gaming yields negentropic thrust toward the singularity

Wired | Chemically, the proteins that run most of a cell’s functions are little more than a string of amino acids. Their ability to perform structural and catalytic functions is primarily dependent upon the fact that, when in solution, that string adopts a complex, three-dimensional shape. Understanding how that three-dimensional structure forms has been a serious challenge; even if you know the order of the amino acids in the string, it’s generally been impossible to predict how they’ll fold up into the final product. But now, gamers are giving scientists some insight into the algorithms that predict protein structures.

In recent years, computing power has finally caught up with the problem a bit, and it has been possible to make some predictions about a protein’s folding based on calculating the lowest energy configuration. But many of the algorithms get hung up in what are local energy minima, folds that are good, but not the best. Since humans often have the ability to recognize things that computers can’t, some researchers figured out a way to get people to volunteer time folding proteins: turn it into a game, which they called FoldIt. They quickly found that, for specific types of problems, gamers could top the best algorithms.

Given the gamers’ success, the scientists behind FoldIt started to wonder if it might be possible to produce algorithms that did some of the things that people did right. In their new paper, they describe how they decided to go about it. “One way to arrive at algorithmic methods underlying successful human Foldit play would be to apply machine learning techniques to the detailed logs of expert Foldit players,” they wrote. “We chose instead to rely on a superior learning machine: Foldit players themselves. As the players themselves understand their strategies better than anyone, we decided to allow them to codify their algorithms directly, rather than attempting to automatically learn approximations.”

Essentially, what they put in place was a scripting engine which allowed users to create a automated series of steps that the users could apply to a protein, speeding up the process of folding it—they called the scripts “recipes.” But the team didn’t stop there: players were allowed to share their recipes, and could modify any recipes they obtained from other users. This enabled a form of social evolution as recipes with names like “tlaloc Contract 3.00″ and “Aotearoas_Romance” got passed around the community.

The recipes were a big success. In under four months, about 5,500 were created, and over 10,000 individual recipes were run on several weeks. Users came up with four general classes of script that modified the protein structure in distinct ways. For example, some recipes would let the user select a region of the protein, distort it, and then search for the lowest energy form of that region, essentially letting them do a partial reset of part of the structure. Another set of recipes allowed users to do an aggressive rebuild of part of the structure.

Nobody came up with a script that performed the whole folding process. Instead, experienced users built up a toolbox of recipes that they’d apply at different parts of the optimization process, allowing them to speed up parts of the process that they might otherwise have to do manually.

By the end of three months, two recipes (called Quake and Blue Fuse) accounted for about a third of the total scripting activities. Both of them took similar approaches to optimizing a local part of the protein’s structure, in essence, letting it breathe a bit, then settle down into a new energy minimum. Quake did this by alternately squeezing and relaxing the structure using a set of virtual rubber bands applied by the user. Blue Fuse did a similar thing by changing the strength of the attraction/repulsion among the atoms in the protein, causing the structure to repeatedly expand and contract. Both of them would successfully pack the protein more densely when applied to a partially completed structure. Fist tap Nana.

them what bean shall get, them what's not shall lose....,

Fist tap Dale.

evolving engineering

TheScientist | After 10 years of tinkering with biological circuits, we need to explain—once again and clearly—the rationale for doing synthetic biology. Despite the musings of some, the field is not limited to toy projects. Metabolic engineers have clearly articulated their goals of manufacturing cheap alkane fuels and much-needed drugs, such as the antimalarial drug artemisinin.¹ (See “Tinkering with Life.”) But for building DNA nanostructures or whole bacterial genomes, the rationales have been less clear—initially confined to cartoonish shapes and watermark sequences, respectively. Recent advances, however—such as a DNA nanostructure that combines cell targeting, molecular logic, and cancer-fighting ability², and a new E. coli genome well on its way to possessing multivirus resistance³—have demonstrated the discipline’s incredible potential.

Much of the progress can be credited to engineers who have developed a deeper appreciation of life’s power. While synthetic biology has brought a welcome injection of rigorous engineering principles to biology, including hierarchical abstractions, computer-aided design (CAD), and interoperable parts, biological mechanisms also offer some distinctive qualities of their own—a handful of underexploited strategies previously rare in engineering fields, such as replication at low cost and natural selection.

