Daisy Haze - Here's To Ambiguity
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Friday 27 May 2011
The Shadows of Srebrenica
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Blind people echolocate with visual part of brain
Blind people who navigate using clicks and echoes, like bats and dolphins do, recruit the part of the brain used by sighted people to see, a new study has found.
While few blind people use echolocation — emitting a sound and then listening for the echo to get information about objects in the surroundings — some that do are so good at it that they can use the ability to hike, mountain bike and play basketball, said Melvyn Goodale, one of the co-authors of the study published Wednesday in PloS One.
Goodale, a psychology professor and the director of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., said he was amazed by the abilities of the two blind men in the study.
"They can tell a flat thing from convex. They can tell a bush from a wall, a car from a lamp post," he said. One of the two subjects, Daniel Kish, 43, could localize objects to within three degrees — "incredibly accurate," Goodale said.
Both Kish and a 27-year-old male subject trained by Kish could also tell which way objects were moving. Goodale and his research team wanted to find out what was happening in the brain while people like Kish were echolocating...
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Emily Chung @'CBC News'
Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'?
A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors.
That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset.
"The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.
IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages...
That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset.
"The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.
IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages...
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Alexis Madrigal @'the Atlantic'
Thursday 26 May 2011
War crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic arrested
Ratko Mladic (left) with Radovan Karadzic in 1995
General Ratko Mladic’s ruthlessness was legendary: ‘‘Burn their brains!’’ he once bellowed as his men pounded Sarajevo with artillery fire.So was his arrogance: He nicknamed himself ‘‘God,’’ and kept goats which he was said to have named after Western leaders he despised.
Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb military chief wanted for genocide for Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since World War II, was the UN war crimes tribunal’s No. 1 co-fugitive together with his partner in crime, Radovan Karadzic.
Mladic, 69, had eluded capture since he was indicted by the tribunal in 1995.
But his days as a fugitive were numbered after Serbian security forces captured Karadzic on July 21, 2008, in Belgrade.
On Thursday, Serbia’s president announced that Mladic is in custody. Known for personally leading his troops in the 1995 Serb onslaught against the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica - where thousands of Muslim men and boys were killed - Mladic was indicted for genocide against the Bosnian town’s population.
Just hours before the massacre, Mladic handed out candy to Muslim children rounded up at the town’s square and assured them that all would be fine - even patting one child on the head.
That sinister image is forever imprinted in the minds of Srebrenica survivors.
Born March 12, 1942, in the southeastern Bosnian village of Bozinovci, Mladic graduated from Belgrade’s prestigious military academy and joined the Yugoslav Communists in 1965.
Embarking on an army career when Yugoslavia was a six-state federation, Mladic rose steadily through the military ranks, making general before the country’s breakup in 1991.
At the start of the Balkan bloodbath, he was in Croatia leading Yugoslav troops in Knin and was believed to have played a crucial role in the army bombardment of the coastal city of Zadar.
A year later, he assumed command of the Yugoslav Army’s 2nd Military District, which effectively became the Bosnian Serb army.
Appointed in 1992 by Karadzic, Mladic led the Bosnian Serb army until the Dayton accords brought peace to Bosnia in 1995.
Among his men, Mladic commanded fierce devotion - many Bosnian Serb soldiers pledged to follow him to the death - and adoration bordering on the pathological.
As military leaderships go, his was omnipresent, from front-line trenches to chess games on high-altitude outlooks.
He was known for ordering push-ups as a prelude to battle, and he enjoyed reviewing pompous military parades and rubbing shoulders with UN commanders in Bosnia.
Obsessed with his nation’s history, Mladic saw Bosnia’s war - which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced another 1.8 million - as a chance for revenge against 500 years of Turkish-Ottoman occupation of Serbia.
He viewed Bosnian Muslims as Turks and called them that as an insult.
Convinced of the power of his army, he was known for telling his soldiers: ‘‘When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God.’’
Once, asking air traffic control to clear the way for his helicopter to land, he declared: ‘‘Here speaks Ratko Mladic - the Serbian God.’’
Sarajevans never forgot his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992.
Mladic issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble his words, which would be picked up, taped and broadcast on television the next day. ‘‘Burn their brains!’’ he ordered as his gunners trained their artillery on one suburb.
Mladic’s short temper only added to his popularity among Bosnian Serbs, who appeared to like him all the more when the general reportedly fell out with Karadzic in 1994.
With Karadzic, Mladic shares a tribunal indictment for genocide linked to the Srebrenica massacre, as well as numerous counts of crimes against humanity.
The allegations include the taking of peacekeepers as hostages, the destruction of sacred places, the torture of captured civilians and the wanton destruction of private property.
During the shelling of Sarajevo, Mladic was said to have commanded: ‘‘Scorch and destroy!’’ He denied ever giving such an order.
The US government offered $5 million for information leading to Mladic’s arrest or conviction in any country.
Mladic was dismissed from his post in December 1996 by Biljana Plavsic, then president of the Bosnian Serb republic.
In 2003, Plavsic was sentenced to 11 years in prison in her own war crimes trial on a reduced charge of persecution.In firing Mladic and his entire general staff, Plavsic cited their indictments for war crimes. But her main aim was to sever links with the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, with whom Mladic was close.During the war, Milosevic - who died in 2006 while on trial in The Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity - was revered as the Bosnian Serbs’ chief patron.
