retail giants are dying and with them the malls they anchor...,

cnbc | Get ready for the next era in retail—one that will be characterized by far fewer shops and smaller stores. 

On Tuesday, Sears said that it will shutter its flagship store in downtown Chicago in April. It's the latest of about 300 store closures in the U.S. that Sears has made since 2010. The news follows announcements earlier this month of multiple store closings from major department stores J.C. Penney and Macy's.

Further signs of cuts in the industry came Wednesday, when Target said that it will eliminate 475 jobs worldwide, including some at its Minnesota headquarters, and not fill 700 empty positions.
Experts said these headlines are only the tip of the iceberg for the industry, which is set to undergo a multiyear period of shuttering stores and trimming square footage.

Shoppers will likely see an average decrease in overall retail square footage of between one-third and one-half within the next five to 10 years, as a shift to e-commerce brings with it fewer mall visits and a lesser need to keep inventory stocked in-store, said Michael Burden, a principal with Excess Space Retail Services.

california drought as seen by kids from the edge of space

The Sierra mountain range as seen from the edge of space in January of 2014. The dry basin at the bottom of the photo is Owens Lake. (Earth to Sky Calculus /January 17, 2014)

LATimes | California's water problem is so bad you can see it from the edge of space.

In the images in the above gallery, some taken at an altitude of 100,000 feet, you can see just how little snow the Sierra Nevada have this year, even though we are halfway through the winter season.

On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown officially declared a drought emergency in the state, and asked residents to reduce their water use by at least 20%.

The simultaneously gorgeous and disturbing images were captured by a group of high school students from Bishop, Calif., who have been launching large, helium-filled balloons up into the stratosphere on a regular basis for three years.

(If you click all the way through, you will get to see an image of a balloon at the moment it popped.)

The goal of these flights is to learn more about the top of the Earth's atmosphere -- how it is affected by solar activity, and what microbes live up there, for example. But on a flight earlier this month, video cameras attached to the balloon also caught images of the Sierra and Death Valley in the midst of one of the worst droughts in the state in decades.

"We had a flight almost exactly a year ago, and at that time the mountains were almost completely covered in snow," said Amelia Phillips, 17. "In the recent images very few mountains were covered with snow. We knew we were in a drought, but it wasn't clear to us before we saw the pictures how bad it is." 

Michael White, 17, another member of the balloon-flying club called Earth to Sky Calculus, said he found the images troubling. "Given that last year was also a low snow year, it is very disconcerting," he said.

The student group is lead by Tony Phillips, an astronomer who runs the website Spaceweather.com.

In one of the images above, you will see a picture of the balloons' launch pad -- a site about 15 miles southwest of Bishop. "For those of us who have been doing these balloon flight for years that is a really striking drought photograph for us," said Phillips. "Those mountains should be covered in snow by now."

baltic dry index: shipping of major raw materials sees worst slide since start of the financial crisis

 

zerohedge | Despite 'blaming' the drop in the cost of dry bulk shipping on Colombian coal restrictions, it seems increasingly clear that the 40% collapse in the Baltic Dry Index since the start of the year is more than just that. While this is the worst start to a year in over 30 years, the scale of this meltdown is only matched by the total devastation that occurred in Q3 2008. Of course, the mainstream media will continue to ignore this dour index until it decides to rise once again, but for now, 9 days in a row of plunging prices is yet another canary in the global trade coalmine and suggests what inventory stacking that occurred in Q3/4 2013 is anything but sustained. Baltic Dry costs are the lowest in 4 months, down 40% for the start of the year, and the worst start to a year in over 30 years... Fist tap Dale.

