http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/04/philosophical-moods.htmlhttp://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2013/03/lets_save_great_ideas_from_the.htmlhttp://fandco.ca/en/trends/article/2013/03/ted-x-ideas-corrupting-ideas-1/
dear nettimers,here I propose you the reading of an article I've just published aboutBitcoin, which seems to be onnipresent on mainstream media nowadays.http://www.dyndy.net/2013/04/bitcoin-ends-the-taboo-on-money/the downloadable PDF is linked from the webpage above, where publiccomments via mainstream social networks are also possible.Here below the abstract. I'll be happy to read your comments, criticismand suggestions, but please keep in mind I'm not focusing at all on anymacro nor micro economical issues, but trying to look at Bitcoin from abiopolitical point of view, as a process, as an emergent constituency.greetings from Cairo------Bitcoin is a decentralized system of digital authentication thatfacilitates the circulation of value on the Internet without thepresence of any intermediaries, a characteristic that has often gainedit the definition of "digital cash" or "crypto currency", since it canbe used as money for payments.This article consists in a technoetic inquiry into the origins of thistechnology and its evolution. This inquiry will take in considerationthe biopolitical dynamics that govern the Bitcoin community as wellspecific characteristics of the technical realization, aiming to provideinsights on the future of this technology as well a post-humanistinterpretation of its emergence.The original source of distribution for this article, also providingits most up to date version, is the Internet websitehttp://jaromil.dyne.org/writingsThis content is licensed as Creative Commons "BY-NC-SA" 3.0 in thejurisdiction of the Netherlands: it is free to be copied, republishedfor non-commercial use, quoted and remixed by providing correctattribution to its author(s), while all derivative works must adoptthe same license. Different licensing conditions can be arranged,those interested can write to Dyne.org Press <press-/YyWnpLq9OY< at >public.gmane.org>
"Some years ago, the elements (ideas, conceptions, practices, people)that compose the current (so-called) Free Culture movement wereappropriated by the bureaucrat and the capitalist. The ones thatmade use of the technologies and available media to the creation ofactions that provided the debate on new perspectives of possiblesocial arrangements (obtained by tools such as free licenses, networksof communication, open source software), are today digested by theold apparatuses and social mechanisms that once they have usedand questioned. They participated, many times unconsciously, in a"socio-professional training" in order to occupy the same functionsestablished for the maintainers of a system that is distant from whatwe imagine as a possible human grouping, even more distanced fromfreedom." submidialogy.=============Global Islands Project:http://bbrace.net/id.html"We fill the craters left by the bombsAnd once again we singAnd once again we sowBecause life never surrenders."
Return to Documenta 13According to Michael Baldwin of Art & Language, Documenta 13 was striking for “speaking very loudly of curatorial power,” with artists and artworks seemingly deployed on many occasions to illustrate the theses of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. This essay seeks to turn the tables, to some extent: Documenta 13 and its curation are themselves used to illustrate observations and notions put forth by Jean-Claude Moineau in his 2010 book, Retour du Futur. Documenta 13 as a stage for many a return: modernism(s), the author, exhibited bodies, ethics – so many attempts to “resist” the unwanted effects of globalization. The inventory of problematic approaches spans thirty works, but also takes note of some of the strong points of this latest Documenta.http://targetautonopop.notart.eu/blog/documenta_13/# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22105322So much for utterly stable market dynamics.
Malware That Turns Computers Into Bitcoin Miners (fwd) { brad brace } <bbrace-qx95VtOkOx/QT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org>Re: <nettime> bitcoin anyone? Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.org Heiko Recktenwald <heikorecktenwald-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg< at >public.gmane.org>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:22:23 -0700 (PDT)From: { brad brace } <bbrace-qx95VtOkOx/QT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Malware That Turns Computers Into Bitcoin Miners (fwd)---------- Forwarded message ----------http://i.nl03.net/ltr6/?_m=3n.009a.180.ja0aof3ujt.44pMalware that turns computers into Bitcoin miners Researchersfrom Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new spam messagecampaign being transmitted via Skype contains malwarecapable of using an infected computer to mine forBitcoins.The malware, identified asTrojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt. Bitcoin is anon-governmental, fully-digital currency based on anopen-source and peer-to-peer internetprotocol.Cybercriminals have figured out that .../:b- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.orgDate: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:23:43 -0400 (EDT)Subject: Re: <nettime> bitcoin anyone?Patrice: Which, once again brings up the question of "media ecology" (i.e. "second nature," "technological environments") and human identity -- as well as the force that shapes all this, FORMAL causality. In a digital world, are the humans stable? Is culture? Or, civilization? Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NY- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:56:09 +0200From: Heiko Recktenwald <heikorecktenwald-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Re: <nettime> bitcoin anyone?Am 12.04.2013 10:40, schrieb Patrice Riemens:The history of the Gold clause. Maybe it did work very well but not for all.Best, H.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hello Nettimers,?We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical frameworkthat is free of politics and human error,? Tyler Winklevoss said.[1]Bitcoin has been framed by proponents, like the one quoted above, as theultimate decentralized and politically neutral currency. However, to me,the recent bubble and it's (partial) burst serve to underline the fallacythe techno-utopian mindset behind projects like this one. The believe thatsetting the right technical parameters will 'free us of human error' andthat systems grounded in mathematics are free of politics.I have made two observations about Bitcoin I would like to share with thelist that I believe support my opinion.Centralized exchange marketsBy design the creation (mining), storage and transfer of Bitcoins happensin a decentralized fashion. The recent bubble however has shown that inorder for people to liquidify their Bitcoin assets they are extremelydependent on just a handful of centralized exchange markets. One of thebiggest of these online exchange markets, Mt. Gox, claims it controls 80%[1] of the market.As the bitbubble burst it became painfully clear how dependent on Mt.GoxBitcoiners exactly are. Also, it showed the extent of Mt. Gox's influenceon the value of the currency. The crash that devaluated Bitcoins from $260to around 100$ dollars was caused by the failure of Mt. Gox's online tradeinfrastructure. The exact cause of the crash is speculation but it isbelieved to have been caused either through an orchestrated ddos, technicalfailure or the sheer amount of server requests caused by a bank run ofpanicked investors.