Vatican’s Celebratory Mood Is Dampened by Leaks

VATICAN CITY — As the world’s Roman Catholics prepare for the addition of 22 members to the College of Cardinals, the Vatican has become embroiled in an embarrassing scandal in which a number of leaked documents have drawn back the curtains on the church’s inner workings.

The internal church squabbling, predictably dubbed “VatiLeaks” by the Italian news media, became public about three weeks ago with the disclosure on television and in newspapers of confidential letters written by a top Vatican official who had denounced alleged corruption and financial mismanagement in Vatican City.

The widespread feeling among experts who follow the Vatican is that the letters were a volley in a battle among officials jousting for power in a papal court whose anointed leader, they say, is more concerned with theological questions than with the day-to-day affairs of state.

Every journalist who follows the church has described the current controversy as part of “a clash between cardinals in the Curia,” even though the Vatican is denying it, said Paolo Rodari, who writes about the Vatican for two newspapers. The e-mails and letters and documents that have made their way into print “could not get out unless they came from someone inside,” he added.

The Vatican has not denied the letters’ authenticity, but it has issued numerous statements saying the news media have blown the matter far out of proportion.

The first missives to be published date from last spring. In them, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, at the time the deputy governor of Vatican City, fretted that he would be ousted after making enemies in his effort to combat overspending and cronyism in the awarding of contracts. He pleaded with his boss, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and the pope to let him stay on. Instead, Archbishop Viganò was named the papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States.

Letters and documents by other Vatican officials followed, including some that suggested that the Vatican was not adequately complying with international legislation to prevent money laundering.

One anonymous document published in a national newspaper last week cited reports that a Sicilian cardinal had spoken vaguely about a plot to kill Pope Benedict XVI before the end of 2012.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, called the reports “delirious and incomprehensible.”

The public airing of the church’s problems comes at an awkward time for the Vatican as it prepares to expand the College of Cardinals, which will take place at a ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday.

It is usually a festive moment, and indeed hundreds of pilgrims have come from New York to be present when Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan becomes a prince of the church. This time, however, some columnists who write about the Vatican have made much of the fact that a higher-than-average number of new cardinals are Italian or have links with the Curia, stacking the deck, they implied, in the election of the next pope.

Full disclosure has never been the Vatican’s choice of public relations strategy (even today, its archives release only long-ago pronouncements in carefully measured doses). But to judge by the numerous statements they have issued, the disclosure of the letters has uncharacteristically placed the Holy See’s house organs in crisis mode.

In a front-page editorial this week about Benedict in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, the editor in chief, Giovanni Maria Vian, described the pope as standing fast “before the wolves” amid “irresponsible and unworthy behavior” encouraged by the “clamor of the media.”

Father Lombardi, the spokesman, also took stabs at the news media and called on church officials to “have strong nerves, because no one can be surprised at anything,” comparing the embarrassment caused by the letters to the mortification that engulfed the United States administration in the WikiLeaks scandal.

The church must stand firm, and not allow itself “to be swallowed up by the vortex of confusion, which is what ill-intentioned people want,” he said in a statement this week. We must “make use of reason, something which not all media outlets tend to do.”

While there is broad consensus among Vatican experts that the Vatican and its churchmen are not immune to the failings of human nature, the storied intricacies of Vatican politics make the final objective of the leaked letters less clear.

Some believe the letters are meant to cast murky light on Cardinal Bertone, accused by critics of being a bad manager even as he tries to expand his influence at the papal court.

Others say the objective is simply to disclose corruption within the Vatican’s financial institutions, though in recent years the Holy See has ostensibly made efforts to be more transparent in its economic dealings (mere smoke screens, skeptics say).

“The lid came off this pot because it was masking a can of worms and it was time that they came out in the light of the day,” said Marco Lillo, an investigative journalist at the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, which has published several of the documents. The letters emerged, he explained, after alleged wrongdoings within the Curia went unpunished. “In a closed world, the only way to make wrongs public is to bring them to light in the public opinion.”

And in a church that has already been shaken by the acknowledgment of widespread sexual abuse of minors on the part of the clergy, the notion that what happens within Vatican walls stays within the Vatican walls “no longer applies,” he said. But there are also those who believe that the attacks are aimed at the pope himself, that he is being blamed for disregarding the management (and machinations) of the church as he instead tries to cement its theological and doctrinal foundations.

The pope, who turns 85 in April, has obliquely referred to the contentious climate in the Curia on several occasions, calling on officials to pay greater attention to spiritual rather than temporal matters.

Speaking to seminarians in Rome on Wednesday, the pope said that in recent days there had been “much talk about the Church of Rome, many things being said,” the Vatican Information Service reported. “Let us hope that people also talk about our faith.”

Source: NYTimes - Vatican’s Celebratory Mood Is Dampened by Leaks

MUST READ! The Boy Who Played With Fusion

“Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

When I meet Taylor Wilson, he is 16 and busy—far too busy, he says, to pursue a driver’s license. And so he rides shotgun as his father zigzags the family’s Land Rover up a steep trail in the Virginia Mountains north of Reno, Nevada, where they’ve come to prospect for uranium.

From the backseat, I can see Taylor’s gull-like profile, his forehead plunging from under his sandy blond bangs and continuing, in an almost unwavering line, along his prominent nose. His thinness gives him a wraithlike appearance, but when he’s lit up about something (as he is most waking moments), he does not seem frail. He has spent the past hour—the past few days, really—talking, analyzing, and breathlessly evangelizing about nuclear energy. We’ve gone back to the big bang and forward to mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter. In between are fission and fusion, Einstein and Oppenheimer, Chernobyl and Fukushima, matter and antimatter.

“Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground. It started with his first, and most pedestrian, interest: construction. As a toddler in Texarkana, the family’s hometown, Taylor wanted nothing to do with toys. He played with real traffic cones, real barricades. At age four, he donned a fluorescent orange vest and hard hat and stood in front of the house, directing traffic. For his fifth birthday, he said, he wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.”

This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive.

To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

At 10, Taylor hung a periodic table of the elements in his room. Within a week he memorized all the atomic numbers, masses and melting points. At the family’s Thanksgiving gathering, the boy appeared wearing a monogrammed lab coat and armed with a handful of medical lancets. He announced that he’d be drawing blood from everyone, for “comparative genetic experiments” in the laboratory he had set up in his maternal grandmother’s garage. Each member of the extended family duly offered a finger to be pricked.

The next summer, Taylor invited everyone out to the backyard, where he dramatically held up a pill bottle packed with a mixture of sugar and stump remover (potassium nitrate) that he’d discovered in the garage. He set the bottle down and, with a showman’s flourish, ignited the fuse that poked out of the top. What happened next was not the firecracker’s bang everyone expected, but a thunderous blast that brought panicked neighbors running from their houses. Looking up, they watched as a small mushroom cloud rose, unsettlingly, over the Wilsons’ yard.

For his 11th birthday, Taylor’s grandmother took him to Books-A-Million, where he picked out The Radioactive Boy Scout, by Ken Silverstein. The book told the disquieting tale of David Hahn, a Michigan teenager who, in the mid-1990s, attempted to build a breeder reactor in a backyard shed. Taylor was so excited by the book that he read much of it aloud: the boy raiding smoke detectors for radioactive americium . . . the cobbled-together reactor . . . the Superfund team in hazmat suits hauling away the family’s contaminated belongings. Kenneth and Tiffany heard Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor, who had recently taken a particular interest in the bottom two rows of the periodic table—the highly radioactive elements—read it as a challenge. “Know what?” he said. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I can actually do them.”

Continue reading - Popsci - The Boy Who Played With Fusion

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor

A Speck in Infinity: Journey Deep into the Cosmos | Peter Russell

From the stars we see with the naked eye, to the billions we don't see in our galaxy alone, to the billions of galaxies strung across the Universe.

A Speck in Infinity: Journey Deep into the Cosmos | Peter Russell

Peter Joseph - "Defining Peace - Economics, The State and War" | The Zeitgeist Movement

Peter Joseph - Founder of The Zeitgeist Movement
Title: "Defining Peace - Economics, The State and War'

This 1.5 hour talk will examine the historical roots of war; its technical irrelevancy; the State's historical psychological coercion of mass appeal; the inherent exclusive benefits to the upper class and denigration of the lower class; the broad inefficiency of the State itself as a divisive business entity and hence its inherent conflict propensity; along with how the only way of achieving lasting human peace is through the dissolving of the Market System catalysts, the Ownership Class and the State entity itself.

"DEFINING PEACE" - Full Lecture | by Peter Joseph | Feb. 6th '12 | The Zeitgeist Movement

The Zeitgeist Movement | "ZFest" Mid-East Event - Peter Joseph [Part 2/2, Q&A ] Feb. 6 12

Peter Joseph Interviewed on 'The Marker' - Tel Aviv TV | The Zeitgeist Movement

The Zeitgeist Movement - Peter Joseph on RT, Feb 10th, 2012 : War and The State

GREECE REVOLT - Rioters Burn Buildings as Greek Parliament Votes on Cuts

Rioters set fire to buildings and battled police in downtown Athens as the Greek Parliament prepared to vote on Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s austerity package to avert the nation’s collapse.

Ten fires were burning in central Athens including buildings housing a Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) cafe, a bank and a movie theater, a fire department spokesman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with official policy. The blazes were near a bank that was set on fire in May 2010, killing three bank employees, during a general strike against Greece’s first bailout package.

“Today at midnight, before markets open, the Greek Parliament must send a message,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told lawmakers in Athens today as the final debate on the accord to secure a 130 billion-euro ($171 billion) second aid package got under way. “We must show that Greeks, when they are called on to choose between the bad and the worst, choose the bad to avoid the worst.”

Demonstrators, rallying against austerity measures including job cuts, tore up marble in front of parliament that they hurled with fire-bombs at police guarding the chamber. Officers in riot gear responded with tear-gas and flash grenades. More than 50 officers were injured in the violence, police spokesman Takis Papapetropoulos said by telephone. The Greek Health Ministry said in an e-mailed statement that 54 people had been taken to hospital. Police said 25 rioters had been detained.

‘Athens in Flames’

“We are seeing Athens go up in flames again,” Mayor George Kaminis, said in an interview on ANT1 television. “This must stop. What they are trying to do to Athens is what they are trying to do to the entire country.”

Papademos appealed to Greeks last night to support budget cuts needed to win the aid while leaders of the two biggest parties urged their lawmakers in parliament to pass the austerity bill today or risk financial meltdown.

The vote is tantamount to a vote on whether Greece wants to remain in the euro and is part of a fight to save the country, Venizelos told parliament.

‘Leave the Country’

“The message to the Greek government is they should leave the country, right now,” one protester, Dimitris Fokos, 49, unemployed, said. “They don’t represent the people anymore.”

Police estimated the crowd today at about 15,000, spokesman Papapetropoulos said.