harpex: shipping of finished goods appears to be heading toward flatline...,

										1. Weekly Rate Assessments We shall publish on a weekly basis, charter rate levels in US Dollars for the following different size / specification of container ships. These assessments are basis 6-12 month fixtures and are based on actual fixtures reported or heard fixed in the container market each week.   700 teu gearless abt   700 teu abt   400@14t gearless abt     8400 dwt abt 100 reefer abt 17kn 1100 teu geared abt 1100 teu abt   700@14t geared abt   14000 dwt abt 200 reefer abt 19kn 1700 teu geared abt 1700 teu abt 1100@14t geared abt   22000 dwt abt 200 reefer abt 19kn 2500 teu geared abt 2500 teu abt 1850@14t geared abt   34000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 2700 teu gearless abt 2700 teu abt 2100@14t gearless abt   37000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 3500 teu gearless abt 3500 teu abt 2400@14t gearless abt   42000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 4250 teu gearless abt 4250 teu abt 2800@14t gearless abt   50000 dwt abt 400 reefer abt 23kn 6500 teu gearless abt 6500 teu abt 4900@14t gearless abt   82000 dwt abt 500 reefer abt 24kn 8500 teu gearless abt 8500 teu abt 6350@14t gearless abt 100000 dwt abt 700 reefer abt 25kn We believe these newly published rates will create a powerful research tool for our clients and readers who can now do the following: Track the actual time charter rates for a particular size of ship over various time frames within the last 10 years. Compare the market fluctuations in the charter rates of different ship sizes, for example, compare the rates for 1700 teu ships against the rates for 2500 teu ships over the last 5 years to see whether there is a correlation between rate changes over such a period. Track the actual time charter rates for various sizes of ship and also show their respective moving averages. 2. Harpex Index Given the changes above, we have decided to amend the methodology used to calculate our index. Our Harpex index was originally developed in 2004 and we feel now is the right time to update and improve the method of calculation in order to better represent the current container charter market. Based on the new methodology we shall be providing an index figure each calendar week, as we did previously. The index will now be based on rate assessments taken from following seven classes of ship, rather than the previous eight classes of ship.   700 teu gearless abt   700 teu abt   400@14t gearless abt   8400 dwt abt 100 reefer abt 17kn 1100 teu geared abt 1100 teu abt   700@14t geared abt 14000 dwt abt 200 reefer abt 19kn 1700 teu geared abt 1700 teu abt 1100@14t geared abt 22000 dwt abt 200 reefer abt 19kn 2500 teu geared abt 2500 teu abt 1850@14t geared abt 34000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 2700 teu geared abt 2700 teu abt 2100@14t gearless abt 37000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 3500 teu gearless abt 3500 teu abt 2400@14t gearless abt 42000 dwt abt 300 reefer abt 22kn 4250 teu gearless abt 4250 teu abt 2800@14t gearless abt 50000 dwt abt 400 reefer abt 23kn We have also retroactively calculated the index for the last ten years based on this new methodology and figures for the last three years are available on the website. We hope everyone finds this useful and should anyone have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.

 

sectarianism: these humans purportedly becoming less violent - with one exception

alternet |  Studies demonstrate the world is becoming less violent, and that human warfare is on the decline. There is one aspect of the human existence, however, that continues to ignite humans to commit violence and atrocities against fellow humans. A major new study published by the Pew Research Center [3] shows that religious hostilities reached a 6-year high in 2012.

Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.

Religiosity, however, continues to play its part in promoting in-group out-group thinking, which casts the difference between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, observes, “Faith inspires violence in two ways. First, people often kill other human beings because they believe the creator of the universe wants them to do it…Second, far greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of their religious affiliation: Muslims side with Muslims, Protestants with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics.”

According to the Pew Research Center, a third (33%) of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29% in 2011 and 20% as of mid-2007. Notably, religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas, with the most dramatic increases felt in areas still reeling from the effects of the 2010-11 political uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

The study demonstrates there has been a sizable increase in the share of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities involving religion. “Incidents of abuse targeting religious minorities were reported in 47% of countries in 2012, up from 38% in 2011, and 24% in the baseline year of the study (2007).” Pew cites several illustrations of religious minorities being attacked by the perpetrators of the majority faith. In Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, for example, monks attacked Muslim and Christian places of worship in April 2012. Several worshippers were killed in an attack on a Coptic Orthodox Church in Libya, which according to the U.S. State Department was the first attack on a church in Libya since the 2011 revolution.

“One of the common things we see in that group of countries is sectarian conflict,” said Brian J. Grim, senior researcher at Pew Research. “In Pakistan, even though minority religious groups like Christians face hostility, there’s also inter-Muslim conflict between Sunnis, Shias and Ahmadi Muslims.”

sectionalism

jamesrmaclean | Sectionalism has been used in two closely related senses. One refers to a regional division, such as a group of states (i.e., divisions of a country) or provinces. The other refers to a division of society that makes its money a certain way. The two concepts are closely related, since sectional divisions of a country usually correspond to reliable generalizations as to the source of each section's wealth.

(See main article on civil war)

Sectional interests often come into conflict, but typically the parties involved are aware of the unlikelihood of a victory in open struggle. There are a few historical cases in which sectionalism has erupted into civil war; this site takes the position that most allegedly "ethnic" or "sectarian" conflicts are actually sectional conflicts caused by a breakdown of sectional comity.

In the United States

(See main article on the Usonian Civil War)

The obvious example of a sectional conflict is the one that raged between the CSA and the northern states, or residual of the United States. Here, the most compelling difference between the two sections was that one relied heavily on slavery, while the other found slavery threatening. More schematically, one relied on the endless expansion of exactly the same system (gangs of slaves working on freshly cleared land to produce the same cash crop in ever-greater volume); the other was a diversified economy which ranged from semi-subsistence farming to large-scale industrial enterprise. The "sections" of the Union advanced fundamentally incompatible claims to the vast amounts of territory that the USA either bought, seized, or divided. Even when significant numbers of actual slaves were not present (Kansas) or never could be (as was alleged with New Mexico and Arizona), the dividing sectional principle was too basic to be resolved peacefully. A crucial claim of the Southern partisans was that, regardless of the merits of slavery, restrictions on slavery in the territories (or, for that matter, the states themselves) represented a violation of the equal protection of Southern slaveowners per se. Under slavery, captive humans in servitude were capital, but if slavery was illegal in a territory—or even in a neighboring state—then one type of capitalist was not allowed in. And while the great majority of Whites in the South owned few or no slaves, slaveowners were the politically decisive class.^[1]

The North also had sectional interests, ones that bound the East with the West: the industrial system that united them depended on a much costlier system of public works, public education, and governmental regulation. Slavery typically faired best in cases where law enforcement was cheap and crude, and dominated entirely by slaveowners. In industrial systems where there was rapid innovation and complex networks of contracts, patents, public services, and technical competition from established foreign companies. The most obvious example was tariff policy and public improvements, but additional issues concerned the nationalization of state debts, federal control over banking and securities, and land policy.^[2] The fundamental difference was that the survival of the Northern economy required a reliable foundation for rapid technological innovation and implementation, while the South was highly sensitive to cost. Moreover, the South was threatened by the relative rise of the North as a political counterweight.

