j-node

fabricating reality

2011-12-07T10:50:00.001+01:00

when science, reality and the mind fall apart...
This is the 5-minute talk I gave at Ingnite Zurich.

slide 1

Russell's complete quote:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

slide 2

Crazy technology:

Computer chips, like Tri Gate 22nm technology
Living organisms with completely synthetic genome
The LHC at CERN
A cyborg beetle
Optogenetics
Growing meat without animals (yes, I'm vegetarian)
IBM's Watson
Attosecond physics, where an attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe

Watch Juan Enriquez' TED talk: Tech evolution will eclipse the financial crisis

You get the idea;-)

slide 4

The Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity are the two most accurately tested theories around.

For more information on the diagram, see Appendix A.2.2 here.

slide 5

String theory, i.e., the collection of the five known superstring theories, had its heyday around 1995, when Edward Witten unified the framework and introduced M-theory. It posits that the fundamental building-blocks of reality are extended entities: strings or membranes. For the mathematics to work, reality has to be 11 dimensional, that is, 10 spacial dimensions plus time. It also requires a new symmetry of nature, called supersymmetry.

In the last decade however, there has arguably not been a lot of excitement in the field. The biggest problem being the missing experimental predictability of the theory. This perhaps explains why Witten recently was on sabbatical at CERN, where the LHC is hoped to give glimpses of supersymmetry or extended dimensions.

An other effort to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity is Loop Quantum Gravity, which does not need a higher-dimensional reality with supersymmetry.

slide 6

Here a list of all the fundamental questions I can think of;-)
A Few Questions...
And: What Can We Know?

The Higgs particle was needed for a peculiar reason. All the equations of the Standard Model don't work if terms for the mass of particles are introduced. Technically, the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) invariant Lagrangian, describing massless particles, can incorporate mass terms via, what is known as, the Higgs mechanism.

Although being a mathematical trick, it is associated with a physical particle. It is a cornerstone of the Standard Model, however, there is no real sign of it at the LHC.

Personally, I do not believe that the particle exists, as I have my personal crackpot theory. Here in a nutshell and here in detail;-)

slide 7

For more information on the diagram, see Appendix A.2.1 here.

Gödels's life ended tragically, as he drifted off into insanity. Watch BBC Four's documentary Dangerous Knowledge. Or watch this.

slide 8

For more on the philosophy of science, see Appendix A and A.1 here. And more in What are Laws of Nature? and A Philosophy of Science Primer.

What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, written by Lewis Carroll, is a brief dialogue about the problematic foundations of logic.

A very interesting book on this is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

Finally, What is a "Law of Physics", Anyway? And look it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Laws of Nature.

slide 9

Einstein's complete quote:

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

Eugene Wigner, in his essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,says:

[…] the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and […] there is no rational explanation for it
[…] it is not at all natural that “laws of nature” exist, much less that man is able to discover them
[…] the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them
[…] fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well

More Einstein:

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

slide 10

Thomas Kuhn's influential work on the history of science and its many paradigm shifts and revolutions prompted Max Planck to say:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Steven Weinberg's full quote in this context:

If the transition from one paradigm to another cannot be judged by any external standard, then perhaps it is culture rather than nature that dictates the content of scientific theories.

The influential philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, claimed that there is no such thing as scientific method. "Anything goes!", he said.

The term postmodernism is hard to define briefly. It has been around for a hundred years or so. In a historical context, Richard Tarnas' book The Passion of the Western Mind, summarizes the last 3000 years (or so) as:

The Greek world view → the Christian world view → the transformation of the medieval era → the modern world view (Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution) → the transformation of the modern era (the crisis of modern science, existentialism and nihilism).

Finally, the last chapter: the Postmodern Mind reads:

There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. It is recognized that human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things-in-themselves, are neither accessible nor possible; and that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to direct testing. The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain.

Postmodernism in real life: Sarah Kay's TED talk If I should have a daughter is about making a list of 10 things you know to be true and comparing it with enough other people's list, and finding that:

someone has the exact same, or very similar, thing as something on your list (affirmation)
someone has the complete and total opposite to something you know is true (dissonance)
someone has something you have never even heard of before (novel thoughts)
someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they are introducing a new angle to look at it (limited scope)

Aldous Huxley once answered an interview question about who should try LSD with:

Well I think the people who would benefit most of all are professors. I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas and with a great certainty about what's what to take this thing and to realize the world he's constructed is by no means the only world. That there are these extraordinary other types of universe.

slide 12

Richard Feynman once said about quantum mechanics:

For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

And to quote Niels Bohr:

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

And there is some more craziness: Quantum probability, the measurement problem, tunneling, vacuum fluctuations, Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, quantum teleportation, the no-cloning theorem and on and on...

Recently, a triple-slit experiment was done. And note that things like entanglement and wave-particle duality have been measured for objects as big as a buckyball.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says there are an infinite amount of parallel realities. Everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other universe or universes. (From Wikipedia.)

See also David Deutsch's Fabric of Reality. Or watch his TED talk: What is our place in the cosmos?

slide 13

Special Relativity comes from the fact that light has a constant speed. One of the consequences, next to time dilation, is Einstein's famous equation stating the equivalence of mass and energy.

Current estimates are that the universe is 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter, and only 5% of it is visible matter or normal energy. Unfortunately, we have no real idea what 95% of the universe is actually made up of. The 2011 physics Nobel prize was awarded for the observation that the expansion of the universe since the big bang is accelerating. This is thought to be due to dark energy, which basically is an energy content of the vacuum.

Regarding the fine-tuning of the universe, the anthropic principle argues that observations of the physical universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. The idea of a multiverse, for instance the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory or coming from M-theory, easily explains fine-tuning: Of the many parallel universes we obviously live in the one where the fundamental constants have the values we measure.

And there is more:

Arrow of time: Why was the universe initially in such an ordered (low entropy) state?
What is the nature of time? There is no theory explaining it.
Is the universe finite or infinite?

Watch Sean Caroll's TED talk: Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

Get a feeling of the involved scales of the universe. And the time spans: David Christian's TED talk, Big history, which brings you from the Big Bang to the Internet, in 18 minutes.

However, things get truly bizarre when the quantum theory is merged with relativity: experiments have shown that causality falls apart. It's impossible to tell what is the affecter and is being affected. Concepts of before and after make no sens. There is no real time in the quantum world.

slide 14

The limits of physics:

Closed-form solutions to analytical equations are mostly only attainable if non-linear effects (e.g., friction) are ignored; most physical systems in nature are non-linear
Not too many interacting entities can be considered (e.g., the three body problem: the equations describing three gravitating bodies cannot be solved - there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe)

The paradigms of complex systems:

Every complex system is reduced to a set of objects and a set of functions between the objects
Macroscopic complexity is the result of simple rules of interaction at the micro level

The first paradigm says that networks are ideal representations of complex systems. The second one is mysterious: complexity comes from simple rules of interaction. This allows complex systems to be easily simulated in a computer, e.g., agent-based simulations. Or Stephen Wolfram's cellular automaton rule 110, which results in a pattern that is neither completely random nor completely repetitive. And John Conway's Game of Life. Fractals, like the Mandelbrot set, are defined by a very simple iterative equation, however, yielding a visualization that can be zoomed into endlessly, revealing an amazing amount of complexity and miniature versions of the original set (self-similarity).

Wolfram also noted:

[The] results [that simple rules give rise to complex behavior] were so surprising and dramatic that as I gradually came to understand them, they forced me to change my whole view of science […].

It took me more than a decade to come to terms with this result, and to realize just how fundamental and far-reaching its consequences are.

Watch Wolfram's TED talk: Computing a theory of everything.

Complex systems in a nutshell: Chapter 1 here. Scaling laws are relevant when it comes to regularities in complex systems.

In closing: science, an overview, and in a nutshell.

slide 15

David Eagleman on perception:

You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

We do not see with our eyes but rather with our brains.

Waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

What we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input.

You're perceptual world always lags behind the real world.

What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology.

Our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world.

This is all why we would never "stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense."

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

There are thoughts you cannot think.

The exact levels of dozens of neurotransmitters are critical for who you believe yourself to be.

From here.

And consider things like selective attention, synaesthesia and the McGurk effect.

slide 16

David Eagleman on the "conscious me":

Our brain runs mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

The unexpected part of the news is that the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain.

Almost all of our actions are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages.

Consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry, and it does little beyond that.

Again from here.

People have been suggesting that the self is constructed and doesn't really exist. For instance Tomas Metzinger. Or watch Henry Markram's TED talk, Supercomputing the brain's secrets:

This theory [of the brain] is that the brain creates, builds, a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us.

slide 17

Behavioral economics:

Daniel Kahneman's TED talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory
Dan Ariely's TED talks: Are we in control of our decisions? and Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)

More on happiness from Dan Gilbert (here and here) and Matthieu Ricard.

Tasting the same wine three times, but experiencing morepleasure if you thought it was expensive: Marketingactions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.

Feeling pain depends on what your beliefs are about the currentexperience: Paul Bloom's TED talk: The originsof pleasure.

Molly Crockett's TED talk: Drugs and morals and Paul Zak's: Trust, morality - and oxytocin.

And on and on:

About Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: The brain: our two cognitive minds (part ii)
More quotes from David Eagleman's book Incognito: Thebrain: alien processes running under the hood (part i)
Free will, consciousness and a 10 second delay: Unconsciousdeterminants of free decision in the human brain
Oliver sacks' TED talk What hallucinationreveals about our minds
Dan Dennett's TED talks Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes and Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
Dunning-Kruger effect
RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Recently someone posted a sign, reading: Don't believe everything you think.

slide 18

The outlook, that no matter how strongly I believe something, no matter how fiercely I am willing to defend my belief, it still simply could be wrong, gives me the incentive to be open. Open-minded and open towards other people. I believe that the world is currently seriously lacking this attitude.

On being wrong:

Kathryn Schulz's TED talk On being wrong
Tim Harford's TED talk Trial, error and the god complex

Alan Alexander Milne in Winnie-The-Pooh. The House at Pooh Corner:

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that's why he never understands anything."

Personally I try not to exclude much about the workings of reality. Even taboo subjects relating to psi phenomenon: Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin.

slide 19

Rolf Landauer's erasure principle.

Seth Lloyd's original quote from his book Programming the Universe:

[It can be shown] that quantum computers can simulate any system that obeys the known laws of physics in a straightforward and efficient way. In fact, the universe is indistinguishable from a quantum computer.

And see more in Charles Seife's book, Decoding the Universe. Information theory, especially quantum information, appears to be the most fundamental aspect of reality. Relativity is essentially about the transmission of information. Quantum theory is at heart about extracting information from reality: the information you receive depends on how you gather that information.

Information is weird:

Digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is, at heart, describable by information, and is therefore computable. Therefore, the universe can be conceived as either the output of a computer program or as a vast, digital computation device (or, at least, mathematically isomorphic to such a device). (From Wikipedia.)

slide 20

The most relevant book I've read in a while: The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. See also the participatory theory. Or the subject-object problem.

Can consciousness fabricate reality? Could this be part of the key: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go?

Seriously, contemplating all of the above, I really cannot exclude anything about the nature of reality...

so, what about greed, inequality and happiness?

2011-10-13T21:17:00.000+02:00

the sword of damocles?
On the 13th of April 2010, the Dalai Lama tweeted:

Economic inequality, especially that between developed and developing nations, remains the greatest source of suffering on this planet.

In early 2011, the authoritative Economist magazine and the WEF in Davos, both perceived global inequality as a major global problem. (Although the Economist proposed a quick-fix: increase social mobility).

The complex causes and possible remedies can perhaps be debated endlessly, but what is clear are the empirical facts. Income and wealth are distributed according to a very specific probability distribution, called scaling law, power law, fat tailed distribution or 80-20 rule. To put it pithily: nearly all have very little and very few have very much. This was already observed by V. Pareto 1906 in and still holds today.

For scientists, the emergence of scaling law distributions is nothing uncommon (although there is no conclusive understanding of their origins). In fact, a huge range of natural phenomena display scaling laws: from physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, computer and network sciences, demography and social sciences to linguistics. It seems, that every complex system in nature, i.e., systems comprised of many interacting or interconnected parts, is associated with scaling law distributions. So we shouldn't take economic inequality too personal, but understand it as a systemic "feature".

What if income or wealth would be distributed according to a normal distribution (also called Gaussian distribution or Bell curve)? Like the height of people or IQ? We would see most incomes or wealth scattered around a global average, while few are very poor and very rich. In contrast, if height would be distributed like a scaling law, things would look like this graph: most people would be 6'7'' or smaller, while very few are in fact larger than hundreds of feet:

Taken from the Height of Inequality (the numbers are said to be from 1971, so this should be an underestimation of the current situation). More in the Economist about this as well.

OK, you get the idea, so lets look at...

Some Numbers

David Tepper, at Appaloosa Management, personally earned an estimated US$4 billion in 2009.

On the other side, we have an estimated 5.15 billion people, or roughly 80% of the world's population, living on US$10.00 a day or less in 2005.

Or in 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived on US$1 or less per day. Visualize this: territory size shows the proportion of all people living on less than or equal to US$1 in purchasing power parity a day.

From worldmapper.org (check out there many maps visualizing various statistics).

For the poor, there is another pressing issue, compounding the problem: the poorest 2 billion people spend 50%-70% of their income on food.

The fact that inequity is described by scaling law distributions also means that it has fractal properties: you can zoom in and still find the same kind of inequality at all scales.

The World Institute for Development Economics Research reported in 2008:

The wealth share estimates reveal that the richest 2 per cent of adult individuals own more than half of all global wealth, with the richest 1 per cent alone accounting for 40 per cent of global assets. The corresponding figures for the top 5 per cent and the top 10 per cent are 71 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. In contrast, the bottom half of wealth holders together hold barely 1 per cent of global wealth. Members of the top decile are almost 400 times richer, on average, than the bottom 50 per cent, and members of the top percentile are almost 2,000 times richer.

According to the latest Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, the people with a household net worth of $1 million or more represent less than 1% of the world’s population but own 38.5% of the world’s wealth: about $89 trillion. That’s up from a share of 35.6% in 2010. Their wealth increased by about $20 trillion last year. In fact, the wealth of millionaires and billionaires grew 29% last year. From the Wall Street Journal's blog.

The Economist notes in the article The 99 percent:

A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) points out that income inequality in America has not risen dramatically over the past 20 years—when the top 1% of earners are excluded. With them, the picture is quite different.

In May 2011, Vanity Fair published an article written by Joseph Stiglitz, an economics Nobel Laureate, called Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%:

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably.

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top.

Stiglitz goes on to note:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin.

Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity.

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real

Analysis of economic networks have revealed that national power-structures are self-preserving: even in the face of corporate governance reforms and globalization, they do not break up. (B. Kogut and G. Walker, "The Small World of Germany and the Durability of National Networks", American Sociological Review, 2001; R. Corrado and M. Zollo, "Small worlds evolving: governance reforms, privatizations, and ownership networks in Italy", Industrial and Corporate Change, 2006)

Our recent analysis of ownership networks has shown:

In markets with many widely held corporations (mostly in Anglo-Saxon countries), the observed local distribution of ownership, meaning shareholder democracy, actually goes hand in hand with a global concentration of ownership (and control), only visible from the bird's-eye view given by the network perspective, where the ownership and control ends up in the same few hands.

and

About 750 top economic agents in the global ownership network of~600k nodes potentially control 80% of the value (operating revenue) of the ~43k transnational corporations.
Of these, the top 50 already have nearly 40%.
The tiny core of the network, comprised of ~1300 nodes, holds ~40% of the potential control.
There are about 150 top agents in the core, potentially controlling about 38%.

See the Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control and the Network of Global Corporate Control.

D. Braha from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), when interviewed about our network study by New Scientist, said:

The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.

(Personally, I feel the word "logical" is perhaps a bit too strong.) However, he "suspects they [the companies in the tiny core of the ownership network that have a disproportionately large amount of control] will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest."

So, What About Greed Then?

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, wrote:

Notfor a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two fulldecades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street andordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readersof the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of SalomonBrothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; [...] What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

Especially recalling Mr. Tepper's 4 billion from above. Lewis goes on to describe his personal experience in the financial industry:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall.

I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Again from here. Of course, this is all debatable, from his sincerity, to possible hidden agendas, to being biased by wanting to write a popular book.

However, these things definitely don't help:

Take the now-infamous example of the recently ousted Merrill Lynchchief John Thain, who not only splurged on his office decor [over $1 million] but alsohad the audacity to propose a $10 million bonus for himself. Inrecognition of what? A year's work in which the company continued tomake bad business decisions, lost about 80 percent of its value, solditself to Bank of America to stave off possible collapse and appears tohave seriously damaged its buyer's franchise?

Bank of America ($45 billion in bailout money)sponsored a five-day "NFL experience" at the Super Bowl; Wells Fargo($25 billion in bailout funds) was planning 12 nights in Las Vegas forselect employees.

From You Can Cap The Pay, But The Greed Will Go On, Washington Post, February 8, 2009.

For Dow Kim, 2006 was a very good year. While his salary at Merrill Lynch was $350,000, his total compensation was 100 times that — $35 million.
The difference between the two amounts was his bonus, a rich reward for the robust earnings made by the traders he oversaw in Merrill’s mortgage business. [...]

But Merrill’s record earnings in 2006 — $7.5 billion — turned out to be a mirage. The company has since lost three times that amount, largely because the mortgage investments that supposedly had powered some of those profits plunged in value.

Unlike the earnings, however, the bonuses have not been reversed.

From On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real, New York Times, December 17, 2008.

Such practices are perhaps a reason why some people working in the finance industry turned away in disgust. Like Michel Lewis, or Geraint Anderson, a former investment banker, who wrote a book about his personal experiences, called City Boy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile. Some of the reviews:

London’s pernicious financial world reveals itself in all its ugliness.
As a primer to back-stabbing, bullying, drug-taking, gambling, boozing, lap-dancing, this takes some beating...a necessary and valuable boo.
Engaging, timely and important...an effective indictment of the narcissism and decadence of City life.

Before, he became notorious for his column City Boy, which he wrote anonymously in The London Paper. There he gave detailed accounts of greed, drug-taking, prostitutes, gambling and fraud.

Recently, I read a comment where the person asked the question, of how much of the risk appetite of investment banking was fueled by cocaine. In Italy, the government is currently debating drug tests for traders. There is allegedly a new study correlating market volatility with drug abuse among traders (the news article claiming this).

The story of Andrew Lahde is also telling. As founder and manager of a small California hedge fund he came into the spotlight in 2007, after his one-year-old fund returned 866% betting against the subprime collapse. In 2008 he closed his fund and wrote a "goodbye" letter to his investors. Some excerpts:

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades.

I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life -- where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management -- with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not. May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established.

First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it.

Others have taken the same line in asking how deserved and legitimate the super-high salaries of top earners are. For instance George Monibot in the Guardian:

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy.

The University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, considered to be one of the leading business schools in Europe, has a lecture on the emergence of new markets, where the increasing importance of innovation is discussed. One of the topics of the course is about leadership, power and conflict:

Innovation is not generated in the power center (management) of a corporation, but instead, exactly by such employees, who diverge from the prevailing mindset of the company.

(From the syllabus, translation mine.) And what does this say about income inequality, Gini coefficients, and who gets payed how much for doing what exactly?

And does high monetary compensation really motivate people? Make us creative and innovative? See for instance the youtube video called Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. (Thanks Ben for your comment reminding me about this.)

Finally, psychologists have also noted the Power Paradox:

[...] studies also show that once people assume positions of power, they’re likely to act more selfishly, impulsively, and aggressively, and they have a harder time seeing the world from other people’s points of view. This presents us with the paradox of power: The skills most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the very skills that deteriorate once we have power.

