American Paradox: 18.5 Million Vacant Homes and 3.5 Million Homeless

rsn | In the last few days, the US government census figures have revealed that 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty or are struggling to live on low incomes. And we know that the financial hardships faced by our neighbors, colleagues, and others in our communities will be all the more acutely felt over the holiday season.

Along with poverty and low incomes, the foreclosure rate has created its own crisis situation as the number of families removed from their homes has skyrocketed.

Since 2007, banks have foreclosed around eight million homes. It is estimated that another eight to ten million homes will be foreclosed before the financial crisis is over. This approach to resolving one part of the financial crisis means many, many families are living without adequate and secure housing. In addition, approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans. It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.

The stark realities that persist mean that millions of families will be facing the holidays in temporary homes, or homes under threat, and far too many children will be wishing for an end to the uncertainty and distress their family is facing rather than an Xbox or Barbie doll.

Housing is a basic human need and a fundamental human right. Yet every day in the United States, banks are foreclosing on more than 10,000 mortgages and ordering evictions of individuals and families residing in foreclosed homes. The US government's steps to address the foreclosure crisis to date have been partial at best.

The depth and severity of the foreclosure crisis is a clear illustration of the urgent need for the U.S. government to put in place a system that respects, protects and fulfills human rights, including the right to housing. This includes implementing real protections to ensure that other actors, such as financial institutions, do not undermine or abuse human rights.

Please join the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and Amnesty International in asking the U.S. to step up its efforts to address the foreclosure crisis, including by giving serious consideration to the growing call for a foreclosure moratorium and other forms of relief for those at risk, and establishing a housing finance system that fulfills human rights obligations.

As we think back on all that Amnesty has achieved over the last year in advancing and protecting human rights, let's do one more thing. This holiday, let's join together like George Bailey's friends to advance the right to housing because, apart from all the other good reasons to do so: "Housing: It's a Wonderful Right."

more ideas...,

the ship MUST BE sinking...,

Fist tap Nomad.

the ministry of propaganda declared ron paul "unelectable"

oftwominds | Here is the second thought experiment: does anyone seriously think any of the Republicrat candidates are even remotely qualified to deal with the crises brewing on the horizon? What exactly makes them "electable"?

Let's consider them one at a time, scrubbed of spin, PR and propaganda:

Mitt Romney: the perfect player for a remake of "The Stepford Wives" entitled "The Stepford Politicos." Romney is the personification of the telegenic, wealthy empty suit, devoid of any ideas beyond retreads of Status Quo tweaks that leave the Power Elite--of which he is a member--safely in charge.

Romney's "electability" rests on the hopes that the hard drives from his time as governor stay safely erased and that zombified voters conclude that having a family and membership in a church are sufficient qualifications for President.

His handlers have carefully studied the political satire The Candidate and have not yet formulated an answer to the question, "What do we do now?" should the wealthy pawn of the Power Elite improbably win the presidency.

Michelle Bachmann: Imagine her wearing a witch's hat, it isn't hard to do; Bachman is the ideal Wicked Witch of the West, but without the charisma. She does have a host of frightful winged monkeys, though--her handlers.

Newt Gingrich: Gingrich has a number of redeeming characteristics, starting with his famously unsavory "baggage" that reveals an appealingly flawed core. He is also the only Republicrat candidate that wouldn't bore you to despair within a few minutes, i.e. he actually strays from the canned scripts approved by the Ministry of Propaganda. Third, on occasion he actually reveals glimmers of awareness that the next 10 years will not be like the previous decade, and that America is at a critical crossroads.

Unfortunately, his canned ideology-as-"solution" ideas expired a decade ago and he has no coherent vision of a future that isn't just a slightly modified version of the Power-Elite dominated one that is now hurtling toward instability.

He has shown a remarkable ability, however, to hide his horns and forked tail.

Rick Perry: Another telegenic empty suit who hoped that having a family and membership in a church qualified him for the presidency.

Rick Santorum: Rick's ruthlessness has its charm, starting with his long and painful campaign to establish a simulacrum of intellectual "seriousness." Like all the other stooges, his version of "the vision thing" is a tepid edit of the Status Quo. Like all the stooges other than the refreshingly flawed Gingrich, he hopes membership in a church qualifies him for the presidency.

What all the candidates but Ron Paul dare not acknowledge because it isn't on the approved Ministry of Propaganda script is that the Status Quo is heading off a cliff at the direct behest of the nation's Power Elite. The only candidate that has "the vision thing" and that clearly enunciates exactly how the Power Elite's policies have led the nation off a cliff of insolvency and Imperial hubris is Ron Paul.

