After getting Fox news coverage and front page Slashdotting N* is now significantly higher than the paper estimate. Think 10-100x.
f(L) is fraction of people in London from N*. Why limit yourself to London? You or your partner might move, travel, visit friends, soon even if you're looking for love! Even within London, the author doesn't count people movement - those who come to London over time.
Further, the author forgets that most all people *like* to find productive partnerships. Unlike SETI, where we have no evidence that the other party is looking for us, we know that women like to find great men just as much you want to find an "attractive, age-appropriate woman with a University education".
Worst, the author spent time write why he "can't find" a partner when he would be better served getting out there doing activities he loves with other people and having a great time life. Then other people will find him, and help find others.
Many of those show I'd never heard of. Significantly disappointed Lexx made but not Farscape. I wanted Farscape to continue.
What I really want is a live action series out of Starblazers - does anyone else remember how awesome that story was, or I am just making a childhood memory better than it really was?
The paper posits that gravity is an entropic force, not a fundamental one. He does this by starting with the assumption of a reduced dimensionality universe with one emergent direction for space and shows that as a mass approaches the holographic boundary he can combine statistical mechanics equations and Einsteins equations for mass & energy (throw in a couple hand waves about average energy and degrees of freedom) and he derives Newton's laws and more.
This is fundamentally a different view of how gravity, inertia and space arise compared to the current "fundamental forces" understanding in physics. An accurate and testable understanding of gravity could potentially lead to areas impossible to predict: anti-gravity, energy production, warping and changing space, usable action at a distance for communication or transportation.
This is analogous to the shift in understanding when humans understood and then used the electrical force. Who could have dreamed before electric power of mobile phones, global Internet connectivity, HDTV, Twitter, Superbowl broadcasts, images from Mars, superconducting MRI coils, particle accelerators, etc. etc. A functional understanding of gravity could be even more revolutionary than the change in the human condition from understanding electricity.
FTA:"Starting from first principles, using only space independent concepts like energy, entropy and temperature, it is shown that Newtons laws appear naturally and practically unavoidably. Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by a change in the amount of information associated with the positions of bodies of matter. "
and "... the holographic hypothesis provides a natural mechanism for gravity to emerge. It allows direct contact interactions between degrees of freedom associated with one material body and another, since all bodies inside a volume can be mapped on the same holographic screen."
If this is proven correct - that gravity and inertia are emergent from information entropy and statistics, it would be very, very exciting if for no other reason than it would be yet another support (probably the strongest yet) for the holographic universe description / the 'reduced dimensionality' description. This could also resolve some of the impossibly inconsistent problems in physics integrating gravity with microscopic forces and spooky effects like action at a distance.
So far all we've had to support a holographic universe is black hole physics and string theory conjectures.
It's mind warping to imagine that the whole of our existence necessarily depends on encodings that are 2-dimensional in nature. If this is the case, what a world it would be. Philosophers and religious folk will argue over what that might mean.
Okay, great. Exciting observations, but really, not that useful in the big scheme of where we are with physics today.
How about you physicists show us Higgs? How do quantum mechanics and gravity mesh into a coherent theory? Explain the disagreement of 107 orders of magnitude (yes, you read that right: 107 zeros) between the upper bound upon the vacuum energy density (from data obtained from Voyager, less than 10**14 GeV/m3) and the zero-point energy of 10**121 GeV/m3 - calculated using quantum field theory, or alternately: Why doesn't the zero-point energy of the vacuum cause a large cosmological constant? Why is there far more matter than antimatter? Are protons stable - if not, what's the half life? Is SUSY real or just implied? What governs the transition of quarks and gluons into pions (ie explain QCD)? What's the mass of a Neutrino? Explain why the fundamental physical constants have the exact and seemingly arbitrary yet interconnected values they have? Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past? What causes gamma ray bursts? and on and on and on...
But most of all, explain what causes the observed effects of hypothetical "dark matter" and "dark energy". My young children are smart enough to know that the dark matter story sounds like total and utter bull. The story goes like this: "We see something that looks like it causes things to move, but we don't know what it is, and we can't see it, or measure it, create it, or understand it at all. These unobservable matter blobs (and energy) may be 95% of everything we observe! We see something we can't explain, so we're calling it 'dark matter' and moving on with the old story that has worked for a while and still gets us grant funding." Why no one with a brain is calling out this story for its absurdity is astounding.