In just 6 years, researchers have reduced the cost of genome reading by a millionfold, and we are now accomplishing a similar effort in writing DNA—thanks to a new technique for harvesting synthetic oligonucleotides from chips, which can generate 60 million linked bases for just $900.⁴ Moreover, we can now create expansive genetic libraries, generating billions of genome variants per day using targeted mutagenesis. Those combinations can then be pitted against each other in an evolutionary footrace, allowing researchers to quickly ferret out the good gene combinations—for example, those that yield high levels of a desired compound—from the bad.

Biologically inspired devices also offer other advantages that may increasingly allow them to compete with silicon-based electronics. DNA is over a billion times more compact per bit than the densest electronic storage or Blu-ray Disc, and polymerase steps are 10 million times more energy efficient than conventional computer unit operations. Indeed, these properties are allowing hybrid bio/optical/electronic systems to grow in diversity and complexity (See, for example, “The Birth of Optogenetics,” The Scientist, July 2011).

designing genomes from scratch will be the next revolution in biology.

TheScientist | A little over one year ago, my team at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the construction of the first cell completely controlled by a synthetic genome. After 8 years of work on DNA synthesis, assembly, and error correction, and on new ways to transplant and boot up chromosomes, we succeeded in creating a cell that used only a chemically synthesized chromosome to code for all aspects of the cellular phenotype.

DNA is the software of the cell, and our studies have shown that when we change the software we change the species. Because it is based on the digitized DNA sequence, the design of synthetic genomes provides a true interface between the computer and biological life. While genome design will dominate the future, the field has been limited to a few gene changes as a part of pathway design and to the engineering of novel biological circuits, such as oscillators, that can be used to construct semisynthetic biological machines.

One major limitation is the cost—in both money and time—associated with genome modification. For example, it required over a decade of work and reportedly more than $100 million for the team at DuPont to make a dozen or so modifications to the E. coli genome so that it would convert glucose into propanediol to make “renewably sourced” fibers. And while some clever techniques for codon modification in E. coli have emerged recently from the laboratory of George Church, these are a long way from genomes designed and constructed to perform unique metabolic activities.

The tools and techniques developed by my team to assemble a completely synthetic bacterial genome, while relatively efficient (we built the entire 1.1-million-base-pair synthetic genome in less than one month), are also still quite expensive ($0.30 per base pair) due to the current cost of oligonucleotide synthesis. Fortunately, this work has helped create a demand for rapid, accurate, cheap DNA synthesis, which has led to some very novel approaches that could help reduce these costs. Over the past 23 years, the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped 8 orders of magnitude. Similar improvements with DNA synthesis await technological breakthroughs that are tantalizingly close.

tinkering with life

TheScientist | In the late 1990s, a handful of physicists and engineers began to take a greater interest in biology. The Human Genome Project was spitting out more and more gene sequences—blueprints for the protein building blocks of the cell—generating a flood of new information about the molecular machinery of life. Trouble was, there were not enough biologists doing the job of figuring out how all these genes and proteins worked together to create a living, breathing organism.

It was around this time that Boston University bioengineer James Collins saw his chance to inject a little engineering know-how into the study of biology. There were two ways to go about it, he figured—either disassemble cells or build them. “A burgeoning young engineer [is] either the kind of kid who takes stuff apart to try to figure out how it works, or [he’s] the kid who puts stuff together,” Collins says. Though both approaches seemed promising, there simply wasn’t enough known about the structures or functions of the genes and their protein products to infer how all the parts worked together by taking a cell apart, piece by piece.

“Reverse engineering seems to be too challenging,” Collins recalls musing to his then grad student Tim Gardner. “But can we do forward engineering? Can we take parts from cells and put them together in circuits, just as an electrical engineer might?”

The answer was yes. After two years of tweaking various characteristics of transcriptional repressors in E. coli, the team succeeded in constructing biology’s first synthetic toggle switch—two repressor genes controlled by two promoters that caused their respective repressors to be expressed by default. The repressors were designed to inactivate each other, however, such that the two genes would never be fully expressed at the same time. The addition of a stimulus, such as a chemical pulse to suppress one gene long enough for the other to come on, allowed the system to flip from one stable state (gene A on, gene B off) to its other stable state (A off, B on).