Things Are Changing

Lahde's words from 2008 ring very familiar with the current Occupy Wall Street movement and their mantra "we are the 99%". Also Joseph Stigliz' analysis from May this year, mentioned above, continues and has an uncanny, prophetic feel to it:

Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? [...] As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.

It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation.

However, there are some rich and super-rich who see this predicament. In this "revolution of the rich", they are calling for higher taxes for themselves. In the US, billionaire Warren Buffet wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times where he sarcastically commented:

These and other blessings are showered upon us [the super-rich] by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

and claims to pay half the percentage in taxes as his employees.

In Germany the musician Marius Müller-Westernhagen proclaimed

Taxes do not make the wealthy poor.

in an ongoing debate, in which some of millionaires have signaled their support of higher taxes for the rich. Similar advances can be seen in France, where 16 top managers of big French companies have signed a petition supporting higher taxes for the rich. More here.

The most extreme scaling law distribution of wealth is one person having everything. The most extreme Gaussian distribution, a delta function, would mean that everyone has exactly the same wealth. In-between, there is a multitude of possibilities. What do you think is equality?

But is this all really the right and relevant way to globally asses the well-being of the world's population? Shouldn't the focus be more related to happiness (which, admittedly, is hard to define) and its pursuit? For instance, something like a happiness index? The obvious answer is: no of course not, financial hardship always results in unhappiness. In contrast, how many people pursue demanding careers, make personal sacrifices and get high compensation actually because they believe this will increase their level of happiness?

But new insights coming from neuro-sciences and behavioral economics have shown that happiness can be very context dependent, constructed and sometimes quite independent from the external world:

Tasting the same wine three times, but experiencing morepleasure because you thought one was expensive: Marketingactions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness,PNAS, 2008.
Feeling pain depends on what your beliefs are about the currentexperience: believing you are deliberately being harmed intensifies the experience of pain. Paul Bloom's TED talk the originsof pleasure.
Daniel Gilbert's TED talks why are we happy? why aren't we happy? and exploring the frontiers of happiness.
Daniel Kahneman's TED talk the riddle of experience vs. memory.
Matthieu Ricard's TED talk habits of happiness.

A risk and compliance consultant at a major bank told the Guardian recently:

My sense is that a lot of people in finance hate what they do. There's no passion. But they are trapped by the money.

Just sayin'...

PS
More on neuro-science:

scaling laws

2011-10-13T19:33:00.002+02:00

complex systems and regularities...
Scaling-law relations characterize an immense number of natural processes, prominently in the form of

scaling-law distributions,
scale-free networks,
cumulative relations of stochastic processes.

A scaling law, or power law, is a simple polynomial functional relationship, i.e., f(x) depends on a power of x. Two properties of such laws can easily be shown:

a logarithmic mapping yields a linear relationship,
scaling the function’s argument x preserves the shape of the function f(x), called scale invariance.

See (Sornette, 2006).

Scaling-Law Distributions

Scaling-law distributions have been observed in an extraordinary wide range of natural phenomena: from physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science and demography to the social sciences; see (Newman, 2004). It is truly amazing, that such diverse topics as

the size of earthquakes, moon craters, solar flares, computer files, sand particle, wars and price moves in financial markets,
the number of scientific papers written, citations received by publications, hits on webpages and species in biological taxa,
the sales of music, books and other commodities,
the population of cities,
the income of people,
the frequency of words used in human languages and of occurrences of personal names,
the areas burnt in forest fires,

are all described by scaling-law distributions. First used to describe the observed income distribution of households by the economist Pareto in 1897, the recent advancements in the study of complex systems have helped uncover some of the possible mechanisms behind this universal law. However, there is as of yet no real understanding of the physical processes driving these systems.Processes following normal distributions have a characteristic scale given by the mean of the distribution. In contrast, scaling-law distributions lack such a preferred scale. Measurements of scaling-law processes yield values distributed across an enormous dynamic range (sometimes many orders of magnitude), and for any section one looks at, the proportion of small to large events is the same. Historically, the observation of scale-free or self-similar behavior in the changes of cotton prices was the starting point for Mandelbrot's research leading to the discovery of fractal geometry; see (Mandelbrot, 1963).It should be noted, that although scaling laws imply that small occurrences are extremely common, whereas large instances are quite rare, these large events occur nevertheless much more frequently compared to a normal (or Gaussian) probability distribution. For such distributions, events that deviate from the mean by, e.g., 10 standard deviations (called “10-sigma events”) are practically impossible to observe. For scaling law distributions, extreme events have a small but very real probability of occurring. This fact is summed up by saying that the distribution has a “fat tail” (in the terminology of probability theory and statistics, distributions with fat tails are said to be leptokurtic or to display positive kurtosis) which greatly impacts the risk assessment. So although most earthquakes, price moves in financial markets, intensities of solar flares, ... will be very small, the possibility that a catastrophic event will happen cannot be neglected.

Scale-Free Networks

Another modern research field marked by the ubiquitous appearance of scaling-law relations is the study of complex networks. Many different phenomena in the physical (e.g., computer networks, transportation networks, power grids, spontaneous synchronization of systems of lasers), biological (e.g., neural networks, epidemiology, food webs, gene regulation), and social (e.g., trade networks, diffusion of innovation, trust networks, research collaborations, social affiliation) worlds can be understood as network based. In essence, the links and nodes are abstractions describing the system under study via the interactions of the elements comprising it.In graph theory, the degree of a node (or vertex), k, describes the number of links (or edges) the node has to other nodes. The degree distribution gives the probability distribution of degrees in a network. For scale-free networks, one finds that the probability that a node in the network connects with k other nodes follows a scaling law. Again, this power law is characterized by the existence of highly connected hubs, whereas most nodes have small degrees.Scale-free networks are

characterized by high robustness against random failure of nodes, but susceptible to coordinated attacks on the hubs, and
thought to arise from a dynamical growth process, called preferential attachment, in which new nodes favor linking to existing nodes with high degrees.

It should be noted, that another prominent feature of real-world networks, namely the so-called small-world property, is separate from a scale-free degree distribution, although scale-free networks are also small-world networks; (Strogatz and Watts, 1998). For small-world networks, although most nodes are not neighbors of one another, most nodes can be reached from every other by a surprisingly small number of hops or steps.Most real-world complex networks - such as those listed at the beginning of this section - show both scale-free and small-world characteristics.Some general references include (Barabasi, 2002), (Albert and Barabasi, 2001), and (Newman, 2003). Emergence of scale-free networks in the preferential attachment model (Albert and Barabasi, 1999). An alternative explanation to preferential attachment, introducing non-topological values (called fitness) to the vertices, is given in (Caldarelli et al., 2002).

Cumulative Scaling-Law Relations

Next to distributions of random variables, scaling laws also appear in collections of random variables, called stochastic processes. Prominent empirical examples are financial time-series, where one finds empirical scaling laws governing the relationship between various observed quantities. See (Guillaume et al., 1997), (Dacorogna et al., 2001) and (Glattfelder et al., 2011).

References

Albert R. and Barabasi A.-L., 1999, Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9910332.
Albert R. and Barabasi A.-L., 2001, Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0106096.
Barabasi A.-L., 2002, Linked — The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Caldarelli G., Capoccio A., Rios P. D. L., and Munoz M. A., 2002, Scale- free Networks without Growth or Preferential Attachment: Good get Richer, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0207366.
Dacorogna M. M., Gencay R., Müller U. A., Olsen R. B., and Pictet O. V., 2001, An Introduction to High-Frequency Finance, Academic Press, San Diego, CA.
Glattfelder J. B., Dupuis A., and Olsen R. B., 2011, Patterns in high-frequency FX data: Discovery of 12 empirical scaling laws, Quantitative Finance, 11(4), 599 - 614.
Guillaume D. M., Dacorogna M. M., Dave R. D., Müller U. A., Olsen R. B., and Pictet O. V., 1997, From the Bird’s Eye to the Microscope: A Survey of New Stylized Facts of the Intra-Daily Foreign Exchange Markets, Finance and Stochastics, 1, 95–129.
Mandelbrot B. B., 1963, The variation of certain speculative prices, Journal of Business, 36, 394–419.
Newman M. E. J., 2003, The Structure and Function of Complex Networks, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0303516.
Newman M. E. J., 2004, Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf ’s Law, http://www.arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0412004.
Sornette D., 2006, Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences, Series in Synergetics. Springer, Berlin, 2nd edition.
Strogatz S. H. and Watts D. J., 1998, Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,Nature, 393, 440–442.

See more in Appendix C of Ownership Networks and Corporate Control: Mapping Economic Power in a Globalized World, J.B. Glattfelder, 2010

[This post was originally posted on my now obsolete tech blog in September 2007 http://blogs.olsen.ch/jbg/2007/09/10/scaling-laws/]

occupy wall street vs. the tea party

2011-10-13T19:07:00.000+02:00

black and white?
What's up with Occupy Wall Street? Just a bunch of hippies? A group of whiny complainers? Or the mirror image of the Tea Party: a radical, ideology-driven, left-wing political movement?

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but [...] their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.

Josepg Stiglitz, May 3, 2011

Let's see what some commentators are saying (italics refer to quotes, see sources at the end).

The Tea Party

The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order. [1]

Occupy Wall Street: The Differences?

In contrast, what should we make of Occupy Wall Street? The movement is, of course, nascent, and growing: on Oct. 5, it picked up thousands of marching supporters of all ages, many from unions, professions and universities, and crowded Foley Square. Its equivalents rallied in 50 cities. Deep anger at grotesque inequities extends far beyond this one encampment; after all, a few handfuls of young activists do not have a monopoly on the fight against plutocracy. Revulsion in the face of a perverse economy is felt by many respectable people: unemployed, not yet unemployed, shakily employed and plain disgusted. A month from now, this movement, still busy being born, could look quite different. [1]

Occupy Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline. [1]

[For Tea Partiers] the tents and untucked shirts, the tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks [...] are eye candy for lazy journalists. [1]

Is it any surprise that Fox News and its allied bloggers consider the protesters “deluded” and “dirty smelly hippies”? [1]

Occupy Wall Street: The Commonalities?

As more than a few observers have noted, the Occupy Wall Street chant, “We Are the 99 Percent” — a shot across the bow of the wealthiest 1 percent of the country, which includes the financial predators and confidence gamers who crashed the global economy with impunity — seems synonymous with the Tea Party’s “Take Back America” ethos. [1]

Until now, fury at the plutocracy and the political class had found no channel to run in but the antigovernment fantasies of the Tea Party. Now it has dug a new channel. [1]

The Motivation?

As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack -- or failure -- of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. [2]

One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world). [2]

Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the current political system, young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If democracy -- that is, the democracy we have been given -- is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete? [2]

How Political Is Anarchy?

And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment — because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. [1]

In this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. [1]

The culture of anarchy is right about this: The corporate rich — those ostensible “job creators” who somehow haven’t gotten around to creating jobs — rule the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party as well, having artfully arranged a mutual back-scratching society to enrich themselves. A refusal to compromise with this system, defined by its hierarchies of power and money, would be the current moment of anarchy’s great, lasting contribution. [1]

The Tools?

It is no surprise that [Occupy Wall Street] makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated — perhaps prefigured — those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An “American Autumn” is their shot at an echo of the “Arab Spring.” [1]

The Message?

Not sure where this came from, but it was making the rounds on Facebook:

End the Collusion Between Government and Large Corporations/Banks, So That Our Elected Leaders Are Actually Representing the Interests of the People (the 99%) and Not Just Their Rich Donors (the 1%).
Investigate Wall Street and Hold Senior Executives Accountable for the Destruction in Wealth that has Devastated Millions of People.
Return the Power of Coining Money to the U.S. Treasury and Return to Sound Money.
Limit the Size, Scope and Power of Banks so that None are Ever "Too Big to Fail" and in Need to Taxpayer Bailouts.
Eliminate "Personhood" Legal Status for Corporations.
Repeal the Patriot Act, End the War on Drugs and Protect Civil Liberties.
End All Imperial Wars of Aggression, Bring the Troops Home from All Countries, Cut the Military Budget and Limit The Military Role to Protection of the Homeland.

[3]

What is the "real democracy" they propose? The clearest clues lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves -- specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic practices. These movements have all developed according to what we call a "multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory decision-making structures." [2]

In a Nutshell?

So this activist movement appears to be about expressing one's resentment against the status quo of the corporate and (to some extent) political power-structures that are perceived as the source of inequality and responsible for the current economic crisis. It is an ad hoc, decentralized, multifaceted, self-organizing movement, using social media to organize. By now, there is no social class, geographical region, religious affiliation or explicit goal associated with it. One defining trait is perhaps the dominance of young people. The formulation of goals is an emergent process and bottom-up. Indeed, the movement is not only spreading across the US, but also to other countries...

So, What About Greed and Inequality?

Read more in the next post...

Sources

[1] The Left Declares Its Independence; T. Gitlin; New York Times; October 8, 2011

[2] The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street; M.Hardt and A. Negri; Foreign Affairs; October 11, 2011

[3] Post on slashdot

---

Update 15.10.11

CNN: Occupy protests spread around the world; 70 injured in Rome

---

Update 26.10.11

As the above quotes can be put off as ideology-driven, here some more quotes from the authoritative Economist magazine, in its current issue. From the article Rage against the machine, October 22:

Yet even if the protests are small and muddled, it is dangerous to dismiss the broader rage that exists across the West. There are legitimate deep-seated grievances. Young people – and not just those on the streets – are likely to face higher taxes, less generous benefits and longer working lives than their parents. More immediately, houses are expensive, credit hard to get and jobs scarce – not just in old manufacturing industries but in the ritzier services that attract increasingly debt-laden graduates. In America 17.1% of those below 25 are out of work. Across the European Union, youth unemployment averages 20.9%. In Spain it is a staggering 46.2%. Only in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria is the rate in single digits. It is not just the young who feel squeezed. The middle-aged face falling real wages and diminished pension rights. And the elderly are seeing inflation eat away the value of their savings; in Britain prices are rising by 5.2% but bank deposits yield less than 1%. In the meantime, bankers are back to huge bonuses.

To the man-in-the-street, all this smacks of a system that has failed. Neither of the main Western models has much political credit at the moment. European social democracy promised voters benefits that societies can no longer afford. The Anglo-Saxon model claimed that free markets would create prosperity; many voters feel instead that they got a series of debt-fuelled asset bubbles and an economy that was rigged in favour of a financial elite, who tookall the proceeds in the good times and then left everybody else with no alternative other than to bail them out. To use one of the protesters’ better slogans, the 1% have gained at the expense of the 99%.

However, they see a danger:

If the grievances are more legitimate and broader than previous rages against the machine, then the dangers are also greater. Populist anger, especially if it has no coherent agenda, can go anywhere in times of want. The 1930s provided the most terrifying example. A more recent (and less frightening) case study is the tea party. The justified fury of America’s striving middle classes against a cumbersome state has in practice translated into a form of obstructive nihilism: nothing to do with taxes can get through Washington, including tax reform.

The Economist notes again in the article The 99 percent:

OF ALL the many banners being waved around the world by disgruntled protesters from Chile to Australia the one that reads, "We Are the 99%" is the catchiest. It is purposefully vague, but it is also underpinned by some solid economics. A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) points out that income inequality in America has not risen dramatically over the past 20 years—when the top 1% of earners are excluded. With them, the picture is quite different.

the network of global corporate control - revisited

2011-10-03T21:02:00.000+02:00

complex systems, vast amounts of data and self-organization...

We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace.

(D. Helbing quoted from here)

The publication The Network of Global Corporate Control has gained some attention in the news (sciencenews.org, newscientist.com) and the blogosphere (for instance, planetsave.com, physorg.com and johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com).Because some reactions have been particularly hostile, for instance Ms. Yves Smith from Naked Capitalism (see also our responses here and in their comment section), or have inspired the conspiracy theory camp, please let me recapitulate what our paper is and isn't and address some of the voiced concerns, in order to avoid misconceptions. (If you are only interested in our responses to critiques - for instance, computing control from ownership and the notion of control in the financial sector - please see Section 8 below.)

Ownership network, more info and 3d video on youtube.

In a nutshell, it's an empirical and interdisciplinary effort to understand a vast economic dataset using methods from the study of complex networks. The analysis focuses, on the one hand on ownership, and on the other hand on control, and reports novel findings for both. It should be noted that ownership is an objective, measurable quantity and that control has to be estimated from it. As in all fields of science, classification and quantification are the first necessary steps in the process of in-depth understanding of novel phenomena.

You are also cordially invited to join the discussion at PLoS ONE, where our paper is "available for commenting and debate by the readers, making [it] the start of a scientific conversation".

1.) The dataset

It is comprised of ownership relations of 37 million economic agents (natural persons, families, foundations, government agencies, listed and unlisted companies, etc.) from early 2007, located in 194 countries. We identify and focus on about 43k transnational corporations (TNCs) in 116 countries, defining a network of 600k nodes.

It is Bureau van Dijk's commercial Orbis database, used, among others, by reinsurance companies, banks and government agencies.

We started in 2007 with our first cross-country study and then did this current global analysis. Yes, it would be very interesting to analyze a more recent network snapshot. However, it is also interesting to see the network shortly before the financial collapse in 2008. Moreover, other national ownership network studies have shown that clusters of powerful agents were very resilient and unaffected by external forces ([3] and [4]). So perhaps the observed power-structure in this 2007 dataset is still surviving the turmoil today...

2.) The research questions

a.) What is the global architecture of ownership (e.g., TNCs may remain isolated, cluster in separated coalitions, or form a large connected component)?

b.) How is control distributed globally?

c.) Who are the key economic actors?

Sample of the international financial network, where the nodes represent
major financial institutions belonging to the core and the links give the
strongest existing relations among them; node colors indicate different
geographical areas: EU (red), US (blue), other countries (green); the
width and the darkness of the links show their weight; only the most
prominent links are shown; the network shows a high connectivity,
with many mutual cross-shareholdings as well as longer cycles; this
indicates that the financial sector is strongly interdependent, which
make the network vulnerable to instability, see [1] or [2].

3.) Methods

a.) Our novel methodology extends the known methods for computing control from ownership, and remedies their shortcomings.

b.) Control is proxied by the potential control over the TNCs operating revenue, referred to as network control in the paper. This estimate the percentage of control from the network of direct and indirect ownership relations (using three different models) and multiples this level of control with the operating revenue of the firms a shareholder is connected to (directly and indirectly).

c.) This measure of control can be understood as a quantity flowing through the network, as the methodology is highly attuned to indirect relations between nodes.

d.) Our study is also relevant to the field of complex networks in general, since the methodology can be applied to discover influential nodes in any network where resources are flowing along weighted directed edges.

4.) Novel findings

a.) The network is seen to organize as follows: there are many (~23k) small clusters of connected nodes (called weakly connected components) and then there is one huge connected component, where 77% of all the nodes are located. See the scaling-law distribution of the sizes of the weakly connected components in Figure S6 in the Supporting Information. Interestingly, although 64% of the TNCs are scattered among the many small connected components, they only account for 6% of the operating revenue. In other words, 1/3 of the TNCs are found in the huge connected component and represent nearly all the value. See Figure 2B in the main text.

b.) The topology of this largest weakly connected component has a tiny, but dominant core (in network speak: the largest strongly connected component defining a bow-tie topology) of about 1300 mostly US and GB financial intermediaries. This observation has possible implications for global systemic risk and global market competition (see more in item 7.).

c.) The economics literature would have us think that ownership relations of US and GB financial institutions should not organize as a tightly-knit group owning the majority in each other (i.e., cross-shareholdings and business groups, the paradigm of widely held firms, and the Atlantic or stock market or arm's-length "type" of capitalism, see references in Section 1.2.2 in [1])

d.) The distribution of control (i.e., the potential control over the TNCs value) is unprecedentedly skewed. It takes the shape of a log-normal distribution (see Figure S3 of the Supporting Information) and is roughly an order of magnitude more unequally distributed than wealth (in developed countries). To give some numbers:
i.) 737 top economic agents in the network of 600508 nodes control 80% of the value (operating revenue) of the 43060 TNCs.
ii.) The core, comprised of 1318 nodes, holds 39% of the control.
iii.) There are 147 top agents in the core, controlling 38.4%.

e.) The top actors are in the core and hence are interconnected and do not carry out their business in isolation.