These issues are not subtle or small. The theories science (specifically physics) now promotes and teaches about the physical world, while highly accurate and highly reproducible in different areas, are *impossibly inconsistent* and *abundantly incomplete*. For science, inconsistency on this scale is a crisis requiring a revolution in thought.
The most dangerous hubris in science is the refusal to accept that we're far more ignorant about our physical environment than most would like to admit.
Note that access to information, education and entertainment, relationships, friendships and intimacy and many other basic human needs are not on that list. Travel, personal property, reproduction, and many other norms we accept as given are also not on that list. What I wrote was that basic human needs for safety and survival would be afforded as a right to all people in a "fair" and idealized world, and that people could work for a life more than that.
I stand by that assertion: such a place would be fair. Would it work? Who knows. European countries offer a reasonable safety net and seem to be doing OK. Compared to some countries, crime there is lower, people are smarter, incarceration is lower, people are happier and healthier, drug use is lower. An idealized world like this probably wouldn't be nearly as free as some people experience today, but it would be fair. Personally, I'd choose freedom over fairness when they conflict, but offering a real safety net for human survival and safety would eliminate the fear that drives many toward the ills we see in the world today, and it would make the world a much nicer place.
If you want to label it a "socialist utopia", fine, call it hoogamazoola for all I care, it doesn't change the essence of the point: life now, on earth, is not even close to fair in any sense, nor do people even give the idea of "fair" a reasonable hearing in social discourse. Marx was right about one thing in the mid 1800's: his premise was there is enough. It was true then, and still is today.
Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair.
There is ridiculous dishonesty in this assertion.
Of course profiting off someone else's work is unfair. Nothing about what the litigant or the defendants have done or will do relates in any way with "fair". If the world were "fair" every single human would have as an inalienable right free access to decent food, housing, healthcare, and security and working beyond that would be an optional choice to better their life. Humanity is far, far from this ideal, and everything we do now in the business world is *nothing* about fair, it is about power and capital, and having long chains of other humans working for the profit of those few who have learned how to escape or work the system. Remember more than half of your planet's population still farms their food by hand, and dies in large numbers when there are droughts.
"Profiting from someone else's innovation" is at the very basic essence of working capitalism. It an the assumption driving nearly all investment. Using capital to buy a stock, and having that stock rise in value, has the effect of making a profit off the wealth creation and innovation in that company. I don't take a position for or against that system it is highly efficient, when it works, at allocating resources and creating significant development.
But even beyond the nature of business and profit, these folks have gone down into the depths of corporate IP litigation, where the idealistic light of "fair" shines like smelly dirt. Lawsuits rarely have much to do with a high notion of justice; they are what you can pay for, and what you can win. To assert that ones actions are about "fair" when filing a corporate IP litigation lawsuit is patently absurd and frankly laughable.
I got rid of my TV feed service years ago. The content is mostly (like 90%+) mindless drivel, and the ads are insidious. When I'm in a room with a TV, and I hear how loud the ads are, I laugh, and ask them to mute it.
We now have free, on demand movies with most cable services, we have Netflix, Hulu, Tivo, Cablebox DVR, Joost, Miro, Mythtv, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, PS3 streaming, we have Itunes, and to top all that off, there is an expanding vibrant black market - all getting around the mess of broadcast TV ad delivery. Plus: (...plug...) there are lots of decent open licensed content that you can find, and that market is growing.</plug>
I say let the dinosaur-age broadcasters keep shoving awful ads and crap programming down the TV feed. Why write laws to try and help them provide a better service? Anyone with half a mind left would have dropped it already, and younger minds will see it for what it is: mindless distraction to suck the life out of you.
The only real identity that is immune from subversion is consistent, community agreement.
What I mean by this is that every piece of data measured can be faked, copied, or altered in the database against which the measurement is checked. DNA can be planted, id cards will be sold on black markets and faked, biometrics can be later changed or forged. The measured data in the database against which identity is checked can be altered - *all* the technology-based methods for ID have vectors of attack.
