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January 29 2012
“Unklare” Bachblüten und “negative” Labortests
Eben habe ich mir den neuen “IGeL-Monitor” des Medizinischen Dienstes der Krankenkassen (MDS) angeschaut, wovon auch schon auf unserer Facebook-Seite die Rede war.
“IGeL”, das sind all diese “fragwürdigen”, “sinnlosen”, “umstrittenen” etc.pp. Zusatzleistungen beim Arzt, die man aus eigener Tasche bezahlen muss.
Warum sich nun ausgerechnet die GKV hier als eine Art Anwalt der gesetzlich Versicherten geriert, erschließt sich mir nicht so ganz. Das Finanzamt ist doch schließlich auch kein Anwalt unserer steuerlichen Interessen, oder?
Wie auch immer: Spaßeshalber habe ich nur mal zwei Bewertungen miteinander verglichen: Bach-Blütentherapie und Toxoplasmose-Test bei Schwangeren.
Zu Dr. Bachs blühendem (aber natürlich “intuitivem”) Unsinn schreiben die MDS-Experten völlig richtig:
Sie ist nicht Bestandteil der naturwissenschaftlich fundierten Medizin, da ihr mehrere Annahmen zugrunde liegen, die nicht nur spekulativ sind, sondern den gesicherten naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen widersprechen.”
Klingt nach einem vernichtenden Urteil, oder?
Weit gefehlt: Der Quatsch erhält beim “IGeL-Monitor” die schmeichelhafte Bewertung “unklar”.
Nützt nix – schadet nix?
Von wegen: „Ein Arzt in Sonthofen setzt die Bach-Blütentherapie auch bei Krebspatienten ein, und zwar, um ihre seelischen Probleme zu beheben, die seiner Ansicht nach für die Krebsentstehung sowie das Krebswachstum verantwortlich sind“, führen die Prüfer in ihrem Bericht explizit aus.
Klarer kann man Quacksalberei kaum benennen – und dennoch ist eine „Glaubenslehre, die quasireligiöse Züge trägt“ (Zitat MDS), also lediglich als „unklar“ einzustufen.
Dagegen pappt am Toxoplasmose-Suchttest in der Schwangeren-Vorsorge das Ramsch-Etikett „tendenziell negativ“ – was der schlechtesten von drei möglichen Kategorisierungen entspricht.
Wie ist das möglich?
Wir lesen weiter: „Insgesamt ist die Studienlage unbefriedigend. Die komplexe Testsituation, die wenig aussagekräftigen Studien sowie die widersprüchlichen Ergebnisse der von uns gefundenen Studien ergeben insgesamt keine ausreichenden Hinweise auf einen Nutzen.“
Natürlich, es gibt kaum einen Test, der mit 100-prozentiger Sicherheit zwischen Gesunden und Erkrankten unterscheiden kann.
Allerdings hat erst Ende November die Wiener Universitätsdozentin Dr. Julia Walochnik bei einer Expertenrunde in Berlin dargelegt, dass die Einführung eines gesetzlichen Toxoplasmose-Screenings in Österreich 5000 Kindern Leben und Gesundheit gerettet habe.
Auch das deutsche Nationale Konsiliarlabor Toxoplasma hat mittlerweile auf einen Spiegel-Bericht (“Ärzte machen mit Unsinn Kasse”) zum IGeL-Monitor reagiert und die Sinnhaftigkeit des Suchtests auf Toxoplasma gondii während der Schwangerschaft unterstrichen.
Mag sein, dass das Ganze ein Expertenstreit um komplizierte Studien und Nutzenbewertungen ist, der in allen seinen Verästelungen für Laien nur schwer nachvollziehbar ist.
Aber wer die Bach-Blütentherapie höher bewertet als einen modernen Labortest, der ist eigentlich auch nicht so richtig ernst zu nehmen.
Zum Weiterlesen:
- Scharlatane kriegen Orden, Forscher wandern aus, Welt-Online am 26. Januar 2012
Book Review: Race Against The Machines
Are we on the verge of totally new social and economic paradigm brought about by the increasing power of computation in our machines?
“The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring.”
So say Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in their new book, Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. We suppose it would be obvious to state that in the Western world, there is at present a major economic crisis that affects the livelihood of all in those countries. As to why this is happening, that is a less obvious answer. According to the authors, there are three main schools of thought which would explain our economic woes.
The Cyclical Explanation
Paul Krugman
This view has been the common explanation which has explained economic slumps in the past. This view states that the economy is simply not growing fast enough to put people back to work. Of course if one really thinks about it, this is not really an explanation, since it begs the question as to why the economy is not growing fast enough. This positions’s champion is Paul Krugman. In an article published in the New York Times, on September 26, 2010, titled, Structure of Excuses, he gives his reasons. We do not know if Krugman was referring to modern computational power as the “structural” problems he speaks about in the article, but it sounds similar. Krugman calls structural unemployment a “fake problem.” This structural problem espouses that Americans do not have the skills required for the jobs that are available to them. What Krugman is debunks is the idea that there is a growing job market that requires special new skills. He cites a report stating that there is no growth in any market, structural or not. Another report cited by Krugman states this,
The predominant, and in our view correct, narrative to describe this situation
has been that the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting loss of wealth led to sharp cutbacks in
consumer spending. The loss of consumers, along with financial market chaos brought on by the bubble’s burst, also led
to a collapse in business investment. As consumer spending and business investment dried up, severe job loss followed.