Observe, that findings a.) to c.) are based solely on the objective ownership data, and require no computation of control. Additional information here and here.

5.) Bottom line

a.) Economists are only slowly starting to turn their attention to economic networks. This said, there is an interesting gap in the literature regarding the tools and models used to do so (see Section 1.2.3 in [1]). This is the first analysis of a global dataset on ownership, using a complex networks approach.

b.) It is a starting point for future research. Determining the true implications is up to other scholars to debate on.

c.) Open question: is the core of top actors an emergent property or the result of planned coordination? We tend to think it is an emergent property of the network dynamics.

6.) What the paper isn't

a.) Pushing an economics or socio-political agenda.

b.) Promoting conspiracy theories.

c.) An exact, unambiguous measurement of real-world control.
"Because interpreting and analyzing these kinds of data is difficult, [Davis] says, the analysis serves more as 'an impression of the moon's surface you get with a telescope. It's not a street map.'" Gerald Davis, economist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, quoted from here.

d.) Alleging that the top agents are colluding.

7.) Why study ownership networks?

a.) Previous studies looked at the impact of globalization forces and corporate governance reforms over time on the network topology and found that there was an unexpected resilient structure of powerful agents which was unaffected by these external forces [3,4].

b.) A cross-country analysis revealed that in markets with many widely held corporations (mostly in Anglo-Saxon countries), this local distribution of ownership actually goes hand in hand with a global concentration of ownership (and control), only visible from the bird's-eye view given by the network perspective [5].

c.) Complex ownership patterns, such as cross-shareholdings (e.g., when firms mutually hold shares of each other), are extensively studied motifs in the corporate governance literature and correspond to strongly connected components in networks. Previous studies (on small samples) have shown that cross-shareholdings significantly reduce competition. Accordingly, antitrust institutions all around the world take the existence of complex cross-shareholding structures very seriously. However, they lack the analytical and quantitative tools to deal with large networks.

d.) For some time economic theory has supported the idea that more connected networks are more stable. In contrast, recently, the work of some scholars as well as the view of some authoritative policy makers predict that a higher level of interconnections among financial institutions can lead to higher systemic risk [6].

e.) The network structure matters: the presence of indirect links can significantly amplify the control (or ownership) held by certain economic agents. If one defines the leverage as the ratio between the control we compute, which takes into account the whole network, and the direct control of agents, the resulting probability distribution is scale free (see Figure 4.10 and Section 4.3.3 in [1]).This means that some agents are able to gain a high level of control because of the presence of indirect ownership relations. Usually, this happens by shareholders having control over small firms, which in turn control larger corporations and so forth. Such ownership structures are also called pyramids but were never studied at a global level. Recall the pyramidal group of indirect ownership around Marco Tronchetti Provera, allowing him to control Telecom Italia, one of the world's largest telecom companies, with a disproportional small amount of equity.

f.) General network measures have meaning in ownership networks: the (scaling-law) distribution of the out-degree gives a measure of portfolio diversification (see Figure S5A in the Supporting Information); the distribution of the sizes of the weakly connected components gives a measure of how integrated or fragmented a market is (see the scaling-law distribution in Figure S6 in the Supporting information); the position of an agent in the network can be indicative of its importance.

8.) Problems'n'Answers:

P1: "OMG they discovered financial institutions hold shares! What a scandal!"
A1: It is obvious that large mutual funds own many shares. However, what we are saying is that the potential control they have is surprisingly high. A portfolio manager would arguably go for a diversification strategy and not a controlling one.

P2: "Everybody knows this. It is all so obvious."
A2: There is a big difference between suspecting the existence of a fact and in empirically demonstrating it. We are not aware of an existing study which gives actual empirical evidence of these findings, which some common wisdom indeed anticipated.
"'This is empirical evidence of what’s been understood anecdotally for years,' says information theorist Brandy Aven of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh." (quote from here).

P3: "You cannot really infer control from ownership."
A3: The separation of ownership and control has been debated in the scholarly literature for decades (see references in Section 6.2.1 in [1]).Although there are many aspects which make the estimation of control from ownership hard to asses (nonvoting shares, dual classes of shares, multiple voting rights, golden shares, voting right ceilings, proxy votes, etc.), researchers have provided, and extensively used, different simple models believed to proxy the control gained from ownership, such as the linear model, assuming the one-share-one-vote principle, or a threshold model, assigning unequivocal control if the percentage of ownership exceeds the threshold. Quite a lot of attention has been devoted to the analysis of ownership and control of individual corporations and of small groups of firms, but never has a large ownership network been investigated. In [5] we added a novel model, that looks at the relative distribution of shares. Even with a small shareholding, if all others hold significantly smaller shares, this model assigns a high level of control.

We computed control using all three fundamentally different models. Neither the topology of the network, nor the distribution of control, nor the identity of the top holders significantly changes in these different scenarios. This unexpected robustness, or invariance, of such global control measures is encouraging, because it means that neither are the models computing arbitrary numbers, nor can the three models have the same bias in computing control the wrong way. So, although for individual agents the computation of direct control can appear arbitrary, the existence of this "aggregated" agreement in the computation is indeed a positive indication that the results are in fact not just spurious or an artifact of the model details. But, as we caution, these numbers are, in any case, an approximation.

P4: "But funds don't exert control."
A4: The question, if funds do or do not exert control, is still being debated in the scholarly literature. It is known that US mutual funds do not always seek to exert control. However, this applies only to them operating in the US. Indeed, the same funds have been shown to exert their power when operating in Europe. We are not aware of a systematic global study about the control financial institutions wield over the companies they have ownership in world-wide. Moreover, control is defined in these studies in a very specific way (for instance the propensity to vote against the management when it comes to issues of corporate governance). In any case, there are 49 mutual funds among the top 737 top holders.

Control can be exerted in ways which are not always visible. We state: "For example, a mutual fund owning some percent of a large corporation may try to impose job cuts because of a weak economic situation. This can happen: (i) without voting and (ii) although the fund does not plan to keep these shares for many years. In this case, the influence of the mutual fund has a direct impact on the company and its employees. Furthermore, mutual funds with shares in many corporations may try to pursue similar strategies across their entire portfolio." Moreover, studies on the network of directors, the boards they serve on, and the interlocks, have revealed these networks to be scale free [7]. This means a few directors are on very many boards. These ties could also be seen as potential channels, through which control can be exerted covertly, when the directors meet in person.

In being cautious, we cannot exclude that the top holders we identify do not globally exert their power in some way. Especially, if we allow for the fact, that control can also be exerted covertly. This is why we talk about potential power in the context of the control numbers we compute. Even if some top holders indeed do assume a passive role, this could be by their own choosing and change anytime.

For references, consult Section 6.2.5 in [1]. and generally Section 6.2 for more concerns that have been addressed.

9.) And finally...

As the world around us is becoming more complex and interconnected, and indeed so at an increasing speed, we believe in the following, in order to try and gain more understanding:

a.) Keep an open mind and question all assumptions, also supposedly established ones.

b.) Let the data speak, not dogmas.

c.) Take the interconnectedness serious: look for and try and understand the network behind complex phenomena.

d.) Use formal tools that can deal with huge amounts of data and complexity in general.

10.) Sources

[1] Ownership Networks and Corporate Control: Mapping Economic Power in a Globalized World, J.B. Glattfelder, 2010
[2] Industrial organization from a geographical and network perspective, S. Vitali, 2010
[3] (Kogut and Walker, 2001)
[4] (Corrado and Zollo, 2006)
[5] (Glattfelder and Battiston, 2009)
[6] (Battiston, Delli Gatti, Gallegati, Greenwald and Stiglitz; 2009)
[7] (Battiston and Catanzaro; 2004)

der homo ideologicus und die postmoderne welt

2011-09-02T15:52:00.001+02:00

rambling, in german...

Takashi Murakami

ja, ja der momentane zeitgeist: trügerische ideologien in allen ecken und auf allen ebenen. je anspruchsloser, desto mehr anhänger. das patt zwischen diametral verschiedenen dogmen, welche abgerichtet sind, das andere gedankengut zu attackieren und dämonisieren. machtstrukturen, deren einziger antrieb und inhalt ihr eigener erhalt ist. politisch, wirtschaftlich und religiös. wie ja z.b. die tea party, kapitalistischer kommunismus, verschwörungstheorie-fanatiker, klassische ökonomie, kreationismus, 9-jährige selbstmordattentäter, ein junger, sich bedroht fühlender wohlstands-skandinavier, in fantasie-uniformen posierend, mit etwas makeup im gesicht, ein jahrzehnt lang sich in hass übend.

und dies, ironisch-erweise, in einer ära, wo die erkenntnisse über die realität und uns selber immer mehr ein kohärentes bild vermitteln, welches elemente hervorhebt wie pluralität, plastizität, koexistenz von ideen, das fehlen von absolutem und der einen "wahrheit", intrinsisch dynamisch und konstant sich ändernd, das konstruierte an unserer wahrnehmung, die krise der physik offenbart in ihrem fundament und letztbegründung, die bizarren schichten der micro-realität, die beschleunigte produktion von immer unermesslicheren technologischen errungenschaften, das problem des freien willens, ... sprich die postmoderne erkenntnis. ein sakrileg an unser aufgeklärtes selbstverständnis, welches auf rationalität, objektivität, empirie, absoluten werten, klaren grenzen, etc. aufbaut. und dies von immer mehr physikern, neurowissenschaftlern, linguisten, philosophen, etc.

dabei ist das psotmoderne gefühl doch so befreiend: egal wie sehr ich etwas glaube, egal wie vehement ich im stand bin mein gedankengut zu verteidigen, ich könnte trotzdem falsch liegen. weil die realität unter umständen viel, viel mannigfaltiger sein könnte als ich je zu träumen wagte und mein wissen davon notwendigerweise bedingt ist durch die neuronalen schaltkreise und den exakten mengen von chemischen stoffen in meinem gehirn. betrand russel sagte mal:

those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt.

es befreit aber auch von der geiselnahme durch dogmen: fördert eine kompromisslose und radikale offenheit für neue ideen und erlaubt sich dem steten wandel von allem hinzugeben, toleranz und abstraktes einfühlungsvermögen zu entwickeln. aber bevor der faule, überdrüssige, selbst-fokussierte, abgeklärte, verdrängende, starre homo ideologicus sich von der süssen verführung des recht-habens und der wohligen sicherheit einfacher schemen lösen kann, und sich der realität und sich selber stellt, muss der leidensdruck wohl noch etwas steigen.

darum, von meiner eigenen, kleinen realitäts-ideologie aus beurteilend;-)

den anderen immer die schuld geben, weniger mitgefühl und empathie, mehr egoismus und laissez-faire, mehr verdrängen, mehr zynismus, weniger verantwortung, mehr verurteilung, mehr verlogenheit, mehr selbstbetrug, mehr verbitterung und verachtung, mehr abgebrühtheit, mehr hass, mehr resignation und frustration, weniger gerechtigkeit, mehr leiden, mehr hinterhältigkeit, mehr entfremdung, viel weniger liebe, dankbarkeit und freude
demagogen an die macht, mehr platz den ideologischen hassrednern, mehr populismus, mehr waffen und gewalt, mehr krieg
totale dämonisierung der wissenschaft, creation science in die schulen, weniger skepsis, mehr ignoranz
weg mit dem umweltschutz, wer braucht schon biodiversität, grössere ökologische footprints, mehr abfall, verbrauchen wir ganzen ressourcen - jetzt, christopher monckton ins IPCC, mehr zerstörung, wen interessiert schon nachhaltigkeit
mehr billiger kredit, mehr billiges öl, nie mehr regulationen, mehr steuersenkungen fürs oberste quantil, mehr betäubender konsum, mehr ablenkung, mehr trägheit, mehr fettleibigkeit, mehr unterdrückung, mehr ausbeutung, mehr gier, was interessiert heute die desillusion der jugend, wen interessiert die zukunft, wen geht armut etwas an
krankheit und alter existieren nicht, wir sind alle immer jung und gesund
und vor allem: keine kollektive intelligenz

nur so...

---

einige unverbindliche quellen:

historical context: thepassion of the western mind by richard tarnas:

the greek world view -> the christian world view-> the transformation of the medieval era -> the modernworld view (renaissance, reformation, scientific revolution) ->the transformation of the modern era (the crisis of modern science,existentialism and nihilism)

finally, the last chapter: thepostmodern mind
"There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. It is recognized that human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things-in-themselves, are neither accessible nor possible; and that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to direct testing. The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain."

neuroscience and psychopathology

david eagleman's book "incognito": (blog post summary) thebrain: alien processes running under the hood (part i)
jill bolte taylor's book "my stroke of insight": (blog postsummary) thebrain: our two cognitive minds (part ii)
free will, consciousness and a 10 second delay: unconsciousdeterminants of free decision in the human brain, natureneuroscience, 2008
tasting the same wine three times, but experiencing morepleasure if you thought it was expensive: marketingactions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness,PNAS, 2008
feeling pain depends on what your beliefs are about the currentexperience: paul bloom's TED talk the originsof pleasure
oliver sacks' TED talk what hallucinationreveals about our minds
dan dennett's TED talks ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes and cute, sexy, sweet, funny
neuroscience and the law: neurolaw

philosophy of science

a summary: appendix A lawsof nature
blog post summary: a philosophy of science primer: partI (history of science and logical empiricism), partII (problems of logical empiricism and critical rationalism, andits problems) and partIII (postmodernism, constructivism or the scoiology of science,relativism)

cognitive biases

dan ariely's TED talks: are we in control of our decisions? and why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes)
daniel kahneman's TED talk the riddle of experience vs. memory
daniel gilbert's TED talks why are we happy? why aren't we happy? and exploring the frontiers of happiness
unskilled and unaware, the dunning-kruger effect
whenpeople are presented with data that conflicts with existing prejudices,many reject the data and become more confident in their prejudice. the boston globe writes the following in an article about this:
“‘The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’rewrong,’ says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher onthe Michigan study. The phenomenon – known as ‘backfire’ – is ‘anatural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.’”
science bias: “What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence thatchallenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it,intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.”

crises in classical economics

an open letter to george soros
the world economics association seeks to increase the relevance, breadth and depth of economic thought.
behavioral economists, see ariely and kahneman above
introduction to chapter 6

on being wrong

kathryn schulz's TED talk on being wrong
tim harford's TED talk trial, error and the god complex

postmodernity in real life: sarah kay's TED talk if I should have a daughter: if you make a list of 10 things you know to be true and compare it with enough other people's list, you will find that:

someone has the exact same, or very similar, thing as something on your list (affirmation)
someone has the complete and total opposite to something you know is true (dissonance)
someone has something you have never even heard of before (novel thoughts)
someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they are introducing a new angle to look at it (limited scope)

the network of global corporate control

2011-08-23T23:08:00.031+02:00

fighting the blogosphere;-)
(Edit: this post is a response to an on-line article, for more insights into our study and additional details on the concerns and misconceptions - especially the often voiced critique about inferring control from ownership and what control means in the financial sector - please read this post.)

A recent news article about the network of global corporate control (Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston) is floating around in the blogosphere. Ms. Yves Smith, from Naked Capitalism, was not amused. She choose an appropriate title expressing her disdain:

Study Asserts World’s Stocks Controlled by "Select Few" (Bad Studies That Confirm Conventional Wisdom Refuse to Die Edition)

Especially as this is the second ownership network study, where the first one, the Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control, was already fiercely declared a deplorably bad study by Ms. Smith.

In her recent critique, we can read:

This paper is a garbage-in, garbage out analysis.
The problem is that the authors never bothered to understand how shares are held and how voting behavior varies based on institutional arrangements.
But the authors didn’t bother thinking about how [some issue] complicate their tidy story of big powerful institutions controlling the world.

and in the comments:

They used the wrong data.
[...] but the authors are physicists. They want to apply their network methodology to a large data set with lots of nodes. So they will be utterly unreceptive to the notion that the data they used is bad and their study is bunk.
This is classic drunk under the streetlight behavior

As a co-author of the study, see the response, epilogue and conclusion sections I provide below...

(Note: somehow the comment section seems broken on their blog. You need to click the "No Comments" link at the end of the post to see the comments.)

This is my response

Thanks for covering the article. I fully agree, inferring control from ownership is a tricky issue. I also think the conspiracy theory spin some media coverage gave the story was unnecessary.

However, I do believe the study has some merits. The fierce critique appears to stem from two issues (apart from the obvious fact that Ms. Smith thinks the whole enterprise of ownership network analysis is total and utter crap;-): the quality of the database and the notion of control, i.e., shareholder voting.

Obviously, everything in the study depends on Bureau van Dijk's (commercial) Orbis database:
http://www.bvdinfo.com/Products/Company-Information/International/ORBIS.aspx
It should perhaps be noted, that the database contains also natural persons and government entities next to corporations. So this is the garbage-in part.

Let's look at the garbage-out bit. It is maybe worth mentioning, that ownership is an objective and measurable quantity. So without even mentioning control, the study empirically uncovers that the global topology of transnational corporations is, similarly to technological networks, organized as a bow-tie, with a very small core of corporations, where 3/4 of the direct ownership stays in the core. This could be interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the obvious being that apparently no one has looked at this global network before. (Which, in itself, is also noteworthy, as many other empirical and interdisciplinary fields have successfully embraced network analysis to deal with the increasing accumulation of mountains of data. In economics, this is only starting slowly. Oh, but wait, physicists can only understand physics and any interdisciplinary effort is necessarily futile;-) Secondly, the economics literature would have us think that ownership relations of US and GB financial institutions should not organize as a tightly-knit group owning the majority in each other (see cross-shareholdings and business groups). The existence of the core could have implications for global market competition and financial systemic risk. The study does not claim anything else. An interesting open question at this point is: is this an emergent feature or the result of a direct organizing principle of the involved corporations? So, no need to discuss control up to here.

What about this worrisome control? Issues like "but control cannot really be assessed from ownership", "comparing ownership, and hence control, in different countries is like comparing apples with oranges", "funds don't exert control" and "are the results really new" are extensively discussed in Chapter 6.2 here:
http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:2007/eth-2007-02.pdf
next to also being mentioned at the end of the study and in the Supporting Information Section 8.1. In a nutshell, yes it is problematic, but perhaps not too much so. The results for the control are at an aggregated level, and it is very encouraging that fundamentally different models used to infer control from ownership (from the scholarly literature) give very similar results.

In any case, indirect ownership (yes, the network;-) and the corresponding control can be quite dramatic. Recall the pyramidal group of indirect ownership around Marco Tronchetti Provera, allowing him to control Telecom Italia, one of the world's largest telecom companies, with a disproportional small amount of equity. Indeed, as the study mentions, control can effectively be covert:
"For example, a mutual fund owning some percent of a large corporation may try to impose job cuts because of a weak economic situation. This can happen: (i) without voting and (ii) although the fund does not plan to keep these shares for many years. In this case, the influence of the mutual fund has a direct impact on the company and its employees. Furthermore, mutual funds with shares in many corporations may try to pursue similar strategies across their entire portfolio."

The study also mentions, that "control" should be taken with a grain of salt:
"In this sense, our notion of control can be related to Max Weber’s definition of 'power', i.e. the probability of an individual to be able to impose its will despite the opposition of the others."
It is up for question, if economic agents, having large potential control, would in fact choose not to exert it.

I had to smile when I read the sentence: "But the authors didn't bother thinking about how [some issue] complicate their tidy story of big powerful institutions controlling the world." Of course, it's not about empirical data being analyzed for the first time. No, it's all about a story to be sold to the uncritical media and the conspiracy theory camp;-) Also, one of the tags of the post, the label "dubious statistics", is funny. Especially, as the network analysis of the study has nothing to do with the methods of classical statistics (it's a lot about linear algebra and algorithms).

