There are headlines all over the news today that experts are now claiming the dollar?s role is secure, all doing damage control over Chinese Economist Fan Gang?s statements earlier in the week that the US dollar was no longer seen as a stable currency.
There is much evidence of the severe decline of the American dollar and American economy. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corp and the world’s richest man, is expecting the dollar to fall further while China continues its phenomenal growth.
The United States government is attempting to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, claiming the litigation would jeopardize national security.
Invoking the rarely used “state secrets privilege,” U.S. Department of Justice lawyers filed a motion with the New York eastern district court this week, stating that the release of any information concerning the U.S.’s involvement in Arar’s deportation to Syria could jeopardize “intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”
A handful of small, boxy robots scurried across the floor in a row, their red, blue and green lights blinking. Suddenly they broke into song—“Hi ho, hi ho. It’s off to work we go”—and then scattered in all directions.
“It was robotics research the likes of which I’d never seen before,” said Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, the Burlington company with which McLurkin conducted the DARPA research. “Creating a programming language for more than 100 robots, an ecology of small robots, there were a number of little challenges James was taking on, all of them very cool.”
Boston News via SmartMobs
So why not automate trial and error? Antenna design, Lohn believes, is one of many engineering problems that could best be solved by evolutionary algorithms, an emerging class of software that produces lots of different designs, rejecting the less fit in order to select the most functional. The resulting designs often seem a little inhuman?inelegant and uncanny.
Evolutionary algorithms, also known as genetic algorithms or GAs, take their cue from biological evolution, which can turn a crawling reptile into a soaring bird without any kind of forward-looking blueprint. In sexual reproduction, the shuffling of each parent?s genes?combined with random genetic mutation?creates organisms with new characteristics, and the less fit organisms tend not to pass on their genes to succeeding generations. Evolutionary algorithms work much the same way, but inside a computer. When Lohn creates a new antenna, for example, he starts off with a population of randomly generated designs and grades their relative performance. Designs that come close to preset goals win the right ?to intermingle their properties with those of other successful candidates. Designs that disappoint go the way of the archaeopteryx: oblivion.
TechReview via Smart Mobs
Like humans, monkeys will pay to see images of powerful and sexually attractive individuals, showing that they also value information according to its social content.
Economics and evolutionary theory predict that animals should selectively acquire information about others that’s most useful for guiding behavior.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina have now provided evidence for the theory in male rhesus macaque monkeys.
Green tea may soon show up in locker rooms and doping tests after being found to boost exercise endurance in mice up to 24% while spurring the use of fat as energy.
While the finding is based on green tea extract (GTE) and is difficult to extrapolate to human athletes, Japanese researcher Takatoshi Murase estimates that to match the effects athletes weighing 75 kilograms (165 pounds) would need to drink about four cups of green tea a day?and over several weeks.
”...the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way…”
“This is the only piece of hardware that needs to be added to the mix of an HDTV and a broadband connection to completely blow away all rental, cable, and physical media business models, take all of them over, and replace them in a way that everyone can still get what they want. It doesn’t need a tuner, because it could eventually replace the channels that right now I have to tune to.”
“This isn’t a computer. It’s a revolution waiting to happen.”
PBS via root.cellar
If America was ever faced with a politician who spoke truth to the people, no-one would know what to make of the oddity. This politician could probably not get elected to office. Sadly, Americans can?t handle the truth.
In the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’, one would think that Americans should be the most enlightened people on our wobbly little planet. On paper and in theory, American democracy is a significant achievement for freedom loving people. ?All men/women are created equal.? America has a government ?of the people, by the people, and for the people.? In theory, all Americans are assured ?life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.? The actual day-to-day reality is a sorry imitation of democracy?s premise and promise.
Arrests for possession of cannabis fell by a third in the first year since it was downgraded to a Class C drug, official Home Office figures show.
An estimated 199,000 police hours were saved, according to data from 26 of the 42 English and Welsh police forces.
From BBC News
Gestalt therapy is a phenomenological-existential therapy founded by Frederick (Fritz) and Laura Perls in the 1940s. It teaches therapists and patients the phenomenological method of awareness, in which perceiving, feeling, and acting are distinguished from interpreting and reshuffling preexisting attitudes. Explanations and interpretations are considered less reliable than what is directly perceived and felt. Patients and therapists in Gestalt therapy dialogue, that is, communicate their phenomenological perspectives. Differences in perspectives become the focus of experimentation and continued dialogue. The goal is for clients to become aware of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how they can change themselves, and at the same time, to learn to accept and value themselves.
Gestalt therapy focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.
Almost all of the available material on Tantra is bunk. Most of the translations were done by non-sorcerers who were incapable of picking apart metaphor from literal description, were not deeply enough versed in Indian psychological and magical models, and were influenced by the early translations which miscast the entire field of study.
Let?s deal with the basics:
A set of fundamental principles for the cybernetics domain is sketched, based on the spontaneous emergence of systems through variation and selection. The (mostly self-evident) principles are: selective retention, autocatalytic growth, asymmetric transitions, blind variation, recursive systems construction, selective variety, requisite knowledge and incomplete knowledge. Existing systems principles, such as self-organization, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, and order from noise can be reduced to implications of these more primitive laws. Others, such as the law of requisite variety, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the law of maximumscope.
PDF via Vortex Egg
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