The results were published in 2000, alongside a paper from physicist Stanislas Leibler’s lab at Princeton University, which had undertaken a similar, but independent, project. Much like Collins with Gardner, Leibler teamed up with his graduate student Michael Elowitz to build an oscillator, which, like Collins’s toggle switches, used transcriptional repressors in E. coli. The Princeton team engineered three genes to inhibit each other in a cyclical manner, rock-paper-scissors style, with each gene repressing the next when a threshold concentration of its gene product had been reached. The result was the periodic expression of all three genes—monitored by the periodic glow of green fluorescent protein (GFP), whose expression was linked to another copy of a promoter controlling one of the three repressors.

The two publications are now widely cited as the seminal papers of synthetic biology, though neither paper received much publicity at the time. “[We were] kind of a ragtag group of engineers and physicists who were essentially amateurs in molecular biology,” Collins says. But in the last decade, many trained molecular and cell biologists have turned to syn bio, designing synthetic circuits built from biological components and branching out from the transcriptional regulation tools of Leibler, now at Rockefeller University, and Collins to add translation and post-translation components.

chomsky: if it cannot justify itself, then it should be dismantled

news.com.au | PEOPLE should embrace the sort of anarchism typified by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky says.

The American commentator, philosopher and activist was being interviewed in front of a packed theatre at the Sydney Opera House today when he was asked his thoughts on Prime Minister Julia Gillard's comments that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's motivations were "sort of anarchic".

Professor Chomsky said if anarchy meant questioning authority and demanding the truth, then everyone should be anarchic.

"In that sense I think everyone should be an anarchist," he said, in response to heavy applause from the audience.

Anarchism should not be viewed in a negative light, Prof Chomsky said.

"It's not the conception of anarchism as people running wild and breaking windows.

"In our age we have to overcome the barriers introduced by the ranks of capitalism and corporate capitalism and I think there is some sense in that, at the core of the anarchist tradition ... is to ask and raise questions about authority, hierarchy and domination.

"And if it cannot justify itself, then it should be dismantled. That's the core principle of anarchism."

His comments came after Britain's High Court in London upheld a ruling that Assange should be sent to face questioning by Swedish authorities over claims of sexual assault against two women.

Prof Chomsky is to receive the 2012 Sydney Peace Prize at a ceremony later this evening.

efforts to push creative collaboration might actually clog the wheels

WaPo | We’ve all been there. The boardrooms with flip charts at the front of the room and candy on the table. The all-hands emergency meetings to come up with ideas to fix the latest mess. And of course, the off-sites in drab hotel ballrooms that are supposed to somehow spark creativity.

Such efforts at brainstorming are well intended, of course. The problem? They rarely work. While leaders hang onto the idea that bringing together a big group of people will produce truly innovative ideas, it’s rare that actually happens.

Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing radical ideas in front of a group and don’t speak up; in other cases, the group is either too small or too big to be effective.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem might be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. On Monday, the British Psychological Society highlighted a recent study by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, two researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University. They asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

Kohn and Smith believed the cause might be because of “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.

As with all such studies, there’s plenty of pretty obvious common sense to this research. But it’s a helpful reminder of how unhelpful it can be when managers dump people in a room together, thinking it will result in creative big ideas. Somehow, a belief in the power of group brainstorming sessions persists, despite evidence that it doesn’t work. Great minds can come up with their own ideas, but sometimes the problem is they think too much alike.

evolution during human colonizations

PhysOrg | Most human populations are the product of a series of range expansions having occurred since modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago to colonize the rest of the world, but how have these processes influenced today's population diversity? An international research team led by Damian Labuda at the University of Montreal, Hélène Vézina from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) and by Laurent Excoffier from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics have studied the effects of rapid territorial and demographic expansions on recent human evolution.

Using genealogies including more than one million individuals in a recently colonized region of Quebec, they show that pioneer individuals on the edge of the colonization wave had a selective advantage, such that their genes are now predominantly found in the population. Similar processes are likely to have occurred in other regions of the world, so that this study suggests that range expansions played a key role in human evolution. The results of their study are published today in the prestigious journal Science.

The exact mechanisms of population expansions are difficult to study as they extend over many generations and hundreds or thousands of years. The expansion of humans into the Charlevoix Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area of Quebec offered researchers a unique opportunity to study a range expansion in real time, thanks to the availability of deep and complete genealogies reconstructed from parish registers. The descending genealogies of all couples who married in these regions between 1686 and 1960 were reconstructed thanks to the BALSAC database managed by Hélène Vézina. The analysis of this huge genealogy including more than one million individuals shows that the genes present in today's population were mostly transmitted by ancestors who were living on or close to the wave front of the expansion.

