Friday, September 30, 2011

平岩外四

私の生涯の道として 一勤め人の職を選んでしまいました
電気事業という仕事にたずさわってきました
そして事業が続くかぎり全員みんなの努力がその中に溶け込んでおります
私の分も何百万分の一か何千万分の一の 極く微量のものが事業の中に溶け込んでおります
それが企業に従事する者の仕事と存じます
自分の足跡を刻む程のことはありません
私は年をとりまして 生命の燃焼も残り少なくなりました
死ぬ迄自分なりに自己陶冶していきたいと思います
それも死とともに 消滅です
自分をあとに残さないように と思っております

23 Archiefdingen

G20 in Toronto:

Canadian,
American,
French and
Italian

Δημοσθένης Αγραφιώτης

Cecile Corbel

LOLbyte.com

New map of Europe according to Americans.



Freedom Alliance

The Mission of Freedom Alliance is to advance the American heritage of freedom by honoring and encouraging military service, defending the sovereignty of the United States and promoting a strong national defense.
Freedom Alliance is an educational and charitable organization which sponsors numerous program activities aimed at supporting and honoring our service members and their families.

Oliver North

I was authorized to do everything that I did.

Sam Harris

Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.
One thing is certain: writers and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Anonymous

Real:
If you let me bite you, the bite to me
the physical pain of bite to you
the feeling and thought of bite for me
the mental feeling of pain to you

when walking on the street I saw my friend cross the street, she is real to me, but my friend didn't see me, so I am not real to her. (same moment, same existence, one is real, one is not) I am real to myself always, my body, my thoughts, my feeling, my spirit and soul are all real to myself.
some people consider that future is not real, Past is also not real anymore. they are gone. only the present time is considered Real. But then how to define the present time? in hours, in minutes, or seconds? 
everything happened in your past can be real still because they were installed in your memory, you safekeep box. But if you forgot some, then those you forgot are not real to you any more.

Jared Roy Endicott


Have you ever been to the future? Neither have I. No one has ever been to the future, because the future is not real. We are only ever in the present, now and always. The present cannot be escaped from. The present is the horizon of realization. The present perpetually realizes from the pattern of resonances and dissonances created by earlier incarnations of the continually unfolding current state of things. These previous presents form a testimonial that we call the past. The past is therefore, and nothing more than, the record of realization. The past is all of reality post-realization. If the present is the horizon of realization and the past is the record of realization, then the future lies over, or beyond, the horizon of realization. The future is pre-realization. Being in a context of pre-realization the future is not yet, and not currently, real. Furthermore, since realization is always happening only in the present, the future is never a realized thing. The future is thus not real.

Anaïs Nin

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

arinanira

Our perspective is founded on pervious knowledge, experience, values, feelings, and attitudes, and focused on our situational desires. That is the reason for the same hill appearing steeper/flatter to somebody b(i)ased on his level of exhaust. In technical terms, the interface we create in order to gasp the world is modified by what we have learned and our state of mind. Of course we don’t pay equal attention to everything that surrounds us, simply because we possess limited mental resources. We have to focus these on one thing at one time – that makes multitasking, in terms of simultaneous mental actions, a myth by the way. There are various factors that can affect the way perception influences our thinking. The most common is logic or reason. Human values and culture can also filter or accommodate new perceptions regardless of the logicality of it – these values may come from religion or faith, education, or superstitions.
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Toothpaste For Dinner


Kelly Evans

If Japan is in such a bind, why is it now a safe haven?

Brian Urquhart

I think you have to look at Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General as someone who had dedicated himself to – for him – the most important cause in the world, which was the UN and peace in a divided east-west nuclear world. He didn’t really feel that there was too much time for much else except he thought that literature, all the arts, particularly music and painting, were an absolute key part of life and he was very active in all these areas.
---
I think you have to remember that Hammarskjöld was operating in the Cold War. And during the Cold War, everyone – including one’s children if they were over five – had at the back of their minds a constant feeling that if you were in New York or Washington or Moscow, you might quite likely encounter a nuclear war, suddenly and quite unexpectedly. It was a very disagreeable background – I mean nuclear war, east-west, was perfectly possible.

Margery Williams

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Marius Arnesen

Smuggling tunnels in Rafah,
Gaza Strip

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Rob Orland

In the 1970's, after information about some of our wartime secrets had been released, some writers used this new found knowledge to sell books based upon a conspiracy theory. They alleged that certain authorities knew in advance that Coventry was to be targeted for a heavy raid, but in order to protect ULTRA (our deciphering of German codes using the captured 'Enigma' machine or other methods) our city was left to burn. Put simply, the conspiracy theorists tried to have us believe that if the citizens of Coventry had been given advance warning, then the Germans would have suspected that we'd broken their secret radio codes...
But still the conspiracy continued - based mainly on the fact that our use of ULTRA information had forewarned British Intelligence and Prime Minister Winston Churchill about the raid, but allegedely purposely not informed Coventry...
Surprisingly, one of the people directly involved in message decryption, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, was also one of those who helped to spread the conspiracy that Coventry was 'left to burn'.

Tyler Cowen

You hear people say, "Oh, in the old Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, intellectuals and artists were so important." Often they were. People would sort of hang onto the next work from a critic or a poet. But when you have a freer, wealthier, more stable society, they're not important in the same way. You know, maybe something is lost there, but in net terms I have no doubt it's for the better.
There's another reason why intellectuals are so often hostile to markets. At least part of it is because markets do not reward quality per se, and that is resented. In a cultural context, if you look at how rewards are distributed, they're not linked directly to quality, no matter how you care to define it. You look out in the market and see that Michael Jackson, who maybe is not the best father, earned however many millions from his music. Or that Madonna, who's not the best singer, earned so much more than a great opera singer. We instinctively feel there's something wrong with that. Maybe there is something wrong with that at some moral level, but the more important question is whether the system as a whole delivers the cultural goods. Does a system that allows a bad singer to earn more than a good singer get you more singing of many different kinds? The answer is yes.

麻木久仁子

時代の変革や激動はいきなり起きるわけではない。もはや誰の目にもそれが明らかになる前に「時代」がいつ、どこで、何を準備したのか。その時々に人々は何を思い、何を守り、何を捨てたのか。日本の近代の濫觴はどこに遡るのか。鑑みて今、この時代の流れはどんな大河になろうとしているのか。なるべきなのか。今を生きる我々ひとりひとりは、どう身を処せばよいのか。
---
物語の登場人物たちは、やがて武士の世の矛盾が頂点に達し、体制が崩壊する日が来ることを、もちろんまだ知らない。だが実はそこかしこに「蓋」があり、開けばなにかが噴き出す予感を感じ恐れている。あるいは無意識のうちに対峙している。
---
成熟しきった社会の中で、その矛盾と限界がひとりひとりの生き様の中に葛藤を生んでいる時代の空気がひしひしと伝わってくる。そんな時代に生きるひとりひとりの胸の内が実に切ない。このあと、体制が崩壊していく歴史の結果を思えば、さて登はどう生きるのか。是非、続編が読みたい。

EICAR

Using real viruses for testing in the real world is rather like setting fire to the dustbin in your office to see whether the smoke detector is working. Such a test will give meaningful results, but with unappealing, unacceptable risks.

Who needs the testfile?
  • If you are active in the anti-virus research field, then you will regularly receive requests for virus samples. Some requests are easy to deal with: they come from fellow-researchers whom you know well, and whom you trust. Using strong encryption, you can send them what they have asked for by almost any medium (including across the Internet) without any real risk.
  • Other requests come from people you have never heard from before. There are relatively few laws (though some countries do have them) preventing the secure exchange of viruses between consenting individuals, though it is clearly irresponsible for you simply to make viruses available to anyone who asks. Your best response to a request from an unknown person is simply to decline politely.
  • A third set of requests come from exactly the people you might think would be least likely to want viruses "users of anti-virus software". They want some way of checking that they have deployed their software correctly, or of deliberately generating a "virus incident in order to test their corporate procedures, or of showing others in the organisation what they would see if they were hit by a virus".

Bruce Schneier

Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection.
  • Turnitin's OriginalityCheck helps instructors check students' work for improper citation or potential plagiarism;
  • WriteCheck helps students by identifying unoriginal content in written work
  • WriteCheck searches the same content as Turnitin.
It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.

ILO

The slow-down in the global economy could result in a massive jobs shortfall among G20 members by next year. ... Employment may in fact grow 0.8 per cent until the end of 2012, resulting in a 40 million job shortfall in G20 countries next year and a much larger shortfall by 2015.

AMANDAW

I, and others, have been mulling over how to refer to people who are not disabled. Roughly, our options seem to be:
  • normal, or non-marked identity: centering a certain body/mind as “normal” ... It tends to imply that “normal” is accepted as good, while non-normal is bad ...
  • able-bodied, which seems to be the settled-upon term: excludes people with non-physical disabilities ... and it just makes my heart cry.
  • temporarily-able-bodied: at any time in life, you may become disabled, due to age, injury, late-manifesting genetics, or social barriers ...
  • neurotypical, physiotypyical: terms used in the autistic community to describe persons whose makeup conforms to the expected norm ...
  • normative: it emphasizes the social conformity rather than some inherent difference; think heteronormative.
  • non-disabled: functional, but we tend to want a specific term to describe the privileged category ...
  • abled, fully-able: I have been leaning on these terms as the most neutral of the set of options, but they still just don’t seem to describe ...
... I’ve finally settled on the term I’m comfortable with: temporarily non-disabled.
ETA: This is somewhat US-centric: UK disability advocates tend to use “disabled person” and “non-disabled person” as opposed to “person with a disability” or “person without a disability” (people-first language). And other countries may have different approaches as well. Something to keep in mind.
ETA 2: Many people in comments bring up the word “currently” in place of “temporary” and most people seem much more comfortable with this terminology (i.e., currently non-disabled).

スワンベーカリー

障がいのある人もない人も、共に働き、共に生きていく社会の実現

このノーマライゼーションの理念を実現させるために故・小倉理事長がヤマト福祉財団とヤマトホールディングス株式会社と共に設立した株式会社です。

Coluche

Je ne suis pas un nouveau riche,
je suis un ancien pauvre.



Dieu a partagé : il a donné la nourriture aux riches et l'appétit aux pauvres.

Eric Clapton

I never set myself too high a goal. It was always tone and feeling, for me.

Gerd Klaassen

As already said you can step through the whole song with this using the standard Blues scheme:

   E7         A7         B7
I---------------3---3------5---5--------0-0-0---0-0-------0-----I
I----3---3------2---2------4---4-------/3-3-3---3-3---0-3-------I
I----1---1------2---2------4---4-------/1-1-1---1-1---0-1-------I
I----2---2---------------4---4----------------0-----0-----------I
I-------------0---0---------------------------------------------I
I--0---0------------------------------(to change from E4 to A7)-I

The end is also simple, just play the chords E6 - E - E6 - E7. That's it.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Ry Cooder

Janifer Gatenby

Moving appropriate data to a network level data with basic enquiry and update Web services is a first step in re-engineering library systems. In fact it is not only the ILS that needs re-engineering, but also the newer solutions that, like the ILS, have created silos of data, often locked inside proprietary systems and databases. It is important for libraries to own and control their data resources; to be free to share them, provide access to them and to expose the data. It is less important that the libraries own or run the software that manipulates and manages the data.

Jonathan Gray

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been defined by our insatiable demand for information. It has led to the emergence of the ‘open data’ movement, whose powerful advocates include politicians and government officials. ...
Why is there a growing momentum behind open government data (OGD)? What are the benefits of making non-personal public data freely available? And what does it mean for both businesses and ordinary citizens?
Open data provides a platform on which innovation and value generation can flourish. If governments publish their data and get out of the way, the applications that people want will emerge.
Open data can reduce integration costs, improve transparency and harness the innovation of others. If you release your data then others will develop applications that make best use of it – providing new services that benefit you directly, like all of those free travel apps that the travel companies didn’t have to write, but which nevertheless drive people onto the transportation network.

Carol Tenopir

Studies show that people start with a search engine like Google when they need information. As early as 2004, in a focus group for one of my research studies, a college freshman bemoaned, “Why is Google so easy and the library so hard?

David W. Lewis

Libraries confront a variety of disruptive technologies and these technologies will disrupt libraries. The structures and practices of libraries will no more withstand the technological changes we are facing than the scribal culture withstood the changes brought on by the printing press. Change will not be instantaneous, but it will be relentless.

There are clear savings as fewer paper items are processed... But I suspect that few libraries have clear strategiesas to how to manage this migration and how and whenthey will reclaim resources. Nor do many libraries seem to be in a hurry to do so.

Google

Google was founded with a clear vision in mind: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And so the world’s leading search engine was born. It did not take long to realize that to fulfill our mission we must help organize not only publicly available information, but also the valuable information residing behind corporate firewalls.
Why is it that you can get the “number of steps in the Statue of Liberty” in under a second, and yet, you have to waste so much time finding that old presentation in your intranet, file share or some other place? We believe your information should be just as easy to find as the stock quotes, weather, movie show times, package tracking and other general information you’re already used to easily finding on Google.com.
Google Enterprise offers a wide range of products to help you organize your corporate information and securely make it available regardless of its location or nature.

Michael Wesch

One of our roles has always been to make knowledge more visible to a large number of people. And collaborative technology just gives you another way to do that. People worried about me when I first started saying this. But now people come to me and ask how they can do it too.

Peter Bradwell

Google opens up vast resources to many more people, but at the same time it undermines the role of universities as stores of knowledge.

Universities are now just one source among many for ideas, knowledge and innovation. That seems to threaten their core position and role, but in this new world of learning and research, there are also great opportunities.

In building the e-infrastructure for higher education we should not just build around the needs of institutions as they exist already. To pursue the possibilities of the ‘Edgeless University’, technology will have to be taken more seriously as a strategic asset. Technology is a driver for change. But we should harness it as a solution, a tool, for the way we want universities to support learning and research in the future.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

David J. Collis, Michael G. Rukstad

The Strategic Sweet Spot

The strategic sweet spot of a company is where it meets customers’ needs in a way that rivals can’t, given the context in which it competes.


David J. Collis, Michael G. Rukstad

A Hierarchy of Company Statements
Organizational direction comes in several forms. The mission statement is your loftiest guiding light—and your least specific. As you work your way down the hierarchy, the statements become more concrete, practical, and ultimately unique. No other company will have the same strategy statement, which defines your competitive advantage, or balanced scorecard, which tracks how you implement your particular strategy.

