why facebook is pure digital evil....,

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wolfram 2010 - using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work

Video - Conrad Wolfram TED Talk on Math Instruction using computers.

"I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculation where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, is such and such true, and I'll say, hmm, not sure. I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand."

"I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculation where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, is such and such true, and I'll say, hmm, not sure. I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand."

how do we fix math education?

computerbasedmath | Whether it's bored students, dissatisfied employers, bewildered governments, or frustrated teachers, almost everyone thinks there's a problem with math (and STEM) education today.

There is a solution, but it needs a fundamental change to the school subject we call math. It needs to be clearly articulated and decisively acted upon. That's why Conrad Wolfram has founded computerbasedmath.org. He and many others see a growing chasm between math in education and math outside, between the increasingly irrelevant school math curriculum that contrasts with the critical and growing importance of math and its uses in the real world. They've observed how many of those involved in school math fail to appreciate the total transformation and fundamental change that computers have brought to this ancient subject in recent decades.

computerbasedmath.org is initially supported by Wolfram Research. For over 20 years Wolfram Research has had a unique position at the epicenter of math and its uses: using high-powered math to develop the latest algorithms for Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha software, mathematicians, and other STEM specialists, supplying technology to the world's community of math users, and interacting with leading experts from all technical fields. That's not to mention its involvement with thousands of universities, schools, and courses worldwide. Wolfram Research really is the "Math Company".

Key ideas behind this computer-based math approach have been forming for more than a decade, but computerbasedmath.org is only just starting. Over the coming months, we will be looking for think-tank members from among the many enthusiastic, leading supporters who have voiced interest in the project.

If you see the great opportunity and empowerment for the future of computer-based math and are interested in joining computerbasedmath.org in any capacity—from sponsoring organization to board member—please contact us.

physics counterpart to the benezet-berman 1930's math teaching experiment?

MATHÉMATIQUES MODERNES Vidéo jph17 sélectionnée dans Vie étudiante

arXiv | Should teachers concentrate on critical thinking, estimation, measurement, and graphing rather than college-clone algorithmic physics in grades K--12? Thus far physics education research offers little substantive guidance. Mathematics education research addressed the mathematics analogue of this question in the 1930's. Students in Manchester, New Hampshire were not subjected to arithmetic algorithms until grade 6. In earlier grades they read, invented, and discussed stories and problems; estimated lengths, heights, and areas; and enjoyed finding and interpreting numbers relevant to their lives. In grade 6, with 4 months of formal training, they caught up to the regular students in algorithmic ability, and were far ahead in general numeracy and in the verbal, semantic, and problem solving skills they had practiced for the five years before. Assessment was both qualitative -- e.g., asking 8th grade students to relate in their own words why it is `that if you have two fractions with the same numerator, the one with the smaller denominator is the larger'; and quantitative -- e.g., administration of standardized arithmetic examinations to test and control groups in the 6th grade. Is it time for a science counterpart of the Benezet/Berman Manchester experiment of the 1930's?

benezet's 1930 math instruction experiment

Inference | In the fall of 1929 I made up my mind to try the experiment of abandoning all formal instruction in arithmetic below the seventh grade and concentrating on teaching the children to read, to reason, and to recite - my new Three R's. And by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language. I picked out five rooms - three third grades, one combining the third and fourth grades, and one fifth grade. I asked the teachers if they would be willing to try the experiment. They were young teachers with perhaps an average of four years' experience. I picked them carefully, but more carefully than I picked the teachers, I selected the schools. Three of the four schoolhouses involved [two of the rooms were in the same building] were located in districts where not one parent in ten spoke English as his mother tongue. I sent home a notice to the parents and told them about the experiment that we were going to try, and asked any of them who objected to it to speak to me about it. I had no protests. Of course, I was fairly sure of this when I sent the notice out. Had I gone into other schools in the city where the parents were high school and college graduates, I would have had a storm of protest and the experiment would never have been tried. I had several talks with the teachers and they entered into the new scheme with enthusiasm.

The children in these rooms were encouraged to do a great deal of oral composition. They reported on books that they had read, on incidents which they had seen, on visits that they had made. They told the stories of movies that they had attended and they made up romances on the spur of the moment. It was refreshing to go into one of these rooms. A happy and joyous spirit pervaded them. The children were no longer under the restraint of learning multiplication tables or struggling with long division. They were thoroughly enjoying their hours in school.

