The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen The Costs of Green Dreams The environmental and economic costs of Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear reactors are growing. Wealth of nations India’s Hindu temples have huge stores of gold sitting idle outside the banking system. Don't Cry to Me Argentina The President tells her people (and the web): “Everything has to do with everything.” Culture Wars Chinese scientists are facing a big backlash for an unethical experiment that edited the DNA of embryos—a historical first. Putin's Prospects Russian workers who have gone without pay due to the economic troubles are protesting at the national scale. The Afterparty Rages On Libya’s failure becomes a campaign issue in the UK.
Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions - Comment - Voices And there you have it. Our dead men didn't matter in the slightest to him. And he had a point, didn't he? For we are outraged today, not by the massacre of the innocents, but because the hostages killed by the Algerian army - along with some of their captors - were largely white, blue-eyed chaps rather than darker, brown-eyed chaps. If all those slaughtered in the Algerian helicopter bombing had been Algerian, we would have mentioned the "tragic consequences" of the raid, but our headlines would have dwelt on the courage and efficiency of Algeria's military rescuers, alongside interviews with grateful Western families. Racism isn't the word for it. So you know whom we care about. From the Middle East, the whole thing looks like an obscene television remake of our preposterous interventions in other parts of the world. I called up another friend, a French ex-legionnaire, yesterday. Do I sniff a bit of old-fashioned colonial insanity here?
?So many people died? Pham To looked great for 78 years old. (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.) His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through. Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time. And it only got worse. One, two… many Vietnams? At the beginning of the Iraq War, and for years after, reporters, pundits, veterans, politicians, and ordinary Americans asked whether the American debacle in Southeast Asia was being repeated. The same held true for Afghanistan. In those years, “Vietnam” even proved a surprisingly two-sided analogy — after, at least, generals began reading and citing revisionist texts about that war. An unimaginable toll Pham To was lucky. The numbers are staggering, the suffering incalculable, the misery almost incomprehensible to most Americans but not, perhaps, to an Iraqi.
Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science - Climate Change - Environment A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt. The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry. However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas. Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.
The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale In their fight against Google, traditional media firmly believe the search engine needs them to refine (and monetize) its algorithm. Let’s explore the facts. The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs and feeds into its Google News service; second, on a broader basis, for all the referencing Google builds with news media material. In the controversy, an argument keeps rearing its head. Last week, rooting for facts, I spoke with several people possessing deep knowledge of Google’s inner mechanics; they ranged from Search Engine Marketing specialists to a Stanford Computer Science professor who taught Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in the mid-90′s. First of all, pretending to know Google is indeed… pretentious. Coming back to the Press issues, let’s consider both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Now, let’s consider the nature of searches.
Tsunamis in the Alps? Nearly 1,500 years ago a massive flood in Geneva reportedly swept away everything in its path—mills, houses, cattle, even entire churches. Now researchers believe they've found the unlikely sounding culprit: a tsunami-like killer wave in the Alps. The threat, they add, may still be very much alive. Spurred by a huge landslide, the medieval Lake Geneva "tsunami" (technically defined as a seismic ocean wave) swamped the city, which was already a trading hub, according to a new study. Far from any ocean, the massive wave was likely generated by a massive landslide into the Rhône River, which feeds and flows through Lake Geneva, according to a group of Swiss researchers. The team analyzed a massive sediment deposit at the bottom of the lake's easternmost corner and determined that the material had once sat above the lake and had slid all at once into the Rhône, near where the river flows into the eastern end of Lake Geneva (map).
Rosa Parks Didn't Act Alone: Meet Claudette Colvin Rosa Parks, left, and Claudette Colvin. Parks photo from Ebony via Wikipedia Commons. In his warm-up for the first-ever inauguration of a black American president, the actor Samuel L. Parks was certainly brave. Colvin was a smart and rebellious teen whose family lived in King Hill, a small, poor section of town flanked by white neighborhoods. On March 2, 1955, a full nine months before Rosa Parks took her famous stand, Colvin boarded a city bus with her friends, taking a seat behind the first five rows, which were reserved for whites. That's what happened that day. This was nothing like Rosa Parks' quiet arrest later. Montgomery's black leaders debated whether Colvin was the proper cause celebre. The news traveled fast, and the black community was livid. On her day in court, Colvin was found guilty of all charges by a hostile judge. They held off on calling for a boycott, and instead raised money for her appeal. But Colvin made her mark on the minds of others.
A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program Click to enlarge. (Max Fisher -- The Washington Post) After Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA launched a program of "extraordinary rendition" to handle terrorism suspects. The agency's problem, as it saw it, was that it wanted to detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the United States or charging them with any crimes. Their solution was to secretly move a suspect to another country. The CIA's extraordinary rendition program is over, but its scope is still shrouded in some mystery. Their participation took several forms. Here's what the Open Society report has to say about the staggeringly global participation in the CIA program, including a full list of the countries it names: I was most curious about the involvement of two governments that are very much adversaries of the United States: those of Iran and Syria. Iran was involved in the capture and transfer of individuals subjected to CIA secret detention. The section on Syria is disturbing.
Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to 'Long Data' | Wired Opinion Our species can’t seem to escape big data. We have more data inputs, storage, and computing resources than ever, so Homo sapiens naturally does what it has always done when given new tools: It goes even bigger, higher, and bolder. We did it in buildings and now we’re doing it in data. Sure, big data is a powerful lens — some would even argue a liberating one — for looking at our world. Despite its limitations and requirements, crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves. But no matter how big that data is or what insights we glean from it, it is still just a snapshot: a moment in time. Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. Because as beautiful as a snapshot is, how much richer is a moving picture, one that allows us to see how processes and interactions unfold over time? We also need to build better tools.
For the Internet-Deprived, McDonald's Is Study Hall CITRONELLE, Ala.—Joshua Edwards's eighth-grade paper about the Black Plague came with a McDouble and fries. Joshua sometimes does his homework at a McDonald's MCD 1.79 % restaurant—not because he is drawn by the burgers, but because the fast-food chain is one of the few places in this southern Alabama city of 4,000 where he can get online access free once the public library closes. Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. But the price of Internet connectivity hasn't come down nearly as quickly. That divide is becoming a bigger problem now that a fast Internet connection has evolved into an essential tool for completing many assignments at public schools. "It is increasingly hard to argue that out-of-school access doesn't matter," said Doug Levin, executive director of a national group of state education technology directors. Moving faster would be expensive. School districts are finding it tough to tackle the digital divide on their own.
Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world. The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. "These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion.