newspeak

Crucially, researchers have found that the most significant factor in determining relative brain size is often evolutionary pressure on body size, and not brain size. For example, the evolutionary history of bats reveals they decreased body size much faster than brain size, leading to an increase in relative brain size. As a result, small bats were able to evolve improved flying maneuvrability while maintaining the brainpower to handle foraging in cluttered environments.

This shows that relative brain size can not be used unequivocally as evidence of selection for intelligence. The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

via Evolution mostly driven by brawn, not brains, analysis finds.

Size matters, relatively speaking.

Fukushima operator feared shutdown if risks revealed • The Register.

Transparency in government seems abstract; radioactivity in the water, on the ground, in the food is not. Transparency means having access to the information and policies that affect the people making up the social fabric. What is at stake is lives: not just those of the present but of the future. And why should there be any doubt here? Why any hesitation? Why the mystery? Isn’t it the responsibility of a putative democracy to make available the information in a way that can be acted upon? Sure, there is the countervailing interest to prevent panic and stampedes and ensure orderly reaction. But that hardly seems to have been foremost in Tepco’s or the government’s mind. And this is not an outlier, nor is Japan–and this goes without saying–alone.

PLOS ONE: Verification in Referral-Based Crowdsourcing.

Summaries of this report do not do it justice, as the details are worth going over and as its application bears keeping in mind, especially in areas such as I deal in–commons based peer networks. The issue there is not usually motivation but outcome that can be acted upon by others. And then sustaining that.

Measuring the Information Society 2012.

The majority of humanity now have mobile phones and are on the path to gain mobile broadband, a category growing faster than “fixed” (wired) broadband. That makes sense and is something I’ve anticipated for a long while, ever since it became known that many polities in Africa skipped the laying of copper and moved directly to mobile technology. 

I’ve argued that a better solution to giving all a wire for their computer is to have something like kiosks. These could be connected by a wire but even then that’s not necessary. But it leads to a mesh network supplemented by, if wanted, servers. 

The bigger point is that moves to promulgate an individualizing computer technology, as in one laptop per child, is not just misguided but I tend to think really problematic. A library is used, is meant to be used, as a community service: individually, by individuals, but maintained by the community. It can be said to store the intellectual capital of the community. And with the advent of electronic books, documents, resources, a community, public library becomes much, much more than a storehouse of printed texts. It becomes what many are already–public, community halls, where part of the knowledge to be gained includes learning how to be in the community. 

Of course, as computing technology gets cheaper both in the making, use, and disposal, inevitably, as with mobile phones, individuals will have their own: that’s the microscopic nature of capitalism. But that can happen gracefully, not programmatically; it can happen according to the cultural logic of the environment affected, not that of the do-gooders’.

Pigs Fly As Open Science Comes To Big Pharma – Forbes.

This is important. I can’t help but think this is a significant step that can lead not only to better therapies but to a more socially engaged conception of information, what it means, to whom, and what can be done with it.

Why The Fades and Doctor Who Confidential were cancelled | Den of Geek.

Shucks. The Fades was a brilliant series in premise, acting, directing. So few so successfully occupy the hazy area of the uncanny as well as The Fades did. 

File Sharing: Is It Wrong? | Media Piracy | The American Assembly.

Let’s start with the easy question: what’s IP piracy? Easy question, much less easy answer. And what is the relation of piracy to privacy? To community? to the pragmatics of any kind of property relation in a commons-based community?

The Truth About Bain: Inside The House That Mitt Built – Forbes.

It probably goes without saying that Forbes is hardly on the left. But independent of that, the journalism as such, as far as I can tell, is quite good and solid, and does give some more insight into the private equity world.

Denver Presidential Debate Live Blog – Live Coverage – Election 2012 – NYTimes.com.

I think the fun will start when we start learning of all the things Romney’s campaign will walk back, starting with the “I love regulations” bit–bitter bait for conservatives coming from the mouth of their elected.

NewsDaily: Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires: study.

It’s not that pesticides are bad for you, though they surely are, especially for those most vulnerable and those applying them or living downwind and down-stream from their immediate application. What really bothers me is the sheer lack of foresight evidenced by those who could regulate these practices. 

It’s a governmental duty: to step out of the market’s immediacy and to look to what is desirable for the populace not just this or next quarter or year but actually decades in the future. Sadly, nearly all governmental models extant are not predicated on such foresight’s desirability or even possibility. Arguably, China’s is more forward looking but as a short look at the Three Gorges Dam project suggests, that look deprecates the consequences of environmental effects and works.