At the end of eight months I took a stenographer and went into every fourth-grade room in the city. As we have semi-annual promotions, the children who had been in the advanced third grade at the time of the beginning of the experiment, were now in the first half of the fourth grade. The contrast was remarkable. In the traditional fourth grades when I asked children to tell me what they had been reading, they were hesitant, embarrassed, and diffident. In one fourth grade I could not find a single child who would admit that he had committed the sin of reading. I did not have a single volunteer, and when I tried to draft them, the children stood up, shook their heads, and sat down again. In the four experimental fourth grades the children fairly fought for a chance to tell me what they had been reading. The hour closed, in each case, with a dozen hands waving in the air and little faces crestfallen, because we had not gotten around to hear what they had to tell.

For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning faculties. There was a certain problem which I tried out, not once but a hundred times, in grades six, seven, and eight. Here is the problem: "If I can walk a hundred yards in a minute [and I can], how many miles can I walk in an hour, keeping up the same rate of speed?"

In nineteen cases out of twenty the answer given me would be six thousand, and if I beamed approval and smiled, the class settled back, well satisfied. But if I should happen to say, "I see. That means that I could walk from here to San Francisco and back in an hour" there would invariably be a laugh and the children would look foolish.

self-organized learning environments

solesandsomes | We know that: Groups of children (6-12 yeards old in groups of 4 or so), given unrestricted and unsupervised access to the Internet can learn almost anything on their own. It doesn't matter who or where they are. We know this from 20 years of research, standing on the shoulders of Aurobindo, Piaget, Vygotsky and Montessori.

This kind of learning is activated by questions, not answers.

There will always be children in the world who, for some reason or the other, cannot pay for education. There will always be children in the world who, for some reason of the other, will not have an adequate education.

Hypothesis:
There will always be people in the world who are willing to mediate in children's learning for, say, one hour a week, with no remuneration.

Speculation:
If we create 'clouds' of mediators and children on the Internet and an arrangement by which they can interact, we would have an alternative schooling.

Action:
In the last three years, we have created 12 Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs) in addition to the several hundred 'hole in the wall' computers that exist in India, Cambodia and several African countries.

There exists a cloud of mediators that have begun to interact with these SOLEs. The cloud is self organised and called a Self Organised Mediation Environment (SOME). The mediators interact with the children over Skype.

Next:
We need a Self- Organized Assessment Method (SOAM) by which children can assess their learning accurately.

We need a curriculum that is driven by questions. Self-organized and self- populating.

We need computing environments for children that are powered by free energy and bandwidth.

Schools in clouds, integrated with the fabric of information space and time....Fist tap Dale.

turning kids from slums into autodidacts

WSJ | Everybody knows that the Internet will transform education, but nobody yet knows how. Most of the models sound like dull attempts to reproduce, at a distance, the medieval habit of schooling—one teacher telling a bunch of children what to think. Now, though, I think I have glimpsed a better idea: the self-organized learning environment (SOLE).

The credit for this approach belongs to Sugata Mitra, an Indian physicist who, a decade ago, began to install public "hole in the wall" computers in the streets of Indian slums. He then sat back and watched how quickly the impoverished kids learned to use the technology. The experiment, which has now gone global, inspired the book that inspired the film "Slumdog Millionaire," in which a boy from the slums improbably learns enough to win a TV quiz show.

Dr. Mitra's next brainchild, SOLE, takes this dynamic into the classroom. He is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. He now goes into schools and asks a hard question that he thinks the students will not be able to answer, such as: "How do you stop something moving?" or "Was World War II good or bad?"

He gives them no clue where to start, but—crucially—he insists that the school restrict the number of Internet portals in the class to one for every four students. One child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot. What happens next is entirely up to the students. All they know is that Dr. Mitra is coming back to be told what they have found.

He arrives with a second question that links the learning more closely to the curriculum, such as: "Who was Isaac Newton?" and then "What's the connection between Newton and stopping things moving?" The kids teach themselves the laws of motion. Of course, the Internet is fallible as a source, but so are teachers and textbooks. For the noncontroversial topics that make up the curriculum, even Wikipedia is pretty good. Fist tap Dale.

macrowikinomics

Video - Don Tapscott expounds on his theory of macrowikinomics.

