NightBlogger

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Since The New York Times reported on the hidden ties between media military analysts and the Pentagon on April 20, ABC, CBS, and NBC have still not mentioned the report. By contrast, during their April 28 evening news broadcasts, all three networks reported on the Vanity Fair photo of Miley Cyrus.
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Mark Leonard/Prospect Magazine

Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony

Britain’s entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe’s in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker?

Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy.
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From:2bsirius Video Added: March 14, 2008
Prediction markets now let people bet on everything from sports scores to election results. Read more

Watch CBS Video on NewsFutures

Visit NewsFutures.com
and Intrade.com
Critical New York Times article on Prediction Markets

In presidential elections from 1988 to 2004, the Iowa Electronic Markets have predicted final results better than the polls three times out of four.

Google builds largest internal corporate prediction market
Jon Brodkin (Network World) 06/03/2008 08:13:54

Prediction markets are known to forecast the outcome of elections more accurately than polls. Now Google is using an internal prediction market to improve business decisions and learn how employees exchange information.

Basically operating like a stock market, Google’s prediction system was designed by its own software engineers and lets employees bet on probable outcomes. Will a project be finished on time? How many users will Gmail have? Who will win the World Series?

Less pain and no incisions are just two benefits of robotically assisted surgery thanks to the da Vinci Surgical System. ~ Video: Detroit Medical Center

UsaToday.com: In a era when an increasing number of patients have been choosing balloon angioplasty to avoid the trauma of open-heart surgery, [The University of Chicago’s] Srivastava is one of a handful of pioneers who are reinventing the bypass operation. The goal is to make bypass surgery almost as patient-friendly as angioplasty. Despite the advantages for patients, doctors have been slow to adopt robotic bypass surgery. It’s a classic case in which the wonders of technology bump up against hard realities. There’s the complexity of the procedure, a shortage of tech-savvy young surgeons willing to learn to perform it and too few patients to go around.
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“This year is make-it-or-break-it time for Vista,” says analyst Benjamin Gray of market tracker Forrester Research. “Vista is getting hammered right and left in the press, and companies are concerned. I’m getting daily client inquiries about skipping Vista altogether and waiting for the next version of Windows. Microsoft is having a tough time convincing their corporate clients that Vista isn’t a risky bet.” Last week, Microsoft reported a 24% decline in Windows sales in the third quarter.
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In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.

Why you should listen to him:

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.

Greene was a math prodigy and a Rhodes scholar, who has written several best-selling and non-technical books on the subject, such as The Elegant Universe, a Pulitzer finalist, Aventis winner and the basis for a three-hour Nova special. He is a professor at Columbia University’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics.

Photo Gaetan Lee

Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. It turns out…that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time…: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy.”
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I thought the NSA already had this under control.

Even seemingly innocent personal blogs are on the Army’s official watch list, according to a report leaked to the controversial Wikileaks website. Web sites include, but are not limited to, “Family Readiness Group (FRG) pages, unofficial Army web sites, Soldier’s web logs (blogs), and personal published or unpublished works related to the Army.”
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The official police position is that the story has no foundation, yet two retired detectives, a professor, and the families of the victims believe that 40 deaths, dating back to 1997, spanning 11 states, are linked to not one, but a group of serial killers. Wow!

“Could a national gang of killers that leaves smiley-face calling cards be getting away with murdering dozens of male college students by making all the deaths look like accidents? That’s what two retired New York police detectives think, after spending their own money to link as many as 40 drowning deaths of otherwise healthy young men, many of them athletes.”
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Alos see: Second congressman asks FBI to investigate ‘Smiley-Face’ killers case

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globeandmail.com
Transcripts of 210,000 trials held at Britain’s famous Old Bailey court from 1674 to 1913 are now available online

The transcript from Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency at London’s Old Bailey court went online for the first time yesterday alongside a raft of murder, robbery and abduction cases. Up for free examination are 110,000 pages of transcripts - including Wilde’s trial and the notorious story of Dr. Crippen and the murder of his wife. Lurid tales of murder and rape, stories of pickpocketing and robbery - every type of crime was paraded before the London court.