Further, even after economic output stopped contracting (in roughly the middle of 2009), its subsequent growth has not
been nearly rapid enough to create the jobs needed to even keep pace with normal population growth, let alone to put
the backlog of workers who lost their jobs during the collapse back to work.
This view sounds very much like the typical explanation given in major media outlets. The last mentioned report also goes on to question the high growth of certain types of jobs. Speaking of the this structural view the report states,
This implies that unemployment difficulties reside in the workers who are unemployed: they either are located in the wrong place or do not have the required skills for the currently available jobs. If this is so, then macroeconomic tools such as fiscal policy (spending or tax cuts) or monetary policy can not address our unemployment or long-term unemployment situation. Surprisingly, perhaps amazingly, there is no systematic empirical evidence for such assertions.
The Stagnation Explanation
Tyler Cowen
This view is championed by Tyler Cowen‘s book, The Great Staganation. Cowen states,
…the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think.
We provide here a visual explanation by Cowen of this position. If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://youtu.be/_93CXTt2K7c.
We found it fascinating that Cowen in the middle of defending his point of view makes the following statement,
There is a second major difference between the internet and the previous arrival of low-hanging fruit, and it has to do with employment. The major internet companies perform a lot of their miracles by information technology and not so much by human hands.
Cowen seems not to see the great import of this statement. To our astonishment, he repeats his point but via a different route,
A recent study found that the iPod—a nearly ubiquitous device—has created 13,920 jobs in the United States, including engineering and retail. That’s a pretty small number.
This new age, by his own admission is one where machines are taking the place of people in the job market. He mentions this at several more places in the chapter but does not seem to grasp the implications of his observation. Cowen seems to contradict himself at this point when he points out that,
At the same time that a lot of people are out of work, some of the cutting-edge companies can’t find and hire the people they need. We’re facing a fundamental skills mismatch, and the U.S. labor market is increasingly divided into a group that can keep up with technical work and a group that can’t.
This kind of argument would seem to be more in line with what Krugman calls the structural problem discussed earlier. What Cowen does not answer is, if there is no innovative growth in American industry, then how is it possible that they are growing and cannot find the employees they need? To us it seems, he cannot have it both ways. We should note that Brynjolfsson and McAfee have also noted this inconsistency in Cowen’s argument.
End Of Work Argument
Jeremy Rifkin
The main thrust of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s book is to pursue this last thesis -our traditional definition of work in society may be coming to an end. The authors do not mean by this that innovation will end. This argument is not new with the authors. They give credit to Jeremy Rifkin, who in 1995 wrote a book titled, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. Rifkin is quoted by the authors of this book,
In the years ahead,” Rifkin wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilization ever closer to a near-workerless world. … Today, all … sectors of the economy … are experiencing technological displacement, forcing millions onto the unemployment roles.” Coping with this displacement, he wrote, was “likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century.
Rifkin has pursued this idea with a further book titled, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World.
We include a short video that will adequately explain Rifkin’s position. If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://youtu.be/s-BLH_9MvCE.
So do the authors have an idea of how things will turn out? Yes they take a position. They are defending the third position. But they are not total pessimists.
…we agree with the end-of-work crowd that computerization is bringing deep changes, but we’re not as pessimistic as they are. We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race against the machine, a fact reflected in today’s employment statistics.
We heartily recommend this well reasoned and well documented book for your purchase. It deals with issues that are vital to the future of the human race.
This article was originally posted at the PlusUltraTech blog.
Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay
Two weeks ago, the Court of The Hague ruled that Ziggo, the largest ISP in the Netherlands, and competitor XS4ALL have to block access to The Pirate Bay.
The ruling was the first to bring broad censorship to the Netherlands and in a response XS4ALL said they were “bitterly disappointed”, noting that fundamental rights had been traded for “commercial interests.”
For BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group that started the court case, the verdict wasn’t quite enough. The Hollywood-backed group wasted no time issuing requests for other ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay as well. Or else.
After internal discussions two large ISPs – KPN and T-Mobile – are now on record stating they will not honor BREIN’s request. This means that millions of Internet users in the Netherlands will still be able to access The Pirate Bay without having to go through proxies.
Speaking out against censorship, both Internet providers state they will only block The Pirate Bay following a court order and that innovation is a better way to deal with the problem of piracy.
“KPN sees the blocking of websites as a drastic measure for which a court order is required,” KPN said in a statement, adding that innovation is needed to curb piracy.
“KPN doesn’t believe a blockade is the right solution. What is needed are robust, attractive business models that are easy to use and offer a fair deal to both producers and consumers of content.”
T-Mobile also said that it will only respond to court orders, while it emphasized the value of an open Internet.
“T-Mobile strongly supports an open Internet and is fundamentally against shutting off access to websites. Dutch law is very clear when it comes to blocking access to the Internet. T-Mobile will only respond to a court ruling, not to demands from a private party such as BREIN.”
If BREIN follows up on threats that were made earlier, both ISPs can expect to be sued by the anti-piracy outfit in the near future. Ziggo and XS4ALL, meanwhile, are expected to enforce the blockade this coming Wednesday, February 1st.
Whether the blockade will have much of an effect is yet to be seen. Judging from what happened in other countries when the site was blocked, users will quickly find ways to route around the blockade to regain access to the world’s largest torrent site.