HuffPo | The global economic crisis should be a wakeup call to the world. We need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle. This is more than a recession or the aftermath of a financial crisis. We are at a turning point in history.

Let's face it. The world is broken and the industrial economy and many of its industries and organizations have finally run out of gas, from newspapers and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving.

At the same time the contours of a new kind of civilization are becoming clear as millions of connected citizens begin to forge alternative institutions using the Web as a platform for innovation and value creation. From education and science and to new approaches to citizen engagement and democracy, powerful new initiatives are underway, embracing a new set of principles for the 21st century -- collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity. Indeed, with the proliferation of social media and social networks, we believe society has at its disposal the most powerful platform ever for bringing together the people, skills and knowledge we need to ensure growth, social development and a just and sustainable world.

Of course, the sparkling possibilities described above contrast sharply with the stagnation and inertia that grips so many contemporary institutions. The harsh reality is that it will take years and probably decades to undo some the damage done by misguided policies and approaches. When the economy crashed in 2008, for example, it cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. Faced with a historic market meltdown, the worst recession in three generations, plus government guarantees that exceed the cost of every war the U.S. has ever fought, American taxpayers are understandably still furious.

It is pretty much the same story around the world. Many people are reviving calls for updated regulations, more government intervention and even the breakup or nationalization of the big banks. In the meantime, the lingering effects of the financial meltdown threaten to engulf not just companies but entire countries in a sovereign debt crisis. Greece, Spain, and Portugal may have rocked the financial markets, but the U.S. arguably looms largest, with Congress contemplating a budget that by 2020 would nearly double America's national debt, to $22 trillion -- twice the size of the U.S. economy. Clearly we need to rethink the old approaches to governing the global economy. But rebuilding public finances and restoring long-term confidence in the financial services industry will require more than government intervention and new rules; it's becoming clearer that what's needed is a new modus operandi based on new principles like transparency, integrity and collaboration.

Video - Don Tapscott expounds on his neologistic theory of wikinomics.

wikileaks and the internet's long war

WaPo | Some historians like to talk about the "Long War" of the 20th century, a conflict spanning both world wars and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. They stress that this Long War was a single struggle over what kind of political system would rule the world - democracy, communism or fascism - and that what a war is fought over is often more important than the specifics of individual armies and nations.

The Internet, too, is embroiled in a Long War.

The latest fighters on one side are Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, and the media-dubbed "hacker army" that has risen in his defense in the past week, staging coordinated attacks on government and corporate institutions that have stood in his way. They come from a long tradition of Internet expansionists, who hold that the Web should remake the rest of the world in its own image. They believe that decentralized, transparent and radically open networks should be the organizing principle for all things in society, big and small.

On the other side are those who believe fundamentally that the world should remake the Web in its own image. This side believes that the Internet at its heart is simply a tool, something that should be shaped to serve the demands of existing institutions. Each side seeks to mold the technology and standards of the Web to suit its particular vision.

In this current conflict, the loose confederation of "hacktivists" who rallied in support of Assange in what they called Operation Payback, targeted MasterCard, PayPal, Visa and other companies with a denial-of-service attack, effectively preventing Web sites from operating. It's a global effort of often surprising scope; Dutch police said they arrested a 16-year-old last week suspected to be involved.

Their cause, from which Assange has publicly distanced himself, follows the simple logic of independence. One self-declared spokesperson for the "Anonymous" group doing battle for WikiLeaks explained its philosophy to the Guardian newspaper. "We're against corporations and government interfering on the Internet," said the 22-year-old, identified only as Coldblood. "We believe it should be open and free for everyone."

The battle between "Anonymous" and the establishment isn't the first in the Long War between media-dubbed "hackers" and institutions, and considering the conflict's progression is key to understanding where it will lead.

will anglo-american hegemons now censor the internet?

Independent | The internet has not only revolutionised politics. It has also changed the way we get our news. Experts blog, offering a critical counterpoint to the traditional media. Ordinary citizens find a platform for views excluded from the mainstream political agenda. Politics has become more participatory. And recent days have shown that protesters do not need to stand on a picket line any more; they can use technology to fight back.