[2]The catalyst role of Mt.Gox in the burst and it's subsequent suspension oftrade for 'market cool down' illustrate the extent of influence thatcentralized structures have within this supposedly decentralized network.Mining Guilds.I would also like to point out the emergence of so-called mining guilds ormining pools. In these pools individual Bitcoin miners join a centralizedorganization to share equally in the proceeds of mining, guaranteeing asomewhat stable income for it's participants.One could argue that these centralized guilds have also been 'designed'into the Bitcoin system. Bitcoin miners are rewarded according to a firstto come first to serve model. The miner that discovers the next viablebatch of Bitcoins gets to have them all. In the early days of bitcoin thiscould be easily done by individuals. However the mining of Bitcoinsbecomes more difficult due to the finite amount of Bitcoin. Miningrequires increasing amounts computing power, superseding the capabilitiesof decentralized individuals. For mining to remain profitable in thesecircumstances miners cluster into pools to share both in computing powerand mining proceeds.As a result, the roughly 30 mining guilds have become the biggest producersof Bitcoins [4][5] In the face of even more difficult mining in the futureit is not unlikely that we will end up with a handful of guilds in controlof all the production. However, the 30 guilds involved in the production ofBitcoin have already acquired the ability of injecting large amounts of newcurrency into the market and thus influence it's course. This makes miningguilds de-facto capable of operating as the central banks that Bitcoinbelievers so strongly oppose to.To come back to the Tyler Winklevoss quote at the beginning of this text.We can see how the design of Bitcoin as a mathematical framework does notmake it free of politics. For in it's design it also contains certain(unconscious) political ideas about society that are grounded inanarcho-capitalism. The mathematical framework has thus for not shown to becapable of preventing the extremely quick formation of potentiallydisruptive monopolies in a system that was designed to be neutral anddecentralized.The idea that setting the right technical parameters will remove thenecessity for supervision and accountability is thus incorrect. For we arewitnessing the appearance of cartels and monopolies that could have neverbeen formed in a properly regulated market. Bitcoin as such will not workto empower the individual and free him from centralized power, insteadBitcoin serves to create new centralized power structures that areunregulated, opaque and unaccountable. Although Bitcoin as a system doesnot free us from human error and on the contrary even facilitates it,donations are welcome on 1u2VMeVbDpWKUQx8cLSMtLUCTSAUfoz7q;)Roel[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/as-big-investors-emerge-Bitcoin-gets-ready-for-its-close-up/[2] https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130404.html[3] https://twitter.com/MtGox/status/322355614414147588[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools[5] http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php
_ |__ __| | /_ |__ \| | | __| | | | (_) | | __/ (__| |_ __ | | | | | | __/ | |/ /_| | | | | _ | | | '_ \ / _ \ | | / /| '_ \| '__|The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project >>>> posted since 1994 <<<< _ | | | '_ \ / _ \ | | / /| '_ \| '__| -_ | | | |__ ___ | | ) | |__ _ __ _ | __ \ (_) | |"A compassionate observer, { brad brace } forges a personal aesthetic inthese 12hr-images infused with blank-sadness and a sense of mystery.What makes them both new and significant is the fact that he organizesits contents in sequences, applying the principles of cinematographicmontage to fixed images."Immaculate Perception: to be happy in gazing: with dead will, free fromthe grip and greed of selfishness -- cold and ashy-grey all over, but withintoxicated moon-eyes... Extraordinary Rendition. You begin to sense the byshadows that stretch from the awe of global dominance. How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed -- easy retreats, half beliefs. Works of art are complex formal interventions within discursive traditions and their myriad filiations. These interventions are defined precisely by their incomparable capacity to trace the dynamics of historical process in paradoxical gestures of simultaneously prognostic and mnemonic temporalities. | __| | | | (_) | | __/ (__| |_ _ | | | '_ \ / _ \ | | / /| '_ \| '__| _| |__) | __ ___ _ ___ ___| |_ |_ ___/ '__/ _ \| |/ _ \/ __| __| |_| _ |_| \___/| |\___|\___|\__| _ _/ | _ |__/`round-the-clock posting of sequenced hypermodern imagery from { bradbrace }. The hypermodern minimizes the familiar, the known, therecognizable; it suspends identity, relations and history. Thisdiscourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is avoidingthe ground on which it could find support. It is trying to operate adecentering that leaves no privilege to any center. The 12-hour ISBN JPEG Project ----------------------------- began December 30, 1994 Pointless Hypermodern Imagery... posted/mailed every 12 hours... a spectral,trajective alignment for the 00`s! A continuum of minimalist masks in the face ofcatastrophe; conjuring up transformative metaphors for the everyday... A poeticreversibility of exclusive events: visual haiku... A post-rhetorical, continuous, apparently random sequence of imagery...genuine gritty, greyscale... corruptable, compact, collectable and compellingconvergence. The vernacular voluptuousness of the grey imminence: the art of makingthe other disappear. Continual visual impact; an optical drumming, sculpted induration, on the endless present of the Net. An extension of the printed ISBN-Book (0-9690745) series... criticallyunassimilable... imagery is gradually acquired, selected and re-sequencedover time... ineluctable, vertiginous connections. The 12hr dialtone... [ see http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace/netcom/books.txt ]KEYWORDS: de-composed, ambiguous, augmented, ambilavent, homogeneous, reckless,spontaneous...obscure, obdurate, unfocused-attention, all-inclusive ground: god... poetic, plural, perverse, potent, prophetic, pathological, pointless, private, peripheral, precocious, porous, placeholders... entertaining, evasive, entropic, erotic, entrancing, enduring, ergodic, expansive, exhaustive, encyclopedic, enlinked, enlaced, enamoured... Every 12 hours, another!... view them, re-post `em, save `em,trade `em, print `em, even publish them...Here`s how:~ Set www-links to -> http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace/12hr.html -> http://bradbrace.net/12hr.html -> http://bbrace.net/12hr.html -> twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr, posterous, delicious Look for the 12-hr-icon. Heavy traffic may require you to specify files more than once! Anarchie, Fetch, CuteFTP, TurboGopher...~ Download from -> ftp.rdrop.com /pub/users/bbrace Download from -> ftp.eskimo.com /home/bbrace Download from -> hotline://artlyin.ftr.va.com.au Download from -> http://12hr.noemata.net/ * Remember to set tenex or binary. Get 12hr.jpeg~ E-mail -> If you only have access to email, then you can use FTPmail to do essentially the same thing. Send a message with a body of 'help' to the server address nearest you: * ftpmail-3T8AaC5c1GapJuVttbx5JA< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-UTnXMkkA7QFWG/WdbR7gnQ< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-fvNdADJ+R/8L63KmMnjC+CEWGD4kr0XT< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-DYzhQxLA0Ss3oV6DbtEs1odd74u8MsAO< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-S2Jh27XaYGuzQB+pC5nmwQ< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-X6Hxh7TTWrm9vlYJWmStIQ< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-qnjoH6n/cBihmSYF2WdT5g< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-5AY5RYz21QO2A7p0XSazQA< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-gw6kpGjVfoAqi7mQTfpNuw< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-LNU3yzNBqtcwFerOooGFRg< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-qNx/NRO7NduQRVQI7GEdMQ< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-bEUK4Ra9SmNHTdbm86jK0w< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-OfajU3CKLf2ClA2aSBCtbg< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-MeFt8Ftqqm5JsNfz3m1ccw< at >public.gmane.org ftpmail-svC55uRaBzvtX7QSmKvirg< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-1uw2dpATeoo+g9CYg3OFHQ< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-nT+P/bIs5Axpcz9v4jDktQ< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-jtllsymgi4yzQB+pC5nmwQ< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-Q+0723U6PhGxgjU+5Knr6g< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-+3LRkV84iCcHf4ZHDsq0gze48wsgrGvP< at >public.gmane.org bitftp-SLoc+omuCZ3R7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.org * *~ Mirror-sites requested! Archives too! The latest new jpeg will always be named, 12hr.jpeg Average size of images is only 45K. * Perl program to mirror ftp-sites/sub-directories: src.doc.ic.ac.uk:/packages/mirror *~ Postings to usenet newsgroups: 12hr alt.12hr alt.binaries.pictures.12hr alt.binaries.pictures.misc alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.misc* * Ask your system's news-administrator to carry these groups! (There are also usenet image browsers: TIFNY, PluckIt, Picture Agent, PictureView, Extractor97, NewsRover, Binary News Assistant, EasyNews)~ This interminable, relentless (online) sequence of imagery began inearnest on December 30, 1994. The basic structure of the project has beenover twenty-five years in the making. While the specific sequence ofphotographs has been presently orchestrated for many years` worth of12-hour postings, I will undoubtedly be tempted to tweak the ongoingpublication with additional new interjected imagery. Each 12-hour imageis like the turning of a page; providing ample time for reflection,interruption, and assimilation.~ The sites listed above also contain information on other culturalprojects and sources.~ A very low-volume, moderated mailing list for announcements and occasionalcommentary related to this project has been established. To subscribe to 12-list,simply send a message with the word "subscribe" in the Subject: field to12-list-request-qx95VtOkOx/QT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org -- The image was to make nothing visible but their connection with one another by space and air, yet each surrounded by the unique aura that disengages every deeply seen image from the world of irrelevant relationships and calls forth a tremor of astonishment at its fateful necessity. Thus from artworks of dead masters, over-life-size strangeness whose names we do not know and do not wish to know, look out at us enigmatically as symbols of all being. -- Big Grey Bricks: This project also serves as a rehearsal for its culmination as a series of offset-printed volumes: each 800+ full-bleed pages (5x8"_300lpi), where the full integrated rhythm of greyscale-sequence can be more intricately resolved. I'd provide all design, prepress and production. The tonality of the imagery is important; these 12hr-jpegs scanned from film-prints are quick approximations for an institutionally unsupported outcome. --This project remains untainted by corrupt corporate and glib governmentart-subsidies. Some opportunities still exist for financially assisting thepublication of editions of large (33x46") prints; perhaps (Iris giclees)inkjet duotones or extended-black quadtones with diasec on dibond mount.Other supporters receive rare copies of the first three web-offset printedISBN-Books. Contributions and requests for 12hr-email-subscriptions,can also be made at http://bradbrace.net/buy-into.html,or by mailed cheque/check: $5/mo $50/yr. Art-institutions must pay $12Kfor each image retained longer than 12 hours.--ISBN is International Standard Book Number. JPEG and GIF are types ofimage files. Get the text-file, 'pictures-faq' to learn how to view ortranslate these images. [http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace/netcom/pictures-faq.html]
http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/09-projectionsSarai Reader 09 : ProjectionsTo project – light, dreams, visions, plans, propositions and prospects. A projection always involves an incandescent transference, some crossing of a void or darkness to effect luminous landings on a distant surface. Without projections, we would have no cinemas, no city plans, no forecasts, no wagers, no fantasies. Projections convect questions, magnify dreams and illuminate desires. Sarai Reader 09: Projections translates this imperative to act as a transport of illumination to build an axis of central questions. A handlist of these questions could be: What does it mean to go back to the drawing board? Which drawing board are we going back to? What makes us want to revisit fundamental questions of how life, space, time, work, power, the ecosystem and society are organised? Why is it no longer possible or attractive to think of piecemeal reforms or solutions to the general economic and social crises of contemporary capitalism? The failure of capitalism to produce viable visions for tomorrow – combined with the scenarios unfolding within situations like the ‘Occupy’ Movements all over the world – anchors the urgency with which these questions can be asked today. What gets transformed when thousands of people gather on the streets? In Delhi, we have witnessed something intangible change in the city ever since thousands of young people began gathering in the wake of the rape and subsequent death of a young woman at the end of 2012. How have these gatherings changed the way people view themselves and each other? Are people seeing each other in a changed light? What tasks can artistic activity set itself in the 21st century? This would include speculations on the future trajectory of practice in the arts, art education, curation and the possibilities of the drawing of new relationships between art, design, technology, science, philosophy and everyday life. How can exhibitions, museums, public art institutions become sites of an active unfolding of questions, rather than a catalogue of answers and assertions? What are the great unknowns of our times, the zones of darkness? Not in terms of negativity, but in terms of the fact that we are simply in the dark about a series of questions that confront us. How effective are visual metaphors for social and political processes? What do we mean when we talk about transparency and opacity, light and darkness, in social and political speech? The form that the contributions in this book take are varied and come from diverse domains. There are essays, arguments, interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works; each evoking responses to what ‘projection’ can mean, extending it in myriad dimensions. Projections operates across two surfaces at once: on the printed page of this book (the ninth and final publication in the Sarai Reader series) and within the context of the contemporary art exhibition titled, ‘Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition’. The exhibition and all the processes that arose within it anticipated the book’s concerns through an occupation of time, space and attention over a nine-monthlong duration at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon. Since it opened in August 2012, the exhibition has taken the form of a series of unfolding proposals and episodes, gathering incrementally to produce a body of work that signposts shifting co-ordinates of image and thought, mapping a new horizon marked by the intersection of art, sociability, research and commentary. The last section of this book, ‘Art as a Place’, acts as an echo in print of the many kinds of energies that have animated the exhibition. Projections is not a catalogue of the exhibition at the Devi Art Foundation. Nor is ‘Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition’ a curated illustration of the concepts advanced by the book. Rather, the publication and the exhibition act as adjacent platforms from which new ideas and concepts, discursive as well as aesthetic, set off as travelling companions and find their separate yet occasionally converging itineraries. This book is a roadmap of that journey. Editorial CollectiveApril 2013, Delhi ***Editorial Collective, Sarai Reader SeriesRaqs Media Collective, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan Edited by:Raqs Media Collective and Shveta Sarda Assistant Editor: Shyama Haldar Kilpady Design: Pradip Saha/DamageControl Design intern: Nirmal Singh Cover image: Anisa RahimBack cover image: Chandan GomesSection separators: Pradip Saha Produced in conjunction with ‘Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition’, 18 August 2012–16 April 2013, curated by Raqs Media Collective at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon. ‘Sarai Reader 09’ is a collaboration between Sarai-CSDS and Devi Art Foundation. Curatorial group from Sarai-CSDS: Shveta Sarda, Bhagwati Prasad, Kavya MurthyCuratorial group from Devi Art Foundation: Kanupriya Bhatter, Anannya Mehtta, Reha Sodhi ‘Sarai Reader 09’, the exhibition and the book, have been supported by generous grants from Royal Norwegian Embassy, Delhi; Foundation for Arts Initiatives, New York and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.Additional support: Goethe-Institut, New Delhi; Pro Helvetia, New Delhi; Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo; Alliance Français, New Delhi; TAKE on Art, New Delhi Published byThe Director,Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, IndiaTel: (+91) 11 2394 2199 Fax: (+91) 11 2394 3450www.sarai.net, dak-5JVyulwl005eoWH0uzbU5w< at >public.gmane.org Delhi, 2013 ISBN 978-93-82388-03-6 Any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial use. The contributors and publishers, however, would like to be informed. Printed by Impress, New Delhi Jeebesh Bagchiwww.raqsmediacollective.net
