The aviation and telecommunication revolutions have conspired to make distance increasingly irrelevant. An important consequence of this is that US citizens, accustomed to competing with their neighbors for jobs, now must compete with candidates from all around the world. These candidates are numerous, highly motivated, increasingly well educated, and willing to work for a fraction of the compensation traditionally expected by US workers.
If the United States is to offset the latter disadvantage and provide its citizens with the opportunity for high-quality jobs, it will require the nation to excel at innovation -- that is, to be first to market new products and services based on new knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge. This capacity to discover, create and market will continue to be heavily dependent on the nation’s prowess in science and technology.
Indicators of trends in these fields are, at best, highly disconcerting. While many factors warrant urgent attention, the two most critical are these: (1) America must repair its failing K-12 educational system, particularly in mathematics and science, in part by providing more teachers qualified to teach those subjects, and (2) the federal government must markedly increase its investment in basic research, that is, in the creation of new knowledge.
Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can America continue to maintain a high standard of living -- including providing national security -- for its citizens.
Science fiction writer Rudy Rucker, author of the book, Mathematicians In Love, claims that any natural process can be regarded as a computation, and that computers are not "digital."
KCRW has selected 'En Cada Lugar' from Federico's new album as their Top Tune of the day!
After his previous album, Granhotelbuenosaires, was released, it went into regular rotation on my iPod, and I still come back to it. AMG termed its sound "the reverse image of trip-hop." Here's how PopMatters described it:
Mashing cultures together, and then reconstructing from the post-collision remnants into newfangled fancies of cultural appreciation.
A sort of mad grab of multiple musical idioms to create a veritable visual pastiche which sounds a lot like a Friday evening filled with tango dancers, dark coffee, and hot brume.
Granhotelbuenosaires acquires a cool sense of mystery. It has a secret; it has a surreptitious, slinking self that I can’t quite latch on to despite my imploring and attempts. A sweaty something as I sidle down a side street with candy colored cars and pastel apartments that can’t be quite denied. Try rationalizing, comparing, and compromising and searching for understanding, but the phrases inexorably roll off of the singer’s tongue and caress the night sky.
A few months here as a Kinks fan, a couple of weeks there as a Ramones fan, many more months listening to Mozart, followed by Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Vinicius and Tom Jobim all became an important part of his record collection. In time he discovered the avant garde Argentinian tango composer and bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla.
The PanAmerican Highway is an apt metaphor for Federico Aubele's "PanAmericana." The highway is a network of roads, not one single stretch of blacktop -- each segment reflects the individual character of the country it's in. You can say the same for the tracks on Federico Aubele's album.
This is "the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine has ever published."
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
Apple's Mac OS X operating system is attracting more attention from users and security researchers alike. Despite this increased interest, there is still an apparent lack of detailed vulnerability development information for OS X. This paper will attempt to help bridge this gap by walking through the entire vulnerability development process. This process starts with vulnerability discovery and ultimately finished with a remote code execution. To help illustrate this process, a real vulnerability found in the OS X wireless device driver is used.
As I studied Freud's old age and his late work, I came to see that the problems he encountered were in many ways still ours.
Freud the analyst of sex was something we all knew about. But there was a second phase of Freud's work, little read, that bears strongly on our own crises in politics and religion. Freud was, I came to believe, something of an expert on how and why authority goes bad.
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
Topic: Politics and Law
10:29 pm EDT, Sep 19, 2007
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.
The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.
"Evening," Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.
"Want to tell me about June 1998?"
Greg looked up from his Departures. "I'm sorry?"
"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, 'Are shrooms really such a bad idea?'"
Time Lapse Video of the 2007 Burning Man festival as viewed from the Block Rock Solar "Powertainer".
