((°}

«cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: if you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring". Apple could put the entire text of Mein Kampf inside the iTunes User Agreement» - ((°}

(MdI, e vien da ridere e nello stesso momento ci si rende conto che non c'è niente da ridere)(che poi vorrei sapere quante persone tra i non addetti ai lavori son consapevoli di tutti i magheggi già in atto) - ((°}

"Millions of working Americans don’t know where their next meal is coming from. We sent three photographers to explore hunger in three very different parts of the United States, each giving different faces to the same statistic: One-sixth of Americans don’t have enough food to eat." - ((°}

un sesto? Addirittura? - Haukr

"By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20." - ((°}

(uh grazie, bastava aprire il link :D È una cifra elevatissima) - Haukr

"He stood just four feet tall, his body contorted by a hump in his back and a crooked gait, and his stunted torso gave the illusion that his head, hands and feet were too big. But he was a giant among scientific thinkers, counting Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as friends, and his contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time. In the early 20th century, Charles Steinmetz could be seen peddling pedaling his bicycle down the streets of Schenectady, New York, in a suit and top hat, or floating down the Mohawk River in a canoe, kneeling over a makeshift desktop, where he passed hours scribbling notes and equations on papers that sometimes blew into the water. With a Blackstone panatela cigar seemingly glued to his lips, Steinmetz cringed as children scurried away upon seeing him—frightened, he believed, by the “queer, gnome-like figure” with the German accent. Such occurrences were all the more painful for Steinmetz, as it was a family and children that he longed for most in his life. But knowing that his deformity was congenital (both his father and grandfather were afflicted with kyphosis, an abnormal curvature of the upper spine), Steinmetz chose not to marry, fearful of passing on his deformity. Born in 1865 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Carl August Rudolph Steinmetz became a brilliant student of mathematics and chemistry at the University of Breslau, but he was forced to flee the country after the authorities became interested in his involvement with the Socialist Party.  He arrived at Ellis Island in 1888 and was nearly turned away because he was a dwarf, but an American friend whom Steinmetz was traveling with convinced immigration officials that the young German Ph.D. was a genius whose presence would someday benefit all of America. In just a few years, Steinmetz would prove his American friend right. Soon after his arrival, he went to work for Eickemeyer and Osterheld, a company in Yonkers, New York, and he identified and explained, through a mathematical equation that later became known as the Law of Hysterisis, or Steinmetz’s Law, phenomena governing power losses, leading to breakthroughs in both alternating- and direct-current electrical systems. America was entering a golden age of electrical engineering, and when Thomas Edison and General Electric learned what Steinmetz was doing with electric motors in Yonkers, the company bought out Eickemeyer and Osterheld in 1892, acquiring all of Steinmetz’s patents as well as his services. Steinmetz Americanized his name to Charles Steinmetz. He chose Proteus as his middle name—the nickname his professors in Germany had affectionately bestowed upon him in recognition of the shape-shifting sea god. In Greek mythology, Proteus was a cave-dwelling prophetic old man who always returned to his human form—that of a hunchback. Steinmetz thoroughly enjoyed the comparison. In 1894 he arrived in Schenectady, the place he would call home for the next thirty years, and his impact at General Electric was immediate. Using complex mathematical equations, Steinmetz developed ways to analyze values in alternating current circuits. His discoveries changed the way engineers thought about circuits and machines and made him the most recognized name in electricity for decades. Before long, the greatest scientific minds of the time were traveling to Schenectady to meet with the prolific “little giant”; anecdotal tales of these meetings are still told in engineering classes today. One appeared on the letters page of Life magazine in 1965, after the magazine had printed a story on Steinmetz. Jack B. Scott wrote in to tell of his father’s encounter with the Wizard of Schenectady at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Charles Steinmetz, circa 1915. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection. Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill. Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following: Making chalk mark on generator    $1. Knowing where to make mark         $9,999. Ford paid the bill. Despite his professional successes, there was emptiness in Steinmetz’s life, which he rectified with a maneuver that helped secure his reputation as the “Bohemian scientist.” He spent his first few years in Schenectady in a “bachelor circle” of GE engineers, hiking, canoeing and experimenting with photography. Steinmetz became close friends with one of lab assistants, a thin, young blond man named Joseph LeRoy Hayden, as they developed the first magnetic arc lamp, later used to light street corners. Hayden began to cook for Steinmetz, and soon had a cot placed in his boss’s laboratory so he could nap during their marathon working hours. When Hayden announced that he intended to marry and find an apartment nearby, Steinmetz had an idea. By the turn of the twentieth century, Steinmetz had started construction on a large house on Wendell Avenue, in the area where GE executives lived. A collector of rare plants, he had it designed with a greenhouse, as well as a laboratory, where he planned to work as much as possible to avoid going into the office. Once the mansion was finished, Steinmetz filled the greenhouse with orchids, ferns and cacti (he delighted in their strange shapes) and focused on the menagerie of animals he had always wanted. Like a mischievous boy, he was fascinated with anything that was lethal, and he gathered alligators, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders. The inventor Guglielmo Marconi once asked about Steinmetz about his Gila monster.  “He’s dead,” Steinmetz replied.  “He was too lazy to eat.” Soon, Steinmetz was dining each night in his home with Hayden and his wife, Corrine, a stout, round-faced French-Canadian. The house was too large for Steinmetz, and the Haydens suspected what might be coming. Finally, Steinmetz turned to Corinne. “Why don’t you come and live with me?” he asked. Joseph Hayden was all for it. It would make their long working hours more convenient, and the house offered space he and Corrine could never afford on their own. Hayden had come to cherish Steinmetz’s eccentricities, and he understood that the Bohemian scientist really yearned for a family of his own. Corrine was reluctant, but Steinmetz gently wore her down. “If we move in with you,” she eventually told him, “I must run the house as I see fit.” “Of course, my dear,” Steinmetz replied, stifling a huge grin. Corrine Hayden then outlined the terms of their cohabitation—Steinmetz would pay only for his share of expenditures.  She would prepare and served meals on a regular schedule, no matter how important his and her husband’s work was. The men would simply have to drop everything and sit down to the table. Steinmetz agreed to all of Corrine’s terms. The living arrangement, despite some awkward starts, soon flourished, especially after the Haydens began to have children—Joe, Midge and Billy—and Steinmetz legally adopted Joseph Hayden as his son. The Hayden children had a grandfather, “Daddy” Steinmetz, who ensured that they grew up in a household filled with wonder.  Birthday parties included liquids and gasses exploding in Bunsen burners scattered decoratively around the house. Not much taller than the children who ran about his laboratory and greenhouse, Steinmetz entertained them with stories of dragons and goblins, which he illustrated with fireworks he summoned from various mixtures of sodium and hydrogen in pails of water. In 1922, Thomas Edison came to visit Steinmetz. By then, Edison was nearly deaf, and Steinmetz tapped out a message on Edison’s knee in Morse Code. Edison beamed, and the two continued their silent conversation in front of bewildered reporters. Steinmetz’s fame only grew in the years he lived with the Haydens on Wendell Avenue. When a Socialist mayor took office, Steinmetz served as president of the Schenectady Board of Education and was instrumental in implementing longer school hours, school meals, school nurses, special classes for children of immigrants and the distribution of free textbooks. One Friday afternoon in 1921, Steinmetz hopped in his electric car and headed off for a weekend at Camp Mohawk, where he’d built a small house overlooking Viele Creek. When he arrived he’d discovered that lightning had damaged the building and shattered a large silver glass mirror. He spent the entire weekend painstakingly reconstructing the mirror, placing the slivers between two panes of glass. Once assembled, he studied the pattern and was convinced that the shattered mirror revealed the lightning’s path of electrical discharge. Back at General Electric, he brought in a gigantic apparatus, then another. There were thunderous crashes at odd hours of the night. The city was abuzz with speculation. What exactly was the Wizard of Schenectady doing in Building 28? In March of 1922, reporters were invited to General Electric and gathered before a model village that Steinmetz had constructed. In a noisy and explosive demonstration witnessed by Edison himself, Steinmetz unveiled a 120,000-volt lightning generator. With a showman’s flourish, he flipped a switch and produced lighting bolts that splintered large blocks of wood, decimated the steeple on a white chapel and split a miniature tree. Reporters were awestruck. The following day, a headline in the New York Times proclaimed, “Modern Jove Hurls Lighting at Will.” Steinmetz’s work led to the measures used to protect power equipment from lightning strikes. But toward the end of Steinmetz’s life, according to his biographer, Jonathan Norton Leonard, “his scientific work had become rather like a boy’s playing with machinery.” He had by then earned the respect of electrical engineers for his contributions to the field, but Steinmetz, at the peak of his celebrity, simply could not help but delighting in the kind of pseudo-science he would have scorned earlier in his career. Proteus was as happy as he’d ever been in his life. In the fall of 1923, Steinmetz and his family traveled west by train, stopping to see the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and the actor Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood. The trip exhausted the 58-year-old scientist, and on October 26, back in his home on Wendell Avenue, his grandson Billy brought him breakfast on a tray, only to observe Steinmetz lying motionless on his bed, a physics book by his side.  In his sleep, doctors said, his heart had failed. The Wizard of Schenectady was gone." - ((°}