On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton and Lisa Shields of the Council for Foreign Relations.Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt<...>JA: On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are starting to come up. There's also a very nice little paper that I've seen in relation to Bitcoin, that... you know about Bitcoin?ES: No.JA: Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a couple of years ago, and it is an alternative... it is a stateless currency.JC: Yeah, I was reading about this just yesterday.JA: And very important, actually. It has a few problems. But its innovations exceed its problems. Now there has been innovations along these lines in many different paths of digital currencies, anonymous, untraceable etc. People have been experimenting with over the past 20 years. The Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and that is why it is starting to take off. The different combination of these things. No central nodes. It is all point to point. One does not need to trust any central mint. If we look at traditional currencies such as gold, we can see that they have sort of interesting properties that make them valuable as a medium of exchange. Gold is divisible, it is easy to chop up, actually out of all metals it is the easiest to chop up into fine segments. You can test relatively easily whether it is true or whether it is fake. You can take chopped up segments and you can put them back together by melting the gold. So that is what makes it a good medium of exchange and it is also a good medium of value store, because you can take it and put it in the ground and it is not going to decay like apples or steaks. The problems with traditional digital currencies on the internet is that you have to trust the mint not to print too much of it.[laughter]JA: And the incentives for the mint to keep printing are pretty high actually, because you can print free money. That means you need some kind of regulation. And if you're gonna have regulation then who is going to enforce the regulation, now all of a sudden you have sucked in the whole problem of the state into this issue, and political pushes here and there, and who can get control of the mint, push it one way or another, for particular purposes. Bitcoin instead has an algorithm where the anyone can create, anyone can be their own mint. They're basically just searching for collisions with hashes.. A simple way is... they are searching for a sequence of zero bits on the beginning of the thing. And you have to randomly search for, in order to do this. So there is a lot of computational work in order to do this. And each Bitcoin software that is distributed.. That work algorithmically increases as time goes by. So the difficulty in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and harder and harder as time goes by and it is built into the system.ES: Right, right. That's interesting.JA: Just like the difficulty in mining gold becomes harder and harder and harder and that is what makes people predict that there is not going to be a sudden amount of gold in the market, rather...ES: To enforce the scarcity...JA: Yeah, to enforce scarcity, and scarcity will go up as time goes by, and what does that mean for incentives in going into the Bitcoin system. That means that you should get into the Bitcoin system now. Early. You should be an early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be worth a lot of money one day. So once you have a... and the Bitcoins are just... a Bitcoin address is just a big hash. It's a hash of a public key that you generate. So once you have this hash you can just advertise it to everyone, and people can send you Bitcoins, and there is people who have set up exchanges to convert from Bitcoin to US dollars and so on. And it solves a very interesting technical problem, which is how do you stop double spending?All digital material can be cloned, almost zero costs, so if you have currency as a digital string of numbers, how do you stop me... I want to buy this piece of pasta.[JA using lunch table objects]JA: Here is my digital currency and, now I take a copy of it. And now I want to buy your bit of egg. And then you go... and now I want to buy your radish! And you go, what? I've already got that! What's going on here? There's been some fraud! So there's a synchronization problem. Who now has the coin? So there is a point to point.. a spread network with all these problems, some points of the network being faster, some points of the network being slower, multiple paths of communication, how do you solve this synchronization issue about who has the currency? And so this is to mind actually the real technical innovation for Bitcoin, it has done this using some hashtrees and then a delay time, and then CPU work has to be done in order to move one thing to another so information can't spread too fast etc. OK, so, once you have a system of currency that is easy to use like that, then you can start to use it for things that you want to be scarce. What is the example of some things that we want to be scarce? Well, domain names. Names. We want names to be scarce. We want short names to be scarce, otherwise if they are not scarce, if it doesn't take work to get them, as soon as you have a nice naming system, some arsehole is going to come along and register every short name themselves.ES: Right. That's very interesting.JA: So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is precisely what I wanted and what I was theorizing about, which is not a DNS system, but rather short names... short bit of text to long bit of text tuple registering service. Cause that is the abstraction of domain names and all these problems solved. Yes, you have some something that you want to register that is short, and you want to couple that to something that is unmemorable and longer. So for example, the first amendment, that phrase, the "US first amendment", is a very short phrase, but it expands to a longer bit of text. So you take the hash of this text, and now you have got something that is intrinsically coupled to that which is unmemorable. But then you can register "US First Amendment" coupled to the hash. And that then means you have a structure where you can tell whether something has been published or unpublished, you can... one piece of human intellectual information can cite another one in a way that... can't be manipulated, and if it is censored the censorship can be found out. And if one place is censored, well you can scour the entire world for this hash, and no matter where you find you know it is what you wanted precisely!ES: RightJA: So that, in theory, then permits human beings to build up an intellectual scaffold where every citation, every reference to some other part of human intellectual content, is precise, and can be discovered if it exists out there anywhere at all, and is not dependent on any particular organization. So as a way of publishing this seems to be the most censorship resistant manner of publishing possible, because it is not dependent on any particular mechanism of publishing. You can be publishing through the post, you can be publishing on conventional websites, you can be publishing using Bittorrent, whatever, but the naming is consistent. And same is for... publishing is also a matter of transferring, you can... all you then have to do is, if you want to transfer something anonymously to someone else, one particular person, you encrypt the information with their key, and you publish it.ES: Are you worried.. basically this entire system depends on basically irrevocable key structures. Are you worried that the key structures would fall apart?JA: Well the hashing, in terms of the naming part, going to patterns--it doesn't depend on the key structure at all. In terms of Bitcoin has its own key structure and that's an independent thing, there is all sorts of problems with it. Hackers can come in and steal keys etc. And the same problems that you have with cash. Armored vans are