"We knew that the migration of species into new areas promoted the spread of rare mutations through a phenomenon known as 'gene surfing', but now we find that selection at the wave front can make this surfing much more efficient. There is thus a long-term evolutionary success of people living on the edge", Excoffier said. Women on the wave front had a selective advantage "We find that families who are at the forefront of a range expansion into new territories had a greater reproductive success.", Labuda explained. Women on the front of the expansion indeed married about one year earlier than women in the range core and had 15% more children and even 20% more married children. The higher fertility on the wave front is compatible with an increase in resource abundance and lowered competition among individuals to access these resources. "People could indeed marry younger as more farm land was available on the wave front than in the core, where good lands were mostly already occupied", says Excoffier.

Human curiosity, also an inherited trait from past range expansions?

Some human traits others than those the team has measured may have also evolved during range expansions. More specifically, if there are some traits favoring dispersal and colonization, it is highly likely that they have also evolved during past range expansions. In other words, human curiosity and the desire to look over the next mountain or hilltop might be one of these inherited traits. "It is exciting to see how a study on a regional population of Quebec can bring insights on human processes that have been going on for thousands of years. The BALSAC genealogical database is a powerful tool for social and genetic research and this study is a very nice demonstration of its possibilities", Vézina said.

what distinguishes you humans from the other animals?

PsychologyToday | For as long as human animals have pondered how we might differ from nonhuman animals (hereafter animals for convenience) many ideas have come and gone. For example, it's been postulated that humans are created in the image of God and are the only rational beings. People vary in their opinions on whether we are the only animals who are created in the image of God and of course it's not a claim that can be proven or disproven. However, ample research has shown that animals are rational beings and that they also share with us many other traits that were once thought to be uniquely human, including manufacturing and using tools, having culture, having a sense of self, using complex systems of communication, producing art, and having rich and deep emotional lives and knowing right from wrong. Two traits that seem to separate us from other animals are we're the only animals who cook food and no other animals are as destructive and evil.

Now, it's been suggested that perhaps mental time travel and having a theory of mind are two uniquely human ways of thinking that separate us from other animals. This idea is put forth in a book called The Recursive Mind by Michael Corballis. Corballis argues that recursion is a uniquely human trait. In an excellent review of Corballis's book, anthropologist Barbara J. King makes many of his arguments palatable to a lay audience. So for example, she writes, "it's a unique human trick to communicate by embedding structures within other structures, as when one noun phrase in a sentence is made to contain another. An example of such linguistic recursion is furnished by Corballis. The non-recursive sentences 'Jane loves John'' and 'Jane flies aeroplanes' may be combined to produce the recursive sentence 'Jane, who flies aeroplanes, loves John'. Less interested in language than the mind itself, Corballis states flatly that recursion is 'the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals'".

Mental time travel and theory of mind are recursive ways of thinking. King goes on to write, "During mental time travel, an experience that we've had in the past or that we imagine for ourselves in the future is 'inserted into [our] present consciousness'. Similarly, in theory of mind, we insert what we believe to be someone else's state of mind into our own."

So, how do Corballis's ideas hold up given what we know about the behavior and cognitive capacities of animals?

it yields no economic return

Reuters | Catholic Ireland's stunning decision to close its embassy to the Vatican is a huge blow to the Holy See's prestige and may be followed by other countries which feel the missions are too expensive, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

The closure brought relations between Ireland and the Vatican, once ironclad allies, to an all-time low following the row earlier this year over the Irish Church's handling of sex abuse cases and accusations that the Vatican had encouraged secrecy.

Ireland will now be the only major country of ancient Catholic tradition without an embassy to the Vatican.

"This is really bad for the Vatican because Ireland is the first big Catholic country to do this and because of what Catholicism means in Irish history," said a Vatican diplomatic source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

He said Ireland informed the Vatican shortly before the announcement was made on Thursday night.

Dublin's foreign ministry said the embassy was being closed because "it yields no economic return" and that relations would be continued with an ambassador in Dublin.