inman, dove sei, perché pensi solo a tesla? - ((°}

"You come in from a summer hike covered with itchy red mosquito bites, only to have your friends innocently proclaim that they don’t have any. Or you wake up from a night of camping to find your ankles and wrists aflame with bites, while your tentmates are unscathed. You’re not alone. An estimated 20 percent of people, it turns out, are especially delicious for mosquitoes, and get bit more often on a consistent basis. And while scientists don’t yet have a cure for the ailment, other than preventing bites with insect repellent (which, we’ve recently discovered, some mosquitoes can become immune to over time), they do have a number of ideas regarding why some of us are more prone to bites than others. Here are some of the factors that could play a role: Blood Type Not surprisingly—since, after all, mosquitoes bite us to harvest proteins from our blood—research shows that they find certain blood types more appetizing than others. One study found that in a controlled setting, mosquitoes landed on people with Type O blood nearly twice as often as those with Type A. People with Type B blood fell somewhere in the middle of this itchy spectrum. Additionally, based on other genes, about 85 percent of people secrete a chemical signal through their skin that indicates which blood type they have, while 15 percent do not, and mosquitoes are also more attracted to secretors than nonsecretors regardless of which type they are. Carbon Dioxide One of the key ways mosquitoes locate their targets is by smelling the carbon dioxide emitted in their breath—they use an organ called a maxillary palp to do this, and can detect carbon dioxide from as far as 164 feet away. As a result, people who simply exhale more of the gas over time—generally, larger people—have been shown to attract more mosquitoes than others. This is one of the reasons why children get bit less often than adults, on the whole. Exercise and Metabolism In addition to carbon dioxide, mosquitoes find victims at closer range by smelling the lactic acid, uric acid, ammonia and other substances expelled via their sweat, and are also attracted to people with higher body temperatures. Because strenuous exercise increases the buildup of lactic acid and heat in your body, it likely makes you stand out to the insects. Meanwhile, genetic factors influence the amount of uric acid and other substances naturally emitted by each person, making some people more easily found by mosquitos than others. Skin Bacteria Other research has suggested that the particular types and volume of bacteria that naturally live on human skin affect our attractiveness to mosquitoes. In a 2011 study, scientists found that having large amounts of a few types of bacteria made skin more appealing to mosquitoes. Surprisingly, though, having lots of bacteria but spread among a greater diversity of different species of bacteria seemed to make skin less attractive. This also might be why mosquitoes are especially prone to biting our ankles and feet—they naturally have more robust bacteria colonies. Beer Just a single 12-ounce bottle of beer can make you more attractive to the insects, one study found. But even though researchers had suspected this was because drinking increases the amount of ethanol excreted in sweat, or because it increases body temperature, neither of these factors were found to correlate with mosquito landings, making their affinity for drinkers something of a mystery. Pregnancy In several different studies, pregnant women have been found to attract roughly twice as many mosquito bites as others, likely a result of the fact the unfortunate confluence of two factors: They exhale about 21 percent more carbon dioxide and are on average about 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than others. Clothing Color This one might seem absurd, but mosquitoes use vision (along with scent) to locate humans, so wearing colors that stand out (black, dark blue or red) may make you easier to find, at least according to James Day, a medical entomologist at the University of Florida, in commentary he gave to NBC. Genetics As a whole, underlying genetic factors are estimated to account for 85 percent of the variability between people in their attractiveness to mosquitoes—regardless of whether it’s expressed through blood type, metabolism, or other factors. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have a way of modifying these genes, but… Natural Repellants Some researchers have started looking at the reasons why a minority of people seem to rarely attract mosquitoes in the hopes of creating the next generation of insect repellants. Using chromatography to isolate the particular  chemicals these people emit, scientists at the UK’s Rothamsted Research lab have found that these natural repellers tend to excrete a handful of substances that mosquitoes don’t seem to find appealing. Eventually, incorporating these molecules into advanced bug spray could make it possible for even a Type O, exercising, pregnant woman in a black shirt to ward off mosquitoes for good." - ((°}

"Forty-three years ago today, the crew of Apollo 11 set down on the surface of the Moon, with Neil Armstrong taking mankind’s first bold steps onto the lunar surface. The event was a marvelous display of human perseverance and engineering design, but mental_floss reminds us of the day it could have been. The publication quotes the personal essay of speechwriter William Safire, published in the New York Times, The most dangerous part of the trip was not landing the little module on the moon, but in launching it back up to the mother ship. If that failed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could not be rescued. Mission Control would have to “close down communications” and, as the world agonized, let the doomed astronauts starve to death or commit suicide. In the event that things had gone horribly wrong, Safire had a speech ready for then-President Nixon. It read: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." - ((°}