needed to protect the cash etc. And there are some enhancements you can use to try and remove the incentives one way or another. You can introduce a subcurrency with fixed periods of expense. So you retract for one week or one day and a merchant will accept or not accept.ES: The average person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful lot of private keys involving commerce were taken,JA: YesES: so...JA: The public key structure is a tremendous problem, so in the same way that domain name structures are a tremendous problem. The browser based public key system that we have for authenticating what websites you are going to, it is awful. It is truly awful. The number of people that have been licensed to mint keys is so tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted and got bought up cheaply by Russian companies, you can assume, I have been told actually that VeriSign, by people who are in the know, although I am not yet willing to go on the public record, cause I only have one source, just between you and me, one source that says that VeriSign has actually given keys to the US government. Not all, but a particular key. That's a big problem with the way things are authenticated presently. There are some traditional alternative approaches, like PGP has a web of trust. I don't think those things really work. What I think does work is something close to what SSH does, and that's probably the way forward. Which is it is opportunistic key registration. So there is part of your interaction, the first time you interact, you register your key, and then if you have a few points of keying or some kind of flood network, then you can see that well lots of people have seen that key many times in the past.
It's time to recover lessons from useful past and don't follows Snowhite's and other Mirrors funnies.Since Feuerbach, we understand exactly what is "subject" and "predicate", even if periodically neoidealism, bergsonism, proudhonism, heideggerism and other irrational-isms (fully analytics but zero substances) try to cook the same old smog. I understand that now is impossible to read, tweeting or tubing, papers like "Das Kap" and, with the risk to "keep it too much simple", maybe useful for Jasnaja Poljana or J.Dewey "kommunist" last-survived school only, here some suggestions from strange humans."Salary ("handcraft, even with the pen !") and capital ("slot machines' watermelons") ARE in opposition" (Saint Simon)."In response to Philosophy of misery, here is a book, my justfriend Joe: "The misery of philosophy", so you can easily apply leftwing hegelian method (by a such socratic type, but with heavy beard, husband of an unknown Jenny von Westphalen)."Don't make the old mistake to exchange the products of drunkless mind with the symbolic ones coming from the hungedhumans tree (an entity that use to play "big bangs", talking to a neocon named Adam ... Smith, suppose).
...or maybe all people who "speak from the heart."-------------------=http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/fcc-chair-endorses-red-sox-f-b=ombBoston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz got the Federal Communications =Commission's seal of approval after he dropped an F-bomb in a pre-game =speech that was broadcast on live television. Ortiz's R-rated remarks =were delivered on the field at Fenway Park before the first Red Sox home =game since Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon.=20"This is our fucking city," Ortiz said. "And nobody gonna dictate our =freedom. Stay strong. Thank you."The FCC regulates "obscenity, indecency and profanity" on radio and =television and often issues fines for on-air swearing. However, FCC =Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement of support for Ortiz on =the agency's official Twitter account after the game."David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today's Red Sox game. I stand with =Big Papi and the people of Boston," Genachowski wrote.--Dave Mandldmandl-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgdavem-Lr0sFQ5rN1I< at >public.gmane.orgWeb: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/Twitter: < at >dmandlInstagram: dmandl
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Hi - some people couldn't open the http://www.alansondheim.org/hastac.docx file; please try http://alansondheim.org/hastac.rtf - this might be easier. Both will probably download the file to your download directory; it should be easy to open from there. Feedback welcomed.Thanks, Alan
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< http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/19/greek-banksters-in-action-on-the-latest-twist-in-the-story-of-mafia-style-terror-spreading-through-the-greek-polity/ >Greek Banksters in Action: On the latest twist in the story ofmafia-style terror spreading through the Greek polity 19 Apr Last November I posted a piece entitled A Small Victory for Press Freedom in Greece's Struggle against Cleptocracy. That story concerned the courageous decision of Kostas Vaxevanis, one of Greece's few, valiant investigative reporters, to publish the so-called Lagarde List; the list of Swiss bank account holders that Greece's political class did its utmost to keep hidden, to pretend that either it never existed or that it had been `misplaced'. Since then, Vaxevanis has been arrested by Special Branch officers, was tried in the Greek Courts, was acquitted triumphantly, and, more recently, awarded one of international journalism's top awards. In an earlier piece, last July, (entitled Bankruptocracy in the Greek Sector of Bailoutistan) I had drawn my readers' attention to the remarkable revelations of Reuters' Stephen Grey regarding the ponzi scheme put together by Greek bankers for the purposes of usurping Europe's bank recapitalisation rules, pretending that they managed to draw private capital into their insolvent banks which never really existed. My piece castigated the Greek media for maintaining a veil of silence on these corrupt and criminal practices, while highlighting the troika's curious lack of interest in the shenanigans of bankers who are receiving billions of European taxpayers' money (in the process of the so-called `recapitalisation' process). Today's post links these two stories together in a manner that you, dear reader, will find startling, worrying, enraging, disconcerting. It comprises, mainly, the summary of a letter that Kostas Vaxevanis sent to a London based journalist last week (the translation and summarising from the Greek original is mine). With this letter Vaxevanis sought support, advice and an opportunity of spreading the news of the dire situation faced by Greeks (citizens and journalists) who refuse to keep silent in the face of deep seated, criminal corruption. I urge you to read on. "In May 2012, I investigated the functioning of Greek banks, with special emphasis on a certain Greek Bank (The Bank henceforth) and its Chairman (The Chairman). I found that The Chairman's family members were the secret owners of a number of offshore companies that would receive loans from the bank without any real collateral. These loans would then: (a) be written off as unserviceable, or (b) be used to buy office space that would immediately be resold to other parties which would then lease them to The Bank or sell them to The Bank at inflated prices. In addition, other offshore companies were used by The Chairman to borrow substantial amounts from two other Greek banks, again with no collateral, for the purposes of buying shares The Bank (thus helping the bank demonstrate its capacity to draw in private capital). Since then the owner of one of these two other banks has been imprisoned (on different charges) while the second bank involved has played a central role in bringing down the Cypriot banking system (after its merger with one of the island's now collapsed banks and the transfer of its headquarters from Greece to Cyprus). After the publication of these two investigative pieces, photographs of Stephen Grey (the Reuters investigative reporter who broke a part of this story to an international audience), were published in various websites with the caption: "The man who came to destroy Greece". Worse still, the same blogs circulated a `document' which `showed' that I was on the payroll of the Greek state's intelligence services. I managed to defuse this campaign of defamation by writing extensively about it in the