To what culture does the concept of "cultural property" belong? Who owns this idea?

It has, like much material property in the last 50 years, often changed hands. And in doing so, it has also changed meanings and grown in importance. It now affects the development of museums, alters the nature of international commerce and even seems to subsume traditional notions of property.

It was brought to modern prominence in 1954 by Unesco as a way of characterizing the special status of monuments, houses of worship and works of art — objects that suffered "grave damage" in "recent armed conflicts." In its statement Unesco asserted that such "cultural property" was part of the "cultural heritage of all mankind" and deserved special protection.

But the framers of that doctrine with its universalist stance would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.

It is critically surveyed in an illuminating new book, "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage" (Princeton) by James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago and former director of the Harvard University Art Museums. The idea is as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests. It has been used not just to protect but also to restrict.

When the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman bought a series of paintings by Adolf Hitler for £115,000, many questioned the morality of paying for works produced by one of history's most brutal dictators.

Yesterday, the brothers unveiled 13 of the watercolours, on which they had added psychedelic rainbows, stars and love hearts, and placed them back on the market for £685,000.

The Chapmans denied that the paintings, which are selling as a single work, sought to "redeem" Hitler, and classed the original watercolours as "bland" and lacking in talent. "The idea of redeeming Hitler is bad, the idea of redeeming his work is a staggering work of genius," said Jake.

He hoped the defacement of Hitler's work, which includes landscapes, vistas of Roman ruins and still life, which the dictator painted when he was young, would have him "spinning". The changes they had added meant it was no longer Hitler's work, he added.

"If hell exists and Hitler exists in it, he would be spinning if he saw these. It's not his work any more. It's our work," he said.

Following concerns that the work could be bought by Nazi sympathisers, White Cube Gallery in London, where it is showing, has stated that it will be extremely careful about who it sells to.

Political philosopher Nicole Hassoun has just published an experimental study on the questions of distributive justice that arise when governments are forced to choose between meeting different people's needs.

"Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?" asks Nigel Smith in the title of his new book (Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $22.95). The obvious answer is no: It would be hard to dispute that Shakespeare's plays are more powerful, and more central to our culture, than Milton's biblical epics or his artfully classical lyrics. Around the world, when people dream about true love, they think of Romeo and Juliet; when they thrill with ambition, they think of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and so on down the list of Shakespeare's characters. Harold Bloom could even speculate, not quite in jest, that Shakespeare invented human nature, so completely does he seem to dominate our imagination of what it means to be human.

A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25.

The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter marks the first time ever one spacecraft has photographed another one in the act of landing on Mars.

Podcasts are available of nearly all of the talks that were given in a public conference held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton last year, "Eugenics and Sterilization in Alberta: 35 Years Later". Eugenic sterilization was practiced in Alberta until 1972, when a new provincial government repealed the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. The conference was public not only in the sense that it was "open to the public" but in that it strove to include the voices of community members who were affected by the long history of eugenic sterilization in the province of Alberta.

Samsung Electronics, the world's largest computer chip maker, said today it has developed a new solid state drive which is expected to replace hard disk drives in laptop computers.

Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4 times faster than traditional hard drives. The company plans to begin production of SSDs this year.

The new SSD "represents a bold step in the shift to notebooks with significantly improved performance and larger storage capacities," the company said in a statement.

Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a "dilemma" - either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What's your opinion about this?

Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization - it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization - in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.

Ziga Vodovnik: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: "Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order." Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?

Howard Zinn: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.

[...]

An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.

Wernher von Braun is an iconic figure of the 20th century, someone who built deadly missiles for Adolf Hitler and the Saturn V rockets that sent Americans to the Moon. Michael J. Neufeld's long-awaited biography, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, steers a course between the extremes of demonization and hagiography. "Von Braun has often been depicted as a saint or a devil, as a hero of spaceflight or as a Nazi war criminal," observes Neufeld. "It is comforting to pigeonhole him as either white or black," he goes on to explain, "because then one does not have to deal with his ambiguity and complexity, or the ambiguity and complexity of the moral and political choices offered to scientists and engineers in the modern era." Neufeld's thorough, nuanced, insightful account does this challenging subject justice.

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

("Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family")

Many people have difficulty with God's acts in the Bible because God seems to be committing or commanding immoral acts (e.g., when God commands the Israelites to wipe out certain people-groups, including children). I think that many of these charges can be alleviated if some good justification can be given for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people as he does in the Bible.