"On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department's Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists. Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy ($3.5m in today's dollars) on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge's other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds. Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint. And the possibilities for control will only expand. European officials have considered requiring all cars entering the European market to feature a built-in mechanism that allows the police to stop vehicles remotely. Speaking earlier this year, Jim Farley, a senior Ford executive, acknowledged that "we know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone." That last bit didn't sound very reassuring and Farley retracted his remarks. As both cars and roads get "smart," they promise nearly perfect, real-time law enforcement. Instead of waiting for drivers to break the law, authorities can simply prevent the crime. Thus, a 50-mile stretch of the A14 between Felixstowe and Rugby is to be equipped with numerous sensors that would monitor traffic by sending signals to and from mobile phones in moving vehicles. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom envisions that such smart roads connected to a centrally controlled traffic system could automatically impose variable speed limits to smooth the flow of traffic but also direct the cars "along diverted routes to avoid the congestion and even [manage] their speed". Other gadgets – from smartphones to smart glasses – promise even more security and safety. In April, Apple patented technology that deploys sensors inside the smartphone to analyse if the car is moving and if the person using the phone is driving; if both conditions are met, it simply blocks the phone's texting feature. Intel and Ford are working on Project Mobil – a face recognition system that, should it fail to recognise the face of the driver, would not only prevent the car being started but also send the picture to the car's owner (bad news for teenagers). The car is emblematic of transformations in many other domains, from smart environments for "ambient assisted living" where carpets and walls detect that someone has fallen, to various masterplans for the smart city, where municipal services dispatch resources only to those areas that need them. Thanks to sensors and internet connectivity, the most banal everyday objects have acquired tremendous power to regulate behaviour. Even public toilets are ripe for sensor-based optimisation: the Safeguard Germ Alarm, a smart soap dispenser developed by Procter & Gamble and used in some public WCs in the Philippines, has sensors monitoring the doors of each stall. Once you leave the stall, the alarm starts ringing – and can only be stopped by a push of the soap-dispensing button. In this context, Google's latest plan to push its Android operating system on to smart watches, smart cars, smart thermostats and, one suspects, smart everything, looks rather ominous. In the near future, Google will be the middleman standing between you and your fridge, you and your car, you and your rubbish bin, allowing the National Security Agency to satisfy its data addiction in bulk and via a single window. This "smartification" of everyday life follows a familiar pattern: there's primary data – a list of what's in your smart fridge and your bin – and metadata – a log of how often you open either of these things or when they communicate with one another. Both produce interesting insights: cue smart mattresses – one recent model promises to track respiration and heart rates and how much you move during the night – and smart utensils that provide nutritional advice. In addition to making our lives more efficient, this smart world also presents us with an exciting political choice. If so much of our everyday behaviour is already captured, analysed and nudged, why stick with unempirical approaches to regulation? Why rely on laws when one has sensors and feedback mechanisms? If policy interventions are to be – to use the buzzwords of the day – "evidence-based" and "results-oriented," technology is here to help. This new type of governance has a name: algorithmic regulation. In as much as Silicon Valley has a political programme, this is it. Tim O'Reilly, an influential technology publisher, venture capitalist and ideas man (he is to blame for popularising the term "web 2.0") has been its most enthusiastic promoter. In a recent essay that lays out his reasoning, O'Reilly makes an intriguing case for the virtues of algorithmic regulation – a case that deserves close scrutiny both for what it promises policymakers and the simplistic assumptions it makes about politics, democracy and power. To see algorithmic regulation at work, look no further than the spam filter in your email. Instead of confining itself to a narrow definition of spam, the email filter has its users teach it. Even Google can't write rules to cover all the ingenious innovations of professional spammers. What it can do, though, is teach the system what makes a good rule and spot when it's time to find another rule for finding a good rule – and so on. An algorithm can do this, but it's the constant real-time feedback from its users that allows the system to counter threats never envisioned by its designers. And it's not just spam: your bank uses similar methods to spot credit-card fraud. In his essay, O'Reilly draws broader philosophical lessons from such technologies, arguing that they work because they rely on "a deep understanding of the desired outcome" (spam is bad!) and periodically check if the algorithms are actually working as expected (are too many legitimate emails ending up marked as spam?). O'Reilly presents such technologies as novel and unique – we are living through a digital revolution after all – but the principle behind "algorithmic regulation" would be familiar to the founders of cybernetics – a discipline that, even in its name (it means "the science of governance") hints at its great regulatory ambitions. This principle, which allows the system to maintain its stability by constantly learning and adapting itself to the changing circumstances, is what the British psychiatrist Ross Ashby, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics, called "ultrastability". To illustrate it, Ashby designed the homeostat. This clever device consisted of four interconnected RAF bomb control units – mysterious looking black boxes with lots of knobs and switches – that were sensitive to voltage fluctuations. If one unit stopped working properly – say, because of an unexpected external disturbance – the other three would rewire and regroup themselves, compensating for its malfunction and keeping the system's overall output stable. Ashby's homeostat achieved "ultrastability" by always monitoring its internal state and cleverly redeploying its spare resources. Like the spam filter, it didn't have to specify all the possible disturbances – only the conditions for how and when it must be updated and redesigned. This is no trivial departure from how the usual technical systems, with their rigid, if-then rules, operate: suddenly, there's no need to develop procedures for governing every contingency, for – or so one hopes – algorithms and real-time, immediate feedback can do a better job than inflexible rules out of touch with reality. Algorithmic regulation could certainly make the administration of existing laws more efficient. If it can fight credit-card fraud, why not tax fraud? Italian bureaucrats have experimented with the redditometro, or income meter, a tool for comparing people's spending patterns – recorded thanks to an arcane Italian law – with their declared income, so that authorities know when you spend more than you earn. Spain has expressed interest in a similar tool. Such systems, however, are toothless against the real culprits of tax