Friday 31 December 2010

Mapping the brain, slice by slice

Julian Assange in Berkeley April 2010


Transcript @'zunguzungu'

Thursday 30 December 2010

Many Arab officials have close CIA links: Assange

Assange Alerts His Hostages

Never again? Elderly Palestinian women called “whores” on Yad Vashem tour, while racism explodes across Israel

The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, And The Politics Of The New Deal

♪♫ Alabama 3 - Barricade

Wikileaks: This Is Just The Beginning

The Transparency Paradox

The evanescence of Twitter debates

Rob Beschizza has a very good post on the dynamics of the spat between Wired.com and Glenn Greenwald. For an excellent overview of the fight and what it’s about, I recommend Blake Hounshell. But Rob picks up on something else:
The AP-style story format now prevalent at Wired.com makes it less bloggy than readers think it is. This establishes a distance between readers and reporters and restores a traditional tone of objectivity to its newswriting. As it is, Wired’s commenters rarely emerge from a state of inchoate, slavering rage, so there’s no incentive for its writers to enter the peanut gallery. And the blog river itself is polished to such a high standard that casual, chatty posts don’t really belong. Without a local venue where writers and readers can engage readers in non-confrontational discussion, it all ends up as bitching on Twitter.
The point here is that the fight is not like the blogwars of old, despite the fact that both sides are publishing on blogs. We haven’t seen a lot of back-and-forth on the blogs, and the blog entries that we have seen have been clearly worked at considerable length. Instead, the debate has been raging on Twitter, where it’s much harder for an outsider coming to the subject afresh to follow what’s going on and who’s saying what.
The biggest development in the story today comes from Sean Bonner, who seems to have managed to elicit over Twitter the very information that Wired’s critics have been calling for all along. Wired’s Kevin Poulsen told Bonner in a tweet that “The published logs include the reference to a secure FTP server Lamo discussed with the Times”; when Bonner asked Poulsen for clarification that the reference in question was the only reference in the chat logs, Poulsen said yes.
On top of that, Wired.com editor Evan Hansen told Glenn Greenwald in a public tweet that he had reviewed all of the chat logs and that everything pertaining to Julian Assange or Wikileaks was already public.
Obviously, that single tweet is not going to satisfy Greenwald. But in many ways it does more to address the demands of Wired’s critics than the long and carefully-worded blog post that Hansen and Poulsen put up last night. And Greenwald too has noted — on Twitter, natch — that “it’s amazing how central of a role Twitter now plays in these disputes/debates”.
What we’re seeing here is the professionalization of the blogosphere — Greenwald and Poulsen both get paid to blog, as do I — and the way in which that has led to the less journalistic parts of blogging moving over to the informal and freewheeling venue of Twitter. I was happy to take a small part in this debate over Twitter this morning, for instance, but I’m concentrating on meta-issues here, partly because I’m clearly conflicted: I have a big story in the latest Wired magazine, and might well be appearing on Wired.com’s blogs in future, too. On Twitter, such conflicts don’t seem to matter, or need to be addressed, in the way that they do on a professional blog.
This development is not, in my mind, a good thing. It robs from the blogosphere much of its naturally conversational element, which has largely moved to Twitter. Back in 2004 or so, it was easy to follow debates back and forth between blogs just by clicking on links; now, it’s much harder, and professional blogs are much more likely to link to straight news stories or just break news themselves than they are to link to other bloggers. Discussions and debates on Twitter aren’t archived in the way that they were on blogs, and they’re functionally impossible to search for if you’re more than a few months away from the event.
This particular debate is big and loud enough that bloggers are following it, archiving it, and linking to important tweets. But most Twitter discussions never reach that level, and therefore will disappear in a way that blog discussions never did. At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.
Felix Salmon @'Reuters'

Former Israeli President Katsav convicted of rape

Israel's former president, Moshe Katsav (C), enters the Tel Aviv District Court before the verdict on rape and other charges of sexual misconduct against him were heard December 30, 2010 Photograph by: BAZ RATNER Credit: REUTERS
An Israeli court has convicted former President Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape. Thursday's conviction means Katsav will face a minimum of four years in prison. The verdict marks the climax of a four-and-a-half year saga that has riveted the nation as it watched its top citizen face the most serious charges ever leveled toward an Israeli public official.
The 65-year-old Katsav is also facing charges of lesser sex crimes involving two other former employees. A verdict on those charges is expected later in the day.
Israel's presidency is a largely ceremonial position. But the allegations roiled the country by portraying the man supposed to be Israel's moral compass as a predatory boss who forced himself on female employees.
Katsav resigned in 2007 and was replaced by Shimon Peres.
@'Yahoo'

WikiLeaks: Design Proposals by Metahaven

The Bad Daddy Factor

The fathers weren’t supposed to matter. But in the mid-1960s, pharmacologist Gladys Friedler was making all sorts of strange findings. She discovered that when she gave morphine to female rats, it altered the development of their future offspring — rat pups that hadn’t even been conceived yet. What’s more, even these rats’ grandchildren seemed to have problems. In an effort to understand the unexpected result, she made a fateful decision: She would see what happened when she put male rodents on the opiate. So she shot up the rat daddies with morphine, waited a few days, and then mated them with healthy, drug-free females. Their pups, to Friedler’s utter shock, were profoundly abnormal. They were underweight and chronic late bloomers, missing all their developmental landmarks. “It made no sense,” she recalls today. “I didn’t understand it.”For the next several decades, Friedler tried to understand this finding, ultimately assembling a strong case that morphine, alcohol and other substances could prompt male rodents to father defective offspring. There was only one problem: No one believed her. Colleagues questioned her results — her former adviser urged her to abandon the research — and she struggled to find funding and get her results published. “It didn’t occur to me that you’re not supposed to look at fathers’ roles in birth defects,” Friedler says. “I initially was not aware of the resistance. I was one of the people who was actually naïve enough to work in this field...”
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Emily Anthes @'Miller-McCune'
Audio slideshow: Don McCullin - 'Shaped by War'

You may recognise a couple of these people



REpost: Death by a thousand cuts




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Wired.com: Lamo/Manning Wikileaks chat logs contain no unpublished references to Assange or private servers

Glenn Greenwald and Wired Magazine: “I see no reason to doubt Poulsen’s integrity or good faith”

