#Mundo

Ativistas ligados ao Occupy Wall Street querem invadir casas desapropriadas

A coisa está ficando séria. Ativistas agora querem invadir casas desapropriadas ou vazias. Diz o The Guardian:

Thousands of Occupy protesters across the US will occupy foreclosed homes today, in what organisers are describing as a “new frontier” for the movement.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street has teamed up with local activist groups to secretly occupy an empty home, and plan to hand the property over to a homeless family. Similar action is scheduled in more than 20 other cities.

Até agora, parte da classe-média consegue digerir o movimento Occupy Wall Street. Mas quando começam invasões de propriedades, a coisa fica impopular. Será o começo do fim dos protestos?

Sacrifique-se pelo capitalismo

(…) I want to suggest that we put in motion a similar undertaking: On January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, citizens from around the country should gather at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Let’s call this macabre gathering—with luck and even worse times, it should be mammoth—”We Surrender” or “Restore Debtor’s Prisons” or “De-Fault Is Ours” or “Collateralize Us.” And plan on a mirthful day of mourning.

The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99 percent of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.

Steve Fraser sugere um novo tipo de Occupy Wall Street. Render-se e sacrificar-se pelo bem do capitalismo.

É claro que é brincadeira. Mas acontece de verdade no Tibet, com monges extremamente perturbados e confusos.

Se já é trágico na Ásia, imagine esse tipo de manifestação em New York. Iria desenterrar de vez o Michael Foucault (PDFzinho pra vocês).

Cyberwar: isso existe mesmo?

All politically motivated cyber attacks are merely sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as warfare itself: sabotage, espionage, and subversion.

Estudo publicado no Journal of Stategic Studies diz que a chamada cyberwar não existe. Pelo menos não como novidade. E a revista Reason vai mais longe. Diz que toda essa conversa é mais uma desculpa de entidades governamentais para limitar as liberdades civís.

A diversidade cultural dos bêbados

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours – cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life – about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures.

This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption – most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures.

Essa é boa. Já estão calculando o nível de integração alcoólica das culturas. Via BBC.

Psicodelia turca?

The Turkish groups were fascinated by the modernity and power of electric guitars, but the grip of psychedelic sounds was more indigenous. It was not attached to drugs or exploring inner space as much as the compatibility of drones, modal forms and the native instruments and percolating percussion already incorporated by adventurous Western rock bands. Turned out the amplified Saz, a traditional stringed instrument, was more apt for rock than the most revved-up sitar. And if a certain British heavy metal band claimed a fascination with Middle Eastern vibes, Turkish performers had a whole lotta love for the same riffs.

Milo Miles, via NPR: ‘Turkish Freakout’: A Musical Turkish Delight.

Não deixe de pegar as piadas internas com o Led Zeppelin.

O cérebro e o iPhone

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like “addiction” and “fix” aren’t as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is “love.”

Martin Lindstrom, no New York Times.

Pesquisador tira imagens de ressonância magnética dos cérebros de donos de iPhone. O pessoal do Neuromarketing confere os dados e dá o seu pitaco.

Mais: dizem que um milhão de unidades do iPhones 4S foram vendidas em 24 horas. Fora que já é preciso esperar até dois meses para conseguir comprar uma camiseta de gola rulê da mesma marca que Steve Jobs usava.

Como é mesmo aquela história de viver sabendo que vamos morrer?

O que vestir durante um protesto?

Why are you protesting? “I’m here just to see what everybody else is doing. I don’t know if I agree with all of this. All these kids are trying to protest against corporations while they’re wearing Hollister and J. Crew and smoking cigarettes, which are the hugest corporations in America.”

“My shirt says ‘Bail Out Workers Not Wall Street.’ It’s actually a few years old, but I’m wearing it because Wall Street received trillions in bailout, while people are over their heads in debt and having a tough time paying bills. But I always dress like this. My shoes are Adidas. I got them for $20.”