What cannot be faked is what ones peers and friends agree upon regarding who an individual really is, and that the human in wuestion really is the person they agree it is. If all the friends and neighbors agree you really are Bob, then you're Bob regardless of what you do, or what data is stored in electronic systems. This is an unwieldy (nearly impossible) metric for access to a bar, authentication for into services, permission to drive, or asserting your ID at the bank to get your money. However, at its heart, community consistency could be the unalterable root from which all the other identification methods would rely upon. Basically one can create all kinds of electronic, physical, and technology based systems that will need to get reset when they are faked or forged or incorrect. To rely on other electronic systems for that reset is flawed and misses the essential nature of how people understand and use interpersonal identity.
Google is not the concern, nor is their control. I have no expectation Google uses search history for any purpose other than algorithm tweaking. The privacy issue comes from ones search history collected in one place. In aggregate, the collection of all Internet search history is an extremely powerful tool for learning about a person, and possibly exposing things an individual doesn't even realize they are revealing.
Most people have never been sued or accused of a crime, gone through a trial, been deposed or subpoenaed, or have any understanding of just how bad things can get when situations really go bad. There are times when one justifiably wants to guard their privacy carefully, but typically it's difficult to always know in the moment when those times are. Realizing after the fact that you need to protect information from discovery is too late.
There may also be others, but this one has worked for me.
Downsides: no cached or similar pages, no searchable search history, no cute math results, none of the value-add search links or maps at the top of the results - just the plain search results.
Upside: no data collection on my searches. (if I believe that the proxy is not also collecting data), you can also set it to give 100 search results as the default.
But its even deeper than this. Freecreditreport leeches off an even bigger scam. The whole premise that people allow, expect and pay these three companies to collect and sell their own information back to others is a intrinsically a scam.
The "big three" do not see or treat consumers as their customers - which explains why they are so difficult to deal with: their customers are other companies that buy information about the "worthiness" of potential customers, like you.
The absurd and unfair treatment that people received from these private companies was so bad that the laws were changed to require them to provide some information back to the unwilling subjects of their profits.
LegalTorrents.com has been in operation for about 6 years now. We host licensed digital media and distribute using Bittorrent.
This article refers to an announcement that we have launched a new service for members providing open Bittorrent tracking so anyone can host their own content seeds, and publish an unlimited amount of material without uploading to the LegalTorrents servers.
There are several steps to qualify for safe harbors, and we will follow each of them to the letter. We have not yet had to reply to any DMCA takedowns yet - all the content on the website must have a share-friendly license before content can be uploaded.
In such a situation, we will both defend the rights of our customers and provide them all the information possible to resolve the issue. I disagree the FAQ is slanted toward "IP-thieves". This does not represent the ethos of LegalTorrents.
Actually, this is not accurate, the trackers are open, and can be used without adding the hash to the website. Unfortunately, a completely open system is open to abuse, copyright infringement, and other issues.
To publish your own content, or content you have a license to distribute, membership is required to "whitelist" content, and prevent automatic removal by blacklisting. This is the solution we have come up with to minimize and prevent abuse.
Any logged in user can flag content as copyright infringing, here http://www.legaltorrents.com/flag_content and unless that hash value is in the whitelist (added by a member), the tracker will remove it in about 15 minutes.
I'd really like to see Google open the API so anyone can upload 360 degree image sets and add to the mapping collection.
Inside and on top of buildings, police stations, museums, libraries, schools, government offices, cemeteries, amusement parks, rivers, caves, airports, ports, national parks, trails, lakes, campsites, businesses, military bases, people's homes, backyards, front yards, hospitals, casinos, daycare centers, bars, strip clubs,...
I say, let's post online detailed maps and images of everything and every single place possible, then give it all to one company to share back to us with ads. This is where these efforts will lead. Oh, wait, that doesn't sound as good (er, not evil) any more.
I'm not sure - but is there a way to use all these images in applications that are not Google? Could others have a license to create a 3D first-person environment simulation of the real world if there were enough stitch-together images or 3D camera imagery? Would Google allow this?
Information distribution is in a gray area now between the past, when reputation came top-down from the creation of large distribution organizations as surrogates for reputation to the new model, (which still does not work well) where reputation comes bottom-up, from various sources and from group interaction. After this issue gets a lot worse, people will start using peer-weighted reputation as a filter before who they believe, but that shift will take a generation to really take hold widely.