Histeria - My Buddy Stalin

The Twilight Singers - On The Corner

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“Whenever you’re here, you’re alive” are the first words sung on Dynamite Steps, the upcoming new album from Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers collective. That line comes from the opening track, “Last Night in Town.” Commencing a record with that title is a ballsy gambit, but there’s a method to his madness. “Last Night in Town” serves the same function as, say, a flash-forward that might open a film noir classic like Out of the Past, laying out the album’s arc in black and white right from jump. Dynamite Steps is the fifth Twilight Singers album, but the group’s first in five years. The Twilight Singers’ previous release, the acclaimed confessional opus Powder Burns, came out in 2006. Dynamite Steps is clearly the next chapter, a whole new level of catharsis and progress, evocatively cramming all the highs and lows of the maverick singer-songwriter’s past half-decade into unexpected sonic trapdoors. “Last Night in Town” encapsulates that vibe, setting the stage for the emotional thrill ride that’s about to come over the ensuing song cycle. On the one hand, the song is as signature Greg Dulli as it gets: starting with washes of spooky Mellotron, his soulful, confrontational howl rises to a messianic apex over symphonic, maximal layers of sound. It’s pure storytelling, reflecting on the impact of a near-death moment—but when a thick, dancefloor-aimed synth bassline surges through the mix, it’s clear this is a leap into the future, not doomed nostalgia.
Indeed, Dynamite Steps explores the thin line between life and death, mortality and immortality, resignation and celebration—that mythical moment when your life flashes before your eyes, drawn out here over the course of eleven songs. The album’s forty-three minutes prove an unflinching odyssey through the dark side, but one that’s ultimately redemptive in its scope and power. Dulli has never attempted anything so ambitious, neither sonically nor confessionally; that he makes it to the other side by the end feels redolent of triumph, but not without dues paid, hides scourged and lessons learned. The second song, “Be Invited,” features the haunting vocal tones of longtime Dulli friend/collaborator Mark Lanegan, adding portent to an already ominous chorus (“There’s something at work here/Chalk circles around your body”); over the song’s lurching country-blues waltz, Nick McCabe—kaleidoscopic guitarist for legendary U.K. group The Verve—adds not so much a guitar part as the hum of a swarm of bees hovering before the sting. The new textures of “Be Invited” pave the way for “Waves,” perhaps the toughest-rocking song Dulli’s ever made, exploring hitherto uncharted oceans of rage rendered as feedback squall; “Step aside while I manipulate,” he commands over shuddering analog synths and chiming, atonal guitars that recall vintage Sonic Youth.
Just as the shock and awe of “Waves” tasers listeners out of their comfort zone, the following quartet of tracks—possibly the greatest achievements in Dulli’s entire career—brings it all back home. Indeed, here are the songs that will make his most die-hard fans get over the fact that there’ll never be an Afghan Whigs reunion. The first, “Get Lucky” proves Dynamite Steps’ emotional crux, a stately piano ballad that looms somewhere between poignant and terrifying. From the dubby rimshot that echoes through its breakdown, “Get Lucky” makes clear we’re in a different dreamland—this is memory processed through regret, the violins swelling until there is literally nowhere left to turn. “I get lucky sometimes” goes the infectious earworm chorus; the accompanying musical thunderclouds, however, make clear that the song’s protagonist is dangerously deluded. The next track, “On the Corner,” could be an antihero rave-up off the Whigs’ revered 1996 opus Black Love, and proves one of Dulli’s best full-on rockers. With its blaxploitation wah-wah solos from Twilight SIngers mainstay guitarist Dave Rosser, catchy “ooh-oohs,” and relentless “I Wanna Be Your Dog” piano line—all driven by a thundering rhythm section, bassist Scott Ford and guest drummer Gene Trautmann (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal)—“On the Corner” captures Dulli in his prime, regardless of what era it was made in. “Spread your legs/Insert your alibi” he sings here, a line that captures his timeless essence: a turn of phrase both clever and vulgar, its truth hitting home all too painfully. “Gunshots” and “She Was Stolen” follow—two of the most heartrending, epic anthems he’s ever released; as such, “She Was Stolen” proves one of his most impassioned, hopeful vocal performances. Critics talk about the soul influence in the man’s work, and it’s clear here—not in sonic signifiers that obviously evoke R&B per se, but in the sheer will to take a performance as far as it can go, no looking back.
According to the liner notes, Dynamite Steps was “shot on location” at various locales significant to Dulli’s life. You can hear the sense of place emanating up from the grooves: here, the weary nighttime decadence of New Orleans rubs up against the oppressive sunshine of Los Angeles and the desolation of Joshua Tree’s desert vistas. Dynamite Steps is particularly distinguished by its bed of spectral female voices, courtesy British chanteuse Carina Round and return appearances from the likes of Petra Haden, Leta Lucy and Ani DiFranco, the latter of whom duets memorably here on “Blackbird and the Fox.” “Dulli and DiFranco, odd a pairing as they might seem, have actually crossed paths before,” The Village Voice noted recently. “The moody ‘Candy Cane Crawl,’ from 2006’s Powder Burns, is one of the best things he’s ever done. This will very happily remind you of that.” Those female voices provide a necessary counterpoint to The Twilight Singers frontman, serving as a beatific alter ego, a salve to the wounds haunting the words. The songs on Dynamite Steps catch him in the act of pulling the thorns and arrows out of his flesh: once comfortable in this new skin, he’s finally able to aim his crosshairs at the dark storms of human relations with newfound lucidity. That’s clear in the pair of songs that climax the record, “The Beginning of the End” and the title track. The former proves one of the most unashamedly beautiful songs Dulli has ever recorded—a lush, soaring Pink Floyd-meets-Slowdive reverie about someone who’s finally learned to fly, but not how to land. He co-produced “Beginning…” with Steve Nalepa, a veteran of L.A.‘s vital electronica scene that’s home to the likes of Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing. Nalepa appears throughout Dynamite Steps; that choice indicates both that this is The Twilight Singers’ most forward, electronic-leaning effort since the band’s 2001 debut, Twilight as Played by The Twilight Singers (co-produced by U.K. downtempo iconoclasts Fila Brazillia) and that Dulli’s musical taste remains as edgy, current and eclectic as ever (a recent playlist he put together for TheWorldsBestEver.com sprawls from the likes of Willie Hutch, Junip and Miles Davis to Laetitia Sadier, Jay Electronica, Black Mountain, Glass Candy, Salem, and Gonjasufi). The title track, meanwhile, proves a typically cinematic, cathartic Twilight Singers closer, its lyric reminding us, via Dulli’s personal journey, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. “I’ll see you at the door/One more time, dear,” he sings as the song reaches its peak; from that, it’s clear this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing from him and the Twilight Singers. If anything, from the evidence on display, this really is just the beginning.
“If you do unto others/You will die by your own hand…”
— The Twilight Singers, “Never Seen No Devil”
Released by: Sub Pop
Release/catalogue number: SP844
Release date: Feb 15, 2011

Why Corporate Capital and Finance Are Waging an All-Out Cyberwar Against Wikileaks

Long famed for hiding money for everyone from Nazis and drug lords to spies and dictators, the Swiss government's banking arm has decided that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are just too hot even for it to handle.
And so the PostFinance, which runs the country's banks, declared in early December that it had "ended its business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Paul Assange" after accusing Mr. Assange of - gasp! - providing false information about his place of residence.
This move followed similar moves by credit card companies MasterCard and Visa, as well as PayPal and Amazon.com, to no longer process WikiLeaks payments and, in Amazon.com's case, to cease hosting its data.
As I write this, Bank of America has joined the crescendo of corporations taking aim at WikiLeaks, refusing to process payments for it any longer because of "our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments..."
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Mark Levine @'AlterNet'

...and the FBI investigates every DDoS attack!

Affidavit Details FBI "Operation Payback" Probe

Support the effort

@'Orthodoxanarchy'
exiledsurfer exiledsurfer Man, 10,000 words shortened down to 1000 words by boing boing when this says it all in 21words and a full stop: http://bit.ly/gCq8Mq

"Bad day at the office!!!'


Simon Clancy SiClancy 'Fans have to expect that performances don't always match up to our hopes and expectations'. Ladies and gentlemen, our proud manager.

German Kindergartens ordered to pay copyright for songs

Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted

Are some people really addicted to music?

There Was Once a Woman Who Had Immortal Cells

Today I found out there was once a woman who had immortal cells.   These immortal cells have multiplied to the point that if you were to weigh all of them that live today, they’d weigh about 50 million metric tons, which is about as much as 100 Empire State Buildings. So who was this woman and why are scientists keeping about 50 million metric tons of her cells supplied with fresh nutrients so they can live on?  The woman was Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells have been essential in curing polio; gene mapping; learning how cells work; developing drugs to treat cancer, herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS… The list goes on and on and on.  If it deals with the human body and has been studied by scientists, odds are, they needed and used Henrietta’s immortal cells somewhere along the way.  Her cells were even sent up to space on an unmanned satellite to determine whether or not human tissue could survive in zero gravity.
Go to just about any cell culture lab in the world and you’ll find billions of Henrietta’s cells stored there.  What’s unique about her cells is that, not only do they never die, in contrast to normal human cells which will die after a few replications, but her cells can also live and replicate just fine outside of the human body, which is also unique among humans.  Give her cells the nutrients they need to survive and they will live and replicate along forever, apparently (almost 60 years and counting since the first culture was taken). They can even be frozen for literally decades and later thawed and they will go right on replicating...
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Indian Film Industry Threatening To Strike Over Proposed Copyright Reform That Would Make Them Pay Composers For Music