The Oldbaileyonline.org site was billed as the largest single source of searchable historical information about British lives that has been published. The transcripts cover every one of the 210,000 trials held at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913. The court is still in operation.
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When Lisa Kelly learned she had leukemia in late 2006, her doctor advised her to seek urgent care at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But the nonprofit hospital refused to accept Mrs. Kelly’s limited insurance. It asked for $105,000 in cash before it would admit her. Sitting in the hospital’s business office, Mrs. Kelly says she told M.D. Anderson’s representatives that she had some money to pay for treatment, but couldn’t get all the cash they asked for that day. “Are they going to send me home?” she recalls thinking. “Am I going to die?”
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Looks like a marketing strategy to me.

Linguistics expert Lewis Glinert, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures at Dartmouth, has found that the names of cancer medicines (common, trade, and generic names), often contain sounds associated with lightness, smallness, and fastness. He says that this might have a subtle effect on both the patient taking the medicine and the doctor prescribing it.
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Other than grassroots ideologies, there’s no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties—they’re both bought and sold to the highest corporate bidder

Democratic presidential front-runner Senator Barack Obama said on Sunday he would endorse Bush’s nominee to direct US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout a region extending from North Africa to Central Asia. The pledge, made on the “Fox News Sunday” program, while predictable, serves nonetheless to thoroughly expose the antiwar pretenses of Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole.
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John Cornwell
A specialist in brain degeneration, [Professor] Greenfield is predicting that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity. She calls it the Nobody Scenario. By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen, she believes that the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alteration.

It’s as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences. “They are destined to lose an awareness of who and what they are: not someones, or anyones, but nobodies, eh!…The time is well nigh,” she says, “to explore the impact of these technologies.”
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Suggested reading: Analysts see boom in kids and branded worlds

We already knew this.

(UPI) The U.S. economy has reached the point of being in recession, leading economists indicated Tuesday. Of 52 economists surveyed in a quarterly poll, USA Today reported, two-thirds of them indicated the U.S. economy is in a recession. The figure jumps to 79 percent when economists who believe the economy will shrink in 2008 are added in.
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A UK-based company fine tunes its vehicle that allows a disabled person to ride a motorbike whilst sitting in a wheelchair. Martin Conquest Limited delivered its first bike to a customer in continental Europe in mid 2007. Peter van Nooy from the Netherlands became disabled after an accident 18 years ago. Since receiving his bike, van Nooy has become a developer for Martin Conquest Limited, advising the company on how to develop specific features aimed at making the riders experience more comfortable.

Photo Patrick

This is why it’s so important to keep your immune system strong; reduce sugar consumption and eat foods that are living.
(Reuters) U.S. researchers are targeting a deadly brain cancer by taking aim at a common virus active in most people with these tumors. The hope is to trick the immune system into attacking the cancer. Sixteen patients with the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme treated with a vaccine that attacks the virus have seen significant delays in tumor progression — the time from when their tumor is cut out by a surgeon to when it starts to grow back.
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Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has again sparked controversy by saying he was “dreaming of riots in Denver” during the Democratic National Convention. “Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during his radio show on Wednesday. He prodded his listeners to help make that a reality. In response to a caller on Thursday’s program, Limbaugh said, “Who wishes for riots?” Limbaugh said that on Wednesday’s program he was responding to comments made by the Rev. Al Sharpton who warned of “trouble” at the convention if Democratic superdelegates decided to nominate Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama.
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Discovery is gearing up to launch Planet Green, a 24-hour original programming eco-friendly television network. Planet Green is hoping to tap into corporate America’s new focus on eco friendliness. The channel will launch June 4th and its programming will be seen on Discovery channels around the world.

This film investigates the controversy that surrounded Castaneda’s book “Teachings of don Juan” and explores the practices of today’s Yaqui Indians with Dr David Shorter, who has spent the last decade working among them in Mexico. An investigative journalist claimed Castaneda had faked his fieldwork and that Don Juan was merely a figment of his imagination.

