jeudi 15 juillet 2010

Links for today

¶ Are we witnessing the emergence of the global brain? Is the Internet weaving the human race into a giant superorganism? Two brilliant articles by Robert Wright: Building One Big Brain and With Liberty and Connectivity for All.

¶ Don't miss the wonderful graphics in the New York Times about the Macondo Oil Spill : Methods That Have Been Tried to Stop the Leaking Oil, the brilliant maps in How Much Oil Is on the Gulf Coast and the very interesting Investigating the Cause of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout.

Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence (Stratfor): about the trade of intelligence gathering today, in the light of the recent Russian spies story.

¶ No Easy Tech Explanation for What Caused Wall St. 'Flash Crash' (The Atlantic): it was probably not a computer bug after all but a more worrying (in our opinion) reason: complexity. Complex systems fail in "cascading effects of multiple factors".

The Banning of the Niqab in France: Legal and Cultural Perspectives (The International Jurist) : a thoughtful legal opinion, for my American friends.