Clipmarks | pascual's clips

the G-3

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:16:53 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: spiegel

How could the next world war be averted? There does exist a tripartite coalition that could engineer the triumph of globalization over geopolitics: The American working class supports Chinese workers by shopping at Wal-Mart, while its upper class spends on European cars and luxury items; both Europe and China buy American technology; and America's General Motors and Boeing and Europe's Airbus can attribute much of their profits to reduced costs derived from production in -- and sales to -- China. Capital markets allow for endless profit for all rather than a zero-sum competition. Furthermore, the "cult of the offensive" does not dominate military strategy today. In an age of nuclear weaponry, few believe that initiating conflict entails quick victory with minimal loss. Never has historian A.J.P. Taylor's adage been more true: If the goal of being a great power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way to remain a great power is not to fight one.

Tags: globalization, politics

the next 20 years in physics

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:58:19 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: physicsworld

Clip Source: physicsworld.com

The string-theory landscape, meanwhile, grew out of the search for a string theory of elementary particles. The important thing about string theory is not that elementary particles are strings, but that it provides a kind of DNA that codes the properties of a universe, in the same way that the base-pair sequence in DNA codes the biological phenotype. Just as there is a huge landscape of biological designs — all the possible rearrangements of the tens of millions of base pairs in a DNA strand — string theory provides an enormous number of patterns for rearranging the elements that comprise a compactification of the extra dimensions.

Tags: physics

a new america

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:40:13 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: speigel

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans.

Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are now paying the price for their pride.

Tags: economy

land of the free

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:55:58 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: eco

Clip Source: www.economist.com

Civil-liberties defenders are trying hard to stop data-mining becoming a routine tool for the FBI to spy on ordinary Americans. They say that the administration is racing in its final months to formalise in law programmes that have run solely under authorisation from the White House that bypasses Congress. One pending change would authorise more intelligence sharing between federal and local officials. In a federal court filing made public on September 20th, America’s attorney-general, Michael Mukasey, sought legal immunity for telecoms firms which have provided details on international phone calls. What happens in practice, and what the law permits, is a hot and unresolved issue.

Tags: politics

when illiquid means insolvent

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:29:09 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: opendemocracy

Clip Source: www.opendemocracy.net

The first and most important of these delusions is the belief that banks and financial institutions are illiquid, when in fact they are insolvent. Systematic insolvency is, again, categorically excluded from world of orthodox economics. It was the failure of central-bank governors and finance ministers like Alistair Darling and Hank Paulson to acknowledge insolvency in the summer and autumn of 2007 that has prolonged and deepened the crisis. It is the failure to recognise insolvency now that lies behind the apparently endless, and ineffective flow of taxpayer-backed liquidity from central banks.

Tags: economy

MDGs update

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:06:10 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ft

Clip Source: blogs.ft.com

Six years ago, the rich countries pledged in Monterrey, Mexico to “make concrete efforts toward the international target of 0.7 per cent of GNP in official development assistance.” Yet the United States stands are 0.16 per cent, Japan at 0.17, Italy at 0.19, Canada at 0.28, Germany at 0.37, and France at 0.39.

In a week in which the US taxpayers will put out almost $1,000bn for a bank bailout and a year in which the US will spend $700bn on the military, it’s hard to credit the idea that the promised development aid is simply unaffordable. Wall Street bonuses in recent years, topping $30bn per year, have exceeded all of the world’s annual aid to Africa. The shortfall in meeting the MDGs is not their great expense or their lack of feasibility. It is, rather, the short-sighted choices we’ve been making in the rich world – to fight wars and to stuff the pockets of rich bankers

Tags: economy, society, globalization

financial WMD

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:32:11 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: iht

Clip Source: iht.com

Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson's $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system "cash for trash." Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

Tags: economy

got another $1 trillion ???

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:00:36 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: nyt

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Finally, there is the question of how much it will ultimately cost. “Institutions so far have written down $550 billion globally of bad debt,” said Daniel Alpert, managing director of Westwood Capital. “We think that when you add up all the problems in the residential housing market still to come — further erosion of housing prices, mortgage foreclosures and so on — we are going to need another $1 trillion of write-downs.”

Tags: economy

got $ 1 trillion ?!!

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:06:52 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ft

Clip Source: www.ft.com

Were the financial crisis to end today, the costs would be painful but manageable, roughly equivalent to the cost of another year in Iraq. Unfortunately, however, the financial crisis is far from over, and it is hard to imagine how the US government is going to succeed in creating a firewall against further contagion without spending five to 10 times more than it has already, that is, an amount closer to $1,000bn to $2,000bn.

Tags: economy

socialization of finance

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:40:58 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: opendemocracy

Clip Source: www.opendemocracy.net

From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance. A small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind. Who said economics was boring?

Tags: economy

big bang or big bounce?

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:00:18 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: sciam

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.

Tags: cosmology

civil liberties

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:28:50 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: economist

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

Sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, liberties are being taken with your liberties. Intelligent Life magazine asks 11 people which freedom lost, and gained, means the most to them. We start with Richard Dawkins ...

Tags: society

the myth of nation-state

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:08:45 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: syndicate

Clip Source: www.project-syndicate.org

This fall, thousands of college students will be taught a myth presented as fact. It is a myth that has helped fuel wars and may hinder finding solutions to the world’s biggest problems. Though the origin of this myth is cloudy, science has proven its falsity, and a globalized world has rendered it anachronistic. I am talking about the nation-state.

Tags: politics, history, psychology

SciFoo 2008

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:45:22 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: edge

Clip Source: edge.org

SciFoo begins with a round of stylized introductions. Since 200 or so people are involved, brevity is a primary virtue. The stated mandate is: name, affiliation, three word self-presentation. Most people interpreted "word" very liberally, in the spirit of the days of Genesis, to encompass "phrase" or "topic". I was among the happy few who literally presented themselves in three words, sat down and shut up. In the process, I discovered both a philosophy of life, an algorithm for creativity, and the title of my fictitious autobiography:

Tags: science, conference

how to build more "wikipedias"

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:21:22 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: edge

Clip Source: www.edge.org

If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

Tags: society, collaboration