Have you seen Red Road?

Internet Eyes is an online instant event notification system. Utilizing Open Circuit Television (OCTV) software, viewers are able to monitor live video feeds from our customers and notify them the instant an event is observed.

Typical event notifications include

* Shop lifting
* Anti-social behavior
* Burglary
* Vandalism

Would you like the opportunity to help detect these crimes?

How does a reward of £1000 a month sound?

Marshall McLuhan:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

Internet Eyes

Lawrence Lessig:

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement -- if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness -- will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

Aaron Swartz:

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Freeman Dyson:

I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken.

Colin Powell:

Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

Against Transparency

New from the National Research Council:

Now more than ever, biology has the potential to contribute practical solutions to many of the major challenges confronting the United States and the world. A New Biology for the 21st Century recommends that a "New Biology" approach--one that depends on greater integration within biology, and closer collaboration with physical, computational, and earth scientists, mathematicians and engineers--be used to find solutions to four key societal needs: sustainable food production, ecosystem restoration, optimized biofuel production, and improvement in human health. The approach calls for a coordinated effort to leverage resources across the federal, private, and academic sectors to help meet challenges and improve the return on life science research in general.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Jay Keasling:

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Dyson:

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever.

A New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States Leads the Coming Biology Revolution

Advice from Garry Wills:

Play to your strengths.

Learn to write well.

Read, read, read.

Seek out the most intellectually adventurous of your fellow students.

Do not fear political activism.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Annual Paycheck

Reading: $118
"Entertainment": $2,698

Donald Rumsfeld:

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

Play Politics

Ken Burns:

Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales -- from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska -- The National Parks: America's Best Idea is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background -- rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. It is a story full of struggle and conflict, high ideals and crass opportunism, stirring adventure and enduring inspiration -- set against the most breathtaking backdrops imaginable.

Michael Chabon:

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted--not taught--to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Jamie Hogan:

I'm an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears.

The National Parks: America's Best Idea | PBS

The Japanese town made infamous by the movie The Cove has temporarily suspended its hunt. The annual Taiji hunt claims around 2,000 dolphins, killed by hand after being herded into a shallow cove.

While Japan officially declares that the move had nothing to do with the protests, an official at the Taiji fisheries association, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Thursday that the decision was made partly in response to the international outcry created by "The Cove."

Ric O'Barry, et al:

We believe that once the Japanese people know, they will demand change.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

"Cove" Town Suspends Dolphin Slaughter

Arnold Kling:

This paper looks at the roots of the current crisis through an analytical framework of bad bets, excessive leverage, domino effects, and 21st-century bank runs. The paper shows that broad policy areas--including housing policy, capital regulations for banks, industry structure and competition, autonomous financial innovation, and monetary policy--affected elements of this framework to varying, but important, degrees. While considering alternative points of view concerning the causes of the financial crisis, the paper concludes that bank capital regulations were the most important causal factor in the crisis and that the policy "solutions" to previous financial and economic crises sowed the seeds for this current crisis.

Sheila Bair:

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

Chuck Klosterman:

Nobody cared, then they did. Why?

Niall Ferguson:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile.

Patricia Princehouse's friend:

It takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean.

Not What They Had in Mind

Richard B. Rafal:

Since we are moving toward socialism with ObamaCare, the time has come to do the same with other professions -- especially lawyers.

ABA Journal:

Of the 2,377 respondents who answered all or part of the survey, 84.2 percent indicated they would be willing to earn less money in exchange for lower billable-hour requirements.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

A Doctor's Plan for Legal Industry Reform

Timo Arnall:

Nearness explores interacting without touching.

One of the essential properties of Near Field Communication is nearness, but this is set against one of the paradoxes of touch-based interaction where, in fact, nothing needs to touch.

Decius:

Good jobs in the US will be less and less knowledge-based and more and more service-based, focusing on proximity to clients.

Technospaces:

Science and technology have had a profound affect on the way humans perceive space and time -think, for example of the way information technologies such as the telephone have reduced our former perception of the world as inaccessible, unknowable and exotic to a sensibility of nearness, friendliness, fellowship and instantaneity (the so-called "global village"). The scientific knowledge which produces technology remains a system of beliefs, the perspectives of science are thought-structures, that is ideologies, which organise the world into sets of believable fictions. Although science has tried to define "the thing in itself", it ends up exploring "the thing for me", through the practical postulate - the praxis - of space/time paradigms. This had had a practical effect upon our invention, and our use, of new technologies.

From the 2008 Year in Ideas:

The survey showed that Predator crews were suffering through "impaired domestic relationships" -- a problem which might possibly have something to do with the proximity of the Vegas strip.

Jonathan Franzen:

The very essence of the cell phone's hideousness, as a social phenomenon--the bad news that stays bad news--is that it enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal. And there is no higher-caliber utterance than "I love you"--nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even "Fuck you, dickhead" is less invasive, since it's the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.

Milan Kundera, via Rebecca Brock:

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.

Nearness

Douglas Rushkoff:

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

George Dyson:

How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don't let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don't call it a bank.

Benjamin Friedman:

It is time for some serious discussion of what our financial system is actually delivering to our economy and what it costs to do that.

Nathan Myhrvold:

I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

John Cochrane:

It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn't make them less false.

Economics Is Not a Natural Science