With only weeks remaining before the country faces a 14.5 billion-euro bond payment, George Papandreou and Antonis Samaras, the leaders of the two largest parliamentary parties, urged support for the bill as lawmakers, with an eye on elections as early as April, bristled at measures such as a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage, smaller pensions and immediate job cuts for as many as 15,000 state workers.

“We are looking the Greek people straight in the eye with full knowledge of our historical responsibility,” Papademos said in a televised address on the eve of the vote. “The social costs that come with these measures are contained in comparison to the economic and social catastrophe that will follow if we don’t adopt them.”

Continue reading - Bloomberg - Rioters Burn Buildings as Greek Parliament Votes on Cuts

MORE GALLERY HERE: Athens, Greece 12/2/12

Raw Video: Greek Rioting Ahead of Austerity Vote

Video: Athens on fire as mass protest turns violent

Burning Banks: More footage of Greek chaos and riots

Cuts & Chaos: Desperation drives Greek clashes

Επεισόδια στο Σύνταγμα 12 Φεβρουαρίου 2012

Παλλαϊκή Συγκέντρωση Σύνταγμα 12/2/2012

Want to Prepare Your Kids for the Singularity? Read Jonathan Mugan’s The Curiosity Cycle

In the future your children won’t just be competing against other children, they’ll be pitted against robots and computers too. What’s a parent to do? Teach them about the best parts of being human: curiosity and creativity. Researcher Jonathan Mugan is bringing his specialty in machine learning to the nursery. His book, The Curiosity Cycle helps parents find simple ways of inspiring children to have the flexible thinking and boundless interest they’ll need to stay competitive in the 21st Century marketplace. It’s not about rote memorization or even developing specialized skills, it’s about raising kids who can understand the world through ever evolving models that they challenge and refine. An old school child will answer questions on a test because they are told they have to. A curious child will test themselves and their environment long before a teacher ever hands out an exam. Singularity Hub spoke with Mugan about The Curiosity Cycle and the science behind it. As machines take on bigger roles in society and the economy, humans will need to embrace the advantages of their humanity even as they take their rightful place at the top of the digital world.

Children aren’t born with degrees in psychology and computer science, but their brains seem to understand those principles all the same. The first two thirds of The Curiosity Cycle is largely focused on giving parents some subtle (and not so subtle) ways to inspire their children to approach the world with an adaptive and examining mindset. Mugan steps the reader through fun ways to introduce mathematical concepts, logic, patterns, and more, so that kids can have the foundation needed to build a complex understanding of how the world works. Many of the concepts will be familiar to those who have read books on developmental psychology, and other ideas will seem like well-articulated common sense. Still, Mugan’s first seven chapters serve as a wonderful reference in how to guide children towards self-education without necessarily resorting to overt lectures and lessons.

The last third of The Curiosity Cycle is where Mugan really distinguishes himself, however. He explains the subtleties of how computers “think” and the advantages children still have over machines that can perform millions of computations a second, but have difficulty in making useful assumptions. Mugan’s later chapters will help parents embrace the benefits of the digital age, learning the lessons that search engines and social networks have taught the world – mainly that holding knowledge is not as valuable as evaluating knowledge. The end of The Curiosity Cycle is a wonderfully insightful walk through augmented reality, cyborgs, The Singularity, and all the other emerging technological trends that our children will have to face. If Mugan starts his book with wisdom that would have been familiar to our grandparents, he ends it with wisdom that seems to come from our future grandchildren.

For those interested in learning more about The Curiosity Cycle, the first chapter can be read online for free, and the book is currently available on Amazon ($13 paperback, $10 Kindle). Or, you can learn more from Mugan himself in the following Q&A. Whether or not The Curiosity Cycle serves as your field manual, the world of the next generation is going to require focusing on some skills and forgetting others. Best prepare yourself and your kids for the new kind of education.

Singularity Hub: Hi Jonathan, thanks so much for answering our questions today. To start us off could you tell us a little about your background, your expertise, and your current work?

Jonathan Mugan: My background is in psychology and computer science. My PhD research focused on developmental robotics, which is the field of study dedicated to enabling robots to learn about the world in the same way that human children do. While doing a postdoc at CMU, I worked in the area of user-oriented machine learning to help users specify privacy policies.

SH: What is The Curiosity Cycle, and what inspired you to transform the concept into a book?

JM: The Curiosity Cycle is a process for constructing knowledge that consists of identifying features in the environment, building models from those features, and testing those models to identify yet more features and models. I began my robotics research with the goal of applying theories from developmental psychology to robot learning, but I found that those theories were not specified in sufficient detail to be implemented on a robot. The Curiosity Cycle is the result of taking those ideas from psychology and making them concrete enough to be implementable. When my first son was born, I noticed that there were few books for raising intellectual children that were both grounded in psychological research and practical enough to be actionable for parents. My hope is that The Curiosity Cycle fills that gap.

SH: It seems like common sense for researchers in robotics or artificial intelligence to leverage lessons learned in child psychology in their work with machines. To what extent does your book take the opposite approach, and how has your experience in robotics affected your theories of human development?

JM: The goal of developmental psychologists is to describe how developmental learning takes place. By contrast, a major goal of developmental roboticists is to build a robot that exhibits such learning. By designing robot learning algorithms, I have come to appreciate the importance of knowledge and how we take it for granted. For example, if I move a table with a book on it, even a young child knows that the book also moves—robots don’t. Sure, you can tell robots that the book also moves, but there are a seemingly infinite number of such facts and basic-level deductions.

SH: The Curiosity Cycle has a rather extensive bibliography, but could you summarize the major studies or theories in developmental psychology that support the techniques you espouse in the book?