After the Civil War, the sectional interests shifted somewhat. The South was still hypersensitive to costs, such as taxes and rising wages; the North was still responding to rapid changes in technology and high fixed costs for plants. But Southern planters could no longer control the entire political structure as easily as before; there were now rival bases of political power (between 1868 and 1898, African American voters were such a base). At the same time, the interests in the North who had demanded a strong government hand in the economy to ensure the creation of power industrial corporations, by the end of Reconstruction, were increasingly at swords points with the burgeoning populism of their workforce and small farmers. Tariffs were high, but labor was militant and populist democracy was corrupt; while the robber barons had tended to champion a strong government leading up to the Grant Administration, and bribed the one they had on a prodigious scale, they were faced with a sinkhole of malfeasance.^[3] In response, they favored the creation of the firm as surrogate to the state: the modern industrial corporation. This was to be the ultimate counterforce to social democracy in the United States, and it meshed with the sectional interests of the planters. Not only could planters form a permanent coalition with the corporate elites to defeat social democratic legislation at the federal level, they could also continue to use their rising economic hegemony as a unifying enemy for poor Southern Whites. The South remained totally dominated by one political party (the Democrats) until the late 1960's, but in Southern states the party actually housed multiple rival factions; the politically conservative faction sided with Northern Republicans, while the populist faction sided with the (weak) Northern Democrats.

Since the time of the Civil Rights Movement, sectional alignments have evolved further; they still have a decidedly economic orientation, with the Democratic Party corresponding to industry and the Republican Party corresponding to resource extraction, farming, financial services, and business management. Casual observers usually assume the Democratic Party is liberal (and hypocritical), while the Republican Party is conservative (and sincere). In reality, both parties are conservative, but oriented towards different sectional interests. The Democratic Party favors public education, public works, and a robust regulatory regime; the Republican Party sometimes claims it does also, but its position towards all three is hectoring and unsupportive. The Republican Party, in turn, favors minimal government role in the economy, and a compensatory maximal role of the state in enforcing market incentives. These are compatible with the "night watchman state" popular among extractive industries such as factory farming, mining, and fossil fuels; and the punitive enforcement of incentives popular with financial services and business management (as a separate political section).

 

silent political privilege

slate |  The excuses are weak. In the words of the committee report, “it is difficult to believe that Holder’s judgment would be so monumentally poor that he could not understand how he was being manipulated by Jack Quinn.” And presidential pardons don’t just slip through like this, especially not pardons of wanted fugitives. If Holder had followed protocols and made sure the Justice Department was looped in, there’s no way that Rich would have been pardoned. Hundreds of thousands of men sit in American prisons doing unconscionably long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. DNA tests routinely turn up cases of unjust convictions. But Marc Rich bought his pardon with money and access, and the committee’s response to that purchase is worth quoting in full:

The President abused one his most important powers, meant to free the unjustly convicted or provide forgiveness to those who have served their time and changed their lives. Instead, he offered it up to wealthy fugitives whose money had already enabled them to permanently escape American justice. Few other abuses could so thoroughly undermine public trust in government.

But there was no real lasting damage to trust in government, or to anyone’s reputation, really. Bill Clinton retired to wealth and adulation. Eric Holder got his wish and eventually became attorney general. And Marc Rich died a wealthy man in Switzerland. He never came back to the United States—if he had returned, he would have been subject to civil suits, which would have ended up costing him money—but he was able to live out the rest of his life without having to worry about being arrested, having bought his freedom from craven politicians who were only too willing to sell.

silent technical privilege

slate |  It frustrates me that people not in the majority demographic often need to be tough as nails to succeed in this field, constantly bearing the lasting effects of thousands of micro-inequities. Psychology Today notes that according to one researcher, Mary Rowe:

[M]icro-inequities often had serious cumulative, harmful effects, resulting in hostile work environments and continued minority discrimination in public and private workplaces and organizations. What makes micro-inequities particularly problematic is that they consist in micro-messages that are hard to recognize for victims, bystanders and perpetrators alike. When victims of micro-inequities do recognize the micro-messages … it is exceedingly hard to explain to others why these small behaviors can be a huge problem.

In contrast, people who look like me can just kinda do programming for work if we want, or not do it, or switch into it later, or out of it again, or work quietly, or nerd-rant on how Ruby sucks or rocks or whatever, or name-drop monads. And nobody will make remarks about our appearance, about whether we're truly dedicated hackers, or how our behavior might reflect badly on “our kind” of people. That's silent technical privilege.