Photo courtesy of ssh

The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system domestically. The NSA monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns.
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Photo courtesy of ynse

Last week, the US Senate passed a bill that would bar employers and insurance providers from considering the results of a person’s genetic tests when making hiring or coverage decisions, but in the wake of the bill’s passage, Ars Technica reports “that a number of people have questioned why it shouldn’t be an employer’s or insurer’s right to make decisions based on genetics…these questions were answered a decade ago, and the intervening progress in human genetics has only reinforced some of the reasoning of the initial decision.
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Photo courtesy of StormyDog

As farmers confront mounting costs and riots erupt from Haiti to Egypt over food, farmers pay the price for Wall Street’s speculation in grain markets. “It’s the best of times for somebody speculating on grain prices, but it’s not the best of times for farmers. The demand for futures exceeds the demand for cash grains.” Commodity investors control more U.S. crops than ever before, competing with governments and consumers for dwindling food supplies. Demand is rising with population and income gains in Asia, while record energy costs boost biofuels consumption, sending grain inventories to the lowest levels in two decades.
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Photo courtesy of Bob

Rising costs are hitting the middle class hard with staples such as rice, wheat, corn and milk on the rise. At food banks across the country, donations are slowing down, because, among other things, people who once donated are now in need of food themselves. So, donations are decreasing as the need for their services increases. One food bank official calls it “the perfect storm”.
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Photo courtesy of Drama Queen

The average paid weekday circulation of eighteen out of twenty of the nation’s top newspapers saw a decline for the six-month period ending in March, as reported today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years according to figures from the Newspaper Association of America. Nielsen Online’s Top 30 News Sites listed The Drudge report as number 1, followed by Daily Kos, Fox News Digital Network, CNN Digital Network and AOL News, ranking in the top 5.

While a handful of news sources dominate the web, still bottlenecking information as did print and broadcast media, the playing field’s been leveled considerably. Options for alternative news are there. All we have to do is search for them. Citizen journalism and Blogs have skyrocketed in recent years; bloggers are reshaping the information landscape into a powerful horizontal structure, empowering its readers with unbiased views on world events, politics, books, music, consumer advice and non-vested interest opinions. Powerful corporations take this exploding trend very seriously by monitoring the daily activity in the blogosphere with companies like BlogPulse who analyze, report, and track key issues, people, news stories, news sources, blog traffic flows from discussions, and conversations.

As Mark Toner points out:

Consider the well-documented attacks on the Church of Scientology by “Anonymous,” a group of hackers and activists who’ve delighted in posting confidential documents and unflattering stories about the Church in recent months. Or Wikileaks, which invites a global audience of whistleblowers to post documents to an “uncensorable” and “untraceable” site for “maximum public impact.” Some 1.2 million documents, including information about alleged human rights violations and military interrogation procedures, are posted on the site, which in March won a U.S. court victory that attracted amicus briefs from the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gannett and the Society of Professional Journalists, among other groups.

Photo courtesy of nighthree

Could be a another Bob Dylan or Jack Kerouac riding in those boxcars.

Mike Brodie aka “The Polaroid Kidd” is a somewhat accidental documentary photographer. By photographing his friends, their homes, and lifestyles, Brodie has captured a marginalized segment of the American population. His haunting photos of hobos, punks, and squatters criss-crossing the country in boxcars are reminiscent of Horace Bristol’s Grapes of Wrath era pics that captured migrant workers on their way to California…except now they have facial tattoos.
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Photo courtesy of Robert Miller

The Peace Corps is no longer just dispatching Americans abroad to teach English or help in the fields. It is tackling more complex issues, like HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation, which creates an impetus for the Peace Corps to professionalize. Now debate is brewing over how the agency can attract greater numbers of older, technically skilled volunteers. Those skilled volunteers may come from the droves of retiring baby boomers.
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Internet Talent Show Auditions

Photo
Jim Whimpy

MySpace producers will hold auditions on the Internet. One episode of the variety show will be devoted to the submissions of MySpace.com users. “People are uploading music videos, tricks and stunts to MySpace all the time,” said Josh Brooks, MySpace’s vice president for marketing and content development. For NBC the partnership will tap into the talent that exists online, said Jared Goldsmith, the network’s director of digital promotion strategies.
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Photo courtesy of Simon

Oil again…

The Sun
“Admiral James Stavridis, who oversees military affairs for Latin America, told Congress on March 6 that he backs plans to designate a new fleet, led by a nuclear aircraft carrier, to patrol the waters of the Caribbean and Latin America in support of counter-terrorism operations. The move comes as South American nations, including Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador, boost military spending to counter tensions and protect oil reserves.”
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In this 6 minute 2005 video, Adam Yamaguchi looks into the disturbing trend of why so many young people in Japan commit suicide. Japan has roughly half the population of the US, yet the same number of suicides.