For this sin against the Status Quo and its Power Elite, Paul has been excommunicated, and the (pardon my language) smarmy army of corporate media whores cannot declare him "unelectable" often enough.

That is proof that he is highly electable, for otherwise the Ministry of Propaganda wouldn't be running a campaign of such transparent desperation.

enemy of the state

NewYorker | For the past six months or so, the Republican-primary electorate has had a polite, patient, reliable, steadily employed suitor chatting with Mom and Dad in the parlor, while a series of more exciting but less appropriate rivals have come knocking at the back door. Mitt Romney will probably win in the end, but each of his serially surging competitors enjoys more immediate access to some essential region of the Republican soul. Herman Cain is the tough, no-bullshit businessman, Rick Santorum the devout pro-lifer, Rick Perry the hypermasculine cowboy, Michele Bachmann the evangelical populist, Newt Gingrich the swashbuckling geostrategist.

It seems fitting that the final surge should belong to Ron Paul, who speaks most directly to one of his party’s deepest emotions: hostility to government. At seventy-six, Paul has aged perfectly into his personality. He’s a white-haired, wide-eyed prophet—it’s easy to imagine him in white robes, instead of a business suit—who must rail against the outrages he has witnessed. To a pinched, stressed, war-weary, declinist nation, he offers the clearest program of any of the candidates. Five federal departments gone in Year One. Ten per cent of the federal workforce laid off. Income tax abolished, along with the I.R.S. Regulations and social programs repealed. No more foreign wars; no more foreign aid; not even very much foreign policy.

Especially to the self-selected group that comes to the Iowa Republican caucuses, Paul’s positions are pulse quickening. If you are antitax, Paul has that sentiment nailed more than any other candidate. If you are antiwar, Paul is right there with you. If you fear for your personal freedoms, Paul has you covered. And if you want a sweeping philosophy, deeply grounded in fundamental texts (Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard), Paul is your man. Nobody has a better claim to be a protest candidate. He’s the only one who has ever run for office from a third party. He’s not about passing bills; he’s about root-and-branch change. His popularity, even if it’s temporary, demonstrates that all politics isn’t necessarily local—that big ideas can exert a pull on voters, too.

ideas do have consequences...,

NYTimes | A Ron Paul stump speech offers something for almost everyone. And that may help explain why Mr. Paul, a 76-year-old Texas congressman, is polling so well here.

For college students, liberals and many veterans, his speeches attack federal drug policy, lament growing income inequality and condemn undeclared wars. By the standards of contemporary American political discourse, he can sound like a pony-tailed advocacy lawyer as he pummels a Democratic administration for carrying out extrajudicial “assassinations.”

Alluding to the drone-strike killing in Yemen last year of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric, by the Obama administration, Mr. Paul said at one of his final campaign stops: ”If you are construed by him and his executive branch as a bad person, even if you are an American citizen, than you qualify to be assassinated. And that is not the way it is supposed to be done.”

For more traditional Republican voters and economic conservatives, Mr. Paul offers dire predictions about the nation’s fiscal future if the federal budget and debt are not slashed immediately and deeply; sharp attacks on the Federal Reserve, bailouts, and the dangers of debasing the currency; and a rousing defense of the second amendment. He warns that time is growing short to correct the country’s course and save it from a fiscal calamity.

“We have met a crisis here in the last four years, which was a predictable crisis,” he said during a speech in December. “Many of the Austrian economists knew there was a bubble. We talked about it for a long time. And the bubble burst. It’s different this time, it is big-time different. It’s the biggest in the history of the world, what we are facing today.”

Evangelicals and social conservatives often find campaign literature on their seats before a speech starts that extols a proposal by Mr. Paul that “effectively repeals Roe v. Wade and would prevent activist judges from interfering with state decisions to protect life.”

Mr. Paul’s campaign talks are long, discursive, and bounce from place to place — he generally does not use a prepared text — but they tend to cover the same core areas: his commitment to following a strict interpretation of the Constitution and how he says that mandates a noninterventionist foreign policy; the need to constrain or eliminate the Federal Reserve; the elimination other parts of the federal government not called for by the Constitution; and a robust embrace of civil liberties that would mean repealing the Patriot Act.

3D learning tools positive for pupils, says study

BBCNews | A study of the impact of 3D in the classroom has found that it improves test results by an average of 17%.

