LOVEINT @astdiomatic-blog - Tumblr Blog

33rd

Counter-Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator

ISIL/ISIS omega watch

inverse rubbleize, don't mind if you pray to all three sides A' last we see

Bias b

"Tor as a concept is quite flawed," he said.

He described its supporters as "cyber-utopians" who mistakenly believe it, and its ilk, are forces for good because they are used in many places where political protests are harshly suppressed.

By contrast, he said, his experience of dark nets such as Tor was that their use by activists and the oppressed was more than outweighed by criminal abuse of such anonymous systems.

TV? (uTorrent) Not saying specific media is flawed, or a good or bad force... (relative thought)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/05/the-nsa-is-trying-to-crack-tor-the-state-department-is-helping-pay-for-it/

#tor

It's like before it starts I vanish without a trace Never give you the chance to put the words to a face I concentrate with a plan to conquer You bite my bars like they were made by Willy Wonka I'm on the ball and never sit on the sidelines Every move watched like Jordan in his prime time Evil Einstein, the future in my palm Traits to take over the world fighting off Bush and Sadam Heart be alarmed cause Drapht's a master of surprise The illusion from the heat playing tricks on your eyes I advise, it's liver than electrics Don't wanna get too close cause I burn when this text hits

http://rapgenius.com/Drapht-prolific-lyrics#lyric

#drapht #science

slammed into a wall, wasn't learning, wasn't earning... information systems were only considering the present, misty past... odd future

#Quadcopters

Science of Law and Order

States lead the US toward a new era in its war on drugs

22:42 16 August 2013 by Peter Aldhous

For similar stories, visit the Crime and Forensics , US national issues and Drugs and Alcohol Topic Guides

It isn't the end of the war on drugs. But it may be the beginning of the end for a punitive approach to sentencing that sees the US imprison more of its people than any other nation.

On 12 August, when US attorney general Eric Holder announced a plan to reduce lengthy minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders, it was a watershed moment. But it was also part of a wider shift towards a more nuanced approach to the US's drug problem in which individual states – rather than the federal government – are leading the way.

Encouragingly, say researchers who study the US criminal justice system, this momentum is based on an accumulating body of scientific evidence on how best to tackle drug-related crime.

"We've been able to come at them with a portfolio of interventions that we know work," says Ryan King, research director for the Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project, based in Washington DC.

Long time coming

It's been a long time coming. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of drug offenders behind bars in the US swelled from 41,000 to 507,000. In large part, that is due to the lengthy sentences handed down since the war on drugs was ramped up in the 1980s. In a federal court, for instance, being convicted of possessing 5 grams of methamphetamine with intent to supply currentlyattracts a minimum of five years without parole.

Changing federal sentencing guidelines won't turn things around by itself: some 80 per cent of imprisoned drug offenders are incarcerated outside of the federal system, in state prisons and local jails. But states have been experimenting with changes to their policies for punishing drug offenders for some time, and the results have been encouraging.

Step forward Texas, which in 2007 abandoned plans to spend $523 million building new prisons, and instead invested $241 million in a combination of policies including wider use of probation for drug offenders and expanding substance-abuse treatment programmes.

Since then, not only has Texas avoided building new prisons, it now plans to close two facilities, with a combined capacity for more than 4000 inmates, by the end of this month. And crime rates in the state are down to levels not seen since the 1960s.

"All the numbers look very good," says Tony Fabelo, the Austin-based director of research with the Council of State Governments' Justice Center, who has been monitoring progress with the initiative.

The fact that this has happened in a Republican-governed state, with a reputation for being tough on crime, is significant. "Texas is seen as a law-and-order state," says King. "That's why it's been such a compelling story."

Evidence-based justice

But Texas might not have had the confidence to make such a bold move if it hadn't been for the pioneering work of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, which has led the way in evidence-based criminal justice.

The institute conducts rigorous studies to determine whether particular policies work, and whether they provide value for money. Among the most cost effective approaches, it has found, is allowing convicted drug offenders to receive reduced sentences if they complete a course of chemical-dependency treatment while in prison.

