Read moreThe second way today’s plutocrats flex their political muscle is more novel. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, a pair of business writers, have called this approach “philanthrocapitalism” — activist engagement with public policy and social problems. This isn’t the traditional charity of supporting hospitals and museums, uncontroversial good causes in which sitting on the board can offer the additional perk of status in the social elite. Philanthrocapitalism is a more self-consciously innovative and entrepreneurial effort to tackle the world’s most urgent social problems; philanthrocapitalists deploy not merely the fortunes they accumulated, but also the skills, energy and ambition they used to amass those fortunes in the first place.
Bill Gates is the leading philanthrocapitalist, and he has many emulators — nowadays, having your own policy-oriented think tank is a far more effective status symbol among the super-rich than the mere conspicuous consumption of yachts or private jets. Philanthrocapitalism can be partisan — George Soros, one of the pioneers of this new approach, backed a big effort to try to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush — but it is most often about finding technocratic, evidence-based solutions to social problems and then advocating their wider adoption.
Philanthrocapitalism, particularly when you agree with the basic values of the capitalist in charge, can achieve remarkable things. Consider the work the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done on malaria, or the transformative impact of Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Bloomberg took philanthrocapitalism one step further — he used his résumé and his wealth to win elected political office. In City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg’s greatest achievements were technocratic triumphs — restricting smoking in public places, posting calorie counts and championing biking. As he prepares for life after political office, he is already honing the more typical plutocratic skill of using his money to shape public policy by energetically engaging in national battles over issues like gun control and immigration reform.
At its best, this form of plutocratic political power offers the tantalizing possibility of policy practiced at the highest professional level with none of the messiness and deal making and venality of traditional politics. You might call it the Silicon Valley school of politics — a technocratic, data-based, objective search for solutions to our problems, uncorrupted by vested interests or, when it comes to issues like smoking or soft drinks, our own self-indulgence.
But the same economic forces that have made this technocratic version of plutocratic politics possible — particularly the winner-take-all spiral that has increased inequality — have also helped define its limits. Surging income inequality doesn’t create just an economic divide. The gap is cultural and social, too. Plutocrats inhabit a different world from everyone else, with different schools, different means of travel, different food, even different life expectancies. The technocratic solutions to public-policy problems they deliver from those Olympian heights arrive in a wrapper of remote benevolence. Plutocrats are no more likely to send their own children to the charter schools they champion than they are to need the malaria cures they support.
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Read moreThe Russian press reports that local officials intercepted a shipment from China that contained home appliances with “spy” microchips capable of spreading malware to wi-fi enabled devices within 200 meters. Tea kettles were apparently the chief culprit.
Specific details of the dodgy shipments remain shady. It’s unclear, for example, if the chips were installed by the Chinese or by cyber criminals en route to Russia. It’s also unclear how Russian authorities spotted the contraband in the first place, although one report claims that the weight of some shipments were slightly off. Finally, the extent of the fiasco is also unclear, though limited press coverage suggests that it’s contained to a small shipment in St. Petersburg.
Read moreInitially, the lance suggested that the skeleton on the biggest platform was a male warrior, possibly an Etruscan prince. The jewelry probably belonged to the second body, the warrior prince’s wife.
But bone analysis revealed that the prince holding the lance was actually a 35- to 40-year-old woman, whereas the second, partially incinerated skeleton belonged to a man.
Given that, what do archaeologists make of the spear?
“The spear, most likely, was placed as a symbol of union between the two deceased,” Mandolesi told Viterbo News 24 on Sept. 26.
Weingarten, however, doesn’t believe the symbol of unity explanation. Instead, she thinks the spear shows the woman’s high status. The other explanation is “highly unlikely,” Weingarten told LiveScience. “She was buried with it next to her, not him.”
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Whereas Greek women were cloistered away, Etruscan women, according to Greek historian Theopompus, were more carefree — working out, lounging nude, drinking freely, consorting with many men and raising children who did not know their fathers’ identities.
Instead of using objects found in a grave to interpret the sites, archaeologists should first rely on bone analysis or other sophisticated techniques, Weingarten said.
“Until very recently, and sadly still in some countries, sex determination is based on grave goods. And that, in turn, is based almost entirely on our preconceptions. A clear illustration is jewelry: We associate jewelry with women, but that is nonsense in much of the ancient world,” Weingarten said.
“Guys liked bling, too.”
Read moreThe ancient ancestor of the modern domestic dog is the wild wolf of the pre-LGM (Last Glacial Maximum: ca 26,000–19,000 years BP). Until recently, the earliest well-preserved and well-documented remains of early domestic dog all came from European contexts dating to no earlier than ca 14,000–9,000 years ago. Recent research, however, has provided a canine skull from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Goyet (Belgium) with a direct age (that is, an date made on the skull itself rather than on artefacts found with the skeleton) of ca 36,000 cal. BP. This skull, however, has physical traits which do not allow for a clear determination of whether this particular animal represents the remains of a very early domesticated dog or a completely wild wolf. More certain, is the well-preserved remains of a ‘dog-like canid’ from Razboinichya Cave (Altai Mountains, Siberia). These remains are dated to ca 33,000 cal. BP, and most interestingly, seem to represent a group of dogs which were in the process of being domesticated by the local people before climatic and cultural changes associated with the LGM disrupted their transformation into domesticated animals. Consequently, this particular line of dogs does not have any direct domesticated ancestors.