But he later abandoned them when he signed the Dayton agreement, a deal intensely disliked by both Karadzic and Mladic. Evading arrest, Mladic began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and designed to withstand a nuclear attack.With his wife, Bosa, Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats.
His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.
Surrounded by security guards, he occasionally ventured out of the dence pine forest to mark events such the anniversary of the Bosnian Serb army and St. Vitus Day, a religious festival marking the 1389 Serb defeat by the Turks at Kosovo.
When in the late 1990s his trail grew too hot in Bosnia, Mladic moved with family into a posh suburban villa in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.
In Belgrade, he was seen attending his son’s wedding. He showed up at soccer games, dined in plush restaurants and frequented elite cafes, refusing to give interviews and smiling quizzically when he happened to be photographed.
When Milosevic was ousted from power in October 2000, and Yugoslavia’s new pro-democracy authorities signaled they might hand Mladic over to the tribunal, tabloids had him leaving Belgrade for Bosnia.
But true to his style, Mladic countered those rumours and others that had him terminally ill in Belgrade.
Before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen in public - sometimes with his guards, sometimes without them.
AFP
blakehounshell Blake Hounshell
Wait, NOW he's being accused of election fraud? RT @GEsfandiari: More Trouble For Ahmadinejad
Wait, NOW he's being accused of election fraud? RT @GEsfandiari: More Trouble For Ahmadinejad
Luomo - 'Plus' preview
Spy
Good Stuff
Good Stuff
Tracks taken from the forthcoming "Plus" album, Moodmusic Records 2011
More Information: http://www.luomomusic.org & http://www.vladilsavdelay.com
Luomo is the pop-experimental face of Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. The music of Luomo stretches taut lines between shadowy experimentalism and shining club aspirations of the dancefloor, capturing tension and romance in shards of polished disco. Full of dark chasms and dangerous sharp edges, the restless experimentation and bittertenderness in Luomo’s songs have shattered and reformed our expectations of pop, songs like ‘Tessio’ became the foundation of what was soon known as ‘microhouse’, a genre characterised by minimal clicks’n’cuts cast in grooving bass.
More Information: http://www.luomomusic.org & http://www.vladilsavdelay.com
Luomo is the pop-experimental face of Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. The music of Luomo stretches taut lines between shadowy experimentalism and shining club aspirations of the dancefloor, capturing tension and romance in shards of polished disco. Full of dark chasms and dangerous sharp edges, the restless experimentation and bittertenderness in Luomo’s songs have shattered and reformed our expectations of pop, songs like ‘Tessio’ became the foundation of what was soon known as ‘microhouse’, a genre characterised by minimal clicks’n’cuts cast in grooving bass.
California Told to Cut Prisoner Population
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies...”
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Adam Liptak @'NY Times'
Courtney Comes Clean
“Who the fuck are you?" she snapped, as I approached her table, tape recorder in hand. Apparently she'd forgotten about our meeting. Joining her that evening were two other well-known musicians, both of them sober, who'd agreed to back her at the rally. Micko Larkin, Hole’s latest guitarist, is a moppet-haired 24-year-old Brit whom Love describes as her "little brother." Simon Kirke, the drummer for the band Bad Company, battled his own problems with substances over the years, but managed to overcome them. As Courtney carried on for the next few hours, he smiled serenely, providing a Zen-like counterpoint to her high-wattage presence...
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Maer Roshan @'The Fix'
Twitter's European boss Tony Wang gives legal warning
Twitter's new European boss has suggested that users who break privacy injunctions by posting on the site could face the UK courts.
Tony Wang said people who did "bad things" needed to defend themselves.He warned that the site would hand over user information to the authorities where they were "legally required".
Lawyers are challenging Twitter in court to reveal the identities of Twitter users who violated a super-injunction.
MP John Hemming named Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs in Parliament on Monday as the footballer who had used a super-injunction to hide an alleged affair, after Mr Giggs' name had been widely aired on Twitter.
Responding to a question from BBC News at the e-G8 forum in Paris, Mr Wang said: "Platforms have a responsibility, not to defend that user but to protect that user's right to defend him or herself".
He declined to comment on the case directly but explained that Twitter would comply with local laws to turn over user details.
He stressed that the site would also notify those individuals of any such request.
Little sympathy Mr Wang made it clear that if the matter came to court, those people would be on their own.
He said Twitter would, "let them exercise their own legal rights under their own jurisdiction, whether that is a motion to quash the order or to oppose it or do a number of other things to defend themselves."
The subject of legal jurisdictions and the internet has been hotly debated at the first e-G8 summit.
Technology industry leaders including Google's Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were among the speakers at the event.
While many attendees felt that there was a need for further discussion, among delegates from the United States, there was little sympathy for the British legal position.
"I do view it to being similar to the Chinese situation where they also cover up misdeeds of high ranking people," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC.
He said that, although the internet was a global phenomenon, it was unlikely to pander to those countries with stricter rules.
"The US is going to be absolutely inflexible on this point. It is in the constitution," he said, referring to freedom of speech provisions.
"I think that puts intergovernmental communication and co-operation on this issue into a different light, which is, there's not a whole lot to co-operate on."
@'BBC'
Wednesday 25 May 2011
JPBarlow John Perry Barlow
"The internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer." - Sarkozy. And I am in Paris to stop him. #eG8 http://bbc.in/lCSvEx
"The internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer." - Sarkozy. And I am in Paris to stop him. #eG8 http://bbc.in/lCSvEx
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