evasion – the super-rich families who profit from various offshoring schemes or simply write outrageous tax exemptions into the law. Algorithmic regulation is perfect for enforcing the austerity agenda while leaving those responsible for the fiscal crisis off the hook. To understand whether such systems are working as expected, we need to modify O'Reilly's question: for whom are they working? If it's just the tax-evading plutocrats, the global financial institutions interested in balanced national budgets and the companies developing income-tracking software, then it's hardly a democratic success. With his belief that algorithmic regulation is based on "a deep understanding of the desired outcome", O'Reilly cunningly disconnects the means of doing politics from its ends. But the how of politics is as important as the what of politics – in fact, the former often shapes the latter. Everybody agrees that education, health, and security are all "desired outcomes", but how do we achieve them? In the past, when we faced the stark political choice of delivering them through the market or the state, the lines of the ideological debate were clear. Today, when the presumed choice is between the digital and the analog or between the dynamic feedback and the static law, that ideological clarity is gone – as if the very choice of how to achieve those "desired outcomes" was apolitical and didn't force us to choose between different and often incompatible visions of communal living. By assuming that the utopian world of infinite feedback loops is so efficient that it transcends politics, the proponents of algorithmic regulation fall into the same trap as the technocrats of the past. Yes, these systems are terrifyingly efficient – in the same way that Singapore is terrifyingly efficient (O'Reilly, unsurprisingly, praises Singapore for its embrace of algorithmic regulation). And while Singapore's leaders might believe that they, too, have transcended politics, it doesn't mean that their regime cannot be assessed outside the linguistic swamp of efficiency and innovation – by using political, not economic benchmarks. As Silicon Valley keeps corrupting our language with its endless glorification of disruption and efficiency – concepts at odds with the vocabulary of democracy – our ability to question the "how" of politics is weakened. Silicon Valley's default answer to the how of politics is what I call solutionism: problems are to be dealt with via apps, sensors, and feedback loops – all provided by startups. Earlier this year Google's Eric Schmidt even promised that startups would provide the solution to the problem of economic inequality: the latter, it seems, can also be "disrupted". And where the innovators and the disruptors lead, the bureaucrats follow. The intelligence services embraced solutionism before other government agencies. Thus, they reduced the topic of terrorism from a subject that had some connection to history and foreign policy to an informational problem of identifying emerging terrorist threats via constant surveillance. They urged citizens to accept that instability is part of the game, that its root causes are neither traceable nor reparable, that the threat can only be pre-empted by out-innovating and out-surveilling the enemy with better communications. Speaking in Athens last November, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discussed an epochal transformation in the idea of government, "whereby the traditional hierarchical relation between causes and effects is inverted, so that, instead of governing the causes – a difficult and expensive undertaking – governments simply try to govern the effects". For Agamben, this shift is emblematic of modernity. It also explains why the liberalisation of the economy can co-exist with the growing proliferation of control – by means of soap dispensers and remotely managed cars – into everyday life. "If government aims for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled." Algorithmic regulation is an enactment of this political programme in technological form. The true politics of algorithmic regulation become visible once its logic is applied to the social nets of the welfare state. There are no calls to dismantle them, but citizens are nonetheless encouraged to take responsibility for their own health. Consider how Fred Wilson, an influential US venture capitalist, frames the subject. "Health… is the opposite side of healthcare," he said at a conference in Paris last December. "It's what keeps you out of the healthcare system in the first place." Thus, we are invited to start using self-tracking apps and data-sharing platforms and monitor our vital indicators, symptoms and discrepancies on our own. This goes nicely with recent policy proposals to save troubled public services by encouraging healthier lifestyles. Consider a 2013 report by Westminster council and the Local Government Information Unit, a thinktank, calling for the linking of housing and council benefits to claimants' visits to the gym – with the help of smartcards. They might not be needed: many smartphones are already tracking how many steps we take every day (Google Now, the company's virtual assistant, keeps score of such data automatically and periodically presents it to users, nudging them to walk more). The numerous possibilities that tracking devices offer to health and insurance industries are not lost on O'Reilly. "You know the way that advertising turned out to be the native business model for the internet?" he wondered at a recent conference. "I think that insurance is going to be the native business model for the internet of things." Things do seem to be heading that way: in June, Microsoft struck a deal with American Family Insurance, the eighth-largest home insurer in the US, in which both companies will fund startups that want to put sensors into smart homes and smart cars for the purposes of "proactive protection". An insurance company would gladly subsidise the costs of installing yet another sensor in your house – as long as it can automatically alert the fire department or make front porch lights flash in case your smoke detector goes off. For now, accepting such tracking systems is framed as an extra benefit that can save us some money. But when do we reach a point where not using them is seen as a deviation – or, worse, an act of concealment – that ought to be punished with higher premiums? Or consider a May 2014 report from 2020health, another thinktank, proposing to extend tax rebates to Britons who give up smoking, stay slim or drink less. "We propose 'payment by results', a financial reward for people who become active partners in their health, whereby if you, for example, keep your blood sugar levels down, quit smoking, keep weight off, [or] take on more self-care, there will be a tax rebate or an end-of-year bonus," they state. Smart gadgets are the natural allies of such schemes: they document the results and can even help achieve them – by constantly nagging us to do what's expected. The unstated assumption of most such reports is that the unhealthy are not only a burden to society but that they deserve to be punished (fiscally for now) for failing to be responsible. For what else could possibly explain their health problems but their personal failings? It's certainly not the power of food companies or class-based differences or various political and economic injustices. One can wear a dozen powerful sensors, own a smart mattress and even do a close daily reading of one's poop – as some self-tracking aficionados are wont to do – but those injustices would still be nowhere to be seen, for they are not the kind of stuff that can be measured with a sensor. The devil doesn't wear data. Social injustices are much harder to track than the everyday lives of the individuals whose lives they affect. In shifting the focus of regulation from reining in institutional and corporate malfeasance to perpetual