Ideally, we want to spur interest in young people from underrepresented demographics who might never otherwise think to pursue CS or STEM studies. There are great people and organizations working toward this goal. Although I think that increased and broader participation is critical, a more immediate concern is reducing attrition of those already in the field. For instance, according to a 2012 STEM education report to the president:

[E]conomic forecasts point to a need for producing, over the next decade, approximately 1 million more college graduates in STEM fields than expected under current assumptions. Fewer than 40% of students who enter college intending to major in a STEM field complete a STEM degree. Merely increasing the retention of STEM majors from 40% to 50% would generate three quarters of the targeted 1 million additional STEM degrees over the next decade.

That's why I plan to start by taking steps to encourage and retain those who already want to learn. So here's a thought experiment: For every white or Asian male expert programmer you know, imagine a parallel universe where they were of another ethnicity and/or gender but had the exact same initial interest and aptitude levels. Would they still have been willing to devote the 10,000-plus hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in the face of dozens or hundreds of instances of implicit discouragement they would inevitably encounter over the years? Sure, some super-resilient outliers would, but many wouldn't. Many of us would quit, even though we had the potential and interest to thrive in this field.

I hope to live in a future where people who already have the interest to pursue CS or programming don't self-select themselves out of the field. I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to have gotten in college and beyond: unimpeded opportunities to develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and fulfilling.

NFL 2014: A Whole New Meaning to the Term Super Bowl

contraction, collapse, and joblessness definitely turn weak groups violent

WaPo |  Jorge Rios, 11 rifle rounds and a silver cross decorating his black flak jacket, lost his job as a dishwasher in Tucson for driving without a license.

Santos Ramos Vargas, at 43 the oldest of this gang, got deported from Menlo Park, Calif., when he was caught carrying a pistol. 

Adolfo Silva Ramos might be with his 2-year-old daughter in Orange County rather than wearing a camouflage cap and combat boots if he hadn’t been busted selling marijuana and crystal meth while in high school there.

The two dozen men standing guard on a rutted road that cuts through these lime groves and cornfields are just one small part of a citizen militia movement spreading over the lowlands of western Mexico. But as they told their stories, common threads emerged: Los Angeles gang members. Deported Texas construction workers. Dismissed Washington state apple pickers. 

Many were U.S. immigrants who came back, some voluntarily but most often not, to the desiccated job market in the state of Michoacan and found life under the Knights Templar drug cartel that controls the area almost unlivable. They took up arms because they were financially abused by the extortion rackets run by the Templars. Because they had family killed or wounded by their enemies. Because carrying a silver-plated handgun and collecting defeated narcos’ designer cellphones as war booty is more invigorating than packing cucumbers. Because they get to feel, for once, the sensation of being in charge. 

“Everybody’s with us, all the people,” said Edgar Orozco, a 27-year-old American citizen who left his job at a Sacramento body shop nine months ago to join the fight after the Knights Templar killed his uncle and cousin. “We’re not going to disarm. Never.” 

Up and down the ranks of this group challenging the authority of the Mexican state are men who have brought their formative experiences in the United States to play in this chaotic uprising.

The movement’s top leader, surgeon Jose Manuel Mireles, lived for several years in Sacramento and worked for the Red Cross. Since he was injured in a plane crash earlier this month, much of the movement’s military leadership has fallen to a 34-year-old El Paso car salesman named Luis Antonio Torres Gonzalez, known as “El Americano” because he was born in the States. He joined the militia after he was kidnapped on a routine family vacation to Michoacan in October 2012. His relatives sold land and took up collections to pay his $150,000 ransom. 

After that, he began plotting with Mireles and others to take revenge on the Knights Templar, an uprising that began last February when residents from three towns — Tepalcatepec, Buena Vista, and La Ruana — marshaled whatever rifles and shotguns they could find and seized control. Since then, the militia has spread to more than 20 towns, nearly encircling the region’s largest city, Apatzingan, a stronghold of the drug gang. 

The Knights Templar retaliated by attacking electricity substations and burning pharmacies and convenience stores. The militia has achieved what thousands of Mexican soldiers and federal police stationed in Michoacan have failed to do: impede the operations of this powerful cartel on a large scale.

does religion turn weak groups violent?

physorg | But new research by a team of Arizona State University faculty has uncovered one factor that increases the likelihood that weak groups will engage in conflict with stronger groups, despite the likelihood of defeat. That factor is religious infusion, or the extent to which religion permeates a group's public and private life.

"Under normal circumstances, weak folks don't try to beat up on stronger folks," says Steven Neuberg, a psychology professor at ASU and the lead researcher on the project. "But there's something about a group being religiously infused that seems to make it feel somewhat invulnerable to the potential costs imposed by stronger groups, and makes it more likely to engage in costly conflict."

Their findings are published in the January issue of Psychological Science, the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. Their work was also written about in the Huffington Post last summer.

The study Neuberg and his team undertook, part of the Global Group Relations Project, spanned five continents and included nearly 100 sites around the globe. The countries included in the project together account for nearly 80 percent of the world's population.

