- Crazy London Riots | Booman Tribune
- …a pretty fascinating collage of the London Riots. It’s impressive how much of the city has been destroyed. It’s worse than the Rodney King riots. I think you have to go back to the late 1960′s to see any comparable destruction in this country. The causes of these riots are hard to understand. The immediate problem was that the police shot and killed a civilian under hotly disputed circumstances. So, in that sense, it is similar to what happened in Los Angeles in 1992. It’s hard to explain the way the riots have expanded into other parts of London, and now into other cities in England.
Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots – Commentators, Opinion – The Independent
- London has woken up to street violence, and the usual narratives have emerged…
- The Downgrade Doom Loop – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman
- Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence.
- [This one's about economics, not the riots. -L]
- Fed up | Hullabaloo – dibby
- Am I wrong or did the Fed just come out and say that everything’s much worse than expected, and so they have decided that their current policies should stay in place for the next two years?
- Rumsfeld Loses Attempt to Have Torture Suit Filed Against Him By Two Contractors Dismissed | Firedoglake • by Kevin Gosztola
- The case, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, et al is one of two cases out of more than a dozen that allege Rumsfeld allowed torture to take place against US citizens in Iraq. …
- The government doesn’t like it when information winds up in the hands of organizations like WikiLeaks, but if the US government allows officials to authorize torture for those who attempt to do the right thing, if they grant impunity to officials who engage in such scandalous behavior, they should expect people will go outside established channels to expose injustice.
- Michele Bachmann Recommended Book That Blamed North for Civil War, Praised Slavery | Firedoglake • by Blue Texan
- From Ryan Lizza’s must-read Bachmann profile in the New Yorker…
- CMS.608 Game Design | MIT OpenCourseWare: New Courses • by Begy, Jason
- This course provides practical instruction in the design and analysis of non-digital games.
- A Mental Abacus Lets Math Whizzes Bypass Language | 80beats | Discover Magazine
- Most of us need everyone to stop talking when we perform mental math. But for children trained to do math visually with a “mental abacus,” verbal disturbances roll off their backs, prompting psychologists to posit that unlike the rest of us, they aren’t routing their calculations through words.
- Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs) | apophenia • by zephoria
- Lessig argued that social systems are regulated by four forces: 1) the market; 2) the law; 3) social norms; and 4) architecture or code. …When a system unfolds slowly, there’s room for the social norms to slowly bake, for people to work out what the norms should be. When a system unfolds quickly, there’s a whole lot of chaos …the faster things move, the faster those collisions occur…
…When social dynamics are allowed to unfold organically, social norms are a stronger regulatory force than any formalized policy. …
People don’t like to be configured.
…designing a system to encourage the growth of healthy social norms is fundamentally different than coming in and forcefully telling people how they must behave. …
A culture where people can build reputation through their online presence… goes a long way in combating trolls …you don’t get that culture by force; you get it by encouraging the creation of healthy social norms.
- Can blaming others make people sick?
- Constant bitterness can make a person ill, according to Concordia University researchers who have examined the relationship between failure, bitterness and quality of life.
[My bookmarks live at delicious.com/camryl. In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Also, signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
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