Source: Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay
Edzard gegen Charles
Edzard Ernst erforscht die Alternativmedizin mit wissenschaftlichen Methoden – und ernüchternden Resultaten. Damit hat er sich viele Feinde gemacht, bis ins britische Königshaus. Als seine Universität ihn loswerden wollte, kam es zum Machtkampf.
weiterlesen im Originalartikel
Der Preis des Wissens – Wissenschaftler gegen Elsevier
Elsevier ist einer der bekanntesten Wissenschaftsverlage, der unter anderem The Lancet und Bücher wie “Gray’s Anatomy” (Der Serienname ist ein Wortspiel auf dieses Standardwerk) vertreibt. Elsevier ist schon seit einiger Zeit in der Kritik, wegen des hohen Preises für Wissen, den Geschäftspraktiken und neuerdings der Unterstützung von SOPA/PIPA.
Der schon länger gärende Konflikt, Scilogs schrieb z.B. im letzten August über “Wissenschaftsverlage – die Blutsauger des Wissenschaftsbetriebs”, geht nun in die nächste Runde.
Tim Gowers, ein bekannter Mathematiker und Gewinner der Fields-Medaille meinte jetzt, dass es genug sei und startete einen Boykottaufruf gegen den Verlag. Auf einer von ihm ins Leben gerufenen Webseite The Cost of Knowledge kann man sich dem Boykott anschließen und erklären, dass man nicht mehr mit Elsevier zusammenarbeiten will.
Gründe dafür gibt es einige:
* Elseviers Preispolitik
* den “Bündelzwang”, d.h. Universitäten müssen Journale abonnieren die sie gar nicht wollen
* Bibliotheken/Universitäten die sich aufregen, werden einfach nicht mehr beliefert
* Die Unterstützung des Research Works Act
* Unterstützung von SOPA/PIPA
* Drangsalierung mit Klagen und Klagsdrohungen
* Elsevier publiziert auch “falsche Journale”, die mit Werbung gefüllt sind
Im Augenblick haben 1382 Wissenschaftler aus aller Welt die Boykotterklärung unterschrieben und es werden täglich mehr. Es geht dabei aber nicht unbedingt um den Kampf gegen einen Verlag, es ist der Kampf um Offene Wissenschaft. Es geht um alle Wissenschaftsverlage und den Umgang mit Wissen, mit den neuen Technologien hat sich die Welt gewandelt.
Historisch gesehen waren Journale wie The Lancet von unschätzbarem Wert. Sie haben Wissen in der ganzen Welt verbreitet. Noch vor 20 Jahren hatte man kaum eine Möglichkeit neue Informationen zu erhalten. Die Wissenschaftsverlage haben dieses Wissen transportiert und den Wissenschaftlern zugänglich gemacht. Ein Service von unschätzbarem Wert.
Doch seitdem hat sich die Welt gewandelt. Mit dem Internet werden Informationen in Lichtgeschwindigkeit um die Welt transportiert. Arbeiten, die z.B. auf arXiv publiziert werden, sind frei zugänglich.
Und damit wurde alles anders. Wo früher die Verlage Verbreiter von Wissen waren, den Zugang geschaffen haben, halten sie es jetzt zurück. Der Service, der früher gutes Geld wert war, wird heute immer belastender.
Die Wissenschaftsverlage, die früher Wissen verbreitet und jedem zugänglich gemacht haben, halten es nun als Geisel und benutzen die existierenden Publikationen um Druck auf Universitäten und Bibliotheken auszuüben.
Weitere Informationen findet man in Tim Govers Blog und in John Baez Blog, lesenswert auch die Kommentare und Reaktionen darauf. Als Wissenschaftler, der sich dem Protest anschließen möchte, kann man das auf der Webseite The Cost of Knowledge tun.
“Edzard gegen Charles” in der neuen “Zeit”
Ein ausführliches Porträt von Prof. Edzard Ernst ist jetzt bei Zeit-Online erschienen:
Es ist schon Mittag, aber noch ruhig. Keine Hassmails von Homöopathen, keine Briefe von Anwälten, kein Ärger mit Prinz Charles. Aber das kann ja noch kommen. [...]
Die beiden sind Stellvertreter in einer Auseinandersetzung, die mit zunehmender Aggressivität geführt wird. Die Fronten verlaufen quer durch politische Parteien und Bevölkerung, in England wie in Deutschland. Es geht um Geld, Macht und Leid, um Lug und Trug. Wirkt die Homöopathie besser als ein Placebo? Sind Akupunktur und Chiropraktik gefährlich? Lässt sich die Alternativmedizin überhaupt wissenschaftlich erforschen? Und wer soll das alles bezahlen?”
Zum Weiterlesen:
- Edzard gegen Charles, Die Zeit am 28. Januar 2012
- Prinz Charles, der Schlangenölverkäufer, GWUP-Blog am 26. Juli 2011
- Quo vadis, Alternativmedizin? GWUP-Blog am 3. Juni 2011
- Werden Sie Scharlatan! Skeptiker 1/2005
January 28 2012
Es hört nicht auf, es wird nur anders
Vor zwei Jahren gelangte der Missbrauchsskandal in der katholischen Kirche mit all seinen Details an die Öffentlichkeit – ein Betroffener schildert, wie schwer es ist, das Erlebte zu verarbeiten und warum die Reaktion der Kirche für ihn ein zweites Verbrechen ist.
weiterlesen im Originalartikel
“ One day I stopped to smell some beautiful white roses and stumbled down a hole. Now I'm stuck. ”— Kallisti
Konspirologen: Hauptsache “anders”
Diese Woche ging es bei Astrodicticum simplex um die Verschwörungstheorie der “kalten Sonne”.