I also like the appeal to authority. Physicists, by default, cannot understand anything about economics. It's a law of nature;-) By the way, the lead author, Ms. Vitali, is in fact an economist and Mr. Battiston published with an economics Nobel Laureate. And the two studies, so hated by Ms. Smith, also had real economists comment kind of favorably:

Bruce Kogut: http://j-node.homeip.net/wfb/jbg%20archive/media/sciencenews.pdf
"The results nicely show how structure emerges from an otherwise weak signal, revealing the ownership backbone within and across countries."

Matthew Jackson: http://www.livescience.com/9704-world-stocks-controlled-select.html
"It's clear, looking at financial contagion and recent crises, that understanding interrelations between companies and holdings is very important in the future," he said. "Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there's some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there's a big difference between having an impression and actually having ... more explicit numbers to put behind it."

Gerald Davis: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/333389/titl /Financial_world_dominated_by_a_few_deep_pockets
Because interpreting and analyzing these kinds of data is difficult, he says, the analysis serves more as "an impression of the moon’s surface you get with a telescope. It’s not a street map."

Although, to be fair, there are the legitimate concerns also mentioned in Ms. Smith's post:

Matthew Jackson: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/333389/title/Financial_world_dominated_by_a_few_deep_pockets
Ownership can be difficult to study internationally because holding shares in a mutual fund doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in the U.S. as it does in communist China. And even within a single country ownership can be hard to tease out, says economist Matthew Jackson of Stanford University. For example, when an individual invests in a mutual fund or even purchases shares through an institution like Merrill Lynch, the firm is often still the official owner of the assets. And even when shareholders do have voting rights, they may not exercise them. "This becomes worrisome if everyone is like me and says I’ll let Vanguard do the voting," says Jackson. "Maybe we should be a little bit worried. I don’t know if we should be."

Finally, the question raised in Ms Smith's post of 2009, where she allegedly debunked the first deplorable ownership network study, namely: "Conspiracy theorists will have to wait until the article described in Inside Science is published to determine whether it delivers on its claims." has been answered. Yes, it was published: Phys. Rev. E 80, 036104 (2009). Oh, but wait, that's a physics journal;-)

---
More here: Ownership Networks and Corporate Control: Mapping Economic Power in a Globalized World

Just for fun, an ownership network...

-----------------

25th of August 2011

Epilogue

Dear authors and readers of Naked Capitalism,

Thank you for your interest in our study. To cut a long discussion short, please let me take a step back and focus on some general issues.

I understand that you categorically disapprove of the value of economic network analysis. Although I don't think the fierce and hostile tone this sentiment was often expressed in was really appropriate, I am fine with that opinion. Especially as this kind of analysis represents a new paradigm in dealing with complex systems and vast amounts of data. (However, other people have thought that network analysis of economic data has been worth their time, see for instance the chapter:
"The Structure of Financial Networks" in Springer's "Network Science: Complexity in Nature and Technology".)

The mentioned study is currently in the peer-reviewing process for it to be accepted for publication. This not only means that the journal chooses independent (anonymous) reviewers it thinks fit for the job (yes, the experts who should find all the flaws in a paper), but, crucially, that every claim we make we had to try and back with understanding found in the scholarly literature. For what it's worth, this is the academic game to play if you want to publish studies. But this is also where an objective discourse can begin.

I don't want to be condescending when I allege that what is being expressed here are just opinions. But without the same rigor in argumentation, i.e., pointing to studies backing ones claims with existing knowledge, the whole discussion just becomes an endless string of assertions. Of course, one can always claim that this focus on published studies is one of the things that is wrong with academia and its ivory towers...

The bottom line:

A.) Please, for 1 minute, just forget that the notion of control even exists! This was the main focus of all the critique. So we are now simply talking about ownership networks. This begs the question: why bother?

Some scholars have noted, that ownership networks can be understood to exhibit (the references can be found in http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:2007/eth-2007-02.pdf):
"the historical bargains struck by labor, the state and holders of capital regarding who gets to own and control the economic assets." (Kogut and Walker, 2001)

That, their study has implications for individual firms:
"A network of ownership ties represents a unique opportunity to examine how an economy-wide structure of relations affects individual firm diversification events." (Kogut and Walker, 1999)
"The relationship of capital to the firm is also shaped by the structure of interfirm networks, which influences firm behavior through access to critical resources and information." (Aguilera and Jackson, 2003)

Finally, they are relevant for policymakers:
"The analysis of networks of business enterprises has grown to be one of the leading perspectives in the study of business policy, organizational behavior, and public economic policy." (Corrado Zollo, 2006)

Analyzing (national) ownership networks has been done before:
-B. Kogut and G.n Walker, "The Small World of Germany and the Durability of National Networks", American Sociological Review, 2001
-R. Corrado and M. Zollo, "Small worlds evolving: governance reforms, privatizations, and ownership networks in Italy", Industrial and Corporate Change, 2006

With our study, we add more sophistication in the methods and extend the scope. And indeed, we find the novel features I mentioned many times not documented in the existing literature (this is a main criterion for a study to be published in a journal).

B.) So, let's look at control now.

There is an extensive body of literature in economics on the issue of control and ownership, which does, in no way, give such a clear cut picture some people here would like to imply and the whole discussion is a lot more complex (again, the references can be found in http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:2007/eth-2007-02.pdf). For instance:
(Brioschi et al., 1989; La Porta et al., 1998, 1999; Claessens and Djankov, 2000; Nenova, 2003; Chapelle and Szafarz, 2005; Chapelle, 2005; The Deminor Group, 2005; Almeida and Wolfenzon, 2006; Almeida et al., 2007). Some of the mentioned authors infer control from ownership using the same models as the study under scrutiny. Others discuss the role of mutual funds:
(Santos and Rumble, 2006; Davis and Kim, 2007; Davis, 2008).

With respect to control, the claim of the study is simple: it is a first approximation of (potential) global control structures. And its distribution turns out to be unprecedentedly skewed (hello conspiracy theory camp;-).

C.) The study only claims to have opened the door to further discussions. "This remarkable finding raises at least two questions that are fundamental to the understanding of the functioning of the global economy": global market competition and global financial systemic risk. To what extent this is really relevant and the control approximation is true, is, of course, up for discussion. But we believe this to be a valuable and fruitful starting point for further research.

So, to be honest, I don't really get the whole fuss that's being made here and the general sense of animosity.

Finally, without wanting to sound patronizing, Ms. Smith should be aware that she is offering her opinions and not "the truth", and hence it is maybe not very pertinent when she writes sentences like "I pre-debunked a report on an earlier version of this paper", "this paper is a garbage-in, garbage out analysis", "you might do some very soft proxies with qualitative data, but the authors are physicists". But then again, in a blog post such utterances help make a gripping read;-)

Anyway, all the best,
j

-----------------

31st of August 2011

Conclusion

Ms. Yves Smith chose a winning strategy:

i.) write a scathing sensationalist critique of a study, frothing with animosity, sprinkled with ad hominem attacks, keeping the readers happy and entertained;
ii.) stubbornly ignore any subsequent clarifications, rebuttals, explanations and context-giving efforts offered by the authors of the study.

This surely works spectacularly well on the Internet, but, in my opinion, it does raise serious questions about Ms. Smith's sincerity, integrity and professionalism...

-----------------

3rd of October 2011

Update

New blog post: The network of global corporate control - revisited

how to make it into the local news...

2011-08-11T12:16:00.007+02:00

15 seconds of fame;-)
1. Write a scholarly article about networks, economics and stuff:

Financial world dominated by a few deep pockets: Economic “superentity” controls more than one-third of global wealth - sciencenews.org, Aug. 2011

2. Jump into water:

Riskante Sprünge vom Dach in die Limmat - 20min.ch, Aug 2011

(embedding one of my youtube videos)

Loop...

1. Write a scholarly article about networks, economics and stuff:

(while keeping the conspiracy theory camp happy: google "illuminati AND physicists AND glattfelder")

2. Jump into water:

(see intro sequence - telezueri.ch, Aug 2007)

the face of horror

2011-07-25T21:22:00.011+02:00

trying not to feel ill:-(

"Deterioration of Mind Over Matter" Otto Rapp

Philip Zimbardo, the physiologist responsible for the Stanford Prison Experiment, tells us that the following makes it easy for people to do evil:

mindlessly taking the first small step down the road to evil;
dehumanization of others;
de-individuation of self (anonymity);
diffusion of personal responsibility;
blind obedience to authority;
uncritical conformity to group norms;
passive tolerance of evil (inaction, indifference).

I would add two other elements:

fundamentalist ideas, dogmatic beliefs, and deep-rooted ideologies;
neurology.

The first item perhaps helps to account for the unfathomable acts of hatred we witness in the form of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism. Where now even small children as young as eight years old are instrumentalized as suicide-bombers. Either consentingly, due to severe brain-washing in special education camps (see Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Inside a school for suicide bombers), or forced against their will.

Here the world recently witnessed a new level of violence during the terrorists attacks in Mumbai in 2008. The terrorists consumed cocaine and LSD to be able to "battle" for 50 hours without food or sleep, efficiently killing nearly 200 people.

Tragically, it appears now, that religiously motivated hatred and terror is being joined by politically motivated hatred and terror. As committed recently by a friendly looking 32 year-old Norwegian, called Anders Breivik.

It takes a very high level of abstraction, i.e., a total absence of empathy and compassion for human beings, to single-handedly shoot and kill at least 68 teenagers, while quietly walking around a pristine little island for over an hour (this after detonating a 300 kg bomb in the heart of Oslo, killing another 8 people).

The motivation for this act is said to be rooted in political extremism. Hence the perpetrator's self-perception of being a liberator, enabling a better future, and not that of being a coldblooded killer, a psychopathic monster, bringing to light an incredible drive to cause suffering.

The children where not only Norwegian, crucially, they where attending a political youth retreat, affiliated with the party the killer perceives as the cause of all problems. He is quoted to having said: "The time for dialogue is over. We tried to give peace a chance. Now the time for armed resistance has come.". He also stated that he only wanted to send a strong signal, not kill as many people as possible.

Apparently, nearly ten years of planing went into this incomprehensible act of hatred. The serial killer wrote a manifesto comprised of 1500 pages, explaining his cause, defining the (political) enemy, and detailing the solution, which he sent to hundreds of people, who share his political ideology, in Europe and the US.

The atypical element of the killing spree is that the perpetrator survived. Neither did he commit suicide, nor did he forcefully oppose his capture. In fact, it is said, that he wants a public trial in order for him to explain his motivations. He is said to view the period after his arrest as a sort of propaganda-phase. Although he has confessed to having carried out the bombing and the mass killing single-handedly, he pleaded not guilty in court. He also looked quite content while being transfered by the police.

However, perhaps this is all a side-effect of a deeper cause - a far simpler one. And all the attempts to explain and classify with ideology and mindsets are simply attempts to comfort ourselves with things we can comprehend.

In 1966, Charles Whitman, a former student at the University of Texas at Austin and an ex-Marine, aged 25, sat down to write his suicide note:

I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

In his diary he had mentioned talking to a doctor about the "overwhelming violent impulses" haunting him. However, he never saw the doctor again. His note continues:

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight. [...] I love her dearly, and she has been a fine wife to me [...]. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.

After having murdered his wife and mother in their sleep, he went to the top of the University of Texas tower and began to shoot indiscriminately at the people below, killing 14, before being shot by the police.

His suicide note also read:

If my life insurance policy is valid please pay of my debts [...] donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.

An autopsy revealed that Whitman's brain contained a tumor. The tumor was pressing on a brain region responsible for emotional regulation, especially fear and aggression. (Taken from Eagleman's book Incognito - The Secret Lives of the Brain, see more in this post).

It is safe to say that the neural circuitry of of the Norwegian killer is profoundly broken, lacking vital elements which allow us to be human: empathy, compassion, connectedness, and love. But then, can any level of understanding ever heal the pain of the victims? How do you live our life after you have witnessed the agony of incomprehensible acts of meaningless hatred and violence? After peering into the face of horror?

"Necronomicon 2" H.R. Giger

What would it mean, if Anders Breivik could really be treated with brain surgery or medication, restoring in him a normal level of empathy and compassion? What if his brain's propensity for ideology would then crumble in the face of its new found capability for humanity? What if he could be cured of the age-old fallacy, that causing any kind of suffering will cease or remedy any other kind of perceived suffering?

I sometimes wonder, if one could define a spectrum for love and hatred, and assuming it to be symmetric, what state of blissful being would lie at the other end of such abysmal hatred...

the brain: our two cognitive minds (part ii)

2011-07-15T15:53:00.003+02:00

mind shattering...

When you hear a person proclaim the following, what do you think:

And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person [...] having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

I can no longer define the boundaries of my body - I can't define where I begin and where I end.

And in that moment my brain chatter [...] went totally silent [...]. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. [...] I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to loose 37 years of emotional baggage. I felt euphoria.

A drug induced psychedelic experience? A religious revelation? A state of mind achieved by years of mediation practice? A manifestation of a manic or psychotic episode? No. This is what happens when a golf-ball sized blood-clot is messing with your brain circuitry...

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist. The above quotes are her recollection of the reality she experienced while suffering a stroke:

A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. In the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate.

And then I realize, oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke. And then the next thing my brain says to me is: 'Wow, this is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?'

The stroke nearly killed her, and it took eight years to recover from:

I curled up into a little fetal-ball, and, just like a balloon with the last bit of air just out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just felt my spirit surrender.

Jill wrote a book about her life-changing experience: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. In 2008, she gave a very personal and moving account of the stroke during a talk at the TED conference (see embedded video below).

She describes the brain as follows: The two hemispheres of the brain are two independent cognitive minds. The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. As a result, the right brain focuses on the present moment, the here and now. It thinks in pictures and constructs an enormous collage of this eternal moment; how it looks, smells, tastes, feels and sounds like. We are all connected through the consciousness of the right hemisphere.

The left brain is into linear thinking, methodical, focused on the past and future. It takes the collage of the present moment, picks out details, which it categorizes and organizes, and associates them with everything learned in the past to project all possibilities into the future. It thinks in language, creating the ongoing brain chatter. It is responsible for creating the sense of self, the "I am", which lets us become separate.

The experience of this day in 1996 transformed Jill, giving her rational outlook on life a distinct spiritual spin, a generic spirituality which could be argued to be inherent in our brain circuitry:

But then i realized: but I'm still alive. I'm still alive and I have found nirvana. Then everyone who is alive can find nirvana. And then I pictured a world with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew they could come to this space at any time. And that they purposely can choose to step to the right of their left hemisphere and find this peace.

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemisphere, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.

What a stroke of insight this could be.

See part i: the brain: alien processes running under the hood.

random quote of the day...

2011-07-15T12:47:00.001+02:00

know yourself...

Those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt.

Betrand Russel

the brain: alien processes running under the hood (part i)

2011-07-09T23:41:00.004+02:00

mind-blowing

"In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection."

In his recent book Incognito - The secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman looks under the hood of the brain and exposes its alien circuitry. The revealed insights have a distinct constructivist and postmodern taste (more on these issues from the philosophy of science on my science blog here), perhaps surprising coming from a scientist describing experiments.

THE BIG PICTURE:

The brain is "the most complex material we've discovered in the universe."

It is "an alien kind of computational material."

"The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us." "Almost the entirety of your inner universe is foreign to you."

"Humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent."

"When the brain finds a task it needs to solve, it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency."

THE CONSCIOUS ME:

"Our brain runs mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs that runs below it."

"The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity."

"The unexpected part of the news is that the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain."

"Almost all of our actions are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems."

"We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood."

"Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages."

"Consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry, and it does little beyond that."

ON PERCEPTION:

"You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you."

"We do not see with our eyes but rather with our brains."

"Waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you."

"What we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input."

"You're perceptual world always lags behind the real world."

"What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology."

"Our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world."

This is all why we would never "stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense."

"Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it."

"There are thoughts you cannot think."

"Consider that you probably would not want to discover the alien subroutines that lurk under your own frontal cortex."

"The exact levels of dozens of neurotransmitters are critical for who you believe yourself to be."

BELIEFS:

"Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true."

"Deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interaction, love, and the rest of your vast mental landscape" are all products of the biologically evolved "hardwiring" in the brain.

"Each individual believes his way is reality."

"Minds seek patterns." "They are driven to 'patternicity' - the attempt to find structure in meaningless data."

FREE WILL:

"The drives you take for granted depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption."

"The behavior of the patient cannot be be separated from his biology."

"Our choices are inseparably married to the tiniest details of our machinery."

"So we see that the invisibly small molecules we call narcotics, neurotransmitters, hormones, viruses, and genes can place their little hands on the steering wheel of our behavior."

"So in our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer."

"After centuries of debate, free will remains an open, valid, and relevant scientific problem."

NEUROLAW:

"Many 'pathogens' can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once a child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modify intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities."

"How you turn out depends on where you've been."

"When modern brain science is laid out carefully, it is difficult to justify how our legal system can continue to function without it."

"Blameworthiness is the wrong question to ask." "The concept and word to replace blameworthiness is modifiability, a forward-looking term that asks, What can we do from here?"

BRAIN ANATOMY:

The brain is best understood as "two separate realms of conscious awareness."

"The origin of consciousness, argues Julian Jaynes, resulted from the ability of the two hemispheres 'to sit down at the table together and work out their differences'."

"Amazingly, as long as the surgery is performed on a child before he is about eight years old, the child is fine." The mentioned surgery is called a hemispherectomy, in which an entire half of the brain is removed, to treat Rasmussen's encephalitis. "He can do anything that a child with two hemispheres can do."

ON THE HORIZON:

"Do human minds interact with the stuff of the universe?" "What is it about observation?". I.e. the measurement problem in quantum physics.

"Why did artificial intelligence become stuck?" "If we hope to invent robots that think, our challenge is not simply to devise a subagent to cleverly solve each problem but instead to ceaselessly reinvent subagents, each with overlapping solutions, and then to pit them against one another."

a year's worth of science tweets...

2011-05-09T16:55:00.002+02:00

archiving

talking with kellee...

2011-04-04T21:54:00.005+02:00

interacting

We are able to create and be whatever we say we are [...].

[...] there is a deep capacity for human beings to transform.

Any human is capable of being anything [...].

Kellee Maize is a singer/songwriter, hip hop artist, entrepreneur and activist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She writes inspirational lyrics strongly focusing on positivity. Her music is available for free and her songs have been downloaded millions of times from amazon.com.

She has an active web presence. For instance, if you google "female rapper", her name pops up in the top ranks.

An interview with Kellee:

JBG: You currently offer your songs free of charge, with the disclaimer that this won't always be the case. How important do you think it is nowadays for new artists to initially offer free songs in order to build up a reputation and start to be successful in the business?
KM: I think it is extremely important that new artists offer their music for free. It is always more effective to allow someone to sample something before they buy. People often don't like something new right away, they need to get related. Who I am, and what I stand for in the world is that everyone has access to the kinds of things that have helped me as a person get thru a lot of B.S. and that they have access to information and art. So, my music will always be free for those who can't afford it and my hope is that I can build a strong network of support so that art like mine has a place in the world and can be sustainable. It also creates structure to find out what works, and what does not work; what resonates and what doesn't. If I could find a way, it would always be free!

Your music videos and the production of your songs look very professional and costly. How do you manage to do this?
For my music videos and production we work with a low budget and find amazing resources and people to make it all happen. I get a lot of support from my friends too, for which I am sooo greatful. Many of the videographer's are either still in school or recent graduates of school. Some are professionals from around Pittsburgh but align with my vision. As for the music, I have a team of producers who create unimaginable works of art for me to flow to. They all are very inspiring and ambitious individuals who also see the vision and work with me to make things happen on very low budgets. The same goes for make-up artists and stylists. They all basically want what I do, to be seen/heard and given a chance so our visions are congruent and complimentary... not to mention we have mad love for each other.

