@MelissaSterry: [The Really] Old School Ravers: New scientific techniques reveal how large tribal gatherings swept neolithic Britain http://t.co/dkEZkibO http://twitter.com/MelissaSterry/status/201609554155409408

"People in wealthier nations are far more likely to search for information about the future compared with citizens of poorer states, a study of 45 billion Google search queries has revealed"

"But they were less agreeable about allowing Robovie civil liberties, like being paid for work. The children also said that the robot could be bought, sold and should not have the right to vote. "

"Somebody said, ‘Get the Waka Flocka.’ Two men broke off, crossed East 161st Street, entered the lobby of an apartment building, approached the bank of 207 mailboxes and opened one. Waka Flocka is the name of a rapper. But to these men, the phrase described something else. The community gun."

"The number of 15 to 19-year-olds taking their own lives is almost three times higher than the world average at 19 to 20 per 100,000, the health ministry's chief psychiatrist Zurab Kekelidze told a round table in Moscow."

"Thoughts for today: the situations where the buyer or seller will shift a measurable value (cash, money) into other less comparable forms (fapioa, …) to disguise the real value of the exchange. Who they are disguising it from. The legal and social rules surrounding the exchange. Aftermarkets for the receipts."

Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished. “Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”

"To start off, our goal is to do what lots of people have asked me to create: a wiki that catalogues everything related to resilient communities. We'd like to create a visual catelogue of the things (from DIY solar stills to an inventory of homes, farms, businesses in your community) that will be useful in the development of resilient communities."

“Google Street View is both the view from the machine (from the car, the Ballardian view-of-our-times) and the view of the machine (the way the machine sees). Overlayed with data augmentation, from a non-human-natural perspective (the roof of the car), slightly lensed (fish-eyed), wholly networked.”

"Swyngedouw points to a climate of global consensus that has become pervasive over the past twenty years, effectively suppressing dissent and excluding most people from governance. He explains this consensus as limited to a select group (e.g., elite politicians, business leaders, NGOs, experts from a variety of fields) and perpetuated through "empty signifiers" like the sustainable/creative/world-class city. He argues that this consensus serves a "post-political" neoliberal order in which governments fail to address citizens' most basic needs in order to subsidize the financial sector and take on grandiose projects designed to attract global capital."

"...photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes… "

"The ’guardian angels’ will be inconspicuous, intelligent and self-sufficient devices designed to help people in daily life. They include sensors that help small children or people in need of care in complicated life situations. Sensors on and in the body measure different bodily functions, process the data and transfer it to mobile devices via corresponding communication channels. These tiny electronic guardian angels should help elderly or handicapped people retain their independence – even if their mental or physical faculties are in decline. However, the guardian angels are also to act as sensors for the environment, to recognise environmental hazards at an early stage, for instance..."

"For the last year I’ve been more visible about being genderqueer. It’s an identity I feel is very important to put forward, especially as I find myself receiving more mainstream attention, though I could just as easily identify with any number of other identities I hold to my being. Despite the fact that I’ve used the word “genderqueer”, I realized I haven’t shared much on my site about what the term means to me."

"If sex ratios stay the same, 600,000 missing girls this year will become, in 18 years’ time, over 10m missing future brides. Robbery, rape and bride-trafficking tend to increase in any society with large groups of young single men. And because in China and India men higher up the social ladder find wives more easily than those lower down, the social problems of bachelorhood tend to accumulate like silt among the poorest people and (in India) the lowest castes."

"Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies. That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they’ll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity."