Koko: Biological Computer Created at Stanford

Koko

Koko

Biological computer created at Stanford

In the foreseeable future, humans might carry microscopic natural computers inside their cells that could guard against disease and warn of toxic threats based on a Stanford research achievement.

A team of engineers there has invented genetic transistors, completing a simple computer within a living cell, a major step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

The startling achievement, to be unveiled in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, presages the day when “living computers’ inside the human body could screen for cancer, detect toxic chemicals or even turn cell reproduction on and off.

“We’re going to be able to put computers inside any living cell you want,’ said lead researcher Drew Endy of Stanford’s School of Engineering.

The computers could deliver true-false answers to virtually any biological question that might be posed within a cell. For instance: Is toxic mercury present? It could detect it.

Also: They can count. This would be a useful tool when treating diseases like cancer, where cells divide uncontrollably. Suppose a liver cell carries a counter that records how many times it divides. Once the counter hits 500, for instance, the cell could be programmed to die.

Endy’s work “clearly demonstrates the power of synthetic biology and could revolutionize how we compute in the future,’ said UC Berkeley biochemical engineer Jay Keasling. He is director of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center that helped support research at Stanford.

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Mar 31

Owl: Pedophilia as “Privilege” and “Pure” — Single Source Page for Glimpse of the Chasm Into Hell — Coast to Shining Satanic Coast – FBI Complicit 1.4

Who?  Who?

Who? Who?

A big problem in sharing even excellent, well-sourced information on the theme of pedophiles occupying the highest ranks of organizations, whether they be corporate, governmental or even religious, is not the sense of incredulity such information usually provokes in typically asleep middle-class readers who have lived relatively protected, cocooned existences oblivious to the innumerable black undersides of what some call reality.  That’s to be expected from those who live in middle-class cocoons.  The real difficulty is in examining and sharing information on practices that are unarguably loathsome, depraved, vile, degenerate and in essence evil, and done by people we look upon as our highest and most respectable leaders. It’s easy to accuse someone of evil, and it is insufficient by itself to do so. One has to provide evidence, and providing evidence entails describing something ineffably malign and almost unutterable in its horror – that’s hard to do, by comparison, because except for those with a strong appetite or attraction to very, very dark things, a minority, no one else, understandably, wants to look at such things. People flee from what repels them, and what is more repellent than pederasts, especially those who have great power and privilege?

This undoubtedly largely has to do with living in a dominantly secular age. The influence of those who don’t believe in a Divine Order or God is pervasive enough to compel the masses to assume the flip side: to take for granted there is no Devil, no source of deep, abiding non-human evil. Anything conveyed about people and their practices that smacks of a quality or degree of evil that puts the smug assumptions of modernity into doubt, that makes the Satanic much more plausible despite the stubborn persistence of modernity’s assumptions about good and evil, is an object of terror and revulsion to the degree that modernity’s values has descended into people’s hearts and minds.  Not that religious “authorities” can be counted on to protect innocent children. Note the Catholic Church’s endless calls to stop abortion, which victimizes innocent children, they say, which is all well and good, but its compulsive, monotonic repetition of this meme seems to be a sign of a compensatory spilling-out of a guilty conscience for having permitted and protected the many pederast priests in its midst. They seem to ignore the more concrete or real crime in exchange for protesting the more abstract one when it comes to their most repeated phrase: innocent children. This happens likely because the real crime is done by their very own, at the center of power and control in the Church, by priests and their bishops.

For these and other reasons, getting the message out about pedophiles who are very powerful is more challenging and daunting than getting out information on any other category of crimes performed by members of the Elite. Yet the task should be done, if only as a microscopic, belated effort to help get some chance of justice for the countless and truly innocent children victimized and even tortured and killed by pederasts, especially those in the highest places, plus to help prevent new such crimes by the high and mighty especially.

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Jan 31

Michel Basuwens: The Relational State – The Human Factor

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens

THE RELATIONAL STATE

HOW RECOGNISING THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS COULD REVOLUTIONISE THE ROLE OF THE STATE

Edited by Graeme Cooke and Rich Muir

Featuring Lead Essays by Geoff Mulgan and Marc Stears

Institute for Public Policy Research (UK), November 2012

click here for the pdf file (64 pages)

Comment, Links, and Table of Contents Below

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Dec 17

Michel Beauwens: Hacking Society: It’s Time To Measure The Unmeasurable

Michel Bauwens

Hacking Society: It’s Time To Measure The Unmeasurable

from the value-and-benefit dept

I was lucky enough to attend a small gathering of great thinkers put together by Union Square Ventures earlier this week for an event they called Hacking Society — which was designed to be a one day open conversation on the economics and power of networks, and how to use that as a force for good, in solving economic and social challenges. There were lots of great thoughts that came out of the event (which was live streamed over the web for people to listen in and participate via Twitter — as many did). It would be impossible to sum up all of the great points in a single blog post, so I’m just going to discuss briefly the larger themes that hit me and helped to connect a few disparate ideas in my own mind.