Bizarr – aber es gibt Leute, die so etwas glauben. Und das sind nicht einmal wenige.
Aber warum?
Dazu findet sich in dem Beitrag eine erhellende konspirologische Selbstaussage:
Das braucht man auch nicht groß zu erklären, da es nur logisch erscheint.”
Heute berichtet nun Spiegel-Online über eine Studie in einem englischen Fachjournal für Sozialpsychologie:
Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.”
Das entscheidende (wenn auch nicht übermäßig überraschende) Ergebnis der Forscher:
Völlig egal, wie irre, widersprüchlich oder versimplifizierend eine Verschwörungstheorie ist: Hauptsache, sie passt zur Grundannahme.
Oder, mit anderen Worten: Zu dem, was man sich ohnehin “immer schon mal so gedacht” hat und was den eigenen Überzeugungen beziehungsweise Erwartungen entspricht.
Klar, diese Erkenntnis hatten wir auch schon mal hier im Blog:
Verschwörungstheoretische Deutungen erlangen dann breite Popularität, wenn sie mit ihren Inhalten an bereits bestehende Mentalitäten, Ressentiments und Vorurteile anknüpfen können.”
Heißt zum Beispiel:
- Die Amis lügen bekanntlich grundsätzlich (siehe Watergate, Irak-Krieg etc.) – also haben sie auch die Mondlandung gefakt.
- Die Amis sind bekanntlich grundsätzlich böse (siehe Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan etc.) – also haben sie auch 11/9 inszeniert.
Und so weiter, und so fort.
Auch an dem aktuellen Kälteeinbruch ist natürlich die eiskalte Sonne schuld. Oder die Chemtrails. Oder der versiegende Golfstrom. Oder sonstwas.
Zum Weiterlesen:
- Winter: Verschwörer stellen uns kalt, GWUP-Blog am 1. Januar 2011
Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land
Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock.
But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity. The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law.
FBI, arrests by huge numbers of police, enormous cash and asset seizures overseas, reward program scrutiny, knowledge of payouts to persistent uploaders of infringing content. Extradition. These are things that changed the game.
“If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.”
For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly.
Earlier this week we documented the drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs. Later we showed how file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity.
In the space of a week and the MegaUpload shutdown aside, huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts.
And this is where it gets quite interesting.
For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent.
But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too.
For the operators of these linking sites and their uploaders, this week has been very hard work indeed. For some sites it was all too much and the shutters have simply come down.
The problem, it seems, is money. While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. The cyberlocker scene is more complex and incestuous, with revenue being generated in a handful of basic ways on both legal and illegal content.
Through reward programs, uploaders get paid on the number of times people subsequently download content. Equally, ‘release’ sites can upload the content themselves and get paid like a regular uploader when people download. Reward programs are important for cyberlockers too since they attract customers away from competitors and also give them an incentive to supply content.
Release sites and warez forums send users to cyberlockers to get content and when they get there they are faced with a choice. Download a little, relatively slowly but for free, or pay for a premium account and get lots as quickly as possible. In many cases choosing the first option means that cyberlockers also make more money from advertising.
When various sites shut their rewards programs this week, those uploading purely for the money were hit hard. In fact, many who had cash mounting up in their accounts lost it all – some cyberlockers simply kept the accrued money. While the ‘victims’ were livid, those who hate financially motivated ‘sharing’ commented that justice had been served.
But while it’s clear that some uploaders, often young and in less well-off countries, are ‘sharing’ small time for a few bucks, for some the reward payouts are more important. For many release sites, those rewards pay the server bills.
“We needed the payout and when [filehost name redacted on request] shut down sharing we were all but finished,” one admin of a release site told TorrentFreak. “90% of our content was hosted there. Then they deleted all our files and closed the account. They won’t even speak with us about it. A whole year’s work gone. We shut at the end of the month.”
But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are and it’s evident from the links being posted on release blogs that the upload-for-cash crew have noticed them quickly.
Things, however, are still in a state of flux. Some of the filehosts still paying out appear to be offering tiered reward systems with just about every country in the world getting a reasonable deal but with the United States right at the very bottom.
Another interesting rumor, which at the time of writing we have been unable to confirm, is that one of the filehosts who banned 3rd party downloads earlier this week is now re-enabling them. This is something to look out for. Without 3rd party links being operational users are extremely unlikely to sign up for a premium account and this is where the cyberlockers can make good money.
So finally, one has to ask whether the MegaUpload shutdown has damaged the Internet piracy infrastructure. Providing an answer is not easy.
The amount of material coming online has not really reduced – content feeding from ‘The Scene’ is business as usual. Torrent sites are watching on closely, but the public ones tend not to host content, their users do. Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content.
Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.
Source: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land
I Am Not Afraid of Islam
Make no bones about it: Faith is evil. Faith is the absence of vigilance and ethics necessitates vigilance. And so faith, in any form, is flagrantly unethical, immoral, evil… whatever terminology you prefer. But it’s an evil in the same sense as zombies. More bumbling than diabolical. And the fact of the matter is almost everyone these days has a little bit of the zombie juice inside of them.
