A well-known alleged paranormal phenomenon is the alien abduction popularized by books such as Communion: A True Story (Strieber 1988) and Intruders (Hopkins 1987). The stereotypical abduction begins with the sleeping human participant being awakened by an entity. Sometimes the human/entity encounter is confined to the bedroom; other times, the entity conveys the human to another location and later returns the human to his bedroom. During the encounter, the entity either imparts arcane knowledge to the human or performs pseudo-medical procedures upon him. When this extraordinary encounter is over, the human paradoxically resumes sleeping. This paradoxical resumption of sleep suggests that the encounter is a hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucination (those experienced during the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness) devoid of any objective reality (Klass 1989).

It is entertaining to speculate on possible inspirations for the hallucinations. A cultural background shared by millions may provide the source material for this brand of hallucination—the shared experience of watching mental hygiene films: short classroom films, dating between 1945 and 1970, “deliberately made to adjust the social behavior of their viewers” (Smith 1999). Mental hygiene films typically focus on how to attain social acceptance along with exhortations to avoid premarital sex, illegal drugs, and careless driving. Curiously, the motifs of several of these films resemble an alien abduction or a hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucination. [...]

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

"A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestigious people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect."

Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society.1 Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small entrepreneurial class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties, meanwhile, were 'given more to hyperbole and public meetings than to organizing and resisting. A large part of the opposition is either ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in power.' A police state would use either a kind of developmental-fascist ideology (as happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would rely on religious fundamentalism, and would find an eager sponsor in the United States. 'Unfortunately,' the article concludes, 'the democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.'

The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed’s analysis remain valid today. The military has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing social forces weaker and divided, with democratic and revolutionary groups only weakly developed. At the epicentre of the War on Terror, Pakistan's current predicament brings together the inability of the state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous imperial sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and the cooptation mechanisms of 'democracy promotion'. Despite an absence of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy, and shrinking capacity to respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan’s military dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and political alternatives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the regime is based on the absence of feasible alternatives.

On the heels of the Blue Brain project, here's another effort to simulate neural systems on a very large scale, with the provocative title "Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing."

From DARPA's announcement: “The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments... The end goal is inevitable, but is unpredictable."

Industrialized agriculture and globalized food systems have been put forth as sources of cheap and abundant food. However, food is no longer cheap. The era of cheap food and cheap oil is over. The food crisis, mainly triggered by rising prices that emerged in 2007 and 2008 has led to food riots in many countries. From 2007 to 2008 the price of wheat increased by 130 per cent. The price of rice doubled during the first three months of 2008. Biofuels, speculation, destruction of local food economies, and climate change have all contributed to the rise in food prices. Climate change is aggravated by industrialized, globalized agriculture based on fossil fuels, and the resulting climate crisis in turn impacts food security in numerous ways, including intensified floods such as those Iowa experienced in 2008 and intensified and extended droughts like the one Australia witnessed in 2007. Globalization has also led to the destruction of local food economies and increased control by corporations like Monsanto and Cargill over our food systems. Global integration of agriculture in effect means global control over the world's food supply.

Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts.

The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new possibilities in the search for life on the red planet.

"If there is life on Mars, this kind of ice would likely preserve ancient organisms and DNA," researcher Jim Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University, told Wired.com. "Examining the water ice could give you a good sample to try to detect if there had been life there."

Professor David Wiggins, the Wykeham Professor of Logic, Emeritus, at Oxford University gave a fantastic talk [...] at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar on "The Solidarity at the Root of the Ethical."

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."...

When lunar astronauts flick on their televisions after a long day of prospecting, they’ll have a trashcan-size nuclear reactor to thank for their nightly dose of prime time. NASA, looking past the already daunting task of simply getting humans to the moon by 2020, recently started considering proposals for ways to power lunar habitats. Batteries and fuel cells provide only short-term solutions. Solar power would be limited where a single night lasts as long as 354 hours. So space-agency officials have started making plans to go nuclear.

From November 27, the channels can be viewed online via their respective sites on bbc.co.uk at the same time as they are broadcast on television. They will also be available to licence fee payers using the internet on portable devices such as mobile phones… The channels join BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC News, which are already simulcast.

Publishing company Jiyu Kokuminsha has released its annual list of the 60 most popular Japanese words and phrases of the year. This diverse collection of expressions highlights many of the events, trends and people that caught the attention of the Japanese mass media in 2008.

