The Forbidden Planet (REDUX 3/27/08)

 

 

Synopsis; An expedition is sent from Earth to Altair in the constellation of Aquilae (some 17 light years from Earth) to discover what happened to a colony of settlers on its fourth planet, Altair-4. What they discover is how and why an alien race of geniuses (The Krell) destroyed itself overnight while leaving their technology intact at some point in the distant, distant past.

This is of course one of the greatest movies of all time. Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still set the mold for much else that would follow in the sci-fi genre. Both films set the bar very, very high for storytelling in the realm of humankind's possible psychological development.

 

The Journal Of Social Structure (REDUX 3/30/08)

As above, so below, as within, so without;

Social Network Analysis [1] is an approach to studying organisations focusing on analysing the networks of relationships between people and/or groups as the most important aspect. Going back at least to the 1950's, it is characterised by adopting mathematical techniques especially from graph theory [2, 3]. It has applications in organisational psychology, sociology, and anthropology. An excellent overview of the field is given by Wasserman and Faust [1].

Social Network Analysis provides an avenue for analysing and comparing formal and informal information flows in an organisation, as well as comparing information flows with officially defined work processes. We are interested in applying Social Network Analysis to military organisations, and especially to military headquarters ranging from brigade to national strategic levels.

An important aspect of Social Network Analysis is the visualisation of communication and other relationships between people and/or groups, by means of diagrams. Visualisation of Social Networks has a long tradition, and an excellent historical survey is given by Freeman [4]. Visualisation of Social Networks is important because of the complexity of organisational structure, and the need for good visual representations of how an organisation functions.

A second aspect is the study of factors which influence relationships, for example the age, background, and training of the people involved. Studying the correlations between relationships is also important, since it offers insights into the reasons why relationships exists. These studies can be done using traditional statistical techniques such as correlation, analysis of variance, and factor analysis, but also require appropriate visualisation techniques.

The ultimate goal of Social Network Analysis is often to draw out implications of the relational data, in order to make recommendations to improve communication and workflow in an organisation. This is the major motivation for our Social Network Analysis programme. In previous work [5, 6, 7], we have applied Social Network Analysis to military organisations. In the course of this work, we have found conceptual distance to be the most useful construct in explaining relationships. This is partly because the human brain is skilled at thinking about and visually judging distances. In this paper we argue the benefits of using conceptual distance for analysing Social Networks, and demonstrate how to do so using a case study.

Table of Contents for the Journal in its entirety.

 

Sociometric Reality Mining (REDUX 3/30/08)

 

 

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

 

Why Cognitive Activism (REDUX 1/25/08)

It is clearly evident that some ‘ways of knowing’ actively abhor the biosphere, and all forms or assemblies of organism in general. Perhaps more surprising is that a vast portion of the ways of knowing we commonly credential actively abhor human beings, and hate or attack all human children — merely by the nature of their character and function in the imaginal and real worlds. Why would we select or empower such modes, when an infinite garden of choices are immediately at hand?

Quoth Bro. Makheru;

As far as these Power Structure Apocalyptic’s are concerned, they have this world on a collision course with barbarism and ecological disaster. Whatever their underpinnings are, they have to be neutralized right now.

The Cognitive Activist response;

We will gain no advantage from any activism that creates dogmas and bureaucracies of itself — and must instead assemble new ways of learning and knowing together. Ways which by their changing and playful nature empower us to lift each other into a place of direct experiential access to new experiences and expression of mutual uplift, exploration, and the celebration of the real potentials of our anciently conserved and miraculously elaborated organismal sentience.

We are cognitive animals, in a hypercognitive environment. Our human activisms will fail, unless they can address the sources of our ancient confusions and failures to discover the clearly present ways and means of mutual prosperity inherent in the problems our broken access magnifies into our experience and history.

Perhaps we might thus agree that we desire an activism so general, that it’s different from anything we’ve ever considered or been exposed to. Possibly even something that doesn’t have or require a name. A game of activism so like what we are and become that rather than fashioning us into the likeness of some model it proposes — it empowers us to choose and celebrate together that which we actually are and may become.

o:O:o

All of human activism has arisen primarily in opposition to broken ways of knowing — employed and empowered by people who agree to believe ideas. But these ideas are ‘cached tokens’ of the experience of distant others. If circumstance is even moderately different according to the moment and the place — this ‘belief’ is too often far more logically false than what literalists might refer to as ‘the false position of faith’.

We’re about to assemble a form of activism with the potential to overwhelm the source of human atrocity — because rather than wasting time in opposing anything — it empowers us to become more than models of some idea. I am also certain we will experience this together, learning in ways beyond the possibilities of our wildest and most hopeful imaginings. When we have unity, access to our birthrights, and the protection of our unique human, personal and cultural diversity we accrue the power to openly oppose atrocity without reference to or memory of combat. We can now explore and become something together that there is no modern model even vaguely alike with — an experience of unity so liberating that its momentum gains speed and effect at unopposable velocities.

Most of our confusion and suffering at the hands of our foibles is the result of an accident. It’s the kind of an accident we’ve never heard a decent story about — and hearing a few radically altars our potential to notice and interact together with novel domains of co-operative play. Since no one had any way to speak of this accident, or the time before it, the best thing we have are badly mistranslated analogs. When we get to play with toys of knowing that are more like what we are and represent, the way our minds arrange and experience knowledge changes dramatically.