TOKYO (AP) — April 25, 2008 — At least four people killed themselves Friday by inhaling fumes from a detergent mixed with other chemicals amid a wave of similar suicides that has reportedly claimed about 50 lives this month in Japan. Authorities are alarmed by the sudden rise in such incidents — an average of two a day were reported in April — because the chemicals are easy to get and the fumes could spread to affect bystanders or rescuers.
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Photo is a prop and courtesy of Eric

Human Nurses could be delegating tasks to robotic colleagues by 2020, according to researchers who unveiled two prototypes at a Midland university. The devices…can collect prescriptions and clean spillages, enabling nurses to spend more time with patients. “We hope to develop it further so they can respond to spoken commands and physical gestures,” says Professor Vinesh Raja, leading the research at Warwick University, “but results of the first hospital trial in Spain have been very good. I do think that by 2020 we will see teams of robots working alongside human staff in British hospitals….”
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Photo courtesy of Vanessa

Back in February 2002, the BBC reported on Pentagon plans for black propaganda: planting propaganda and misleading stories in the international media. The office set up to disseminate this black propaganda was called the Office of Strategic Influence. In November the same year, Fair.org ran a story about how this revelation (also reported in The New York Times) “was met with outrage, and within a week the Pentagon had closed down the OSI, claiming the negative attention had damaged the office’s reputation so much ‘that it could not operate effectively’”. Fair goes on: “…although Rumsfeld was forced to close the office he had no plans to abandon the work.”

Which brings us to the current story appearing in The
New York Times exposing a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the U.S. media with pro-war propaganda.

You can bet propaganda campaigns of this nature continue. Hence the importance of seeking sources from other than mainstream corporate owned media–seek out the little guys, for the bigger the publication, the more likely its information is biased.

Image source: Reality Carnival

“The cell image is micrometers wide. The image of the universe is billions of light years across. The cell image shows neurons in a mouse brain. The other is a simulated image of the universe. Together the images suggest the surprisingly similar patterns found in vastly different natural phenomena.”—David Constantine.

“What Monsanto is doing across the country is often, and according to farmers, trespassing even, on their land, examining their crops and trying to find some of their patented crops,” said Andrew Kimbrell, with the Center For Food Safety. “And if they do, they sue those farmers for their entire crop.” In fact, in Feb. 2005 the Runyons received a letter from Monsanto, citing “an agreement” with the Indiana Department of Agriculture giving it the right to come on their land and test for seed contamination. Only one problem: The Indiana Department of Agriculture didn’t exist until two months after that letter was sent. Read more

Photo courtesy of a wisper…

Wired
Sharon Weinberger

It seems DARPA is funding research on a technology that taps into the brain’s ability to detect threats before the conscious mind is able to process the information. Something they call “Luke’s Binoculars” named after the high-tech binoculars used by Luke Skywalker. Enter an American law student, Stephen White, who published an analysis of international law regarding war crimes that might be committed using DARPA’s “future brain-interface-controlled weapon systems”. White raises questions related to whether the military exploitation of a soldier’s “pre-conscious” brain activity could be used against him/her as a sort of precrime-type offense. Makes for some interesting reading.
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Suggested reading:
Brain-plug weapons could provide war crime immunity
Electrode hats to exploit soldiers’ subconscious powers

Photo courtesy of jurvetson

Good news but this law won’t prevent unscrupulous businesses and corporations from buying your personal genetic information on the black market if it’s available.

The US Senate has voted unanimously to outlaw genetic discrimination. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans US employers from using genetic information in hiring, firing, promotion and compensation decisions, and from collecting genetic information from employees. Similarly, the bill prevents health plans and insurers from denying coverage or boosting premium prices based on a person’s genetic information, such as whether they have gene variants known to increase disease risk. It also forbids them from requesting or requiring people to take genetic tests.
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Ben Stein, nytimes
“YOU may well be asking yourself, as I have asked myself, how on earth did the credit crisis on Wall Street become such a catastrophe? In a word…the S.E.C. told Wall Street to police itself to save on regulatory costs, while not bothering to discuss the cost to society of increasing the probability that a large broker-dealer could go bust. A result of all this…was as follows: The owners, employees and creditors of these institutions are rewarded when they succeed, but it is all of us, the taxpayers, who are left on the hook if they fail. This is called private profits and socialized risk. Heads, I win. Tails you lose. It is a reverse-Robin Hood system.”
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