One step towards arguing for the claim that it is morally permissible for God to kill people is to argue that people do not have the right not to be killed by God. I may have the right that you not kill me, and vice versa, but perhaps there are different considerations with God. The difference is that while others don't own my body, God may own my body. There are three options:

a) God owns the body inhabit and I don't,
b) I own my body and God doesn't
c) God and I jointly own my body.

[...]

Sometimes you hear things that are so unbelievable that you wonder whether it was all in your imagination. That is precisely the way that I felt in listening to comments by the Bush administration on the disastrous cyclone that hit the south Asian nation of Myanmar (Burma).

Don't get me wrong. I am no fan of the military junta that runs Myanmar and has both repressed its people and served the multinational corporations. I am sickened by their anemic approach in responding to the disaster, one in which it is now estimated that at least 127,000 people may be dead. Yet in listening to the Bush administration and their rants against the Myanmar junta's approach to the disaster, one could get the impression that there had never been something called the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Consider, for just a moment, the Bush rhetoric; in fact, just consider one piece of it. President Bush criticizes the Myanmar junta for its failure to allow into the country foreign aid workers to help with disaster recovery. While this criticism appears to be absolutely correct, it ignores an interesting fact: in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster the governments of both Cuba and Venezuela offered badly needed assistance. The Bush administration, under those circumstances, either ignored the offers or turned them down. In fact, the Cuban government had experienced personnel on standby prepared to fly to the Gulf Coast (note: Cuba has a great deal of experience with hurricanes).

What is striking here is not only the hypocrisy of the Bush administration but that few commentators have even noticed. A global chorus of outrage has been expressed with the Myanmar junta, but a significant silence surrounds any comparison with the failures of the Bush administration's approach in the Katrina disaster.

The filmmakers acknowledge they did not ask Ono for permission to use 15 to 20 seconds of the song. But they argue they are protected by the 'fair use' doctrine.

If TV's Dr. House, diagnostician extraordinaire, is ever truly stumped, he can refer his patient to the National Institutes of Health's new "Undiagnosed Diseases Program."

Health care providers will refer patients whose symptoms do not fit any known pattern, and the agency will invite some of them for a work-up at the NIH's Clinical Center in Bethesda. After examinations by dozens of medical specialists, patients might be enrolled in one of the existing 1,500 ongoing clinical trials or perhaps inspire a new investigation. In addition to attempting to diagnose the undiagnosable, the program will also identify subtypes of more common illnesses, leading to a "catalog of descriptions of conditions – a phenotype atlas that will provide new information for textbook diagnoses," said William A. Gahl, MD, PhD clinical director at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who was one of a panel of speakers at a telephone news conference today announcing the program.

This paper is a critical review of the literature on discovering comprehensible, interesting knowledge (or patterns) from data. The motivation for this review is that the majority of the literature focuses only on the problem of maximizing the accuracy of the discovered patterns, ignoring other important pattern-quality criteria that are user-oriented, such as comprehensibility and interestingness. The word “interesting” has been used with several different meanings in the data mining literature. In this paper interesting essentially means novel or surprising. Although comprehensibility and interestingness are considerably harder to measure in a formal way than accuracy, they seem very relevant criteria to be considered if we are serious about discovering knowledge that is not only accurate, but also useful for human decision making. The paper discusses both data-driven methods (based mainly on statistical properties of the patterns) and user-driven methods (which take into account the user’s background knowledge or believes) for discovering interesting knowledge. Data-driven methods are discussed in more detail because they are more common in the literature and are more controversial. The paper also suggests future research directions in the discovery of interesting knowledge.

The Skoptsy were a secret sect of Christianity in imperial Russia. The Skoptsy are best known for practicing castration of men and removal of women's breasts in accordance with their teachings against sexual lust. The movement originated as an offshoot of the sect known as the "People of God" and was first noted in the late eighteenth century. The Skoptsy were persecuted by the imperial government and later by the Soviet Union, but enjoyed substantial growth before fading into obscurity by the mid-twentieth century.

When times get tough, as in America during the Great Depression and the Second World War, music gets soft. The times, surveys say, are once again tough, and they're likely to stay that way. A sustained period of stylistic regression is thus a possibility. But there is no law that says history has to repeat itself in an endless loop.

Have you seen a truly awful piece of Photoshop work? Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter. And yes, deep down, we love Photoshop.

Coming soon: better tools for monitoring and regulating power consumption in the home. "Power companies will be able to cue us...to make choices about when and how we consume power. And most likely, we'll have our computers and appliances carry out those decisions for us." It's not just that we're managing power efficiency with smart tools, but we're doing it interactively with feedback to and from the energy provider.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently.

Hillary Clinton is finished, and contrary to the insistence of many of her supporters, sexism has had virtually nothing to do with it.

Gloria Steinem was wrong in her now infamous New York Times op-ed a few months back. Clinton's problem was not that she was a woman and that 'women are never front-runners' (indeed, just a few weeks prior to Steinem writing those words, Hillary had been just that, not that facts matter, I guess). Her problem was that she exuded, as did her husband even more than she, a sense of entitlement, a sense of being owed the Presidency, a sense that--as I've heard so many white women say these past few months--'it's our turn,' as if philogynous voting behavior were the moral duty of women everywhere.

Please understand, when I say that sexism has had nothing to do with Clinton's electoral demise, I don't mean to suggest that there were no men out there who voted against her because of sexist, even misogynist views. I have no doubt there were. And it is certainly true that Clinton faced repeated denigration by male media pundits who played upon gender stereotypes and sexist imagery in their criticisms of her. All of that happened, to be sure, and it is indefensible (Interestingly, the worst example of misogyny probably came from Clinton supporter James Carville who suggested that Hillary has more balls than Obama, and ya' know, balls are just what the world needs more of).

In order to download (or upload) files on any peer-to-peer network whatsoever, all on-campus users have to pass an online quiz on copyright infringement. But not just once. Passing the test -- with a perfect score -- enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user's on-campus registered machines. The next time, the student, staff or faculty member has to go to the intranet Web page and take the randomized test again.

This is Cyberdyne's HAL (hybrid assistive limb) exoskeleton, a powered robotic suit designed to significantly increase the strength of the wearer. Using sensors attached to the skin, HAL senses which muscles you intend to move, and powers its joints at the same rate as you move yours, allowing you to walk around effortlessly while wearing the fifty pound suit. If you pick something up, the suit is able to compensate for a portion of the weight, effectively increasing your strength from 2 to 10 (!) times. The suit can be used indoors or outdoors and will provide power for between about three to five hours before it needs a recharge.

The BLF (http://billboardliberation.com) has been improving outdoor advertising since 1977. Prior campaigns have included work for Exxon, R.J. Reynolds, General Motors, Revlon and Apple Computers.

monochrom (http://monochrom.at/english) is an Austrian based worldwide collective dealing with technology, art, context hacking and philosophy since 1993. Some of them are afraid of skin cancer.

The Walking Beast is a mechanical creature that walks on 8 legs!

I call it the Beast because of it's size. Its current weight is 11,300 Lbs. When finished it will be approximately 6 tons (12,000 lbs)! It stands 11 feet tall, 8' 4" wide and 23 feet long! It is capable of transporting 8 people including the driver. It has a step height of 41" and a stride of 5 feet!

The machine is powered by a 454 cubic inch chevy V-8 married to a modified TH400 trans coupled to two klune extreme under drive planetary gear boxes, uses a rockwell 2 1/2 ton military axle to supply power to the leg crank shafts, The final drive ratio is 125:1. The legs are supported on a 4 link system and uses 56 pivot points and 114 bearings. I am currently working on the hydraulics for the elevator. the elevator is used to get passengers to the top of the machine and doubles as a cornering device, it will have a pivot pad on the bottom that will lift one side of the machine to allow it to walk in a circle. The speed of the machine is yet to be determined as I am still working the bugs out!

It has now been almost 45 years since John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. In September 1964, the Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy was issued by the United States Government. It is generally known as the Warren Report after Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who chaired the Commission. Constituting 26 volumes of testimony and evidence, the Warren Report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who caused JFK's death.

From the start, questions were asked about the validity of the report. While initially a majority of people agreed with the Commission's findings, today well over two-thirds of all Americans do not accept that Oswald acted alone, while a significant number doubt that he was involved at all. How is it that in a relatively short amount of time, a report issued by such seemingly impeccable sources has come to be so widely disparaged? One major cause was the skeptical critique brought upon it by philosophers.

