meertn shared this story from Darkgate Comic Slurper:
	It's funny because it's true :)

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	jlvanderzwan shared this story from CultureLab:
	Sounds like a book worth reading, even if you don't agree.

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Stephen Battersby, consultant

(Image: Jean-Luc Bertini/Picturetank)

Make way for the physicists! Economics is finally becoming an enlightened science, say new books by Mark Buchanan and James Owen Weatherall

SOMETHING is stirring amid the swamps of the dismal science. It speaks of brass beads and rice piles, of power laws and positive feedback, of phase changes, chaos and complexity. Resembling an actual science, it might come to have some bearing on the real world and help reduce future financial catastrophes. That is the main message of Mark Buchanan's new book, Forecast.

This new science is battling to escape the dominant theory of neoclassical economics. That "almost psychotic fantasy", as Buchanan puts it, is as absurd as a theory of weather that says storms do not exist. Its adherents see only equilibrium where there is dynamism, its edicts have made markets and the global economy more unstable.

In the 1930s and 40s, Buchanan recounts, American economist Irving Fisher and others advanced a view of the economy as a dynamic, unstable beast, but over the following decades others worked hard to bury the insight. Milton Friedman and his allies in the Chicago School promoted the idea of equilibrium in markets and economies.

With forbiddingly intricate equations, they proved that a perfect market of rational people, coolly calculating how to maximise their gains, reaches an equilibrium where all goods are priced at the optimum level. In this best of all possible worlds, says Buchanan, any change would reduce the overall wealth. Adam Smith's invisible hand was drawn in rigorous mathematics.

Of course, we do not act like rational automata. If we did, only the literally starving would choose to take out a "payday loan" at 2000 per cent interest. Instead, we guess, panic and follow whims, hormones or herds. Psychologists have long known how much other people affect our perceptions and behaviours.

But in a remarkable feat of logic, Friedman argued that for a hypothesis to be important, it "must be false in its assumptions". Which makes neoclassical theory sound very important indeed.

And the theory fails to account for bubbles or market crashes. No matter, say proponents: external shocks, from outside economics, are behind all those unfortunate events. So the "equilibrium delusion", as Buchanan calls it, has persisted. Now deregulation and derivatives have moved us closer to that perfect market in which anything can be traded with anyone at any time.

As you may have noticed, this did not turn out well. The global economic crisis, writes Buchanan, now looks like "an unusually powerful hurricane that was brewing... for half a dozen years while economists - their textbooks on financial weather dealing only with the theory of calm blue skies - insisted that everything was fine".

His attack on the Chicago School is unmerciful, but the book's main aim is more positive, describing how physicists become financial storm-chasers. Buchanan is not afraid to use a few graphs, but that is no bad thing, and he tells a lucid, absorbing story. In short, physicists saw that markets follow statistical patterns called power-law distributions, which also crop up in complex systems, from earthquakes to the weather, and in simpler things such as avalanches in a rice pile. These systems tend to organise themselves into critical states, where large and violent events can have small and ordinary origins.

A new breed of financial models does the same. Based on simple, interacting agents that chop and change strategies based on past performance, the models show that the largest market crashes can be triggered by a single trade. And they can explain oddities, too, such as how markets change phase, like melting ice, when they get too crowded.

The models also show how proliferating derivatives and increased leveraging (borrowing to invest) make a market less stable. Just as we have driven the weather to be more extreme, so we have driven markets to be more violent. In future, Buchanan hopes similar models will help head off trouble.

In The Physics of Finance, James Weatherall takes a more winding road, through tales of scientists drawn into finance. He runs from the 19th-century Louis Bachelier's work on the randomness of market prices to today's "quants", the quantitative analysts, often recruited from physics, who devise complex trading algorithms. He covers critical phenomena, too, but ranges more widely than Buchanan, telling of physicists' bids to beat casinos at roulette, and how theories from particle physics could measure inflation.

This is all very engaging, and makes an easy, informative read. But it can also be a little frustrating as we skim the surface of ideas without gaining the same sense of insight that we do from Forecast.

Some of the converts to "econophysics" have called for a new Manhattan Project for economics. It may be a good plan, but the name carries radioactive connotations - and physicists must recognise the danger of radical new tools and theories.