JM: In the mid-20th century, Jean Piaget proposed a now-famous theory of cognitive development whereby children constructed new knowledge from previous knowledge, and their development progressed in stages. More recently, Leslie Cohen proposed an information processing theory of cognitive development in which children are endowed with a domain-general information processing system that they use to bootstrap knowledge. Jean Mandler refers to this information processing that children do to construct knowledge as “perceptual meaning analysis.”

Developmental psychologists have also described learning as a process of active exploration. Eleanor Gibson proposed that human children are endowed with systems to allow them to explore and learn about the world. She emphasized that it was this exploration that enabled cognitive development. Alison Gopnik stresses that children explore to learn new things while adults are more rigid and exploit previous knowledge. Presumably, this is why it takes young children so incredibly long to put on the their socks and shoes.

SH: How have you applied the lessons you outline in your book to raising your own children?

JM: One thing I do is experiment with finding the right features to jump-start their curiosity cycles. For example, I recently stumbled upon a method to get them interested in learning Spanish. I told them that as they get older, it will be cool to speak Spanglish (a mix of Spanish and English) with their friends. I gave them some examples, and they thought the juxtapositions of the two languages were hilarious. Suddenly they were asking me questions to learn more and practicing what I had already taught them.

SH: What separates a good, but generic, book about raising children from a good book about raising children in the 21st Century?

JM: A book about raising kids for the 21st Century needs to tie deep principles of learning with the societal changes brought by technology. With the steady improvement in computer intelligence, some skills such as memorization should be de-emphasized, while others such as creativity are becoming more important. With smart computers like Watson being able to answer arbitrary questions of fact, the asking of insightful questions becomes more important.

Continue reading - Singularity Hub - Want to Prepare Your Kids for the Singularity? Read Jonathan Mugan’s The Curiosity Cycle

HILARIOUS! Paul Krugman vs. the World

The escalating battle of ideas between the Nobel Prize-winning economist and his illustrious peers

What has been getting the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist so riled up lately? In the last few weeks, what began as a semi-civil battle of ideas between “saltwater” Keynesians of Krugman’s persuasion and “freshwater” economists of the Chicago school has escalated into a two-way barrage of insults and name-calling.


Source: Businessweek: Paul Krugman vs. the World

Meet The Author Of “Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK”

Growth is a good thing, right? It’s the buzzword on seemingly every politician’s lips, the answer to our economic woes. You know this if you watched President Obama’s latest State of the Union Address. Increase the production of goods and services and stimulate consumer spending, that’s how we get this downtrodden economy back on its feet. Makes sense to me.

To Federico Pistono, however, it does not. The 26-year-old, self-described computer scientist, author and social activist is currently working on a book with which he plans to poke gaping holes in the conventional wisdom of ‘growth is good.’ The book, titled “Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK – How to survive the economic collapse and be happy,” is part of a crowdfunding campaign and has received a lot of support. Multiple publishers have approached Pistono about the book, but when it’s finished he intends to distribute it freely to the public.

The Verona, Italy native questions those who pin the current recession on bad economic choices by CEOs and politicians and asks us to rethink what a healthy economy should – and could – look like. Yes, bad, damaging choices have been made. But human greed and short-sightedness, Pistono thinks, is secondary to limitations that are inherent to the global economy. He thinks that technological developments have finally driven us towards a choke point that will be reached within the next fifty years. Automation is taking jobs away faster than economic growth can replace them, and it’s only going to get worse. I recently spoke with Pistono about his book, robots, our economic future, and what it means to be happy.

How is our economy today different from the economy 100 years ago?

At the beginning of the 20th century we lived in an agrarian society that employed 98 percent of people. As technology progresses and old jobs are eliminated you kind of move through cycles of job elimination and job formation. At some point you run out of cycles where there are no more jobs to fill except for a very few highly specialized jobs, the kind of jobs that require many years of education.

But this is nothing new, new technologies have always driven demand for increasingly specialized workers to run those technologies

Now, it requires more time to be educated into these new sectors than it requires for the technological progress to advance. The thing is, we used to be able to keep up with the speed of technological progress because we were at the beginning of the exponential curve. At the beginning the doublings didn’t seem unsettling for the global economy because we could keep up with it. It’s within our mental capabilities to keep up with it. After some time when you reach a point in the curve when it becomes to fast.

What about future generations?

I don’t think education can be solved by governments or institutions of any sort because institutions by definition are institutionalized. They can’t make progress. But if you look at the Khan Academy, Udacity, open courseware, things like that can enable new generations to speed up the process of education and learn to be a biotechnologist, for example, in two years or three years for free at home.

So right now, if you don’t have a higher education already, it’s already too late?

I’m wondering about the millions of people who haven’t learned the most important thing: critical thinking and problem solving. They might have learned skills such as driving a truck or carpentry but they don’t know how to solve problems. In this type of economy I don’t know how you can educate these people to do these highly sophisticated, very challenging jobs that the new economy will require in five to ten years time. I just don’t see how a 50-year-old truck driver can reinvent himself in five to ten years.

What are the consequences of massive amounts of unemployed people around the world?

I think this whole thing is going eventually to collapse into an unsustainable social situation where you have riots. I mean, when people don’t have food, basic necessities and they don’t see a future for themselves or for their families they’re going to start to get really pissed off. They’re going to grab guns. I would like to avoid that.

What’s the solution?