But fight what? Defenders of WikiLeaks say that US government attempts to remove its domain name system and close down its income sources it are assaults on freedom of speech. A group of "hacktivists" worldwide have offered their services in cyber-assaults on companies that have done Washington's bidding.

Most of them are just internet geeks instinctively defending their obsessions. But the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has a broader agenda. He sees power in information and regards himself as something of a revolutionary. In an essay he wrote in 2006, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies", he quotes Theodore Roosevelt to the effect that "behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people". Assange goes on: "The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie."

More recently, he told Time magazine that his aim is to push the US towards even greater secrecy, implying that this would bring the current US system closer to collapse. "They have one of two choices. One is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavours, and proud to display them to the public .... The other is to lock-down internally and cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organisations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient." He also advocated the use of misinformation.

It is not hard to see why this has spooked Washington. US intelligence analysis of the 9/11 attacks showed that a key problem in American unpreparedness was the tendency of different departments and agencies to compartmentalise information. The US government's left hand did not know what the right was doing. For the past nine years, Washington has brought in a series of reforms to share intelligence across government. This allowed a single US intelligence analyst in Iraq, Bradley Manning, allegedly to leak a quarter of a million documents to WikiLeaks. Washington experts fear a recompartmentalisation of intelligence – of the precise kind Assange has outlined – will compromise their ability to piece together information and head off terror plots against the US.

The challenge for us is to separate the good that WikiLeaks has done from its potential for harm. WikiLeaks has performed an important public service in exposing government-backed torture in the "war on terror". It has revealed a casual indifference among Western authorities to the death of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has shown that Britain allowed the US to keep cluster bombs on its soil in defiance of our treaty obligations. It has disclosed that the US State Department pressured the German authorities to turn a blind eye to the CIA's kidnapping of a German citizen.

assange: state and terrorist conspiracies

IQ.ORG | Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to out think the same group of individuals acting alone
Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

What does a conspiracy compute?
It computes the next action of the conspiracy
Now I we ask the question: how effective is this device? Can we compare it to itself at different times? Is the conspiracy growing stronger or weakening? This is a question that asks us to compare two values.

Can we find a value that describes the power of a conspiracy?
We could count the number of conspirators, but that would not capture the difference between a conspiracy and the individuals which comprise it. How do they differ? Individuals in a conspiracy conspire. Isolated individuals do not. We can capture that difference by adding up all the important communication (weights) between the conspirators, we will call this the total conspiratorial power.

Total conspiratorial power
This number is an abstraction. The pattern of connections in a conspiracy is unusually unique. But by looking at this value which in indepndent of the arrangement of conspiratorial connections we can make some generalisations. If total conspiratorial power is zero, there is no conspiracy. If total conspiratorial power is zero, there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt.

Separating weighted conspiracies
I now return to our earlier idea about cleaving a conspiracy into halves. Then we looked at dividing a conspiracy into two groups of equal numbers by cutting the links between conspirators. Now we see that a more interesting idea is to split the total conspiratorial power in half. Since any isolated half can be viewed as a conspiracy in its own right we can continue splitting indefinitely.

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?
We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment. We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.

An authoritarian conspiracy that can not think efficiently, can not act to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.
When we look at a conspiracy as an organic whole, we can see a system of interacting organs, a body with arteries and veins whos blood may be thickened and slowed till it falls, unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.

why are wars not being reported honestly?

Video:
Truth and Lies in the War on Terra Part 1.
Truth and Lies in the War on Terra Part 2.
Truth and Lies in the War on Terra Part 3.
Truth and Lies in the War on Terra Part 4.

Guardian | In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence's psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of "information dominance", "asymmetric threats" and "cyberthreats". They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

In the wake of this "war to end all wars", Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for propaganda "which was given a bad name in the war". In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as "an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country" thanks to "the intelligent manipulation of the masses". This was achieved by "false realities" and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays's early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as "torches of freedom".)

the conservative case for wikileaks

Video - The southern avenger delivers the narrative below.

TheAmericanConservative | Lovers necessarily keep or share secrets. Being in a healthy relationship means achieving a certain level of intimacy, where shared knowledge of each others’ weaknesses and insecurities is protected by a bond of mutual trust. Sometimes lovers might do devilish things that outsiders wouldn’t understand, or shouldn’t be privy to, and this is fine. But by and large, what they do is simply no one else’s business.

But imagine that the man in the relationship kept it a secret that he had other women on the side, kids, a criminal record, venereal disease, and basically betrayed his lover in every way imaginable, unbeknownst to her?

Now imagine a third party felt it was their moral duty to reveal it?

No one questions that governments must maintain a certain level of secrecy, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Time that “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” The entire premise of Assange’s whistleblower organization is this: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the other partner in the United States government’s relationship — the American people — should these secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?

How often does our government use “national security” simply as an excuse to cover up questionable dealings? Reports Time: “in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75% … . At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times…”

To say that government must keep secrets is not to say that all government secrets must be kept.

the shameful attacks on julian assange

The Atlantic | The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country's political leadership.

Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America's wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year. According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, an estimated 854,000 people now hold top secret clearance - more than 1.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive," the Post concluded, "that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents: The failure of American counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in destabilizing Iraq, the anti-Western orientation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other tenets of American foreign policy under both Bush and Obama.

It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.

The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together - a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. "We're the step before the first person (investigates)," he explained, when accepting Amnesty International's award for exposing police killings in Kenya. "Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest."

ardin no longer cooperating with authorities...,

TheRawStory | One of the two Swedish women who have filed sex complaints against the founder of WikiLeaks has reportedly left Sweden and may no longer be cooperating with the criminal investigation.

According to a report at Australian news site Crikey.com, Anna Ardin has moved to the Palestinian territories to volunteer with a Christian group working to reconcile Arabs and Israelis.
Crikey.com reports:

One source from Ardin’s old university of Uppsala reported rumors that she had stopped co-operating with the prosecution service several weeks ago, and that this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges — and what still appears to be an absence of charges.

Ardin's blog shows that she has recently posted from the Palestinian territories. Her most recent blog posts make no mention of WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange.

Some of Ardin's most recent Tweets suggest sympathy for WikiLeaks.

"MasterCard, Visa and PayPal -- belt them now!" Ardin urged in a Tweet Wednesday, evidently referring to the cyber-attacks launched on those institutions after they severed their relationships with WikiLeaks.

In a more recent Tweet, she complained of the media reports digging into her background.

"CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, flat & fatally in love with a man, can you even be all [these things all] the time?" she Tweeted in Swedish.

Some news reports have linked Ardin to the CIA, based on her contact with anti-Castro groups in Cuba. Ardin wrote her master's thesis on these groups, while located in Havana and Miami. But others have questioned the validity of the connection.

Crikey.com notes that Ardin, an avowed feminist, has taken criticism from many prominent feminists, who, perhaps surprisingly, appear to have sided against the female accuser and with the male accused.

"Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up!" Tweeted Naomi Klein.

Feminist activist Naomi Wolf penned an article sarcastically congratulating Interpol for its "commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating."

speaking of teaching lessons...,

Bloomberg | Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov was found guilty of two counts of stealing the firm’s trade secrets by appropriating part of a high-frequency computer source code.

Aleynikov went on trial Nov. 29 in federal court in New York on charges of violating the Economic Espionage Act and the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property Act. He faces as long as 10 years in prison on the espionage charge and five years for the interstate transportation charge.

U.S. District Court judge Denise Cote set sentencing of Aleynikov for March 18. He and his lawyer both declined comment. He will be under home confinement and electronic monitoring, Judge Cote ruled.

Aleynikov, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, holds dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, his lawyer Kevin Marino said in court.

Been a minute since I thought about this busted buster - though I gave a lot of thought to what he and his evil masters managed to perpetrate and get away with, something for everybody to consider in light of what's around that signpost up ahead for Msr. Assange...,

full.force.of.the.law...,lessons.need.to.be.learned...,

BBCNews | Lessons need to be learned from a security lapse which allowed protesters to attack the Prince of Wales' car, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

Those responsible for the violence at Thursday's student protest must feel the full force of the law, he said.

americans will violently protest $5.00/gallon gasoline...,

Video - Students in London shout "off with their heads" at Charles and Camilla.