Both his Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever series (fantasy) and his Gap series (Sci Fi) were excellent writing and stories. I read them growing up and thought they were great. He's one of the few authors I've read that can do both genres really well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Donaldson
Also, I think a fun class project would be to compile a concept or theme-based wiki and find/cite examples of major themes in fantasy and sci-fi literature. I use "wiki" loosely here because in my experience wiki tools offer too much freedom to express and with groups it usually makes a mess. But simply put, answer this: what are major and interesting repeated themes in sci fi and fantasy literature, which books do those themes appear in, and for each, a brief description of how the story uses or modifies the basic theme for that story, which stories show best examples of the theme, which places did the theme first appear, etc.
when I first read this description, I thought it was about people using twitter to by open and public about their money.
In most other parts of the world the Internet is driving companies and products to "out-open" each other. more transparency wins, more obvious pricing models win, easier services win. People who are more open and more public about their lives are more successful generally (though its not clear which are the causes and which are the effects).
This drive toward open has not reached financial matters (yet). People and companies are still extremely private about how much money hey have and what they do with that money, for good reason.
Eventually I see the intersection of "open" culture drivers - and the privacy of personal and organizational finance hitting a crossroad. It may not be pretty. I think that once the norm is forced to be more open in order to compete, then eventually there will be a drive to be open about money and transactions - how much people and orgs have, and exactly how they use it. Financial information may be protected for some time legally, but with ever increasing information available about everything, it will get out, be shared, and used to make decisions. I think we'll see on 10+ year timelines some organizations and people and orgs being "open" about their money voluntarily and it will be a very good thing. Totally open finance.
Consumers will have data never before imagined: consider at point of sale knowing exactly what the producers of a product paid in capital and marginal costs to produce a product you might buy, the breakdown of costs and profits to which organizations, and which people are benefiting from that potential purchase? I think we'll see this faster than you might imagine.
Reading TFA, Nate's analysis implies that there is a systematic bias toward some last digits in the overall poll percentages aggregated over many disparate topics.
What seems so improbable (to me) is that if someone really were grossly "cooking the books" like this - literally not doing the poll, or tallying any numbers at all, but instead simply reporting fake results for press... is that they would be so stupid to make up the results manually instead of using a computer in some way. What, some guy in an office reading other polls and saying "gee I think the number will be 45%."
If this kind of bias really has been introduced by manually creating and publishing the results (as the analysis seems to imply), then it will be easy to track down and prove with further digging into the data, interviewing people who made the calls or took the data, etc. However, accepting such an explanation would requires a level of stupid on the part of the principals in this company that is so extreme that I find such a scenario an improbable explanation for the results presented.
NOT ALL MEN are sensors, concerned primarily with the "look" and image of beauty that is socially defined as "attractive". Most are, but not all. This social, media driven image of one beauty for women is a big social myth that even if not true for some men, most all men learn that this one, social image is the "normal" for attractive, so they mimic the behaviors of other men.
FTA: "'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'"
More accurately, they could say: "conclude MANY men's cognitive functioning".
Jung developed and published models of cognition in the early 1900s that explain directly the different means by which people (men and women) collect information and make judgments. These models are not scientific (yet), but rather observational classification. They have been re-used and rediscovered multiple times under many different names for decades. It is really frustrating to read professional scientists doing funded social research that blurs the lines and causes confusion about these issues in the lay public. While I do not dispute their results, the point is that there are observational models that show that these results do not apply to all men, and these models can reproducibly predict (in some people) which men it would apply to.
It will be such a huge leap forward for humanity when there is reproducible scientific evidence and measurement techniques to back up Jung's neural models so that social researchers can segment the population intelligently for this kind of social research.
Slashdot Mirror
The pdf:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/why_i_dont_have_a_girlfriend.pdf
After getting Fox news coverage and front page Slashdotting N* is
now significantly higher than the paper estimate. Think 10-100x.
f(L) is fraction of people in London from N*. Why limit
yourself to London? You or your partner might move, travel,
visit friends, soon even if you're looking for love!
Even within London, the author doesn't count people movement -
those who come to London over time.
Further, the author forgets that most all people *like* to find
productive partnerships. Unlike SETI, where we have no evidence
that the other party is looking for us, we know that women like
to find great men just as much you want to find an "attractive,
age-appropriate woman with a University education".