From this list, a panel of judges will select the trendiest Japanese word of 2008 (and 10 runners-up) and announce the results on December 1. The expressions are listed below in no particular order.

It's unfair to call the US auto industry dinosaurs, as some now do. It's certainly unfair to the dinosaurs. The 'Terrible Lizards' did not lay the basis for their own extinction or that of myriad other species. The original dinosaurs (who scientists now tell us were neither all that terrible nor lizards), were great examples of success and adaptation, good enough to rule the planet for 150 million years. The US auto industry is the opposite. It's not just that the Terrible Metal Lizards opposed fuel efficiency standards. Of course, they did. They also promoted gas-guzzling SUVs as a lifestyle must. They cranked out cars many did not want to buy. They wielded heavy clout in Congress, and were able to sponge off public funds in the name of saving jobs as they have yet again. Having received $ 25 billion earlier, their hats are in their outstretched hands again.

But that's the easy part. There's a lot more they did, as a major sector of industry - and as part of the larger corporate world of the United States. Over decades, they destroyed both existing and potential public transport. The 'American Dream' so far as the automobile went, was an imposed nightmare. In Detroit itself, you can see the skeletons of a once-alive transport system. All across the country, for decades from the 1920s, they bought up public transport systems and shut them down.

A team led by a Texas A&M University anthropologist has discovered a group of primates not seen alive in 85 years. The pygmy tarsiers, furry Furby-like, or gremlin-looking, creatures about the size of a small mouse and weighing less than two ounces, have not been observed since they were last collected for a museum in 1921.

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

Ghabban now believes Muhammad's close associates and early followers "stripped Qur'ans of diacritical marks" in order to permit "Muslims to read the Qur'an as it was revealed to Muhammad in the various dialects of the Arabs, and allowing the skeleton of the word to bear all the meanings which appear in it."

Hoyland added that, "this would mean that Western scholars would have less excuse to change the text as we have it now."

Without diacritical marks, for example, a sentence such as, "I took with my whole hands," can also be interpreted as, "I took with my fingertips."

The first known Islamic inscription, whose carver might have made his own mark while walking down a Syrian pilgrimage road, may solve yet another Arabic history mystery: When did noted Islamic leader Umar ibn al-Khattab die?

According to tradition and other historical accounts, a Persian soldier assassin stabbed Umar in public as the caliph was leading prayers in a mosque. Zuhayr, who may have witnessed the violent crime, recorded that Umar died in "four and twenty," which means 644 A.D.

A recent study published by the UC Davis MIND Institute has found that infants who repetitively play with toys by spinning them or rattling them or who look at objects out of the corners of their eyes at one year of age are more likely than those who don't to be diagnosed with autism, says the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

What is troubling is not the finding itself, but the idea that these results might encourage parents to become hyper-vigilant about their infant's play behaviors, perhaps even to the point of unnecessary worry for the parents. Moreover, at one year of age, there do not exist the treatment interventions to begin caring for autistic children or those on the spectrum in the same way for those with later diagnoses. Adding a screening test of this kind at this point--without having established that there are effective treatment modalities for children diagnosed at this age--would unnecessarily worry parents and provide them with no viable treatment options.

The U.S. Congress will vote this week on what to do about the America's Big Three automakers -- Chrysler, Ford and GM. GM teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and is screaming for help. The Bush administration does not want to give more than the $25 billion it has already promised to develop more fuel-efficient cars. Democrats want to take another $25 billion from the $700 billion financial bailout program and use that as a bridge loan to the auto industry. That would be a $50 billion dollar bailout for auto. The Big Three and the United Auto Workers (UAW) are lobbying together for the bailout and Congress is to vote on this next week.

This will be a decision about the government's commitment to working class communities, its concern about the future of transportation in America, and its awareness of the ecological disaster that confronts us. We should ask how our tax money might be best used in this situation to help working class communities, to rebuild our national infrastructure and to improve the environment? What if we taxpayers said: It's our money being used for this bailout, so we want a voice and a vote in running these companies, not only to save workers' jobs and communities, but also to rebuild the country and to protect the world's environment? What might that look like?

Kidney failure currently affects around 400,000 people in the US and countless others around the world. And even for people who can access it, plugging into a dialysis machine is a far from an ideal solution.