My personal sense is this comprises an entirely unexplored universe of human potential, primarily in the domain of an incredible new way of learning — and of human unity in mutual exploration — that will lead us to terrains of knowledge so vast an unexpected that they could entirely re-write most of what we consider to be fact within the next 5 years. Science, religion, and philosophies — are about to face an insurmountable opponent to their primacy and credentialing-power: pure organismal sentience, in liberated coemergence.

And this is what ‘Life’ is actually about. All of organismal reality is ‘attempting to recapitulate something’ in the same way our own genesis and experience as an embryo was recapitulating all of the terrestrial genesis of life. Something is being assembled by and with(in) physical organismal expression and activity...that is not physical at all in the way we would match with this idea. It is hyperconnective, self-elaborative, and it plays a unityGame that binds all participants ever more closely into something we have no metaphor of: Our world is a distributed organism...

[a multiply atemporal psybiocognitive hyperstructure]

And all of this has a lot to do with how we know, what we know, and what we can do with and about these gardens...in a radically new way: a way that makes new ways, instead of trying to preserve itself and children of itself at all costs.

o:O:o

This is why I support local, nuclear centres of activity free of the thanaturgic taint. It is also why any and everything short of that achievable objective, I discount as idle conversation, or worse still, a doctrinal recapitulation of the thanaturgic ethos that I detest. Those death-loving parasites are contagious and their modus operandi is addictive, repetitive and plainly discernable in operation...,

Something Else Ordered Yet Non-Repeating...,

ibn Khaldun |  Mystical ⁴⁶⁹ exertion, retirement, ⁴⁷⁰ and dhikr exercises ⁴⁷¹ are as a rule followed by the removal of the veil (kashf) of sensual perception. The Sufi beholds divine worlds which a person subject to the senses cannot perceive at all. The spirit belongs to those worlds. The reason for the removal of (the veil) is the following. When the spirit turns from external sense perception to inner (perception), the senses weaken, and the spirit grows strong. It gains predominance and a new growth. The dhikr exercise helps to bring that about. It is like food to make the spirit grow. The spirit continues to grow and to increase. It had been knowledge. Now, it becomes vision. The veil of sensual perception is removed, and the soul realizes its essential existence. This is identical with perception. (The spirit) now is ready for the holy gifts, for the sciences of the divine presence, and for the outpourings of the Deity. Its essence realizes its own true character and draws close to the highest sphere, the sphere of the angels. The removal of (the veil) often happens to people who exert themselves (in mystical exercise). They perceive the realities of existence as no one else (does).

They also perceive many (future) happenings in advance. With the help of their minds and psychic powers they are active among the lower existentia, which thus become obedient to their will. The great Sufis do not think much of the removal (of the veil) and of activity (among the low exis­tentia). They give no information about the reality of any­thing they have not been ordered to discuss. They consider it a tribulation, when things of that sort happen to them, and try to escape them whenever they afflict them.⁴⁷²

The men around Muhammad practiced that kind of (mystical) exertion. They had a very abundant share in the acts of divine grace, but they did not bother with them. (The description of) the virtues of Abu Bakr, Umar, ⁴⁷³ and Ali contain much (information) to this effect. They were followed in this respect by the Sufis who are mentioned in the Risalah of al-Qushayri, ⁴⁷⁴ and their later successors.

Recent mystics, then, have turned their attention to the removal of the veil and the discussion of perceptions beyond (sensual perception). Their ways of mystical exercise in this respect differ. They have taught different methods of mortifying the powers of sensual perception and nourishing the reasoning spirit with dhikr exercises, so that the soul might fully grow and attain its own essential perception. When this happens, they believe that the whole of existence is encompassed by the perceptions of the soul, that the essences of existence are revealed to them, and that they perceive the reality of all the essences from the (divine) throne to light rain. ⁴⁷⁵ This was said by al-Ghazzali in the Kitab al-Ihya', after he had mentioned the forms of mystical exercise.

The ⁴⁷⁶ (Sufis) do not consider removal (of the veil) sound, unless it originates in straightforwardness.⁴⁷⁷ People who do not eat and who retire (from the world), such as sorcerers, Christians, and other ascetics, may obtain removal (of the veil) without the existence of straightforwardness. However, we mean only that removal (of the veil) which originates in straightforwardness. It may be compared with (the reflections of) a mirror. If it is convex or concave, the object reflected by it appears in a distorted form different from the actual form of the object, but if the mirror is flat, the object appears in its correct form. As far as the "states" impressed upon the soul are concerned, straightforwardness means to the soul what flatness means in a mirror.

The recent (Sufis) who have occupied themselves with this kind of removal (of the veil) talk about the real character of the higher and lower existentia and about the real character of the (divine) kingdom, the spirit, the (divine) throne, the (divine) seat, and similar things. Those who did not share their approach were not able to understand their mystical and ecstatic experiences in this respect. The muftis partly disapprove of these Sufis and partly accept them. Arguments and proofs are of no use in deciding whether the Sufi approach should be rejected or accepted, since it belongs to intuitive ⁴⁷⁸ experience.

 Some ⁴⁷⁹ details in explanation:

Hadith scholars and jurists who discuss the articles of faith often mention that God is separate from His creatures. The speculative theologians say that He is neither separate nor connected. The philosophers say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. The recent Sufis say that He is one with the creatures, in the sense that He is incarnate in them, or in the sense that He is identical with them and there exists nothing but Himself either (in the) whole or (in) any part (of it).

