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• <nettime> Ten Theses on Wikileaks by Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens - "The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy makes that there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailled and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media- owners has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of 'citizen journalism' and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the 'crowd sourcing' of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents."
• The Third Replicator | NYTimes.com - "Neither memes nor genes are a dog or a dog-owner. Neither is on a leash. They are both vast competing sets of information, all selfishly getting copied whenever and however they can. To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is."
• Does Language Influence Culture? | WSJ.com - "In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase." (previously: http://ff.im/3XIVn )
• Deconstructing Buddhism | Audio Dharma - "Based on an examination of early discourses found in the Buddhist Pali Canon, this class explored the question: "What did the Buddha teach that was distinctively and originally his own?" By differentiating the Buddha's Dhamma from the ideas of Indian religion and metaphysics that prevailed at his time this class sought to uncover a clearer sense of the Buddha's message and then considered what relevance it still has for people living in the modern world."
• Disease as a byproduct of adaptation | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine (via http://ff.im/o57M3) - "When a new exogenous stress hits a population mean fitness drops immediately. Natural selection quickly increases in frequency any alleles which confer protection against the exogenous stress. But, baked into the cake of how genetics in complex organisms usually works, one allele may often have multiple downstream consequences. This is pleiotropy. This means that if a change at a locus increases aggregate fitness, it may nevertheless destabilize long established biochemical pathways. In the short term evolution simply takes the net fitness impact into account. Over the long term one assumes that “better solutions” will emerge which do not have so high a fitness drag, perhaps through the evolution of modifier genes which mask the deleterious outcomes of the initial mutant. This sort of ad hoc trial and error and “duct-taping” of kludges is part and parcel of how adaption works in situations where shocks out of equilibrium states are common."
• Listening to Boredom | Joseph Brodsky | [Paleopsych] - "Known under several aliases--anguish, ennui, tedium, the doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, etc.--boredom is a complex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and new-fangled, would hope for. Alas, life won't supply you with that option, for life's main medium is precisely repetition. [...] As for poverty, boredom is the most brutal part of its misery, and escape from it takes more radical forms: violent rebellion or drug addiction. [...] In fact, you may lump all these together, and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amidst a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window."
• A Scientist Takes On Gravity | NYTimes.com (via http://ff.im/nVjqp) - "What is new, he said, is the idea that differences in entropy can be the driving mechanism behind gravity, that gravity is, as he puts it an “entropic force". [...] Think of the universe as a box of scrabble letters. There is only one way to have the letters arranged to spell out the Gettysburg Address, but an astronomical number of ways to have them spell nonsense. Shake the box and it will tend toward nonsense, disorder will increase and information will be lost as the letters shuffle toward their most probable configurations. Could this be gravity? That inspiration came to him courtesy of a thief."
• Worldchanging: Bright Green: TED Global 2010: Auret Van Heerden and Bringing Human Rights into the Global Supply Chain (via http://ff.im/nT0Po) - "Auret Van Heerden of the Fair Labor Association holds up a cellphone and tells us that the phone started its life with artisinal mines, run by gangs and staffed by slaves in the Congo. It was built in a factory in China where people have committed suicide and died after impossibly long work shifts. Chocolate comes from cocoa harvested by children in Ivory Coast. Diamonds come from impossibly dangerous mines in Zimbabwe. Uzbekistan shuts down the schools to bring children into the cotton fields to harvest – they allow the country to be the world’s second largest cotton producer. And all these products end up in dumps in slums in places like Manila. These are evidence of governance gaps – gaps in our supply chains. Some happen in failed states. Some happen in states that feel like deregulation or lack of regulation is good for trade. But they provide a human rights dilemma for all of us."
• GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free- information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions - "In China's moral order, information that serves to prioritize the individual is "bad," and in Google's moral order, information that serves to prioritize the individual is "good." As such, it is understandable why there would be tension. A moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels while a moral order rooted in Confucian ideals rewards followers."
• Edge: DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT By David Gelernter (via http://ff.im/nLkL2) - "At minimum focus, Consciousness is the small circle, wholly surrounded by Memory. Memory comes between consciousness and external reality; consciousness is shut off like a castle by its moat. You are conscious only of internal, imaginary reality. As focus-level falls, the two circles gradually trade places. And this is the daily, tidal rhythm of the human mind. (These pictures might sound abstract, but they can be rough blueprints for software.)"
• Electric Literacy Playground | (hm) (via http://ff.im/nGfcw) - "de Kerckhove shows that the theater helped condition the mostly illiterate population of Greece to the pressures of literacy. Confined to their seats, eyes fixed on a stage where action took place at a distance, the theater audience was removed from the multi-sensory sphere of their oral culture. Theater allowed the illiterate to experience many of the sensory and cognitive effects of reading without being able to read or write. While they were attending stage productions illiterates might be deemed to develop their attention span, their concentration, their critical faculties and their capacity for abstraction, their manipulation of language, and even train their visual skills from peripheral to centralized and directional vision. [...] What would a playground for electric literacy look like? Have we already created such an environment?"
• Why Parents Hate Parenting | The Last Psychiatrist - "...it should have occurred to the writer that the reason "parents are unhappy" may not have anything to do with the kids. That insight, however, most emphatically does not occur to her or anyone connected with the article. Which is why it is accurate, though mysterious, to say that the reason parents are unhappy is these articles. [...] It would be a pointless act of euthanasia to criticize the article, except that these popular press articles are more than bathroom reading, they are the template for how to think about these social issues. [...] These articles offer you the freedom to argue about the conclusions, but trick you into accepting the form of the argument. [...] These articles are cognitive parasites, that's what makes them dangerous. They change the way you think. Even if you disagreed with the conclusion, you're still going to approach this problem from, "why aren't put together moms happy?" This will never lead you to the answer."
• Lightheaded
• Ignore the anti-soya scaremongers | Justine Butler | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - "Soya is the great divider; you're either for it, or against it. Is this humble pulse really such a demon bean, or is the anti-soya brigade using scare stories and pseudo science to further their own agenda? If you look carefully, most anti-soya stories can be traced back to one single group in the US called the Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF). [...] In reality, there is no scientific evidence that the consumption of soya is harmful to humans. The majority of what the WAPF says is anecdotal, untrue or based on scientifically flawed animal experiments. First, phytoestrogens behave differently in different species, so animal studies are not applicable to humans. Second, the intestines act as a barrier to phytoestrogens, so artificially boosting levels in animals by injection has no relevance. Finally, many of these experiments have exposed animals to phytoestrogens at levels many, many times higher than those absorbed by people eating soya."
• How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won : Johann Hari - "At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions." [...] It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either."