Hackgate, power elites and the limits of the “corruption” critique Just days before the first revelations of hackgate started to emerge, I remarked to a left-wing friend of mine impatient at the failure of the causes we share to gain any wider traction, that it was nearly always “corruption” scandals involving elites rather than the power of reasoned critique which opened up a window for profound and lasting change. The observation stemmed from the insight of Robert Darnton, and other scholars of revolutionary France, that it was not so much the rational arguments of the Enlightenment philosophes, but the relentless attacks of the libellistes – the French gutter press - on the greed and depravity of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, which led to the French populace’s disillusionment with monarchy and ultimately the downfall of the ancien regime. More recently, we saw in Egypt, how the malfeasance of Mubarak’s government, as exposed by Wikileaks and others, played such an important role in spurring on the protesters. We are at a pivotal moment.
Profound Heterogeneity » About Burning the Boats/Books For the past 400 years, give or take 100, knowledge has primarly been structured by the codex form. Since the inviting of the printing press rules, customs, laws, and social practices have become organized around the idea that a book is the ideal medium for delivering content. The digital network alters this, or at least in theory ought to alter this. The existence of the digital networked archive reveals as historical many of the principles analog culture treats as natural. Nowhere is this perhaps more clear than in the world of academia, where being a published author serves as proof of expertise, and tenure decisions (especially within the humanities) revolve around being the author of a published book. A brief story to explain . . . In April of 2010 I gave a talk to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, titled “Burn the Boats/Books.” What Would Scholarship Look Like If It Were Not Designed to End Up in Books?
Naomi Wolf: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps | World news Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody. They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
cluster - Node.js v0.6.0 Manual Cluster A single instance of Node runs in a single thread. To take advantage of multi-core systems the user will sometimes want to launch a cluster of Node processes to handle the load. The cluster module allows you to easily create a network of processes all which share server ports. var cluster = require('cluster');var http = require('http');var numCPUs = require('os').cpus().length; if (cluster.isMaster) { for (var i = 0; i < numCPUs; i++) { cluster.fork(); } cluster.on('death', function(worker) { console.log('worker ' + worker.pid + ' died'); });} else { http.Server(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200); res.end("hello world\n"); }).listen(8000);} Running node will now share port 8000 between the workers: % node server.js Worker 2438 online Worker 2437 online The difference between cluster.fork() and child_process.fork() is simply that cluster allows TCP servers to be shared between workers. cluster.fork is implemented on top of child_process.fork. cluster.fork() # cluster.isMaster #
'The Fate of an Honest Intellectual', by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Understanding Power) I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? Well, he got back one answer, from me. Well, he didn't believe me. By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, "Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we'll take care of you, we'll make sure you get a job," all this kind of stuff. Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready.
ScienceBlog.com Weekend Musing: Direct Democracy and Economics - macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au Guest blogger Steven Spadijer presents a multi-part series on Direct Democracy to start off the Weekend Musing articles for 2012. In this first post he examines the empirical evidence, speficially the economic impact versus a “representative” democracy. The second post will confront the questions regarding the intelligence of voters, particularly the information-rich environment effect on voter knowledge and interest in politics. In the final post Steven will question if Australia should abolish the states and create something more akin to highly decentralised Swiss cantons. What is Direct Democracy? Readers might notice that these regions are some of the wealthiest, well-governed and most stable countries in their region today. Given the interest emanating from Deus Forex Machina’s recent post “Is Australia the new Switzerland?” the empirical analysis provides evidence that referendums induce less centralization of fiscal activities. Progressivism and Direct Democracy Reasons? 1. 2. 3.
The US ZIPScribble Map What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected. The idea for the ZIPScribble came from playing with Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode. (ZIPScribble Map PDF) The patterns and density distribution are readily apparent, and can in fact be seen much better than when only the dots are drawn. (ZIPScribble Map Color PDF) Not surprisingly, some of the white lines really separate states, others don’t. (ZIPScribble Map Color with Names PDF) Adding the colors clearly adds information, but it also removes some of the mystery. Since the lines between the denser areas could still be artifacts, let’s add a backdrop to see if they really are state lines. (ZIPScribble Map B/W with Borders) (ZIPScribble Map Color with Borders PDF) As some of the comments below have mentioned, Alaska and Hawaii are missing from this map.
Weekend Musing: Direct Democracy and Voters - macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au Guest blogger Steven Spadijer, of Australian National University, continues with Part Two of his series on Direct Democracy. Part One is available here. In today’s post I’ll examine the role direct democracy has on informing the people. That is, what impact does direct democracy have on the average voter competence? Authors Benz and Stutzer (see references at bottom) provide evidence in favour of the conjecture that citizens in states with direct democratic institutions are better informed than citizens in purely representative states. Some European states used referendums to pass the Maastricht Treaty, others did not. They also looked at to what degree direct democracy in Switzerland is practiced at cantonal level, and compared this with the answers from Swiss citizens on three questions about general Swiss politics. The US literature also reveals the positive endogenous effects of direct democracy: So the “people are stupid” mantra seems rather…err…stupid. Californism?
Science Made Cool: Biology My personal fitness plan revolves around trees. We have a wood stove which contributes a not-inconsiderable fraction of our home heating during the winter, and that means I have to spend spring and summer refilling the woodpile. Mostly I cut up deadfalls, but occasionally I do cut down trees which look as though they're going to fall down anyway, or which are in places I don't want them to be. Earlier this summer I took down a medium-sized pine tree, about 40 feet tall, in order to bring more light to part of the yard. Now, pine wood isn't as dense as, say, maple or oak, so it doesn't burn as hot. A couple of weeks later I happened to pass the stack of pine logs, and I noticed something. The first was the sawdust. I bent closer and noticed the second thing. My resident scientist did some Googling, and we guess it was some sort of beetle larvae, from one of the many species of beetles which attack pine logs. So the lesson for today is: listen to your wood.