Netflix believes, algorithmically at least, that I am the kind of person who likes to watch “Dark TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead.” This picksome genre is never one that I that seek out intentionally, and I’m not sure it even represents my viewing habits.

In 2006 a man walked into an internet cafe in Kassel, Germany, and shot dead Halit Yozgat, a 21-year-old member of the Turkish-German family who owned it. It was the ninth in a series of racist killings by neo-Nazis, the motivation for which the police persistently refused to admit.

The mood in the room after an early Sundance screening of Adam Bhala Lough’s The New Radical was polite, but a little icy.

It’s our 50th episode!  To celebrate we sit down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: the scientists and experts who are deciding whether or not we formally adopt the Anthropocene into the geologic time table.  We discuss what makes the Anthropocene boundary different from all of the other boundaries in geologic history, how they deal with the increased public attention to this particular boundary, and some cultural ripple effects of the Anthropocene dealing with the Law of the Sea.  As we wrap up, the Generation Anthropocene producers take a minute to reflect on all of the rapid changes we’ve witnessed over the past 50 episodes.

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If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

1. Conservation in the Anthropocene

2. Welcome to the… Technosphere?

3. The rock hard truth of mass extinctions

Contributors

Jan Zalasiewicz

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, and before that worked at the British Geological Survey.  He is a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, and researches fossil ecosystems and environments across 500-million years of Earth history.  Jan is also the convenor for the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ and has published many scholarly works on the topic.  Along with Mark Williams, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Davor Vidas

Davor Vidas is the director of the Law of the Sea and Marine Affairs Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI).  As an expert dealing with the Law of the Sea, Davor is currently investigating how international laws, all of which were written during our previous and stable geologic epoch, need to adapt to better fit the unstable environment of the Anthropocene.

Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis is the head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey.  Mike has worked all across the world researching the intersection of plate tectonics and landscape evolution, the environmental impacts of climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a reader in paleobiology at the University of Leicester.  His work deals primarily with the interactions between the biosphere and other Earth systems.  Mark also studies climate proxies and the application of numerical climate models.  Along with Jan Zalasiewicz, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Interviewer

Miles Traer

For biographical information on Miles Traer, please click here.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/anthropocene-working-group-roundtable/

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday against Defense Distributed, the Texas organization that promotes 3D-printed guns, in a lawsuit that it brought last year against the State Department.

This article contains extensive descriptions of vaginas and might be NSFW, depending on your place of work. Growing up, Japanese artist Rokudenashiko ― who uses a pseudonym that translates to “good-for-nothing” ― never said the word manko, or vagina, out loud. No one really did.

Looking for examples of science/weird fictions that deal with 'zones': intermediate or parallel realms - often forbidden - beyond the normal sphere of law or reason. ...of course there's 'Stalker' or 'Roadside Picnic' & echoes in the 2010 film 'Monsters' and Jeff VanderMeer's recent 'Southern Reach' series. I'm thinking of Samuel Delaney's concept of the 'paraspace' too, though these are always accessed through some technological prosthesis.

Any other ZONES?

In the wake of high-profile police shootings, the Obama administration has encouraged local police departments to equip their officers with body-worn cameras.

The US wants to press ahead with asteroid mining, but rights to the riches buried in space are a grey area. How should we draw up rules for harvesting the heavens? “MAGNIFICENT desolation.

Anyone who has a smartphone is capable of whipping out a high-resolution camera and filming injustice in progress. That technology is how we've become exposed to police abuses nationwide and helped inspire a new wave of police reform activism.

The Random Darknet Shopper art project is no longer under investigation, but the MDMA it bought on Agora was destroyed. Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo are !Mediengruppe Bitnik (read - the not mediengruppe bitnik). They live and work in Zurich/London.

As history has repeatedly shown, political systems come and go. Given our rapid technological and social advances, it's a trend we can expect to continue. Here are 12 extraordinary — and even frightening — ways our governments could be run in the future.

Algorithms have long adjudicated over vital processes that help to ensure our well-being and survival, from pacemakers that maintain the natural rhythms of the heart, and genetic algorithms that optimise emergency response times by cross-referencing ambulance locations with demographic data, to ea

The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional—indeed wrong—to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic Enlightenment authors were part of the same world of thought. Similarly, both eighteenth-century Christian and Enlightenment thinkers were heirs to the same conceptual revolution of seventeenth-century natural philosophy (which included what we now term science), and both moved on the same deeper tidal currents of early-modern intellectual change.

Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression.

It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers, which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, ... a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised. The business arrangement that an author made with an editor might make it look as if words could be traded like watches or pork bellies, but it just wasn't so.

Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to find an effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the U.S. market.

One of the most shocking stories I've ever read: the criminalisation of childhood in Texas

A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

RT @XiXiDu: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents http://t.co/RioYhh3

x #agency #ai #law #politics #books #autonomy