Worst, the author spent time write why he "can't find" a partner
when he would be better served getting out there doing activities
he loves with other people and having a great time life. Then
other people will find him, and help find others.
Truly be yourself and it is uniquely attractive.
Many of those show I'd never heard of. Significantly disappointed Lexx made but not Farscape. I wanted Farscape to continue.
What I really want is a live action series out of Starblazers - does anyone else remember how awesome that story was, or I am just making a childhood memory better than it really was?
what does this potentially bring us
The paper posits that gravity is an entropic force, not a fundamental one. He does this by starting with the assumption of a reduced dimensionality universe with one emergent direction for space and shows that as a mass approaches the holographic boundary he can combine statistical mechanics equations and Einsteins equations for mass & energy (throw in a couple hand waves about average energy and degrees of freedom) and he derives Newton's laws and more.
This is fundamentally a different view of how gravity, inertia and space arise compared to the current "fundamental forces" understanding in physics. An accurate and testable understanding of gravity could potentially lead to areas impossible to predict: anti-gravity, energy production, warping and changing space, usable action at a distance for communication or transportation.
This is analogous to the shift in understanding when humans understood and then used the electrical force. Who could have dreamed before electric power of mobile phones, global Internet connectivity, HDTV, Twitter, Superbowl broadcasts, images from Mars, superconducting MRI coils, particle accelerators, etc. etc. A functional understanding of gravity could be even more revolutionary than the change in the human condition from understanding electricity.
FTA:"Starting from first principles, using only space independent concepts like
energy, entropy and temperature, it is shown that Newtons laws appear naturally and
practically unavoidably. Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by a change
in the amount of information associated with the positions of bodies of matter. "
and "... the holographic hypothesis provides
a natural mechanism for gravity to emerge. It allows direct contact interactions
between degrees of freedom associated with one material body and another, since all
bodies inside a volume can be mapped on the same holographic screen."
If this is proven correct - that gravity and inertia are emergent from information entropy
and statistics, it would be very, very exciting if for no other reason than it would be yet
another support (probably the strongest yet) for the holographic universe description /
the 'reduced dimensionality' description. This could also resolve some of the impossibly
inconsistent problems in physics integrating gravity with microscopic forces and spooky
effects like action at a distance.
So far all we've had to support a holographic universe is black hole physics and string
theory conjectures.
It's mind warping to imagine that the whole of our existence necessarily depends
on encodings that are 2-dimensional in nature. If this is the case, what a world
it would be. Philosophers and religious folk will argue over what that might mean.
Okay, great. Exciting observations, but really, not that useful in the big scheme of where we are with physics today.
How about you physicists show us Higgs? How do quantum mechanics and gravity mesh into a coherent theory? Explain the disagreement of 107 orders of magnitude (yes, you read that right: 107 zeros) between the upper bound upon the vacuum energy density (from data obtained from Voyager, less than 10**14 GeV/m3) and the zero-point energy of 10**121 GeV/m3 - calculated using quantum field theory, or alternately: Why doesn't the zero-point energy of the vacuum cause a large cosmological constant? Why is there far more matter than antimatter? Are protons stable - if not, what's the half life? Is SUSY real or just implied? What governs the transition of quarks and gluons into pions (ie explain QCD)? What's the mass of a Neutrino? Explain why the fundamental physical constants have the exact and seemingly arbitrary yet interconnected values they have? Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past? What causes gamma ray bursts? and on and on and on...
But most of all, explain what causes the observed effects of hypothetical "dark matter" and "dark energy". My young children are smart enough to know that the dark matter story sounds like total and utter bull. The story goes like this: "We see something that looks like it causes things to move, but we don't know what it is, and we can't see it, or measure it, create it, or understand it at all. These unobservable matter blobs (and energy) may be 95% of everything we observe! We see something we can't explain, so we're calling it 'dark matter' and moving on with the old story that has worked for a while and still gets us grant funding." Why no one with a brain is calling out this story for its absurdity is astounding.
These issues are not subtle or small. The theories science (specifically physics) now promotes and teaches about the physical world, while highly accurate and highly reproducible in different areas, are *impossibly inconsistent* and *abundantly incomplete*. For science, inconsistency on this scale is a crisis requiring a revolution in thought.
