have anything to lose if they went to war – but the regime, they have wealth.” Living in luxury, he says, the leaders will not want to risk what they have.
After he escaped a closed and impoverished society, one imagines his greatest surprises in the outside world would have been at technology. Instead, it was the uneaten fruit he found in Chinese forests while running away that amazed him most. “There were apples just dangling in the trees, falling on the ground. In North Korea, even the smallest apple will be eaten because the people are starving. But China had abundant food,” he says.
Starvation and hunger is a topic he returns to several times, and with good reason. The death of his four-year-old niece from malnutrition, after he had already seen many others dying in an economy wrecked by the regime’s agricultural policies, convinced him to defect. The world might be concerned by the threat of nuclear war, but Mr Kim believes the dictatorship is using this to distract the international community and its own people from the problems they face.
U.S. Ranks Near Bottom of UNICEF Report on Child Well-being
KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor – Salon
The cliché holds that: Our children are our future. If that is true we don't have much of a future. We don't seem to give a damn about our children and, as the UNICEF report makes clear, it shows.
The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to ‘child life satisfaction.”
Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.