This data, along with other lines of evidence, demonstrates that dog domestication was a multi-regional process—that is, groups of people in various areas domesticated their local dog populations creating their own domestic breeds, rather than a single group of dogs being domesticated on one occasion by one group of people, and then these animals being transported around the globe. In the Australian context, we have the now-native dingo which was transported here from East Asia by Indigenous Australians around 5000 years ago.
Read moreMesolithic Wiltshire man and woman were enjoying an attractive diet. “There’s basically a Heston Blumenthal menu coming out of the site,” said Jacques.
“We can see people eating huge pieces of aurochs, cows which are three times the size of a normal cow, and we’ve got wild boar, red deer and hazelnuts.
"There were really rich food resources for people and they were eating everything that moved but we weren’t expecting frogs’ legs as a starter.”
The discovery is entertaining, but has a wider importance, said Jacques, as it adds to evidence that there was a near-3,000-year use of the site.
“People are utilising all these resources to keep going and it is clearly a special place for the amount of different types of food resources to keep them going all year round. Frogs’ legs are full of protein and very quick to cook: the Mesolithic equivalent of fast food.”
[…] the idea of the future being different from the present
is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and
behavior that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting
on it in practice.
John Maynard Keynes (1937)
Read more“You [saw] all this edgy TV work but it [didn’t] touch the leader,” she said. For example, when a soap opera opera dealt with corruption, the program never blamed Assad for the corruption. Instead, the series showed an Assad-like figure who could solve the problem. “[In the mosalsalats], the authority of the leader is justified even more because of the fight against corruption,” Donatella said.
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“Traditionally, Syrians made the soaps, while Gulf channels broadcast them to the region. Those broadcasters are often based in countries that have severed ties with the regime and are now boycotting Syrian TV programs. It’s led to a resurgence in the Egyptian TV production industry–but it means that Syrian voices are struggling to be heard.”
A hardware store owner in Syria before the civil war, Hussein Zoubi, 40, took up arms against the government almost two years ago. Since then, like thousands of Syrian men in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, he has been leading the life of a commuter rebel, a fighter inside Syria and a family man across the border.
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Ramtha is the twin city to Dara’a, the birthplace of the Syrian uprising just across the border from here. Errant mortar shells from Dara’a fall with regularity inside Ramtha, and the intensity of fighting over there can sometimes be gauged by just lowering the television volume here. Just as significant, Dara’a’s ability to tap Jordan’s mobile phone network allows the divided families to engage in a nearly constant stream of text and instant messages, not to mention calls.
Like Mr. Zoubi, these part-time fighters, part-time refugees, belong to groups linked to the Free Syrian Army, the association supported by the United States and Jordan.
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In Syria, Mr. Askar found himself participating in firefights and using his seniority, at age 36, to try to unify the troops.
“To be honest, I spend most of my time settling differences inside the brigade,” he said, adding that he was able to do this from here, over Skype, because of the fast shared mobile network.
For his wife, Madjoleen, 29, strong connections were a godsend. “I know he’s O.K. because he calls every few hours when he’s away in Syria,” she said.
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In a room where she was observing the Muslim mourning period, Qassem’s widow, Fatima, 28, remembered how they had met as teenagers and how one day, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, he had visited her parents to explain his intentions. When he was fighting in Syria, the couple exchanged constant messages on social media applications like Viber and WhatsApp.
Two days before he was killed, he sent her a portentous video message on WhatsApp. He assured her, “with all my love and respect and nostalgia,” that the road ahead for her was “spread with flowers.” The video went on, “In your absence my sky is not blessed with rain.”
Later, Fatima received a cellphone photograph of her husband’s grave in a rebel cemetery in Dara’a.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/world/middleeast/family-man-one-day-rebel-fighter-the-next.html
Read moreFor engineering reasons, the quantum processor can never be installed in Glass, but together with Google’s conventional server centers, it can point the way to a better blink-detecting algorithm. That would allow the Glass processor to detect blinks with better accuracy and using significantly less power. If successful, it could be an important breakthrough for wink-triggered apps, which have struggled with the task so far.
Read moreProfessor Parker said that in order to guarantee that it kept getting money from Congress, NASA worked very hard to from the 1960s onwards to develop the story of its importance for the future.
“The cards at the National Space Centre are very poignant. Lots of people will be able to say exactly where they were when they saw Neil Armstrong land on the Moon. It became part of the narrative of your life.
“But the notions of progress which were common in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s are now no longer as universally accepted. I don’t think anyone believes that things only move forward for the better anymore.”
Dr Lewis Goodings said: “This research highlights the intersections between our personal experiences of the event and the particular version of the past that is given to us through the media and other sources.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 