May 2013
6 posts
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Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria,... →
As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework.
Innovations emerging...
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Palm Beach County sheriff gets $1 million Spy On... →
Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn.
He said he met with Bradshaw about the program and “got assurances from the sheriff that this is going to be done in a way that respects people’s autonomy and privacy, and that he makes sure to...
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"Five things everyone should know about U.S.... →
1. The US incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world: Approximately 1 in 100 adults or more than 2.2 million people are behind bars in the US, according to the Pew Center on the States. In addition, another 4.6 million (or a total of almost 7 million) people live under some form of correctional supervision.
Although the US is widely recognised as a “land of...
April 2013
9 posts
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jonprins:
The sudden drop in the value of Bitcoins, the hot new Internet currency, has added urgency to the question of whether Bitcoin is the way of the future, or just another bubble. Not to keep readers in suspense, the answer is a bubble, but a particularly interesting example of one. In particular, Bitcoin represents what ought to be the final refutation of the efficient-markets...
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eight bitcoin inventions that will change the... →
After a comically misinformed start, reporters in the established media have actually improved their Bitcoin coverage considerably, at least from a factual perspective. I am noticing much less misu…
“The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used...”
– Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster - Bloomberg (via iamdanw)
“How did you pay for your coffee this morning, by cash? By credit card? If a...”
– Bitcoin Explainer, Mother Jones (via motherjones)
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No More Typed Passwords, Berkeley Researchers... →
infoneer-pulse:
“Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password,” explains a UC Berkeley School of Information press release about new research that utilizes brainwaves to authenticate users instead of passwords of numbers and letters. With a $100 consumer-friendly brainwave-reading headset, the Neurosky MindSet, Professor John Chuang found that the...
March 2013
9 posts
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Where by I pontificate (briefly) about one of...
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Aljazeera - Bitcoin Rises, by Nicolas Mendoza →
bitcoinnews:
Nicolas Mendoza (@NicolasMendo) follows up to his May 2012 article in Al Jazeera with the more recent developments. Excerpts:
“What we have here is radically different from the current system where money creation is based on debt, politically motivated, surrounded by secrecy, inflationary, unilateralist, colonialist, and exploitative of powerless nations, etc. The flaws in the...
Bitcoin's Busy Year →
On Wednesday, BitPay, the world’s leading Bitcoin payment processor, introduced a new WordPress tool integrating its services with Fulfillment by Amazon which stores, packs, ships and provides customer service to those using the Amazon marketplace, is available to merchants who do not sell their products through Amazon but who still want to provide the same quality services. Less than a week...
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“Put another way: If Jeff Han had designed a keyless entry system for a car, it...”
– How ‘Minority Report’ Trapped Us In A World Of Bad Interfaces | The Awl (via slantback)
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February 2013
15 posts
“Kickstarter is all about the gift as a mechanism of patronage, art production,...”
– From 3 paths toward a more creative life
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Distributism →
Distributism (also known as distributionism or distributivism) is an economic philosophy that developed in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, based upon the principles of Catholic social teaching, especially the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno.
According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and...
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Christopher Dorner's Letter →
It is hard for this reader to understand how such a hardworking and decorated citizen and seemingly genuinely caring person could choose to resort to killing innocent family members of those whom he had complaint against. Seems counter to everything he stood for, especially in contrast to his complaint. But that is just my opinion.
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Video: William Perrin talks about augmented...
iconolith:
See on Scoop.it - Augment My Reality
Could augmented reality be a lifeline for regional media?
See on guardian.co.uk
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“But Kickstarter backers aren’t investors, and they aren’t looking for the...”
– Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter? - NYTimes.com
So true. The marketplace doesn’t understand the phenomenon because Kickstarter isn’t playing by the marketplace economics and incentives.
(via joshuanguyen)
Kickstarter is more of a trust metric, and a social reward for creativity...
News headlines used to predict future events →
singularitarian:
Researchers have developed software which could predict future events such as disease outbreak.
The prototype software uses a combination of archive material from the New York Times and data from other websites, including Wikipedia.
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“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody. And the people...”
– George Orwell, 1984 (via 4mbivalent)
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“The state and the capitalist class are not antagonistic forces, and America is...”
– Statism and the Illusion of Choice (via azspot)
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“A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can...”
– Michael Isikoff | EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans
My problem here is not the morality of the issue. To some degree I accept that bad people want to do bad things in the US, and sometimes punitive actions must be taken to ensure security...
January 2013
22 posts
What would George Orwell have made of the world in... →
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Quantum Dots Produce More Colorful Sony TVs →
singularitarian:
Sony is using nanoscale particles called quantum dots to significantly improve the color of some of its high-end Bravia televisions. It showed off the technology, which increases the range of colors that an LCD television can display by about 50 percent, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. This marks the first time that quantum dots—which for a long time...
“Now imagine that there is a vital national resource that is supposed to be under...”
– Art Brodsky: U.S. Internet Suffers When the Refs Blow the Calls (via azspot) 