会場へ行ってみると、板の間に二十人ほどがすわっており、外の木の下でも三人五人とかたまって話しあっていた。雑談をしているように見えたがそうではない。事情を聞いてみると、村で取り決めをおこなう場合には、みんなが納得いくまで何日でも話し合うという。
はじめに一同があつまって区長から話を聞き、それぞれの地域組でいろいろと話しあって区長のところへ結論を持っていく。もし折り合いがつかねばまた自分のグループへもどって話しあう。用事のある者は家へかえることもある。ただ区長・総代は聞き役・まとめ役としてその場にいなければならない。
とにかくこうして二日も協議が続けられているという。夕べも明け方近くまで話しあったそうで、眠くなり言うことが無くなれば帰ってもいいのである。話といっても理屈を言うのではない。一つの事柄について自分の知っているかぎりの事をあげていくのである。
この寄り合い方式は近ごろ始まったものではなく、村の申し合わせ記録の古いものは二百年近く前のものもある。
昔は腹がへったら食べに帰るのでなく、家から誰かが弁当を持ってきたそうで、それを食べて話をつづけ、夜になって話が切れないとその場に寝る者もあり、起きて話して夜を明かす者もあり、結論が出るまでそれが続いたそうである。
と言っても、三日でたいていの難しい話もかたがついたという。気の長い話だが、とにかく無理はしなかった。みんなが納得のいくまで話しあった。だから結論が出ると、それはキチンと守らねばならなかった。

Somewhere I can call home

Where I can breathe and not feel alone
Where I can talk and no one knows
Where danger doesn’t grow
Where I am not scared to show
Where I don’t feel vulnerable
Where I can be myself
With no worries.

To feel comfortable
With the smell of flowers
I inhale.

Where as soon as I walk in
There is no such thing as failure.
Where I can lie down
Rub my face on a pillow and know
No one’s going to hurt me.

A safe place.

Japaneren Eisaku Sato fikk prisen i 1974, det var den verste tabben. Nye papirer har vist at han ikke var tilhenger av den anti–atomvåpenpolitikken han fikk prisen for! Alt tyder på at komiteen var feilinformert.

Many modern data sets, even those considered modestly sized, contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of variable pairs—far too many to examine manually. If you do not already know what kinds of relationships to search for, how do you efficiently identify the important ones?
The maximal information coefficient (MIC) is a measure of two-variable dependence designed specifically for rapid exploration of many-dimensional data sets. MIC is part of a larger family of maximal information-based nonparametric exploration (MINE) statistics, which can be used not only to identify important relationships in data sets but also to characterize them.
A paper describing MINE and applying it to data from global health, genomics, the human microbiome, and Major League Baseball was published in Science Magazine.
MINE was developed jointly by David Reshef and Yakir Reshef, working under Professors Pardis Sabeti and Michael Mitzenmacher.

Luxembourg — It was a blunt and unsettling message for a country whose opaque banks have sucked in hundreds of billions of euros from abroad and whose national motto — “We want to remain what we are” — is a credo of dogged resistance to change.
“Nothing is as it was before,” Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told Parliament last month, explaining why, after years of resistance, Luxembourg had decided to start sharing information with foreign tax authorities about the money stashed in its banks. “Not everything has changed, but lots of things have changed. Other changes are necessary, or everything will change.”

The next information revolution is well under way. But it is not happening where information scientists, information executives, and the information industry in general are looking for it. It is not a revolution in technology, machinery, techniques, software, or speed. It is a revolution in concepts.
So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has centered on data—their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has centered on the “T” in IT. The next information revolution asks, What is the meaning of information, and what is its purpose? And this is leading rapidly to redefining the tasks to be done with the help of information, and with it, to redefining the institutions that do these tasks.
The next information revolution will surely engulf all major institutions of modern society. But it has started, and has gone farthest, in business enterprise, where it has already had profound impacts. It is forcing us to redefine what business enterprise actually is and should be. This largely underlies the new definition of the function of business enterprise as the “creation of value and wealth,” which in turn has triggered the present debate about the “governance of the corporation,” that is, for whom the business enterprise creates value and wealth. Yet, despite its importance and impact, the next information revolution has so far been largely ignored by the information establishment. For it has started in the information system of which—though it is the oldest and still the most widely used one—IT people, as a rule, tend to be both ignorant and contemptuous: Accounting.