       

MISSION
Why we exist

VALUES
What we believe in
and how we will behave

VISION
What we want to be

STRATEGY —————————
What our competitive
game plan will be

BALANCED
SCORECARD

How we will monitor
and implement that plan

| The BASIC
| ELEMENTS
| of a Strategy
| Statement
|
| OBJECTIVE = Ends
|
| SCOPE = Domain
|
| ADVANTAGE = Means

Mac Margolis

Of the many war stories that Dilma Vana Rousseff tells of her rise from revolutionary to career bureaucrat to president of Brazil, one in particular stands out. It was early in the race to succeed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and most Brazilians were waking up to the idea of life without their hyperpopular leader, the “father of the poor.” One day in a crowded airport a woman and her young daughter tentatively approached Rousseff to get a closer look at the upstart female frontrunner. “Can a woman be president?” the girl—whose name, fittingly, was Vitória—wanted to know. “She can,” Rousseff answered. With that Vitória thanked Rousseff, raised her chin, and walked off a few inches taller.

Sergei N. Martynov

There was a pervasive feeling that chaos was engulfing the planet: one global crisis followed the next; international law was being shamelessly trampled; and a growing number of people were suffering. We need a global strategy against chaos. It must be built on strengthening international law, establishing global partnerships and revitalizing the United Nations.

Let us be frank. Everyone bears grudges against the United Nations. In recent years, the United Nations appeared to have merely survived various crises, rather than solved or prevented them.

iParadigms

Turnitin's OriginalityCheck helps instructors check students' work for improper citation or potential plagiarism by comparing it against the world's most accurate text comparison database.
GradeMark saves instructors time and provides richer feedback to students by enabling editorial highlights, custom comments, and QuickMark editing marks directly on the student papers.
PeerMark facilitates peer review so that students can evaluate each other's work and learn from their classmates.
WriteCheck helps students become better writers by identifying grammar errors and unoriginal content in written work. WriteCheck was developed with the guidance and input of instructors who saw the need for a simple service to help students identify and correct writing mistakes in a formative manner.
WriteCheck searches the same content as Turnitin.

中山身語正宗

お行は「形の行」、すなわち仏前におけるお行が基本です。わずかな時間でも毎日欠かさず努めることが大切です。この積み重ねによって道がひらいていくのです。
具体的には、読経、念仏行、お瀧、おすがり、お百度、古四国巡拝などのお行があげられます。
お行に取り組む心構えは、「信行一如」と説かれます。つまり、「いくら信じていますといっても、実際に自分自身がお行をしないなら、信じているとはいえない。
いかにお行をしていても、心の中に不足不満を持ち、み仏を信じきれないお行は、お行をしているとはいえない」ということです。信じるには、み仏を前にして「素直になること」、また、行じるには中途半端でなく「やりぬくこと」が必要です。

Clayton Christensen

Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.
An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill. Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics.
Because companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ lives change, most organizations eventually end up producing products or services that are too good, too expensive, and too inconvenient for many customers. By only pursuing “sustaining innovations” that perpetuate what has historically helped them succeed, companies unwittingly open the door to “disruptive innovations”.
Some examples of disruptive innovation include:
Disruptor
Cellular phones
Community colleges
Discount retailers
Retail medical clinics
Disruptee
Fixed line telephony
Four-year colleges
Full-service department stores
Traditional doctor’s offices

Judy Luther, Maureen C. Kelly

A casual Google search may well be good enough for a daily task. But if you are a college student conducting his or her first search for peer-reviewed content, or an established scholar taking up a new line of inquiry, then the stakes are a lot higher. The challenge for academic libraries, caught in the seismic shift from print to electronic resources, is to offer an experience that has the simplicity of Google—which users expect—while searching the library’s rich digital and print collections—which users need. Increasingly, they are turning to a new generation of search tools, called discovery, for help.

Monday, September 26, 2011

David W. Lewis

I would propose a short test to see if you and your organization are ready to live in the world of disruptive technology.
  1. Can you consider buying half as many books as you now do and investing the money in other ways of providing information to library users?
  2. Can you act on what you learn from freshman when what they teach you runs counter to what the faculty say they want?
  3. Can you trust small groups in your library to develop products and services, or does everyone on the staff have to buy in to everything?
  4. Are you prepared to spend money to develop exploratory projects knowing that one in three will fail?
If you can answer yes to all of these questions your library may be ready. If you cannot, you need to get ready. As a first step, read The Innovator's Dilemma.

David W. Lewis

Sustaining technologies improve the performance of established products along dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued. Sustaining technologies improve products or processes, and they can be driven by new, and sometimes even revolutionary, technologies, but what is important is that the improvements result in accomplishing the same thing, only doing it better. Because of this, established customers recognize the value of the improvements. Relationships in the market, cost structures, and organizational dynamics can thus remain largely unchanged.
Disruptive technologies bring a very different value proposition to the market. Generally, disruptive technologies initially underperform established products in mainstream markets. This makes them easy to ignore. But disruptive technologies have other features that are valued by a few fringe or new users. They also improve at a faster rate than established technologies. This is what makes them dangerous to established firms. Disruptive technologies often appear to be merely toys, but before you know it the toys have grown up and are cheaper, faster, and better than what established firms are selling.

Carla J. Stoffle, Kim Leeder

  1. Move from cooperation to collaboration in our activities.
  2. Only do locally what must be done locally.
  3. Focus on the needs of our campus, not what libraries traditionally do.
  4. Provide all services, including information fluency instruction, to the desktop.
  5. Change the portions of our budget going to collection-building and managing legacy collections.
  6. Redesign our spaces as people space, not storage areas.
  7. Develop new performance and assessment measures.
  8. Internalize the concept of “planned abandonment,” which encourages the abandonment of programs and projects in decline to free up resources for innovative new projects.
  9. Create new sources of revenue.

                  Woody Allen

                  Eighty percent of success is showing up.

                  Sunday, September 25, 2011

                  Daily Yonder

                  Salon

                  Le Télégramme

                  Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

                  What is "real"? How do you define "real"?

                  Nancy Reagan

                  Just say no.

                  John Fusco

                  Louis de Bernières

                  Corelli: Do you miss me?
                  Pelagia: So much that I cant sleep at night

                  Penelope Lively

                  It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

                  Marianna A. Klochko, Peter C. Ordeshook

                  Within the rational choice paradigm, the usual way of understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation - of how people overcome the imperatives of the motives illustrated by the Prisoners' Dilemma - is conceptualizing individual choice as part of some ongoing social process. In addition to admitting a consideration of such things as learning and imitation, the formal acknowledgment that social processes are dynamic allows us to establish the existence of a class of equilibria that are not normally present in more limited (myopic or static) representations. Specifically, defectors from cooperation 'today' can be punished 'tomorrow' by those they injure or with whom they interact in the future and who act on the basis of reputations earned from earlier choices, while non-defection can be rewarded subsequently by allowing a person to share in the social gains from cooperation. Put simply, by expanding the set of strategies available to people, conceptualizing social processes as ongoing and dynamic expands the set of equilibria in our analyses to include cooperative as well as non-cooperative outcomes.

                  Питирим Сорокин

                  Punishments and rewards that impact immediately have a stronger influence than punishments and rewards moved to the future, and the more they are moved the less their influence.

                  Peter Ordeshook

                  The concept of a Nash equilibrium n-tuple is perhaps the most important idea in noncooperative game theory. ... Whether we are analysing
                  • candidates' election strategies,
                  • the causes of war,
                  • agenda manipulation in legislatures, or
                  • the actions of interest groups,
                  predictions about events reduce to a search for and description of equilibria.

                  Put simply, equilibrium strategies are the things that we predict about people.

                  MBAecon: Additionally, nash equilibrium is used in business decisions. Nash equilibrium strategies can be used in the use of advertising decisions, quality decisions, and pricing and product mix decisions. Business managers also use nash equilibrium strategies to analyze interactions between workers and managers and to monitor the actions of employees.

                  Rajiv Sethi

                  It has sometimes been argued that the Nash prediction in the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma (and in many other environments) is counterintuitive and at odds with experimental evidence. However, experimental tests of the equilibrium hypothesis are typically conducted with monetary payoffs, which need not reflect the preferences of subjects over action profiles. In other words, individual preferences over the distribution of monetary payoffs may not be exclusively self-interested. Furthermore, the equilibrium prediction relies on the hypothesis that these preferences are commonly known to all subjects, which is also unlikely to hold in practice.
                  To address this latter concern, the concept of Nash equilibrium has been generalized to allow for situations in which players are faced with incomplete information. If each player is drawn from some set of types, such that the probability distribution governing the likelihood of each type is itself commonly known to all players, then we have a Bayesian game. A pure strategy in this game is a function that associates with each type a particular action. A BayesNash equilibrium is then a strategy profile such that no player can obtain greater expected utility by deviating to a different strategy, given his or her beliefs about the distribution of types from which other players are drawn.
                  Allowing for incomplete information can have dramatic effects on the predictions of the Nash equilibrium concept. Consider, for example, the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma, and suppose that each player believes that there is some possibility, perhaps very small, that his or her opponent will cooperate in all periods provided that no defection has yet been observed, and defect otherwise. If the number of stages n is sufficiently large, it can be shown that mutual defection in all stages is inconsistent with equilibrium behavior, and that, in a well-defined sense, the players will cooperate in most periods. Hence, in applying the concept of Nash equilibrium to practical situations, it is important to pay close attention to the information that individuals have about the preferences, beliefs, and rationality of those with whom they are strategically interacting.

                  Roger A. McCain

                  If there is a set of strategies with the property that no player can benefit by changing her strategy while the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute the Nash Equilibrium.
                  ... In fact, any dominant strategy equilibrium is also a Nash Equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium is an extension of the concepts of dominant strategy equilibrium and of the maximin solution for zero-sum games.

                  John Forbes Nash, Jr.

                  Let (S, f) be a game with n players, where Si is the strategy set for player i, S=S1 X S2 ... X Sn is the set of strategy profiles and f=(f1(x), ..., fn(x)) is the payoff function for x \in S. Let xibe a strategy profile of player i and x-i be a strategy profile of all players except for player i. When each player i \in {1, ..., n} chooses strategy xi resulting in strategy profile x = (x1, ..., xn)then player i obtains payoff fi(x). Note that the payoff depends on the strategy profile chosen, i.e., on the strategy chosen by player i as well as the strategies chosen by all the other players. A strategy profile x* \in S is a Nash equilibrium (NE) if no unilateral deviation in strategy by any single player is profitable for that player, that is
                  \forall i,x_i\in S_i, x_i \neq x^*_{i} :  f_i(x^*_{i}, x^*_{-i}) \geq f_i(x_{i},x^*_{-i}).

                  A game can have either a pure-strategy or a mixed Nash Equilibrium, (in the latter a pure strategy is chosen stochastically with a fixed frequency). Nash proved that if we allow mixed strategies, then every game with a finite number of players in which each player can choose from finitely many pure strategies has at least one Nash equilibrium.

                  When the inequality above holds strictly (with > instead of \geq) for all players and all feasible alternative strategies, then the equilibrium is classified as a strict Nash equilibrium. If instead, for some player, there is exact equality between x^*_i and some other strategy in the set S, then the equilibrium is classified as a weak Nash equilibrium.

                  Russell Kleinbach, Mehrigiul Ablezova, Medina Aitieva

                  The 1999 and 2001 data provided evidence that approximately 50 per cent of ethnic Kyrgyz marriages were the result of kidnappings. These data provided evidence that as many as 66 per cent of these marriages were non-consensual. The first two studies concluded that approximately 33 per cent of ethnic Kyrgyz women were married against their will as a result of bride kidnapping. The 2004 data show that 80 per cent of Kyrgyz marriages in this village are the result of kidnappings. These data illustrate that 57 per cent of these marriages are non-consensual. The 2004 village study suggests that 45 per cent of the ethnic Kyrgyz women are married against their will as a result of bride kidnapping. Based on the cumulated data from the three studies, we estimate that approximate 35–45 per cent of married ethnic Kyrgyz women are married against their will as a result of bride kidnapping.
                  The evidence from the 2004 village study suggests the rate of kidnapping and the rate of non-consent have been increasing for the last 40–50 years. The percentage of women kidnapped has increased from 64 per cent to over 85 per cent and the percentage of women kidnapped without consent from 43 per cent to 75 per cent for the 16–25 year-old age group. The weight of the evidence here points to an increase in male dominance rather than to a practice that counters arranged marriages and affirms a lover’s option. If it were primarily a lover’s option, a much higher percentage of the kidnap-marriages would be consensual.

                  Adrian Banks

                  The most basic of the Roman Law principles is:
                  "The chief division of the rights of persons is this: men are all either free or slaves."

                  Slavery has been an institution throughout the history of the human race. What about today? In America and no doubt in other countries of the world, people are told from childhood that they are free. But just because something has been drummed into your head all of your life mean that what you have been mentally conditioned to believe is true? ... There is nothing new about religion and politics combining forces to make people conform to a certain way of thinking. Power and truth have collided throughout history. Today is no different.

                  Newsweek Magazine

                  The new 5% Victory tax, which has no parallel in tax history.

                  Garet Garrett

                  Nevertheless, there is here a startling departure. It begins with saying that democracy and capitalism shall be reformed together. The argument is circular. To arrive at the free and abundant life to which every individual is entitled, it will be necessary to reform democracy. But to reform democracy it will be necessary first for a government, acting in the name of the people, to overthrow the rule of individualism in the economic sphere, to lay a controlling hand upon all the means of production and to say how the nation's wealth and income shall be divided. It follows simply that in order for the government to seize and exercise this power of economic and social control, thereby to reform democracy for the full and abundant individual life, it will be necessary for the individual to surrender the economic liberties he has enjoyed and may have abused under what hitherto ne mistook to be a democratic form of government. Not for his own sake as a specific individual but for the sake of every individual, he must submit his individualism to a planned economy.

                  Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center

                  Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, formerly two of Russia's leading entrepreneurs, have been unjustly imprisoned since 2003. Patriots, family men, and philanthropists, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev had every opportunity to leave Russia prior to their arrests, once it became clear they were being targeted by authorities seeking to neutralize their political activities and seize their assets. But they chose not to flee their homeland.

                  Khodorkovsky and Lebedev remain in jail today because their vision for their country differs from that of the people in power. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev support the development of a free, open society, a competitive and modern market economy, independent political and judicial institutions and increased international cooperation.

                  Прессцентр Михаила Ходорковского и Платона Лебедева

                  2 июля 2003 года Платон Лебедев был арестован в госпитале имени Вишневского.

                  25 октября 2003 года в Новосибирске самолет Ходорковского штурмом берет спецназ ФСБ. Ходорковского обвиняют в нарушениях при приватизации ОАО «Апатит» в 1994 году и арестовывают.

                  佐々木閑

                  愚かな人は
                  私には子供がいる
                  私には財産があると思って
                  それを失わないように悩む
                  しかしそもそも
                  自分自身が自分のものでない
                  ましてや
                  どうして子が自分のものであろうか
                  どうして財が自分のものであろうか

                  人は様々なものに執着して生きている。しかし執着が過度に強くなると、家族や財産といった、本来幸せをもたらすはずのものも、自分の思い通りにならないことにいらだち、苦しみを感じてしまう。ブッダは、自分勝手な執着をいましめるとともに、自分の教えについても、過度に執着してはならないと説いた。そして、自分を救えるのはあくまでも自分自身であり、自分の心を正しく鍛えることによって、心の平安を得ることが出来るとした。

                  Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger

                  University of Chicago (UC) free market economists have turned up for decades around the world, from the winners’ circle at Nobel ceremonies to hands-on reforming of economic systems in South America. The worldwide move toward more market-oriented reforms during recent decades is often traced back to the terms of US president Ronald Reagan and UK prime minister and Hoover honorary fellow Margaret Thatcher. But they were not the first to turn seriously to markets in the mid–twentieth century in a trend that now stretches across the globe in the era of globalization. Important aspects of market economics suffused the post–World War II reforms in the Asian “tigers” or “dragons”: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the only countries in the past half century to leap over the rest of the “developing” world into the developed world.
                  With support from the Ford Foundation, a program was launched that enabled many Chilean students to pursue graduate studies in economics in the United States, mostly at the UC, and US professors to conduct research from a base at the PUC. Contrary to the common assumption that Friedman was the dominant influence in Chile, a different UC (later University of California at Los Angeles) professor, Arnold Harberger, was in most respects the father of the Chicago boys. His goal was to teach economics fundamentals to students from Chile and demonstrate how economics is linked to the real world.

                  Mahmoud Abbas

                  The suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of Israel’s colonial occupation is crystal clear to the world, since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem, in 1967, Israel continues with its settlement policy on the Palestinian land, especially in Jerusalem, where it is currently being accelerated through various means, including the seizure of the homes of Palestinian inhabitants in the City and the imposition of restrictions and even preventing Palestinians from building and sometimes from repairing their homes, while new settlement neighborhoods are being established and Jerusalem is being completely isolated from its surroundings because of the illegal settlements and the apartheid Wall.

                  Saturday, September 24, 2011

                  FALSE is one of the early purveyors of independent fashion anarchism. The brand has been functioning as an evolving propaganda to Le Messie’s visions on societies illusions. His mixed media artworks constantly work on re-emerging themes of breaking down social bourgeois structural views laid on by the so called “mass elite”. Often harboring dark under-line meanings, his strong influence to mystical aesthetics often draw about a deep question into the relation of his art and it’s viewer, often functioning in it’s own individual life-like form. All garments are individually hand-screened and hand-finished by FALSE. FALSE is parent brand to Better Off Dead, Fallacy Of Rome, FALSE Sounds& Anti-Anti.

                  Stop Blood Diamonds

                  Stop Blood Diamonds is an organization pledged to stopping the exploitation of the diamond trade by human rights abusers.

                  Blood diamonds, often called conflict diamonds, are mined in war torn African countries by rebels to fund their conflict. The rebels grossly abuse human rights, often murdering and enslaving the local populations to mine the diamonds.

                  We can stop this by purchasing legitimate diamonds. Botswana used to be a poor farm country but today its government works hand in hand with the Diamond industry to give Botswana a living standard 7 times higher than its neighbors.
                  Make sure your jeweler stops the blood diamonds trade by supporting conflict free diamonds.

                  Franck Muller




                  Link-Replicas.net

                  Diamond Nexus Labs

                  Below you will see two rings. On the left (from Bluenile.com) is a 1.03carat, D color, IF clarity stone set in a simple 18kt gold solitaire setting. The cost is $24,345. The ring on the right (from Diamond Nexus Labs) is a one carat, D color, IF clarity stone set in a simple 18kt gold solitaire setting. It costs $877. That is a difference of $23,468.







                  Yes, it is a diamond simulant, but what does that mean anyway? Unless you are a scientist, the only real difference between a mined diamond and our made-in-a-laboratory diamond simulant is the chemistry of the stone. Also, and importantly, a created diamond simulant is a green and conflict free choice, with none of the environmental and ethical issues associated with mined diamonds.

                  Anthony Grafton

                  The well-recognized complexity and opacity of alchemical literature has long constituted a barrier to its proper understanding. Indeed, since the eighteenth-century disappearance of its last serious practitioners within the community of chemists, alchemy has been the subject of several radically distinct schools of historical interpretation. The current understanding of alchemy among historians of science, not to mention the general public, remains strongly colored by one or more of these divergent schools of interpretation, which stem, respectively, from the Enlightenment rejection of obscurity and the later Romantic disenchantment with Newtonian science that led to a new embrace of the occult.

                  Mark Twain

                  Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

                  Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

                  九岛伸一

                  雲の中の群れ

                  Tim Love

                  When I send to magazines my habit is to send 3 poems: 2 proper poems and novelty party piece. The party piece is often the one selected - I guess editors want a bit of variety in their magazines, but also these poems might be free of the portentious baggage that can burden my more ernest efforts.

                  Richard Pogge

                  Statistics [Raw (Percent out of 50)]:
                  • Mean: 34.09 (68.18%)
                  • Spread: 7.96 (15.92%)
                  • Median: 35 (70%)
                  What do each of these numbers mean?
                  • The Mean of the curve is the average (the "arithmetic mean") of the all of the exam scores. It is computed by adding up the scores for all of the students and dividing by the number of students.
                  • The Spread in the curve is a measurement of the distribution of scores above and below the mean. In simple terms, it is the characteristic width of the grade curve, defined mathematically as the "standard deviation" of the scores. A large spread in a grade curve means that the scores were spread over a large range, making the curve wide and shallow. A large "tail" of low scores will also result in a larger spread in scores. A tall, narrow curve (small spread) means most people scored pretty close to the mean grade.
                  • The Median is the score that divides the grade curve down the middle (think about the so-called "median-line" in the road: the line painted down the middle). Half of the students score at or above the median, and the other half at or below the mean. The median is another way of judging the class performance, since the arithmetic mean can be skewed slightly by having a number of very high or very low scores. If the curve has a long tail towards lower scores, as it the case here, then the median is a better measure of class performance than the mean. If the curve is a symmetric bell curve, the mean and median are the same.
                  In this example, the grade distribution curve is slightly lopsided towards low scores. This is why the median (35) is larger than the mean (34.09) by a little bit. The more lopsided a curve is (on either side), the greater the difference between the median and mean.