electronic guidance of individuals, algorithmic regulation offers us a good-old technocratic utopia of politics without politics. Disagreement and conflict, under this model, are seen as unfortunate byproducts of the analog era – to be solved through data collection – and not as inevitable results of economic or ideological conflicts. However, a politics without politics does not mean a politics without control or administration. As O'Reilly writes in his essay: "New technologies make it possible to reduce the amount of regulation while actually increasing the amount of oversight and production of desirable outcomes." Thus, it's a mistake to think that Silicon Valley wants to rid us of government institutions. Its dream state is not the small government of libertarians – a small state, after all, needs neither fancy gadgets nor massive servers to process the data – but the data-obsessed and data-obese state of behavioural economists. The nudging state is enamoured of feedback technology, for its key founding principle is that while we behave irrationally, our irrationality can be corrected – if only the environment acts upon us, nudging us towards the right option. Unsurprisingly, one of the three lonely references at the end of O'Reilly's essay is to a 2012 speech entitled "Regulation: Looking Backward, Looking Forward" by Cass Sunstein, the prominent American legal scholar who is the chief theorist of the nudging state. And while the nudgers have already captured the state by making behavioural psychology the favourite idiom of government bureaucracy –Daniel Kahneman is in, Machiavelli is out – the algorithmic regulation lobby advances in more clandestine ways. They create innocuous non-profit organisations like Code for America which then co-opt the state – under the guise of encouraging talented hackers to tackle civic problems. Such initiatives aim to reprogramme the state and make it feedback-friendly, crowding out other means of doing politics. For all those tracking apps, algorithms and sensors to work, databases need interoperability – which is what such pseudo-humanitarian organisations, with their ardent belief in open data, demand. And when the government is too slow to move at Silicon Valley's speed, they simply move inside the government. Thus, Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America and a protege of O'Reilly, became the deputy chief technology officer of the US government – while pursuing a one-year "innovation fellowship" from the White House. Cash-strapped governments welcome such colonisation by technologists – especially if it helps to identify and clean up datasets that can be profitably sold to companies who need such data for advertising purposes. Recent clashes over the sale of student and health data in the UK are just a precursor of battles to come: after all state assets have been privatised, data is the next target. For O'Reilly, open data is "a key enabler of the measurement revolution". This "measurement revolution" seeks to quantify the efficiency of various social programmes, as if the rationale behind the social nets that some of them provide was to achieve perfection of delivery. The actual rationale, of course, was to enable a fulfilling life by suppressing certain anxieties, so that citizens can pursue their life projects relatively undisturbed. This vision did spawn a vast bureaucratic apparatus and the critics of the welfare state from the left – most prominently Michel Foucault – were right to question its disciplining inclinations. Nonetheless, neither perfection nor efficiency were the "desired outcome" of this system. Thus, to compare the welfare state with the algorithmic state on those grounds is misleading. But we can compare their respective visions for human fulfilment – and the role they assign to markets and the state. Silicon Valley's offer is clear: thanks to ubiquitous feedback loops, we can all become entrepreneurs and take care of our own affairs! As Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, told the Atlantic last year, "What happens when everybody is a brand? When everybody has a reputation? Every person can become an entrepreneur." Under this vision, we will all code (for America!) in the morning, drive Uber cars in the afternoon, and rent out our kitchens as restaurants – courtesy of Airbnb – in the evening. As O'Reilly writes of Uber and similar companies, "these services ask every passenger to rate their driver (and drivers to rate their passenger). Drivers who provide poor service are eliminated. Reputation does a better job of ensuring a superb customer experience than any amount of government regulation." The state behind the "sharing economy" does not wither away; it might be needed to ensure that the reputation accumulated on Uber, Airbnb and other platforms of the "sharing economy" is fully liquid and transferable, creating a world where our every social interaction is recorded and assessed, erasing whatever differences exist between social domains. Someone, somewhere will eventually rate you as a passenger, a house guest, a student, a patient, a customer. Whether this ranking infrastructure will be decentralised, provided by a giant like Google or rest with the state is not yet clear but the overarching objective is: to make reputation into a feedback-friendly social net that could protect the truly responsible citizens from the vicissitudes of deregulation. Admiring the reputation models of Uber and Airbnb, O'Reilly wants governments to be "adopting them where there are no demonstrable ill effects". But what counts as an "ill effect" and how to demonstrate it is a key question that belongs to the how of politics that algorithmic regulation wants to suppress. It's easy to demonstrate "ill effects" if the goal of regulation is efficiency but what if it is something else? Surely, there are some benefits – fewer visits to the psychoanalyst, perhaps – in not having your every social interaction ranked? The imperative to evaluate and demonstrate "results" and "effects" already presupposes that the goal of policy is the optimisation of efficiency. However, as long as democracy is irreducible to a formula, its composite values will always lose this battle: they are much harder to quantify. For Silicon Valley, though, the reputation-obsessed algorithmic state of the sharing economy is the new welfare state. If you are honest and hardworking, your online reputation would reflect this, producing a highly personalised social net. It is "ultrastable" in Ashby's sense: while the welfare state assumes the existence of specific social evils it tries to fight, the algorithmic state makes no such assumptions. The future threats can remain fully unknowable and fully addressable – on the individual level. Silicon Valley, of course, is not alone in touting such ultrastable individual solutions. Nassim Taleb, in his best-selling 2012 book Antifragile, makes a similar, if more philosophical, plea for maximising our individual resourcefulness and resilience: don't get one job but many, don't take on debt, count on your own expertise. It's all about resilience, risk-taking and, as Taleb puts it, "having skin in the game". As Julian Reid and Brad Evans write in their new book, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously, this growing cult of resilience masks a tacit acknowledgement that no collective project could even aspire to tame the proliferating threats to human existence – we can only hope to equip ourselves to tackle them individually. "When policy-makers engage in the discourse of resilience," write Reid and Evans, "they do so in terms which aim explicitly at preventing humans from conceiving of danger as a phenomenon from which they might seek freedom and even, in contrast, as that to which they must now expose themselves." What, then, is the progressive alternative? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" doesn't work here: just because Silicon Valley is attacking the welfare state doesn't mean that progressives should defend it to the very last bullet (or tweet). First, even leftist governments have limited space for fiscal manoeuvres, as the kind of discretionary spending required to modernise the welfare state would never be approved by the global financial markets. And it's the ratings agencies and bond markets – not the voters – who are in charge today. Second, the leftist critique of the welfare state has become only more relevant today when the exact borderlines between welfare and security are so blurry. When Google's Android powers so much of our everyday life, the government's temptation to govern us through remotely controlled cars and alarm-operated soap dispensers will be all too great. This will expand government's hold over areas of life previously free from regulation. With so much data, the government's favourite argument in fighting terror – if only the citizens knew as much as we do, they too would impose all these legal exceptions – easily extends to other domains, from health to climate change. Consider a recent academic paper that used Google search data to study obesity patterns in the US, finding significant correlation between search keywords and body mass index levels. "Results suggest great promise of the idea of obesity monitoring through real-time Google Trends data", note the authors, which would be "particularly attractive for government health institutions and private businesses such as insurance companies." If Google senses a flu epidemic somewhere, it's hard to challenge its hunch – we simply lack the infrastructure to process so much data at this scale. Google can be proven wrong after the fact – as has recently been the case with its flu trends data, which was shown to overestimate the number of infections, possibly because of its failure to account for the intense media coverage of flu – but so is the case with most terrorist alerts. It's the immediate, real-time nature of computer systems that makes them perfect allies of an infinitely expanding and pre-emption‑obsessed state. Perhaps, the case of Gloria Placente and her failed trip to the beach was not just a historical oddity but an early omen of how real-time computing, combined with ubiquitous communication technologies, would transform the state. One of the few people to have heeded that omen was a little-known American advertising executive called Robert MacBride, who pushed the logic behind Operation Corral to its ultimate conclusions in his unjustly neglected 1967 book, The Automated State. At the time, America was debating the merits of establishing a national data centre to aggregate various national statistics and make it available to government agencies. MacBride attacked his contemporaries' inability to see how the state would exploit the metadata accrued as everything was being computerised. Instead of "a large scale, up-to-date Austro-Hungarian empire", modern computer systems would produce "a bureaucracy of almost celestial capacity" that can "discern and define relationships in a manner which no human bureaucracy could ever hope to do". "Whether one bowls on a Sunday or visits a library instead is [of] no consequence since no one checks those things," he wrote. Not so when computer systems can aggregate data from different domains and spot correlations. "Our individual behaviour in buying and selling an automobile, a house, or a security, in paying our debts and acquiring new ones, and in earning money and being paid, will be noted meticulously and studied exhaustively," warned MacBride. Thus, a citizen will soon discover that "his choice of magazine subscriptions… can be found to indicate accurately the probability of his maintaining his property or his interest in the education of his children." This sounds eerily similar to the recent case of a hapless father who found that his daughter was pregnant from a coupon that Target, a retailer, sent to their house. Target's hunch was based on its analysis of products – for example, unscented lotion – usually bought by other pregnant women. For MacBride the conclusion was obvious. "Political rights won't be violated but will resemble those of a small stockholder in a giant enterprise," he wrote. "The mark of sophistication and savoir-faire in this future will be the grace and flexibility with which one accepts one's role and makes the most of what it offers." In other words, since we are all entrepreneurs first – and citizens second, we might as well make the most of it. What, then, is to be done? Technophobia is no solution. Progressives need technologies that would stick with the spirit, if not the institutional form, of the welfare state, preserving its commitment to creating ideal conditions for human flourishing. Even some ultrastability is welcome. Stability was a laudable goal of the welfare state before it had encountered a trap: in specifying the exact protections that the state was to offer against the excesses of capitalism, it could not easily deflect new, previously unspecified forms of exploitation. How do we build welfarism that is both decentralised and ultrastable? A form of guaranteed basic income – whereby some welfare services are replaced by direct cash transfers to citizens – fits the two criteria. Creating the right conditions for the emergence of political communities around causes and issues they deem relevant would be another good step. Full compliance with the principle of ultrastability dictates that such issues cannot be anticipated or dictated from above – by political parties or trade unions – and must be left unspecified. What can be specified is the kind of communications infrastructure needed to abet this cause: it should be free to use, hard to track, and open to new, subversive uses. Silicon Valley's existing infrastructure is great for fulfilling the needs of the state, not of self-organising citizens. It can, of course, be redeployed for activist causes – and it often is – but there's no reason to accept the status quo as either ideal or inevitable. Why, after all, appropriate what should belong to the people in the first place? While many of the creators of the internet bemoan how low their creature has fallen, their anger is misdirected. The fault is not with that amorphous entity but, first of all, with the absence of robust technology policy on the left – a policy that can counter the pro-innovation, pro-disruption, pro-privatisation agenda of Silicon Valley. In its absence, all these emerging political communities will operate with their wings clipped. Whether the next Occupy Wall Street would be able to occupy anything in a truly smart city remains to be seen: most likely, they would be out-censored and out-droned. To his credit, MacBride understood all of this in 1967. "Given the resources of modern technology and planning techniques," he warned, "it is really no great trick to transform even a country like ours into a smoothly running corporation where every detail of life is a mechanical function to be taken care of." MacBride's fear is O'Reilly's master plan: the government, he writes, ought to be modelled on the "lean startup" approach of Silicon Valley, which is "using data to constantly revise and tune its approach to the market". It's this very approach that Facebook has recently deployed to maximise user engagement on the site: if showing users more happy stories does the trick, so be it. Algorithmic regulation, whatever its immediate benefits, will give us a political regime where technology corporations and government bureaucrats call all the shots. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in a pointed critique of cybernetics published, as it happens, roughly at the same time as The Automated State, put it best: "Society cannot give up the burden of having to decide about its own fate by sacrificing this freedom for the sake of the cybernetic regulator."" - ((°}