One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices.
In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. While Samsung has no immediate plans to offer a brain-controlled phone, the early-stage research, which involves a cap studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes, shows how a brain-computer interface could help people with mobility issues complete tasks that would otherwise be impossible.
Brain-computer interfaces that monitor brainwaves through EEG have already made their way to the market.

Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.
But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In a couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Farther into the future, your robot assistant will appear by your side with a glass of lemonade simply because it knows you are thirsty.
The technology, often called a brain computer interface, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.
Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen.

Negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985. However, these bleak findings are put into some perspective by the fact that news organizations are more trusted sources of information than are many other institutions, including government and business.
Further, people rate the performance of the news organizations they rely on much more positively than they rate the performance of news organizations generally.

There are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried than I have been in the past. It’s scary.
We push back a lot; we are able to turn down a lot of these requests. We do everything possible to protect the data. If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We’re doing it as well as can be done.

「究極の自動車」ともいえる自動運転車の開発に、世界の企業が取り組み始めた。意外なのは、自動車開発とは無縁に思える米グーグルが先頭を走っていることだ。スマートフォン関連事業で成功したビジネスモデルを、自動車の世界に持ち込む狙いが透けて見える。自動車メーカーはグーグルを警戒しつつ、開発のアクセルを踏み始めた。

グーグルは、あらゆるビジネス領域に進出する準備すら始めている。グーグルは、スマートグリッドのことを「Internet of Things（モノのインターネット）」と表現する。スマートグリッドでは、あらゆるモノがセンサーを備え、インターネットに接続され、情報を発信するようになる、という意味だ。
グーグルが整理できる情報は従来、インターネット上に存在するWebサイトなど、限られた領域だけだった。スマートグリッドによって、グーグルが整理できる対象が飛躍的に拡大する。それに伴いグーグルのビジネス領域は、飛躍的に広がろうとしている。
グーグルはまず、メディア産業や広告産業に壊滅的といっていいビジネス上の打撃を与えた。続いてグーグルは旧来型のIT産業にも殴り込みをかけた。それが「クラウドコンピューティング」だ。
クラウドはグーグルにとって、野望の実現に向けた「第二歩」に過ぎない。次のターゲットは、電力産業や自動車産業、通信産業である。さらにその先もきっと、模索し始めているはずだ。

Ookla is the global leader in broadband testing and web-based network diagnostic applications. The company’s software and methodologies set the broadband industry standards for accuracy, popularity, ease of use and the subsequent development of statistical data. Ookla solutions have been adopted by nearly every Internet Service Provider in the world, and have been translated into over 30 languages for use by thousands of small businesses, federal and state governments, universities and major organizations such as AT&T, BBC, Cisco, Comcast, FCC, Reuters, Time Warner, Verizon, Vodafone and Vonage. Over three million people a day use Ookla software, making the company the dominant leader in broadband connection testing.
Founded by Internet and telecommunications veterans in 2006, Ookla has offices in Seattle, WA and Kalispell, MT.

ＪＲ東海が１３日に明らかにしたリニア中央新幹線の中間駅の概要について、山梨県の横内知事は１５日の定例記者会見で「待合室も切符売り場もない。あれで賛成と言ったわけではない」と今後、同社と協議する考えを示した。
同社と中間駅が設置される地元自治体は２０１１年、駅として必要な機能は同社が、それ以外の観光施設などは自治体がそれぞれ負担して整備することで合意。横内知事は、同社がネット販売を前提に切符売り場を置かないなど簡素な作りとするとした中間駅の概要について「切符売り場は駅になければいけないのでは」と話した。
横内知事の発言を受け、同社の山田佳臣社長は同日、名古屋市内で開いた会見で「リニアは事前に予約するので、（駅で待っていても）キャンセルが出れば、ネットでほしい人のところに買われていく。設備はこれで十分と考えており、どうしても必要なら、自治体が作ればいい」と反論した。

In the fourth quarter of 2011, analysis of the top 100 fastest cities around the world, based on average connection speeds, reflected the following:

• Cities in the Asia Pacific region continued to dominate the list of the 100 fastest cities worldwide. 69 cities including 61 in Japan, six in South Korea, one in Australia, as well as Hong Kong made the top 100.
• 24 cities in North America ranked among the top 100, including two in Canada and 22 in the United States.
• Seven cities in Europe, including three in Sweden, two in Switzerland and one each in Romania and Latvia were included in the top 100.