press. On 11^th September 2012, late at night, a group of 4 or 5 people staked out my home. It was only accidentally that I avoided being ambushed (my motorcycle had a flat tire and I thus returned home in a friend's car). Upon noticing the stalkers I called the police and asked them to come quietly. The police arrived noisily and went to a nearby house first, thus giving the men plenty of time to make their escape. For days, the police refused to investigate properly or to call eyewitnesses to make a statement (later, after I published the story, they did). Since then, I have been denied police protection (unlike most other journalists) and have had to resort to private security. Soon after the failed ambush, a woman visited my office insisting that I should see her to discuss "the bankers' designs" on me. I decided to meet with her. She was a frightened woman who claimed to be in grave personal danger. She said that she had been, and was, part of a group comprising former agents and salaried members of the Greek intelligence services, connected to business interests who worked on, at first, wrecking my public image and, later on, planning my physical demise. She added that it was her who, following specific orders, had forged the document `proving' that I was on the payroll of the secret service - a document which her group then circulated to the various blogs that used it. According to her testimony to me, a group stationed in Skopja was engaged to "see me off". Part of the same plot concerned the defamation of another woman, a former bank manager with The Bank, who had been fired on false charges of embezzlement because, in truth, she possessed damning evidence concerning The Chairman's family's activities. Their plan, vis-a-vis this former bank manager was to plant narcotics in a restaurant that she owned on the island of Zakynthos and to orchestrate a very public arrest so that, in the future, if she ever revealed her evidence against The Chairman's family, the press could dismiss her as a `drug dealer'. To prove her story, my interlocutor handed over a sequence of photographs that were the result of the surveillance of the former bank manager taken by «her group». The woman further claimed that she had not dared distance herself from that group but she was afraid that she would be killed upon completing her `tasks'. On our part, we immediately investigated her claims. We subjected her to an accredited graphologist's test who comfirmed that the forged document showing that I was, supposedly, on the secret agents' payroll (as published in various blogs) was in her handwriting. We also confirmed with the ferry company that the car in which that team of operatives was supposed to have travelled to Zakynthos (to plant drugs in order to frame The Bank's former employee) had indeed travelled there. We also established that the car was registered to former intelligence agents who had been prosecuted for an number of misdeeds - and whose court case is pending. I met with this woman a number of times in an attempt further to establish the truth of her allegations. In one of these meetings, she said that the headquarters of her group was close to our magazine's (HOT DOC) but also that the group had abandoned those quarters fearing that we had worked out they were conducting surveillance on us from there (after I had written in HOT DOC that I know I am being followed). Furthermore, the woman handed to us audio records from her group's meetings in which they were discussing their plans. We went to the address she gave us to find abandoned offices that were for lease and to see if they featured hidden crypts (where the woman had told her group kept weapons). We found these hidden crevices and photographed them. To protect myself, I wrote a report on the above which I sealed and delivered to a notary to be released on the event of my death or disappearance. I also visited a district attorney whose incorruptibility I trust. The woman left Athens and is in hiding, even though I remain in contact with her. Following the above events, I was contacted by the group of people that I consider to have planned to assassin me. I alerted the police and met with them under police surveillance. In the meeting, they denied everything and pretended they had nothing to do with any of these plans. I left that meeting and then refused to take their repeated calls. A few days ago the case files were transferred again from the police to the district attorney. I know nothing further about the law agencies' activities in this regard." Kostas Vaxevanis' letter then moves on to another, related, issue: The Lagarde List which he and HOT DOC published causing a major political storm, that echoed around the world, and leading to his arrest (for endangering the privacy of those on the list) - not to mention to worldwide acclaim at least within the international community of investigative journalists. Vaxevanis was then acquitted in a short and triumphant trial but the prosecution appealed with the result that a second trial will take place next June. Meanwhile, following the publication of the Lagarde List, and under enormous pressure from public opinion, the Greek Parliament set up an investigative committee (made up of parliamentarians from each party, in proportion to their strength in Parliament - as per the Constitution) to investigate only one person: the former Minister of Finance, Mr George Papakonstantinou under whose watch the Lagarde List got `lost' within the Greek government and was never utilised by the authorities. The said Committee has a remit to rule on whether there is sufficient evidence to try Mr Papakonstantinou. In the context of its investigation, the Committee calls witnesses who are then examined by members of the Committee. In his letter, Vaxevanis says that, even though no one disputes that the list he and HOT DOC published was the original Lagarde List - as given to him by an anonymous person - certain members of the Committee subjected him to aggressive examination (something that I can vouch for having read the official transcripts as produced by the Greek Parliament) the purpose of which was, clearly, not to establish the truth about the Lagarde List but to discredit Vaxevanis and HOT DOC. Vaxevanis notes in his letter that the members of the Committee that were most aggressive happened to be the ones that ought to have stood down from the Committee on the basis of a clear conflict of interest. In particular, Vaxevanis writes in his letter: "The mother of one member of the Committee was on the Lagarde List. The wife of another member of the Committee appears to have power of attorney for an account on the Lagarde List. The third member, who happens to Chair the Committee, is the lawyer of a tax office employee who has been convicted for having embezzled millions of euros of tax payers' money. He has also been the subject of two parliamentary investigations but escaped prosecution shielded by legislation that gives investigators/prosecutors a mere two years before the case is considered to fall under the statute of limitations." Vaxevanis' letter finishes thus: "I thought it important to relate to you these events. I am in need for your assistance and advice. Every day that goes by, a new piece of a conspiracy is put together and I fear that the jigsaw may be completed by the time my second trial takes place in June. I feel they are keen to convict me while giving me the option to pay a fine instead of serving time in prison. Of course if convicted I shall refuse to do so, opting for prison in order to publicise in that manner what is going on in this country. I could ask for assistance from opposition parties but I revile the idea of becoming part of the party political game. Thank you for your attention and apologies for tiring you with my long-winded story. Alas, you are our only allies. Greece is sinking not only in an economic crisis but also in filth." Epilogue You may wonder what happened to The Chairman and to The Bank. The Chairman is doing fine, thank you. His insolvent bank has now turned into a (by Greek standards) Too-Big-Too-Fail monster, having been handed on a silver platter the good chunks of banks that the Greek taxpayer has paid through the nose to carve out of failed operations. Those in the know expect that he, amongst all Greek bankers, will probably manage to retain control of `his' bank after ESM-funded recapitalisation (though no one seems to know why he can attract private capital when healthier banks, like the National Bank of Greece, are failing to do so). His close connections with people high up in the Central Bank of Greece and in the political establishment (that the average Greek refers to as the Cleptocracy) have ensured that his power to extract rents from the rest of a crumbling society is inversely proportional to `his' bank's performance. Being a major `sponsor' of the bankrupt (both financially and morally) Greek media has certainly not done him any harm. Bankruptocracy in the Greek Sector of Bailoutistan is, thus, progressing in leaps and bounds. With European taxpayers' loan guarantees providing the capital and a bonfire of the Greek people's hopes for the future supplying the energy.
