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FROM BBC NEWS

By Gareth Morgan
Technology reporter

The Living Earth Simulator will collect data from billions of sources

Ten-year climate model unveiled
It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.

An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.

Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.

"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work," says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator.

Knowledge collider
Thanks to projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator built by Cern, scientists know more about the early universe than they do about our own planet, claims Dr Helbing.

What is needed is a knowledge accelerator, to collide different branches of knowledge, he says.

"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."

The result would be the LES. It would be able to predict the spread of infectious diseases, such as Swine Flu, identify methods for tackling climate change or even spot the inklings of an impending financial crisis, he says.


Is it possible to build a social science equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider?
But how would such colossal system work?

For a start it would need to be populated by data - lots of it - covering the entire gamut of activity on the planet, says Dr Helbing.


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FOR THE REAL MOVIE REVIEW OF AVATARD CLICK HERE!!!!!! DONT FORGET TO SEE VIDEO BELOW!!!!


http://www.fadsmashers.com/5/post/2009/12/avatard-the-real-review.html
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FROM UK TELEGRAPH

Every email and website to be stored

t will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.
Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state.
 
The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them.
It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".
Any suggestion of a central "super database" has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time.

That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism.

The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.

The move was buried in the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: "We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework.

"This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to protect the public.

"Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in every major Security Service counter terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations.

"We will legislate to put in place the necessary regulations and safeguards to ensure that our response to this technology challenge is compatible with the Government’s approach to information storage and civil liberties."
But Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: "One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.

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FROM PHYSORG


Bilingual, bicultural 'Roboceptionist' on its way


Researchers at the University of Arizona and Carnegie Mellon University are working to create a robot receptionist. What makes the effort novel is that the "roboceptionist" is bilingual and bicultural – a computer with a face and a natural language interface.

A three-year, $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Foundation is funding basic advances in human-computer interaction. Majd Sakr, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is the principal investigator on the grant.

Reid Simmons, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, and Sandiway Fong, a UA associate professor of linguistics and computer science, are the co-PIs. Carnegie Mellon University will provide the robotics innovations, while the UA will supply the language technology.

Fong spent part of his sabbatical leave in 2009-10 at Carnegie Mellon's Qatar campus where an existing version of the roboceptionist, called Hala, greets visitors in English and Arabic.

"They invited me to join the team because they saw opportunities to generalize and improve the limited language capabilities of Hala," said Fong. "They needed Hala to be more flexible in dealing with language input from users. And that is where the University of Arizona comes in. We will provide both the language-specific and inter-language-related cultural capabilities so that this robot can be not just bilingual, but bicultural."

Fong said a bicultural robot is not one that merely switches between English and Arabic, Hala's current format, but also has both modes simultaneously active in order to spot and deal with potential cultural ambiguities and misunderstandings.

"You may speak Arabic, but you may choose to converse with the robot in English," said Fong. "You may be conversing with the sensibility and the cultural background and the idioms from the Arabic world. This robot needs to understand both."

The phrase "week after week," for example, "I'm looking for the group that meets week after week" means "every week" in English. But in some Arabic dialects it can mean "every other week." Only a robot that is simultaneously facile with both lexicons can compute that this phrase is subject to cultural variation and can ask the user for clarification.

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According to this columnist that is!!!

"The real story of Hanukkah is not about oil; it’s about factionalism and human suffering. When I first read that grisly story, the one in the apocrypha, my feelings about my ancestral religion slid a notch away from disinterest and toward dyspepsia.

In the book of 1 Maccabees, the gentiles have desecrated the Jews’ Holy of Holies, the Temple at Mount Zion. A family of badass Rambo Jews—the Maccabees—retake the Temple by force. They re-sanctify the altar by lighting a menorah, and the oil lasts eight crazy nights."

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/22806/judahs-avatar/
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*Contrary to the popular/ fringe belief that Avatars propaganda purpose was to promote a fake environmentalism and carbon credit trading, we find more significant meanings if we look further...
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See actual review here

Nathan Human (or someone)

So we hear all of this talk about how this is going to "change the way movies are made" and all that other bullshit the director paid the news agencies to say to convince us to dignify this monumental waste of wealth, expertise, and resources while indoctrinating our obsolete minds with the philosophy of those who rule us simply by telling us they do not actually rule us...