We’re all aware of the approximately two billion people now on the Internet in every part of the planet, thanks to the explosion of mobile technology.
But there are also upwards of a trillion interconnected and intelligent objects and organisms what some call the Internet of Things.
All of this is generating vast stores of information. It is estimated that there will be 44 times as much data and content coming over the next decade…reaching 35 zettabytes in 2020. A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros. And thanks to advanced computation and analytics, we can now make sense of that data in something like real time. This enables very different kinds of insight, foresight and decision-making.

Knowledge is humanity’s first and final frontier. From the Edenic exodus to flights beyond earth, our mythic narratives reveal that going where no one has gone before to learn what no one has known before drives us like no other quest.
While American innovation in chips, operating systems and applications continues, the U.S. doesn’t enjoy leadership in the underlying bandwidth that fuels this virtuous cycle. No single metric captures the situation fairly, but all suggest danger ahead. Recent Ookla data says the U.S. is 34th in download speed, 42nd in upload speed and 38th in quality; an Akamai study shows that of the 100 fastest cities in the world, only eight are in the U.S., with our fastest broadband speed only clocking in at 77th.
The beauty of an economy whose growth is based on greater knowledge is that, unlike one based on materials extraction, its prospects are as limitless as our mythic frontier. In such an economy, our nation’s greatest assets are our institutions of higher education. Thus, while it is often said, it is not said nearly enough that our institutions of higher education are the envy of the world. Anyone who hopes that America’s economic success in the 20th century is repeated in the 21st, should hope U.S. higher education remains the object of envy.
It should be irrelevant to most Americans whether the size of our mansions in Beverly Hills, our yachts in West Palm, or the diamond rings on 5th Avenue inspire similar envy. But for the sake of most Americans, we should also want the world to envy our bandwidth and what happens when we put the world-leading tools for high-performance knowledge exchange in our world-leading university communities.

How much time do students spend on low-level facts rather than higher-order thinking skills? Are students learning how to be expert communicators and collaborators, critical thinkers, and problem solvers? What can be done to better equip students with these thinking skills that are so important today?

Listen, You Pencil Neck Geeks

The word geek is a slang term for odd or non-mainstream people, with different connotations ranging from “a computer expert or enthusiast” to “a person heavily interested in a hobby”, with a general pejorative meaning of “a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual”.
Although often considered as a pejorative, the term is also often used self-referentially without malice or as a source of pride.
The definition of geek has changed considerably over time, and there is no longer a definitive meaning.

ロシア最大の日刊紙「ロシスカヤ・ガゼタ/ロシア新聞」が、政治、経済、文化、流行などさまざまな分野でロシアの今を伝える日本向けの新聞『ロシアNOW』。すでに世界１７カ国２１の新聞で７００万部配布されているものの日本版です。２０１２年６月から８ページの本格的な特集としてスタートしました。７月、１月以外の各月第２週木曜日に東京首都圏で配布されます。同時にweb site「毎日ｊｐ」でもロシアの最新の情報がご覧になれます。どうぞお楽しみください。

History’s greatest conspiracy theories

1. September 11, 2001
2. The assassination of John F Kennedy
3. A flying saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947
4. Nasa faked the moon landings
5. The Illuminati and the New World Order
6. The Jesus conspiracy
7. Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered
8. Elvis Presley faked his own death
9. Operation Northwoods
10. MK-ULTRA
11. North American Union
12. Shakespeare was somebody else
13. The disappearance of Shergar
14. Paul is dead
15. The July 7, 2005 Tube bombings
16. The Moscow apartment bombings
17. Black or unmarked helicopters
18. Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent
19. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
20. The peak oil conspiracy
21. Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen
22. The Philadelphia Experiment
23. Pan Am Flight 103
24. Fluoridation
25. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
26. Plastic coffins and concentration camps
27. HAARP
28. The Aids virus was created in a laboratory
29. Global warming is a hoax
30. Chemtrails

We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the context of interruptions makes a difference. We found that context does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality. Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort. Individual differences exist in the management of interruptions: personality measures of openness to experience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions.