Let us explain in detail these dogmatic opinions and the real meaning of each of them, so that their significance will be clarified. We say:

Separateness has two meanings. It may mean "separateness in space and direction." ^479a The opposite, then, would be connectedness. In this sense, the statement of (separation) ⁴⁸⁰ implies (that God is in some) place, either directly - which would be direct anthropomorphism (tajsim) or in directly - which would be indirect anthropomorphism (tashbih) ⁴⁸¹ in the way in which one speaks about (God's having) direction. It has been reported that an early Muslim scholar similarly professed the separateness of God, but a different interpretation is possible.

The speculative theologians, therefore, did not acknowledge this (kind of) separateness. They said: It cannot be said that the Creator is separate from His creatures, and it cannot be said that He is connected with them, because such a statement can be made only about things in space. The statement that a particular thing ⁴⁸² can be described as devoid of one concept and at the same time of the opposite of that concept depends upon whether the description is sound in the first place (or not). If it is impossible, (the statement is) not (correct). It is, in fact, permissible to describe (a certain thing) as devoid of one concept and at the same time of the opposite of that concept. Thus, a solid substance may be described as not wise and not ignorant, not powerful and not weak, not causing harm [?] and not being harmed. ⁴⁸³ Now, the correctness of describing God as separate in the way mentioned is predicated upon the possibility of ascribing direction to Him in the proper meaning of the word, but this cannot be done with the Creator, who is free from (such a description).

This was mentioned by Ibn at-Tilimsani ⁴⁸⁴ in his commentary on the Luma' of the Imam al-Haramayn. He said: The Creator can neither be said to be separate from the world, nor to be connected with it. He is not in it and not outside it. That is what is meant by the philosophers when they say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. They base themselves (on the assumption) that there exist substances (atoms) that exist not in space. The speculative theologians did not acknowledge their (existence), because they would have to be considered equal to the Creator in the most specific qualities. That is fully dealt with in the science of speculative theology.

The other meaning of separateness is "being distinct and different." The Creator is called separate from His creatures in His essence, identity, existence, and attributes. The opposite is being one, mingled, and merged (with something else).

(God's) separateness in this sense is assumed in the dogmas of all orthodox people, such as the great mass of early Muslims, the religious scholars, the speculative theologians, and the ancient Sufis, such as the men mentioned in (al­Qushayri's) Risalah, and those who follow them.

A number of recent Sufis who consider intuitive ⁴⁸⁵ perceptions to be scientific and logical, hold the opinion that the Creator is one with His creatures in His identity, His existence, and His attributes. They often assume that this was the opinion of the philosophers before Aristotle, such as Plato and Socrates.

That is what the speculative theologians mean when they speak about the (oneness of God with His creatures) in theology and try to refute it. They do not ⁴⁸⁶ mean that there could be a question of two essences, one of which must be negated or comprised (in the other) as a part (in the whole). That would be clear distinctness, and they do not maintain that to be the case.

The oneness (assumed by the Sufis) is identical with the incarnation the Christians claim for the Messiah. It is even stranger, in that it is the incarnation of something primeval in something created and the oneness of the former with the latter.

 

Za'irajah

A branch of the science of letter magic, (practiced) among the (authorities on letter magic), is (the technique of) finding out answers from questions by means of connections existing between the letters of the expressions (used in the question). They imagine that these (connections) can form the basis for knowing the future happenings they want to know. Here we have something like puzzles and trick problems.⁸³⁵ There are many discussions of the subject by them. The most comprehensive and most remarkable discussion of it is as-Sabti's Za'irajah of the World. It has been mentioned before. Here, we shall explain what has been said about how to operate it. We shall quote the poem that, it is thought, as-Sabti wrote on the subject.⁸³⁶ Then, we shall give a description of the Za'irajah with its circle and the table written on the verso.^836a Finally, we shall reveal the truth about it. It is nothing supernatural; (the indications derived from it) result from an agreement in the wording of question and answer. It is (just) one interesting way among others, and a curious one, for finding out the answer from the question with the help of the technique called the technique of "breaking down."

From the Science of Letter Magic THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun Very few people share the (self-scrutiny) of the Sufis, for negligence in this respect is almost universal. Pious people who do not get that far perform, at best, acts of obedience 464 freed from the juridical study of how to be satisfactory 465 and conforming (in the execution of the acts of divine worship). The (Sufis), however, investigate the results of (acts of obedience) with the help of mystical and ecstatic experience, in order to learn whether they are free from deficiency or not. Thus, it is evident that the Sufis' path in its entirety depends upon self-scrutiny with regard to what they do or do not do, and upon discussion of the various kinds of mystical and ecstatic experience that result from their exertions. This, then, crystallizes for the Sufi novice in a "station." From that station, he can progress to another, higher one. From the Science of Sufism THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun

Gurdjieff's Theory Of Laughter

This is about Jill Bolte Taylor, Shirley Q. Liquor, Cognitive Dissonance, and the American Tradition. What It Do;

Gurdjieff offers us a theory of laughter, independent of any state of amusement (= humor), that nevertheless distinguishes between laughter as a physiological response and the organismic cause of it, which he also calls “laughter.” This organismic variable (O), though not necessarily the same as humor, is shown to be a complex structure that is radically different from the visible laughter that results from it. Since his conception of O, though outlined in a most rudimentary and concise form, provides us the basis of the most viable theory of humor that we have been able to elaborate and immediately brings into relief some of the most conspicuous features of this humor-theory, we find it both convenient and opportune to begin with his succinct formulation of the structure of the organismic variable responsible for both humor and laughter. The passage on laughter is reproduced below in full and much of this thesis may be considered to be a systematic interpretation of his theory of laughter, its integration into a general theory of humor, and a sustained exploration of its consequences in various domains. We shall ignore his references to other aspects of his system such as his theory of yawning, of accumulators, centers, and so on, except insofar as they are relevant to our proper understanding of humor.

