The “shadow banking system” can broadly be described as “credit intermediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system”. Although intermediating credit through non-bank channels can have advantages, such channels can also become a source of systemic risk, especially when they are structured to perform bank-like functions (e.g. maturity transformation and leverage) and when their interconnectedness with the regular banking system is strong. Therefore, appropriate monitoring and regulatory frameworks for the shadow banking system needs to be in place to mitigate the build-up of risks.
Good luck on your journeys overseas this week, and congratulations on decisively winning your second term as our president! The first time you won four years ago, most of us couldn't contain our joy and found ourselves literally in tears over your victory.
This time, it was more like breathing a huge sigh of relief. But, like the smooth guy you are, you scored the highest percentage of the vote of any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, and you racked up the most votes for a Democratic president in the history of the United States (the only one to receive more votes than you was … you, in '08!). You are the first Democrat to get more than 50% of the vote twice in a row since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This was truly another historic election and I would like to take a few minutes of your time to respectfully ask that your second term not resemble your first term.
It's not that you didn't get anything done. You got A LOT done. But there are some very huge issues that have been left unresolved and, dammit, we need you to get some fight in you. Wall Street and the uber-rich have been conducting a bloody class war for over 30 years and it's about time they were stopped.
I know it is not in your nature to be aggressive or confrontational. But, please, Barack – DO NOT listen to the pundits who are telling you to make the “grand compromise” or move to the “center” (FYI – you're already there). Your fellow citizens have spoken and we have rejected the crazed ideology of this Republican Party and we insist that you forcefully proceed in bringing about profound change that will improve the lives of the 99%. We're done hoping. We want real change. And, if we can't get it in the second term of a great and good man like you, then really – what's the use? Why are we even bothering? Yes, we're that discouraged and disenchanted.
At your first post-election press conference last Wednesday you were on fire. The way you went all “Taxi Driver” on McCain and company (“You talkin' to me?”) was so brilliant and breathtaking I had to play it back a dozen times just to maintain the contact high. Jesus, that look – for a second I thought laser beams would be shooting out of your eyes! MORE OF THAT!! PLEASE!!
In the weeks after your first election you celebrated by hiring the Goldman Sachs boys and Wall Street darlings to run our economy. Talk about a buzzkill that I never fully recovered from. Please – not this time. This time take a stand for all the rest of us – and if you do, tens of millions of us will not only have your back, we will swoop down on Congress in a force so large they won't know what hit them (that's right, McConnell – you're on the retirement list we've put together for 2014).
BUT – first you have to do the job we elected you to do. You have to take your massive 126-electoral vote margin and just go for it.
Were any of our email accounts subject to scrutiny by the FBI, we might not be revealed as cheating cads, but most of us would, in ways large and small, be exposed as frequent and shameless purveyors of idle gossip, unnecessary fibs, outrageous flattery, pathetic excuses, and bandwidth-hogging cat videos. It’s all there in the emails and text messages that map the quotidian details of our lives. If, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, technologies are “extensions of man,” then the Petraeus story serves as a useful reminder of how our technologies (incredible as they are) nevertheless can encourage the extension of man’s less noble traits. History might end up judging Petraeus a meritocratic and military success but a moral manqué. As for the rest of us, let him without a sinful email sent (or drafts) folder cast the first stone.
The Islamist takeover of two-thirds of Mali this year has spurred the West as well as concerned neighboring countries in Africa to find a way to restore Mali to its democratic path and drive out jihadist elements. Islamist groups in Mali currently include Ansar Dine, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is considered one of the most dangerous of al Qaeda's affiliated groups.
In 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached the National Research Council's TIGER standing committee and asked it to develop a list of workshop topics to explore the impact of emerging science and technology. From the list of topics given to DIA, three were chosen to be developed by the Committee for Science and Technology Challenges to U.S. National Security Interests. The first in a series of three workshops was held on April 23-24, 2012. This report summarizes that first workshop which explored the phenomenon known as big data.
The objective for the first workshop is given in the statement of task, which explains that that workshop will review emerging capabilities in large computational data to include speed, data fusion, use, and commodification of data used in decision making. The workshop will also review the subsequent increase in vulnerabilities over the capabilities gained and the significance to national security. The committee devised an agenda that helped the committee, sponsors, and workshop attendees probe issues of national security related to so-called big data, as well as gain understanding of potential related vulnerabilities. The workshop was used to gather data that is described in this report, which presents views expressed by individual workshop participants.
Big Data: A Workshop Report is the first in a series of three workshops, held in early 2012 to further the ongoing engagement among the National Research Council's (NRC's) Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate, and Review (TIGER) Standing Committee, the scientific and technical intelligence (S&TI) community, and the consumers of S&TI products.
Steve McIntosh and Jeff Salzman discuss Steve's new book, Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins—a powerful and exciting argument for the progressive nature of evolution in matter, life, culture and personal development. He demonstrates how these fundamental dimensions of life are called forward into more complex and intelligent forms by the gravitational pull of Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Ultimately Evolution’s Purpose reveals a radical spiritual teaching, and it succeeds not by relying on established religious lineages but by pointing out the profound creative forces that are demonstrably at work in our world and in our lives.
