Clipmarks | pascual's clips

East vs West

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:50:43 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: globalist

Between 1598 and 1894, there were only three brief wars that involved China — the 1659-60 and the 1767-71 wars with Burma, and the 1788-89 war with Vietnam, as well as two wars that did not involve China — the Siamese-Burmese wars of 1607-18 and of 1660-62.

Indeed, insofar as China is concerned, we should speak of a 500 years’ peace since, in the 200 years preceding the 1592 Japanese invasion of Korea, China was at war with other East Asian states only during the invasion of Vietnam in 1406-28 to restore the Tran dynasty.

Tags: history

who sells arms and to whom

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:31:44 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: eco

Clip Source: www.economist.com

The world's biggest arms exporters

JUST five countries supplied 80% of global arms exports between 2003 and 2007, according to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank. SIPRI counts the deliveries of large conventional weapons, each of which are assigned a value according to cost, strategic importance and other criteria. America supplied a third of global exports by this count, with South Korea and Israel the main buyers. China is Russia's best customer, taking 45% of its total exports. China is also the largest recipient of imports, accounting for 12% of the global total. Other big importers include India and the United Arab Emirates.

Tags: economy, conflict

education and the competitive edge

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:27:16 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: iht

Clip Source: iht.com

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American's level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about eight years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, "The Race Between Education and Technology," America's educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America's edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America's educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely.

Tags: education, economy, globalization

USA income distribution

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:43:36 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: economist

Clip Source: www.economist.com

Figures collated by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at Berkeley, make the point starkly. In the 1990s, the incomes of the richest 1% of taxpayers went up 10% a year in real terms (see chart), while those of the other 99% grew at an average annual rate of 2.4%. Between 2002 and 2006 the richest 1% saw 11% annual real income growth: everyone else got less than 1%. Three-quarters of the gains from the Bush expansion went to 1% of taxpayers, who now receive a larger share of overall income than at any time since the 1920s.

Tags: economy

how big is the internet?

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:23:35 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: google

Clip Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Tags: internet

how the net alters reading

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:54:51 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: atlantic

Clip Source: www.theatlantic.com

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Tags: internet, information, literature

on mandela

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:20:16 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: intellife

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

a part

Machel observes no lingering pain from his incarceration, aside from his guilt at missing his children as they grew up. "He developed a selective memory and he cherished the good things. Maybe it is of him having decided not to be bitter, so he talks of the positive side." Bill Clinton tells of asking Mandela if he was angry about the years lost to jail. Mandela said that he felt furious until the night before his release, when he decided to quash his emotions, because "if I stay bitter, then they will still have my mind in prison."

Tags: africa, society, conflict

on the fractal nature of space-time

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:22:13 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: sciam

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The outcome is pretty mind-boggling: the number of dimensions depends on the scale. In other words, if we let the diffusion go on for just a short while, spacetime appears to have a different number of dimensions than when we let it run for a long time. Even those of us who specialize in quantum gravity can scarcely imagine how spacetime could smoothly change its dimension depending on the resolution of one's microscope. Evidently, a small object experiences spacetime in a profoundly different way than a large object does. To that object, the universe has something akin to a fractal structure. A fractal is a bizarre kind of space where the concept of size simply does not exist. It is self-similar, which means that it looks the same on all scales. This implies there are no rulers and no other objects of a characteristic size that can serve as a yardstick.

Tags: physics

how reality is perceived

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:26:26 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: seed

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

But the group's work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics' foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, "All information is physical." How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

I asked Dr. Zeilinger about this as I was about to leave his office. "In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time... It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both."

Tags: physics

is the singularity near?

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:21:33 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ieee

Clip Source: www.spectrum.ieee.org

Take the idea of exponential technological growth, work it through to its logical conclusion, and there you have the singularity. Its bold incredibility pushes aside incredulity, as it challenges us to confront all the things we thought could never come true—the creation of superintelligent, conscious organisms, nanorobots that can swim in our bloodstreams and fix what ails us, and direct communication from mind to mind. And the pièce de résistance: a posthuman existence of disembodied uploaded minds, living on indefinitely without fear, sickness, or want in a virtual paradise ingeniously designed to delight, thrill, and stimulate.

This vision argues that machines will become conscious and then perfect themselves, as described elsewhere in this issue. Yet for all its show of tough-minded audacity, the argument is shot through with sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, and irresponsibility.

Tags: technology

greedy market speculators

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:21:11 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: spiegel

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

After investing in high-tech stocks and real estate loans for years, legions of speculators have now discovered commodities like oil and gas, wheat and rice. Their billions are pushing prices up to astronomical levels -- with serious consequences for ordinary people's quality of life and the global economy.

Tags: economy

buildings as commercial products

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:13:58 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: spiegel

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

The "wow effect" is everything; it translates into structures mimicking lilies, harps, trophies, tents and other unconventional shapes.

Hamburg architect Volkwin Marg, who runs a thriving business in China with his partner Meinhard von Gerkan, isn't fond of this tendency toward representational building. For Marg, these "iconic buildings" lack social significance.

Peter Schweger, another architect from Hamburg, even describes the current trend as "absurd, atrocious blossoms of sculptural architecture." He has also noticed an impact on Western architectural aesthetics, where "buildings are starting to be designed like commercial products that can be aggressively marketed."

Tags: architecture

what is consciousness?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:50:46 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: nybooks

Clip Source: www.nybooks.com

Our conscious life is a constant flow, or integration, of an immediate past and the present—what Henri Bergson called le souvenir du présent (1908) and Edelman more recently called the remembered present (1989). Consciousness, in this view, is neither recalled representations nor the immediate present, but something different in kind (as colors are different in kind from the lightness and darkness of different reflected wavelengths).

Tags: neuroscience

origin of the oil bubble

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:40:57 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ft

Clip Source: www.ft.com

There is a growing feeling that the latest sharp upsurge in the price of oil may be a speculative bubble rather than an outcome of market fundamentals. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission indicated last week that there may be “system risk” and George Soros, the veteran investor, in testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, warned that commodity index funds, which treat oil as an asset rather than a commodity to be bought and sold for use, are creating a bubble.

Tags: economy

how to open your mind

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:19:07 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: projectsyndicate

Clip Source: www.project-syndicate.org

The concept of a dialogue between cultures is sometimes strained, or seems only a pious hope, because we ask it to do the impossible: solve inflamed political conflicts. Dialogue, as benevolent as it may be, can’t resolve questions related to people’s freedom of movement, or to the sharing of territory or natural resources. Politics and culture don’t work on the same level: the former governs action, the latter influences mentalities; the former deals with emergencies, the latter can require generations to produce any result.

We should work for this type of dialogue by beginning with simple and modest initiatives. We need more translations of the ideas and literatures of other countries, more long stays abroad for university students, more teaching of foreign languages and encouragement of study about other cultures, and more confrontation between national memories

Tags: globalization