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 Saturday, August 7, 2004
The real cost of Homeland Security - An Opportunity for Canada. 3 months ago my son returning from a business trip to Europe and connecting via the US missed his connecting flight even though he had a 3 hour window. The reason? The interminable security. He personally had not problem.... [Robert Paterson's Weblog]
Seattle is better at attracting the employees of 21st Century services because they want to live here rather than Omaha. What happens when they decide they would rather live in Canada than the US, because life is easier? 5:38:41 PM 
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The Left is More Patriotic. Found this item on Slashdot. I confirmed all of the claims. The Left truly is more patriotic. All these patriotic items were created by LEFTISTS! (Oh, my!)I love Guthrie's work. "This Land is Your Land" is another piece of our... [Open Source Politics]
Well, at least when it comes to songs and poems. America, the Beautiful is our best song. And This Land Is Your Land is what should be song instead of God Bless America. Glad to see that the patriotic right is so happy to use leftist prose, such as the pledge, especially after they make it pure by adding 'Under God.' I wonder what progressive works from this time in America will be shanghaised by false patriots a hundred years from now? 5:14:46 PM
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Smart Mobs, Social Networks, Political Demonstrations. Scientific evidence for the mechanisms of political smart mobs? Scientists at Northwestern University have reported their findings, based on computer models, of means by which crowds of strangers might achieve consensus -- and the need for alternative communication media and practices appears to be crucial.
(Thanks, Bill!) A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 70,000 people
gathered in the streets of Leipzig, East Germany, on Oct. 9, 1989, to
demonstrate against the communist regime and demand democratic reforms.
Clearly, no central authority planned this event; so how did all of these
people decide to come together on that particular day?
A new study by researchers at Northwestern University sheds light on how
individuals might obtain information about the decisions and preferences of
other individuals with whom they do not have a relationship or even contact.
The findings are published online this week (Aug. 2) by the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The Leipzig demonstration is an example of a complex system, the result of
an evolving process. The common characteristic of complex systems, whether
they be social or biological in nature, is that they display organization
without any external organizing principle being applied.
"How did a consensus come about? Our computer model shows how social
networks can substitute for central mechanisms in decision making," said
Luís A. N. Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological
engineering and an author on the PNAS paper. "Surprisingly, information can
be aggregated more efficiently if local information transmission is not
perfectly reliable but is subject to error or random noise, due to lack of
trust, indecision or unreliable information technologies."
For the citizens of Leipzig, the "noise" was the presence of the Stasi, the
state secret police. "The need of individuals to avoid certain forms of
communication, due to fear of the Stasi, might actually have contributed to
the more efficient spread of information about a generalized dissatisfaction
with the regime and the willingness to take a stand against it," said
Amaral. [Smart Mobs]
What is novel in this study was that it found that information transmission could be ENHANCED if it was not perfectly reliable and subject to noise. This seems to be non-intuitive but if correct, describes blogs and the Internet perfectly. It explains why social networks can be so efficient and why the attempts by authoritarian hierarchies to stop it simply make it stronger. Something for this Administration to think about. And probably a good reason for why democracies that encourage social networks will be the important organizations of the 21st Century.
Be sure to read the PR to get an idea of what they did. Here is what the abstract for their paper states: Many natural and social systems display global organization and coordination without centralized control. The origin of this global coordination is a topic of great current interest. Here we investigate a density-classification task as a model system for coordination and information processing in decentralized systems. We show that sophisticated strategies, selected under idealized conditions, are not robust to environmental changes. We also demonstrate that a simple heuristic is able to successfully complete the classification task under a broad range of environmental conditions. Our findings hint at the possibility that complex networks and ecologically efficient rules coevolve over time. 5:02:20 PM
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Rhetorical dishonesties and their countermeasures. Here's a list of "Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them."
(8) The argument that we should not make efforts against X which is admittedly evil because there is a worse evil Y against which our efforts should be directed (pp 50-52)
Dealt with by pointing out that this is a reason for making efforts to abolish Y, but no reason for not also making efforts to get rid of X.
(9) The recommendation of a position because it is a mean between two extremes (pp 52-54)
Dealt with by denying the usefulness of the principle as a method of discovering the truth. In practice, this can most easily be done by showing that our own view also can be represented as a mean between two extremes.
Link
(via Making Light) [Boing Boing]
Goodness. What would happen to politicians and pundits if they were held to these standards? You see almost everyone of these 38 being used everyday by supposed analysts. There is little logic used today. It simply gets in the way with selling something. 4:54:31 PM
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Fox News attacks Disney for insufficient homophobia. Fox News's review of the Disney PC contained a totally random hysterical condemnation of the company for permitting the annual Gay Day events at its parks.