The source said the Vatican was "extremely irritated" by the wording equating diplomatic missions with economic return, particularly as the Vatican sees its diplomatic role as promoting human values.

Diplomats said the Irish move might sway others to follow suit to save money because double diplomatic presences in Rome are expensive.

It was the latest crack in relations that had been seen as rock solid until a few years ago.

"Ya gotta put something ON the table, before you can put your feet UNDER the table."

Video - WGBH documentary Riding the Rails

PBS | At the height of the Great Depression, more than a quarter million teenagers were living on the road in America, many criss-crossing the country by illegally hopping freight trains. This film tells the story of ten of these teenage hobos -- from the reasons they left home to what they experienced -- all within the context of depression-era America.

most u.s. unemployed no longer receive benefits

AP | he jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America's unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent - a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Congress is expected to decide by year's end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.

The ranks of the poor would also rise. The Census Bureau says unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people from slipping into poverty last year. It defines poverty as annual income below $22,314 for a family of four.

Yet for a growing share of the unemployed, a vote in Congress to extend the benefits to 99 weeks is irrelevant. They've had no job for more than 99 weeks. They're no longer eligible for benefits.

Their options include food stamps or other social programs. Nearly 46 million people received food stamps in August, a record total. That figure could grow as more people lose unemployment benefits.

So could the government's disability rolls. Applications for the disability insurance program have jumped about 50 percent since 2007.

"There's going to be increased hardship," said Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute.

The number of unemployed has been roughly stable this year. Yet the number receiving benefits has plunged 30 percent.

Government unemployment benefits weren't designed to sustain people for long stretches without work. They usually don't have to. In the recoveries from the previous three recessions, the longest average duration of unemployment was 21 weeks, in July 1983.

By contrast, in the wake of the Great Recession, the figure reached 41 weeks in September. That's the longest on records dating to 1948. The figure is now 39 weeks.

"It was a good safety net for a shorter recession," said Carl Van Horn, an economist at Rutgers University. It assumes "the economy will experience short interruptions and then go back to normal."

Weekly unemployment checks average about $300 nationwide. If the extended benefits aren't renewed, growth could slow by up to a half-percentage point next year, economists say.

in six days: connecticut community resiliency failing on an epic scale...,

Video - CP&L CEO answers kwestins...,

AP | Tempers are snapping as fast as the snow-laden branches that brought down power wires across the Northeast last weekend, with close to 300,000 Connecticut customers still in the dark and the state's biggest utility warning them not to threaten or harass repair crews.

Angry residents left without heat as temperatures drop to near freezing overnight have been lashing out at Connecticut Light & Power: accosting repair crews, making profane criticisms online and suing. In Simsbury, a hard-hit suburban town of about 25,000 residents, National Guard troops deployed to clear debris have been providing security outside a utility office building.

At a shelter at Simsbury High School, resident Stacy Niezabitowski, 53, said Friday she would love to yell at someone from Connecticut Light & Power but hadn't seen any of its workers.

"Everybody is looking for someplace to vent - not a scapegoat, just someplace to vent your anger so somebody will listen and do something," said Niezabitowski, who was having lunch at the shelter with her 21-year-old daughter. "Nobody is doing anything."

The October nor'easter knocked out power to more than 3 million homes and business across the Northeast, including 830,000 in Connecticut, where outages now exceed those of all other states combined. Connecticut Light & Power has blamed the extent of the devastation partly on overgrown trees in the state, where it says some homeowners and municipalities have resisted the pruning of limbs for reasons including aesthetics.

The company called the snowstorm and resulting power outages "an historic event" and said it was focused on getting almost all power back on by Sunday night.

For some residents still dealing with outages, no excuse is acceptable.

In Avon, a Farmington Valley town where 85 percent of customers were still without power on Friday, town manager Brandon Robertson said he faulted CL&P for an "absolutely unacceptable and completely avoidable" situation. He said the high school that is being used as an emergency shelter was still running on a generator. Although public works crews had cleared most of the town roads, he said, more than 25 still were blocked as they waited for CL&P crews to clear power lines.

"Our residents are angry. We're angry," he said. "It's just really shocking."

stand up chicago shows how it's done!!!

Video - Wisconsin Koch Bros sockpuppet Scott Walker gets MIC checked in Chicago.

When Wisconsin Governor gave a speech at Chicago's Union League Club the morning of Nov 3rd, he has some unexpected guests: Stand Up! Chicago

wait, does anybody believe this old fake, kept poodle gas?