"Our sites include the most populated countries of the world – China, India, USA, Brazil – as well as a wide range of others," says Carolyn Warner, an ASU political science professor and a co-principal investigator on the project. "This breadth and diversity is rarely the case in studies of religion and conflict."

Most research on group conflict employs one of two methods – the case study, which closely examines a particular location or situation in which conflict occurs – or a quantitative analysis of data pulled from existing studies.

For this project, researchers recruited a large, international network of social scientists with expertise on the sites selected for study. These "expert informants" responded to an Internet survey, answering a wide range of questions on a host of social, political, religious and psychological variables about the groups being studied.

Neuberg and his team examined the data to learn how religion might shape intergroup conflict around the world. They focused on two factors known to increase conflict: incompatibility of values and competition for limited resources.

They found that religious infusion was an important factor in predicting conflict in both situations. In cases where two groups held incompatible values, the groups tended to exhibit increased prejudice and discrimination against one another only if religion permeated their everyday lives.

More surprising, however, is the finding on how religious infusion affects groups competing for limited resources and power. Only the disadvantaged groups that are religiously infused are more likely to engage in violence.

scientists growing more politically active and radicalized...,

peaksurfer | "Rather than spurning financial system terrorists, Holmgren urges activists to become “terra-ists”; to directly bring down the system by thousands of acts of economic disobedience."
A ferment in the environmental movement, brewing for many years, has now bubbled up into the blogosphere. We are dipping our ladle in here to take a little taste of it, even though we are quite certain it is not done fermenting.

Bill McKibben has been stirring the wort of whether social activism can save us for many years. In Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, as in The End of Nature a quarter century earlier, he poignantly waffled, in elegant prose, between hope and despair. Since launching 350.org — “the first political action with a number for a name” — he has urged those of us with any remaining shred of hope for our children’s future, given what we now know about climate change, to step up and lay our lives on the line. Get arrested. Risk lengthy jail terms and even death to stop this atrocity. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Words to this effect we have heard much longer and louder from Derrick Jensen, another eloquent writer, the difference being that McKibben advocates for non-violence in the mold of Gandhi and King, while Jensen has no qualms about advocating violence. Naomi Klein, another stirring writer with an arrest record, calls for acts of resistance large and small. McKibben is tepid about taking on capitalism’s growth imperative, as though it were not a major contributing factor, while neither Holmgren, Klein nor Jensen have any such reservations.

Thus we are tasting many different flavors of leadership, or literary guidance, in the shaping of the nascent climate resistance movement.

Scientists themselves have been growing politically more active and radicalized, as Klein described in her October New Statesman essay. If you go back enough years you’ll find scientists like Dennis Meadows, Howard Odum and James Lovelock, all of whom correctly foresaw the impending collision between consumer civilizations and natural systems. Lovelock made a series of climate-and-society predictions that went unheeded for 20 years but hold up well in retrospect.

nytimes: all kind of obscure isht, but not a peep about getting rid of "race"...,

NYTimes |  Here are some concepts you might consider tossing out with the Christmas wrappings as you get started on the new year: human nature, cause and effect, the theory of everything, free will and evidence-based medicine.

Those are only a few of the shibboleths, pillars of modern thought or delusions — take your choice — that appear in a new compendium of essays by 166 (and counting) deep thinkers, scientists, writers, blowhards (again, take your choice) as answers to the question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement?

The discussion is posted at edge.org. Take a look. No matter who you are, you are bound to find something that will drive you crazy. 

John Brockman, the literary agent and provocateur who presides over intellectual bar fights at Edge, his online salon, has been posing questions like this one since 1998. The questions have included what you believe but can’t prove, how the Internet is changing everything, and what you’ve changed your mind about.

“It’s really the same thing every time,” Mr. Brockman said over the phone, explaining that this year’s question had arisen at a conference on the social sciences last summer and immediately engendered a debate about whether it was suitable for the Edge forum.

Mr. Brockman’s contributors, many of whom are his clients, are a rambunctious lot who are unified by little more than a passion for ideas and the love of a good fight. (He represents several New York Times writers, although not this one.) 

Some are boldface names in the pop-science firmament, like Freeman Dyson, the mathematician and futurist at the Institute for Advanced Study; Steven Pinker, the best-selling linguist from Harvard; Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and best-selling atheist from Oxford University; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who invented the notion of flow, or being completely lost in what you are doing, and who says scientists need to let go of the idea that the truths they find are good for all time and place.

“Some are indeed true,” Dr. Csikszentmihalyi says, “but others depend on so many initial conditions that they straddle the boundary between reality and fiction.”

vorticular spin polarization quantum mechanics and the sothic great provider....,

Reich of the Black Sun

sciencedaily | Orch OR was harshly criticized from its inception, as the brain was considered too "warm, wet, and noisy" for seemingly delicate quantum processes.. However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair's theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations. In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff, MD, at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.

"The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?" ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review. "This opens a potential Pandora's Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, 'proto-conscious' quantum structure of reality."