The solution is to prepare for a change in the economic system. If we resist automation we are still going to see this problem. Companies need to be productive and in order to be productive you have to automate, that’s the only way to increase productivity. It’s been true for 200 years. The only way I can see out of this within this economic system is for the state to take over and just employ people for doing nothing or almost nothing. But states and governments are already broke, so I don’t see how that’s possible. Another way would be to just socialize. Many people have proposed a minimum wage just for living. So if you’re a citizen you get a thousand dollars a month. In Martin Ford’s book “The Lights In The Tunnel” he comes with very, very convoluted arguments like we’re going to pay people to read books because we want people to be smart and stay informed. I read that and I think, yeah, it makes sense within this type of culture, but I think it’s fundamentally corrupt and quite plainly insane. I think the only way out is to rethink the labor for income and income for survival cycle. And I think that the argument that it’s going to be either capitalism or socialism, I think those are 18th century ideas that are obsolete in world of interconnected, global information and economies where everything is instant and can be transferred. We have enabling technologies like 3D printing that makes the old way of thinking of manufacturing obsolete.

Where do we go from here?

One must start to wonder if this growth paradigm is even possible, in the physical sense. So I made some calculations that were confirmed by Tom Murphy, a physics professor who writes the blog “Do The Math,” where he proves mathematically and physically that continuous growth on this finite planet, even with all the efficiency mechanisms of the market system is physically impossible. Plain and simple thermodynamics, it’s impossible to grow at the current rate for more than fifty or sixty years. So on one side you have the physical impossibility of growth, on the other you say, wait a minute, even if growth was possible did we ever even stop and think if it was desirable?

Huh?

For hundreds of years there was a correlation of growth and quality of life, because you needed to go from having nothing to having a good standard of living. And once you’ve reached a certain point where you have enough to live by this correlation no longer holds. This is because it wasn’t a causation it was just a correlation. One did not directly cause the other. Once some enabling factors come in you have this decoupling of growth and happiness and quality of life. In fact research shows that it is inversely correlated when you increase by a large factor the wealth that a person has. If you make eighty or a hundred thousand dollars a year that’s enough for you to live by without having to worry about money. But if you make millions and millions you accumulate more stress. The monetary inequalities within a state is a very good indicator of that state’s social health. The more unequal the country is the worse the situation is. You have high crime rates, suicide rates, depression, everything.

How can I be happy without a capitalist economy?

It’s atrocious to think that the highest peak of a person would be to barely survive in an economy where we can create an abundance for basically everyone on the planet. I think it’s not only myopic, it’s morally corrupt and intellectually corrupt. It’s not just a technological problem, it’s a sociological problem, an ecological problem because it’s physically unsustainable, and an economic problem. I know it’s hard because many people have been educated into believing in this kind of system and don’t think any other is possible. We first have to move away from thinking that growth will solve our problems. That’s not true, we’ve known that for forty years, but we have deluded ourselves into believing that. I think the countries should recognize that an indicator of the wealth of a nation is not the GDP, but maybe some other indicators that have been developed like the GNH, which is Gross National Happiness or the quality-of-life index. Those are the things we should be maximizing. I agree it’s a harder thing to quantify than profit, but to think that with our current AI algorithms, computational power, and data that it would be too difficult to estimate the quality of life of a nation, I think it’s highly irrational.

Source: Singularity Hub - Meet The Author Of “Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK”

More on IEET: Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK: how to survive the economic collapse and be happy

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Federico Pistono
Book: Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK | how to survive the economic collapse and be happy

Robots will steal your job, but that's OK - crowdfunding campaign

GLOBAL REVOLT - Athens and Rio on Fire

Greek protesters have clashed with police in Athens at the start of a 48-hour strike against austerity measures.

Demonstrators threw stones and police responded with tear gas, with reports of minor injuries on both sides.

Greek leaders have been frantically trying to agree swingeing cuts demanded by the EU and IMF in return for a new 130bn-euro ($170bn; £110bn) bailout.

The smallest party in the coalition has withdrawn support for the package days before a parliamentary vote.

The far-right Laos party complained that Greeks were being humiliated by Germany, and the party's four cabinet ministers offered their resignations.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said it was time for Greece to make a "final strategic choice".

"If we see the future of our country within eurozone, within Europe, we should do what we have to do for the programme to be approved," he said.

Last night the Greeks presented their plans for austerity cuts to a meeting of eurozone ministers in Brussels.

Their proposals include:

15,000 public-sector job cuts
liberalisation of labour laws
lowering the minimum wage by 20% from 751 euros a month to 600 euros
negotiating a debt write-off with banks.

But the ministers demanded a further 325m euros in savings for this year. It is thought that the shortfall came because the Greek coalition could not agree to restructuring pensions.

Continue reading - BBC - Athens clashes over Greece eurozone austerity deal

Greek police union wants to arrest EU/IMF officials

Greece's largest police union has threatened to issue arrest warrants for officials from the country's European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders for demanding deeply unpopular austerity measures.

In a letter obtained by Reuters on Friday, the Federation of Greek Police accused the officials of "...blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty" and said one target of its warrants would be the IMF's top official for Greece, Poul Thomsen.

The threat is largely symbolic since legal experts say a judge must first authorize such warrants, but it shows the depth of anger against foreign lenders who have demanded drastic wage and pension cuts in exchange for funds to keep Greece afloat.

"Since you are continuing this destructive policy, we warn you that you cannot make us fight against our brothers. We refuse to stand against our parents, our brothers, our children or any citizen who protests and demands a change of policy," said the union, which represents more than two-thirds of Greek policemen.

"We warn you that as legal representatives of Greek policemen, we will issue arrest warrants for a series of legal violations ... such as blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty."

The letter was also addressed to the European Central Bank's mission chief in Greece, Klaus Masuch, and the former European Commission chief inspector for Greece, Servaas Deroose.