You incentivize people to share your songs using their social networks. For instance, by offering a gift in return for sharing one of your videos on Facebook or Twitter. Do you believe this is the future of marketing in the music business?
I believe that this is one way of doing things. Social media is very important in terms of promotion. By sharing a video one time that video can then be shared on, and on, and on. The free gifts are just an added feature that a lot of people are really interested in. I love to make my fan's happy, and offer them an added bonus when I can.

Lady Gaga has over 8 million followers on Twitter; Tila Tequila became famous for having the most friends on MySpace. What are your views on this high level of connectivity using social networks?
Social media is revolutionizing how we communicate. It really allows one to connect to another in a way that may not happen in "real life". People from all over the country and the world can talk to me, ask me questions, express their feelings about my music. When you provide that sort of relationship to the people who really understand my lyrics and really strive to be this world of unconditional love, it creates a space of fulfillment in my heart and in theirs. It's like when a fan meets his or her favorite music artist in the world. They go crazy, they get excited, it all becomes real. I think the artist in turn is inspired and enlivened by such an interaction and that is how I think we both feel when we communicate via social networking!

I believe there is currently a merging to be seen between hip hop and electronic music. What is your take on this and how do you view electronic music in general.
I think hip hop and electronic music have always been synced in many ways. I became aware of it during my first trip to the Winter Music Conference when I heard all the emcees spit over electronic music... and I myself have always done this. Electronic music provides an extra sense of aliveness, joy and creation. When I hear electronic music I become totally engaged with moving my body and creating a work of art in it's own, dance. It's like massaging the Earth when we dance... the native people have done it for thousands of years. I almost see electronic music as extra terrestrial too, like the higher bpm is communicating with other dimensions and other worldly life. So, it only makes sense to me that it would then merge with more direct language communication in hip hop... because such a big part of hip hop is the emcee and the lyrics!

You describe yourself as a female rapper. However, your lyrics are unconventional in the sense that they are inspirational and spiritual. Could you say something about this uncommon mixture?
I am a female rapper, singer, and dancer and I think hip hop has always been a medium for activism. I am an activist for my listeners to become inspired and more open to ideas and concepts that I think are very useful in our current times. I often also cover the state of the world, as a means to hopefully presence the listener to what is going on and then offer various things that have helped me recognize my own power to overcome and our power to create in the face of no agreement in the world. You could say that a lot of it is spiritual, but sometimes that word leads people down the wrong path. I am really just about understanding how humans (we) work at promoting, love, peace, compassion and creation. We are able to create and be whatever we say we are and for too long, we have been controlled by the negative voice inside that results from domestication. The one that says we can't do this or that. I believe we are entering a stage where that voice will be dealt with in a direct and powerful way, just in time to redirect the focus of this planet from fear and hate to love... .and just in time.

Could you say something more about what inspires you, what your spiritual message is and what role it plays in your life?
I am very inspired by all of my beautiful friends, family, teachers, creatures and plants. They all are a "team" in allowing this space of fulfillment, success, love, peace, and joy that I am creating moment to moment... .and then when I go to a negative space, which we all do, they that bring me back! I receive many letters from fans that just touch my heart in so many ways it's hard to describe. They all keep me going. It inspires me to consider a realm of true unconditional love, where war is not an option, where there is food for every person on the planet. I know this is possible, given the fact that there is enough wealth in this world, and that there is a deep capacity for human beings to transform. This is what inspires me. I spend as much time as I can focusing on this kind of world, envisioning what it would be like, imagining it is here, writing from the space of what it will take to be there.

The current zeitgeist has been described as being postmodern (stressing the plasticity, plurality and constant change of reality and knowledge) and afflicted by the data deluge (the petabyte age of information overload). What is your advice for young people to successfully navigate these uncertain, changing and challenging times?
Well, I think I answered a lot of this above. I know how hard it can be. As a young person I was confused, depressed and angry. I think the single most important thing I can think of is to focus on what you want. And I mean this on an individual and global level. We are not taught that what we spend our time concentrating on expands. From a personal perspective, that can be as simple as thinking that I am stuck with a certain trait. Any human is capable of being anything and we all have a unique role to play. So, for example... a kid that may want to be a painter, but someone told them they are a shitty painter. Then, moving forward, that is all they can hear. That is all they focus on, that one voice of another, becomes our own voice. This also makes me think about how important it is to be loving and compassionate to others, because you never know how one moment can alter a persons life particularly when they are young. So, I think its just important to know that what you focus on expands and that we need to keep an empowering, inspiring context in all that we do. I think that young people are really being brought into this world with new and different brain capacities and they will be the ones leading the way on all of this! If you google indigo children, that is specifically what I am talking about. We just need to make sure we aren't medicating our youth!

Are you vegetarian/vegan? If yes, why? If not, why?
I actually consider myself a pescitarian, which means that I occasionally eat eggs (free range) and wild fish (no farm raised). It is somewhat rare however that I eat them so I am currently in a space where I am considering becoming a a full vegetarian and eating only organic foods. I teeter back and forth on that decision so I have stopped calling myself a vegetarian for that reason. I learned entirely too much about the meatpacking industry years ago that I cut out meat for a long time and don't miss it. And, films like Food Inc have really restricted what I will eat these days. There are so many issues with pesticides and processing! And I just feel the animals are not killed responsibly and not raised responsibly. It hurts my heart when I see animals killed in the manner that we currently do... .like literally, I feel it when I see or think about it.

How do you see yourself in 10 years?
Well, I am going to phrase this as if it is already happening... cause that is how u create :). I will be doing shows internationally and speaking on a regular basis. I will be releasing an album a year... so that would mean I would have 10 more albums by then :). I will definitely start a family by then as well and hopefully become versed in the healing arts of reiki and cellular expansion. My business will also always be a big part of my life... check it out at www.nakturnal.net!

How do you see the US in 10 years?
Again, I will phrase this from what I want to see, as if it is real! The US will be an aid to all countries, we will offer reparations for slavery to African Americans, we will cancel all depts owed to us by third world countries. We will have universal health care. We will be leaders in the healing arts, technology, scientific discovery, and medicine. I know it sounds idealistic but, I am not gonna offer the other side of how I think it may be cause that just isn't worth my time. I cover it in my music to raise awareness but, in this format, I think it is better to answer how I WANT and feel it could be. :)

How do you see the world in 10 years?
All cultures are respected and maintained but also open minded to others and willing to learn from each other. I think a lot will go down between now and then that will help to create a balance so that we can be understood as individuals throughout the world community but also develop a oneness that creates compassion and love for each other. If you ever see the end of Zeitgeist where it talks about the Venus project, i am tryin' to see that as the future!

She just released her newest video, with fast vocals and a dubstep bassline. See the lyrics here

fun with networks

2011-04-04T21:38:00.001+02:00

geeky

3d visualization of an ownership network. Using cuttlefish and processing.org. More information here and here.

(Originally posted here.)

vegetarian, wtf?

2011-04-04T21:04:00.002+02:00

choosing lifestyles

being vegetarian(*) has one serious drawback: during meals, you nearly always need to explain and/or justify why anyone would ever choose such a lifestyle.

phuket vegetarian festival (credits phuketobserver.com)

with the years, i have chosen the following two strategies.

i.) the short answer

i can easily live without eating animals.

ii.) the long answer

in my opinion, the factory farming of animals is grotesque and perverse; these are terrible places for the animals and the human workers alike.
it is simply not possible to feed billions of people with meat (even if you employ factory farming). meat is a very inefficient source of calories and uses disproportionate amounts of resources.
the seas are in a terrible state (see more).
i am personally not prepared to kill and slaughter lambs, calves or other animals. contrary to common belief, even very "primitive" animals can display a surprising level of intelligence (see more).

disclaimer

i do not believe everyone should become vegetarian. the issue is more about how often people need to eat meat. and if it is really necessary to always buy the cheapest meat available. for me, it boils down to how one behaves as a consumer in general.

i do not believe a vegetarian lifestyle is necessarily healthier. you can eat very unhealthily, also as a vegetarian. however, i do not believe in the myth, that vegetarians are generally weakly and prone to deficiency symptoms. humans have successfully been vegetarian in various cultures for millennia.

i am not going to bother with giving sources. find out yourself, if you care...

(*) of the many flavours of vegetarianism, i am at the "ovo-lacto" level: no fish, no meat, no chicken.

party on...

2011-04-04T19:58:00.000+02:00

musing

hanging out with friends can help a lot in maintaining one's sanity...

the status of climate scepticism

2011-02-24T19:55:00.027+01:00

facepalm...

Unnoticed by the public, climate scientists continue doing their job, monitoring and researching climate change. Albeit with a new twist: it has been realized, that also human psychology needs to be thrown into the, already very interdisciplinary, mix. Not only the hard science matters, but crucially also subtle issues, like clarifying, constraining and communicating uncertainty. To this aim, the prestigious Nature Publishing Group has issued a new journal: Nature Climate Change, augmenting the physical climate science with insights from social science research. Read the editorial here.

Meanwhile, in the climate sceptic camp, Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has been getting a lot of media attention. He is a prolific, hugely popular and very influential climate sceptic.

Let's see what happens when one gets to the bottom of his contrarian claims and assertions, by the courtesy of youtuber and science journalist potholer54:

Monckton recently lost a legal battle with the BBC over a documentary about climate change scepticism portraying him, called "Meet the Climate Sceptics" (BBC Four), which, he said, would gravely damage his reputation. (See the four youtube clips below.)

The central question is this. It's not whether CO2 or other greenhouse gases can cause warming, because we've known for 200 years that they can. It's not whether we are causing the CO2 in the atmosphere to rise, because we are. The only question that really matters is, given the rate at which we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, how much warming will that cause, if it continues [i.e., climate sensitivity].

Christopher Monckton

It is important to understand the difference between forcing and sensitivity because, as we will see in a minute, Monckton gets them completely mixed up.

Potholer54

Christopher Monckton on the politics of climate science:

In December [2009], just weeks away, at Copenhagen, a treaty will be signed, that will, for the first time, create a world government [...].

and on a miraculous invention:

And then 18 moths ago I cured myself with an invention which shows much promise. We're curing people of everything from HIV to malaria to multiple sclerosis.

More Monckton quotes and misquotes:

"Meet the Climate Sceptics":

More on climate change in the blog post a climate of confusion.

random quotes: the reality about modern life...

2011-02-10T19:50:00.013+01:00

well, someone had to say it...

this is a strange, rather perverse story. just to put it in very simple terms: it's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about. [1]

the reality of the society we're in, is there are thousands and thousands of people out there, leading lives of quiet screaming desperation, where they work long hard hours, at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy tings they don't need, to impress people they don't like. [2]

we can change society's definition of success. away from the moronically simplistic notion, that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. [2]

[1] Professor of Sustainable Development at University of Surrey, Tim Jackson's TED talk Economic reality check, October 5, 2010
[2] Best-selling author and advertising CEO, Nigel Marsh's TEDx talk How to make work-life balance work, February 7, 2011

k&d: from the 90s back to the 10s

2011-01-30T19:27:00.013+01:00

over a decade of electronica...
the austrian duo kruder and dorfmeister are back! after having helped shape the 90s electronica landscape with their trip-hop, dub, d'n'b and downtempo inspirations and remixes, it became quiet around the two sound freaks. ah yes, all those memories listening to the infamous k&d sessions album back then;-)

since 2010 peter kruder and richard dorfmeister, together with the two mcs earl zinger and ras tweed, are touring in celebration of the 16 year anniversary of their g-stone recordings label with a 2 hour live set sporting stunning visuals (by fritz fitzke) next to an array of hard-core beatz.

on the 29th of january 2011 they performed in dorfmeister's home town of choice, zurich. as soon as the show started, the concert hall was instantaneously transformed into a club.

k&d at volkshaus in zurich, kraftwerk-style.

a little impression from inside the venue (albeit with the terrible audio provided by an iphone):

beardyman makes some noize...

2010-08-18T20:47:00.013+02:00

enter the subculture...

a disc jockey (also known as dj or deejay) is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience.

says wikipedia.

many modern djs add electronic effects to their dj sets relying on existing samples of other djs/music producers.

some djs produce their tracks live at the club.

and then there is beardyman, a beat box guru, who produces whole dj sets constructed live from his vocalisations only, using looping effects. he usually makes heavy use of korg's kaoss pads.

beardyman live looping @ lethargy (august 13th, beginning of the 2010 streetparade in zurich @ rote fabrik --- more on flickr):

disclaimer: don't record loud music using an iphone;-)

other beardyman performances

classic:

using the kaoss pads:

live show with improv beatboxing and looping:

beardyman is also really good at producing random sounds:

a few questions...

2010-04-21T21:01:00.029+02:00

feeling insignificant

the FQXi, an organization striving to understand the foundations of physics and cosmology, is looking for questions for an essay contest. they propose:

What is the universe made of?
Is Nature continuous or discrete?
Why the quantum?
Physics and philosophy: How does one help the other?
Origin of the fundamental constants
Origin of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Emergence in physics
Paradoxes in physics
Physics, Mathematics, and Reality
Physics, Knowledge, and Information

i would add:

why does anything exist ("why is there something rather than nothing? for nothingness is simpler and easier than anything" - von Leibniz)?
what is the origin of everything?
how much of reality is unobservable (multiverse, many worlds, higher dimensions, dark energy, supersymmetrical particles, ...)
why three spatial dimensions?
what is the nature of time (fundamental or emergent, an illusion, arrow of time and the low entropy of the early universe, ...)?
what are laws of nature?
why is there a structure-forming and self-organizing process and how did it arise and how does it function?
why is complex behaviour the result of simple rules?
are there transcendental, "supernatural" or psi phenomena, or: is there an non-physical level of reality?
is there a unifying "theory of everything" to be discovered?
is there a theory of quantum gravity to be discovered?
why does macro-reality appear so well-ordered whilst the quantum realm is so bizarre (non-locality, observation/measurement, uncertainty, duality, entanglement, delayed choice, superpositions, probabilistic nature, ...)?
will there ever be a conclusive interpretation of quantum theory?
why (special) relativity (alternatively: why a constant speed of light)?
is space and time quantized?
is reality intrinsically finite, or: does infinity really exist outside the human mind?
does a physical higgs boson exist (my conspiracy theory says no;-)?
why a big bang and an expanding universe?
at what point in the evolution of the cosmos did the possibility of life (and consciousness) first become apparent?
why are scaling-law relations and distributions ubiquitous in complex systems?

and:

what can we know?
why were the attempts to found science on common sense notions (as seen in the programs of logical empiricism and critical rationalism) unsuccessful?
why gödel's theorems?
do the clay institutes' millennium problems have solutions?
what is the mind matter link?
why the correspondence between inner and outer reality (the mind's ability to devise formal thought systems and the universes propensity to be described by them, e.g., wigner's unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics) or: why has science been so fantastically successful at describing reality?
why is science producing amazing technology at accelerating speed?
why life?
why death?
does any non-physical entity or information content continue to exist after physical death?
what about (temperature- or chemically-induced) suspended animation?
what is the biological basis for aging and what determines the lifespan of healthy organisms (longevity)?
why consciousness?
is there a model of the mind or theory of the brain to be discovered?
is there free will?
does a true mystical or enlightened state of mind exist?
why information processing (from dna to consciousness and computers)?
is there a meaning to existence?
is there a creating or omnipotent entity?
do we live in a simulation?
are there absolutes (e.g., good and evil)?
why is life so improbable (fine-tuning of physical constants, birth of stars, supernovae fusing heavy elements, carbon's unique bonding properties, right temperature conditions, anomalies of water, ...)?
were the dozen or so extinction events in the history of life imperative for the emergence of humans?
how will life look in 3 billion years (assuming it doesn't get annihilated)
will the amount of suffering experienced by living creatures on earth ever decrease?
will the human race ever reach a level of sustainability with the environment?
will the human race ever manifest collective intelligence?
will theology ever be superseded?

quote of the day...

2010-04-17T16:36:00.008+02:00

musing

well i think the people who would benefit most of all are professors. i think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas and with a great certainty about what's what to take this thing and to realize the world he's constructed is by no means the only world. that there are these extraordinary other types of universe.

aldous huxley on psychedelic substances.

@11:27

a climate of confusion

2010-02-05T16:43:00.089+01:00

rational

is climate change a threat? does global warming exist? is co2 the driving factor? or is it all just an elaborate hoax?

but taking a step back first, what can we know? what is science? what are laws of nature? and what can be said for certain when addressing these issues?

two short comments:

the global climate is a mind-bogglingly intricate, interdependent, adaptive, and self-regulating complex system
without wanting to bother with the philosophy of science (e.g., problems of logical empiricism and critical rationalism), any knowledge about the nature of reality is never certain. 100% certainty is not what science is about. its a process adapting in the face of new observations or insights.

furthermore, i think being sceptical is a very sane approach to life. and i find alarmism and scaremongering very unhelpful and misguided strategies. finally, topics that continuously get hyped in the media tend to become very boring very quickly.

the two sides

a first look at the debate between proponents and sceptics of anthropogenic climate change reveals two things: a very heated, ideological debate and a lot of conflicting information, e.g., nicely visualized here http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/

in a nutshell, the sceptic argument is something like this: scientists have conspired with politicians to generate a climate of fear based on fraud and pseudoscience. to quote lubos motl, a former harvard string theorist and passionate climate sceptic: "to summarize, what WG2 [the IPCC Working Group II] is saying is mostly a shameful piece of crap [...].", "[the IPCC is a] bureaucratic tumour of professional parasites and liars [...]." taken from his blog http://motls.blogspot.com/

i am very willing to consider the possibility, that there has been fraud, incompetence, an existing hidden agenda, exaggerated alarmism, and an environmental ideology in the climate activist camp. however, i would also assign a similar level of fraud, incompetence, existence of conspiracy theories, denial, and political ideology driving climate scepticism. considering the possible distribution of deceitful human beings in the population, i would be very surprised if they all turned out to be climate activists or climate scientists.

so, how to see through the misinformation and rationally try and get to the reality of the situation? well, i think this is actually quite easy. need to know stuff about cern and higgs bosons? ask a particle physicist. need to understand things about the climate? well, ask a climate scientist. and as climate scientists represent one of the biggest scientific communities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyorcJ28UA) this should be easy.

so what are these people, who professionally work in the field, and who are assembling the vastly growing body of knowledge on the climate saying? well, basically this:

It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
and
http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/306/5702/1686
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/19/climategate-copenhagen-science-opinions-contributors-s-robert-lichter.html
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/12/10/tech-climate-uk-scientists.html

try browsing the scholarly artices on anthropogenic climate change:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=anthropogenic+climate+change
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=anthropogenic+climate+change+hoax+fraud

of course there is no 100% certainty and there remain many open questions and legitimate sceptical voices
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

the prestigious economist magazine, highly sceptical until 2006 http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7852924, concludes:

This newspaper believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it. That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be constantly tested against evidence, and refined, and more evidence collected, and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists. When they stop questioning orthodoxy, mankind will have given up the search for truth. The sceptics should not be silenced.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14966227

the problem

so, what is the problem then?

i have a big problem when a whole community of scientists gets successfully branded in the public opinion as a bunch of lying, incompetent, alarmist and fanatically driven people producing nothing but pseudo-science in an ongoing global effort to dupe the public. the tactics with which this was achieved (e.g., discredit the scientists and the science, imply that there is an hidden agenda and ideological motivation, conjure up conspiracy theories, select people with no professional training in the subject as public spokespeople, pay public relations firms and lobby groups to instil a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public, promote obscure ideas and fringe theories, ...) painfully remind me of creationism.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/21/806905/-Climate-Denial-Sociopathology,-Creationism:-Hacked-Emails,-Piltdown

or roy spencer, climate scientist and former senior scientist for climate studies at nasa, who is both sceptical about the climate (see his book http://www.drroyspencer.com/climate-confusion/) and holds the belief "that, despite all [he] had previously thought, genesis, the first book of the bible, might actually be true!" http://theevolutioncrisis.org.uk/testimony2.php

and although many of the sceptic claims have been debunked, they continually reappear, just as if ignoring one thing and relentlessly repeating an other thing makes it true.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense
http://www.nzic.org.nz/CiNZ/articles/Mackie_71_3.pdf

unfortunately, it is so much easier to be "educated" via blogs, youtube and the like than actually read the abstract of a scientific paper on the subject. in my opinion this accounts for the terrible signal to noise ratio in the public discussion, given by the multitude of uninformed voices of opinionated people thinking they are experts on climate science. and then you get this:

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/steep-decline-in-american_n_330315.html

climate science can perhaps be broken down into four parts:

reconstruction of the past climate (paleoclimatology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
instrumental measurements since 1850 (covering the atmosphere, the oceans (sea levels, acidity, temperature), the cryosphere, etc.)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5955/984
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8261953.stm
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/arcticice_decline.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850
http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/090622_gletschermasse_su/index_EN
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE59S3LT20091029
http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/091214_gletscherschwund_su/index_EN
the actual science of the climate (insolation, greenhouse gases, aerosols, feedback mechanisms, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
computer simulations of climate models (one of the fastest supercomputers will be used by the german climate data processing centre http://www.dkrz.de/dkrz/about/hardware/HPC_Cluster?setlang=en_US)

and then there are secondary effects of climate change seen by biologists, e.g.,
http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=1354-1013
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/warming-coral.html
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050621_warming_list.html

consistently, objectively and rationally rejecting all of this knowledge is a very tough call. moreover, there is not much in terms of viable alternative hypothesis to work with. e.g., solar activity theory, a pet theory of many sceptics, doesn't look too good at the moment
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/463/2086/2447
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/publications/preprints/pp2006/MPA2001.pdf
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/brightness.shtml

furthermore, the sceptics don't speak in unison. there is a large spectrum of (contradictory) sceptic arguments

climate change is natural
global warming is not occurring
the global climate is actually getting colder
the global climate is getting warmer, but not because of human activities
the global climate is getting warmer, in part because of human activities, but this will create greater benefits than costs
the global climate is getting warmer, in part because of human activities, but the impacts are not sufficient to require any policy response

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_change/science/skeptics.asp
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

in effect, the sceptics offer no alternate hypothesis to the issue and are basically just saying "no, you're wrong".

a sensible attitude:

Scientists will continue to monitor the global climate and the factors which influence it. It is important that all legitimate potential scientific explanations continue to be considered and investigated. Debate will continue, and the Royal Society has just hosted a two day discussion meeting attended by over 300 scientists, but it must not be at the expense of action. Those who promote fringe scientific views but ignore the weight of evidence are playing a dangerous game. They run the risk of diverting attention from what we can do to ensure the world's population has the best possible future.