 Video - Occupy protests allegedly costing businesses and cities 1% patronage money.

how much of the global economy is useless friction?

oftwominds | There is no way that printing money or standard "austerity" measures can overcome the structural friction crippling economies such as Greece and Italy--or those of the U.S., the rest of the E.U. and China.

If we set aside the absurdist headlines about various "rescues" of insolvent governments, we might focus instead on a larger question: how much of the Greek and Italian economies is useless friction? How much of the U.S. economy is useless friction? How about economies like China and India that are rife with corruption at every level?

The question matters because friction will seize up a machine once the energy devoted to overcoming it drops below a critical threshold. It seems painfully obvious that Europe is about to reach that threshold, the U.S. is getting close and China is teetering on the precipice. Once those three seize up, then the rest of the world will follow.

Behind all the headlines of rescues, bailouts, austerity packages and all the rest of the propaganda spewed out by eurocrats and their media lackeys, let's ask the question no one dares ask: what if the entire European Union bureaucracy is nothing but friction? If so, then the E.U. isn't the "savior" of the Eurozone economies, it is the cause of their systemic ills.

Let's explore the analogy of friction a bit.

Friction is the resistance between moving parts that cause a bicycle in motion to come to a stop once you stop pedaling. If you flatten the bike’s tires, increasing the resistance between the rubber and the road, that increase in friction causes the bike to slow far more quickly than a bicycle with inflated tires. Increase the friction enough, and you can barely push the bike forward.

Though friction cannot be eliminated entirely, it can be reduced to the point that very modest amounts of energy create substantial results. Alternatively, friction can increase to the point that the energy input required to maintain output rises far beyond the value of the output. At that juncture, the system freezes up. The returns are so marginal that they no longer justify the energy and expense needed to maintain the machine.

A bicycle with wheels that barely turn will be tossed aside when the rider realizes he can go faster by walking -- and with much less effort.

How Much of the US Economy is Friction?

Economies have friction, too. When the friction increases to the point that much of the economy’s energy and surplus are being consumed in overcoming systemic friction, then the system will eventually freeze up and be abandoned.

How much of the U.S. and other global economies is friction? It is a difficult question, as we’ve grown so accustomed to our way of doing things that we tend to assume that the present system is the most efficient one possible. If it is visibly inefficient, that we assume it serves a social need so vital that its maintenance overrides the high costs of maintaining the system.

Much of our faith is based on the belief that because we live in a market economy, the efficiencies intrinsic to a market economy -- such as customers gravitating toward the goods and services that offer the lowest costs and highest benefits -- are being effectively captured by the US economy.

But this is mostly wishful thinking, the net result of ceaseless self-promotion by the Status Quo that benefits from the enormous friction that is, in fact, grinding down the US economy. In actuality, market forces influence very little of the US economy, and what they do influence is a series of carefully limited false choices constructed by non-market forces and the immense powers of marketing.

roman catholic church's pedophile investigator jailed for possessing thousands of child porn images

DailyMail | A Catholic Church child safety co-ordinator who was in charge of investigating sexual abuse allegations was jailed for 12 months today for internet peadophile offences.

Christopher Jarvis, 49, a married father-of-four, investigated historic claims of child abuse, interviewing the victims when they were adults.

He was responsible for child protection at 120 churches and parish community groups for nine years.

He also, as a member of the Devon and Cornwall Multi-Agency Safeguarding Team, had access to police and social services information about victims of child abuse.

As a result of the conviction and sentencing, the Roman Catholic Church has ordered a review of child protection across the South West of England.

According to The Times, the Bishop of Plymouth, the Right Rev Christopher Budd, has asked the NSPCC to carry out the inquiry into child protection arrangements in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.

The revelations that the church hired a peadophile in a key child protection role will add to the controversy surrounding the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales over its handling of sexual abuse.

At the time of his arrest in March this year, Jarvis was leading an investigation into an historic sex abuse allegation at Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Devon.

He was arrested after uploading images of pre-pubescent boys on to the Ning social networking website.

Police officers who traced him to his home in Plymouth, Devon, found more than 4,000 child porn images, mainly of boys aged 10 to 12, on his church-supplied computer and a memory stick when they raided the house in Penrose Road.

