Brave New World | Stephen Hawking

Described as nothing less than “a global exploration of the scientific breakthroughs that are transforming our lives in the 21st century”, this ambitious series, introduced by Professor Stephen Hawking, showcases some of the astonishing work being currently undertaken to find cures for disease and physical impairment, to create a new generation of intelligent machines and to expand our understanding of the universe.

A team of scientists, among them Richard Dawkins and Lord Winston, report on the discoveries that they consider will have the most far-reaching and life-changing effects. In tonight’s opener, veterinary scientist Mark Evans fuses his brain with a computer in Switzerland to test an entirely new breed of machine, and Professor Kathy Sykes is in America to experience the future of transport – in a driverless car.

In Italy, Jim Al-Khalili comes face to face with a baby-like robot that can mimic the learning skills of a child, and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits one of the world’s largest telescopes in the Canary Islands, where the search is on for planets that human beings could, some day, colonise.

Machines. The team showcase breakthroughs in technology and engineering that are creating a new generation of machines. Mark Evans fuses his brain with a computer in Switzerland to test a new breed of machine. Kathy Sykes hits the streets of San Francisco to have the ride of her life as she experiences the future of transport in a driverless car.

Brave New World With Stephen Hawking - Machine

Health. The experts examine how scientists are fighting for our survival by battling the world’s big killer diseases. Biologist Aarathi Prasad joins virus hunters in the jungles of Africa, Robert Winston sees first-hand how the surgeons of the future could be robots, capable of operating round the clock, and Richard Dawkins investigates the way brain disorders might one day be treated using laser light and genetically modified brain cells.

Brave New World With Stephen Hawking - Health

Technology. The experts explore how 21st-century technology is shaping our future by changing the way we live, the way we communicate and our perception of the universe. Physicist Kathy Sykes explores how our mobile phones can give experts access to our every habit and action: a brave new world in which it’s hard to keep a secret but where urban planners can build cities around our needs.

Brave New World With Stephen Hawking - Technology

Environment. Science turns superhero as it battles to save the planet and preserve the human race. In California, physicist Jim Al-Khalili sees how the power of the world’s largest laser could create a fuel to answer all our needs, while at Longleat Sir David Attenborough helps collect the DNA of an elephant for the Frozen Ark – a project to save all the world’s species from extinction.

Biology. The experts unearth the amazing breakthroughs that are transforming the resilience and strength of the human body. Mark Evans joins the bio-prospectors in Central America exploring the untapped reserves of the oceans for life-changing drugs; Aarathi Prasad meets the remarkable old people who could hold the secret to a long and healthy life; and Robert Winston explores how our behaviour and environment may be influencing the genes of future generations in ways we once thought impossible.

Ron Paul Explains The Economic Crisis In Iowa

Ron Paul Explains the Economic Crisis

Ron Paul: The Chinese Are Our Bankers, They're Not Going to Attack Us

Annual Cato Monetary Conference

Ron Paul: "FED is immoral" - speech at the CATO

Extra: One-hour Interview with Ron Paul

Ron Paul at Des Moines Register Editorial Board Interview

Occupy Love

Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.

Source: Occupy Love

Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love

The Paradox of Choice | Decision-making and Economics

We have never been this free—and this conflicted. Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks with Lars Mensel about the downside of choice, and the silver lining to the economic downturn.

The European: How did you get into researching choice and decision making?
Schwartz: For many years, I have been interested in the hold that the ideology of free market, economics has on people throughout the developed Western world. Why is it that everyone thinks that it’s a miracle of human intervention? I concluded that one of its principle attractions is that it seems to cater to the desire for freedom. That’s the most important thing about it: nobody tells you what to do, nobody tells you what to buy. There’s no other way to arrange things where that kind of freedom is nearly as substantial. The question then is: are people actually liberated by all this freedom? A study came out more than ten years ago, that actually showed that when you give people too much choice, instead of being liberated, they get paralyzed. That study has generated many many follow-up studies, that indicate that this is really quite a pervasive phenomenon, and it seemed to me that this undermined the principle justification for organizing everything around competitive markets. Even if your aspiration is to enhance human freedom, this doesn’t seem to be the way to do that.