The framed web presentation is very cumbersome, but the analysis is on point and is the likes of which you will never encounter in the ordinary literature...., Gurdjieff’s Theory of Laughter 1. Though only a theory of laughter, and not of humor, it distinguishes between the binary-structured organismic variable (O) and its physiological resolution (R). O provides the basis of the most viable theory of humor even while preserving its link with laughter (R). 2. R is the discarding of superfluous energy due to O: an unstable structural opposition between two sharply contrasting simultaneous impressions, positive and negative, of a single stimulus (S). It is not the particular contents—cognitive, affective or motor—but the binary structure of the mutual neutralization that determines O. 3. R is pleasurable due to relief from tension and not due to amusement (as in humor); O may nevertheless have a painful element. 4. Though the convulsion O may be unerringly registered by the subject, the constituents and even structure of O may remain unspecifiable. 5. This laughter mechanism releases possibly pre-existing negative emotions through the negative component of O. Thus, culturally it is a ‘luxury reflex,’ simultaneously valorized for the relative freedom from fundamental biological instincts it provides and also devalorized for its necessary dependence on the same. Marks the ambivalent threshold between nature and culture. 6. Laughter being infectious, R in another can act independently of S for one’s own laughter (parastha-hâsa). Similarly, another’s laughter induces one to perceive the real S in terms of O. 7. The possibility and frequency of O’s occurrence is doubly determined: both by the effectiveness of the stimulus (S) and the subjective state of the individual (also his psychic constitution). 8. [61] Gurdjieff’s ‘behaviorizing’ theory of the psychology of the ordinary modern man is perfectly compatible with the traditional ‘psychology’ underlying brahmanical philosophy; just as the reversal of the ‘behavioral circuit,’ the finality of his system, is the counterpart of the ‘autonomy’ (svâtantrya) of the Trika ‘metapsychology.’ It is within this combined theoretical framework that humor-and-laughter, hâsa-and-hâsya, will be investigated in their universality. 9. Hâsa classified as a pleasant emotion despite the neutral character of O, because the resulting laughter (R) is pleasant. 10. Reduction of Freud’s ‘comic of movement’ to Gurdjieff’s ‘laughter in the moving-instinctive center.’

Baking Soda Anti-Inflammatory

healthimpactnews |  There was a time, decades ago, when doctors would prescribe bicarbonate of soda, aka baking soda, mixed with water to patients suffering from influenza or other temporary ills. By the way, baking soda does not contain aluminum, baking powder usually does.

Now its efficacious use is known by only a handful of holistic medical practitioners. Though not part of the medical establishment’s “standard of care,” which if not followed can result in an MD’s loss of license to practice, bicarbonate of soda has been used by paramedics and ER attendants for extreme emergencies. A handful of MDs have even discretely used it on kidney patients to augment or avoid dialysis.

Now a medical study has reported indications of dampening inflammation that bring on autoimmune diseases. The study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Immunology in April of 2018 to confirm the hypothesis that bicarbonate of soda does have medical merit, and can be a simple cure to autoimmune diseases.

The Study and What It Means

The research report is titled Oral NaHCO3 Activates a Splenic Anti-Inflammatory Pathway: Evidence That Cholinergic Signals Are Transmitted via Mesothelial Cells. (Abstract)

Time for a few nomenclature explanations:

NaHCO3 is the chemical makeup of bicarbonate of soda, commonly known as baking soda. Splenic refers to the spleen. Cholinergic refers to choline, a primary component of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine found in nerve fibers, are thin plate-like calls that cover the walls of fluid containing cavities within the body.

The study was conducted at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The researchers’ message is:

Our data indicate that oral NaHCO3 activates a splenic anti-inflammatory pathway and provides evidence that the signals that mediate this response are transmitted to the spleen via a novel neuronal-like function of mesothelial cells.

The Georgia Medical College study determines the mechanics of how baking soda manages all of the wonderful things it does despite its efficacy not being heralded by the “orthodox” medical industry.

Their research discovered the spleen’s role in mitigating inflammation beyond raising acidic pH levels to higher alkaline levels, which is a recognized attribute of baking soda even in mainstream medicine.

The spleen creates macrophages, large white blood cells that clear cellular and microbial debris, and lymphocytes or killer cells that go after bacterial and viral infections. This is an aspect of the immune system, which if unnecessarily overstimulated, creates chronic inflammation

The Georgia Medical College researchers observed that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of small amounts of sodium bicarbonate it ironically becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal.

Regarding the inflammation/autoimmune disease link, after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of macrophages shifted from those that promote inflammation, (M1), to those that reduce it (M2).

The researchers became aware that the little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen receive cholinergic messages telling the fist-sized organ that there’s no need to mount a protective immune response.

This eliminates an unnecessary inflammatory response, which may become an endless immune response feedback loop leading to a cytokine storm, which can be fatal, or chronic inflammation, the precursor to almost all autoimmune diseases.  Fist tap Dale.