“We’re a band called Environmental Encroachment. The leggings, I like to provide some hallucinogenic visual stimulation for people. Pretty much everything I’m wearing is supposed to be awe-inspiring and hallucinogenic. And it also feels really good to wear tights. ”

Jornalistas do New York Times circularam pelas manifestações do Ocuppy Wall Street perguntando o que as pessoas estavam vestindo e porquê. Interessante exemplo de como funciona a mecânica da mente discursiva, compondo cenários, criando amigos, inimigos e histórias.

A decadência da ‘classe criativa’

But for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level — the working- or middle-classes within the creative class — things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold.

Scott Timberg, do Salon.com, reclama que a “classe criativa” — gente que trabalha com cultura — está à beira da falência. Quando, mesmo, isso foi diferente na história da humanidade?

O Pinheiro achou essa réplica ao artigo de Timberg.

O metamovimento

OccupyWallSt Getty

(Getty Images)

The Metamovement is a movement of movements. Not all these movements are similar; no two are exactly like; each can be readily distinguished from the next. The Arab Spring is part of the Metamovement; the London Riots were part of the Metamovement; protests spreading across America, under the banner of Occupy Wall St, are all part of the Metamovement.

Yet, just like in an epidemic, each outbreak triggers the next–and in that cascade can perhaps be traced the jagged outline of the shared DNA within each cell of the larger metamovement.

In other words, it’s not just about inequality–but the deeper failure of institutions. To let people–especially the young–redress inequality by whatever slender means they might muster, by creating new opportunities. At every turn, the people in the Metamovement feel not merely spurned and scorned–but suffocated and strangled by institutions every bit as unflinchingly lethal as a hangman’s noose.

Protestos se espalham em diversas partes do mundo. Nenhum deles parece articulado ao outro. Nem mesmo a algum tipo de teoria. Mas talvez eles tenham algo em comum.

Sistema operacional para cidades inteiras

City

Urban OS should mean buildings get managed better and gathering the data from lots of sources gives a broader view of key city services such as traffic flows, energy use and water levels.

“If you were using an anatomy analogy, the city has a network like the nervous system, talking to a whole bunch of sensors gathering the data and causing actions,” said Steve Lewis, head of Living PlanIT- the company behind Urban OS.

“We distribute that nervous system into the parts of the body – the buildings, the streets and other things.

Having one platform managing the entire urban landscape of a city means significant cost savings, implementation consistency, quality and manageability, he added.

As empresas que estão fabricando aplicativos para gerenciar espaços urbanos. O que inclui bombeiros, tráfego, hospitais e muito mais.

Culturomics: os padrões quantitativos da cultura

The Google/University consortium has digitized about 15 million books so far. Researchers at Harvard took the full text of the most reliable 5 million books, combined their texts into one file and treated their 6 billion words as a single text. As they report in the journal Science in December 2010, they then analyzed the patterns of word usage in this aggregated book text.

O nascimento da Antropoestatística.

Via Kevin Kelly.

O sonho da eficiência

Eficiência na vida…

Three years, 11 negative results. Finally they said, “Well, in this case here is what we do. We bring out the big guns. It’s IVF, in-vitro fertilization. Test-tube babies. We use hormones to stimulate egg release, we harvest the eggs, and mix them with your sperm in a dish. Then we transfer the eggs directly to the uterus. It costs about $15,000. But there are discounts available.”

…e na morte:

One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.

The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.

After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.

Target confirmed.

This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.

A tecnologia ainda é mais eficiente para matar do que para fazer nascer?

Vazaram a autobiografia de Julian Assange, do WikiLeaks

Julian Assange’s publishers will tomorrow publish “the unauthorised first draft” of his autobiography without his consent, months after the WikiLeaks founder withdrew from a million-pound contract for his memoirs.

In a dramatic move, Canongate has defied Assange’s wishes and secretly printed thousands of copies of The Unauthorised Autobiography, by Julian Assange, copies of which have been shipped amid strict security to booksellers in preparation for imminent release.”

Carma ou marketing? Ou os dois?

Via The Guardian.