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/News.aspx?id=1521&terms=great+global+warming+swindle
by martin rees, cosmologist and president of the royal society (see an inspiring talk on cosmology, complexity, and the future perspectives of humanity here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qF26MbYgOA), in a response to the documentary "the great global warming swindle"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle

in my opinion, an advisable and sane strategy is the so-called "precautionary principle". this is detailed in a study of the reinsurance company swiss re on the topic (remember, they have an economic interest in finding out what is really going on, as they are the ones who will pay if things actually go wrong)
published in 2007, as a useful tool for decision-making when there is uncertainty and the stakes are high
http://www.swissre.com/resources/35aee480469b0764a38fb31f84a810e3-ULUR-75GHUN_insights_August_2007.pdf.

i believe even a small indication that humans could be responsible in tipping the balance of a complex and life-sustaining system, such as the global climate is, warrants action. especially, as 100% certainty and unison are elusive goals. however, what this action should be in detail is a whole other can of worms, involving governments, politicians, and generally lobbying and special interest groups, next to scientists...

so to conclude, sceptical, yeah, unscientific, no.

epilogue

it may be a bit disconcerting, but the emergent rules of how science is done in the world are these: new scientific results are reviewed by scientists working in the specific fields and get published in scientific journals if deemed relevant and correct. the importance or prestige of a journal is reflected in its so called impact factor. this is so from quantum physics to the study of complex systems. it is not a perfect set-up and has its drawbacks. but judging, for instance, by the breakneck-speed of technological advances witnessed today, which is founded in the body of knowledge assembled by the various communities of scientists, things could be far worse...

i often marvel at the emergent collective intelligence of ants, an assemblage of pretty unintelligent individuals, to form an adaptive, self-organizing superorganism, living in a sustainable balance with its environment. having said this, i find it one of the most perplexing observations, that individual intelligence appears to hinder the emergence of collective intelligence, as demonstrated by the human race and its relationship with the environment.

just for fun

and in random order...

sceptics:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60H3VE20100120
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/01/climate-scientist-breached-dat.html
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1098476
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport
http://www.conservapedia.com/Global_warming
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/15/reference-450-skeptical-peer-reviewed-papers/
http://www.prisonplanet.com/third-world-under-attack-from-genocidal-climate-change-policy.html
http://www.infowars.com/hacked-climate-emails-include-calls-for-earth-government-as-foundation-of-new-world-order-splitting-of-america/
http://www.climatedepot.com/
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
http://www.globalwarminghoaxblog.com/
http://www.co2science.org/
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/38609397.html
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/146138
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6944684.ece

addendum

in the weeks after having written the above post, my severely biased science sources gave me the following;-)

log: february/march 2010

Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming; 28 January 2010

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488v1
"Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here, we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

Subtropical Water Melts Greenland's Fjords; 18 February 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/warm-water-melts-greenland-glaciers-100218.html

Ice Shelves Disappearing on Antarctic Peninsula: Glacier Retreat and Sea Level Rise Are Possible Consequences; 22 February 2010
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100222120137.htm

Humans Behind Rising Seas, Study Says; 28 February 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/human-activity-rising-sea-levels-100227.html

FAQ: Global Warming and Snowstorms; 2 March 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/global-warming-snowstorms-faq-100302.html

Do Stolen Emails Show Climate Science Malfeasance? 3 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climategate-emails

Climate change will impact infectious diseases worldwide, but questions remain as to how; 3 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-will-impact-infectio-2010-03-03

Which climate changes can be blamed on humans? 5 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/03/which-climate-changes-can-be-b.html

High-carbon ice age mystery solved
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18618-highcarbon-ice-age-mystery-solved.html
"How come a big ice age happened when carbon dioxide levels were high? It's a question climate sceptics often ask. But sometimes the right answer is the simplest: it turns out CO₂ levels were not that high after all."

Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions; 8 March 2010
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/23/0906974107.abstract
"CO₂ emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the primary cause of global warming."

Butterflies emerging earlier because of climate change; 18 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18671-butterflies-emerging-earlier-because-of-climate-change.html
"For the first time, a causal link has been established between climate change and the timing of a natural event – the emergence of the common brown butterfly."

Has Global Warming Slowed? 22 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=has-global-warming-slowed
Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Earth's Nine Lives
http://www.newscientist.com/special/ocean-to-ozone-earths-nine-life-support-systems
"We have already overstepped three of nine planetary boundaries and are at grave risk of transgressing several others"

State of Flux: Images of Change
http://climate.nasa.gov/stateOfFlux/index.cfm
"Each week State of Flux will be featuring images of different locations on planet Earth, showing change over time periods ranging from centuries to days"

A warming world: global temperature update
http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld/

WIREs Climate Change
http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresJournal/wisId-WCC.html
An important new forum to promote cross-disciplinary discussion of a global phenomenon with long-term societal implications.
An authoritative, encyclopedic resource addressing key topics from diverse research perspectives.

Honesty is the best policy for climate scientists; 24 February 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527492.500-honesty-is-the-best-policy-for-climate-scientists.html

Can we trust the IPCC on the big stuff? 24 February 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527493.700-can-we-trust-the-ipcc-on-the-big-stuff.html?full=true

There's no war to fight over global warming; 2 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527490.100-theres-no-war-to-fight-over-global-warming.html
"Perhaps the most astonishing allegation we face is that climate science is a grand conspiracy of thousands of scientists in many countries."

Why scientists must be the new climate sceptics; 4 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18609-why-scientists-must-be-the-new-climate-sceptics.html
"Science needs to fight back, but not just by attacking its critics. Scientists need to reclaim the badge of "scepticism". They need to show that although the essentials of global warming are settled, the field itself is alive with debate and revision, as all science should be. They need to tell the public that there are things in the science that are open for debate, even if those things do not detract from the case for action."

Climate Change; 19 February 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PWDFzWt-Ag
"The Internet was abuzz with a quote from Professor Phil Jones that there has been no global warming since 1995. But is that what he actually said?"

The Impact of Food Waste on Climate Change; 5 March 2010
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/03/the-impact-of-food-waste.php

After Climate-Gate, U.N. Submits to Independent Review; 10 March 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/10/united-nations-submits-independent-review/
"Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has ordered a newly formed outside scientific panel to review its [the IPCCs] "procedures and practices" -- and more significantly, its management."

How Can NOAA Help Explain Climate Change? 15 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=noaa-climate-change
"New administrator and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco hopes to explain what scientists do and do not know via the government agency's new climate service"

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I

Vast Antarctic iceberg 'threatens marine life'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8538060.stm

The Most Surprising Results of Global Warming
http://www.livescience.com/environment/091204-top10-surprising-climate-results.html

How to Capitalize on Carbon - Pt. 1: Balancing Earth;
http://www.livescience.com/common/media/show/player.php?aid=34051

Capitalizing on Carbon - Pt. 2: Pumping New Oil
http://www.livescience.com/common/media/video/player.php?aid=34023

Coffee hit by global warming say growers; 27 Feb 2010
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Global-Warming/-Coffee-hit-by-global-warming-say-growers-/articleshow/5623299.cms

[...] it's time for the wine industry to lead the agricultural charge against global warming; 15 February 2010
http://www.zesterdaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=400

The Christian Science Monitor: Ocean acidification: another path to EPA rules on carbon emissions? 12 March 2010
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0312/Ocean-acidification-another-path-to-EPA-rules-on-carbon-emissions
"Ocean acidification results from the ocean's uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many scientists have become increasingly concerned about the effect industrial emissions of CO2 are having on the chemistry of the world's oceans and about the fallout for many species of marine animals."

The Economist: The clouds of unknowing; 18 March 2010
There are lots of uncertainties in climate science. But that does not mean it is fundamentally wrong
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15719298
"No one doubts that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, good at absorbing infra-red radiation. It is also well established that human activity is putting more of it into the atmosphere than natural processes can currently remove. Measurements made since the 1950s show the level of carbon dioxide rising year on year, from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 387ppm in 2009. Less direct records show that the rise began about 1750, and that the level was stable at around 280ppm for about 10,000 years before that. This fits with human history: in the middle of the 18th century people started to burn fossil fuels in order to power industrial machinery. Analysis of carbon isotopes, among other things, shows that the carbon dioxide from industry accounts for most of the build-up in the atmosphere. "

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

What's the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399535012?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwgregcraven-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0399535012

Some Journalists' Scientific Ignorance
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kunc/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1616795/Regional/Some.Journalists%27.Scientific.Ignorance

100 Places to Remember Before they Disappear
http://www.100places.com/en/

The media, global warming and Climategate; 11 March 2010
http://www.pri.org/science/environment/the-media-global-warming-and-climategate1908.html
"Scientists' efforts to defend the integrity of climate studies thwarted by unbalanced media coverage."

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change; 28 February 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html

book review: "The Real Global Warming Disaster"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/15/real-global-warming-christopher-booker
"[The author's] position would require that you accept something like the following:
1) Most of the world's climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception.
2) Most of the world's climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models, yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.
There's a third option: the world's climate system is hugely complex, hard to predict and constantly surprising; yet in the long term the world is getting warmer, for reasons we basically understand, and there is good reason to believe that humans are mostly responsible for it."

Political ads: new weapon in U.S. climate change war? 11 March 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62A0MF20100311

Battle over climate science spreads to US schoolrooms; 11 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527514.100-battle-over-climate-science-spreads-to-us-schoolrooms.html
"Schools in three US states - Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota - have been told to teach alternatives to the scientific consensus on global warming. The moves appear to be allied to efforts to teach creationism in public schools."

---

Update: U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims - Scientists Continue to Debunk “Consensus” in 2008 - Released: December 11, 2008
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport

newLISP tackles global warming
http://unbalanced-parentheses.nfshost.com/newlisptacklesglobalwarming

---

log april 2010

Climate Change: The Clock is ticking
http://www.riskmetrics.com/knowledge/climate
"Climate change is emerging as the #1 global sustainability risk driver. RiskMetrics’ Guide to Climate Risk Management provides an overview of climate risk as an investment issue and related solutions."

Climategate inquiry points finger at university; 31 March 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18715-climategate-inquiry-points-finger-at-university.html
"Climate scientists need to swallow their misgivings and share their data and working methods with their critics.
But, in an unexpected turn of events, the [...] committee has placed more blame for the debacle on the university than on the scientists at its Climatic Research Unit [...]"

Who Funds Contrariness on Climate Change? 31 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=who-funds-contrariness-on
"Greenpeace is accusing one of the nation's largest conglomerates of sowing confusion around scientific assertions behind climate change, a broadside that comes amid waning public engagement on human-caused emissions."

Climate Change Innovation summer school, 5 July to 13 August 2010 in Paris, London and Zurich
http://www.climate-kic-proposal.org/k_education/sumschool2010

Climate scientist bashing; 7 April 2010
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/climate-scientist-bashing/
"A new popular sport in some media these days is 'climate scientist bashing'. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news."

Climategate scientists chastised over statistics; 14 April 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18776-climategate-scientists-chastised-over-statistics.html
"'We found absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever,' said Oxburgh at a press briefing in London today."

UK Inquiry Clears Climate Scientists in Email Row; 14 April 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=uk-clears-climate-scientists
"An inquiry cleared British climate researchers of wrongdoing on Wednesday after their emails were hacked, leaked and held up by skeptics as evidence they had exaggerated the case for man-made global warming."

Cosmic rays and global warming; Europhysics News Vol. 41, No. 1, 2010, pp. 27-30
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/index.php?option=article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/epn/abs/2010/01/epn20101p27/epn20101p27.html
"In our view the jury is back and the verdict is that cosmic rays and solar irradiance are not guilty for most of the GlobalWarming. Nevertheless, they could be responsible for a contribution and we look forward to future experiments [...]."

And the heat goes on: warmest March on record; Associated Press; 16 April 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iHflCWniocoeysySL9BE1rmXD8rgD9F3IVKO0
"Last month was the warmest March on record worldwide, based on records back to 1880, scientists reported Thursday."

Debunking Lord Monckton Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfA1LpiYk2o
"He's everywhere on the climate denial circuit. He's not a scientist. He's a classics major and journalist. How is it that he's been able to sell himself to climate deniers as their number one spokesman?"

Debunking Lord Monckton Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duxG4lyeSlc

Geologists Drill into Antarctica and Find Troubling Signs for Ice Sheets' Future; 19 April 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=antarctica-andrill-ice-sheets

Impacts of Climate Change Extend to Human Health; 22 April 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-human-health
"Climate change is already affecting U.S. and other industrial nations' public health, according to a new government report"

Scientists refute carbon capture doubts; 26 April 2010
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P4FQ20100426
"Geologists refuted on Monday a report which in January had cast doubt on a technology to bury greenhouse gases underground, and on which some policymakers have pinned hopes to fight climate change."

Melting icebergs boost sea-level rise; 30 April 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18841-melting-icebergs-boost-sealevel-rise.html
"When an ice cube melts in a glass, the overall water level does not change from when the ice is frozen to when it joins the liquid. Doesn't that mean that melting icebergs shouldn't contribute to sea-level rise? Not quite."

Summer School - IDEAL Climate ‘Responsible Engineering in a Warming World’; June 21-26, 2010, TU Delft, The Netherlands
http://www.ethicsandtechnology.eu/news/comments/summer_school_ideal_climate_responsible_engineering_in_a_warming_world
"Climate change is one of the most urgent problems the world is currently facing. It is commonly agreed that the world’s energy consumption lies at the heart of the problem. In order to deal with the climate problem two types of solutions are proposed, namely mitigation and adaptation."

Sea Ice Loss Accelerates Arctic Warming; 30 April 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sea-ice-arctic-warming
"The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the globe thanks in part to melting sea ice, a new study finds"

Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer? 5 May 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/Whatever-Happened-to-the-Hole-in-the-Ozone-Layer-100505.html
"Interestingly, recent studies have shown that the size of the ozone hole affects the global temperature. Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps, according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research."

Greenhouse-gas numbers up in the air; 5 May 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenhouse-gas-numbers-up-in-t
"To control emissions, countries must first account accurately for their carbon. That will take considerable effort [...]."

Warmer Nights Threaten India's Rice Production; 5 May 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=warmer-nights-india-rice
"Climate change has made nights warmer in India over the past decade, an ominous sign for the nation's vital rice crop."

Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean; 5 May 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VHC1-DO_8
"In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse."

---

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science; Science 7 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5979, pp. 689 - 690
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689
" We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of politicalassaults on scientists in general and on climate scientistsin particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientificfacts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientificconclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. Whensomeone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutelycertain before taking any action, it is the same as saying societyshould never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophicas climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk forour planet.
Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basiclaws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature,and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings,scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designedto find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientistsbuild reputations and gain recognition not only for supportingconventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating thatthe scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a betterexplanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einsteindid. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeplytested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-establishedtheories" and are often spoken of as "facts."
For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that ourplanet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the originof Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today'sorganisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory ofevolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by thescientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could showthese theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into thiscategory: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistentobjective evidence that humans are changing the climate in waysthat threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typicallydriven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effortto provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies theevidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involvethousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensivereports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes.When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there isnothing remotely identified in the recent events that changesthe fundamental conclusions about climate change:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations ofheat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washingtondoes not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gasesover the last century is due to human activities, especiallythe burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth'sclimate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patternsto change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, includingincreasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologiccycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making theoceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatenscoastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies,marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments,and far more.
Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientificsocieties, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusionsshould be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned aboutwhat future generations will face from business-as-usual practices.We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediatelyto address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrainedburning of fossil fuels.
We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminalprosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guiltby association, the harassment of scientists by politiciansseeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outrightlies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We canignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope weare lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce thethreat of global climate change quickly and substantively. Thegood news is that smart and effective actions are possible.But delay must not be an option."

----

log january 2011

A climate sceptic prophesied that we would see ever more papers being published in scientific journals opposing the consensus on anthropogenic climate change. From February 2010 to January 2011 I was randomly checking the science and major news outlets for related publications and studies next to new books. These are posted below.

Unfortunately, I cannot see the prophecy being fulfilled. On the contrary, ever more knowledge is pouring in, substantiating the scientific consensus. From a wast array of different fields.

However, what I find very positive, is that some scientists are finally taking the rational and legitimate sceptics serious and are addressing their concerns. This has the possibility to refine the filed of climate science.

Unfortunately, I don't see this having any impact on the public's perception of the issue. As the flooding of the internet with pseudo-science, misinformation and blatant lies has persuaded many people, that, thank god, everything is just fine and the human race's activities have no impact on the planet we live on whatsoever. If only...