The court heard that 4,389 images were found on the laptop and memory stick.

The majority, 3,721, were at Level One, the lowest level for abusive images.

But there were 120 at Level Four, which includes scenes of child rape, and 12 at Level Five, which can include scenes of torture and sadism.

Jarvis, who the court heard claimed he was abused as a child, was sentenced at the city's crown court after admitted 12 counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images at a previous magistrates' court hearing.

that cop in oakland who injured scott olson was trying to kill somebody...,

Business Insider | As the events that led to Oakland protester Scott Olsen's head injury continue to unfold and investigations begin, we thought it important to offer some perspective.

This comment is from a former Marine with special operations in crowd control.

He points out that shooting canisters such as those that likely hit Scott Olsen is prohibited under rules of engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of any political position on the Occupy protests, these are some Interesting insights:

Before gas goes into a crowd shield bearers have to be making no progress moving a crowd or crowd must be assaulting the line. Not with sticks and stones but a no bullshit assault. 3 warnings must be given to the crowd in a manner they can hear that force is about to be used. Shield bearers take a knee and CS gas is released in grenade form first to fog out your lines because you have gas masks. You then kick the canisters along in front of your lines. Projectile gas is not used except for longer ranged engagement or trying to steer the crowd ( by steering a crowd I mean firing gas to block a street off ). You also have shotguns with beanbags and various less than lethal rounds for your launchers. These are the rules for a WARZONE!!

How did a cop who is supposed to have training on his weapon system accidentally SHOOT someone in the head with a 40mm gas canister? Simple. He was aiming at him.

I'll be the first to admit a 40mm round is tricky to aim if you are inexperienced but anyone can tell the difference between aiming at head level and going for range.

The person that pulled that trigger has no business being a cop. He sent that round out with the intention of doing some serious damage to the protestors. I don't care what the protestors were doing. I never broke my rules of engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. So I can't imagine what a protester in the states did to deserve a headshot with a 40mm. He's damn lucky to be alive and that cop knows he was using lethal force against a protester he is supposed to be protecting.

Additionally: Jesse Davis mentions "The methods prohibited in war, and actions after the fact are also against war zone policy." Check out his infographic here.

Specifically these two transcribed directly from US Army Law of War/Law of Armed Conflict training.

The Military manual states:

…have a duty to collect and care for the wounded. Prioritize treatment according to injuries. Make NO treatment distinction based on nationality. All soldiers, enemy or friendly, must be treated the same.

Second, the officer threw a flash-bang directly into a group of people trying to carry him away for medical treatment. Here's the Military guidance on that decision: Medical Personnel Considered out of combat if they exclusively engaged in medical duties. (GWS, art. 24.) Doctors, surgeons, nurses, chemists, stretcher-bearers, medics, corpsman, and orderlies, etc..., who are “exclusively engaged” in the direct care of the wounded and sick.

speaking of debt collection and debt collectors...,

NYTimes | On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

twits tweeting telling on themselves...,

Nature | US intelligence agency aims to forecast unrest by reading the runes of social media. It is every government's dream: a system that can predict future events such as riots, political upheavals and the outbreak of wars. Last week, a collection of academics and private businesses was scrambling to meet the deadline for proposals for research aiming to do just that.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the US intelligence community, is sponsoring the work under the Open Source Indicators (OSI) programme. The three-year project, with an unspecified budget, is designed to gather digital data from a range of sources, from traffic webcams to television to Twitter. The goal, according to IARPA, is to provide the intelligence community with predictions of social and political events that can "beat the news".

Initially, the OSI project will focus on Latin America, which has abundant publicly available data and offers a convenient test bed for researchers' models. Those models will build on strategies that have already shown promise for predicting disease outbreaks and consumer behaviour, and which are becoming increasingly popular with US national security agencies (see Nature 471, 566–568; 2011).

Indeed, the OSI project is one of many being sponsored by the US national security community, which seeks to meld mathematics, computer science and economics with the social sciences, creating a new field of social and political forecasting that has often been compared to Isaac Asimov's concept of 'psychohistory'.

At the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, computer scientist Peter Gloor has been working with colleagues to build models that can predict consumer behaviour, such as ticket sales for Hollywood films, using a range of online sources including social media. "We're up to 90% accuracy" for predicting box-office returns, says Gloor, who is part of a team applying for OSI funding.