In 2001 the technoprogressive and cyberlibertarian dreams of the 90s were largely on ice. The hacker community moribund. Everywhere the future seemed in retreat. For two years popular culture had dwelled on the turn of the millenium and the uncontroversial conclusion was nothing had lived up to snuff. To those who had been actively struggling in broad spheres the postponement of such predictions and dreams hardly needed explanation; hands-on engagement brings with it an appreciation of the complexity to culture and society in all its many fractal arenas. But to a certain class of people, junior technocrats mostly, who had grown up taking comfort growing up from prophesies of an assured gleaming rationalist future, this was an ecclesiastical betrayal that required a simple answer. And then the towers came down.
The core of the internet has always been atheist and so to was the fledgling bloggosphere in 2001. The difference was mostly one of age and cynical elitism. It takes a while to develop a finer appreciation of the underlying mechanisms of our society, there’s simply too much going on. “Why” can be a steep learning curve; explorations don’t deliver any framing narratives quickly. So much easier to stay at the surface with “People are stupid.” In this way, in that way. Slowly collect and label little discrete failings apparent in others, each one with attendant narrative implications. As parts of the picture fill in so to does a reflexive defense of certain institutions and assumptions.
9/11 was a pivotal paradigm-shift for a host of reasons from bewildered suburban housewives with existential vertigo to jetsetting corporate executives shocked that old fashioned things like national governments hadn’t been sufficiently sidelined. But the technocratic hordes reading instapundit, poised on the foundations of our embryonic information society, ended up playing no small part. Finally the world could be epic again. A clash of civilizations! Their conservatism was fancy devices and Janes and Stratfor, white, male and upper-middle-class, or at least aspirationally inclined to those things; they had little to fear from the conservatism of George W Bush, then merely an ineffective moderate. America was a bastion of secularism and gleaming champion of initiative, as atheists they convinced themselves it was the only tool worth a damn. And Islam was the devil. The heart of everything holding us back from an Asimovian paradise.
It’s so sad that one of the most potent cultural impetuses to the last decade of imperialism could be so blatantly fucking ridiculous.
Islam is a joke. (Christianity is a joke too.)
There are many forms of faith possible in life; religions only happen at the point when metaphorical flesh is dripping off a fractured logical skeleton and the insides have already rotted away.
Anyone and everyone capable of seizing any sort of power must at least retain enough brains to machievelli. It’s impossible to keep enough of a dynamic mind to look out for threats and manage the social complexities that interface with a religion without taking a step back from that religion and grounding yourself in less bulky faiths and more explicit selfishness. Our leaders from Ahmadinejad to Pope Sidious are atheists at core, always have been. Doesn’t make them any less evil, obviously, but it does assure a certain level of rational self-interest. bin Laden was an incredible dumbass, and he was contextually fenced in terms of social capital and desire, but he wasn’t such a dumbass as to actually be religious in his heart of hearts. He wasn’t going to start an apocalypse.
Further, at the end of the day Al Queda was stuck working through religion. Hezbolla, The Islamic Brotherhood, etc. No matter how much some of them may want to eat all our brains they’re an innately hobbled force. They have the mass sometimes, they just don’t have the speed or dexterity.
I am not afraid of Islam for a lot of reasons. But ultimately I am not scared of Islam because unlike those privileged and content enough to sit back and wait to be ushered in to some gleaming new world those of us actually struggling to build the future have a better appreciation of the landscape and dynamic obstacles at play. You can’t judge progress by comparison to shiny pamphlets as if the future was a condo going up (Next Fall!). In the trenches, in the nitty-gritty, you can see progress happening still small, sometimes just grinding industriously away at the rocks in our path, but accelerating with exponential growth nonetheless. We are changing the conditions of the battlefield faster than they can shamble. So no, you entitled bourgeois assholes who’ve never fought a fascist in your life or done any struggle besides petulant bloviating in the defacto service of totalitarianism, I’m aint scared of no holy ghost. Nor its followers.
And, if the last decade wasn’t mounds and mounds of proof that you shouldn’t think of the religious as anything other than a mindless natural disaster that it’s relatively easy to skirt, I’d like to tell you of a gal I saw once.
Minneapolis has a large Somali immigrant community, burqas and hijab are a common sight on the bus, with hot-pink phones flashing under the sleeves. One afternoon in the month leading up to the RNC while I was taking the 14 through South Minneapolis to meet up with someone at a FNB, a gal got one of these teenage Somali gals got on the bus in full black burqa. Except that covering the back of it were punk band patches. From Antischism to Bad Religion. I don’t know if she was trying to balance Islam with anarcho-punk or if she was maintaining the burqa as an atheist in some personal fuck you to cultural prejudice and patriarchal sexualization, the way her sharp eyes burned I suspected the later. Either way, and I don’t mean to say this with any colonial associations: Free thought can consume anything. We got nothing to fear.
Or at least my team doesn’t. To hell with yours.
sofias
Drupal usability study at Google
Drupal is an open source content management system with thousands of active community members behind it. A popular solution for both small and large scale websites, Drupal is extremely flexible and offers thousands of add-on modules. Drupal’s user experience (UX) layer, however, can be daunting and frustrating for beginners to learn. I am working on an exciting project in conjunction with the Drupal User Experience team and the Google Open Source team to help determine some of the key UX issues new users of Drupal encounter. The usability study will have participants (all Googlers) building a website and will help to gain insight into the stumbling blocks users encounter along the way.