Increasingly schools are using 3D projectors and learning resources to add a new dimension to learning.

The research, conducted in seven schools across Europe, found that 3D-enabled learning tools helped children concentrate more.

It also led shy children to speak up in class discussions.

Only a handful of schools in the UK use the technology, which requires a 3D-enabled projector as well as 3D glasses for all pupils and a set of bespoke learning resources.
Pupils using 3D in the classroom 3D provides a wow factor in class but it has longer lasting effects, research says

The study, conducted by researchers from the International Research Agency on behalf of Texas Instruments, assessed 740 students in schools across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, the UK and Sweden.

Students were tested before and after the lessons with a control group learning with traditional resources only.

On average, 86% of pupils in 3D classrooms improved in test results, compared to 52% of children using traditional teaching methods.

It also found that attention levels soared - with 92% of the class paying attention during 3D lessons compared to 46% in the traditional learning environment.

"It grabbed children's attention and this carried on beyond the 3D episode, it seemed to trigger an interest in learning that maintained through the rest of the lesson," said Prof Anne Bamford, who led the study.

"The level of questioning also increased and anecdotally teachers reported that the children asking questions were those that wouldn't normally engage in class," she told the BBC.

Researchers observed a series of biology lessons, in which children learned about the functions of the body.

"Children can see how things function. Instead of learning about the heart statically they can see it in a solid way, literally see blood passing through the valves, see exchange of oxygen, rotate it, tilt it and zoom in," said Prof Bamford. Fist tap Dale.

physicists seek to lose the lecture as teaching tool

NPR | The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

"Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down," says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it's a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught.

"I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching — which is what my instructors had done to me. So I lectured," he says.

He loved to lecture. Mazur's students apparently loved it, too. They gave him great evaluations and his classes were full.

"For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job," he says.

But then in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent.

"I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did," Hestenes says.

Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to look at students' conceptual understanding of physics. It's a test Maryland's Redish has given his students many times.

Here's a question from the test: "Two balls are the same size but one weighs twice as much as the other. The balls are dropped from the top of a two-story building at the same instant of time. The time it takes the ball to reach the ground will be..."

The possible answers include about half as long for the heavier ball, about half as long for the lighter ball, or the same time for both. This is a fundamental concept but even some people who've taken physics get this question wrong.

To get to the answer, Redish went to the second floor of the physics building. A group of his students was on the sidewalk below. When he reached the top, he dropped two balls from the roof.

The two balls reached the ground at the same time. Sir Isaac Newton was the first person who figured out why. He came up with a law of motion to explain how two balls of different weights, dropped from the same height, hit the ground simultaneously.

While most physics students can recite Newton's second law of motion, Harvard's Mazur says, the conceptual test developed by Hestenes showed that after an entire semester they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics. When Mazur read the results, he shook his head in disbelief. The test covered such basic material.

"I gave it to my students only to discover that they didn't do much better," he says.

The test has now been given to tens of thousands of students around the world and the results are virtually the same everywhere. The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works.

"The classes only seem to be really working for about 10 percent of the students," Arizona State's Hestenes says. "And I maintain, I think all the evidence indicates, that these 10 percent are the students that would learn it even without the instructor. They essentially learn it on their own."

He says that listening to someone talk is not an effective way to learn any subject.

"Students have to be active in developing their knowledge," he says. "They can't passively assimilate it."

This is something many people have known intuitively for a long time — the physicists just came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing. But with budgets shrinking and enrollments booming, large classes aren't going away. You don't have to lecture in a lecture hall though.

Mazur's physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

At a recent class, the students — nearly 100 of them — are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students start talking with one another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got it right. After talking for a few minutes, Mazur tells them to answer the question again.

This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer. The process then begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls "peer Instruction." He now teaches all of his classes this way.

"What we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple," he says.

One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don't need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the "information-gathering" part of education — before they come to class.

"In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information," Mazur says. "Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part."

Mazur's approach is one of many developed in response to evidence that traditional lectures don't work. Among the advocates of these approaches there's an increasing sense of urgency about how to help more students do better.

"We need to educate a population to compete in this global marketplace," says Brian Lukoff, an education researcher at Harvard. "We can't do that by just sort of picking out 10 percent and saying, 'Oh you guys are going to be the successful ones,' and you know we need a much larger swath of that population to be able to think critically and problem-solve."

But ask anyone involved with efforts to lose the lecture and they'll tell you they encounter resistance. Sometimes the stiffest opposition comes from the students.