Starbucks Had A Really Bad Store Manager Problem In Philadelphia - Period

nakedcapitalism |  The results also support our hypothesis about the Starbucks incident, in which a now-fired manager called the cops on two men whose crime appeared to be waiting at a Starbucks while black, and using the restroom. The evidence below indicates this manager was a disaster waiting to happen and had been calling the police at a vastly higher frequency than her predecessor.

We had discussed briefly that one Malcolm Gladwell’s books included a case study of biased policing in the Los Angeles Police Department, which has a a terrible record in that regard. He found was that a very few cops were responsible for virtually all the incidents. Gladwell argued that that meant the conventional approach, of more training for all the police, was all wet. Those rogue policemen needed to be taken off the street. 

Starbuck’s rush to hold a training program may be good optics, but it isn’t likely to be the best approach. The coffee chain should require managers to write an incident report any time they call the police. That would enable them to see if any managers were making a lot of requests and they could then look as to whether the calls were warranted or not. 

News reports have pointed out that part of the problem is that Starbucks never gave its store managers any policy on what to do about people who stay in a Starbucks without buying anything. I’m skeptical that promulgating rules on a national basis is the right answer. As I mentioned when I had nearly a week of having to work in Starbucks thanks to Verizon-induced connectivity woes, there was often one or two homeless people in an area that was a bit removed from the cash registers. 

There were also plenty of customers back there, most working solo like me, but also a few groups of two or three people chatting. No one was bothered by the homeless people sitting nearby. In fact, I thought it was a good thing that some of the money I spent at Starbucks was helping the homeless. However, it isn’t hard to think that in an affluent suburb, the locals would go nuts if a homeless person were to hang out in a Starbucks, and management would almost be forced to run them off because customers were certain to make a stink.

You Don't Own and Cannot Access or Control Facebook's Data About You

theatlantic |  But the raw data that Facebook uses to create user-interest inferences is not available to users. It’s data about them, but it’s not their data. One European Facebook user has been petitioning to see this data—and Facebook acknowledged that it exists—but so far, has been unable to obtain it.

When he responded to Kennedy, Zuckerberg did not acknowledge any of this, but he did admit that Facebook has other types of data that it uses to increase the efficiency of its ads. He said:

My understanding is that the targeting options that are available for advertisers are generally things that are based on what people share. Now once an advertiser chooses how they want to target something, Facebook also does its own work to help rank and determine which ads are going to be interesting to which people. So we may use metadata or other behaviors of what you’ve shown that you’re interested in News Feed or other places in order to make our systems more relevant to you, but that’s a little bit different from giving that as an option to an advertiser.

Kennedy responded: “I don’t understand how users then own that data.” This apparent contradiction relies on the company’s distinction between the content someone has intentionally shared—which Facebook mines for valuable targeting information—and the data that Facebook quietly collects around the web, gathers from physical locations, and infers about users based on people who have a similar digital profile. As the journalist Rob Horning put it, that second set of data is something of a “product” that Facebook makes, a “synthetic” mix of actual data gathered, data purchased from outsiders, and data inferred by machine intelligence.

With Facebook, the concept of owning your data begins to verge on meaningless if it doesn’t include that second, more holistic concept: not just the data users create and upload explicitly, but all the other information that has become attached to their profiles by other means.

But one can see, from Facebook’s perspective, how complicated that would be. Their techniques for placing users into particular buckets or assigning them certain targeting parameters are literally the basis for the company’s valuation. In a less techno-pessimistic time, Zuckerberg described people’s data in completely different terms. In October 2013, he told investors that this data helps Facebook “build the clearest models of everything there is to know in the world.”

Facebook puts out a series of interests for users to peruse or turn off, but it keeps the models to itself. The models make Facebook ads work well, and that means it helps small and medium-size businesses compete more effectively with megacorporations on this one particular score. Yet they introduce new asymmetries into the world. Gullible people can be targeted over and over with ads for businesses that stop just short of scams. People prone to believing hoaxes and conspiracies can be hit with ads that reinforce their most corrosive beliefs. Politicians can use blizzards of ads to precisely target different voter types.

As with all advertising, one has to ask: When does persuasion become manipulation or coercion? If Facebook advertisers crossed that line, would the company even know it? Dozens of times throughout the proceedings, Zuckerberg testified that he wasn’t sure about the specifics of his own service. It seemed preposterous, but with billions of users and millions of advertisers, who exactly could know what was happening?

Most of the ways that people think they protect their privacy can’t account for this new and more complex reality, which Kennedy recognized in his closing remark.

“You focus a lot of your testimony ... on the individual privacy aspects of this, but we haven’t talked about the societal implications of it ... The underlying issue here is that your platform has become a mix of ... news, entertainment, and social media that is up for manipulation,” he said. “The changes to individual privacy don’t seem to be sufficient to address that underlying issue.”

Russiagate Conspiracy Theorists Don't Scrutinize Power, They Protect It!

medium |  Lately I’ve been getting a lot more accusations of being a Kremlin agent and questions about my motives and agendas in response to my writings and far fewer actual arguments against the content of my writing, as well as demands that I stop arguing with this Russiagate thing and move on to writing about other matters. I’ll tell you what: I’ll stop writing about the Russiagate lies when they stop happening, how’s that sound? If you foam-brained pussyhat-wearing cultists are going to keep using lies to inadvertently manufacture support for America’s new cold war escalations, the least I can do is try to throw a monkey wrench in it.