After 20 years of skeptical criticism, "the evidence now clearly supports Orch OR," continue Hameroff and Penrose. "Our new paper updates the evidence, clarifies Orch OR quantum bits, or "qubits," as helical pathways in microtubule lattices, rebuts critics, and reviews 20 testable predictions of Orch OR published in 1998 -- of these, six are confirmed and none refuted."

An important new facet of the theory is introduced. Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in megahertz) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG "beat frequencies." Despite a century of clinical use, the underlying origins of EEG rhythms have remained a mystery. Clinical trials of brief brain stimulation aimed at microtubule resonances with megahertz mechanical vibrations using transcranial ultrasound have shown reported improvements in mood, and may prove useful against Alzheimer's disease and brain injury in the future.

Lead author Stuart Hameroff concludes, "Orch OR is the most rigorous, comprehensive and successfully-tested theory of consciousness ever put forth. From a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions."

The review is accompanied by eight commentaries from outside authorities, including an Australian group of Orch OR arch-skeptics. To all, Hameroff and Penrose respond robustly.

Penrose, Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay will explore their theories during a session on "Microtubules and the Big Consciousness Debate" at the Brainstorm Sessions, a public three-day event at the Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, January 16-18, 2014. They will engage skeptics in a debate on the nature of consciousness, and Bandyopadhyay and his team will couple microtubule vibrations from active neurons to play Indian musical instruments. "Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music which is harmonic," Hameroff explains.  Fist tap John.

any given hieroglyphic symbol became a synthesis of polarities of particular oppositions of forces, held in balance by the glyph - the information - itself...,

The n.h.zed struggle - Work

artima |  For those following my blog, you know that my academic experience resulted in a degree in Physics. 

Even though I professionally engage in programming, I would prefer to play in the world of physics. Not long after graduating, a friend pointed me to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. It was a very mind-opening read, but, to cut to the chase, it got me to thinking about the nature of the universe. I've been particularly stumped with current physics thinking about particle/wave duality. There is something about it all that just "bugs" me. My brain just can't accept the human tendency to completely break ideas down into component parts. My brain just keeps taking me back to where we need to be able to hold both concepts in our mind AT THE SAME TIME. The reason why physics has been stuck with this for the last 100 years is because these really smart people haven't done it, both, at the same time...

Ok, so particle/wave is one thing... not sure exactly what that means, but it's a starting point. In a simplified essence that my brain can hold, that duality is probably more easily stated as matter/energy. I'm not sure why, but the first thought that jumped into my head was space/time. Is it the same thing as matter/energy... hmmm, yes - and no! What about other levels of organization in the universe... molecule/reaction, social groups/communication, and so on? It seems that at different levels of organization, this same pattern emerges. No matter how I conceptually zoom in on the universe, there it is. A self-similar system - a fractal. Dual natures encompassing a single phenomenon.

This fractal duality concept extends through the universe at many levels of complexity. The static aspect captures stable states, the dynamic aspect disrupts and moves between stable states within the duality's realm of influence and each aspect of the duality can morph from one aspect to the other.

Another feature I recognized is that, amazingly, the higher order complexity fractal duality "behaviors" are intertwingled with and driven by the lower order fractal duality behaviors. Viruses interact in social populations, photons interact with cellular organisms, and so on, all of these intertwinglings creating diverse new kinds of fractals!

Interestingly, the higher order dualities rarely appear to intertwingle in the lower order dualities and when they do, it is only in a limited fashion. Organization at the higher orders need to have 'knowledge' of the lower orders to effect them. The greater the knowledge (sustainable fractal pattern), the more adept the manipulation of the lower order duality.

As for knowledge, it also seems that the lower order sustainable fractal patterns are 'unaware of' the higher order fractal patterns even though they are a necessary component. Is this a "can't see the forest for the trees" effect?

Hmmm...,  Dale.

Jablonski taking a sledgehammer to race - MUCH more impressed with this woman than I am with myself...,

Edge | Race has always been a vague and slippery concept. In the mid-eighteenth century, European naturalists such as Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, and Johannes Blumenbach described geographic groupings of humans who differed in appearance. The philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant both were fascinated by human physical diversity. In their opinions, extremes of heat, cold, or sunlight extinguished human potential. Writing in 1748, Hume contended that, "there was never a civilized nation of any complexion other than white."

Kant felt similarly. He was preoccupied with questions of human diversity throughout his career, and wrote at length on the subject in a series of essays beginning in 1775. Kant was the first to name and define the geographic groupings of humans as races (in German, Rassen). Kant's races were characterized by physical distinctions of skin color, hair form, cranial shape, and other anatomical features and by their capacity for morality, self-improvement, and civilization. Kant's four races were arranged hierarchically, with only the European race, in his estimation, being capable of self-improvement.

