Alex Gray and the Mind Parasites

Culture
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Alex Gray and the Mind Parasites

Jonathan Zap

Reality Sandwich

EXTRACTS:

Alex began to have an out-of-body experience, and found himself hovering above the weirdness of what was going on in the loft. On some different plane he saw deities drinking from a pool of “electric milk” a “vast lake of timpani,” of “vibrating energy.” Alex described the vision as follows:

“I had a vision of the group soul of humanity as a perfectly circular pool of intense living light. All around the rim of the milky pool were a complex variety of sexual rites, a metaphor for all social interaction. Translucent Hindu deities swooped over the group taking the excessive energy of the shimmering pool and passing through the group as ecstasy and pain. I saw that the reason we were all brought together was to provide a psychic energy feast for the Gods and Goddesses. I saw my heart as the axis of karmic, earthly, and universal energies, transected by and uniting the polarities of male/female, birth/death, good/evil, and love/hate. To maintain a balance of forces we all fed both Deities and Demons.”

This visionary experience eventually became the masterpiece: Demons and Deities Drinking from the Milky Pool.

. . . . . . . .

The Archons are masters of deception who manipulate by encouraging us to give away our power to external saviors and authorities. We become like the living dead when they succeed, like Tolkien's Ring Wraiths–withered, obsessed beings forever craving but unable to reach “The Precious,” which could take the form of an object or person of desire, or a fanatic ideology/fundamentalist religion that enslaves us to its version of salvation.

Read full article.

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required No size limits, no cloud

Autonomous Internet

BitTorrent Sync creates private, peer-to-peer Dropbox, no cloud required

No size limits, no cloud: Hands-on with BitTorrent's new file syncing software.

BitTorrent today released folder syncing software that replicates files across multiple computers using the same peer-to-peer file sharing technology that powers BitTorrent clients.

The free BitTorrent Sync application is labeled as being in the alpha stage, so it's not necessarily ready for prime-time, but it is publicly available for download and working as advertised on my home network.

BitTorrent, Inc. (yes, there is a legitimate company behind BitTorrent) took to its blog to announce the move from a pre-alpha, private program to the publicly available alpha. Additions since the private alpha include one-way synchronization, one-time secrets for sharing files with a friend or colleague, and the ability to exclude specific files and directories.

BitTorrent Sync provides “unlimited, secure file-syncing,” the company said. “You can use it for remote backup. Or, you can use it to transfer large folders of personal media between users and machines; editors and collaborators. It’s simple. It’s free. It’s the awesome power of P2P, applied to file-syncing.”

File transfers are encrypted, with private information never being stored on an external server or in the “cloud.”

“Since Sync is based on P2P and doesn’t require a pit-stop in the cloud, you can transfer files at the maximum speed supported by your network,” BitTorrent said. “BitTorrent Sync is specifically designed to handle large files, so you can sync original, high quality, uncompressed files.”

Read full article with multiple screen shots.

Neal Rauhauser: DataScienceCentral, LinkedIn, Wrong Tool

Crowd-Sourcing, P2P / Panarchy
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

DataScienceCentral Users – No Klout Via LinkedIn

The retrieval of 11,712 DataScienceCentral profiles completed earlier today. I found about 2,600 instances of ‘linkedin’ when I checked the extract dt/dd files. I rigged up a bunch of awk statements and distilled that down to about 900 DSC userids and the associated plain text LinkedIn userids. I skipped the ones with embedded slashes, figuring I could go back later, and then I hit the roadblock you see above.

Read more.

Choosing The Wrong Tool

When we left off last night we had about 55,000 keywords from about 11,500 Data Science Central profiles. I manually reviewed and filtered, tossing out stuff that I felt was noise. Here are those nodes after I left the ForceAtlas2 layout algorithm work while I was making breakfast.

Automated community detection in Gephi found eleven communities using the default values. If you’re a puzzled Maltego user trying to follow along, community detection is an algorithm that examines edges and assigns nodes to groups, which can then be colored. This is what you are doing manually with the five colored stars Maltego lets you use to group entities.

Read more with several large network graphics.

Patrick Meier: Jointly: Peer-to-Peer Disaster Recovery App

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Jointly: Peer-to-Peer Disaster Recovery App

My colleague Samia Kallidis is launching a brilliant self-help app to facilitate community-based disaster recovery efforts. Samia is an MFA Candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While her work on this peer-to-peer app began as part of her thesis, she has since been accepted to the NEA Studio Incubator Program to make her app a reality. NEA provides venture capital to help innovative entrepreneurs build transformational initiatives around the world. So huge congrats to Samia on this outstanding accomplishment. I was already hooked back in February when she presented her project at NYU and am even more excited now. Indeed, there are exciting synergies with the MatchApp project I’m working on with QCRI and MIT-CSAIL , which is why we’re happily exploring ways to collaborate & complement our respective initiatives.

Read full post with multiple graphics.

Patrick Meier: Web App Tracks Breaking News

Crowd-Sourcing, Governance
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Web App Tracks Breaking News Using Wikipedia Edits

A colleague of mine at Google recently shared a new and very interesting Web App that tracks breaking news events by monitoring Wikipedia edits in real-time. The App, Wikipedia Live Monitor, alerts users to breaking news based on the frequency of edits to certain articles. Almost every significant news event has a Wikipedia page that gets updated in near real-time and thus acts as a single, powerful cluster for tacking an evolving crisis.

Read full post with screen shot.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Web App Tracks Breaking News”

Patrick Meier: Social Media for Emergency Management

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Social Media for Emergency Management: Question of Supply and Demand

I’m always amazed by folks who dismiss the value of social media for emergency management based on the perception that said content is useless for disaster response. In that case, libraries are also useless (bar the few books you’re looking for, but those rarely represent more than 1% of all the books available in a major library). Does that mean libraries are useless? Of course not. Is social media useless for disaster response? Of course not. Even if only 0.001% of the 20+ million tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy were useful, and only half of these were accurate, this would still mean over 1,000 real-time and informative tweets, or some 15,000 words—i.e., the equivalent of a 25-page, single-space document exclusively composed of fully relevant, actionable & timely disaster information.

Read full post.