Policemen have borne the brunt of the anger of massed protesters who frequently march to parliament and clash with police in riot gear. Chants of "Cops, pigs, murderers!" are regularly hurled at policemen or scribbled on walls.

Thousands turned out on Friday for the latest protest in Athens, this time against new austerity measures that include a 22 percent cut in the minimum wage.

A police union official said the threat to 'refuse to stand against' fellow Greeks was a symbolic expression of solidarity and did not mean police would halt their efforts to stop protests getting out of hand.

Continue reading - Reuters - Greek police union wants to arrest EU/IMF officials

Violence erupts in Greece before austerity vote - Rough Cuts

Greece: running street battles erupt in Athens

Rio police vote for strike action

Police in Rio de Janeiro have voted to go on strike to demand better pay - just a week before the Brazilian city's annual carnival.

The state legislature had hoped to avoid industrial action by offering a 39% salary increase.

But unions said that rise was not enough to make up for decades of falling wages.

Protesters in Rio cheered when it was announced that the strike would go ahead.

A military police officer taking part in the protest, Tiago Rodrigues, said Brazilians should stay at home while the strike was on.

"We do not want a strike, we want better salaries," he said.

"Unfortunately, the population will now be caught up in this during carnival.

"We are advising people not to leave their homes. Stay indoors until the situation is calmer."

A strike by police in the city of Salvador, in Bahia state, since last week, led to an increase in reported murders and violence.

Continue reading - BBC - Rio police vote for strike action

MUST READ! Aaron Swartz Hacks the Attention Economy

A digital guerrilla fighter explains what's wrong with anti-piracy laws, why the Internet and copyright law don't get along, and how he got into politics.

For Aaron Swartz, sharing files on the Internet isn't just fun and profitable. It's existential.

The 25-year-old programmer faces criminal charges that he hacked into MIT's computer system and downloaded 4.8 million journal articles with the intent of posting them online. He pleaded not guilty, but according to a manifesto he penned in 2008 it is precisely such acts of online civil disobedience that are needed to bring rampant Internet file sharing "into the light" and challenge "unjust laws."

Even before his arrest, Swartz was known for his contributions to the code that runs the Internet—as a teenager, he coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification, which organizes news feeds online. He also helped create the website Reddit, a site for sharing news, ideas, and photos that now logs two billion page views per month.

The hacking case has helped turn Swartz into a political symbol for a generation of young people for whom downloading, re-mixing, and sharing files on the Internet is second nature, even if it sometimes violates copyright laws. While his ideology may seem extreme—he wrote in his manifesto that "we need to take information, wherever it is stored, make out copies and share them with the world"—his point is that such behavior is already widespread and mostly benefits society.

The tension between Internet sharing and copyright law erupted again this January over the Stop Online Piracy Act, also called SOPA, a bill that would have made it easier for Hollywood studios to shut down websites that stream pirated movies, including by preventing search engines from linking to them. The legislation could have affected many Internet sites, including YouTube, news aggregators, and thousands of others where users regularly upload copyrighted text and images.

The bill was shelved after it became the subject of a massive publicity campaign by Internet companies and activists—during one day in January, websites including Wikipedia went dark in protest. Not surprisingly, Swartz had something to do with the Internet protests. During the very week in September 2010 that prosecutors say he was siphoning the JSTOR database into a laptop hidden in a campus network closet, Swartz was also circulating the first online petition to raise awareness of the controversial anti-piracy law.

Technology Review business editor Antonio Regalado interviewed Swartz via telephone. His lawyer, Martin Weinberg, allowed Swartz to be interviewed on the condition that he would not discuss his pending criminal case or his 2008 manifesto.

TR: What role did you play in the fight to stop SOPA?

Swartz: I first heard of the bill shortly after it was introduced in September 2010—back then it was called something else. They kept changing the name. I heard about it and quickly put together a website, which ended up becoming Demand Progress, to try to make people aware of the issues. Their plan was to rush it through a vote before anyone could have a chance to raise any objections.

Very quickly our protest started going viral. Several hundred thousand people signed the petition, and the vote was delayed. And that began this long fight. Since then, my engagement has been on and off. I've had other things to do but have tried to be a catalyst at key moments. The main thing was the incredible community building. That was basically what stopped it in the end.

Why were you opposed to the legislation?

The bill would provide censorship for the Internet, which is something that not only doesn't exist in the U.S. but previously had been seen as kind of crazy. That was the kind of thing you have in China or Iran. In a country with a First Amendment, I never would have expected the government would be going around deciding which websites Americans are allowed to see.

One problem was a due-process issue. If there is a crime, you find the person who's responsible, you bring them to court, you have a trial, and you hear evidence. If they're convicted, then they're convicted. But under SOPA, there was no adversarial trial, just an ex parte hearing before a judge. To shut down a website, you didn't even have to show evidence that they had committed a crime—only that it looked like there was copyrighted material there.

What are the lessons businesspeople should draw from the fight over copyright enforcement?

I think it's often been portrayed as artists versus pirates. That isn't accurate at all. The recording industry and movie industry are infamous for stealing money from artists. I mean, the phrase "Hollywood accounting" is a cliché. And one of the ways that artists have managed to escape that is by going directly to their fans on the Internet. That's very threatening to these middlemen who have been stealing some of the money. I think a big reason the movie studios want to have more control over the Internet is to shut it down as an alternative distribution mechanism, to put it back in the bottle and go back to the old ways where they can take their cut.