Here are some of the most widespread myths about climate science and arguments why climate change is not a problem, and how they can be refuted.
http://knowledge.allianz.com/?717/climate-skeptics-science-myths
Allianz is one of the largest financial services providers in the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allianz

Even Skeptics Admit Global Warming is Real; 18 March 2010"The 2,500 or so scientists, economists and other experts of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) call global warming "unequivocal" and think it "very likely" that humans have contributed to the problem. The world's governments agree with the panel, which also shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Then there's the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). These 23 individuals from 15 countries, including a handful of scientists, disagree. Led by physicist S. Fred Singer—best known for his denial of the dangers of secondhand smoke—they argue the reverse: 'Natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause' of climate change."http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=even-skeptics-admin-global-warming-is-real-video

State of the Climate in 2009; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center
As appearing in the June 2010 issue (Vol. 91) of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2009.php

Hunting for Projects to Help Fish and Wildlife Adapt to Climate Change; 22 March 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hunting-for-climate-change
"For the average United States' city or 'burb dweller, firsthand evidence of climate change is rare. Hunters and anglers see it every day.
That's one of the main messages from a coalition of hunting and fishing organizations that released a report Monday outlining the consequences of climate change for fish and wildlife in the United States."

Expert credibility in climate change; 9 April 2010
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
"(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. "

Roz Savage: Why I'm rowing across the Pacific; 28 April 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXqPaHQp4Xw

Sensitive side (The cutting edge -newly published NASA research); 05 May 2010
http://climate.nasa.gov/cuttingEdge/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowCuttingEdge&CeID=312
"A little extra carbon dioxide in the air may, unfortunately, go further towards warming Earth than previously thought. A team of British and U.S. researchers have uncovered evidence [1] that Earth’s climate may be up to 50 percent more sensitive to long-term increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide than current climate models predict."

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's glacier observations:
http://glaciology.ethz.ch/swiss-glaciers/
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/divisions/gz/projects
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/people/gz/abauder/projects/data/gz_141_mass_balance_gries_silvrettaglacier
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/people/gz/luethim/projects/data/gz_141_causes_rap_thin_jakobshavn
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/people/gz/abauder/projects/data/gz_141_variations_gr_aletschgretscher
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/people/gz/archive/gz_143_mass_balance_photogrammetric
http://www.vaw.ethz.ch/people/gz/archive/gz_141_reg_diff_mass_balance
Temporal glacier variations are among the clearest natural indicators of ongoing climate change. Continuous efforts in glacier monitoring have achieved long time-series of length variation, mass balance and volume change of glaciers.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Center for Climate Systems Modeling
http://www.c2sm.ethz.ch/
The Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) has been
established to address the scientifically challenging and
socially relevant issue of climate change. While there is
a more widespread acceptance that anthropogenic activities
are significantly influencing the Earth’s climate,
many uncertainties remain in our understanding of the
complex processes involved in the climate system, including
its atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, biospheric
and cryospheric sub-components. The overarching goal
of C2SM is to foster and coordinate the development and
application of climate models operating at various scales
to improve our capability to understand and predict the
Earth’s climate, including its weather systems, chemical
composition and hydrological cycle.

2nd Deepest Lake Now Warmer Than in Past 1,500 Years; 16 May 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/lake-tanganyika-warming-100516.html
"Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest and the second-deepest lake in the world, is warmer than it has been in more than 1,500 years, a new analysis released today finds. "

2010 Warmest on Record So Far; 19 May 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/2010-warmest-year-so-far-100519.html
"The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January through April, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has records going back to 1880. "

New Study Finds Ocean Warmed Significantly Since 1993; 19 May 2010
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-169
"The upper layer of Earth's ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new international study co-authored by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet. "

Living in denial: Unleashing a lie; 21 May 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.300-living-in-denial-unleashing-a-lie.html?full=true
"IN November 2006, the conservative columnist Piers Akerman published a scathing attack on climate science in Australia's Daily Telegraph. Akerman contended that warnings about warming were deliberately exaggerated. To back his claim, he quoted John Houghton, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying: 'Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.'
[...]
So the quote's gradual rise to prominence began. It has now appeared in at least three books, well over 100 blog posts and on around 24,000 web pages. It has become a rallying cry for climate deniers. Yet Houghton never said or wrote those words. His 1994 book usually cited as the source contains no such phrase. The first person to publish them appears to have been Akerman."

How climate scientists can repair their reputation ; 02 June 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627624.700-how-climate-scientists-can-repair-their-reputation.html
"They [climate scientists] must realise that they face doubts not just about published results but also about their conduct and honesty. It simply won't work for scientists to continue to appeal to the weight of the evidence while refusing to discuss the integrity of their profession. The harm has been increased by a perceived reluctance to admit even the possibility of mistakes or wrongdoing."

Interview by Gretchen Cook-Anderson, NASA Earth Science News Team; 1 June 2010
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=324

Majority of Americans Still 'Believe' in Global Warming; 9 June 2010
http://www.livescience.com/culture/majority-americans-believe-global-warming-real-100609.html

Bowed but not cowed: People still believe in anthropogenic climate change; 11 June 2010
http://www.economist.com/node/16352731?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/globalwarming
"The American survey shows, as such surveys have shown for years, that there is a strong partisan effect on climate-change belief"

http://americasclimatechoices.org/
"The newest report in the America's Climate Choices suite of studies, Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change, was released Thursday, June 22, 2010. The report examines how to best provide decision makers information on climate change. See the report page for more information. A final overarching report, America's Climate Choices, will build on each of the previous reports to offer a scientific framework for shaping the policy choices underlying the nation's efforts to confront climate change."

Are Climate Skeptics Lousy Scientists? 24 June 2010
http://www.slate.com/id/2258088/
"The White House says they are."

How close are we to catastrophic climate change? 29 June 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=how-close-are-we-to-catastrophic-cl-2010-06-28
"As you may have noticed, scientists remain convinced that humans are altering the global climate with an excess of greenhouse gas emissions—soot, methane and the ever-present carbon dioxide we pump out from our lungs and coal-burning power plants. The question is: how bad is said climate change going to get?"

Climate control: Is CO2 really in charge? 30 June 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627661.200-climate-control-is-co2-really-in-charge.html
"A few studies, however, suggest that there may been periods when it was cold when CO₂ levels were high, or hot when CO₂ levels were low. So what was going on at these times? Are we missing part of the climate puzzle?
The existence of such inconsistencies no more disproves the idea that CO₂ causes warming than your house warming up on a sunny day proves it does not get warm when you turn the heating on - rather, it suggests that some other factor caused the warming."

'Climategate' jibes fly over El Niño impact on warming; 29 June 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727670.201-climategate-jibes-fly-over-el-nino-impact-on-warming.html
"The echoes of "climategate" rumble on with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research in which some of the researchers involved take issue with a suggestion that greenhouse gases are not primarily responsible for global warming.
'[researchers whose emails were stolen from the University of East Anglia last November] uncovered a fatal flaw in the analysis [...]'
"

Expert credibility in climate change; 9 April 2010
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
"Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. "

Climategate Scientist Cleared in Inquiry, Again; 01 July 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climategate-scientist-cleared-in-inquiry-again
"It is the third formal inquiry to clear scientists involved in the scandal, which publicized more than 1,000 private e-mails from scientists expressing doubts about their data, refusing to share information and questioning the work of others.

Mann is confident these efforts to discredit scientists and undermine climate science will ultimately be judged harshly by history.
'They will continue to attack the science and the scientist," he said. "But I believe that as (the evidence) becomes increasingly compelling, as the public continues to understand that climate change is already unfolding ... we will look back with scorn at those who denied climate change.'"

The climate scandal that never was; 05 July 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/07/the-climate-scandal-that-never-was.html
"In truth, climategate was a pseudo-scandal, and the worst that can be said of the scientists is that they wrote some ill-advised things. 'I've written some pretty awful emails,' admitted Phil Jones, director of the CRU at the time. The scientists also resisted turning over their data when battered by requests for it - requests from climate sceptics who dominate the blogosphere and don't play by the usual rules.

But there is nothing very surprising, much less scandalous, about such behaviour. Yes, a "bunker mentality" developed among the scientists; they were "huddling together in the storm", in Pearce's words. But there really was a storm. They were under attack. In this situation, the scientists proved all too human - not frauds, criminals or liars.

So why were their hacked emails such big news? Because they were taken out of context and made to appear scandalous."

Soaring Arctic temperatures – a warning from history; 09 July 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19155-does-history-warn-of-soaring-arctic-temperatures.html
"'These results should be alarming,' says Ballantyne. Although it could take centuries for current global temperatures to respond to rising CO2 levels, we can expect the Arctic to warm much more than the rest of the planet, he says."
Journal reference: Geology, DOI: 10.1130/g30815.1

Scientists Quantify Global Warming's Threat to Public Health; 12 July 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-quantify-global-warmings-threat-to-public-health
"From heat stress to sewage overflows, climate change promises to bring extreme weather that will challenge the ill-prepared U.S. public health infrastructure."

Warming Waters Exacerbate Dwindling New England Fisheries; 13 July 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=warming-waters-exacerbate-dwindling-new-england-fisheries
"A 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at codfish catch records over four decades. It concluded what fishermen who know this cold-loving fish would have predicted: As the bottom water temperature increased, the probability of catching a cod decreased.
Last year, a federal effort to coordinate research, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, found ocean warming already was forcing a migration of some species."

Jan.-June warmest first half of year on record; 15 July 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38263788/ns/us_news-environment/
"2010 tops 1998 temps; question now is whether 12 months will break 2005 record for warmest year "

Last month was the warmest June ever, NOAA reports; 15 July 2010
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/07/15/warmest.june/?fbid=MsoiUOHbmqZ
" Last month's combined global land and ocean surface temperatures made it the warmest June on record at 61.1 degrees Fahrenheit (16.2 degrees Celsius). That's 1.22 Fahrenheit degrees (0.68 Celsius degrees) higher than the 20th century average of 59.9 (15.5 degrees Celsius)."

Comparative photos of Mount Everest 'confirm ice loss' ; 16 July 2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10660130
"Photos taken by a mountaineer on Everest from the same spot where similar pictures were taken in 1921 have revealed an "alarming" ice loss."

How facts backfire; 11 July 2010
"Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

NASA Earth Observatory; Land Surface Temperatures, Early July 2010
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44664

Reenlisting Submarines to Study Global Warming in the Arctic; 20 July 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=re-enlisting-submarines-t0-study-global-warming-in-the-arctic
"Civilian researchers have signed an agreement with the U.S. Navy to revive a dormant program that uses the vessels to collect information on parts of the Arctic's ice and ocean that normally lie beyond scientists' reach"

The warm, fuzzy side of climate change: Heftier marmots; 21 July 2010
"While polar bears flounder in the face of shrinking ice floes, another furry creature has gotten a boost from climate change. In the past three decades yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) have been fruitful—and multiplied—thanks to longer summers, according to a new study. "

Record-breaking heat does not 'prove' global warming; 22 July 2010
"No: the record-breaking heat does not "prove" global warming. Just as extreme winter weather does not prove the world is cooling,"

Ancient Ocean Acidification Intimates Long Recovery from Climate Change; 22 July 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ancient-ocean-acidification-intimates-long-recovery-from-climate-change
"It may takes tens of thousands of years for oceans to recover from the acidity caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide"

Action on carbon is down the drain ; 25 July 2010
"The Democratic leadership in the US Senate has suspended efforts to pass a climate change bill. It abandoned not only its planned comprehensive cap-and-trade measure, similar to one already passed by the House of Representatives, but also a more modest bill aimed at electric utilities. The Senate will most likely pass an energy bill of some sort, but this will barely even pretend to make progress on curbing greenhouse gas emissions."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19abeff6-981c-11df-b218-00144feab49a.html

Climategate data sets to be made public ; 27 July 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727710.101-climategate-data-sets-to-be-made-public.html
"The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, recently at the centre of the hacked emails controversy, is launching a pilot study into how best to make public three major temperature data sets and detailed records of how they are processed."

End dirty tactics in the climate war ; 28 July 2010
"For years, ruthless climate sceptics have harassed scientists, drowning them in freedom of information requests and subjecting them to vicious personal attacks. Climategate was merely the public face of this insurgent war."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727712.600-end-dirty-tactics-in-the-climate-war.html

Global Warming Is Undeniable; 1 August 2010
"Yet more scientific research highlights ongoing climate change--as the U.S. enjoys the hottest July on record."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=global-warming-is-undeniable-10-08-01

Why is society not acting on climate change? John Holdren asks ESA meeting; 5 August 2010
"'Societies are not taking the actions that the science indicates are needed and the technology indicates are possible. It’s important to understand why not,' he says."
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/08/why_is_society_not_acting_on_c.html

Climate change denial? There's an app for that ; 6 August 2010
"A new iPhone climate change sceptics' app inadvertently reveals the strategies of disinformation and denial they employ"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/aug/06/iphone-climate-denial-app

Huge ice sheet breaks from Greenland glacier; 7 August 2010
" He said it was not clear if the event was due to global warming.
The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record globally, scientists have said."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10900235

Rising temperatures threaten rice yield growth -- study ; 10 August 2010
"Rice yields threatened by higher temperatures. Study finds daily minimum temperatures rising faster"
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE67902R._CH_.2400

Is climate change burning Russia? 12 August 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19304-is-climate-change-burning-russia.html
"However, it is important to bear in mind that no single weather event can be reliably linked to climate change. "It's a statistical tendency, a push in one direction," says Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London. The Russian heatwave might have occurred anyway, without help from greenhouse gases. All we can say for sure is that such events are more likely in a warmer world."

World's Tallest Island Glacier Disappearing; 16 August 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/indonesia-ice-cores-update-100816.html
"Ice cores extracted in June from one of the last tropical glaciers in the Pacific recently arrived in the United States, where researchers will spend the coming months scrutinizing their every detail."

The Sun's 'Quiet Period' Explained; 16 August 2010
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/08/16/1814249/The-Suns-Quiet-Period-Explained?from=rss
"Solar physicists may have discovered why the Sun recently experienced a prolonged period of weak activity. The most recent so-called 'solar minimum' occurred in December 2008. Its drawn-out nature extended the total length of the last solar cycle — the repeating cycle of the Sun's activity — to 12.6 years, making it the longest in almost 200 years. The new research suggests that the longer-than-expected period of weak activity may have been linked to changes in the way a hot soup of charged particles called plasma circulated in the Sun."

A melting Arctic hits home; 17 August 2010
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/17/1829447/a-melting-arctic-hits-home.html
"As the Arctic melts due to climate change, its iconic marine mammals are feeling the heat. The Arctic Ocean held less sea ice in June of this year than any previous June on record. For the last four summers, the ice melt has exceeded what even pessimistic climate models predicted only a few years ago."

http://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/web/de/klima/klima_schweiz/phaenologie/Fruehlingsindex.html

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
"Read year-round scientific analysis and see daily image updates of Arctic sea ice."

About the Census of Marine Life
http://www.coml.org/about
"Better information is needed to fashion the management that will sustain fisheries, conserve diversity, reverse losses of habitat, reduce impacts of pollution, and respond to global climate change."

Census of Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life (CeDAMar)
http://www.coml.org/projects/census-diversity-abyssal-marine-life-cedamar
"Climatic change will reach the deep sea considerably later than other marine environments, but the effects of bottom temperature and the productivity of the surface waters on the environmentally sensitive fauna that live there are expected to be dramatic. CeDAMar will provide a foundation of knowledge about faunal composition, seasonal variations, and the influence of productivity in the deep sea on which any future study of the effects of global warming or human interference will have to rely."

http://protectourwinters.org/
"Protect Our Winters is the environmental center point of the winter sports community, united towards a common goal of reducing climate change's effects on our sport and local mountain communities.

We believe that to really effect things, consumer behavior needs to change and that the power of an actively participating and united community can have a direct influence on climate change, now and for generations behind us."

Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues; 25 October 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic
"She did not necessarily agree with the criticisms, but rather than dismissing them, as many scientists might have done, she began to engage with the critics.

It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders—or at least, some of them. And it made her reconsider her uncritical defense of the IPCC over the years.

Climate skeptics have seized on Curry’s statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.

Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”
"

Global Warming Likely to Get Cool Reception in Congress; 4 November 2010
http://www.livescience.com/environment/elections-climate-roundup-101104.html
"Over 100 freshmen Republicans were elected to the 112th Congress. According to an investigation by ThinkProgress, a progressive blog, 50 percent of the GOP class of 2010 deny the existence of manmade climate change, and 86 percent are opposed to any climate change legislation that increases government revenue."

Climate Hawks
http://www.grist.org/tags/climate+hawks

Merchants of doubt; Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
"The troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda."

In Warming Climate, Geese & Polar Bears Strike a Balance; 4 November 2010
http://www.livescience.com/animals/snow-goose-eggs-may-save-arctic-polar-bears-101104.html
"The polar bear is the poster child for species threatened with extinction by climate change. But a new study finds that the Arctic animals may get a reprieve in the form of an abundant supply of eggs from snow geese."

Rapid warming boosted ancient rainforest; 11 November 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-warming-boosted-ancient
"Most scientists have assumed that, as carbon dioxide levels increase and the Earth warms, plant species diversity in the rainforests will start to dwindle, with plants unable to adapt to the heat. But a new study suggests that the opposite may be true. In the past, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and higher temperatures actually drove the evolution of far greater numbers of new rainforest plant species than were wiped out.

But don't trade in your electric car for a gas-guzzler just yet--if rainfall drops as temperatures rise, or if they rise too rapidly, the outcome for rainforest diversity could be much less positive."

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/03/2226238/Google-Earth-Engine-To-Provide-Climate-Change-Data; 3 December 2010
Google has unveiled Google Earth Engine, "a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data — current and historical — online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment." They're also "donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities."

2010 hottest climate year on record, NASA says; 10 December 2010
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/post-carbon/2010/12/2010_hottest_climate_year_on_r.html
"Many scientists use the climate year, which runs from December of the preceding year to November of the current year, to evaluate long-term climate trends. The combined land-ocean temperature readings NASA's Goddard Institute posted Friday indicate that 2010 has surpassed what it identified as the previous warmest climate year, 2005."

2010: probably the hottest year ever recorded ; 14 December 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/14/hottest-year-environment-review-vidal
"Temperature records tumbled in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Burma and Pakistan, causing heatwaves and devastated harvests
2010 was the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries. Two leading groups of scientists say it was the warmest since records began in 1850; another suggests it was the second-warmest."

Record Warmth in 2010, Despite Cooling Influences; 4 January 2011
http://www.climatecentral.org/blog/record-warmth-in-2010-despite-cooling-influences/
" No matter how you crunch the data, 2010 is certain to go down in history as one of the warmest — if not the warmest — years since the beginning of instrumental records in the late 19th century. This is despite the recent cold and snowy weather in much of the U.S. and across Europe."

Don't believe the hype over climate headlines; 10 January 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/steve-connor-dont-believe-the-hype-over-climate-headlines-2180195.html
"Climate contrarians have been making much of an article published on 20 March 2000 – the last day of winter – with the headline: 'Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.'"

Have Insurers Begun to Detect Climate Change in Storm Damage? 11 January 2011
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=have-insurers-begun-to-detect-climate
"It's likely that the number of strong storms involving rain, snow and hail is also rising because of warming temperatures, not just urban sprawl and expanding development."

NASA Research Finds 2010 Tied for Warmest Year on Record; 12 January 2011
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2010-warmest-year.html
"Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York."

Provided global warming exists, what strong evidence exists against it being caused by humans?
http://www.quora.com/Provided-global-warming-exists-what-strong-evidence-exists-against-it-being-caused-by-humans

Provided global warming exists, what strong evidence exists in support of it being caused by humans?
http://www.quora.com/Provided-global-warming-exists-what-strong-evidence-exists-in-support-of-it-being-caused-by-humans

Arctic current warmer than for 2,000 years: study; 28 January 2011
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=arctic-current-warmer-than-for-2000
"A North Atlantic current flowing into the Arctic Ocean is warmer than for at least 2,000 years in a sign that global warming is likely to bring ice-free seas around the North Pole in summers, a study showed."

---

my favorite cognitive biases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect, http://www.springerlink.com/content/064786861r21m257/fulltext.html

---

Taking a closer look at the contrarian claims and assertions by popular and influential climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton in the blog post the status of climate scepticism.