                  Mediathink

                  Politicians, educators, moralists, and others have long complained that electronic media don’t just report on or portray what’s going on in the real world, but actually shape events and the public reaction to them. This is the subject of endless and sometimes fascinating debate, but if that viewpoint has any credibility it will be strengthened immeasurably by the three-screen model of voice-and-video access that fits into the palm of one’s hand. Making phone calls, watching TV, and going online all on the same small device has world-changing potential. Video cameras, for instance, captured the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia not long ago, and more recently, cell phones documented the genocide in Darfur. Technology generally improves our lives, and sometimes enables us to be witnesses even of atrocities.

                  Chris Anderson

                  Long tail - forces:
                  1. More stuff is being produced. Technology and the internet make it cheaper and easier to record and distribute your own songs, publish your own writings and so on. This lengthens the tail.
                  2. There is better access to niches, again thanks to the reach and economies on the net. This fattens the tail.
                  3. Search and recommendations connect supply and demand. This drives business from hits to niches.
                  Long tail - conditions:
                  1. Variety (there are many different sorts of things)
                  2. Inequality (some have more of some quality than others)
                  3. Network effects (e.g., word of mouth and reputation, which tend to amplify differences in quality)

                  Karl Popper

                  Inductivist methodology supposed that one can somehow move from a series of singular existential statements to a universal statement. That is, that one can move from 'this is a white swan', 'that is a white swan', and so on, to a universal statement such as 'all swans are white'. This method is clearly deductively invalid, since it is always possible that there may be a non-white swan that has eluded observation (and, in fact, the discovery of the Australian black swan demonstrated the deductive invalidity of this particular statement).

                  It is always possible to change the universal statement or the existential statement so that falsification does not occur. On hearing that a black swan has been observed in Australia, one might introduce the ad hoc hypothesis, 'all swans are white except those found in Australia'; or one might adopt another, more cynical view about some observers, 'Australian bird watchers are incompetent'.

                  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

                  Black Swan Theory:
                  1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology
                  2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
                  3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

                  John Mauldin, Jonathan Tepper

                  We borrowed like there was no tomorrow. And because we were so convinced that all this debt was safe, we leveraged up, borrowing at first 3 and then 5 and then 10 and then as much as 30 times the actual money we had. And we convinced the regulators that it was a good thing. The longer things remained stable, the more convinced we became they would remain that way. The chart shows how our sandpile ended up. It's not pretty.

                  Mark Buchanan

                  In 1987 three physicists, named Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Weisenfeld, began to play the sand pile game in their lab at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Now, actually piling up one grain of sand at a time is a slow process, so they wrote a computer program to do it. Not as much fun, but a whole lot faster. Not that they really cared about sand piles. They were more interested in what are called nonequilibrium systems.

                  In this simplified setting of the sand pile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes. After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size.

                  忌野清志郎

                  双葉町





                  ☢原子力明るい未来のエネルギー☢

                  ☢ Nuclear energy is an energy of bright future ☢

                  Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Australian Government

                  Australian Visa Bureau

                  In an effort to both raise awareness amongst potential asylum seekers of the dangers of people smuggling and illustrate the risks they face when they enter Australia illegally, the Australian government has launched a new multi-lingual YouTube channel.
                  One of the short videos hosted on the YouTube channel show Australia immigration officers tracking and arresting a suspected member of a people smuggling gang.
                  The videos have been translated into eight languages, including Arabic, Tamil and Bahasa and it's a new attempt by the Australian government to illustrate the risks and dangers that asylum seekers face when they pay criminal gangs to help them reach Australia by boat.
                  Another video details an agreement reached earlier this month that will see 800 asylum seekers from Malysia returned to their native country after being detained in Australia.

                  Lynsey Hanley

                  On one day – one minute – in the next month, the world's 7 billionth human resident will be born. The United Nations is marking the occasion on the last day of October with what it describes it as an "opportunity" to promote "7 billion actions" for environmental sustainability and women's education, estimating that the world's population will top out at 9 or 10 billion mid-century before declining as economic development matures in countries with higher birth rates.
                  They appear to be right. Worldwide, fertility rates in countries such as Mexico and Bangladesh have fallen vastly in a single generation – thanks, in large part, to what the economist Amartya Sen terms "development as freedom". Yet Thomas Malthus, who at the turn of the 19th century predicted that population growth would inevitably lead to famine, still has his fans among those inclined to believe that humans mean little but bad news.

                  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

                  • Who abducted forcefully tens of millions of people from their homes in Africa and other regions of the world during the dark period of slavery , making them a victim of their materialistic greed.
                  • Who imposed colonialism for over four centuries upon this world. Who occupied lands and massively plundered resources of other nations, destroyed talents, and alienated languages, cultures and identities of nations?
                  • Who triggered the first and second world wars, that left seventy millions killed and hundreds of millions injured or homeless. Who created the wars in Korean peninsula and in Vietnam?
                  • Who imposed, through deceits and hypocrisy, the Zionism and over sixty years of war, homelessness, terror and mass murder on the Palestinian people and on countries of the region?
                  • Who imposed and supported for decades military dictatorship and totalitarian regimes on Asian, African, and Latin American nations.
                  • Who used nuclear bomb against defenseless people, and stockpiled thousands of warheads in their arsenals?
                  • Whose economies rely on waging wars and selling arms?
                  • Who provoked and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade and impose an eight-year war on Iran, and who assisted and equipped him to deploy chemical weapons against our cities and our people. Who used the mysterious September 11 incident as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq , killing, injuring, and displacing millions in two countries with the ultimate goal of bringing into its domination the Middle East and its oil resources?
                  • Who nullified the Breton Woods system by printing trillions of dollars without the backing of gold reserves or equivalent currency? A move that triggered inflation worldwide and was intended to prey on the economic gains of other nations.
                  • Which country's military spending exceeds annually a thousand billion dollars, more than the military budgets of all countries of the world combined?
                  • Which governments are the most indebted ones in the world?
                  • Who dominates the policy-making establishments of the world economy?
                  • Who are responsible for the world economic recession, and are imposing the consequences on America, Europe and the world in general?
                  • Which governments are always ready to drop thousands of bombs on other countries, but ponder and hesitate to provide aid to famine-stricken people in Somalia or in other places?
                  • Who are the ones dominating the Security Council which is ostensibly responsible for safeguarding the international security?
                  It is as lucid as daylight that the same slave masters and colonial powers that once instigated the two world wars have caused widespread misery and disorder with far-reaching effects across the globe since then.