NYTimes | According to the French writer Agnès Poirier, “It is not in the British DNA to demonstrate. The British simply don’t believe in it.” Early last month, when Ms. Poirier, who lives in London, made her comparison between the revolutionary tradition of her native country and the stiff-upper-lip stoicism that seemed to characterize the British response to the financial crisis, there appeared little reason to argue.

But on Nov. 10 tens of thousands of students took to the streets to protest government plans to cut the education budget while sharply increasing tuition fees. Two weeks later, the students were out again, this time in even greater numbers, though the police — stung by criticism for allowing a few demonstrators to vandalize Conservative Party headquarters — responded by herding many protesters into improvised enclosures where they were kept for several hours, a tactic known as “kettling.”

Last Tuesday saw yet another twist, as students, anxious to avoid kettling, played a cat-and-mouse game with police all through central London. Instead of marching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster as planned — and where massed ranks of police, some on horseback, were prepared to turn protesters away from Parliament, which was debating a Labour Party motion opposing the government’s proposals — groups of chanting students ran through Whitehall and around Buckingham Palace while helmet-clad riot police gave chase. Smaller groups of students marched down Oxford Street and Regent Street shouting slogans at bemused Christmas shoppers.

There were simultaneous demonstrations in Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Newcastle and Oxford. Although the police in London arrested 146 people who refused to leave Trafalgar Square, for the most part this third wave of protests ended peacefully. The British protests are expected to continue at least until Parliament votes Thursday on the proposed changes.

“Nonviolence is essential — once we resort to violence it’s the only thing the media picks up,” said Milaad Rajai, co-president of the Student Union at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where protesters have been peacefully occupying the Brunei Gallery since Nov. 21. Students have also taken over buildings at University College London, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bristol and Cambridge.

the coming age of slaughter

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TNR | The age of mass killing, the 1930s and 1940s, was also a moment of environmental panic. World War I had disrupted free trade, and the new Europe was divided between those who needed food and those who controlled it. By the 1960s, improvements in seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides would make surpluses rather than shortages the problem. But, during the crucial 1930s and 1940s, when the decisions were made that sealed the fate of millions, European leaders such as Hitler and Stalin were preoccupied with mastering fertile soil and the people who farmed it.

World War I, in which both Hitler and Stalin played a role, had seemed to show that conquest of cropland meant security and power. It ended in 1918 during a failed German attempt to colonize Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. To us, the “Ukrainian breadbasket” is a strange notion—perhaps as strange as the concept of “Saudi oil fields” will be 70 years from now. In the 1930s, however, it was at the center of strategic discussions in Moscow and Berlin. The Soviets held Ukraine and wanted to exploit its black earth; the Nazi leadership, ruling a country that was not self-sufficient in food, wanted to take it back.

Both Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror took place during an interval of environmental risk: between the identification of a critical environmental problem and the introduction of the technologies that would solve it. National Socialism and Stalinism both identified enemies to be eliminated, of course; and today, when we talk about Nazism and Stalinism, we understandably emphasize the hatred—the racial hatred of Hitler and the class hatred of Stalin. But there was an economic and environmental side to their ideologies as well: Both Hitler and Stalin made killing seem to serve a vision of economic development that would overcome environmental limitations. Perhaps we today tend to ignore this dimension because noting environmental limitations smacks of making excuses for horror. Or perhaps we see the economy as a realm of rationality and so assume that economic thought must not be implicated in apparently emotional projects such as mass killing. Or perhaps we have simply forgotten the environmental constraints of an earlier period, so different from those of our time.

We face our own environmental limitations and so have very good reason to recover this history. We have entered a new interval of environmental risk, an era in which we know that global warming is taking place but do not yet have the means to slow it. We Americans tend to see events of great importance as unique and the end of history around every corner. Of course global warming is an unprecedented challenge, and of course the Holocaust was an unparalleled tragedy. Yet the relationship is not as distant as we may think. We must use what we know of the dire environmental politics of the past to prepare for the calamities yet to come. We can recall that the most dangerous of ideologies were those that unified a promise of environmental mastery with the demonization of the group that seemed to stand in the way. Perhaps, by recalling this history, we can prevent a new age of mass murder.

how "dangerous" is hacker network defending wikileaks?