Unnoticed by the public, climate scientists continue doing their job, monitoring and researching climate change. Albeit with a new twist: it has been realized, that also human psychology needs to be thrown into the, already very interdisciplinary, mix. Not only the hard science matters, but crucially also subtle issues, like clarifying, constraining and communicating uncertainty. To this aim, the prestigious Nature Publishing Group has issued a new journal: Nature Climate Change, augmenting the physical climate science with insights from social science research. Read the editorial here.

Meanwhile, in the climate sceptic camp, Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has been getting a lot of media attention. He is a prolific, hugely popular and very influential climate sceptic.

Let's see what happens when one gets to the bottom of his contrarian claims and assertions, by the courtesy of youtuber and science journalist potholer54:

Monckton recently lost a legal battle with the BBC over a documentary about climate change scepticism portraying him, called "Meet the Climate Sceptics" (BBC Four), which, he said, would gravely damage his reputation. (See the four youtube clips below.)

The central question is this. It's not whether CO2 or other greenhouse gases can cause warming, because we've known for 200 years that they can. It's not whether we are causing the CO2 in the atmosphere to rise, because we are. The only question that really matters is, given the rate at which we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, how much warming will that cause, if it continues [i.e., climate sensitivity].

Christopher Monckton

It is important to understand the difference between forcing and sensitivity because, as we will see in a minute, Monckton gets them completely mixed up.

Potholer54

Christopher Monckton on the politics of climate science:

In December [2009], just weeks away, at Copenhagen, a treaty will be signed, that will, for the first time, create a world government [...].

and on a miraculous invention:

And then 18 moths ago I cured myself with an invention which shows much promise. We're curing people of everything from HIV to malaria to multiple sclerosis.

More Monckton quotes and misquotes:

"Meet the Climate Sceptics":

More on climate change in the blog post a climate of confusion.

complex systems update

2010-01-27T16:12:00.014+01:00

scientific

complex systems are composed of many interconnected parts and cannot be tackled analytically, i.e., by using closed-form mathematical expressions. complex systems come from many domains:

socio-economic
technological
biological

Complex systems are often represented by networks; source.

they are typically characterized by non-linear behavior, display emergence ("the whole is greater than the sum of its parts") and are highly adaptive.

complex systems can be viewed as the current frontier in the understanding of the workings of nature, which started with the analysis of liner systems described by few variables:

(source: s. strogatz; "nonlinear dynamics and chaos"; 2001)

there are arguably two main strands in the study of complex systems:

complexity science or complex adaptive systems
multi-agent systems

the former fields find their moder incarnation mostly in the form of complex network theory, where the system's elements are represented by nodes in a graph, and their interactions are defined by the graphs edges. complex networks can have three levels of description:

direction of links
weights of links
variables assigned to nodes

the topology of the network often reflects its function.

multi-agent systems originate from the computational approach of agent-based modeling. agents interact with each other through local rules. often the evolution of these systems can only be known by letting the actual simulation evolve.

(source: wikipedia, complexity map overview)

slowly however, the focus has shifted on merging the two strands. in may 2010 there will be a workshop on "emergent intelligence on networked agents". from the description:

the intention of this workshop is to [bridge] the gap between the two research communities in complex networks and multi-agent systems.

currently, it seems that research on multi-agent systems is still mostly focused on agents themselves, whereas networks of agents have received relatively little attention.

a framework to model these multi-agent systems is provided by the complex networks approach [...]. thus, the underlying network structure of a multi-agent system plays a crucial role in explaining emergent properties. networked agents, on the other hand, may be able to actively change this structure by forming new links or cutting existing ones. consequently, there is not only a strong relation, but a coevolution in the dynamics of agents and their network of interactions.

how the brain works...

2009-10-24T19:07:00.005+02:00

fascinated

"the brain creates a version of the universe and projects this like a bubble around us."

"99% of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes, it is what you infer."

"reality emerges out of the fabric of the brain."

"how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other [as every brain has a different fabric]?" although the brain circuitry can change, the pattern of reality that emerges does not.

the first glimpse of simulated neuron activity in a supercomputer: the raw electrical activity creates "ghost like structures"

"the universe [possibly] has evolved the brain to see itself. which may be a first step of becoming aware of itself."

the idiosyncratic borders of knowledge

2009-07-28T17:49:00.002+02:00

:-/

we spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace.

Dirk Helbing, July 2009, Science special online collection: Complex Systems and Networks

[..] we have better maps of Mars than [the territory belonging to the US that lies beneath the sea, which is as big as the US itself].

Robert Ballard, December 2008, Exploring the Oceans (TED talk)

good and evil

2009-05-12T20:44:00.008+02:00

enlightened
how to get people to do evil:

mindlessly taking the first small step down the road to evil

dehumanization of others

de-individuation of self (anonymity)

diffusion of personal responsibility

blind obedience to authority

uncritical conformity to group norms

passive tolerance of evil (inaction, indifference)

watch philip zimbardo's (the stanford prison experiment guy) ted talk:

the cause of the financial crisis..

2009-02-25T20:22:00.013+01:00

unimpressed
how did a housing crisis become a financial crisis, ending up as an economic crisis?

how come highly trained professionals didn't see it coming?

a nice simple summary visualizing all the subprime mortgage, CDO, CDS, leverage, tranching, rating, AAA, default, frozen credit market stuff:

at the barebones level, wired magazine gives insight into the core mechanism in their article Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street.

the culprit:

the gaussian copula function

basically a quantity measuring the correlation (preciser: the dependence structure) of two random variables.

"the corporate CDO world relied almost exclusively on this copula-based correlation model."
"everyone was pinning their hopes on house prices continuing to rise."

the idea, published in 2000, quickly became a metric quants ubiquitously used to evaluate risk and a cornerstone of financial engineering allowing simple modeling of vastly complex risks. particularly default risks of CDO tranches. until august 2007...

the ideas:

tame the nasty nature of real-world dynamical, complex and latent variables by substituting them with a clean and simple number summing up everything
convey an image of what is happening: correlation is more like a constant than a fluctuating variable and all you need to know and compute
let the method be adopted by investors, banks, rating agencies and regulators
ignore any warning signs (for instance d. sornette in 2006: "this recurrent use [of gaussian copulas] has been ratified by the recommendations of the BIS concerning credit risk modelling. however, there are many indicators suggesting that this [...] approach may be grossly inadequate to account for large credit risks [...]." pg. 138)
let everyone make a lot of money
let quants forget about the concrete reality behind the math and crank up the models
let managers, lacking formal math skills, execute transactions worth trillions of dollars based on the models
forget about the underlying magic that makes it all work: a decade of soaring housing prices
lend money to people without jobs and income
be surprised when everything blows up in your face

cartoon from cagle.com

--
update 28th of june 2010:

who cares?

2009-02-22T21:00:00.036+01:00

mood: more bewilderment and head-shaking
is the human brain big enough to save one of the most intelligent creatures? greenpeace asks cynically in an add, aiming at banning whaling amongst other ocean related concerns.

when i mention i'm vegetarian in restaurants, a frequent response is to point me in the direction of the fish...

greenpeace campaign

fact i: the ocean is humanities last frontier of ignorance

72% of earth's surface covered by sea
97% of the ocean is unexplored
with one yearly NASA budget, the exploration program of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) could be funded for 1600 years
largest mountain range covering 23% of earth's surface area underwater (visited for the 1st time after the moon in 1973)
coral reefs still unexplored between 60 and 150 meters
there are better maps of mars than the 50% of total US territory which lies under the sea
most of the southern hemisphere's underwater terrain is unexplored (more exploration ships in that region during captain cook's times than today)
the seabed is harboring countless well preserved archaeological artifacts
underwater hot springs are basically commercial grade heavy metals deposits
underwater volcanoes are emitting methane

fact ii: the oceans are teeming with life

although most of the ocean does not get exposed to photons from the sun, and hence there is no photosynthesis, it is completely erroneous to not expect life
the antarctic sea is, unexpectedly and only recently discovered, teeming with marine life
hydrothermal vent systems are islands of life
bacteria replicating photosynthesis in the dark by chemosynthesis where accidental discovery as no one ever predicted their existence
resilient bacteria living in ph 11 environments
7 new species found per hour of deep reef exploration
2000 to 2500 estimated new species in the indo-pacific ocean alone (vs. 5000-6000 known species)
not only new species are still being discovered, but also new behavior and new ecology
amazing variety of bioluminescent animals

fact iii: the seas are being destroyed at breakneck speed

90% of all big fish have disappeared in the last 100 years
50% of all coral reefs are destroyed
for 1kg of fish ending up in a market, at least 10kg of bycatch was killed and thrown away
1.7% of the blue whale population is remaining
10% of the tuna fish population is remaining
commercial trawlers are forced to access ever deeper seabed due to the depletion of fisheries; this completely destroys potential habitats which are totally unexplored and eradicates possibly unknown species
throwaway plastic accumulating in the sea (half of the 100 billion pounds of plastic pellets a year are made into throwaway plastic produces of which a large fraction ends up in the sea)
100000 albatross chicks in remote habitats dying from stomachs filled with plastic trash
some ocean water samples contain more plastic than plankton
plastic debris concentrate pollutants and become "poison pills"
these are been eaten by many fish at the bottom of the food chain
gigantic garbage patches in the pacific and atlantic

Sylvia Earle's moving (and prizewinning) TED talk:

Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean's hidden worlds

Captain Charles Moore on the seas of plastic

Richard Pyle: Exploring the reef's Twilight Zone

David Gallo fascinating TED talk:

update 20.04.2010:
Edith Widder: Glowing life in an underwater world

update 05.05.2010:

update 02.06.2010:
Brian Skerry reveals ocean's glory -- and horror

update june 30th 2010:

update july 12 2010:

update july 27 2010:

messages from banksy

2008-11-22T17:38:00.020+01:00

mood: respectful
"people who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine"

"sometimes i feel so sick at the state of the world i can't even finish my second apple pie"

"the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.
it's people who follow orders who drop bombs and massacre villages.
as a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told. this is the only way we can be sure"

"it takes a lot of guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in - like peace and justice and freedom"

"we can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles; in the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves"

"people who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one"

"a lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to"

banksy is a british graffiti artist. he has reached international fame notably for stunts like:

hanging a picture he painted (depicting mona lisa with a yellow smiley face) in the louvre
or painting images on the israeli west bank wall showing, for instance, a girl being blown away by holding on to flying balloons
or spraying "this is not a photo opportunity" on certain well-known photograph spots around the world
or painting official looking signs on white walls reading "this wall is a designated graffiti area" and documenting the progress of tags and graffitis being created there by other street artists.

hollywood celebrities have purchased his art and one piece was auctioned for over half a million usd in 2007. he responded to a sotheby’s sale of his work by posting a painting on his website featuring people bidding for a picture, with the caption "i can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

his view of life is anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-consumerist and anti-establishment, using very strong imagery for his pictures. his messages are often ironic, cynical, very to the point and critical comments on the current zeitgeist.

his true identity is unknown...

sources: webpage, wikipedia, wall and piece.

quotes of the day...

2008-10-26T21:06:00.004+01:00

mood: bewilderment
sometimes, psychology (wishful thinking, denial, cognitive bias, blind spots, ideology, ...) is stronger than intelligence.

alan greenspan's comments on the financial/economic crisis:

I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I was going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.

source oversight.house.gov.

the worst of two worlds

2008-10-17T17:21:00.031+02:00

mood: disgusted
reading the daily news can at times be quite a depressing experience. psychological protective mechanisms maintaining the mind's sanity can vary from cynicism over callousness to denial, etc. and so most news events don't cause any lasting effects...

apart from "normal" global tragedies as war, genocide, poverty, famine, opression, species extinction, catastrophic climate change events, etc. and the current ludicrous financial and economic crisis, in the last years the cannibalistic activities of Armin Meiwes and the horrific ordeals of Natascha Kampusch and Elisabeth Fritzl have been particularly shocking.

today the list can be extended by another unfathomable abomination. the titles of the articles read:

From the content:

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent.

During a crackdown on the mosque, police were astonished to discover pornography on computer hard drives. But what was not reported then was that the haul included images of children being sexually abused that were encoded with messages as a clandestine method of communication.

on the one hand, there is (in my opinion) the worst acts of destruction sentient beings can perform: systematically abuse the most fragile members of the society for pleasure. contaminate the cradle of future generations. personally i don't understand why there has been no global uproar, as the victims of child abuse become younger and younger and the atrocities worse and worse (some statistics), calling for a coordinated international effort to stop such and related activities (like female genital mutilation, child labour, ...).

and on the other hand, people driven by ideology to kill certain other people with different ideologies are using these unspeakable crimes as a vehicle for their own means of spreading death, destruction and suffering...

deep insights into the abyss of the human soul...

:-(

activism, anarchy and fun

2008-07-06T19:45:00.011+02:00

mood: party on

from the 4th to the 6th of july 2008, hundreds of activists from the zurich squatter and left alternative scene occupied the old football stadium hardturm, to celebrate a weekend of fun, partying and anarchy.

after an initial clash with the police on friday evening, the security forces said they would tolerate the event, as long as the stadium is cleared by sunday.

offering such a platform in zurich, being known for it's active party culture, attracted a few thousand party goers by saturday, as the message of the event spread like wildfire...

this has been the third major event of the organizers in the last years, where for a couple of days all effective rules and regulations were suspended, and an alternative subculture asserted itself for a couple of days.

the event was lively reported on by all the swiss mainstream media.

view photos in the brotäktschen set on my flicker account.

visit the "official" website of the organizers: raumpflege.org

More info: indymedia, nzz, tagesanzeiger.

some little things life has taught me...

2008-05-21T17:32:00.006+02:00

mood: inspired depending what your personal goals are in life, some strategies work better than others...

you are not the center of the universe

be critical towards your cultural and religious imprintings: they could be far from ideal, and simply represent idiosyncratic artifacts from the past
don't take yourself too seriously: a little distance to ones own ego can work wonders (and besides, the universe existed for roughly 14 billion years before your birth, and the last discernible structure in it will probably cease to exist after 10 to the power of 23 years after your death)
don't expect your perception of reality to be too representative of reality itself (psychopathology, cognitive biases, psychedelic drugs)
don't expect your knowledge and understanding of things to give you more than a glimpse of reality: you cannot possibly know and understand everything
reality is perhaps more bizarre than anyone ever guessed (non-locality, quantization, measurement, duality, uncertainty, entanglement, time dilation, arrow of time, dark matter and energy, self-organization, emergence, life, death, consciousness, etc. without even mentioning multiverses and possibilities of higher dimensional space and/or time)
allow for the possibility, that all your opinions and points of views could be wrong
dogmas have never and will never work
the best way to appreciate the arbitrariness of your socio-religious background and respect other takes is by traveling

you are the center of your universe

take responsibility: don't expect others to think for you
learn to accept and respect yourself
your mind creates your experience of reality: you have total freedom in your mind
you can always choose your inner reactions to impulses from the outer world
appreciate the enigma of existence: every day you wake up in a structured and self-organizing reality, and rediscover yourself, a thinking, sentient entity full of memories from the past
appreciate the improbability of existence: changing the values of fundamental physical constants just a little would most probably result in unstructured mess
everything in the universe expresses the universe

getting into the right state of mind

get a sense of humor
once in a while, stop and think about how you are living your life, and if it's what you really want
happiness is a state of being/mind: your only chance of finding it is within yourself
modesty, honesty, sincerity can get you a long way
let go: you can't control everything anyway
be aware of your own mortality: relax and accept the only thing you can know for sure
open your mind to change: conservatism and paranoia about new things doesn't get you far in a universe where everything is constantly changing
good/bad or right/wrong are very relative attributes and often in the eye of the beholder
there is no absolute evil
assume that all people act to the best of their possibilities (even if the outcome of their decisions are disastrous), and that you would be the same, given their biography and neurochemistry
relax, kick back and chill out once in a while
dream of a better future
be the change you want to see in the world
don't be ignorant

interacting

respect other opinions
don't take stuff personal
it is very easy and rewarding to be nice/helpful/compassionate to other people
listen more, talk less
respect every aspect of life: from plants, to insects to animals, to human beings of other faith/race/...
the strong should protect the weak
value friendship
don't worry about what others think about you
violence is really the very last resort; and mostly, just your inner commitment to defend yourself to the very end, prevents you from having to actually do this

lifestyle

have fun
resist the temptation to blindly follow the masses: many people doing stupid things isn't a justification for anything
limit addictions
you don't have to be evil to make money, or be a bastard to get ahead in life
a more or less healthy lifestyle helps: a little movement, a somewhat balanced diet, and a (pragmatic) optimistic mindset can work wonders
materialism is a bad strategy if you're looking for happiness
as already mentioned, go travel
the more you spend time getting educated, the better you can approximate the big picture
did you know, lifestyles don't necessarily come pre-tailored: you can choose and combine elements from any pop- or subculture you like
ever think about ecology and sustainability, i.e., your footprint?
ever consider vegetarianism?

the story of stuff...

2008-05-17T18:06:00.036+02:00

mood: cynical If you don't happen to be one of the billion people living on 1 US$ a day or less, chances are that you could be one of the billion people living in an industrialized nation.

Then there is one word that describes your identity best: consumer. You live in a consumer nation.

This is the story of stuff, the stuff you consume, told by Annie Leonard, an American scholar (on international trade, development, international sustainability and environmental health issues) who has looked into this stuff for a decade.

It is a simple but enlightening look deep into the heart of our consumer lifestyle: where does stuff come from where does it go?

Watch the 20 minute feature on her website thestoryofstuff.com or on youtube (part 1 of 7):

Some fun facts:

Food at the top of food chain with highest level toxic contaminants: human breast milk; i.e., human babies are getting the highest dose of toxins on the planet.
In the US, 99% of stuff is thrashed in 6 months.
Within three decades, one third of all natural resources have been consumed.
75% of global fisheries are fished at or beyond capacity.
80% of the planet's original forests are gone; in the Amazon, 2'000 trees a minute are chopped.
There are 100'000 synthetic, i.e., man made chemicals; no tests on synergistic health impacts (i.e., what happens when these substances interact) are done; dioxin the most toxic man made substance known to science.
Globally, 200'000 people a day are moving from environments that have sustained them for generations into cities, looking for work.
US industry: 4'000'000'000 pounds of toxic chemicals a year.
Average US citizen consumes twice as much as 50 years ago.
3'000 ads a day are seen by US citizens; this is more ads seen a year today than 50 years ago in a whole lifetime.
Less leisure time today, and this scarce time is mostly used to watch TV and shop.
In the US, each household produces twice as much garbage as in the 70s.
More stuff owned today than ever, but US national happiness declining since 50s.
Industrial design journals from the 50s: how fast can we make stuff break and still leave the consumer to have enough faith in the product to go out and buy another one.
The US, with its 5% of world population, consumes 30% of the worlds resources and produces 30% of the worlds waste; this scales up to 3 to 5 planets needed to sustain such a lifestyle if every person on earth would behave in this way.
Of the 100 largest economies 51 are corporations.

If you're interested in more such musings, see my other blog post, take the Earth Institute quiz, or, if you understand French or German, Le Monde Diplomatique's Atlas of Globalization.

fun

2008-04-16T22:07:00.011+02:00

mood: adrenalized after work recreation

subculture: electronica

2008-04-16T21:56:00.016+02:00

mood: lounging

listen to some electronic sounds

a small compilation:

vector lovers
sniper mode
ils
notenshun
tiga
air
christian morgenstern

about

2008-04-04T12:07:00.015+02:00

mood: informativeThis is a blog dedicated to commenting on the zeitgeist.

Critically observing the global social cultures and the prevalent lifestyles, while keeping the context defined by a historical perspective in mind (i.e., the path-dependent arbitrariness of it all), is in my opinion a good starting point for paving the way to a better future.

My other, technical blog (computer science, physics, complex systems, ...) can be found here.

--
james b. glattfelder, April 2008.