If Russiagate was legit, the people responsible for selling it to us wouldn’t have to come up with new lies about it constantly. There are many very real dangers of the Trump administration that we can focus on without fanning the flames of world-threatening tensions between two nuclear superpowers based on lies, and the longer we spend fighting over this crap the more of those dangers manifest unnoticed.

Russiagaters are the very worst kind of conspiracy theorist, and as long as they’re imperiling my world with their complicity in the manipulations of the US power establishment I’m going to keep fighting them. Get used to it.

Civilization is the Monetization of Knowledge, Skill, and Ability

paulcraigroberts |  A white male professor of philosophy has discovered that in order to have an academic career in these days he must find “white privilege” everywhere. Professor John Caputo, according to this report, https://downtrend.com/robertgehl/professor-calls-reason-itself-a-white-male-construct, has found white male privilege in reason itself.

Reason, says Professor Caputo, “is a white male Euro-Christian construction.” Since reason is white, reason is not neutral. It implies that what is not white is not rational. “So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued.”

Professor Caputo ties into University of California professor Sara Giordano who defines science as a “colonial and racialized form of power” that “must be replaced with an anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021 

I can’t say that this would be all bad. This way we wouldn’t have nuclear weapons and the frustrating digital age. But before I vote for it, I want to know what feminist science is. I have a disturbing feeling that it brings with it the genocide of the white heterosexual male. After all, if white heterosexual males are responsible for all the evil and ills of the world, how can we tolerate their existence? 

The University of Oregon’s Jewish president was prevented by students from giving an university address this month about free speech. Free speech, declared the student protesters, perpetuates “fascism and white supremacy.” http://ijr.com/the-declaration/2017/10/1004087-protesters-block-speech-college-president-supporting-free-speech/?utm_campaign=Conservative%20Daily&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=57696223&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_lEYnedyjzkJdQg3N0OOoF5PhhKtm5yUGqIhbxb5fs878ae8aYjTk2wdWuWYc-7oq7BaJJbOQ6kJI-21n_qpeRECaKqA&_hsmi=57696223 

Journalists seem to agree with the Oregon students. The European Federation of Journalists is leading a “Media against Hate” campaign against hate speech and stereotyping of illegal immigrants. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11214/europe-journalists-free-speech In other words, any European who protests his/her country being overrun by foreign invaders must be shut up. The scenario in The Camp of the Saints is now happening before our eyes. 

A British university has blocked a professor’s study of those who regret their transgender operation because it is politically incorrect and could damage the university’s reputation. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4916026/University-bars-non-PC-study-transgender-operations.html The study, the university said, would be “transphobic.”

Speech as Violence: Political Narrative Construction

A “narrative” is a communication and control device. The intent of a narrative is to “speak” to the emotional subconscious part of you humans. The purpose of narrative is to elicit specific feelings, thoughts, and actions (in that order). What is communicated via narrative can be, but need not be, true. Consequently, narrative need not be truthful to be effective.

Narrative is neither moral or immoral in and of itself. It is a tool. One of the reasons this tool is effective is that the emotional part of you humans (essence) is not ratiocinatively equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. The factual discernment of essence operates at the approximate developmental level of a seven year old child. 

Once narrative is accepted, the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative (not-seeism), or, it will change information to make it fit. The real problem isn’t the use of narrative, it is the the bad character and/or bad intentions of those who are driving the narrative coupled with the arrested development and cognitive vulnerability of those susceptible to uncritically accepting the narrative.

The political establishment in America is desperate to overturn 2016's presidential election results because these results defy the formerly prevailing political narrative. In the process of doing so, their primary narrative constructions have been rendered so transparent that they are revealing the whole methodology and mechanism that they have employed to maintain political control.

Why are our narrative drivers desperate to overturn the election results? Very simple, although he's dirty and sketchy as a trailer-park stripper, Scott Free .45 doesn't have a control file and cannot be extortionately controlled through the conventional mechanisms used to vet presidential candidates.

An acceptable candidate for U.S. president must be susceptible to blackmail. It is increasingly clear to anyone paying attention that most of Congress and most of those who operate or benefit from the Deep State have committed all manner of crimes and are themselves generically susceptible to blackmail.

These miscreants have looked the other way too many times as their elite establishment fellow travelers have committed moral, social, economic, and violent crimes against ordinary citizens, particularly citizens of conscience or color. That is a fact. Possibly the defining fact of American governance for the past fifty years of living memory history.

That said, we will not now distort or detract from our topic by revisiting the multi-generational mountains of drugs and weapons proliferation or the crimes against humanity committed outside U.S. borders. Political co-optation, regime change, natural material resource looting and plundering,  money backed by murder profit seeking, polluting, dumping endless garbage and toxins in the seas… all perpetrated with a little help from our political masters and their prosecutorial minions.

Is there anyone left who is not aware of the outsourcing of American industry and consequent hyper-enrichment of C-Level psychopaths? The outsourcing of American industry to China and Mexico has created havoc for 1/2 the country. The concurrent promotion of degeneracy via dictatorship of celebrity is yet another vile narrative construction created to distract and misdirect the narratively susceptible. But I digress....,

These are merely the myriad not-seen externalities most possess a vague liminal awareness of yet refuse to explicitly call-out, identify, or correct - because the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative. It's not the story we're being told by our dominant narrative-drivers. Consequently, the man-made terror of our situation is not a truth that we are for the most part ready to see. Finally, because once-seen, we would be morally compelled to directly act - our not-seeism signifies not only our susceptibility to political narrative, but also the inertial consumerist comfort, complacency, and cowardice which accompanies our total lack of moral fiber or empathy toward humans lacking the due process window-dressing sometimes accorded U.S. citizens.