The usability study will be streamed live and available for everyone to watch. The usability study is planned to take place February 1-3. Details about the live stream will be posted in the comments section below in the coming days. You can follow the discussion about this study on the Drupal.org wiki page.
Saturday, January 28 at Drupal Camp San Diego (SANDCamp) I will be presenting a talk called “Usability Studies for you and Drupal too!” on the fundamental principles of user experience and an introduction to the usability study. Jen Lampton from Chapter Three is co-presenting with me to talk about why UX is so important to Drupal, what the Drupal UX team has discovered through past studies, and how to get involved with the project.
Stay tuned for another post on the results, and make sure to check back on the Drupal.org wiki for details on how to watch live!
By Becky Gessler, Google Search Quality team
January 27 2012
Erstes deutsches Baby nach Erbgut-Diagnose geboren
Es ist ein Mädchen: Das erste Baby Deutschlands, bei dem Mediziner eine Präimplantationsdiagnostik (PID) durchführten, ist in Lübeck zur Welt gekommen. Mittels des Tests konnte ein tödlicher Gendefekt ausgeschlossen werden.
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Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship
It’s no secret that the entertainment industries believe search engines are not delivering enough when it comes to protecting copyright works. Just last month, the RIAA and IFPI accused Google of massively profiting from piracy, while putting up barriers to make life difficult for rightsholders.
If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.
The document, which describes a government-overlooked “Voluntary Code of Practice” for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
In short, the rightsholders want the search engines to make substantial changes so that pirated content becomes harder to find, or is de-listed entirely. In addition, they want to boost the rankings of licensed content. Below are the three new measures they propose.
- Assign lower rankings to sites that repeatedly make available unlicensed content in breach of copyright
- Prioritize websites that obtain certification as a licensed site under a recognised scheme
- Stop indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites
In the document rightsholders explain that they find it inexcusable that some websites – Pirate Bay and Isohunt in particular – are still indexed by all major search engines even though courts have ruled they facilitate copyright infringement.
Not surprisingly, there is no mention of the collateral damage that such a broad filter would bring with it – many artists and other legitimate individuals are known to use these websites to share their works.
The document further details how many of the top search results for music, movies and books crrently link to pirated copies. In order to stop this, the rightsholders propose that Google and other search engines systematically assign a lower ranking to possibly infringing pages.
“We propose that in order to further protect consumers and to encourage responsible behaviour among websites, the extent of illegal content on a website should become a factor influencing the ranking of that website in search results returned to consumers,” they write.
This should be doable according to the rightsholders, as Google already influences its search results based on various other criteria, such as the lower rankings that are assigned to so-called content farms.
“Given that Google already de-ranks and de-lists sites that do not meet its own ‘quality guidelines’ or otherwise violate its policies, we do not believe that search engines would face significant legal exposure if they were to de-rank or de-list sites using an objective measure, based on their actions in response to legal DMCA complaints, in pursuit of the legitimate objective of preventing their service being used to facilitate copyright infringement,” they write.
Conversely, it’s argued that search engines should also boost the ranking of legitimate sites for certain ‘relevant’ searches. A list of relevant terms to match to these relevant searches should be provided by pro-copyright groups. In the proposal, the rightsholders give the following example in the case of music files.
“We would propose that prioritisation be enabled for searches that contain any of the following key search terms: “mp3″, “flac”, “wma”, “aac”, “torrent”, “download”, “rip”, “stream” or “listen”, “free”, when combined with an artist name, song or album title contained on a list to be regularly updated and provided to a search engine by a recognised and properly mandated agency representing rights holders for a particular sector, such as BPI.”
Aside from these new proposals, the document also calls on the search engines to improve the censorship measures already in place, such as Google’s keyword filter for their “instant” and “autocomplete” services.
Although the proposal from the rightsholders is not a direct threat as it is a long way from being accepted, it clearly shows that rightsholders see censorship as the way forward. The search engines on the other hand were not impressed and are expected to supply a proposal of their own in a future meeting. Again behind closed doors.
The proposals
Source: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship
Bischof prangert Korruption im Vatikan an
Die Veröffentlichung geheimer Briefe bringt den Vatikan in Bedrängnis: In mehreren Schreiben an den Papst prangert ein Erzbischof und früherer hoher Verwaltungsbeamter Korruption im Kirchenstaat an – und beschwert sich über seine Versetzung in die USA.
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Open in Public Day
Am 28. Januar findet auch dieses Jahr der vom Europarat ausgerufene „Data Protection Day“ statt. An diesem sollen Menschen über die Sammlung und Weiterverarbeitung „ihrer“ Daten und ihrer diesbezüglichen Rechte aufgeklärt werden. (EU-Kommissarin Viviane Reding hat ihre Visionen für solche Rechte vor kurzen dargelegt und die Probleme dieser Sichtweise waren hier auch schon Thema.)
Als Kommentar auf diesen Tag zur Feier der Unterdrückung freien Datenflusses soll an dieser Stelle der „Open in Public Day“ ausgerufen werden.
Der „Open in Public Day“ findet ebenfalls am 28. Januar statt und soll den Menschen den Wert gemeinsamer, offener und freier Daten und Kommunikation illustrieren. Anstatt uns in unseren Häusern und Wohnungen zu verstecken in Angst, „unsere“ Daten könnten in die Öffentlichkeit gelangen, treten wir frei in die Öffentlichkeit.
Damit wir alle den Tag gemeinsam erfahren und erleben können, greifen wir ein bekanntes Datenschutzmem auf: Peinliche Fotos in sozialen Netzwerken.