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CSM | A self-styled and loosely affiliated group of Internet-freedom fighters dubbed “Anonymous” has morphed into a borderless digital militia, slinging Twitter posts and virtual handbills across cyberspace to coordinate digital attacks in defense of WikiLeaks and becoming a new force to be reckoned with on the Internet.

In the global furor since WikiLeaks' release of secret US documents and the arrest of the group's founder, Julian Assange, cyber attackers have crippled corporate websites. To do so they have deployed old digital weaponry forged by new social media tools into a novel virtual global attack system that is leaderless, anonymous and powerful.

"Operation Payback" is the name that Anonymous has given its cyber-retribution campaign against corporations that have withdrawn support and services from Mr. Assange, who was arrested in Britain this week on a Swedish rape charge.

Hackers rally to support WikiLeaks: Top 5 recent attacks

As of Thursday, the group's attacks had crippled or brought down with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at least a half dozen major websites belonging to Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, the Swiss bank Postfinance and others that withdrew services to WikiLeaks.

"This is probably the largest attack of its kind," Derek Manky, an Internet security expert at Fortinet, a Sunnyvale, Calif., computer security company. "It's not just one specific audience trying to launch an attack. It's a much more global audience – a global group – and these targets that they're taking down are not small."

Large they may be, but DDoS attacks like those that hit Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and other corporate websites by flooding them with data and Internet requests are nothing new, or advanced, technically speaking. Such attacks involve creating or enlisting the support of botnets – many thousands of computers coopted to work in tandem – and getting several of them to focus on particular Internet sites to clog them by making virtual information requests simultaneously. A sort of cyber blockade.
Use of social media is key

But it is the use of social media and the novel way old digital attack weapons are being organized that experts say is at the heart of what's happening, say experts who have studied the group. Anonymous members have essentially posted virtual handbills across the Internet on websites and Internet relay chat forums to rally new participants.

paypal releases wikileak's funds

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AFP | PayPal is releasing all of the remaining funds in an account set up to raise money for WikiLeaks, but it will no longer accept donations for the site.

John Muller, PayPal's general counsel, announced the move in a blog post late Wednesday in which he said PayPal's decision to restrict the WikiLeaks account was not the result of any pressure from the US government.

Besides PayPal, Mastercard and Visa have also suspended WikiLeaks accounts, choking off donations to the website that has been releasing confidential and embarrassing US diplomatic cables.

The move has triggered cyber attacks in recent days on the websites of the Internet payment and credit card companies by supporters of WikiLeaks.

Muller said "media reports" had "created confusion about PayPal's decision to permanently restrict the account that was raising funds for WikiLeaks."

full open government scenario

How OPEN is it possible for a government to be? What if full disclosure (live but also recorded) of "any and all discussions, etc. involving the people's business" were required by law? Imagine:

-- All government personnel (i.e. any elected official and anyone who is an employee or contractor of the government) must wear a POV cam with audio whenever awake. Any non-government personnel must wear one any time they are involved in any aspect of government business. Streaming and recording off by default while e.g. at home, but TBD minutes retroactive recording on detection of certain keywords or activities which can only be unsealed by order of a court after showing cause, etc. Instant transition to public live stream/recorded should any related party (lobbyist, coworker, superior, other government entity, etc.) make contact by any means. Shouldn't be too tough to do; they're all wearing one too.

-- All text-based electronic discussions of government business must be held in a public chat/discussion board-type environment where only the parties involved are allowed to post (except during public comment period, etc.).

-- Telephone conversations among e.g. any two or more such entities conducting government business will be streamed and recorded.

-- Must be deployed at all levels of government (including quasi-gonvermental boards, etc.) in order for a state to receive federal funds. After all, it involves/affects interstate commerce somehow. It always does.

-- By default, all is made public; only a court of competent jurisdiction can make an event private or secret a priori/posteriori, (though backwards-egg construction remains a thorny problem) and must specify the earliest reasonable date by which the information must be revealed.

-- Severe penalties ($$ and time) for evading or attempting to evade disclosure or to conceal anything related to the program (and there's always the good ol' "conspiracy to" charge to fall back on...)

-- Information available only to citizens of the US, who must verify their identity and status at the time. etc.

Technology framework to be provided, developed, and paid for entirely within the US, by US citizens. Open source. You think we can't do it? Got iPhone or Android?