Why did the scientific racism of Hume and Kant prevail in the face of the logical and thoughtful opposition of von Herder and others? During his lifetime, Kant was recognized as a great philosopher, and his status rose as copies of his major philosophical works were distributed and read widely in the nineteenth century. Some of Kant's supporters agreed with his racist views, some apologized for them, or—most commonly—many just ignored them. The other reason that racist views triumphed over anti-racism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that racism was, economically speaking, good for the transatlantic slave trade, which had become the overriding engine of European economic growth. The slave trade was bolstered by ideologies that diminished or denied the humanity of non-Europeans, especially Africans. Such views were augmented by newer biblical interpretations popular at the time that depicted Africans as destined for servitude. Skin color, as the most noticeable racial characteristic, became associated with a nebulous assemblage of opinions and hearsay about the inherent natures of the different races. Skin color stood for morality, character, and the capacity for civilization; it had become a meme. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of "race science." The biological reality of races was confirmed by new types of scientific evidence amassed by new types of scientists, notably anthropologists and geneticists. This era witnessed the birth of eugenics and its offspring, the concept of racial purity. The rise of Social Darwinism further reinforced the notion that the superiority of the white race was part of the natural order. The fact that all people are products of complex genetic mixtures resulting from migration and intermingling over thousands of years was not admitted by the racial scientists, nor by the scores of eugenicists who campaigned on both sides of the Atlantic for the improvement of racial quality.

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the continued proliferation of scientific treatises on race. By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found.

Despite major shifts in scientific thinking, the sibling concepts of human races and a color-based hierarchy of races remained firmly established in mainstream culture through the mid-twentieth century. The resulting racial stereotypes were potent and persistent, especially in the United States and South Africa, where subjugation and exploitation of dark-skinned labor had been the cornerstone of economic growth.

After its "scientific" demise, race remained as a name and concept, but gradually came to stand for something quite different. Today many people identify with the concept of being a member of one or another racial group, regardless of what science may say about the nature of race. The shared experiences of race create powerful social bonds. For many people, including many scholars, races cease to be biological categories and have become social groupings. The concept of race became a more confusing mélange as social categories of class and ethnicity. So race isn't "just" a social construction, it is the real product of shared experience, and people choose to identify themselves by race.

Clinicians continue to map observed patterns of health and disease onto old racial concepts such as "White", "Black" or "African American", "Asian," etc. Even after it has been shown that many diseases (adult-onset diabetes, alcoholism, high blood pressure, to name a few) show apparent racial patterns because people share similar environmental conditions, grouping by race are maintained. The use of racial self-categorization in epidemiological studies is defended and even encouraged. In most cases, race in medical studies is confounded with health disparities due to class, ethnic differences in social practices, and attitudes, all of which become meaningless when sufficient variables are taken into account.

Race's latest makeover arises from genomics and mostly within biomedical contexts. The sanctified position of medical science in the popular consciousness gives the race concept renewed esteem. Racial realists marshal genomic evidence to support the hard biological reality of racial difference, while racial skeptics see no racial patterns. What is clear is that people are seeing what they want to see. They are constructing studies to provide the outcomes they expect. In 2012, Catherine Bliss argued cogently that race today is best considered a belief system that "produces consistencies in perception and practice at a particular social and historical moment".

Race has a hold on history, but it no longer has a place in science. The sheer instability and potential for misinterpretation render race useless as a scientific concept. Inventing new vocabularies of human diversity and inequity won't be easy, but is necessary.

altruistic (prosocial) behavior in rats modulated by social experience

elifesciences | In mammals, helping is preferentially provided to members of one’s own group. Yet, it remains unclear how social experience shapes pro-social motivation. We found that rats helped trapped strangers by releasing them from a restrainer, just as they did cagemates. However, rats did not help strangers of a different strain, unless previously housed with the trapped rat. Moreover, pair-housing with one rat of a different strain prompted rats to help strangers of that strain, evidence that rats expand pro-social motivation from one individual to phenotypically similar others. To test if genetic relatedness alone can motivate helping, rats were fostered from birth with another strain and were not exposed to their own strain. As adults, fostered rats helped strangers of the fostering strain but not rats of their own strain. Thus, strain familiarity, even to one’s own strain, is required for the expression of pro-social behavior.

toward a cross-species understanding of empathy

nih | Empathy reflects the capacity of one animal to experience the emotional feelings of another, a process with many cognitive refinements in humans. Thus, investigators commonly distinguish between emotional and cognitive forms of empathy (see below) [1,2]. Studies of empathy make up a relatively new subdiscipline in neuroscience, with human brain imaging providing many correlates of relevant, higher psychological functions [3–5]. Neuroscience research on empathy in other animals has lagged far behind, but simplified animal behavior models based on emotional contagion, the presumed foundations of empathy, have been developed (Figure 1) [6]. Our goal here is to summarize such novel empirical approaches for studying empathy in laboratory rats and mice, and to highlight an integrated neuro-evolutionary strategy for understanding human empathy.

Before proceeding, we consider the meteoric rise of neuro-empathy studies during the past few decades. The study of empathy was sparse in the biologically-oriented sciences of the 20th century until E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), where constructs such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism were seen as major evolutionary explanations for individuals behaving unselfishly, even ‘altruistically’, toward others, provided that such behaviors supported the survival of one’s own genes [7]. Indeed, in Descent of Man, Darwin suggested that ‘We are thus impelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved’ and ‘those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring’ ([8], p. 88). Thus, inspired by writings of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, together with American social psychologists such as William McDougall [9] and Russian evolutionist Pyotr Kropotkin [10], a prosocial perspective emerged in late 20th century suggesting that individuals might be constitutionally more cooperative and emotionally interdependent than previously considered.