It's sometimes amusing to see how organizations that are strong copyright defenders, because they rely on copyright for certain aspects of their business, respond when copyright law is strengthened in ways that help others. Suddenly, they seem to react differently, and all the talk about how important copyright is to "protect content creators" goes out the window. Earlier this year, we wrote about India's proposed copyright reform, which would strengthen certain rights for the content creators themselves, at the expense of many third parties. I actually think this is probably not a very good idea, and will do more harm than good, but it's still a bit amusing (via Jamie Love) to see that the Indian film industry is threatening to go on strike if a part of the law that would require it to actually pay composers and lyricists for the music they use goes through. All too often it seems like copyright is only important when it benefits the specific industry fighting for it. If it benefits anyone else, at that industry's expense, suddenly it's bad...
Mike Masnick @'techdirt'

Detox or Die


DETOX OR DIE by David Graham Scott This powerful 45-minute program is by and about filmmaker David Graham Scott, a former heroin addict trying to kick his intense methadone dependency. An emotional, no-holds-barred look at one man's struggle to get clean, ONE LIFE: DETOX OR DIE? follows Scott as he tries a dangerous, untested new detox method that promises an intense but mercifully brief withdrawal process. ** WARNING!! This documentary contains several strong scenes of intraveneous drug use and would not be suitable for children under 15 and sensitive individuals. ** The film was broadcast on BBC1 in 2004 as part of the One Life documentary strand. Here's a synopsis: Detox or Die provides an in-depth portrait of a small-time drug addict seeking redemption. Addicted to opiates for almost 20 years, filmmaker David Graham Scott decides to opt for a quick fix. The radical detox agent Ibogaine puts the user into a gut-wrenching hallucinatory state for 36 hours from which he emerges cleansed of his addiction. But several fatalities have been reported in connection with this unlicensed drug and Scott must weigh up the options before embarking on the trip of a lifetime...

Glenn Greenwald VS Wired


Illustration: 'exiledsurfer'

Wired's refusal to release or comment on the Manning chat logs

Response to Wired's accusations

Remember... 

A note to Greenwald and the Wired guys

Wednesday 29 December 2010

DDoS attack shuts 4chan down

REpost: Mr. Ian Wright (artist extraordinaire)





More from Ian Wright 

Rop Gonggrijp's keynote at 27C3

REpost: A Man Within

Glenn Greenwald vs Fran Townsend WikiLeaks Debate (December 27, 2010 CNN)


The merger of journalists and government officials

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Bak Magazine (Issue 15)


Issue 15 | Theme: Love
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Back Issues

What Makes A Song Sad?

Where does sad music get its sadness from? And whom should you ask—a composer or a cognitive psychologist?
Scientific American recently reported on a Tufts University study that purportedly lends experimental reinforcement to the widely accepted, albeit vague, notion that the interval of a minor third (two pitches separated by one full tone and one semi-tone) conveys sadness, in speech as in song.

From the Scientific American article, by Ferris Jabr:
Almost everyone thinks "Greensleeves" is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it's because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third's emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like "Happy Birthday") are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby") tend towards the doleful.
While there might be a loose correlation—reinforced by our particular musical tradition—between minor scales and "sadness," it's a mistake to think that the moods evoked by music can be confidently reduced to tonality in and of itself. Indeed, those recalcitrant minor key songs that defy generalization about the link between tonality and mood may tell us something more important about music than the ones that conform.
Don't forget: The main reason "Happy Birthday" sounds "upbeat" and "Eleanor Rigby" sounds "doleful" is that their composers intended that they should. And because that's what their composers obviously intended, that's the way the songs are typically performed. But there's much more than tonality that goes into evoking those moods.
Take "Eleanor Rigby." It's actually a very bad example of the idea that minor key tonality is inherently sad. The best evidence for that view would be minor key songs that are stubbornly, ineffably sad despite other song elements—lyrics, arrangements, tempo, etc.—that are emotionally neutral or positive. The worst kind of song to adduce in support of minor key determinism is one in which any sadness intrinsic to the melody gets a lot of "help" from the other parts of the song. And "Eleanor Rigby," remember, was considered a breakthrough for the Beatles precisely because it was one of their first songs of this kind, one that combined song elements in mutually reinforcing ways to create a unified artistic whole...
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Daniel Wattenberg @'the Atlantic'
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