"Revamping my entire education, you know, philosophy for this one class was a bit daunting," says Ryan Duncan, a sophomore in Mazur's class.

But he adapted and says he learned more in Mazur's class than he did in his other physics course at Harvard.

Maryland's Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads, but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them — lecturing isn't enough anymore.

"With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."

Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don't have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.

"It used to be just be the 'sage on the stage,' the source of knowledge and information," he says. "We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information."

Mazur sees himself now as the "guide on the side" – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.

teachers fear inevitable disintermediation...,

NYTimes | Matt Richtel writes in Wednesday’s New York Times about the conflict over Idaho’s plan to require students to take online courses and to issue them laptops or tablets. While teachers say they are in favor of using technology in the classroom, they would prefer to use it on their own terms, and they are skeptical of the educational value of online courses. They note that the state may have to shift money away from teacher salaries to pay for these programs.

State officials say teachers had been misled by their union into believing the plan was a step toward replacing them with computers. “The role of the teacher definitely does change in the 21st century. There’s no doubt,” said Tom Luna, the schools superintendent. “The teacher does become the guide and the coach and the educator in the room helping students to move at their own pace.”

Readers are weighing in on the article, with many questioning the push to stock classrooms with digital devices. “Teachers love using technology when it works and is organically the best way to convey content, assess mastery or engage students in an honest fashion,” writes Daniel Rosen of Teaneck. “But we don’t like it when it becomes its own end instead of a means.”

Cstrebel of Camden offers a different perspective on online courses: “Having a master teacher at the helm and teachers in the classroom to guide students is a fine idea. Education such as this would offer the students a wide range of subjects taught by experts that they could not get in their local schools.”

The article is part of The Times’s series on educational technology, Grading the Digital School. Teachers and others debated the merits of such technology in an accompanying dialogue on Room for Debate.

Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.

NEPC | Over just the past decade, online learning at the K-12 level has grown from a novelty to a movement. Often using the authority and mechanism of state charters, and in league with home schoolers and other allies, private companies and some state entities are now providing full-time online schooling to a rapidly increasing number of students in the U.S. Yet little or no research is available on the outcomes of such full-time virtual schooling. The rapid growth of virtual schooling raises several immediate, critical questions for legislators regarding matters such as cost, funding, and quality. This policy brief offers recommendations in these and other areas, and the accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement the recommendations.

1% dislikes this video, coincidence?

tepco and regulators pretending "mission accomplished"

TEPCO Believes Mission Accomplished & Regulators Allow Radioactive Dumping in Tokyo Bay from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

japan's nuclear exclusion zone...,

Boston | What does a sudden evacuation look like? After everyone is gone, what happens to the places they've abandoned? National Geographic Magazine sent Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder to the nuclear exclusion zone around Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant to find out. Evacuated shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami led to a nuclear radiation crisis, the area has been largely untouched, with food rotting on store shelves and children's backpacks waiting in classrooms. The area may face the same fate as the town of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. This isn't the first time Guttenfelder has gotten a rare glimpse of a place few see, as The Big Picture featured his photographs of North Korea in an earlier post. Collected here are Guttenfelder's haunting images just released of a place abandoned, and of people dealing with the loss. -- Lane Turner (39 photos total)

2012 forecast: bang and whimper

Kunstler | There's a lot to be nervous about, even if you don't subscribe to the undercooked Mayan apocalypse lore moving through the gut of the Internet like a Staphylococcus-infected tamale. The casual observer might say that nothing seemed to give on the world scene in 2011 despite the Fukushima meltdown, the Arab Spring uproars, the train wreck of European finance, the disappearing act at MF Global, and the assorted injuries done to the Kardashian brand by the giant walking dildo Kris Humphries.

I demur. On close examination, the industrial world underwent complete zombification in 2011. Its member states and their institutions are now lurching across the stage of history like so many walking dead. Whole European nations are dead, their citizens squirming around the ruined bones of failed speculative condo projects, housing estates, and luxury hotels like botfly larvae. The USA lies in complete moral ruin despite the exertions of ten thousand evangelical preachers in dusty back-road tilt-up chapels from Texas to Carolina, several new museums of Creation Science, and the shining example of former Senator Rick Santorum. Just look at how we behave, from the cloakrooms of Congress to the piercing parlors of West Hollywood to the 7-Elevens of suburban Maryland: a nation of thieves, racketeers, reality TV sluts, wannabe road warriors, light-fingered gangsta-boyz, and crybabies living in an anomie-drenched decrepitating demolition derby landscape of failure. When everybody is a zombie, whose brains are left to eat? Echo answers.... On to the predictions for 2012 then.