The most dangerous hubris in science is the refusal to accept that we're far more ignorant about our physical environment than most would like to admit.
this is also happening on Ubuntu server, running Spamassassin 3.2.5
The linked article references a workaround: /etc/spamassassin/local.cf
add this line to the "local.cf" spamassassin config file, on this system is was
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0
If you're running spamassassin as a daemon, you *may* also want to restart spamd
with something like:
sudo /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart
This solution simply removes the rule by setting the score for that rule to 0.
You'll want to undo this once a solution is deployed.
Note that access to information, education and entertainment, relationships, friendships and intimacy and many other basic human needs are not on that list. Travel, personal property, reproduction, and many other norms we accept as given are also not on that list. What I wrote was that basic human needs for safety and survival would be afforded as a right to all people in a "fair" and idealized world, and that people could work for a life more than that.
I stand by that assertion: such a place would be fair. Would it work? Who knows. European countries offer a reasonable safety net and seem to be doing OK. Compared to some countries, crime there is lower, people are smarter, incarceration is lower, people are happier and healthier, drug use is lower. An idealized world like this probably wouldn't be nearly as free as some people experience today, but it would be fair. Personally, I'd choose freedom over fairness when they conflict, but offering a real safety net for human survival and safety would eliminate the fear that drives many toward the ills we see in the world today, and it would make the world a much nicer place.
If you want to label it a "socialist utopia", fine, call it hoogamazoola for all I care, it doesn't change the essence of the point: life now, on earth, is not even close to fair in any sense, nor do people even give the idea of "fair" a reasonable hearing in social discourse. Marx was right about one thing in the mid 1800's: his premise was there is enough. It was true then, and still is today.
Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair.
There is ridiculous dishonesty in this assertion.
Of course profiting off someone else's work is unfair. Nothing about what the litigant or the defendants have done or will do relates in any way with "fair". If the world were "fair" every single human would have as an inalienable right free access to decent food, housing, healthcare, and security and working beyond that would be an optional choice to better their life. Humanity is far, far from this ideal, and everything we do now in the business world is *nothing* about fair, it is about power and capital, and having long chains of other humans working for the profit of those few who have learned how to escape or work the system. Remember more than half of your planet's population still farms their food by hand, and dies in large numbers when there are droughts.
"Profiting from someone else's innovation" is at the very basic essence of working capitalism. It an the assumption driving nearly all investment. Using capital to buy a stock, and having that stock rise in value, has the effect of making a profit off the wealth creation and innovation in that company. I don't take a position for or against that system it is highly efficient, when it works, at allocating resources and creating significant development.
But even beyond the nature of business and profit, these folks have gone down into the depths of corporate IP litigation, where the idealistic light of "fair" shines like smelly dirt. Lawsuits rarely have much to do with a high notion of justice; they are what you can pay for, and what you can win. To assert that ones actions are about "fair" when filing a corporate IP litigation lawsuit is patently absurd and frankly laughable.
I got rid of my TV feed service years ago. The content is mostly (like 90%+) mindless drivel, and the ads are insidious. When I'm in a room with a TV, and I hear how loud the ads are, I laugh, and ask them to mute it.
We now have free, on demand movies with most cable services, we have Netflix, Hulu, Tivo, Cablebox DVR, Joost, Miro, Mythtv, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, PS3 streaming, we have Itunes, and to top all that off, there is an expanding vibrant black market - all getting around the mess of broadcast TV ad delivery. Plus: (...plug...) there are lots of decent open licensed content that you can find, and that market is growing.</plug>
I say let the dinosaur-age broadcasters keep shoving awful ads and crap programming down the TV feed. Why write laws to try and help them provide a better service? Anyone with half a mind left would have dropped it already, and younger minds will see it for what it is: mindless distraction to suck the life out of you.
The only real identity that is immune from subversion is consistent, community agreement.
What I mean by this is that every piece of data measured can be faked, copied, or altered in the database against which the measurement is checked. DNA can be planted, id cards will be sold on black markets and faked, biometrics can be later changed or forged. The measured data in the database against which identity is checked can be altered - *all* the technology-based methods for ID have vectors of attack.