Continue reading - Aaron Swartz Hacks the Attention Economy

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Source: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Awakening | Development of Awareness, Mind and Ego in Human

Awakening is a process where the experiencer looses attachment to the identities of the image self, thus dissolving the Ego. But the key to dissolving the Ego is to still the mind - more specifically the thinking part of the mind. Any attempt to fight the image self will strengthen it. The Ego needs mind thoughts to keep its self image alive, by taking away its only source of energy - the thinking mind - Ego will weaken and dissolve over time. However, most people do find it difficult to break off from thinking, as their mind has been so active for much of their lives. So, daily meditation in solitude is strongly recommended in the beginning to train the mind to be calmed first. Once the mind is trained to be still, awareness can seep through the experiencer resulting in gain of awareness. With more awareness, Egoic habits then becomes easier to catch and correct, thus weakening the Ego further. There are powerful tools like sensory deprivation tank and medical cannibis that can help to train the thinking mind to become more stilled. The awakening process can be accelerated if a combination of the practices are used together.

Development of Awareness and Mind

Awareness is the capacity for experience, it is the being, the true self, the experiencing entity underneath all the identities, Awareness is the experiencer behind all the labels - such as the body, name, gender, color, race, occupation, and so on. In short: We are awareness.

Awareness exists in every life form, its just the degree of awareness that varies. The capacity for experience depends on the complexity of the physical form. In the development of awareness in human, our capacity for experience became very rich, perhaps more rich and vibrant than any other life forms ever existed on this planet. We are able sense the world in vibrant color and richness with the five senses we have. Through these five senses, we can experience many of the beauties that exist in this world.

Approximately 4 Billion years ago, awareness emerged in form with the creation of the first life on Earth. This life form perhaps emerged as micro organisms in the beginning. It might only be aware of the temperature of its surrounding and not much more. Its capacity for experience was very faint. Later, nervous systems emerged as more senses developed to further the capacity for experience. Millions of years later, brain slowly emerged in life forms and consequently, awareness and capacity for experience increased substantially.

In life forms, the physical body acts as a conduit that allows awareness to exist in form, while the mind is the intelligence that exists between the inner world (awareness) and the outer world (form). This intelligence processes all the flows of the information between the two worlds. The mind is a necessary conduit that enables experiences to take place in this realm.

Many thousands of years ago in human, our thinking mind reached a threshold in intelligence and we became self aware.

Development of Ego

Thousands of years ago, human mind gained self awareness after a threshold in mind intelligence was reached. We became aware of the self and we labeled it: i. Later we added identities to this i. We added names, nationality, religion, race, job titles, social status and so on.

i grew in strength as more identities were added, and once attachments to those identities became solidified - i became the Ego. Ego is then sustained and inflated with mental thoughts to reinforce its existence. Mind activity for the experiencer intensified, creating unease and suffering. When Ego gained enough strength, the thinking mind became incessantly active and turned itself into the Egoic mind. Mind activity in the form of thoughts is what keeps the image self alive, the mind is the source of energy for the Ego.

It can also be said that we human mistakenly identified with the false self and became attached to our image. In fact, we thought of more ways to inflate the image as we added more identities by accumulating material wealth, social status, personal possessions and so on. As we became more identified with the Ego, awareness and capacity for experience fainted.

In the western culture, now reflected throughout the world is very much identified with the image self. As of present day, the human collective is still in the Egoic mind state as we continue to engagement in wars, deceptions, violence, pollution and destruction to other life forms on this planet.

Amazingly, in its quest to experience the world in more vibrant color, awareness lost itself to the Ego for a period of time. But awareness is awakening now...

Awakening

Awakening is a necessary process in self aware life forms to dissolve away the inner ego in them before they can become an aware life form fully aware of its existence in this realm. After human became self aware, we identified ourselves with the image because that was all we could see, we thought we were our body. It is through suffering and questioning of our existence we began to awaken and become more aware of our true identity.

During awakening, the experiencer looses attachments to the identities of the image self, thus dissolving the Ego in the process. But to detach requires the thinking mind to be stilled. A stilled mind produces no thought, cutting off the incessant mental activities that sustains the Ego. Mental thoughts and images are what hold the attachments in place and keeping the self image alive.

The key to dissolving the Ego is to still the mind - more specifically the thinking part of the mind. In the state of no thought, the experiencer is able to experience the world in the present moment. Its important to note that thinking and full presence can not coexist, it can also be said thinking and full experience can not coexist. Incessant thinking not only produces disturbances, it also traps the experiencer in the mind realm. However, most people find it difficult to break off from thinking, as their mind has been so active for much of their lives. So, daily meditation in solitude is strongly recommended in the beginning to train the mind to be calmed first. Once the mind is trained to be still, awareness can seep through the experiencer resulting in gain of awareness. With more awareness. Egoic habits then becomes easier to catch and correct, thus weakening the Ego further. To accelerate the awakening process, there are powerful tools like sensory deprivation tank and medical cannibis that can help to train the thinking mind to become more stilled.

Awakening in human started around 2600 years ago in a few individuals. Today, the rate of awakening is accelerating with the aid of technology and important teachings. Although that number is still relatively small compared to the population, it seems like now is we are ready for an awakening to happen on the collective level. Once the Ego is dissolved in the collective, much of the sufferings we see in the world today will disappear and peace can be experienced on Earth. The flow of life is restored and we human have fulfilled our destiny.

