tisiwoota

1. Why YouTube Won’t Suffer Napster’s Fate

2. Skin Ages Faster in Women Than Men

3. The original Spam tries to reclaim its name

4. Trojan Horse Video Where can one sneak a Trojan horse into in the modern day? via.

5. What is the Extinction Rate of Administrative Agencies?
“[T]he business world is exhibiting the complex system behavior of self-organizing criticality: on the whole, the business system maintains a long term stability at its core, but on its surface is a wildly dynamic changing of the guard.
Does this occur in legal institutions as well? Sure it does. For example, based on the Government Manual for each turn of the decade year from 1950 - 2000, in 1950 there were 48 federal independent agencies, ranging from the Phillipine War Damage Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission. How many of those had gone “extinct” by 2000? The answer is 35.“

1. Selfish Impulse Set Free by Magnetic Pulse to Brain: New research finds that damping down prefrontal cortex activity boosts selfish behavior (or more scientifically put, derepresses it). The article breezily closes with the reassurance that “[T]he technology is not likely to show up in salesrooms anytime soon, thankfully; it takes at least 15 minutes of direct application to the skull to induce the changes . . . and they only last a short while.”

Personally I’m not so reassured– as far as I’m concerned, this is another step closer to manipulation that could be rather bad in the wrong hands. (e.g., could this lead to a method for extracting information from someone who is withholding it for altruistic reasons of country or justice? As desirable as that might be for terrorist interrogations, it would equally be kryptonite for the Jack Bauers of the world– and what a short season of 24 that would be…)

2. The 2006 Ig Nobel Prizes: An unusual hiccup cure, why woodpeckers don’t beat their brains out, and the sound of a three-pronged garden rake on slate is the Most Annoying Sound Ever.

3. Software to Monitor Political Opinions: Ah, even more Orwellian possibilities! I remember thinking when I first read about social networking both how contructively useful it would be for political/humanitarian movements to be able to identify the superconnected keystone links most important for making a group successful– and how that knowledge might be used to thwart progressive momentum. (Um. Am I sounding dark and paranoid this week? Must be the sudden cold snap… and lack of functioning heat in this house…)

4. Cola Wars in Mexico: a story of religious factions and water privatization… (Did you know it takes three cups of water to make one cup of coke?)

Like fireworks and copal, pox is a sacrament in a local religion that blends Catholicism with elements of native tradition. It is a sacred drink that cleanses the soul; the more pox one drinks, the greater the purification. Over the past several decades the caciques—local elites who wield economic and political power and control the soft drink concession—have convinced the faithful that pox should be drunk with Coke or Pepsi, depending on who is doing the proselytizing. They say the cola induces burping, which releases evil from the soul.

The caciques and their affiliated drink companies do a booming business—nevermind that the beverages sell for 50 U.S. cents a can, exactly the average daily income. Purchasing a soda often means not purchasing food, and Chiapas has one of the highest rates of both malnutrition and Coke consumption in Mexico.

5. Starbucks Workers Quasi-unionize. Sort of. Baristas are joining the Industrial Workers of the World, despite pressure from their employer.

1. The graceful response of the Amish to the school shooting– inviting the killer’s family members to grieve.

2. One Small Step for _A_ Man: Audio analysis solves the debate.

3. Employees at Religious Organizations Lack Basic Employment Rights. Apparently there can be such a thing as too much separation of church and state– at least when avoidance of getting involved in ‘religious’ disputes leads to dismissal of cases filed by:

…the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.

4. Why Propaganda Doesn’t Work– among other things, it alienates parties who would otherwise be your natural allies.

5. Everyone’s a Supervisor: Taking Away Unionizing Rights of Nurses. Or as Stephen Colbert sees the implication of the legal trend: “No More Secretary’s Day”

ACS also sums up the current tally of the categories of workers without the right to unionize:

Supervisors 16.6 million workers, 8 million new supervisors plus traditional 8.6 million
Agricultural Workers 3 million workers
Domestic Workers 1 million workers
Independent Contractors 7 million workers
Managers 10 million workers
Employees of religious institutions 500,000 workers

This morning my friend Tom (no blog!), through some random serendipity, found himself acting as translator for a Democracy Now! interview of Bolivian activist Oscar Olivera, who played a significant role in the campaign against Bechtel’s privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The transcript (and audio stream) is here; I encourage you to check it out.

Excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN:
[C]ould you explain . . . what happened in Cochabamba? Talk about what Bechtel tried to do and what the people responded.

OSCAR OLIVERA: [translated]
It’s not that Bechtel tried to do it. They did it. They increased the charges for water, the cost of water, by 300%, so that every family had to pay, for this water service, one-fifth of their income.

AMY GOODMAN:
How did they get control of the water? I mean, here, you turn on the tap. You don’t pay.

OSCAR OLIVERA: [translated]
The government, under a law that was passed, conceded control of the water under a monopoly to Bechtel in a certain area. So that means that Bechtel tried to charge a fee and had the monopoly power over a very basic necessity for people. The law said even that people had to ask, had to obtain a permit to collect rainwater. That means that even rainwater was privatized. The most serious thing was that indigenous communities and farming communities, who for years had their own water rights, those water sources were converted into property that could be bought and sold by international corporations.

1. Bacterial Immortality: Rumors of (the inevitability of) their death turn out to be greatly exaggerated.

2. The Thai Elephant Orchestra: It’s worth a listen. Really.

3. The 100 Most Family-Friendly Companies to Work For

4. Reality TV Stars Outscore All other Celebrities on the Narcissism Personality Inventory

5. Use your own face as an emoticon