Weatherall argues, reasonably, that quants alone cannot be blamed for the recent crisis. Even so, the input of physicists has clearly helped destabilise markets. Take the Black-Scholes equation: based on diffusion equations in physics, it has been used to price arcane derivatives. And recently, high-frequency algorithmic trading has led to "flash crashes", where a stock dips massively for under a second. If physics inspires more effective economic theories, they may in turn change the nature of markets in profound, possibly dangerous ways.

This is reason for caution, but wilful ignorance is not an option. Some hedge funds use the latest physics-inspired dynamic models, and the light is dawning even in government institutions. While the European Central Bank still uses equilibrium models to make growth predictions, its president, Jean-Claude Trichet, has admitted that existing models failed during the crisis, and that central banks could learn from the new models.

Economics may be reaching its age of enlightenment, becoming a rational science by abandoning the idea that we are perfectly rational. The field may even warrant its own Nobel one day.

Book information
Forecast: What physics, meteorology, and the natural sciences can teach us about economics by Mark Buchanan
Bloomsbury Publishing
£19.99
The Physics of Finance: Predicting the unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall
Short Books
£12.99

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	jlvanderzwan shared this story from Short Sharp Science:
	That's a pretty cool way of gathering data.

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Rebecca Summers, reporter

(Image: Drew J, Philipp C, Westneat MW (2013)

There's no doubt that this bristling shark-tooth sword would have been an effective threat among the 19th century coconut-armour-clad inhabitants of the Gilbert Islands. But its grisly past impaling enemies and being paraded in rituals has given way to a new role as a clue to two vanished shark species.

Joshua Drew from Columbia University in New York and and colleagues from the Field Museum in Chicago scoured natural history museums for the spiky swords, as well as clubs, daggers, lances and spears. The teeth lashed to this sword with coconut fibres and human hair offer evidence of past ecosystems, before written records.

The teeth reveals that the spot-tail shark (Carcharhinus sorrah) and the dusky shark (Carcharhinus obscurus) swum in the islands' waters sometime during the last half of the 19th century. Although still common elsewhere, these species may have been wiped out locally by intensive fishing or rapid environmental change - or could still be living undetected somewhere in the depths.

	jlvanderzwan shared this story :
	"Hey guys, let's loot the already poverty stricken and cause ecological collapse in the process!"

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Local fishermen in West Africa are struggling with reduced catches.

Godong/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

It is a whopper of a catch, in more ways than one: China is under-reporting its overseas fishing catch by more than an order of magnitude, according to a study¹ published on 23 March. The problem is particularly acute in the rich fisheries of West Africa, where a lack of transparency in reporting is threatening efforts to evaluate the ecological health of the waters.

“We can’t assess the state of the oceans without knowing what’s being taken out of them,” says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study. The unreported catch is crippling the artisanal fisheries that help to feed West African populations, he says.

Fisheries experts have long suspected that the catches reported by China to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome are too low. From 2000 to 2011, the country reported an average overseas catch of 368,000 tonnes a year. Yet China claims to have the world’s biggest distant-water fishing fleet, implying a much larger haul, says the study, which was funded by the European Union (EU). Pauly and his colleagues estimate that the average catch for 2000–11 was in fact 4.6 million tonnes a year, more than 12 times the reported figure (see ‘A colossal catch’). Of that total, 2.9 million tonnes a year came from West Africa, one of the world’s most productive fishing grounds.

Liu Xiaobing, director of the division of international cooperation of China’s bureau of fisheries, put the yearly overseas catch at 1.15 million tonnes in a speech to the EU last June. Pauly says that figure would be accurate if it referred to the amount brought back to China, rather than the total catch. Liu did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

SOURCE: PEW Charitable trusts

Fisheries scientists find the latest assessment startling. “So that’s where my fish were going!” says Didier Gascuel at the European University of Brittany in Rennes, France, who is a member of the scientific committee that advises Mauritania and the EU on fishing agreements. Year after year, Mauritanian populations of bottom-dwelling species such as octopus, grouper and sea bream have remained stubbornly low — a sign of over­fishing by bottom-scraping trawlers, he says. “We had no idea the Chinese catch was so big and of course we never included it our models,” he says.