"It would be remiss to discuss David Foster Wallace and language without mentioning the words that Wallace himself conceived and introduced to the public; or, more accurately, the words his mother conceived. Sally Wallace, a distinguished English professor all her own, made up words or phrases for David and his sister when there were none in the English language to describe what she was thinking. These words never left Wallace and he included them in Infinite Jest and The Pale King, delighting and confusing readers in equal measure. Among the most well-known of these is the phrase the howling fantods, which refers to an intense feeling of fear of or repulsion for something. This is an extension of the original meaning of fantods as “a state of uneasiness or unreasonableness”. While Wallace did not coin the phrase entirely, as the term fantods already had a similar meaning, Wallace took the word and made it his own; indeed, the phrase “the howling fantods” is perhaps the closest thing Wallace has to a catchphrase. Ironically, Wallace often used this phrase to describe members of the main characters’ family in Infinite Jest: one of the members of the fictional “Incandenza” family featured in the novel refuses to go to parts of the Boston Metro infested with bugs because roaches “give him the howling fantods”. Another such word used by the Wallaces was greebles, meaning little pieces of lint or tissue. For example, in Wallace’s unfinished final novel The Pale King, one character tries to use toilet paper to try to dry an outbreak of sweat  “without the toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead”. While these words and phrases are difficult to find used beyond the context of Wallace’s works and life, their popularity and usage among fans of Wallace is a testament to his (and his mother’s!) passionate love for language." - ((°}