                  Ben Harper

                  Friday, September 23, 2011

                  Irma

                  Zaz

                  Donnez moi une suite au Ritz, je n'en veux pas !
                  Des bijoux de chez Chanel, je n'en veux pas !
                  Donnez moi une limousine, j'en ferais quoi ? papalapapapala
                  Offrez moi du personnel, j'en ferais quoi ?
                  Un manoir a Neufchatel, ce n'est pas pour moi.
                  Offrez moi la Tour Eiffel, j'en ferais quoi ? papalapapapala
                  Je Veux d'l'amour, d'la joie, de la bonne humeur, ce n'est pas votre argent qui f'ra mon bonheur, moi j'veux crever la main sur le coeur papalapapapala allons ensemble, découvrir ma liberté, oubliez donc tous vos clichés, bienvenue dans ma réalité.
                  J'en ai marre de vos bonnes manières, c'est trop pour moi !
                  Moi je mange avec les mains et j'suis comme ça !
                  J'parle fort et je suis franche, excusez moi !
                  Finie l'hypocrisie moi j'me casse de là !
                  J'en ai marre des langues de bois !
                  Regardez moi, toute manière j'vous en veux pas et j'suis comme çaaaaaaa

                  新浪女性综合

                  抢救人员发现她的时候,她已经死了,是被垮塌下来的房子压死的,透过那一堆废墟的的间隙可以看到她死亡的姿势,双膝跪着,整个上身向前匍匐着,双手扶着地支撑着身体,有些象古人行跪拜礼,只是身体被压的变形了,看上去有些诡异。救援人员从废墟的空隙伸手进去确认了她已经死亡,又在冲着废墟喊了几声,用撬棍在在砖头上敲了几下,里面没有任何回应。
                  当人群走到下一个建筑物的时候,救援队长忽然往回跑,边跑变喊“快过来”。他又来到她的尸体前,费力的把手伸进女人的身子底下摸索,他摸了几下高声的喊“有人,有个孩子 ,还活着”。
                  经过一番努力,人们小心的把挡着她的废墟清理开,在她的身体下面躺着她的孩子,包在一个红色带黄花的小被子里,大概有3、4个月大,因为母亲身体庇护着,他毫发未伤,抱出来的时候,他还安静的睡着,他熟睡的脸让所有在场的人感到很温暖。
                  随行的医生过来解开被子准备做些检查,发现有一部手机塞在被子里,医生下意识的看了下手机屏幕,发现屏幕上是一条已经写好的短信“亲爱的宝贝,如果你能活着,一定要记住我爱你”,看惯了生离死别的医生却在这一刻落泪了,手机传递着,每个看到短信的人都落泪了。

                  Desmond Parker

                  An episode occurred last year, at the height of the General Debate, when electric power in the North Lawn building failed for several hours, which produced a strange blend of frustration and amusement.
                  (At the time, the Secretary-General was holding a series of bilateral meetings with Heads of State and Government.) It was indeed very interesting to see several Heads of State and Government, and their entourages, climb four levels of stairs to the Secretary-General’s Conference Room.
                  (Such events cannot be predicted, and it is the job of Protocol staff to be able to react quickly to smooth things over as much as possible.) It is Murphy’s Law that things will go wrong, but we try to prevent Murphy’s Law from being legal.

                  Karla Suarez

                  The Economist

                  Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That’s partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy.

                  Mila Kreiserman

                  Создал Бог осла и говорит ему:
                  - Ты будешь ослом, ты будешь таскать тяжелые грузы на своем горбу и работать от заката до рассвета. Ты будешь питаться травой и будешь достаточно глупым. Жить ты будешь пятьдесят лет.
                  - Пятьдесят лет для такой жизни это слишком много. Пожалуйста, дай мне не больше двадцати.
                  И было так.

                  Кукла ММ

                  Freedom House, Inc.

                  Over the past decade, the influence of the internet as a means to spread information and challenge existing media controls has rapidly expanded. As events in the Middle East in winter of 2011 have demonstrated, the internet has also emerged as a crucial medium through which citizens can mobilize and advocate for political, social, and economic reform. Fearing the power of the new technologies, authoritarian states have devised subtle and not-so-subtle ways to filter, monitor, and otherwise obstruct or manipulate the openness of the internet. Even a number of democratic states have considered or implemented various restrictions in response to the potential legal, economic, and security challenges raised by new media.

                  TV-Novosti

                  Kyung-wha Kang

                  Immediately and unconditionally release all political opponents, activists and journalists, who were not involved in any violence. Conduct an impartial, credible and objective investigation of circumstances in which these persons were arrested and detained and of al reported cases of torture and ill treatment and bring those responsible to justice. Put an end to all forms of political and administrative pressure and harassment of human rights defenders, journalists and political opponents.

                  Asya

                  National Digital Stewardship Alliance

                  The National Digital Stewardship Alliance and all member organizations are bound as a community by the following values:
                  • Stewardship (members are committed to managing digital content for current and long-term use)
                  • Collaboration (collaborative work is the central value shared by all members)
                  • Inclusiveness (collaborative effort to preserve a distributed world digital collection for the benefit of current and future generations)
                  • Exchange (members encourage the open exchange of ideas, services, and software)

                  John Popper

                  Verne G. Kopytoff

                  Encouraging employees to buy their own laptops, or bring their mobile phones and iPads from home, is gaining traction in the workplace. ... 48 percent of information workers buy smartphones for work without considering what their IT department supports. By being more flexible, companies are hoping that workers will be more comfortable with their devices and therefore more productive.
                  "Bring your own device" policies are also shifting the balance of power among electronics makers. Manufacturers good at selling to consumers are increasingly gaining the upper hand, while those focused on bulk corporate sales are slipping.
                  It’s not just electronics. A variety of online services that were originally aimed at consumers are crossing over. Google is hoping that people using its Gmail and Google Docs products will produce a guerrilla movement inside corporations strong enough to displace Microsoft and its Office suite of software. Skype, the Internet calling service that started as a way to call friends at no charge, is pushing into the workplace. Dropbox, originally pitched as a way for people to store and share personal documents online, has also gained a foothold in businesses.

                  Thursday, September 22, 2011

                  Dylan Thomas

                  Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

                  Henri Frédéric Amiel

                  Cerveau, intelligence, raison lucide. Je lui fais l'effet d'un esprit lucide (...) qui possède à fond son sujet.

                  Tahar Ben Jelloun

                  ... l'amour n'atteint la maturité et la sérénité qu'aidé par l'amitié. Il y faut du temps, de la générosité et de la lucidité.

                  Albert Camus

                  L'intelligence dans les chaînes perd en lucidité ce qu'elle gagne en fureur.
                  ---
                  L'absurde, c'est la raison lucide qui constate ses limites.
                  ---
                  De toutes les écoles de la patience et de la lucidité, la création est la plus efficace. Elle est aussi le bouleversant témoignage de la seule dignité de l'homme: la révolte tenace contre sa condition, la persévérance dans un effort tenu pour stérile.

                  Wednesday, September 21, 2011

                  Sam Zarifi

                  North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable. For decades the authorities have refused to admit to the existence of mass political prison camps.
                  These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored.
                  As North Korea seems to be moving towards a new leader in Kim Jong-un and a period of political instability, the big worry is that the prison camps appear to be growing in size.
                  Hundreds of thousands of people exist with virtually no rights, treated essentially as slaves, in some of the worst circumstances we’ve documented in the last 50 years.

                  Brian Christian

                  The history of the computer has generally been a case of expecting the right answers, as quickly as possible – whereas life is more the reverse: the timely answer, as correct as possible.

                  We think of science as an indefatigable advance. But in the context of the Turing test, humans – dynamic as ever – don't allow for that kind of narrative. The fact is, the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative and quick-learning species on the planet. We're not going to take defeat lying down.

                  Tuesday, September 20, 2011

                  Charles Platt

                  For the time being, I think there's no risk of our humanness being successfully simulated by program code.

                  And speaking of humanness, despite my worst fears, when all the votes were in, I was rated the "most human human" of all. By being moody, irritable, and obnoxious, I came out way ahead of the other four confederates, who were mild-mannered and much more polite.