Have any American citizens in Congress NOT been rewarded for their narrative complicity?

How dare these miscreant lawyer/preacher disciples of evil make laws and employ oxygen-thieving thugs to intimidate, fine, imprison and torture American citizens. These swamp-dwelling troglodytes wallow in narrative feces and call it government.

They are literally the scum of the earth.

Why Beauty Matters

gurdjieff |  Because literature for Gurdjieff, as for the Sufis, is inextricable from philosophy, it is appropriate in considering Beelzebub’s Tales to address some fundamental philosophical questions, the answers to which help put Gurdjieff’s writings into perspective. Among the issues to be addressed, one of primary importance is to define what constitutes literature for Gurdjieff, or what, according to his aesthetics, distinguishes literature from non-literature; art from non-art. 

Unraveling this distinction involves comprehending some of Gurdjieff’s fundamental ideas about human beings and their place in the world. We have already proposed that Gurdjieff’s primary philosophical stance is that of Sufism, and his philosophy of art supports this contention.¹ At the core of his aesthetics is the position that no form of artistic expression possesses value in itself; no art is appreciable for its intrinsic value alone. Because of his premises concerning the meaning and purpose of human existence, all “art” for Gurdjieff, and consequently all literature as an art-form, must be functional or didactic. The value of an art work resides in its potentiality to transform or metamorphose the art appreciator. Insofar as a work of literature, a piece of music, a painting, or any other potential art form aids humans in the process of their spiritual evolution, that object or activity earns the designation “art” for Gurdjieff and possesses what he refers to as “soul.”

Gurdjieff’s use of terminology to espouse his aesthetics and other branches of his philosophy frequently involves his supplying old terms with new meanings. Consequently, we are forced when approaching his writings to temporarily abandon old associations of key words used in his discussions. Such is the case with the terms “soul,” “objective” and “subjective,” “conscious” and “unconscious.” “Subjective art,” for example, in Gurdjieff’s terminology, refers to most of what is commonly interpreted as art. Most twentieth-century art in its various forms, according to his standards, would fall into this category. But subjective art is not authentic art for him; it is the result of mechanical, unconscious human activity, and most of humanity is unconscious according to Gurdjieff. For the same reason, he refers to subjective art as “soulless” in that it results from little or no consciousness on the part of the would-be artist. In his introduction to Meetings with Remarkable Men, he asserts that contemporary civilization is unique in history in its massive production of soulless, pseudo art.

On the other hand, “objective art” is authentic art in that it results from deliberate, pre-meditated efforts on the part of a conscious artist. In the act of creation, the true artist avoids or eliminates any input which is subjective or arbitrary, and the impression of such art on those who experience it is always definite. To the degree that objective art is the result of consciousness, it inherently possesses “soul.” As one example of soulful art, Gurdjieff cites the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci; as another he refers to the Taj Mahal. Both constitute objective works of art.

Trump: Like a BOSS!!!

straightlinelogic |  If Seth Rich was the source of the WikiLeaks’ DNC email disclosures and the FBI knew it, then the Russian hacking story was a fabrication, and James Comey was probably involved in an attempt to drive President Trump from office.

The biggest story of the entire Russiagate controversy was published Tuesday. Not the story about President Trump’s alleged statement to former FBI Director James Comey: “I hope you can let this go.” A witness is only as good as his or her credibility. If the actual big story pans out, Comey has none, which is why the mainstream media is obsessing over Trump’s alleged statement and doing everything it can to ignore and stifle the other story.

Seth Rich was on the staff of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). He was gunned down on July 10, 2016. Robbery has been speculated as a motive for the murder, but his wallet and watch were not taken. There is also speculation that Rich was the source of the DNC emails that were released by WikiLeaks twelve days later, to the consternation and embarrassment of the DNC. Fueling that speculation was WikiLeaks’ offer of a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s murderer. WikiLeaks has neither confirmed nor denied that Rich was its source.

The emails appeared to show a concerted DNC effort to stop Senator Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign for the Democratic nomination and led to the resignation of party chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz. After WikiLeaks’ DNC disclosure, the DNC refused to let the FBI investigate its computer servers. Instead, it allowed a cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, to investigate. It’s conclusion, subsequently undercut, was that the Russians had hacked the DNC’s server.

Fox News reported that an unnamed source, almost certainly from the FBI, has seen and read emails between Seth Rich and the late Gavin MacFadyen, a director of WikiLeaks. A FBI forensic report on Seth Rich’s computer was allegedly compiled within 96 hours of his murder. The source said there were 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between DNC leaders transferred from Rich to MacFadyen from January 2015 through May 2016.

If this is correct, then within 96 hours of Rich’s murder, or by July 14, 2016, the FBI knew that Rich had communicated with WikiLeaks and it knew what he had communicated. That means that when WikiLeaks subsequently released the DNC emails on July 22, the FBI knew that Rich, not the Russian government, was the source. That would make the entire “Russia hacked the DNC” story nothing more than a concocted fabrication.

your brain is not a computer...,

aeon |  No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections.