Drug offenders who go through the programme are less likely to be reconvicted, and the scheme results in overall savings of $14.51 for every dollar spent – including the benefits of reduced spending on prisons, and lowered costs for victims of crime.

Swift and certain

Perhaps the most impressive approach being tried is "swift and certain sanctions". This involves probation with strict monitoring, in which offenders know they will be quickly thrown into jail – but for just a few days, rather than months or years – if they are caught using drugs. In a randomised trial in Hawaii, offenders enrolled into the scheme were 55 per cent less likely to be re-arrested than a control group of probationers.

These impressive results are a consequence of working with human psychology, suggests Mark Kleiman, an expert in drug policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. People respond well to rewards and sanctions if they are consistent, and delivered quickly.

As they involve clear sanctions, such approaches are also acceptable to politicians who might otherwise fear being seen as soft on crime if they were to reject punitive sentencing. Together with the spiralling costs of keeping drug offenders behind bars, this helps explain the growing acceptance that it is time for a fresh approach to the war on drugs.

"What's fascinating is that you have movement not only on the political left but also on the right," says Steven Raphael, a specialist in criminal justice policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "The country seems to be ready for this change."

Science of Data

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

Updated 13:15 24 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

Magazine issue 2835. Subscribe and save

For similar stories, visit the Finance and Economics Topic Guide

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc 2. Capital Group Companies Inc 3. FMR Corporation 4. AXA 5. State Street Corporation 6. JP Morgan Chase & Co 7. Legal & General Group plc 8. Vanguard Group Inc 9. UBS AG 10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc 11. Wellington Management Co LLP 12. Deutsche Bank AG 13. Franklin Resources Inc 14. Credit Suisse Group 15. Walton Enterprises LLC 16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp 17. Natixis 18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc 19. T Rowe Price Group Inc 20. Legg Mason Inc 21. Morgan Stanley 22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc 23. Northern Trust Corporation 24. Société Générale 25. Bank of America Corporation 26. Lloyds TSB Group plc 27. Invesco plc 28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA 30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company 31. Aviva plc 32. Schroders plc 33. Dodge & Cox 34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc* 35. Sun Life Financial Inc 36. Standard Life plc 37. CNCE 38. Nomura Holdings Inc 39. The Depository Trust Company 40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance 41. ING Groep NV 42. Brandes Investment Partners LP 43. Unicredito Italiano SPA 44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan 45. Vereniging Aegon 46. BNP Paribas 47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc 48. Resona Holdings Inc 49. Capital Group International Inc 50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

...Understand asTDroid is not a unit, He need a surface and a purpose to thyself do it, Either way I'm going to stick with my balance order, Valence dream to become a man Camcorder. Am I becoming more indifferent every day? Can all the ambition question fade to grey? Some of the things that I said I hated to say, I blame myself, point fingers the wrong way. I still think, even if I could stay, Could you sit read Sci Fi and pray, But everybody got to move with thyself, Inequality patience lust love material wealth. What's Rich are you man enough to H.E.L.P? Or are you destined for the darkness, concealing yourself? (yelp) CHORUS I'm trying to deal with age years I spent in prison, Not the physical, because of existentialism. Ive backed myself into a previously dead deposition, When all I ever had to do is just think and listen. Why cant I leave everybody alone, Who'd really need to see that Ive grown. Who ain't smart enough to see what I know, Why screens of drama some really bleed til' I go. I'm too numb to fear previous decisions the other sides, Trying to fight the good fight how many of us tried? I don't know if I trust myself mockery hang with me. Is it God, or is it the big bong theory? I know some respected people and they fang clearly, Still the jokes on me yeah really. Selfish youth to third planet how near is peace yet, Where the 'ight out there rap festering try B.E.T Lyrics Remix - Jedi Mind Tricks - Venni Paz - Death Messiah

sprecare = italian = waste?d

How did I get here? How do I get back?

Population India

#International #lore

Because cars and trains are better than boats? This is possible with combined super powers right? Envision. Don't micky mock me singing captain planet :p

#engineering

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

LOVEINT