Tools and practices recommended to still the mind
•Meditation - mental exercise that helps direct the focus of the mind away from thinking into the present moment. Make it a habit to become aware of the now moment to moment. Daily practice in solitude is recommended as the thinking mind may be too active in the beginning.
•Sensory Deprivation Tank - While floating inside, all external sensory stimuli is removed from the experiencer leaving the mind very stilled. Awareness can grow very quickly with this tool.
•Medical Cannibis - Is the medicine for the mind. It can help to reduce mental activities if explored in combination with meditation. This is especially helpful for beginning meditators who find mediation difficult. Explore this with health professionals in legalized states.

Source: Awakening | Development of Awareness, Mind and Ego in Human

How your brain tells you where you are | Neil Burgess [TED]

How do you remember where you parked your car? How do you know if you're moving in the right direction? Neuroscientist Neil Burgess studies the neural mechanisms that map the space around us, and how they link to memory and imagination.

Neil Burgess: How your brain tells you where you are

MUST READ! The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

On Wall Street, bonus season is a sacred ritual. It is the annual rite where net worth and self-worth get elegantly reduced to a single number. During the 25-year boom that abruptly ended in 2008, the only principle that really mattered come bonus time was how you ranked against the guys to your right and left. The system was governed by a kind of atavistic justice: You eat what you kill. From the outside, the seven- and eight-figure payouts that star bankers earned could seem obscene, immoral even. But on the inside, the outlandish compensation reflected a strict, almost moral logic. “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” as a senior Citigroup executive put it to me recently. “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they created value for their institution.” The sanctity of the bonus was built on the idea that Wall Street pay was simply the natural order of capitalism.

And so, among the many dislocations Wall Street has suffered since 2008, none may have been more destabilizing than the headlines that flashed across Bloomberg terminals on the afternoon of January 17, when news leaked that Morgan Stanley would cap cash bonuses at just $125,000. A week later, Bank of America announced that it would be cutting the cash portion of its bonuses by 75 percent, giving the rest in stock. All across Wall Street, compensation is crashing. Goldman Sachs, coming off a lackluster fourth quarter, slashed compensation by 21 percent.

Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.

The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Of course, described a little less colorfully, reducing the risk in the system at a cost of a certain amount of the banks’ profits was precisely what the government was striving for. All this has meant that Wall Street’s traders have found themselves on the wrong end of the market—a predicament that many of them have never seen before. Before the crash, when compensation slid, the banks risked seeing their top talent run for the doors to rival firms or hedge funds. Now, with a glut of hedge funds and an industrywide belt-tightening, bank chiefs are calling their star traders’ bluffs. “If you’re really unhappy, just leave,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman bluntly told Bloomberg TV a few days after his bank announced its meager bonus numbers.

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching—which is, in itself, a surprising development. Since the crash, and especially since the occupation of Zuccotti Park last September (which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves), there has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation. Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.”

The questions of how to fix Wall Street–style capitalism—from taxes to regulation—are being intensely argued and will undergird much of the economic debate during this presidential election. And many on Wall Street are still making the argument that the consequences of hobbling Wall Street could be severe. “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year,” Bove told me. “We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.”

And yet, the complaining has settled to a low murmur. Even as bonuses have withered, Wall Street as a political issue is gaining force. Bankers are aware that populism has a foothold, even in the Republican Party, and that these forces are liable to accelerate the process already taking place. “There’s a real sense the world is changing,” says a private-­equity executive with deep ties to the GOP. “People are becoming aware there’s real anger out there. It’s not just some kids camping out in some park. The Romney attacks caught everyone by surprise. We have prepared for this to come from the Democrats in the fall, but not now. You could run an entire campaign if you’re Barack Obama with ads using nothing but Republicans saying things about finance that you’d never hear two months ago. It’s an amazing thing.”

Continue reading - NYMag - The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

A Day Made of Glass 2 | Corning Incorporated

Watch and share "A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked," to see how Corning's highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world. Take a journey with our narrator for details on these technologies, answers to your questions, and to learn about what's possible -- and what's not -- in the near future.

A Day Made of Glass 2: Unpacked. The Story Behind Corning's Vision.

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision.

QFT 1.0 | First NASA Quantum Future Technologies Conference

Despite a comprehensive and rapid advance of quantum technologies in recent years with several breakthrough areas emerging there has been no in-depth systematic discussion so far on how the quantum revolution can benefit National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) missions and objectives. This conference aims to bring together NASA scientists with the best quantum technology experts from academia, government and industry to identify the areas and challenges in Space Exploration, Aeronautics, Earth and Space Science where quantum technologies can have the greatest impact. The conference will focus on 3 areas: Quantum Measurement (QM), Quantum Computing (QC) and Quantum cryptography and key distribution (QK).

The conference topics will include theoretical understanding of measurement precision bounds offered by quantum correlations under realistic conditions of noise and decoherence; the development of next generation quantum instruments for measurements of time and distance, navigation, field sensing, and gravity wave detection, including the challenges of moving beyond laboratory prototypes.

The conference will also focus on quantum algorithms and scalable quantum computing architectures to address the need for a dramatic increase in computational power and data storage at low energy and spatial scales to address challenges in Space Exploration, Aeronautics and Space and Earth Science. The target application areas for NASA include software and hardware validation and verification, image processing, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, data mining, automation, planning, and scheduling and system diagnostics in fully autonomous regime for Deep Space and planetary missions, robot navigation, precision landing, aviation safety, air traffic control and others.

The final topic area, Quantum Cryptography, specifically Quantum key distribution protocols based on both discrete and continuous variables, encompasses technologies that promise completely secure communication. The motive for NASA is practical and secure transmission over long distances, including fiber channels and Earth-Satellite links through a turbulent atmosphere.

Presentations and Videos Available Online Here

Source: QFT 1.0 | First NASA Quantum Future Technologies Conference