(TRENTADUE PAGINE A4 BELLE FITTE DI CONSENSO INFORMATO) - ((°}

mah. ho scoperto però che c'è un'assicurazione. non so decidere (può anche darsi che non venga comunque scelta anche se acconsento) - ((°}

"In honor of its 150th anniversary, Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, New York, commissioned the city’s first Torah written by a female scribe. Traditionally penned (or quilled, to be more precise) by a trained man, called a sofer, writing a Torah is time-consuming, and the rules are strict: It must be written on parchments using a quill dipped in ink in a specific style and spacing—all Torah scrolls must look alike. It typically takes about a year to write the 304,805 Hebrew letters that make up the five books of Moses with the proper concentration. So, for lots of reasons, I was pretty excited when I ended up being the first person to read from the scroll during the holiday celebrating the Torah the following year. Now imagine if it were written by a robot! Germany may be busy celebrating a World Cup win, but the country is also hosting the world’s first Torah-writing robot. While the end result of its three-month endeavor is not kosher for use during religious services—there are prayers one traditionally recites while writing, among other issues—the technological scribe is hard at work in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Created by Robotlab and adapted with the help of an Israeli graphic designer, the robot is part of the exhibit “The Creation of the World,” which focuses on the roll and significance of sacred text in the Jewish tradition—Rabbi Reuven Yaacobov, a sofer, is in a nearby room writing his own scroll. What’s most interesting about the robot is the attempt to mimic the act of people like Yaacobov—instead of using any fancy digital printing, it adopts the human act of writing, right down to the quill. For Robotlab, that’s the point: “bios [bible]” is focussing on the questions of faith and technical progress. The installation correlates two cultural systems which are fundamental for societies today—religion and scientific rationalism. In this contexts scripture has all times an elementary function, as holy scripture or as formal writing of knowledge. In computer technology 'basic input output system' (bios) designates the module which basicaly coordinates the interchange between hard- and software. Therefore it contains the indispensable code, the essential program writing, on which every further program can be established. The robot will be on display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin through January 2015." - ((°}

NOAOAOAOAO PICCI - Haukr

uh - reo

MA PICCY - Craiv

ci voleva un barbatrucco, era troppo spaventata e ho avuto paura perdesse la coda - ((°}

pallidina - Pluto in USA

sono molto carini! purtroppo la gomma si rovina presto :(((( - ((°}

oddio la voglio! cos'è? - Pea Bukowski

questo grappolino di fiori è grande come il palmo di una mano piccina. la pianta, se la lasci crescere, può diventare enorme (i miei genitori ne hanno una che tappezza una parete 2mX4m circa). se le metti un sostegno si arrampica, questa invece è in un vaso appeso, son diversi rami da circa 1m. cresce solo d'estate, d'inverno sta lì tranquilla - ((°}

o anche, più pragmaticamente, a farli arrivare in viale regina elena senza passare dalle scale - ((°}

forse scelgono solo posti con pavimentazione regolare dotata di comode linee ortogonali - ((°}

"Sint"? - Sleepers

(mi chiedevo quanto casino ci potesse essere, poi ho visto la foto della tizia che si tappa le orecchie) - ((°}

la versione del 1150 avanti cristo del sesso in auto è incantevole - ((°}

sono praticamente sicuro però che non sia la raffigurazione più antica. - Haukr

non so, però complimenti all'ignoto artista - ((°}

ah, sicuro :) - Haukr