It is a remarkable fact that three of the earliest and most influential critics of the Warren Report were professional philosophers – Bertrand Russell, Richard Popkin and Josiah Thompson. Russell, who was 91 years old at the time of the shooting, was one of the first prominent individuals to raise serious questions about the report, even before it was completed.

[...] UTOPIA can be traced back to the book 'De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque nova insula Utopia Libellus vere aureaus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus (Of the best state law and of the new island Utopia, truly a golden booklet, as pleasant as it is cheerful)' by Thomas Morus which was first published in 1516. The text alludes to positive scenarios of technical, spatial and social constructs which have not been realised. Usually, technology plays a major role in utopian phantasms. More often than not their realistic implementation is a matter of availability of technology and very often it is – especially in digital art – the starting point of a work of art. [...]

The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation promised that more trade would help to eradicate poverty and hunger. Foodcrops? Self-sufficiency in food? They had a better idea. Local farms would be closed down or encouraged to concentrate on exports. This would make the most, not of natural conditions which might be good for growing tomatoes in Mexico or pineapples in the Philippines, but of the fact that production costs are lower in Mexico and the Philippines than they are in Florida or California.

Farmers in Mali would rely on more highly mechanised, more productive producers in the Beauce or the Midwest for grain supplies. The farmers would pack up, move into town and get jobs in some western firm that had relocated to take advantage of cheaper labour than it could find at home. The countries on the East African seaboard would lighten their load of foreign debt by selling their fishing rights to the factory ships of wealthier countries. The Guineans would import tinned fish from Denmark or Portugal. Never mind the additional pollution generated by transporting all these goods. A life of bliss was guaranteed and so were the profits of the middlemen – wholesalers, shippers, insurers, advertisers.

The World Bank, prime promoter of this "development" model, now tells us that there may be food riots in 33 countries. And the WTO fears a resurgence of protectionism: some food-exporting countries – India, Vietnam, Egypt, Kazakhstan – have decided to reduce exports in order to feed their own people. What a nerve! The North is easily upset by other people's selfishness. The Chinese eat too much meat, that’s why the Egyptians are short of wheat.

Do you know about this? On Nov. 22, Thanksgiving Day, 2007, two U.S. jets were scrambled from the 90th Fighter Squadron at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska to intercept two Russian long-range "strategic" bombers (strategic being a euphemism for nuclear-capable) in the skies over the Aleutian Islands as the bombers approached Alaskan air space.

The U.S. F-22 jets monitored the Russian Bear H bombers at close range for a few minutes before the bombers turned back. This encounter was one of the consequences of Vladimir Putin's decision, announced last August, to resume regular "strategic flights" of its nuclear bombers. Most reports said that the bombers were not carrying nukes, that the flights were ostensibly for "training" and "readiness" purposes, although nuclear armed missions were not explicitly ruled out. And probing the state of U.S. and NATO warning and defense systems and reminding the world of Russia's superpower status may have been on the agenda as well.

The Thanksgiving Day encounter was not an isolated incident.

Aficionados of alcohol and androids alike celebrated the first stateside gathering of cocktail-serving robots this weekend at Roboexotica.

Patrons delighted in drink-making droids that ranged from a fire-spewing drink warmer, a fully automated mind-reading mixologist and a shot-pouring conveyor belt built entirely from Legos.

"You have liquor, fire and robots," said Johannes Grenzfurthner, Roboexotica organizer and member of art collective monochrom in Austria. "How could we go wrong?"

The annual gathering of booze-pouring robots is usually held in Vienna, Austria. To celebrate its approaching 10-year anniversary, organizers threw a San Francisco satellite event.

Though the U.S. event was slightly smaller than its Viennese counterpart, the barbots landed with a booze-fueled bang.

I Can't Be Blamed For Transfiguring History But For Laziness, Though

A musical gala evening with monochrom featuring Damon Smith (acoustic bass), Phillip Greenlief (saxophone), Weasel Walter (drums), Aurora Josephson (vocals).

The folks at monochrom who brought us Arse Elektronika 2007 are back, asking the question on everyone’s mind: Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep? Check out their call for presenters, performers, and collaborators. [...] Having heard so many good things about last years conference I can't wait to see what comes out of this one. It's rare to find an event that strives to engage sexuality in academic, artistic, and pornographic ways all at once. With the recent success of Sex2.0 and the announcement of a second Arse Elektronika, I'd say things are looking up.