The European: Yet modern times and Western prosperity has enabled us to do just about anything we want. What is the downside?
Schwartz: It seems fabulous in prospect and I can easily see why people embrace this with such enthusiasm. Not just choice when it comes to the stuff you buy, but choice when it comes to how you live. There’s no canonical form of intimate relations—you get to decide, and you get to change your mind. You’re not shackled the way your parents or your grandparents were, what could be better? It just turns out that when you give people this kind of unconstrained opportunity to reinvent themselves, they don’t know what to do. Or if they do it, they look over their shoulders, convinced that they’ve made the wrong decisions, made the wrong career move, the wrong romantic choices and so on. So you are plagued with doubt, you are always dissatisfied with whatever you’ve chosen because just around the corner there’s a better option. And I think we see this in the explosion of people seeking psychotherapy. In this land of milk and honey of unimagined freedom and affluence, everybody seems to be miserable.

The European: Many will confirm that even the most mundane decisions can be a burden. Is it the expectation to make something of our lives that weighs down on us?
Schwartz: Not just something: that we make something spectacular out of our lives. When choice was limited, I think people’s aspirations and expectations were limited. And so you could live a decent life and feel good about it. But living a decent life just isn’t good enough anymore. Why would you settle for decent when anything is possible? It seems possible that the economic calamity of the last few years might reverse this to some degree and move people back to more reasonable expectations about what life can be like. I think that the economic downturn would really have to last a substantial period of time before it changed the way people think about themselves and about their lives. I certainly don’t wish on us another decade of economic turmoil and suffering. But the potential benefits if that were to occur include lowering expectations, which I don’t think is a bad thing. The European: So the economic downturn is helping to usher along the lesson that settling down also means settling for something, and enjoying what we’ve got. Schwartz: Good things sometimes come out of tragic circumstances. I am not optimistic that any of this will happen automatically or quickly. As long as people think that tomorrow, it’s all going to change, they are basically just treading water, waiting for the downturn to end, so that they can go back to living the life that they had imagined for themselves.

The European: In the NYT magazine, scientist Roy Baumeister talks about decision fatigue: His theory is that too many decisions wear us out and negatively affect our judgement.
Schwartz: It’s the phenomenon where you have to exert self-control to get yourself to do something that is unpleasant and to stay at it. And when you do that, it’s sort of like tiring your muscles. When you now have to do it again, you don’t have the resources available. Like if you’ve run 15 miles, you can’t just hop up and run another 15 miles. You are worn out. He thinks the same thing is true with whatever mechanisms enable us to exercise discipline and self-control. One study that the Times article does mention is that one way of wearing people’s self-control out is by requiring them to make a series of decisions. Just like sticking with a really unpleasant reading assignment or a set of homework problems wears out your self-discipline, so also does making choices. And I find that quite plausible. I think there’s good reason to think that if you go shopping back to school at the mall with your kids, and you are making one set of choices after another, by the end of the day, you are doing some really stupid things, just to get it over with and get out of there.

The European: …which brings up the larger question of how many decisions we can even make. On the one hand, there are expectations, on the other hand there’s a limit to our ability to decide.
Schwartz: Another point that Baumeister makes that is not apparent in the article in the Times, is that if self-control is a muscle that gets fatigued with use, in theory it can also get strengthened with exercise. If that’s true, you may see lots of individual differences. Some of us can make more decisions over a longer period of time without getting worn out. It’s an empirical question and I don’t know that there really are any clear data to answer that. But there’s got to be a point for pretty much anybody, where you just can’t make another decision. We don’t regard a lot of decision that we make as decisions. You don’t decide to brush your teeth in the morning.

The European: David Eagleman thinks that decisions are mostly subconscious: Our brain is on a certain trajectory and that all decisions are built upon.
Schwartz: Of course that is true. Think about what you do every day when you get up: you brush your teeth. Is that a decision? No. You put your underwear on. Is that a decision? No. You put on your socks before you put on your shoes. Is that a decision? No. Well of course, all those things are decision, but they have become so habitual that you do them automatically. You drive to work. Do you decide whether to make a left turn here or make the left turn on the next block? No. You are sort of on automatic pilot, you follow the same route every day. That saves us. If every real choice involved a deliberate decision for us, we would be worn out before we even got ourselves out of the house.