Fishing contracts between Chinese companies and African nations are secret, so to estimate the catch, Pauly and his team had to do some sleuthing. The picture was further clouded because Chinese companies sometimes operate vessels flying local flags. So at least ten researchers combined clues from field interviews, scholarly articles and newspaper and online reports in 14 languages to estimate how many Chinese fishing vessels were operating in 93 countries and territories. They found many in nations where China reported no catch. The estimates were averaged to reach their conclusion: China had at least 900 ocean-going vessels, with 345 in West Africa, including 256 bottom-trawlers.

The scientists estimated the catch per country on the basis of an assumed average catch for each type of vessel. “These numbers may not be absolutely exact, but they give the first hint of the magnitude of the problem,” says Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who was not involved in the study.

Other experts are sceptical. “The new estimates seem far, far too high,” says Richard Grainger, chief of the fisheries statistics and information service at the FAO. He notes that a previous assessment² estimated the total unreported catch in West Africa (by all nations) at 300,000–560,000 tonnes a year. That study tried to identify what was missing from official catch figures with a review of English-language scientific studies.

If the new numbers stand up, renewals of fishing contracts with West African nations could be affected. In the 2000s, under public pressure, EU fleets stopped fishing in coastal waters off much of West Africa, except Mauritania and Morocco. They were replaced by Chinese vessels, mostly large bottom-trawlers whose violations of near-shore no-fishing zones have led to protests.

Gascuel, who helps to determine how many fish can be caught while avoiding population collapse, says that numbers of octopus and shrimp available to be taken in EU contracts with Mauritania, primarily by Spanish vessels, were already small. But once the actual Chinese catch is factored in, he says, “we’d have to eliminate the Spanish catch”.

Ironically, it was Pauly’s team that 12 years ago found that China had been over-reporting its domestic catch by at least 6 million tonnes. Pauly says that mid-level bureaucrats in the country often exaggerate their achievements³.

But he says that China’s under-reporting of the distant-water catch is the more important problem. “It shows the extent of the looting of Africa, where so many people depend on seafood for basic protein.”

	jlvanderzwan shared this story from Flak Photo:
	Hmmm... large format photography...

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Lisa Elmaleh
Hogslop String Band, Harpeth River, Tennessee, 2010
From the American Folk series
Website - LisaElmaleh.com

Lisa Elmaleh is a large format photographer who was born and raised in South Florida. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Elmaleh is a recipient of PDN’s 30 (2013), the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant (2012), the Aaron Siskind Foundation IPF Grant (2011), The Everglades National Park Artist Residency (2010), the Camera Club of New York Darkroom Residency (2008), and the Tierney Fellowship (2007). She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the Center for Alternative Photography in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn and occasionally in her pickup truck.

	jlvanderzwan shared this story from Technology news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk:
	Trying out the Newsblur bookmarklet. And what better way then with an article on why Google just made a big mistake?

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Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees: we'll all be worse off

It's a mistake to think that just because a small number of people use a product that they don't matter - and Google's attempt to push Reader users to Google+ is a mistake too

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Bees are a good example of collaborative working - and social interaction. Killing Google Reader is like killing them. Photograph: RESO / Rex Features

Around the world, the bees are dying due, it's thought, to modern insecticides, The irony is that bees are essential to agriculture and the wider ecosystem; the outcome of their decline will be far more onerous than the insect damage the treatment was supposed to prevent.

Google is now in the unhappy position of emulating the pesticide-wielding farmers. It has announced that it is closing Google Reader, a service that aggregates updates from blogs, news services and any site that uses the RSS content syndication standard. Google Reader has been on a death watch for a while as its owners try to funnel readers to its Google+ social network for finding and sharing information of personal interest.

It's hard to make money from RSS feeds, and they've always been something of a minority interest among internet users. "We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We're sad too.", said software engineer Alan Green in a company blog post.

