Software reconstructs shredded spy files

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“A research team in Germany has developed a computer-software system to piece together some 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. The files were torn up nearly 18 years ago by panicking agents of communist East Germany’s dreaded State Security Service (Stasi).

“…piecing together all the 600 million slips of paper by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years; their computer program should hopefully be capable of finishing the job in a little more than five years.

 

Story at Nature.com

“The world has moved on”

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“One has only to watch US TV for 10 minutes to conclude that America’s communicators no longer have the intellectual resources and political literacy to mount successful, well-informed propaganda. The Fox Channel is for home-turf idiots. And besides, what would the state-subsidized propagandists be able to boast about? Predator raids in Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Thirty million on part-time work or jobless in the Homeland? America is not the sell it once was, when the economic growth rate was headed up and capitalism seemed capable of delivering on its promises.”

From a post at CounterPunch.org on the growing influence of Al Jazeera

“The enemy has a name now”

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From a scary post by John Pilger:

“Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

If you really believe the problems facing our country can or will be solved with the next election (or a Democrat or a Republican), raise your hand.

“The Future of Work”

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Chris Brogan thinks work will be more and more modular, mobile, cause-balanced, smaller/bigger, and goal-aligned.

“Many of us will start using “project” as the unit of measurement of work. Meaning, a job won’t be a job any more, but a collection of projects, sometimes with the same employer and sometimes not. We will all work a bit more like Hollywood’s film industry, gathering the right team for the right project, and having more than one “picture” in the works at all time. This will require a lot more self-organizing and a lot more self-discipline, but people who define work around the unit of “project” instead of the unit of “job” will definitely have a better chance of succeeding.”

Brogan notes that “management styles are still based around “butt in chair” metrics.” While you might just be hoping to have a job in the future, this short –but insightful post– is worth a read if you want a peek at what things will be like in the future.

Memory is fiction

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A recurring theme in some of my recent reading has been the nature of subjective time. Among other insights, that the past and the future are delusions, created by the mind. This is a little easier to grasp for the future. Any ideas we have about what is going to happen is clearly fiction. But the past feels more “real.” It happened. I remember it. But that’s fiction as well.

“A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.” — The Frontal Cortex

This reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner when Rachel discovers her memories are implanted. A disturbing thought because (for most of us) we ARE our memories.

But if that’s not really so, if our memories are fiction, who are we? Probably not who we think.

Super-thin displays are here

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via singularityhub.com

Perhaps one day the Super Bowl could be televised uninterrupted by commercial breaks – the camera could simply zoom in on the quarterback’s AMOLED covered helmet during a time out. Or even better for advertisers, their commercials could play throughout the game, turning each helmet into a video display>

Watching the news to get high

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That’s what I’ve been doing. For years. I didn’t realize it until reading this post by David Cain. The post is eerily close to the view of my friend Henry. A little more spiritual, perhaps, but they’ve wound up at the same place.

“A few years ago I quit watching the news, because I realized I only did it to get high. It felt good to feel outrage sometimes. It felt good to take up and defend certain mental positions about social issues, to hate people who did bad things. It also felt comforting to have some socially-acceptable TV to watch after dinner.

I did it because I was attracted to it, not because it actually gave me any advantages or improved my quality of life. When I think of all those hours spent watching the news, it’s hard to figure out quite what I gained in exchange. Those volumes of information about O.J. Simpson, Sarah Palin or any other Outrage of the Month haven’t done me a lick of good since the moment I absorbed it.

Because it was gratifying, I never had any incentive to examine what it was doing for me or what it cost me. In any case, I would tell myself I was “staying informed” like any responsible citizen, as the typical argument goes, but it was really a fairly useless indulgence that just made some part of me feel good at the time.”

So many of the things I do every day are mindless. I do them without being aware of doing them, certainly unaware of why I am doing them.

I’m going to try to skip the evening news to which I have so long been addicted. That’s a half-hour a day. An extra week each year? Wish me luck.

Advanced sign-in security for your Google account

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I love most things Google. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader and most of the tools and services they’ve come out with (Wave and Buzz notable exceptions).

If someone hijacked my Google accounts, they’d have to take my belt and shoe laces. So I was eager to try their recently announced 2-step verification process. From the Gmail blog:

“…it requires the powerful combination of both something you know—your username and password—and something that only you should have—your phone. A hacker would need access to both of these factors to gain access to your account. If you like, you can always choose a “Remember verification for this computer for 30 days” option, and you won’t need to re-enter a code for another 30 days. You can also set up one-time application-specific passwords to sign in to your account from non-browser based applications that are designed to only ask for a password, and cannot prompt for the code.”

I’ll have a better feel for this in a few days but I’m willing to put up with a little extra hassle to know my account is safe.