Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance | Cory Doctorow

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If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/may/21/privacy-public-health-surveillance

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Empowering Our Digital Sixth Sense with Google Glass, Augmented Reality and Wearable Health Gadgets | TIME.com

We all know about our five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Many people believe we also have a kinesthetic sense, which is what some folks believe is a sort of spiritual sense — for instance, when they perceive another person is in a room with them even though the other person is behind [...]

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Wang Hui: The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (2009)

A compelling examination of the future of Chinese modernity by the leading member of China’s “New Left.” Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the [...]

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Richard Sennett: The Craftsman (2008)

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, [...]

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Thomas Bey William Bailey: Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music & Sound Art in the 21st Century, 2nd ed (2009/2012)

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, the author charts an ongoing trend in electronic music: an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of [...]

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The Oatmeal’s Latest Fundraiser To Save The Tesla Tower – Forbes

Matthew Inman (perhaps better known as web comic creator The Oatmeal) has an ambitious fund-raising project up his sleeve—to save Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower. Wardenclyffe Tower is rich in history, a symbolic landmark of Nikola Tesla’s last great piece of scientific research that was in Tesla’s mind, destined to change the world. I sat down with [...]

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The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck | Mother Jones

The online peanut gallery can get you so riled up that your ability to reason goes out the window, a new study finds. http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/you-idiot-course-trolls-comments-make-you-believe-science-less

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Google Glass Is Watching—Now What?

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As Congress frets about the privacy implications of Google Glass, one thing is clear: The technology that can redefine what is “public” and link the digital and physical worlds is here. Now the question is what will anyone do about it? Owners of wearable Internet-connected devices already face choices about where or when it is [...]

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Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong

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The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not [...]

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“Hollywood and CIA” – Panel at Left Forum 2013, NYC

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Date/Time Date(s) – 06/09/13 3:00 pm – 4:45 pm Location Pace University Category(ies) No Categories Join author Nicholas Levis (of Occupy Astoria LIC) and philosopher Bryan Sacks for a two-hour presentation on “Hollywood and CIA,” with Rutgers Media Studies Professor Deepa Kumar as discussant, at the Left Forum 2013 in New York City. All those [...]

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Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

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For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell.  And yet, these are exciting times for “executable [...]

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Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (2012)

The first sustained exploration of Simondon’s work to be published in English. This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon’s thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem. Complete with a contextualising introduction and a [...]

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The Rise Of The ARG: games™ investigates alternate reality games and what the future has in store for the curious experiment.

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Matheny himself was there at the beginning of the ARG, when the increasing prominence of online media got him thinking about new forms of storytelling. “I’ve been a tech person since the Eighties,” he reminisces. “I was an IT expert and moved up into software, and I used to play the Steve Jackson games a lot. I also played the Flying Buffalo play-by-mail games, which were kind of like a LARP but done through mail, phone and faxes. You would send your mailing address and your phone number and you would start getting stuff in the mail.

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The Term Conspiracy Theory is Officially Dead Language, Let’s Move On to Mind Control Facts – disinformation

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Wait, where was I going with that? Oh yeah, I’ve been saying this for years, but the term “conspiracy theory” is officially over. Here’s the problem. A long time ago, because of a quite coordinated campaign by monolithic mainstream media conglomerates, they slandered it to mean batshit. You see a lot of the word “tin [...]

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Snooping

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The FBI is pushing for expanded power to eavesdrop on private Internet communications. The law enforcement agency wants to force online service providers to build wiretapping capabilities into their products. But a group of prominent computer security experts argues that mandating “back doors” in online communications products is likely to compromise the security of Americans’ [...]

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BBC News – Nasa buys into ‘quantum’ computer

A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility. It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494

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Congress Asks if Google Glass Will Be a Privacy Nightmare

Google Glass makes it easy for wearers to surreptitiously take pictures or video of unknowing subjects. That’s caused more than a few people to ask: What does Glass mean for our privacy? Now Congress, too, wants answers. Eight members of Congress’ bi-partisan privacy caucus sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page Thursday seeking answers [...]

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The Priests of High Strangeness

Co-creation of the “alien abduction phenomenon” Sometimes an event comes hurdling along and scatters wellintentioned plans left and right. I had intended to wait several more years before writing about my hard-won insights into the alien abduction phenomenon. During my ten-year marriage to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, I’d actively participated in some of Budd’s UFO [...]

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