It’s hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought.
There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer.
In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching.
A typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.

Here we go again. The United Nations is trying to take over the Internet! Or maybe it isn’t.
Only five months ago, at a treaty conference convened by a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, the U.S. delegation stormed out, refusing to sign the proposed document, saying it posed a threat to the current, decentralized Internet governance system. Several dozen other countries joined the boycott.
Next week, beginning Monday, the agency can make no such protestations about a meeting it is convening in Geneva. The stated topic of the World Telecommunication Policy Forum is, yes, Internet governance.
Even if the official opinions are largely banal, individual governments will have the right to stand up in Geneva next week to make their own policy statements. Countries like Russia and China, as well as governments in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, have made no secret of their desire to exercise more control over things like the Internet address system.
Congress has been looking at Internet governance, too. In April, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill stating that “it is the policy of the United States to preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet.”
But some critics noted that wording adding that the United States also supported “a global Internet free from government control” was removed from the bill.

GoodData, a cloud-based business analytics company, and Box, which provides online storage, announced a product that analyzes how data is used to judge the overall health of the business. Frequent use of some particular marketing collateral, for example, would indicate it is particularly effective. Items shared between different departments could indicate new customer needs.

“There is so much data generated by every product that it is crazy not to try and capture it.” – Roman Stanek, the chief executive of GoodData

There are dozens of this kind of thing, with more every day, as companies start to think of every recorded process and product as a means to greater insight.
One interesting upshot of this is that data can no longer be thought of as having a single definition. It used to be that data was mostly stored and forgotten about, or drawn on for some specific purpose, like finding the number of a part, or recalling an airline reservation.
Before, data was mostly in a single state. Now it’s a kind of potential object, ready at all times to be combined with other data for some new insight. New databases and data frameworks, like Hadoop, have arisen to capture and exploit this. Companies doing fast retrieval of stored data, for real-time analysis, are on fire.

Япония не собирается пересматривать свою позицию в отношении Второй Мировой войны и совершенных в ходе нее преступлений, заявил в среду в японском парламенте премьер-министр страны Синдзо Абэ.
“Мы разделяем мнение предыдущих кабинетов (правительства Японии – ИФ) о том, что (Япония – ИФ) нанесла огромный ущерб и причинила страдания народам Азии”, – сказал он.
Министр иностранных дел Японии Фумио Кисида отметил, что правительство не намерено пересматривать официальные извинения, принесенные в 1995 году странам -жертвам японской экспансии, и добавил, что С.Абэ разделяет ту же точку зрения.
Ранее президент Южной Кореи Пак Кын Хе в интервью американскому изданию “Вашингтон пост” заявила, что действия Токио вызывают напряженность в отношениях с азиатскими соседями и что Японии следует задуматься о своей истории.
Напряженность в отношениях Токио и Сеула, в частности, была вызвана недавним посещением храма Ясукуни в Токио группой из более 160 японских депутатов и японским вице-премьером Таро Асо.
Посещение высокопоставленными чиновниками храма Ясукуни традиционно вызывает негодование Сеула, Пекина и Пхеньяна. В Китае и обеих частях Кореи посещение мемориала воспринимается как почтительное отношение к военному прошлому Японии, что является оскорблением для стран, пострадавших от японской оккупации.
В 1995 году премьер-министр Японии Томиити Мураяма выступил с речью, посвященной 50-летию окончания Второй Мировой войны и согласно которой Япония признает последствия колониального господства и агрессии и приносит искренние извинения за содеянное.