"everything must not change for everything to remain the same" the leopard2.0 - Spaghettiland, 2013So the electoral quake was all a fake. King George Napolitano is elected bythe Mummy into a second term for the first time in the history of theitalian republic, which effectively turns into a presidential republic (theconstitution says we're a parliamentary republic, but what the hell).Grillo was outmaneuvered by the old foxes of the caste, the gerontocratswho want to hold onto power in Italy and who cares if more than half ofitalians have voted either for the center-left or for the 5star movement(whose electoral influence seems on the decline after two months ofparliamentary stalemate). The former president has accepted another term onstrict conditions: a grosse koalition government pursuing EU-inspiredausterity policies backed by the PD and mr B's and Monti's clubs. It's thetriumph of stagnation over change. It's very depressing in a verydepressive socioeconomic situation. As elsewhere in Southern Europe, youthunemployment has skyrocketed. Not a day passes without a suicide foreconomic reasons. But the dimissionary leadership of the PD headed byBersani has succeded in the miracle of handing the country back toberlusconi.Let me tell you my friends, it was a political thriller with a bad endinglast week. Grillo proposed for presidential candidate Rodot?, a respectedconstitutionalist, rights advocate and former president of the party thatgenerated the PD, that cathocommunist hybrid that has collected a string ofself-inflicted defeats since its inception in 2007. The PD made anagreement with mr b over old christiandemocrat unionist Marini, but aminority of the PD and its ally, Vendola-led SEL, refused to vote him. Theypreferred Rodot?. At the 4th round of parliamentary voting, when justsimple majority was needed to elect the new president, Bersani pulledProdi, fomer head of the European Commission who twice defeated berlusconiand is therefore hated by the right, out of the hat. SEL voted him, while5star stuck to Rodot?, but in the secrecy of the ballot 100 PDrepresentatives stabbed Prodi in the back. At that point the party startedto self-dissolve, as militants started to lay raucous siege to thecapranica theater in Rome where presidential electors of the center-leftcongregated to decide who to vote for. Bersani resigned, but not beforebegging the 88-year old Napolitano to stay, who said "you're an amateur whoshould have never tried to govern with Grillo's tacit consent; if I pullyou out of your own shit, the pd must do a presidential government withberlusconi and monti". Napolitano was elected with the mummy rejoicing, asGrillo cried for coup and called for people to assemble in front ofParliament. He said he would come with his camper. Thousands of peopleshowed up, but he never came (police adviced him not to). It could havebeen the veritable start of Italian indignad< at >s, but alas italians do notseem able to transform protest in radical change and especially the drasticactions needed to defeat the Leopard 2.0. The rage is all around but theleft is dead (as i wrote in my recently published essay "being leftytoday"). It's unclear at this stage who will lead the new government(moderate he will be, for it will be a he, and old white males where allthe sages who drafted the future government's program on behalf of thepresident). In early may what's left of the parliamentary left plus FIOM,red metalworkers' union, will convene called by Vendola and Barca (atechnocrat son of a partisan who's recently drafted a paper on how toreconstruct the left: "experimental democracy" and "cognitive mobilization"are his recipes). A lefty party is in the cards, but it won't get beyond10% (and that's optimistic in present conditions).hope i didn't bore you with the byzantine twists of spaghetti politics,lx
Have you seen this "proposed European citizen initiative" about unconditional basic income ? it's an old project, and your voices can count if you agree.https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/REQ-ECI-2012-000028/public/JN
[It's the classic approach. First, de-skill a certain task, i.e. makepeople behave like machines, then replace them by actual machines.This becomes particularly clear at the end of the article.]April 4, 2013Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a BreakBy JOHN MARKOFFhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.htmlImagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue bookand getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the“send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly,your essay scored by a software program.And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that thesystem would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improveyour grade.EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has justintroduced such a system and will make its automated softwareavailable free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it.The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays andshort written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growingconflict over the role of automation in education. Although automatedgrading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are nowwidespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to gradeessay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educatorsand has many critics.Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX,predicted that the instant-grading software would be a usefulpedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essaysover and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said thetechnology would offer distinct advantages over the traditionalclassroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwalsaid. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instantfeedback.”But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers.One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attentionseveral times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooledsoftware grading programs into giving high marks. He has also beenhighly critical of studies that purport to show that the softwarecompares well to human graders.“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did nothave any valid statistical test comparing the software directly tohuman graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and acurrent researcher at M.I.T.He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating apetition opposing automated assessment software. The group, whichcalls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essaysin High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures,including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’sstatement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannotmeasure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy,reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance,convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity,among others.”But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools anduniversities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. andthe University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classesfrom Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for coursecompletion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year,including adding international schools.The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to firstgrade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety ofmachine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade anynumber of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring systemcreated by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numericalrank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a studentwhether an answer was on topic or not.Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing thecapability of human grading.“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s goodenough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality ofthe grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor toinstructor.”EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, whichdates to early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a rangeof companies offering commercial programs to grade written testanswers, and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and WestVirginia — are using some form of the technology in secondary schools.A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the softwareis used as a “second reader,” to check the reliability of the humangraders.But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards islikely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announcedthat it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system thatwill incorporate the automated assessment technology.Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanfordfaculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, arealso committed to automated assessment systems because of the value ofinstant feedback.“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so thatlearning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating towardresubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, acomputer scientist and a founder of Coursera.Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set upby one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two$100,000 prizes aimed at improving software that grades essays andshort answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner ofone of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to helpdesign its assessment software.“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,”said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation.“It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. Thechallenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lotmore and they take a lot more time.”Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio,supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoringand wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology —though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachersto give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said.Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from thenation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much betterthan at most schools.“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact,they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine evercould,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation ofwhat is actually going on in the real world.”
Folks:One of the least understood *distinctions* drawn by Marshall McLuhan was the one he made between HOT and COOL media.In simplest terms, this refers to the broad differences between behaviors and attitudes in an environment saturated with radio (HOT) and with one saturated by television (COOL).A handy way of considering this in terms of "politics" would be to consider the sort of environment that *shaped* the rise of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Kim Il Sung -- all radio-based (HOT) -- and the sort of an environment that gave us an Obama or an Angela Merkle or a Gorbachev or a Tony Blair -- all television-based (COOL).Much of the frustration felt by today's *activists* about how whatever they try to do it just seems to be "commodified" and absorbed by "late-stage capitalism" is the result of trying to apply radio-era tactics in an age dominated by television sensibility. If you don't *understand* media, then you are doomed to make the same mistake over-and-over!The last time there was a *concerted* effort to understand the impact of "media environments," the focus was RADIO (i.e. in the 1930s/40s) -- which involved some of the most "respected" social scientists at the time (organized out of Columbia and Princeton, including Lazarfield, Cantril and Adorno) and which produced today's "opinion research" industry as well as fields like Social Psychology and Communications Research.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_ProjectThere were some fascinating studies done about the relative "propaganda" deficiency of TELEVISION (compared with radio) -- resulting in the complaints of FCC head Newton Minow about a "vast wasteland" and Fred Friendly's efforts to start "public television" -- which produced at least one PhD about how TV could *not* be used to "teach" anything (by Tavistock-related Marilyn Emery) and, indeed, the 1953 Ford Foundation funding that launched McLuhan's own career studying "Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior in the New Media of Communication" (i.e. television.)And, if you don't understand the differences between RADIO and TELEVISION as *environments*, then you will really be confused about the Internet -- which is fundamentally different from either of these.First, despite all the efforts by Facebook, Google et al to harness the INTERNET as the successor to *television* advertising (e.g. the design of their business models and the "demographic" data collection their systems are organized to try to sell to advertisers), these businesses cannot succeed!Second, consider the widespread *hair-on-fire* reaction of those committed to television-era mass-media "rationality" -- particularly to the "values" of democracy/tolerance/non-discrimination/equality/globalism -- to what the INTERNET has done to their cherished ability to "curate the news."Today, the NYTimes foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman, takes aim at the Internet-based "radicalization" of the Boston Marathon bombers. He reminds his readers, "That's why, when the Internet first emerged and you had to connect with a modem, I used to urge that modems sold in America come with a warning label from the surgeon general like cigarettes. It would read: 'Attention: Judgement not included.'"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/friedman-judgment-not-included.html?ref=thomaslfriedman&_r=0The NYTimes is a part of the dying *television* environment (having previously been a part of the *radio* environment), so it cannot comprehend what has happened -- as the ENVIRONMENT has once again shifted to something quite different. This past week, Eric Schmidt's publisher printed 150,000 copies of his "The New Digital Age" -- an attempt to bring the Council on Foreign Relations (among others) into the INTERNET era. The first words of the book are "The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they truly don't understand." The heuristic he uses to drive home this distinction is the notion that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and another that is "virtual." Let's see how well the television-saturated "policy" audience he's aiming at deals with his claims. So far the term used to describe the book, which many presumed to be another expression of Californian "libertarian" tech-utopianism, seems to be "sobering"! Not HOT (like radio, although with many similar qualities) and not COOL (like television, against which it is most directly opposed), the INTERNET brings with it a new set of behaviors and attitudes.Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NYP.S. For those unfamiliar with the history of the phrase "No soap, radio," the Internet provides some guidance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_soap_radioP.P.S. There are many commonplace distinctions that can help you to distinguish between the RADIO and TELEVISION expressions of the same urges -- such as the distinction between Aleister Crowley and his protege L. Ron Hubbard or the distinction between Erector Sets and LEGO. As an exercise, try to imagine what synthetic-gnostic-religion or a build-a-bridge-toy would look like in the *digital* age.P.P.P.S. For those interested in how NEW MEDIA can be compared with those mediums that came before, the best approach is still "The Laws of Media: The New Science" by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (a work that is apparently largely unknown in Europe, due to the way that McLuhan was mis-represented on the Continent.)