March 2012
92 posts
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Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and Koch-Fueled Cato... →
Remember globalization neoliberals and conservatives? The market for oil is global, not national, and the United States accounts for a grossly disproportionate 25% of world usage. Moreover, gas prices have doubled since the inauguration because Obama took office during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has almost doubled since it’s March...
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“If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create...”
– Physicist Michio Kaku
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A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators
As words and articles became digitized over the last 15 years, they began to float, there for the plucking and replication elsewhere. Words like “curation” and “aggregation” became the language of the realm, sometimes used as substitutes for describing the actual creation of content. What had once been a craft was rapidly becoming a task.
Traditional media organizations watched as others...
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The Human Planet
Humans have been changing the planet ever since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began altering the land—and the plants and animals growing on it—rather than simply living as hunters and gatherers. Agriculture enabled humans to proliferate and literally changed the face of the planet; today 38% of the earth’s ice-free land has been cleared and...
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Bye Bye American Pie: by Robert Reich
Computers, software applications, and the Internet are letting us produce more with fewer people.
In theory, this is a huge plus. We can live better and have more time off.
But as Tonto asked the Lone Ranger, “who’s ‘we,’ kemosabe?”
The challenge at the heart of the productivity revolution – and it is a revolution – is how to distribute the gains. So far, we’ve been failing miserably to meet...
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The Military Goes All In With Energy Innovation
In the interest of national security, the military is pursuing advanced batteries and novel biofuels for the battlefield and energy-efficient buildings and energy-independent bases for the home front. The Armed Forces are investing and enabling green technologies independently, through its own research (e.g., DARPA) and procurement (e.g., the Army’s new Energy Initiatives Office) processes, as...
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Mitt Romney's Fake Policy Plans
Like a street façade on a movie set, Romney’s economic plans are designed to project an outward appearance of functionality. But when you look behind their cleverly made-up fronts, there’s nothing to see. Romney’s policy offerings on taxes, spending, and entitlements consistently lack crucial structural details; his campaign seems intent on emulating the outward appearance of policy proposals...
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A war with Iran would devastate the economy
Responding to questions from reporters yesterday, Barack Obama promised to restart a gimmicky Justice Department inquiry into whether speculators have unlawfully inflated oil prices. This task force was announced with great fanfare the last time gas prices were a big political issue, but it rarely met and didn’t accomplish much of anything. In other news yesterday, the price of Brent crude oil...
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Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology,...
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Why ‘Crony Capitalism’ is as American as Apple Pie
Conservatives are supposed to cherish tradition, to draw on customs and policies which worked well in the past to guide what office-holders ought to do in the future. So it is ironic, if not hypocritical, that they constantly peddle a notion about the separation of business and government that has no basis in American history. “The voters,” asserted Mitt Romney, after his victory in the...
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The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama
Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in...
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How To Be Creative
Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we’re probably focused on the wrong answer.
And this is why relaxation helps: It isn’t until we’re soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we’re able to turn the...
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Project Avatar: U.S. military researches ways for...
According to the Darpa’s 2013 budget: ‘The Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.’
The report, released this week and seen by wired.com, says the remote controlled androids will be capable of doing everything that a human soldier...
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How a $1,000 test could destroy the...
In 2008, Congress overwhelmingly passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Ron Paul was the lone dissenter. The legislation bars insurers from denying coverage or raising premiums on individuals who show a genetic predisposition toward particular diseases. And in doing, it armed a time bomb beneath the health-care industry.
Eventually, genomic...
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Spider silk conducts heat as well as metals, study...
Spider silks – particularly the draglines that anchor webs in place – conduct heat better than most materials, including very good conductors such as silicon, aluminum and pure iron. Spider silk also conducts heat 1,000 times better than woven silkworm silk and 800 times better than other organic tissues.
A paper about the discovery – “New Secrets of Spider Silk: Exceptionally High...
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The Case for Treating Big Finance Like Big Pharma
“We propose that when investors invent new financial products, they be forbidden to market them until they receive approval from a government agency designed along the lines of the FDA, which screens pharmaceutical innovations,” the pair writes. “The agency would approve financial products if and only if they satisfy a test for social utility. The test centers around a simple...
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“Many of my conservative friends are deeply suspicious of climate change, and...”
– Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota
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“Those who purchase ethically believe that they are more ethical than those who...”
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