And how, Normally taciturn insiders at Google HQ talk of the company being unprepared for quite how much sadness there'd be, inside and out, and how much anger. There's been "a very considerable internal hubbub about Reader's closure", one Googler told me, while a 600-post thread of anger and dismay on highbrow forum Metafilter mirrors outrage across Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

The corporate surprise adds to the decision itself to paint a picture of a company dangerously adrift from a real understanding of its audience, and the information ecosystem.

Google Reader is more than just a news aggregator, and its users are more than factory-farmed data ruminators. While the usage figures may indeed be modest, the quality of that usage - and the users - is superb. Buzzfeed reports that the moribund Reader still drives vastly more traffic to sites than the pampered Google+. That's because of its excellence as a tool for people who are front line experts in sampling and using the raw information the internet generates, and the consequent interest in what they find worthwhile.

It's easy to see the managerial reasons for killing Reader. Google is in the middle of a spring clean, trying to focus resources in fewer places. Even mature products with no apparent updates cost money to keep alive within Google's internal and constantly-morphing infrastructure. In October last year, Google removed Reader's own link-sharing system and replaced it with a Google+ 'like' button - a statement of intent that was very easy to follow.

But those core Reader users are worth more to Google than any random million Google+ posters. They are the journalists, the producers, the specialist communicators, who need to absorb hundreds and thousands of the web's primary sources a day - and then share and act on the best. A radio programme maker told me that "it's a disaster. I completely rely on Reader so much for research, finding experts, and stayng current on the facts that rarely make it safely into the mass of the media." Perhaps that's why the Financial Times chose to put a report headlined "Twittersphere in meltdown over killing of Google Reader" prominently on the front page of the print edition of its Companies and Markets section on Friday. Its audience is those specialist communicators. Presumably, they've indicated their upset too.

There are other services that aggregate RSS, but many of them rely on Google Reader. Many others have been driven out of business by Reader's dominance, including most that synchronise across several devices - precisely the way that busy information VIPs work. These people are the apex pollinators of the web, the first responders and the most influential creators of quality across an internet that so desperately needs it. They find Reader mindful where Twitter is mindless; Reader organises and prioitises, it keeps information in sight, not rushes it away.

Such people will find other ways to get their data - less easily, less reliably and less well integrated with how they work - but for now, they are angry and uncertain. "I feel betrayed," the radio programme maker said. "I used to recommend Google to everyone, but now I can't trust it. It's all very well putting all the books in the world online, but what's the point if you then shaft the readers?"

Google exists, it says, to encourage everyone to use the internet. It isn't in the business of supporting small groups of specialists, except through general purpose tools. But by angering and disenfranchising the very people who keep the internet fruitful and productive, it is poisoning its own fields - and those of others. It betrays itself as not understanding that "social" isn't just about numbers, it's about people - people who might be hard to sell advertising to, but who create the conditions in which advertising can work.

That level of ignorance is very dangerous to Google. It looks as if the company has stopped seeing the internet as something it should serve and enhance, choosing instead to treat it as something Google itself ties to its own internal reality. Google said it was shutting down Reader to "make a better user experience". Such hubris is, in the end, the death of companies.

As Richard Feynman said in his report on the Challenger shuttle disaster: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled". It's a lesson that agribusiness and Google alike ignore at their, and our, peril.

Rupert Goodwins is a freelance journalist (and Google Reader user)

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And it's happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Clarissa Bonet
Street, Chicago, 2012
From the City Space series
Website - ClarissaBonet.com

Clarissa Bonet (b. 1986 Tampa Florida) Lives and works in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2012 and her B.S. in Photography from the University of Central Florida. After moving to Chicago to attend Columbia College, Clarissa was intrigued and overwhelmed by the city’s space, both physically and psychologically. Her project, City Space, is a photographic exploration of her relationship to the urban environment and the people that occupy it. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. She was the recipient of the Albert P. Weisman grant for two consecutive years. Her work is in the collection of the South East Museum of Photography and Calumet Photographic. Most recently, she won PDN’s The Curator: The Search for Outstanding and Undiscovered Fine Art Photography.