The European: If you think about something as fundamental as picking up a glass of water; it involves plenty of the decisions.
Schwartz: Yes. There’s some very interesting research done by a psychologist named Hazel Marcus on cultural differences on what counts as a decision. She brings people into the lab to do some study, but in the course of doing the study, they get to choose which cubicle to sit in, which writing implement to use, and a whole bunch of other trivial things like that. And when they are all done, they get asked: “how many decisions did you make?” And what she finds is that Caucasian Americans think they have made many more decisions than people from India or Japan. The way we organize our experience is itself heavily influenced by the culture we come from, and if you come from a culture that does not celebrate choice, all of these choices aren’t interpreted by you as choices.

The European: Does the notion of free will also differ between cultures?
Schwartz: I think it probably does, but I am not myself aware of research that has asked that specific question. There is a lot of work that Western societies need to do to figure out what stance to take. What does it mean to say that somebody is in charge of his decisions? We have operated with the notion that human beings are autonomous agents, that what we do is the product of conscious reflection, and we don’t have to do any of the things we do, so that we are of course responsible for our actions. This is the framework with which we operate when we are interacting with other people. It’s why we blame people when they do something bad, praise people when they do something right, it’s why we put people in jail for committing crimes, and so on. And it’s a fiction. By that I don’t mean that we are never in charge, all I mean is that we are certainly not always in charge. And our social and legal institutions have not caught up with modern understanding that has come out of research in the psychology of decision making. So we are going to have to think hard about how to revise the framework of holding people accountable in light of this new evidence.

The European: The classical economic point of view is that peoples’ decisions results from a careful weighing of what will create the most desirable result. What do you advocate?
Schwartz: Well, I think this picture is completely false, but I think that even economists have known it was false almost from the start. Arguably the leading economist from the 20th century, Keynes, wrote about animal spirits. So here’s this framework of rational, utility-maximizing choice, and along comes Keynes and there’s this package of stuff that he calls animal spirit, that we just might call psychology, that has an enormous influence, moderates, completely negates all these processes of rational deliberation that economist models are built on. So this has been the dirty secret of economics forever. They build models as if people are rational actors, knowing that that assumption is unjustified. And what they hope, I think, and what Keynes thought was also a mistake, is that our irrational quirks are idiosyncratic, so that they basically just cancel each other out. Since economists are not particularly interested in predicting what you will do, or what I will do, but rather what whole markets will do, quirkiness doesn’t matter if it’s random. What Keynes appreciated is that it’s not random. In fact, bubbles are the opposite of random. Every time one of these bubbles pops, it seems to me, it’s a real thorn in the side of the kind of models of rational choice that economists build.

The European: Interestingly, it still seems to surprise economists.
Schwartz: Some people did see it coming, but nobody listened to them. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Fed, who everybody thought was a guru, whose every sentence needed to be chiseled into stone—when the downturn happened, he testified in front of US Congress and he said, “Everybody needs a world view. The world view I’ve been operating on is that people are rational decision makers. I was wrong.” It didn’t do us much good that he said it when he no longer had power. If he’d appreciated this when he was actually making decisions, it’s quite possible that this calamity could have been avoided. There were opportunities that people who run major financial institutions had that could have prevented this from happening. But easier and easier credit, fewer and fewer regulation: all of that made sense on the model that people are rational actors, will act in their own best interest, and collectively that will lead to better results in everyone’s best interest. A different person in the chair’s position could have prevented a lot of the catastrophe, I think, from happening. Every time a bubble happens, a huge segment of profession is shocked.

Continue reading - Barry Schwartz | Decision-making and Economics - The Paradox of Choice

US REVOLT - UC Davis Students Protest Against 81% Tuition Fee Hike, Pepper Sprayed

After pepper-spraying incident, UC Davis redesigns website



Excerpt from UC Davis 2010-2012 General Catalog (Joke of the Day)

Applied Biological Systems Technology (College of Agricultural and Environmental Science)

176. Introduction to Pepper Spray. (3) Lecture— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Crowd Control Through Chemicals 122B. Basic uses of pepper spray in threatening, semi-threatening and completely non-threatening and utterly peaceful situations. Common spraying techniques. Overview of rationalization methods. Color choices. Jackboot styles.

177. Advanced Pepper Spraying. (3) Lecture— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Introduction to Pepper Spray 176. Calculating optimum angles in spraying situations. Spraying seated vs. standing persons. History and development of chemical warfare against inconvenient demonstrations. Elements of CYA: basics and best practices.

178: Pepper Spray Practicum. (3). Laboratory— 3 hours. Prerequisite: Advanced Pepper Spraying 177. Working in teams, students locate sites where individuals are exercising First Amendment rights and develop a strategy for spraying them. Emphasis on intimidation and staying calm under awesome hippie threat. Teams are held responsible for escaping responsibility themselves and insulating higher-ups.