It's not like we're going to run out of hard disk space or bandwidth or anything and, once everyone expects it and becomes accustomed to it, what will happen? What will a meeting be like between your Senator and a lobbyist when both are required by law to stream and record the event? What happens now? Talk about "Reality TV." w00t!

Nobody would like it, but they'd get used to it soon enough. After all, isn't it our trusted authorities who are always the first to fall back on that old "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about" canard?

Would I like my life streamed? No, but we're already heading down a no-more-privacy hole, and besides, I'd go along while involved in any discussions of government business. Are there privacy issues? Yep, but then there are transparency ones to be considered as well. Our government wants to get intrusive with us? "OK," we say, "let's start with you." I listened to the pre-Turkey Day Biden-committee TSA hearings and, just when anything was about to get remotely informative, the answer was always "Well, Senator, again, we're going to have to cover that behind closed doors."

I'm just sayin.' Play the FULL OPEN GOVERNMENT scenario around in your head for a while. Nobody's gonna be able to watch all of it, but you never know who might be watching any one something.

As usual, when we/they look back at this period, the dominating factors will have been consequences unintended or unforseen at the time. Fist tap Arnach.

constant conflict: a military celebration of dopamine hegemony

Video - Bob Marley Them Belly Full But We Hungry.

ICH | It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win. Fist tap Dale.

the big payback

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The Raw Story | Operation Payback raised the stakes in the battle over WikiLeaks' Julian Assange when it began attacking credit card providers Visa and MasterCard over their freezing of WikiLeaks accounts,, causing parts of the companies' online operations to go dark.But the disappearance of the group from Twitter is expected to be short-lived, as setting up a new account is relatively easy.

One such account, Anon Operationn, already appears to be operational.

For its part, WikiLeaks appeared to be in a charitable mood today, perhaps in an attempt to dampen anger in some corners over the leaked State Department cables and cyber-attacks on anti-WikiLeaks groups.

"We are replacing operation #payback with operation #payitforward," WikiLeaks announced on Twitter. "Hackers, please perform random acts of kindness."

UPDATE IV: Sarah Palin is the latest target of "Operation Payback," the group of hacktivists who have been launching cyber-attacks against organizations and people working against WikiLeaks.

Palin drew attention last week when she said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."

ABC News reports:

The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

Hackers in London apparently affiliated with “Operation Payback” – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts.

According to ABC's Jake Tapper, the website associated with Operation Payback -- anonops.net -- had listed Palin's website as a potential target.

“This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts,” Palin said in an email.

mass mirroring - isn't it kewl...,

wikileaks.ch | In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, we need your help.

if you have a unix-based server which is hosting a website on the Internet and you want to give wikileaks some of your hosting resources, you can help!

Please follow the following instructions:

* Setup an account where we can upload files using RSYNC+SSH (preferred) or FTP
* Put our SSH key in this server or create an FTP account
* Create a virtual host in your web server, which, for example, can be wikileaks.yourdomain.com
* send the IP address of your server to us, and the path where we should upload the content. (just fill the form below)

We will take care of all the rest: Sending pages to your server, updating them each time data is released, maintaining a list of such mirrors. If your server is down or if the account don't work anymore, we will automatically remove your server from the list.

Our content is only html/css/javascript/png static files, so we don't require much resource to host it.

The complete website should not take more than a couple of GB at the moment (with base website and cablegate data)

In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.

If you want to add your mirror to the list, see our Mass Mirroring Wikileaks page
Mirror List

Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1334 sites (updated 2010-12-08 22:43 GMT)

wikileaks a warground: people vs. empire

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Counterpunch | The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

western civilization has shed its values...,

Video - Bob Marley chasing those crazy baldheads.

Globalresearch | Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN's Wolf Blitzer's reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government's improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.

The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush's reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that "authorized" Bush to violate US law.

Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks' critics. A number of American politicians have called for the US government to murder Julian Assange, as have journalists such as neoconservative propagandist Jonah Goldberg, who wrote: "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"

WikiLeaks' critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks' critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.

The US government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime's use of lies, fabricated "intelligence," and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into US puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating US and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.

As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the US government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown "fix" the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America's wars. The US was able to do this, because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.

The leaked documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.