What cannot be faked is what ones peers and friends agree upon regarding who an individual really is, and that the human in wuestion really is the person they agree it is. If all the friends and neighbors agree you really are Bob, then you're Bob regardless of what you do, or what data is stored in electronic systems. This is an unwieldy (nearly impossible) metric for access to a bar, authentication for into services, permission to drive, or asserting your ID at the bank to get your money. However, at its heart, community consistency could be the unalterable root from which all the other identification methods would rely upon. Basically one can create all kinds of electronic, physical, and technology based systems that will need to get reset when they are faked or forged or incorrect. To rely on other electronic systems for that reset is flawed and misses the essential nature of how people understand and use interpersonal identity.
Google is not the concern, nor is their control. I have no expectation Google uses search history for any purpose other than algorithm tweaking. The privacy issue comes from ones search history collected in one place. In aggregate, the collection of all Internet search history is an extremely powerful tool for learning about a person, and possibly exposing things an individual doesn't even realize they are revealing.
Most people have never been sued or accused of a crime, gone through a trial, been deposed or subpoenaed, or have any understanding of just how bad things can get when situations really go bad. There are times when one justifiably wants to guard their privacy carefully, but typically it's difficult to always know in the moment when those times are. Realizing after the fact that you need to protect information from discovery is too late.
I use a proxy as my default search service, like this:
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?q=google+is+collecting+your+data
There may also be others, but this one has worked for me.
Downsides: no cached or similar pages, no searchable search history, no cute math results, none of the value-add search links or maps at the top of the results - just the plain search results.
Upside: no data collection on my searches. (if I believe that the proxy is not also collecting data), you can also set it to give 100 search results as the default.
But its even deeper than this. Freecreditreport leeches off an even bigger scam. The whole premise that people allow, expect and pay these three companies to collect and sell their own information back to others is a intrinsically a scam.
The "big three" do not see or treat consumers as their customers - which explains why they are so difficult to deal with: their customers are other companies that buy information about the "worthiness" of potential customers, like you.
The absurd and unfair treatment that people received from these private companies was so bad that the laws were changed to require them to provide some information back to the unwilling subjects of their profits.
LegalTorrents.com has been in operation for about 6 years now. We host licensed digital media and distribute using Bittorrent.
This article refers to an announcement that we have launched a new service for members providing open Bittorrent tracking so anyone can host their own content seeds, and publish an unlimited amount of material without uploading to the LegalTorrents servers.
@publicknowledge has an excellent 2-part video recap, here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5t2DYT_SV8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAeZwvvI7w
and an issue section with several articles, http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/soc
There are several steps to qualify for safe harbors, and we will follow each of them to the letter. We have not yet had to reply to any DMCA takedowns yet - all the content on the website must have a share-friendly license before content can be uploaded.
In such a situation, we will both defend the rights of our customers and provide them all the information possible to resolve the issue. I disagree the FAQ is slanted toward "IP-thieves". This does not represent the ethos of LegalTorrents.
Fred von Lohmann from the EFF provides an excellent .pdf review for service providers; there is a recently updated version here:
http://www.law.depaul.edu/centers_institutes/ciplit/niro_symposium_09/pdf/paper_cohn1.pdf
plus EFF has a wiki page with additional details: http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Copyright:_Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
Actually, this is not accurate, the trackers are open, and can be used without adding the hash to the website. Unfortunately, a completely open system is open to abuse, copyright infringement, and other issues.
To publish your own content, or content you have a license to distribute, membership is required to "whitelist" content, and prevent automatic removal by blacklisting. This is the solution we have come up with to minimize and prevent abuse.
Any logged in user can flag content as copyright infringing, here
http://www.legaltorrents.com/flag_content
and unless that hash value is in the whitelist (added by a member), the tracker will remove it in about 15 minutes.
I'd really like to see Google open the API so anyone can upload 360 degree image sets and add to the mapping collection.
Inside and on top of buildings, police stations, museums, libraries, schools, government offices, cemeteries, amusement parks, rivers, caves, airports, ports, national parks, trails, lakes, campsites, businesses, military bases, people's homes, backyards, front yards, hospitals, casinos, daycare centers, bars, strip clubs,...
I say, let's post online detailed maps and images of everything and every single place possible, then give it all to one company to share back to us with ads. This is where these efforts will lead. Oh, wait, that doesn't sound as good (er, not evil) any more.
I'm not sure - but is there a way to use all these images in applications that are not Google? Could others have a license to create a 3D first-person environment simulation of the real world if there were enough stitch-together images or 3D camera imagery? Would Google allow this?