Free advertising on the news
It is pretty clear how this movie will set the standard for upcoming follywood trash of the sort. Its a difficult process but I think I have figured it out, first you need .5 BILLION dollars (the GDP of a small country) for advertising on the NEWS. Then your 99% of the way there. After that you buy this program for 50$ and pay some kid from youtube to make the fkn thing, all the while showing everyone how the American dream is still vital and pumping strong... on Youtube...

Sure enough, (and like any good propaganda film) pretend news agencies paid to lie to us, wont shut up about this movie, to such an extent that if you dont know what "avatar" is yet, you probably have yet to have had your country infringed on and bled completely dry by multinational resource whores and banking oligarchs. Anyways, people never seem to question the free advertising that is sold as news, probably because we are so fucking used to it. We wont let that stop us from regarding the mainstream media as the ultimate source of truth though!!! HELL NO!!!! NEVER!!!!

Even the most critical minded people never seem to take issue with the self-fulfilling nature of something like Facebook, Twitter or other new invasive technologies being popularized via the news in talking about how "popular it is", because we are by and large obsolete sets of lips and assholes whose primary mission is too decieve ourselves so not to inconvenience our masters. 

Word Theft
I am sick and fucking tired of hollywood taking all of our fucking words. Every god damn word in the english language is now a movie. Everytime I type in avatar on google, I am going to be inconvenienced with 1 million links about how fat headed docile avatards have seen the movie 'Avatar' 6 times because they hate everything about themselves. I wont be directed to information as to what the word means, or other knowledge of interest. For example: Google the word "big brother" Orwell may make the list if you are lucky... Its likely you are being inundated with links ado with the bullshit reality TV program I am guessing...

Preconditioning
Judging by the name 'avatar' the preconditioning in this movie is clear, they are prepping us for Virtual Reality, augmented reality, bioengineering, cybernetics etc. Anything ado with the mind/ body dualism is being promoted here.

As far as I know the movie has the usual imperialist set-up (i.e. Humans go to planet to conquer natives). It is not clear yet as to whether the word Zion will be used for the invading spaceship, although it will likely sneak its way in there like it sneaks into everything (and everywhere) else!!!

I strongly enourage everyone to go and waste their remaining money on this movie, especially if you are feeling like fadulous uncultured scum who simply goes to the movies because you "want to see what all the fuss is about". Its absolutely imperative that you and millions of others deliberate this "fuss" while passively absorbing this fictitious narrative which will be used to acclimatize and further coax you into accepting these brutal realities as they are engineered and manifested in the non-fictional world.


A FOLLOW UP AFTERTHOUGHTS

I watched this movie for free on the internet. Yum. It was a kick ass cam job ripped from utorrent. Do I give a shit? Am I bothered about not making a contribution to this 2 1/2 hr 500 million dollar mindfuck? Oh yes... yes indeed. I feel terrible that the cabal of writers and producers wont be getting my money to make more bullshit subliminally loaded films in the future.

The film begins with some soon to be reformed fucktards 6 month journey across the solar system to a planet called Pandora in an insanely technologically advanced spaceship while suspended in cryosleep, only to come off the ship in what appears to be a ghetto wheelchair from the 1990's, which is infeasibly contrasted amidst the backdrop of giant mechs and flying robots of all shapes and sizes.

In the spirit of ripping off the movie 'Being John Malcovich' the movie proceeds to demonstrate a technology that allows one sentient beings mind to control anothers body. This is the purpose of our protagonist. His mission is to have his mind transeferred and control the body of a "navi" tribesmen and gain intelligence as to the natives way of life for some greedy corporation who wants to take their land, who has also promised him that if he completes the mission successfully he will be given back his legs (note: he is a paraplegic).

Slowly throughout the movie of course, the protagonist comes to embrace the lifestyle of the Navi people, and realizes that there is absolutley nothing the imperialists (sky people= White people) can offer them in replacement for their livelihood (the environment which they are physically connected). He discovers that the Navi world is one of intense biochemical integration to the environment around it. For example every navi has sensors in their hair that can connect to everything in the environment (like the internet) and upload and download information about the system as a whole, in addition to allowing them to take control of animals and flying creatures within this network of life. Realizing this deeply engrained interconnectedness the navi have with their world, the soldier eventually switches sides and fights alongside the Navi against the imperialist army of which he was once apart.