A healthy newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions to certain stimuli that are important for its survival. It turns its head in the direction of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth. It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effectively with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their distant ancestors faced.

Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Computers, quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop – is represented by a very specific pattern of a million of these bytes (‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters that tell the computer to expect an image, not a word.

Computers, quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different physical storage areas etched into electronic components. Sometimes they also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph. The rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside the computer. Together, a set of rules is called a ‘program’ or an ‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help us do something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an ‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.

Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

john nash dead

reuters |  Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.

The film "A Beautiful Mind" was loosely based on his battle with schizophrenia.

Nash received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950 and spent much of his career there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He began experiencing what he described as "mental disturbances" in 1959 after marrying Alicia, a MIT physics major who was then pregnant, according to his biography on the Nobel Prize website.

"I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years," Nash said in a 2004 video interview on the Nobel website.

He stressed that his was an unusual case, as he was able eventually stop taking medication and return to normal activities and his research.

The 2001 movie represented an "artistic" take on his experience, giving insight into mental illness but not accurately portraying the nature of his delusions, Nash said in the interview.

"John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory," Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement.

"The story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges," he added.

Nash and his wife were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, New Jersey police said.

biology is technology, time is precious, and stupid only gets in the way...,

H+ |  DARPA, the Defense Research Projects Agency, is perhaps best known for its role as progenitors of the computer networking and the Internet. Formed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, DARPA’s objective was to ensure that the United States would avoid technological surprises in the future. This role was later expanded to causing technological surprises as well.

And although DARPA is and has been the leading source of funding for artificial intelligence and a number of other transhumanist projects, they’ve been missing in action for a while. Nothing DARPA has worked on since seems to have had the societal impact of the invention of the Internet. But that is about to change.

The current director of DARPA is Dr. Arati Prabhakar. She is the second female director of the organization, following the previous and controversial director Regina Dugan who left the government to work at Google. The return to big visions and big adventures was apparent and in stark contrast to Dugan’s leadership of the organization.

Quoted in WIRED, Dugan had, for example, stated that “There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,” and she told a congressional panel in March 2011, “Darpa is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.”

Those days are gone. DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize the human situation and it is fully transhumanist in its approach.

The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little fanfare in the spring of 2014. This announcement didn’t get that much attention, perhaps because the press release announcing the BTO was published on April Fool’s Day.

But DARPA is determined to turn that around, and to help make that happen, they held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a handful of government contractors and military personnel.

is "second-order science" any kind of science at all?

constructivism |   Context: The journal Constructivist Foundations celebrates ten years of publishing articles on constructivist approaches, in particular radical constructivism. Problem: In order to preserve the sustainability of radical constructivism and regain its appeal to new generations of researchers, we set up a new course of action for and with the radical constructivist community to study its innovative potential. This new avenue is “second-order science.” Method: We specify two motivations of second-order science, i.e., the inclusion of the observer, and self-reflexivity that allows second-order science to operate on the products of normal or first-order science. Also, we present a short overview of the contributions that we have collected for this inaugural issue on second-order science. Results: These six initial contributions demonstrate the potential of the new set of approaches to second-order science across several disciplines. Implications: Second-order science is believed to be a cogent concept in the evolution of science, leading to a new wave of innovations, novel experiments and a much closer relationship with current research in the cognitive neurosciences in particular, and with evolutionary and complexity theories in general.

wikipedia |  One version of social constructivism contends that categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions. These interactions also alter the way in which scientific episteme is organized.

Social activity presupposes human beings inhabiting shared forms of life, and in the case of social construction, utilizing semiotic resources (meaning making and meaning signifying) with reference to social structures and institutions. Several traditions use the term Social Constructivism: psychology (after Lev Vygotsky), sociology (after Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, themselves influenced by Alfred Schütz), sociology of knowledge (David Bloor), sociology of mathematics (Sal Restivo), philosophy of mathematics (Paul Ernest). Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy can be seen as a foundation for Social Constructivism, with its key theoretical concepts of language games embedded in forms of life.

Constructivism in philosophy of science

Thomas Kuhn argued that changes in scientists' views of reality not only contain subjective elements, but result from group dynamics, "revolutions" in scientific practice and changes in "paradigms".^[3] As an example, Kuhn suggested that the Sun-centric Copernican "revolution" replaced the Earth-centric views of Ptolemy not because of empirical failures, but because of a new "paradigm" that exerted control over what scientists felt to be the more fruitful way to pursue their goals.

"But paradigm debates are not really about relative problem-solving ability, though for good reasons they are usually couched in those terms. Instead, the issue is which paradigm should in future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. [A decision is called for] and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than on future promise."

—Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . p. 157

The view of reality as accessible only through models was called model-dependent realism by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.^[4] While not rejecting the idea of "reality-as-it-is-in-itself", model-dependent realism suggests that we cannot know "reality-as-it-is-in-itself", but only an approximation of it provided by the intermediary of models.^[5] These models evolve over time as guided by scientific inspiration and experiment.

In the field of the social sciences, constructivism as an epistemology urges that researchers reflect upon the paradigms that may be underpinning their research, and in the light of this that they become more open to consider other ways of interpreting any results of the research. Furthermore, the focus is on presenting results as negotiable constructs rather than as models that aim to "represent" social realities more or less accurately. Norma Romm in her book Accountability in Social Research (2001) argues that social researchers can earn trust from participants and wider audiences insofar as they adopt this orientation and invite inputs from others regarding their inquiry practices and the results thereof.