By the late 1990s human brain imaging offered robust approaches for identifying brain regions aroused during emotional states, encouraging systematic neuropsychological studies of empathy [11,12] that have now yielded diverse affective, cognitive, and social neuroscience perspectives [1,13–15]. Concurrently, primatologists recognized signs of empathic sensitivities [16,17] and now neuroscientists, inspired by classic early behavioral studies [18–20], are fashioning reliable simplified models to study the evolutionary roots of empathy (Box 1 and Figure 1)

learn some moral psychology and step outside your blindered matrix...,

edge | What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

can a blind person be a racist?

scientificamerican | Do blind people understand race? Given the vast and sprawling writings on race over the past several decades, it is surprising that scholars have not explored this question in any real depth. Race has played a profound and central role to human relationships. Yet how is it possible that this basic question has escaped deeper contemplation?

This gap in the scholarly literature and public discourse points to a fundamental assumption that we almost all make about race, its significance, and its salience. Race has been central to human relationships. Yet, there seems to be at least one thing that most people can agree upon: that race is, to a large extent, simply what is seen. There are surely many variables that inform individuals’ racial consciousness, such as religion, language, food, and culture. But race is primarily thought to be self-evidently known, in terms of reflecting the wide variation in humans’ outward appearance tied to ancestry and geographic origin such as skin color, hair texture, facial shapes, and other observable physical features. Thus, race is thought to be visually obvious; it is what you see, in terms of slotting visual engagements with human bodies into predefined categories of human difference, such as Black, White, and Asian. Given the dominant role these visual cues play in giving coherence to social categories of race, it is widely thought that race can be no more salient or significant to someone who has never been able to see than the musical genius of Mozart or Jay-Z can be salient to someone who has never been able to hear. Therefore, one plausible explanation for why questions concerning blind people’s understanding of race have not been explored is that, from a sighted person’s perspective, the answer seems painfully obvious: blind people simply cannot appreciate racial distinctions and therefore do not have any real racial consciousness.

This pervasive yet rarely articulated idea that race is visually obvious—a notion that I call “race” ipsa loquitur, or that race “speaks for itself”—has at least three components: (1) race is largely known by physical cues that inhere in bodies such as skin color or facial features, (2) these cues are thought to be self-evident, meaning that their perceptibility and salience exist apart from any mediating social or political influence, and (3) individuals without the ability to see are thought, at a fundamental level, to be unable to participate in or fully understand what is assumed to be a quintessentially ocular experience. Through this “race” ipsa loquitur trope, talking about race outside of visual references to bodily differences seems absurd, lest we all become “colorblind” in the most literal sense. Much of the ideological value in the emerging colorblindness discourse works from the idea that race and racism are problems of visual recognition, not social or political practices.

But, how much does the salience of race—in terms of it being experienced as a prominent and striking human characteristic that affects a remarkable range of human outcomes—depend upon what is visually perceived? To play upon the biblical reference to 2 Corinthians 5:7, do we simply “walk by sight” in that the racial differences are self-evident boundaries that are impressionable on their own terms? Or, is there a secular “faith” about race that produces the ability to “see” the very racial distinctions experienced as visually obvious? And if we take this idea seriously, that the visual salience of race is produced rather than merely observed, precisely what is at stake—socially, politically, and legally—when we misunderstand the process of “seeing race” as a distinctly visual rather than sociological phenomenon?

In my work, I have pushed the boundaries of the “race” ipsa loquitur trope by investigating the significance of race outside of vision. I critique the notion that race is visually obvious and suggest that the salience of race, in terms of its visually striking nature and attendant social significance, functions more by social rather than ocular mechanisms. Though perhaps counterintuitive, I begin with the hypothesis that our ability to perceive race and subsequently attach social meanings to different types of human bodies depends little on what we see; taking vision as a medium of racial truth may very well obscure a deeper understanding of precisely how race is both apprehended and comprehended, and thus how it informs our collective imaginations and personal behaviors as well as how it plays out in everyday life.

Dieudonné: banksterism IS zionism...,

Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

Joyeux anniversaire Monsieur Gurdjieff

wikipedia | George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (January 13, 1866 – October 29, 1949), also commonly referred to as Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff and G. I. Gurdjieff, was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to mid-20th century who taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff developed a method for doing so, calling his discipline "The Work"^[1] (connoting "work on oneself") or "the Method".^[2] According to his principles and instructions,^[3] Gurdjieff's method for awakening one's consciousness is different from that of the fakir, monk or yogi, so his discipline is also called (originally) the "Fourth Way".^[4] At one point, he described his teaching as being "esoteric Christianity".^[5]

At different times in his life, Gurdjieff formed and closed various schools around the world to teach The Work. He claimed that the teachings he brought to the West from his own experiences and early travels expressed the truth found in ancient religions and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives and humanity's place in the universe.^[6] The title of his third series of writings, Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', expresses the essence^{[citation needed]} of his teachings. His complete series of books is entitled All and Everything.