We’re living in a new kind of computing environment. Everyone has a device, sometimes multiple devices. It’s been a long time since we have had this rate of change—it probably hasn’t happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago. To make the most of these opportunities, we need to focus—otherwise we spread ourselves too thin and lack impact. So today we’re announcing some more closures, bringing the total to 70 features or services closed since our spring cleaning began in 2011:

• Apps Script will be deprecating the GUI Builder and five UiApp widgets in order to focus efforts on Html Service. The rest of the Ui Service will not be affected. The GUI Builder will continue to be available until September 16, 2013. For more information see our post on the Google Apps Developer Blog.
• CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013. Most developers’ use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API, which we recommend using instead. If you’re a developer and the Calendar API won’t work for you, please fill out this form to tell us about your use case and request access to whitelisted-only CalDAV API.
• Google Building Maker helped people to make three-dimensional building models for Google Earth and Maps. It will be retired on June 1, but users are still able to access and export their models from the 3D Warehouse. We’ll continue to expand the availability of comprehensive and accurate new 3D imagery on Google Earth, and people can still use Google Map Maker to add building information such as outlines and heights to Google Maps.
• Google Cloud Connect is a plug-in to help people work in the cloud by automatically saving Microsoft Office files from Windows PCs in Google Drive. But installing Google Drive on your desktop achieves the same thing more effectively—and Drive works not only on Windows, but also on Mac, Android and iOS devices. Existing users will no longer be able to use Cloud Connect as of April 30.
• We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.
• Beginning next week, we're ending support for the Google Voice App for Blackberry. For Blackberry users who want to continue using Google Voice, we recommend they use our HTML5 app, which is more secure and easier for us to keep up to date. Our HTML5 site is compatible with users with Blackberry version 6 and newer.
• We’re deprecating our Search API for Shopping, which has enabled developers to create shopping apps based on Google’s Product Search data. While we believe in the value this offering provided, we’re shifting our focus to concentrate on creating a better shopping experience for users through Google Shopping. We’ll shut the API down completely on September 16, 2013.
• Beginning today we’ll no longer sell or provide updates for Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows. Existing customers will continue to be able to download the software and can contact us for support. We’ll continue to offer the Snapseed mobile app on iOS and Android for free.

These changes are never easy. But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives.

Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow

Third in the trilogy.

	RSA Animate - The Power of Outrospection Introspection is out, and outrospection is in. Philosopher and author Roman Krznaric explains how we can help drive social change by stepping outside ourselv...	From: theRSAorg Views: 233382 4828 ratings
	Time: 10:29	More in Nonprofits & Activism

Just want to say thanks to Toonhole for making that incredible animation. Fair warning: A lot of their content is NSFW.

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

Food is becoming an increasingly political issue. Food security has risen up the international agenda to become one of the most talked-about aspects of strategic planning for the future. From questions of who owns the patents on the seeds people need to survive, to questions of the effects of additives in your body, to understanding the impact of our consumption habits on the environment, information about food is much-needed and often difficult to come by.

The G8 is organising an International Conference on Open Data in Agriculture, to take place on the 28th and 29th April. The idea is to openly share useful, publicly funded information about agriculture across international borders, so the everyone can move towards greater food security. In particular, the G8 group have made a commitment to share this data with African countries to enable “a sustainable increase in food security”.

There’s an open call for ideas to present at the conference, so if you have thoughts about how open data can improve global food security and food use then think about getting in touch. The folk from Open Food Facts are submitting their ideas, and they’ve invited input into their letter explaining why the project is important. The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 8th March, so now’s the moment!

If you’d like to get involved in discussions about open data, food and sustainability more generally, sign up for our Open Sustainability Working Group.

Seven of a batch of 10 "natural" remedies for erectile dysfunction actually contain the active chemical ingredient from Viagra

Only about a week left to submit for OUR EVENT IN BOSTON!

Released three weeks ago after a year on tour at various film festivals, Choros is the latest experimental art film from director Michael Langan the explores the movement of the human body, specifically the motion of dancer Terah Maher. Choros follows in the steps of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren, all of whom spent years studying the physical moment of animals and humans through film. Langan takes the next step using new digital innovations to layer some 32 sequential instances of a single movement and then stretch it out over time. Set to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the 13-minute video is pulsating, hypnotic, and flat out lovely to watch. You can read more about it over at Short of the Week.