Am „Open in Public Day“ veröffentlicht jeder Teilnehmer und jede Teilnehmerin ein „peinliches“ Foto von sich in seinem/ihrem Blog oder auf seinem/ihrem Profil in sozialen Netzwerken. Das können die gefürchteten „Partybilder“ sein, Dokumentationen der eigenen modischen Fehltritte oder von persönlichen Fails. Die Bilder werden öffentlich gepostet und wenn möglich auch mit dem eigenen Namen/Profil (durch Tagging) verbunden. Am besten verbreitet Ihr dann Euer Foto nochmal auf allen Kanälen (verwendet den Hashtag #oipd12). Setzt einen Trackback auf diesen Post oder postet Euren Link in den Kommentaren, damit wir ein Netz aus allen diesen Bildern herstellen können.
Der „Open in Public Day“ ist ein Zeichen gegen die Angst. Gegen die Angst vor Euren Mitmenschen und dem was sie über Euch denken. Gegen die Angst nicht perfekt zu sein. Wir können alle gemeinsam ein Zeichen setzen für eine freiere Gesellschaft.
Augmenting Humans
This week has brought several interesting articles about human enhancement. Although much of this technology is still in the research phase, some tech is beginning to make it to the market.
Via IEEE Spectrum, bionic eyes are beginning to help those with some forms of blindness see again. Although the glasses are not elegant, the technology not perfected, and the solution not universal, this represents a serious step forward in biotechnology. I wrote about a chip that did substantially similar things as part of a post on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and now it seems prepared to come to market. Even more exciting is how quickly the problems with the technology should get solved; probably within just a few years. Because this chip-glasses combination works, but is largely limited by resolution, increasing the resolution of the image ought to be relatively easy. After all, from video game systems to cell phones and digital camera, resolution has time and again proven to be a basic fix; the tech is there, it’s just a matter of integrating it.
Other emerging technologies are not as easily remedied. CNN reports on a new bionic hand, another technology highlighted in the Deus Ex video linked above. Matt’s new hand appears close to human level functionality, with an opposable thumb, connecting fingers, and universal application. The CNN video is a little lighter on details than I would like, but I imagine if the hand had touch-sense capability or other upgrades, it would likely have been mentioned. Still, these hands seem to have a quick learning curve and are becoming available for those that need it.
In biological tech, the New York Times reports that doctors in Sweden have replaced a cancer-ridden trachea with one grown in a lab. Although the surgery was very expensive (around $450,000), because the windpipe was grown from the patient’s own cells, no anti-rejection medication is needed. However, the article notes, the body might well ultimately encapsulate the trachea with scar tissue; a process that isn’t exactly rejection but leads to similar results. Other organs are also on the way.
Some people, unwilling to wait for FDA approval and a medical need, are beginning to upgrade themselves. Do It Yourself Biohackers use basic techniques, coupled with a whole lot of courage and determination, to upgrade their senses by doing things like implanting magnets into their fingertips to be able to sense electromagnetic currents, magnetic north, or even the locations of their friends. As the basic technology becomes more widespread, and people become more familiar with how to use it, I imagine this sort of garage-augmentation will only increase in the future. However, I still expect most people will go to a doctor if they can. The posted videos are amazing.
If the private sector isn’t moving technology along rapidly enough, Discover Magazine reports that the US Military, through DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) and other agencies, has been quietly funding projects along many of the same lines. Although the ultimate purpose to which DARPA and these other agencies may put this technology could be questionable, research unhampered by the usual; regulations and solid financial backing are almost sure to push these technologies forward very rapidly. Most scientists involved in the research,†apparently, don’t find the military’s involvement objectionable.
By far the most interesting thing to augment, however, is the brain. Many people suggest that we know too little about the brain to effectively augment it. However, experiments like this one on rat brains are pushing forward our knowledge. Scientists are having luck replacing parts of the rat brain with engineered components that perform the same functions. Once they understand how to replace parts of a rat’s brain with engineered analogues, they hope to be able to help restore functionality to humans with damaged brains.
One possible application that I’ve written about at some length is increasing human intelligence. Neuroscientist Natalie Wolchover considers what might happen if the average intelligence doubled. However, increasing intelligence might not be an entirely good thing; George Dvorsky comments on a recent article by the journal Current Directions In Psychological Sciences that argues there are many side effects to heightened intelligence, and that any advances in human intelligence will need to account for those side effects.
Finally, Sarah Wanenchak offers an insightful article about how disabled people who have limbs replaced with prostheses still face discrimination. It’s worth a read, especially for anyone considering voluntarily adopting these technologies in the future (although I imagine that as more people adopt the technologies, the stigma attached will subside.)
John Niman is a J.D. Candidate at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He graduated magna cum laude from UNLV, earning his B.A. in philosophy with a minor in business law.
Newzbin Dumps .COM, Promises VPN & Cyberlocker Services
Last October, the High Court in London handed down a judgment to BT, one of the UK’s largest Internet service providers. The injunction – the first of its type in UK history – ordered BT to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 on copyright grounds.
Although Newzbin2 anticipated the result and had already prepared circumvention software to enable BT users to carry on using the site, it still has a key vulnerability – its US-seizable .COM domain. According to the site’s operators, that weakness is now being addressed.
“Newzbin is leaving the American Internet. In a couple of weeks we will cease to use the newzbin.com domain and move to newzbin2.es,” says the site’s Mr White.