Then shit hits the fan and the two sides go to war, sure enough the Navi are initially outgunned by the humans more advanced technology. Eventually though "Aiwa" the equivalent of our "gaia" is summoned and all of her creatures humiliate the imperialist army. The Navi get fucked up pretty good, but in the end send the humans packing (LOL! now this is where it gets deceptive!!!!).

Here is the point of this movie.

1) To demonstrate that nature is technology, that uploading and downloading everything about our lives into big brothers mainframe is something nearly spiritual in its significance.

2) The only thing that saves the Navi (natives) in the movie is the army of Aiwa's monsters that fight off the humans. Without this fictional interjection they surely would have been fucked, like the natives of the real world. The fact is there is NO BIG VIRTUOUS MONSTERS IN THE REAL WORLD. THE PURPOSE OF THE FILM IS TO INSTILL A FALSE SENSE OF HOPE. THE SAME OLD PREPACKAGED BULLSHIT HOLLYWOOD ENDING THAT TRIES TO MAKE YOU THINK EVERYTHING WILL BE OK.

They demonstrate the crudeness and immorality of the humans/ imperialists/ white people in the movie and show how nature balances things out in the end. Basically it translates into: Dont worry Palestine, big monsters MAY save you!!!

The term alien originated as one intended just to refer to foreigners, only in the last century has it been used to refer to what we know commonly refer to as alien lifeforms. I think they tried to show how the natives were aliens, perhaps refering to the perception on earth amongst bigots that native populations are somehow inhuman. Near the end of the movie the soldier (protagonists) is told by his commander that he has betrayed his "race" in his joining of the Navi, yet again alluding to similiar xenophobic situations on earth.

The main point of this movie is the ending, which IS NOT REAL. THEY WOULD LIKE US TO BELIEVE THAT MOTHER NATURES MONSTERS WILL COME TO THE AID OF THOSE WE PLUNDER!!! THEY WILL NOT. THEY WOULD LIKE US TO BELIEVE THAT MOTHER NATURE WILL CORRECT AND PUNISH MANKINDS WRONGS, That some mysterious force is going to save us from the corporate assfuck brigade that takes whatever it wants. IT MAY BUT LIKELY... WONT. THE VIRTUOUS MONSTER >>>>>MUST<<<<< BE>>>>>YOU<<<<<.

A much deeper meaning to the film is the idea that these corporate assfucks are actually up against some kind of notable resistance. It makes it appear as if there is a real challenge, a real threat, in the same way they hyped up Saddam Husseins army before they invaded Iraq. Its the same way they talk about "Irans revolutionary Guard" and how its a force to be reckoned with. So that when the time comes to fight, it wont appear so one sided, and there will be less sympathy for the people defending their freedumb.

One final observation
The imperialist protagonist who is implanted into the Navi body (avatar) at the end is able to tame a wild beast that none of the Navi were ever able to tame. It subtley tries to demonstrate (as so many hollywood films subtley do) the dominance of the imperialist army, as if only this Navi convert can tame the most wild of all beasts, and beat the Navi at their own game. He does this for the sake of leading the Navi to victory of course, so it appears OK. Its like an Israeli soldier switching sides and showing Palestinians how to defeat the IDF. Its there to refresh the myth of a dominance which doesnt actually exist...

One more

Avatar in the hindu culture is referred to as

"In Hinduism, Avatar or Avatara (अवतार, IAST ), often translated into English as incarnation, literally means descent (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes."

So the message in this context is that in stepping into the body of the Navi one is descending in spiritual significance, even though the reverse is depicted in the movie. The traditional understanding of the term indicates a demotion in the quality of representation, like how your facebook avatar only represents an aspect of you... But the words meaning has now been reversed to represent something that is more real, more natural, more spiritual, something... augmented...

I could go on about the deceptive  nuances of this waste of fucking time for hours, but all you need to know about any movie the media is promoting is that it will ALWAYS be in accordance of the interest of the ruling class, no matter how moral and spiritual it appears to be.




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