Police in the U.S. have used pepper spray against peaceful students taking part in an 'Occupy' campaign in front of the University of California in response to the proposed 81% tuition hike. Demonstrators had been ordered to remove their camp, but after refusing, officers showed up and and tore their tents down, using force against unarmed people. 10 protesters have been arrested.

Source: Interview with a pepper-sprayed UC Davis student

UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed

Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!

Meanwhile in Baruch College, CUNY

Police attack Occupy CUNY students

Robin Ince: Science versus wonder? [TED]

Does science ruin the magic of life? In this grumpy but charming monologue, Robin Ince makes the argument against. The more we learn about the astonishing behavior of the universe -- the more we stand in awe.

Robin Ince: Science versus wonder?

GLOBAL REVOLT - Occupy's Global Day of Action | Shut Down Wall Street

a





Occupy Wall Street Fights Back!

Thought the Occupy movement was dying out? Think again. Two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street and following the violent eviction of the New York encampment on Tuesday, tens of thousands today re-occupied Zuccotti Park, shut down the Big Apple, and entirely blocked off all entrances to the New York Stock Exchange for a while. Afterwards, they marched on Union Square, Foley Square and Brooklyn Bridge in one of the largest rallies in the US so far.

Once again, the NYPD tried desperately to retain at least the illusion of control over the situation. The New York Times already reports over 200 arrests for today, with one protester seen leaving the scene with blood pouring from his face, and reports of attacks on photographers and peaceful protesters. None of this could stop Lower Manhattan from grinding to a near-complete halt, with protesters blocking off roads and occupying dozens of subway stations throughout the city .

Meanwhile, thousands of students from the occupation at the City University of New York blocked traffic as they marched to the streets on their way to the New School. Police tried to set up barricades but failed to stem the unstoppable flow of popular outrage from flooding into the streets. Labor unions were mobilized, too, and all marches eventually converged on Brooklyn Bridge — right where the NYPD pointlessly arrested 700+ protesters in October.

Violent OWS arrests video: RT footage of cops in action

Police start arrests at OWS Day of Action protest

OWS protester left bloody and bruised by NYPD

Day of OWS Action: Over 400 arrested, dozens injured

23 Occupy Protesters Arrested in LA

Occupy Protesters Arrested in L.A.

Occupy LA takes action with OWS

Occupy DC Protesters March to Bridge

A new dawn for Occupy Wall Street -- life after Day of Action

OWS gather steam from nationwide protest cop crackdown

Greece Commemorates Polytechnic Uprising









In Athens, police fired tear gas and over 70 people were detained as tens of thousands marched through the city to commemorate the start of the Polytechnic uprising of November 17, 1973, which eventually toppled the US-backed military junta the year after. Today, 38 years later, many in Greece feel they are once again faced with a form of dictatorship — this time under the aegis of the markets. As Occupied London wrote, “then with tanks, now with banks.”

“We have an economic and political junta,” said Marita, a student at the Polytechnic, referring to last week’s installment of a so-called “technocratic” coalition government composed of neoliberal economists and self-declared neo-fascists. The coalition, headed by Lucas Papademos, a former Vice-President of the European Central Bank, will be responsible for enacting the most severe budget cuts so far and the largest privatization drive in Western history.

As is custom on 17N, the demonstrators marched on the US Embassy to protest against the dark role played by the United States in supporting and propping up the brutal military dictatorship. At the Embassy, violent clashes broke out with police, leaving at least one person severely injured and with two broken legs after falling down from a ledge while being chased by riot police.

Greece battles video: Clashes, firebombs as thousands march in Athens

Students Strikes and Protests Across the World






While the actions in New York were the most headline-grabbing, similar rallies and occupations took place throughout the United States — and, indeed, throughout the world — as people everywhere expressed their solidarity with the evicted Wall Street occupiers and celebrated the 2-month anniversary of the Occupy movement. Rallies took place in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Portland, Washington, Denver, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, St Louis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto and countless other cities throughout the US and Canada.

Rome clashes: Video of Italy cops beating protesters with batons



In Spain, students started a one-week general strike and took to the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, Tarragona, Palma, Sevilla, Santiago de Compostela, Murcia, Valencia, Castello, Alicante and Zaragoza. In Italy, clashes broke out in Milan as students tried to occupy Bocconi University, which is headed by Italy’s new Prime Minister, Mario Monti, in protest against the bankers’ government he heads. Thousands marched in Rome, Turin and Palermo, followed by more violent clashes with police.