VARNEY: Well, you know, I -- exactly. I mean, in June you have "Gay Days" at your theme parks. You got any 'Gay Days' on the Mickey computer?
IGER: Well, this has built into it all kinds of protective devices that protects the kid, or the child from internet sites that a parent wouldn't deem appropriate. Also, the fact --
VARNEY: Well, you don't protect the kids from "Gay Days" at the theme parks, do you? Why do you have to protect them in the computer?
Link
(Thanks, Oliver!) [Boing Boing]
You know, Disney is not one of my favorite organizations because of its approach to copyright, but this attack on Faux News is a little beyond the pale. How in the world would they filter out gays from Disneyworld? Do they have secret tatoos? Maybe Disney is supposed to give them one. Or anybody who might be gay? Or look gay? What an absolutely ridiculous idiot who has a job at Fox. That appears to be the main occupants of what goes for news these days. Ridiculous idiots.Bread and circuses. 4:43:07 PM
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Read more about how this Administration is making us safer. Right. I guess they only provided the name of a double agent if by doing so they would make us safer from terrorists. How about these from the Reuters article:None of those reports mentioned at the time that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover. Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.
But British police have acknowledged the raids were carried out in a rush. Suspects were dragged out of shops in daylight and caught in a high speed car chase, instead of the usual procedure of catching them at home in the early morning while they can offer less resistance.
It appears that at least one of those arrested in Britain has been released due to lack of evidence. Considering that Khan had sent them emails over the weekend, and our government confirmed his existence on Monday, I imagine our allies had to move fast.
Itsn't it fun to be a US ally? We burn their own intelligence assets in the war against terror. Even the Pakistani government kept trying to disavow Khan's existence, saying he may not even exist, after this Adminstration screwed up. I guess Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, et al. ran off all the adults on professionals, replacing them with ideolgues and hacks. What a nice group we have here! How can anyone really trust them to work effectievly to stop teeor? Anything that gets done apparantly is done by the small residual professionals who place the needs of the US over short term political or financial gain. This really is becoming Worst Administration Ever. 4:03:40 PM
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For more on the outed double agent, read this article by Juan Cole. Again, we see intelligence assets being destroyed purely for politcal reasons. Intelligence assests that are directly being used to fight the war against terrorism. How any sane person can believe that this Administration is serious about protecting the US over their own short term goals is beyond me. Can anyone seriously believe that this Adminstration would do anything to protect the US if it required them to also harm their chances for reelection? In this case, they could have just taken a little heat for a fewe weeks and kept their mouths shut. But, much better to destroy an asset so that you can get a nice bounce in the polls. I am sure the professionals running our intelligence agencies are really happy abut this.
Here is the Reuters article. Pakistan Source Under Cover When U.S. Confirmed Name I agree with Cole. Either this is deliberate outing of a secret source for political reasons or horrendous mismanagement. Neither case sheds a good light on this Administration. I am becoming more and more convinced that this Administration is both built around short-sighted political rationalizations AND gross stupidity in its management practices. Maybe thie same approach was used at Halliburton, where the CEO (Cheney) was apparently totally unaware that all his underlings were completely mistating their numbers in order to jack up the share price. What might have been the policy of plausible denyability of the Iran-Contra affair is increasingly looking like just plain incompetence. Someone should lose their job over this but it will not happen. Bush is too 'loyal.' 3:40:36 PM
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Investigators Concluded Shelby Leaked Message (washingtonpost.com) [Daypop Top 40]
IOKIYAAR! Just like the fact that this Administration again outed an intelligence resource (in this case, an a Queda double agent who was actively working with allies in order to help us fight terrorists) for purely political reasons. Several stin operations in Britain had to be cut short quickly because of this ingredible screwup by our own 'elected' officials. But, I really guess that for many in the US, It's OK If You Are A Republican. Just like leaking intelligence secrets to the press. IOKIYAAR. Should be Bush's slogan. 3:23:20 PM
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California's SUV Ban - The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn't seem to know it. By Andy Bowers [Daypop Top 40]
I hope that everytime those drivers use an illegal vehicle in an innapropriate road, they get tickets. I've known for a long time that the reason we have SUVs is because they alow the automakers to get around various pollution restrictions that apply to cars. Funny how none of those restrictions apply to trucks, which are now the most popular form of transportation. Unintended consequences. More profit. Less government restrictions. And very little help on curtailing air pollution. What a deal. I guess the capitalists will sell the rope to their own hanging. Well, at least the automakers. Because air pollution affects us all, even those of us who have chosen to stay away from SUVs, drive stick-shift cars and are eyeing the new generation of hybrids. 3:19:02 PM
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