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Nov 24

DefDog: Anonymous Attacks Israel

DefDog

Anonymous takes down over 550 Israeli sites, wipes databases, leaks email addresses and passwords

When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began taking military action in the Gaza strip against Hamas (as the IDF announced on Twitter), Anonymous declared its own war as part of #OpIsrael. Among the casualties are thousands of email addresses and passwords, hundreds of Israeli web sites, government-owned as well as privately owned pages, as well as databases belonging to the Bank of Jerusalem and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Read comments, claims, and press release.

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Nov 16

Michel Bauwens: Nondominium and the Commons

Michel Bauwens

Using Nondominion to Evolve from Local to Global Commons

* Paper: From Local to Global Commons. Applying Ostrom’s Key Principles for Sustainable Governance. By Valnora Leister and Mark Frazier.

Abstract

“This paper explores a possible new local-to-global system for the equitable governance of the “common pool resources.” As normally understood, the “Commons” refers to resources that are owned or shared among communities. Such resources (forests, fisheries, etc.) when located within national boundaries are subject to that country’s laws. Areas beyond national jurisdiction, including the high-seas, Antarctica, the ocean sea-bed, outer space and the Earth’s environment, are known as “Common Heritage of Mankind” (CHM) and subject to Public International Law (PIL). The object and subject of traditional PIL is the nation-state. However, since the 1972 Conference for the Human Environment, individuals and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) have been legally recognized under PIL as having direct responsibility for protection of the global environment, by working for transparency and accountability in its management. With this opening for direct participation by individuals and NGOs in working for sustainable management of the global Commons, it may be now feasible to extend the precedents identified by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom for successful economic governance of local common pool resources to wider CHM areas.

A recently developed legal concept – nondominium – offers a framework for recognizing user rights toward this end. Combining Ostrom’s principles with this new approach for shared use of the Commons promises to give a more solid legal grounding for the 5 “As” (Architecture, Adaptiveness, Accountability, Allocation and Access) in the governance of the global commons for the benefit of humanity.”

Read Extracts.

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Oct 29

Michel Bauwens: Alan Moore on Hacking the Future

Categories: Hacking

Michel Bauwens

To be Part of the Future You Have to Hack It

Alan Moore

Huffington Post, 6 August 2012

Embracing an ambiguous world

In 2006 IBM produced a report called ‘The enterprise of the future’. The survey of CEOs revealed that 8 out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. Why? I would argue these leaders did not have the means to see an unfolding story, that we are decoupling from a linear industrial society and so were unable to embrace, nor articulate the emergence of new organisational structures, legal frameworks, new production and design processes, not the underlying societal trend that sought greater mutualism, opportunity, freedom, diversity, and empowerment, that were in direct contrast to the increasing unfairness and monoculture of a wholly consumer orientated society.

In this non-linear world, companies and organisations premised upon the old orthodoxies, linear, industrial-scale models must think and embrace the unthinkable and work out how they innovate to survive. Whether we survey the political, media, engineering, NGO, educational or healthcare landscape we can identify an increasing sophistication in how we are responding to the challenges of living in a more complex world. At the same time, there is the ever-increasing acceleration of the collapse of the old ways of command and control. Every work of art, said Wassily Kandinsky, is a child of its time.

And so to learn new ways of doing these things we have to hack the future.

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Oct 29

Mini-Me: REPLAY Future of the USA in 3 Parts

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

The future of the USA – 2012-2016: An insolvent and ungovernable United States (first part)

Thus, according to LEAP/E2020, the 2012 election year, which opens against the backdrop of economic and social depression, complete paralysis of the federal system (3), strong rejection of the traditional two-party system and a growing questioning of the relevance of the Constitution, inaugurates a crucial period in the history of the United States. Over the next four years, the country will be subjected to political, economic, financial and social upheaval such as it has not known since the end of the Civil War which, by an accident of history, started exactly 150 years ago in 1861. During this period, the US will be simultaneously insolvent and ungovernable, turning that which was the “flagship” of the world in recent decades into a “drunken boat”.

To make the complexity of the current process understandable, our team has chosen to organize its anticipations around three key areas:

1. US institutional deadlock and the break-up of the traditional two-party system
2. The unstoppable spiral of recession/depression/inflation
3. The breakdown of the US socio-political fabric

Read rest of analysis.

Below the line: the other two parts of the series.

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Oct 20

Graphic: Military Open Source Software – I Want You!

Click on Image to Enlarge

Military Open Source Software Home

Tip of the Hat to Alexander Howard at Google+.

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Oct 16

We Are Legion – The Story of the Hacktivists (2012)

From Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.

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Sep 25