“We regret the need to do this but, thanks to the retards in the US Government and the MPA, a ‘.com’ address is no longer viable. Really, any domain controlled by the US government proxy Verisign isn’t viable.”
No exact date has been given for the switch but it will be during the next few weeks. For “legal reasons” the old .COM domain, which Newzbin2′s operators say is currently rented from a 3rd party, will not redirect or even provide a link to the new Spanish domain.
During 2012 it’s expected that the site’s unblocking tool will see wider use as other ISPs are also expected to begin blocking Newzbin2. But according to the site, thus far censorship has had the opposite effect.
“I can’t give exact figures but an executive summary would be that, from our Apache logs, traffic grew steadily over 2011 with a big spike about the time we were blocked; down a little since then, but still at higher levels than ever before,” Mr White told TorrentFreak.
“Overall the MPA’s web blocking has had something of a Streisand Effect on our traffic levels. It seems that they are driving users to us. Our best friend is our worst enemy,” he notes.
Nevertheless, Newzbin2′s operators aren’t simply cruising. Mr White told TorrentFreak that they intend to use the trust they’ve built up in the community to launch a secure VPN service which will not only allow anonymous Internet use, but will also defeat site-blocking measures.
But surprisingly, especially given the astonishing MegaUpload-related developments of the last week, they also intend to launch a cyberlocker service.
“Our reaction to Megaupload and the fallout was twofold. On the one level this is a very important case because if New Zealand extradite Dotcom to the US, which is where the smart money is I reckon, it will be a fascinating exhibition of the MPA’s legal strategy against cyberlockers. It may be the feds prosecuting but we all know that the MPA’s hand is up their puppet ass,” says Mr White.
“The shame for Dotcom was only that he didn’t spend his money on politicians & cops rather than godawful pink Cadillacs. And how INTERESTING that the FBI have shown publicly that they really can backdoor Skype,” he added.
Mr White described the ensuing pandemonium in the cyberlocker market as “like a herd of elephants being frightened by bees” and advised site operators who have done nothing wrong to “man up and show some spine.”
Newzbin2 assure us that their forthcoming service will be “legal from the ground up” but predict their service will receive “sniping from the malodorous content dinosaurs.”
In an uncertain world and even more uncertain cyberlocker market, that last prediction is probably the most certain we’ve heard all week.
Source: Newzbin Dumps .COM, Promises VPN & Cyberlocker Services
Monty Python Truppe dreht Film zusammen!
Wie es scheint, wird das alte Monty-Python-Team wieder zusammen einen Film drehen. Natürlich mit ein paar Einschränkungen. Graham Chapman spielt nicht mit, da die Verhandlungen mit ihm gescheitert sind. Er kann sich wohl , solange er immer noch tot ist, nicht dazu aufraffen, in einem weiteren Film mitzuwirken. Mit Eric Idle wurde nach Angaben des Producers gesprochen, er hat aber noch nicht zugesagt (Gerüchte behaupten bereits das Gegenteil).
Damit haben aber John Cleese, Terry Gilliam und Michael Palin unterschrieben, in der Science-Fiction-Farce “Absolutely Anything” Aliens ihre Stimmen zu leihen. Terry Jones entwickelte die Story zusammen mit dem Drehbuchautor Gavin Scott (Small Soldiers, Earthsea – Die Saga von Erdsee, Die Abenteuer des jungen Indiana Jones, …) und wird auch Regie führen. In einer weiteren Rolle wird Robin Williams wohl einen Hund sprechen.
Terry Jones meinte in einem Interview:
“It’s not a Monty Python picture, but it certainly has that sensibility,”
Einen Film im Stile der alten Monty-Python-Tradition wie “Das Leben des Brian” oder “Die Ritter der Kokosnuß” zu drehen , ist heute wohl unmöglich; es bleibt jedoch zu hoffen, dass die Jungs sich inhaltlich treu bleiben und eine absurde Komödie abliefern werden, wie man es qualitativ von ihnen gewohnt ist. Schließlich wurde nicht umsonst die Bezeichnung “pythonesk” erfunden, um ihre Sketche und die der Nachahmer zu klassifizieren. Sie haben Spam “erfunden” und die englische Sprache auch mit anderen Phrasen wie “And now for something completely different” und “The parrot is dead!” bereichert.
“Das Leben des Brian” war in diversen Ländern wegen des blasphemischen Inhalts verboten oder mit 18+ Einschränkungen belegt, in einigen Städten sogar fast bis heute. Und noch heute ist der Film für religiöse Vereinigungen ein Aufreger. Die Pythons waren auch stolz darauf, wie historisch präzise sie die Zeit dargestellt haben. Diese Aussage mag seltsam erscheinen angesichts z.B. der Ufo-Szene, aber die Menge an Nachforschungen, die in den Film und die Szenerie geflossen sind, war wohl immens. Vielleicht kann man sagen, dass sie die historische Wirklichkeit genauso überzeichnet haben wie in anderen Sketchen die heutige Zeit.
Auch der tägliche Alltag, Politik, Firmen, Finanzindustrie und Kultur bekamen in diversen Filmen ihr Fett ab. In aller Absurdität haben die Pythons ein zutiefst skeptisches Bild der Welt gezeichnet und man muss ihnen heute noch dankbar sein, dass sie so respektlos waren.
In Memoriam Graham Chapman:
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