Carga en el Congreso #17N

Meanwhile, the epic saga of the Chilean student uprising continued with another day of protests in the city of Valparaiso. Once more, the students were faced with brutal police repression as water cannons and tear gas rained down them as they rallied in front of Congress. Remarkably, the students were joined by an astonishing 2,500 professors who arrived from all over the country in a 55-bus caravan.

Estudiantes chilenos vuelven a las calles, son reprimidos

In Paris, police broke up the occupation of the Defense business district. In Germany, student strikes, occupations, flash mobs and rallies took place in over a dozen cities, confirming the fact that the movement has even managed to penetrate into the bastion of European capitalism — one of the few eurozone members that has managed to stay on its financial feet throughout this crisis (at the expense of brutal austerity measures imposed on its neighbors).

Paris La défense, cops legions arrive and destroy the camp, destruction du camp

Just witnessing all of this unfold in its beautifully chaotic cacophony, it is undeniable that something incredibly historic is afoot. Not only has the movement gone global in an unprecedented kind of way, it also appears to be picking up steam right at a time when critics and skeptics were starting to declare its slow demise. Far from fading out, the global revolutionary wave of 2011 just keeps thundering forward — and we’re still riding its crest. In fact, we’re only just getting started!

Source: 17N: The global revolutionary wave of 2011 thunders on

The Consistent Candidate: Ron Paul 2012

The Consistent Candidate: Ron Paul 2012

US REVOLT - Berkeley Protests on Public Education

Anti-Wall Street protesters rallied on Tuesday at the University of California, Berkeley, vowing to reestablish a short-lived camp even as police shot and wounded a man who brandished a gun in a campus computer lab.

Police said there was no indication the shooting was linked to the demonstrations taking place in Sproul Plaza, across campus, and protest organizers said they would not be deterred from rebuilding a nascent "Occupy Cal Encampment" torn down by police a week earlier.

"The shooting on campus is completely unrelated to today's protest. All plans continue," Caloccupation said in a tweet about two hours after the incident, as thousands of students and protesters rallied in the plaza.

Campus police said they shot the unidentified man after he drew a gun from his backpack in the lab at the Haas School of Business and displayed it in a threatening manner. He was in surgery at a hospital on Tuesday evening, the university said.

Protest organizers had called for a daylong student strike featuring teach-ins and rallies in response to the arrest of 39 people last week after demonstrators briefly tried to "occupy" the campus with tents.

Tuesday's rallies were bolstered by members of the Occupy Oakland movement, who were evicted on Monday morning from their own camp in that city's Frank Ogawa Plaza near downtown and who marched north to Berkeley to join the protests.

At Berkeley, protesters beat on drums and chanted as they held up signs reading "Hella Occupy" and "Defend Public Education" and displayed pictures from 1960s student protests and marches led by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

"The things that brought me out are cuts in social services and education," 22-year-old history major Eden Foley said as she staffed a Students for Social Change table in the plaza.

Buddy Roark, a 23-year-old coffee shop barista from nearby San Leandro, said he came to speak out against "just inequality in general, but especially with the political system being influenced by the cash flow."

ACTION SHIFTS FROM OAKLAND

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich was scheduled to speak later on Tuesday, and an agenda circulated by organizers of the strike called for "reestablishment of the Occupy Cal Encampment" at 8 p.m.

Campus police, who were criticized for their handling of last week's demonstrations, declined to say if they would prevent protesters from setting up their tents on campus.

"Certainly that encampment is both against university policy and state law, so we will definitely again be educating protesters and participants on how they can exercise their first amendment rights," Police Lieutenant Alex Yao said.

He said that the goal of officers during last week's raid had been to remove the "illegal encampment" and that they had been actively resisted by the demonstrators.

"Officers used the means that was necessary at the time to overcome this resistance and move the crowd back so they could gain access and remove the illegal tents," he said.

Recent unrest surrounding protests in nearby Oakland has helped rally support nationwide for Occupy Wall Street, a movement launched in New York in September to protest economic inequality and excesses of the financial system.

Continue reading - Reuters - Berkeley protests carry on despite campus shooting

Berkeley Students Hold Strike, Teach Out