Information distribution is in a gray area now between the past, when reputation came top-down from the creation of large distribution organizations as surrogates for reputation to the new model, (which still does not work well) where reputation comes bottom-up, from various sources and from group interaction. After this issue gets a lot worse, people will start using peer-weighted reputation as a filter before who they believe, but that shift will take a generation to really take hold widely.
kinda like this,
"Scientists create synthetic polio virus from genetic sequence"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm
Several articles on this back in 2002.
Both his Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever series (fantasy) and his Gap series (Sci Fi) were excellent writing and stories. I read them growing up and thought they were great. He's one of the few authors I've read that can do both genres really well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Donaldson
Also, I think a fun class project would be to compile a concept or theme-based wiki and find/cite examples of major themes in fantasy and sci-fi literature. I use "wiki" loosely here because in my experience wiki tools offer too much freedom to express and with groups it usually makes a mess. But simply put, answer this: what are major and interesting repeated themes in sci fi and fantasy literature, which books do those themes appear in, and for each, a brief description of how the story uses or modifies the basic theme for that story, which stories show best examples of the theme, which places did the theme first appear, etc.
when I first read this description, I thought it was about people using twitter to by open and public about their money.
In most other parts of the world the Internet is driving companies and products to "out-open" each other. more transparency wins, more obvious pricing models win, easier services win. People who are more open and more public about their lives are more successful generally (though its not clear which are the causes and which are the effects).
This drive toward open has not reached financial matters (yet). People and companies are still extremely private about how much money hey have and what they do with that money, for good reason.
Eventually I see the intersection of "open" culture drivers - and the privacy of personal and organizational finance hitting a crossroad. It may not be pretty. I think that once the norm is forced to be more open in order to compete, then eventually there will be a drive to be open about money and transactions - how much people and orgs have, and exactly how they use it. Financial information may be protected for some time legally, but with ever increasing information available about everything, it will get out, be shared, and used to make decisions. I think we'll see on 10+ year timelines some organizations and people and orgs being "open" about their money voluntarily and it will be a very good thing. Totally open finance.
Consumers will have data never before imagined: consider at point of sale knowing exactly what the producers of a product paid in capital and marginal costs to produce a product you might buy, the breakdown of costs and profits to which organizations, and which people are benefiting from that potential purchase? I think we'll see this faster than you might imagine.
Reading TFA, Nate's analysis implies that there is a systematic bias toward some last digits in the overall poll percentages aggregated over many disparate topics.
What seems so improbable (to me) is that if someone really were grossly "cooking the books" like this - literally not doing the poll, or tallying any numbers at all, but instead simply reporting fake results for press ... is that they would be so stupid to make up the results manually instead of using a computer in some way. What, some guy in an office reading other polls and saying "gee I think the number will be 45%."
If this kind of bias really has been introduced by manually creating and publishing the results (as the analysis seems to imply), then it will be easy to track down and prove with further digging into the data, interviewing people who made the calls or took the data, etc. However, accepting such an explanation would requires a level of stupid on the part of the principals in this company that is so extreme that I find such a scenario an improbable explanation for the results presented.
NOT ALL MEN are sensors, concerned primarily with the "look" and image of beauty that is socially defined as "attractive". Most are, but not all. This social, media driven image of one beauty for women is a big social myth that even if not true for some men, most all men learn that this one, social image is the "normal" for attractive, so they mimic the behaviors of other men.
FTA: "'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'"
More accurately, they could say: "conclude MANY men's cognitive functioning".
Jung developed and published models of cognition in the early 1900s that explain directly the different means by which people (men and women) collect information and make judgments. These models are not scientific (yet), but rather observational classification. They have been re-used and rediscovered multiple times under many different names for decades. It is really frustrating to read professional scientists doing funded social research that blurs the lines and causes confusion about these issues in the lay public. While I do not dispute their results, the point is that there are observational models that show that these results do not apply to all men, and these models can reproducibly predict (in some people) which men it would apply to.
It will be such a huge leap forward for humanity when there is reproducible scientific evidence and measurement techniques to back up Jung's neural models so that social researchers can segment the population intelligently for this kind of social research.
Childs could cause damage to San Francisco's network.
But, but... think of the children