                  Martin B. Cassidy

                  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is hoping software entrepreneurs will answer the call for a fresh take on transit-related apps that will keep smart phone-toting riders informed throughout their travels.
                  The parent organization of Metro-North Railroad this week announced MTA App Quest -- a contest offering a $5,000 grand prize to the software developer that creates the best application to help rail and bus riders, or motorists, navigate the transit or road systems maintained by the MTA.
                  In addition to the cash prize, the winner and other top finishers can have their application added to the growing list of links to MTA-related software applications which are shown on the MTA's site.

                  Timothy B. Lee

                  ... the patent system is supposed to reward companies who invest in innovation. Yet thanks to the growing blizzard of frivolous patent lawsuits against technology companies, the patent system is actually becoming a net disincentive to innovation, especially software.

                  James Surowiecki

                  ... under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. This is a good thing, since human beings are not perfectly designed decision makers. Instead, we are what economist Herbert Simon called “boundedly rational.” We generally have less information than we‘d like. We have limited foresight into the future. Most of us lack the ability — and the desire — to make sophisticated cost-benefit calculations. Instead of insisting on finding the best possible decision, we will often accept the one that seems good enough. And often we let emotion affect our judgment. Yet despite all these limitations, when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent.
                  This intelligence, or what I’ll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. ...

                  Indur M. Goklany

                  Modern economic growth is characterized by unparalleled technological change, which has transformed the world more in the past two centuries than all the other events put together since the beginning of agriculture 10 millennia ago. This technological change was accompanied by a prodigious increase in the use of inanimate energy, particularly fossil fuels and other renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. The associated industrialization and increases in agricultural productivity, urbanization, population, mobility, trade, and consumption of material goods have transformed the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of societies.

                  • 道,是自然规律或者法则,是指这个世界还没有人的时候就存在的自然界、宇宙的规律和法则。
                  • Dao is considered to have ineffable qualities that prevent it from being defined or expressed in words. It can, however, be known or experienced, and its principles can be followed or practiced.
                  • Le tao est la force fondamentale qui coule en toutes choses dans l’univers, vivantes ou inertes. C'est l’essence même de la réalité et par nature ineffable et indescriptible.
                  • Дао обозначает вечное действие или принцип творения, который отвечает за происхождение единицы и двойственности и вместе с тем за начало мира и творение («10 000 вещей»).
                  • 道とは、人や物が通るべきところであり、宇宙自然の普遍的法則や根元的実在、道徳的な規範、美や真実の根元などを広く意味する言葉である。

                  Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich, John Holdren

                  I = PAT is the lettering of a formula put forward to describe the impact of human activity on the environment.
                  I = P × A × T

                  Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of P= Population, A= Affluence, T= Technology. This describes how our growing population, affluence, and technology contribute toward our environmental impact.

                  Nathan Bransford

                  I think we're in a cultural period that celebrates mass appeal and democracy and devalues experts. I'd bet that more people read Amazon reviews than the New York Times Book Review. More people check Yelp for restaurant recommendations than a city's local restaurant critic. People don't particularly listen to the judges when they vote for their favorites on American Idol and they certainly don't listen to movie critics when they decide which movies to see. The Internet has opened up all kinds of ways for the crowd to be king.
                  And I think this has resulted in a cultural moment that celebrates mass appeal rather than the elite. Which definitely has its benefits ...
                  At the same time, there is definitely something that is lost in the over-celebration of mass appeal and the lowest common denominator and the dismissal of experts, and I really think it can be taken too far. What about aspiring to create something that is great, rather than merely popular? What about pushing the envelope even when it's not what's currently in fashion? What is wrong with being elite and appreciated by experts if not by the masses?

                  Monday, September 19, 2011

                  Tehran Times

                  The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has banned the import of copies of the Holy Quran published in China via Iran’s customs’ offices, Deputy Culture Minister Bahman Dorri said here on Wednesday.

                  Copies of the Holy Quran published in China are littered with spelling mistakes and Chinese publishers are printing the Quran with spelling mistakes, Haji-Sharif had said.

                  He added, “Some cultural figures believe that publication of the Holy Quran outside Iran is due to a shortage of printing presses, but I must point out that development of the printing industry inside the country is one of the major policies of the ministry.”

                  Roberta Stevens

                  A key goal of the 2011–2015 ALA strategic plan is to provide leadership in the transformation of libraries and library services for today’s dynamic and increasingly global digital information environment. Virtually every media interview I’ve had during the past seven months has been an occasion to illustrate how libraries, the people who work in them, and the services offered by them reflect the remarkable changes in communications and information access during the past two decades. My mantra is: Libraries have been and continue to transform themselves to be responsive to the needs of the populations they serve.
                  Reporters are often surprised to learn about the soaring circulation of materials. “Yes,” I say, “People are still checking out books. In fact, more books than ever. And, by the way, we have e-books!” It’s hard to resist asking media representatives if they have actually been in their local library recently. If so, they certainly would have seen that people are often waiting to get on the computers to access online databases and e-government services, file job applications, send e-mail messages, or conduct research related to their small businesses. Libraries are busy because they are central to the lives of millions of families, students, older adults, entrepreneurs, and those who require assistance in weathering the economic challenges of the past few years.

                  Ginia Bellafante

                  At the Workforce1 office on East 149th Street, I watched a job counselor, Rhodina Smith, assisting someone in a better but still difficult circumstance. The applicant, Michelle Joseph, had a college degree and had worked for 12 years in the St. Lucia Mission to the United Nations. She spoke Creole and some French and had trained diplomats.

                  "If I had a magic wand and could give you any job you wanted, what would it be?" Ms. Smith asked.

                  "Anything," was the reply.

                  Mike Shatzkin

                  The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution.
                  The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. Pocket Books in the US was also born just before the war. During World War II, historian and polymath Philip Van Doren Stern ran a program for the US military by which inexpensive paperbacks were made available to the troops.
                  After the war ended, mass market publishing really grew. Many houses — Ballantine, Bantam, Signet, Avon — were launched immediately following the war. The key to mass-market publishing was that it achieved distribution through the network of wholesalers that put magazines on newsstands and in local stores (often drugstroes) nationwide. Unlike trade books, which required an agreement between publisher and bookseller to get a copy of any book on a retail shelf, mass markets were “allocated” by the publisher to the wholesaler and in turn pushed out by the wholesaler to the racks they controlled.

                  Taiwan Airport

                  Airports across the world have created a myriad of innovative ways to keep their passengers entertained, from airport spray tanning in London to an airport wedding service in Amsterdam. Now Taiwan's international airport has put a high-tech twist on airport reading — with the world’s first airport library for ebooks.

                  Lendle

                  Lendle is the easiest, fastest, fairest, and best way to lend and borrow Kindle™ books. Amazon allows for lending of Kindle books to people you know. We bridge the gap so that you can also lend and borrow from people you don’t know!
                  Lendle has no direct affiliation with Amazon. However, we do utilize an Amazon Associate account, which means any Kindle™ books purchased via Lendle’s “buy” link will earn Lendle a modest cut of the purchase price. We thank you for buying your books through Lendle!
                  All books available for borrow on Lendle are legally allowed to be lent as part of their deal with Amazon for the Kindle platform.
                  Lendle is a participant in the Amazon Services llc Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon. When you buy a book via one of our links, we receive a modest share of the purchase price.
                  Unfortunately, Barnes and Noble doesn’t currently offer an api which would make a feature-rich lending service practical.