The biggest political shock awaiting us is the massive disruption of the major party nominating conventions next summer, when thousands of angry citizens descend on Tampa and Charlotte demanding a reality test. The parties will attempt to go about their ritual business, ignoring the mischief outside the convention centers, and both parties will make the mistake of siccing the cops on the protestors. The result will be a much bigger mess than the one I personally witnessed on the streets of Chicago, 1968, when the party hacks anointed the grinning sell-out Hubert Humphrey to run against Ole Debbil Nixie. Just before getting tear-gassed on Michigan Avenue that night, I saw some kid hoisting a sign that depicted the nominee with a Hitler mustache over the epithet: Mein Humph! It made my night, despite the subsequent retching in the gutter.

The two major parties are completely bankrupt zombie organizations and this election may be their last stand - if they even survive the conventions. Neither of them can come to grips with the reality-based issues of the day: epochal financial and economic contraction, peak energy (and many other resources), climate change, the absence of the rule of law in banking, and generational grievance - or, perhaps more to the point, the manifestations of these giant trends as presented in unemployment, debt slavery, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness, hunger, and X-million family tragedies. Both parties can only promise the return to a bygone status quo that is largely mythical.

President Obama, the putative "progressive" - spokesman of the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Lower Manhattan, and all the other precincts where "folks" imagine themselves to be advanced thinkers - can't even wrap his mind around the simple fact that we will never be "energy independent" if we think that means running 260 million cars and trucks, no matter how many algae farms we pretend to invest in. Here is man who ought to know better and either doesn't, or is lying about it. He has other failures to answer for, too. Why, following the Citizens United decision in the Supreme Court, did Mr. Obama not prompt his party to sponsor federal legislation (or a constitutional amendment) that would redefine a corporation as not identical in "personhood" to a human being? Why does he still employ an Attorney General who has not started one prosecution for financial misconduct amid a panorama of arrant swindling and fraud? (Ditto: heads of the SEC, CFTC, etc.) And why did he not object loudly to the provision in the latest defense appropriations bill that allows for the capricious arrests and indefinite detention of anyone in the USA on suspicion of "terrorism?" Does this graduate of Harvard Law remember what habeas corpus means?

A lot of voters projected on Mr. Obama some notion of supernatural brilliance - our Hollywood fantasies are rife with wishes to be saved, and therefore redeemed, by our former victims - but he turned out to have a pedestrian mind. Could he possibly believe we have "a hundred years of natural gas" in the ground? Or that we're in a position to ramp up another cycle of industrial economic "growth?" Or that we can continue the web of cruel rackets that passes for medical care in this country? When the Democratic Party re-nominates Obama, it will be sealing its death warrant, and it will be on its way to the same cosmic vacuum where the memory of the Whigs lingers on.

why black market entrepreneurs matter to the global economy

Wired | Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
“There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. The guys who get it across the border. The truck loaders and unloaders. All working under the table.”

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that. Fist tap Dale.

The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

ArsTechnica | A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

TDP seems to have been influenced in part by an earlier unofficial effort launched by the Internet group Anonymous called Operation Mesh. The short-lived operation, which was conceived as a response to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and its potential impact on Internet infrastructure, called for supporters to create a parallel Internet of wireless mesh networks.

The idea is intriguing, but it poses major technical and logistical challenges, and it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation. During the IRC meeting, they struggled to coordinate a simple discussion about how to proceed with their agenda.

Still, despite TDP's dysfunctional organizational structure and lack of concrete strategy, their message seems to resonate with an audience on the Internet. And enthusiasm for mesh networks and decentralized Internet isn't isolated to the tinfoil hat crowd; serious government programs aim at producing similar technology. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a US government-funded program to create wireless mesh networks that could help dissidents circumvent political censorship in authoritarian countries.

As repressive governments continue to get better at thwarting circumvention of their censorship tools, dissidents will need more robust tools of their own to continue propagating information. The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression abroad.

A growing number of independent open source software projects have also emerged to fill the need for darknet technology. Many of these projects are backed by credible non-profit organizations and segments of the security research community. Such projects could find a useful ally in the TDP if they were to engage with the growing community and help mobilize its members in a constructive direction.

Unlike TDP, the original Operation Mesh coordinators had specific technologies in mind: they highlighted the I2P anonymous network layer software and the BATMAN ad-hoc wireless routing protocol as the best prospective candidates. Both projects are actively maintained and have modest communities, though the I2P website is currently down. Promising projects like Freenet develop software for building darknets on top of existing Internet infrastructure.

Another group that might benefit from broader community support is Serval, a project to create ad-hoc wireless mesh networks using regular smartphones. The group has recently developed a software prototype that runs on Android handsets. They are actively looking for volunteers to help test the software and participate in a number of other ways.

TDP members who are serious about fostering decentralized Internet infrastructure could meaningfully advance their goals by assisting any of the previously mentioned projects. The growing amount of popular grassroots support for Internet decentralization suggests that the momentum behind darknets is increasing. Fist tap Dale.

open-source online banking software

Cyclos | Cyclos is a project of the Dutch non profit organization STRO. Cyclos offers a complete on-line banking system with additional modules such as e-commerce and communication tools. Cyclos is currently available in ten languages and used worldwide by many organizations and communities. The Cyclos platform permits a de-centralization of banking services that can stimulate local trade and development. With the latest version it is possible to roll out mobile banking services using mobile channels such as SMS. Cyclos is published under the GPL (open source) license meaning that it can be downloaded for free and used at no cost.

The objective of the project is to develop open source complementary currency software that is easy to use and maintain, flexible, secure, and highly customizable. The Cyclos structure is entirely dynamic. This means that it is possible to 'build' a monetary system from scratch. Organizations that want a standard system can use the default database that comes with basic configurations and can be easily enhanced. Cyclos is used for mutual credit systems like LETS, Barter systems, administration of Micro credits, Time banks and backed currency systems such as a C3 (consumer and commerce circuit). Cyclos just started to be used as a back-end for mobile banking services in Africa, and various Universities are studying the possibility to use Cyclos as a campus payment system. Fist tap Dale.

web search by the people for the people...,

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

YaCy | YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.

Decentralization
Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run by many private computers which aren't under the control of any one company or individual. Well, that's what YaCy does! The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index (and growing - download and install YaCy to help out!) and more than 600 peer operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are performed with this network each day.

There are already several search networks based on YaCy: the two major networks are the 'freeworld' network (which is the default public network that you join when you load the standard installation of YaCy) and the Sciencenet of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technology which focuses on scientific content. Other YaCy networks exist as TOR hidden services, local intranet services and on WiFi networks too.
Installation is easy!

The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don't need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy. Fist tap Dale.

what is america?

because animal studies were insufficient...,

From World War II until the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government performed military tests on large populations. While in their hospital beds, patients were injected with plutonium, along with many other amoral experiments, for the likes of which Nazi officers had been convicted during the Nuremberg Trials.

Soldiers were exposed to radiation to test their performance in a nuclear war. The Army released bacteria in the environment, making hundreds of thousands of Americans unwitting guinea pigs...

WaPo | IN 2010, THE FEDERAL government funded 55,000 experiments worldwide on human subjects. Ethical and operational controls adopted over four decades have eradicated the most abominable experiments, such as those in which U.S. researchers infected unwitting Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases during the 1940s. But the sheer number of ongoing projects and the absence of a centralized record-keeping system argue for additional safeguards.

Thousands of often desperately ill individuals volunteer each year to participate in experimental, federally funded medical programs. Thousands more participate in more mundane research with significantly less risk. And yet others take part in projects fueled by federal dollars that focus on social science and education research. The Department of Health and Human Services funds the most research on human subjects, but some 18 federal agencies play a role.

According to a recently released report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the government does not have a centralized database to keep tabs on these experiments. Even some agencies do not have a comprehensive database of the experiments they fund. The Defense Department, for example, took roughly seven months to compile data about research it sponsors on human subjects. The commission sensibly recommends creation of an online registry of all federally funded research on humans.

Another area of uncertainty: the number of individuals injured in medical experiments. “We don’t think it’s a big problem,” commission chair Amy Gutmann said, “but it’s perceived as a big problem because we’re one of the only developed countries that does not guarantee compensation for injured subjects.”

The commission encouraged the government to establish such a system. It did not endorse a particular approach but rightly pointed to the “no fault” program developed by the University of Washington. The university will pay up to $10,000 for medical care provided outside of the university system for individuals injured as a result of participation in a university research project. The school will pick up the tab for all post-injury medical services provided by university staff. Individuals who are treated through this program maintain the right to take the university to court. But one side benefit of the university’s morally responsible behavior is that it has seen the number of court cases and its litigation costs go down.