As well as forcing people to structure their lives around the process, dialysis is not as efficient as a real kidney at removing toxic chemicals from the blood, while leaving important biomolecules untouched.

A new kind of filter can avoid those problems, though, and be small enough to implant inside the body, a new patent application claims.

David Cameron's apple-pie promises and feel-good rhetoric might sweep him to power in 2010, but there’s a yawning gap between the vagueness of his words and the likely consequences of his policies. Alex Nunns takes us on a trip into the future to see how Britain might look after four years of Tory rule.

It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The Information Bomb, War and Cinema, Speed and Politics -- less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.

Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the technological death- instinct moving at the speed of light. And remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, facination,terror, and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described "atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."

But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process, principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the technological accident that has become us.

But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio.

Are we beyond Speed and Politics? [...]

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.

Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being?

In the race to explore space, there may be a new moon on the rise. In the same week that NASA declared the Mars Phoenix mission over, India dropped a probe onto the moon today, the Associated Press reports. The probe took off from India's space probe Chandrayaan-1, which entered lunar orbit earlier this week. The probe, painted with the flag of India, was blown to smithereens after crashing into the moon at about 3,100 miles (5,000 km) per hour.

The study found 44 per cent of people polled claimed to have consumed more music this year than in 2007. As well as the swelling market for live music, this surge may have something to do with commercial harnessing of music through means other than record sales, since 69 per cent of "the most passionate music fans" agreed that brand affiliations provide a valuable new revenue stream for artists.

Most people know something of the events in 1714 when the British government instituted a prize for the discovery of a successful way to find longitude at sea. The aim was to reduce the heavy toll of shipwrecks caused by the crude navigational method of dead reckoning. Dava Sobel gave new life to this episode in her bestselling book, Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time (1995), which inspired the widely viewed television programme Lost at Sea (aired in 1998). After these came a feature film directed by Charles Sturridge in 1999, starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons. All these versions place at their centre the heroic figure of John Harrison and his struggles to perfect a clock which would finally carry off the prize of £20,000. Meanwhile, an early rival who figures in the tale has gone down in history as another projector from Yorkshire, named Jeremy Thacker. Unfortunately Thacker never existed and his proposal now emerges as a hoax.

Hi there Johannes,

You probably don't remember, but a very long time ago you posted this on monochrom:
http://monochrom.at/english/2007/07/googorama.htm
that, eventually, led to this:
http://photo.net/street-documentary-photography-forum/00LzqU
and finally ended up being insightfully developed by an art critic and curator from Brazil (Tadeu Chiarelli).

He gave a speech a while ago that centered on googorama, but discussed other aspects of contemporary arts' production related to digital, net.art, photography and so on. I have just translated his speech to english and I feel almost obliged to have it get back to you, since you sort of started the whole process, you can find a PDF of the translation here:
rhwinter.com/tadeu_chiarelli_en.pdf
(I've also posted it back to Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/26641 )

I feel this is especially relevant to you since monochrom is cited directly, and also because Chiarelli implies how important these means of communication are for understanding the unfolding of contemporary arts' (hi)story and production.

Well, hope you have the time to read and enjoy it.

Regards,
Roberto

Behavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.

Six Christian sects divide control of the ancient church. They regularly fight over turf and influence, and Israeli police are occasionally forced to intervene. A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th century has remained there ever since because of a dispute over who has the authority to take it down.

Not all University of Oxford researchers are uptight and humorless, "irregardless" of what you might think. In fact, a bunch of them compiled a list of the Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English language -- just because we needed one.

US president-elect Barack Obama will need to decide soon whether to retire the space shuttle in 2010 or extend its life, a government oversight office said on Thursday.

The space shuttle is one of 13 'urgent' issues that face the next US president, according to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) list. "These are issues that will require the attention of the President and Congress early on in the next administration," says GAO spokesperson Chuck Young.

Deciding the fate of the shuttle is particularly time-sensitive, Young says. If the government decides to fly more shuttle missions, it could impact how quickly NASA can move forward with a shuttle replacement, set to be ready to fly by March 2015.

If you still use WPA as encryption standard of your wireless access point, you better switch to WPA2 now, because a new hacker playground just has been opened. My recommendation: Leave your WLAN open and do others a favour (flatrate is a nice thing anyways) - and use strong encrypted VPN software for accessing whatever needs to be secure.

The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.