Ever wonder what you’re really drinking when you pick up that bottled water? And I don’t just mean what’s in the water: where’s it come from? What’s its impact? What’s its future? These questions have been bugging me, so I set out to discover the answers. Turns out, there’s a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t buy bottled water any more. So, here’s the seven deadly sins of bottled water.

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Today’s quote is via the German newspaper, Spiegel Online, and concerns the recent alarming reports of the destruction of German (and American) bee populations. In it, they refer to Albert Einstein as saying:

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

It seems that the exact cause of the decline of bee populations in Germany and America may have a large number of causes. In Germany, it has been attributed to an alien invader from Asia called the varroa mite, the use of pesticides on wild flowers, and monoculture. More worryingly, it is also suspected that it may be as a result of genetically modified crops. In America, similar reasons have been given to account for their loss, also citing a “vampire” mite that destroys bee hives.

The phenomenon of entire hives being destroyed is called “colony collapse disorder“, and it appears to have spread to regions in Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Poland, and also Britain. An astonishing 24 states in America have reported a 50 to 90 percent loss in bee colonies.

Most interestingly of all is a recent German study that claims that radiation from mobile phones is the cause because it “interferes with bees’ navigation systems” and prevents them from finding their way back to their hives.

All the reasons do seem to have one thing in common, however: us. Not really a newsflash, but still, it’s sad.

Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons. There are several fantastic quotes scattered throughout the document, but one of the more interesting ones is this:

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoplesâ?? attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the worldâ??s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

I find that particularly fascinating (and promising, in fact). I’ve always found Marx’s works to be interesting and still relevant in today’s society, especially in the fields of sociology and political economy, despite some of my friends still having a chuckle and saying that he has absolutely no relevance in today’s world. In fact, one of the first lines of an economics text I read a while ago said that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marx was proved “wrong”, never mind that since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 it was recognised amongst the Left and others that Lenin’s revolution bore no resemblance to Marx’s ideas. At any rate, it seems he may have relevance in tomorrow’s world.

On a related note, this document ties in nicely with another paper I’ve started reading from the Oxford Research Group entitled Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, which argues “that international terrorism is actually a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends”, such as climate change and resource competition.

(And if you want a summarised version of the Global Strategic Trends report, the Guardian have done an article on it).

Here’s an interesting hypothesis that I came across recently, reading through an article in the latest edition of the IEEE Spectrum about digitally animated faces. It’s called the “Uncanny Valley” effect, formulated by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and it basically says that, as a robot becomes more human-like in appearance, the more humans are likely to empathise with it. However, this effect reaches a point where empathy is reversed, and humans are likely to be repulsed instead. This, too, is then reversed and replaced with positive empathy once more as the appearance of the robot becomes even closer to that of a human being.

I’d be extremely interested if this hypothesis could work in reverse. For example, could individuals who believe in cyborgization i.e. integrating themselves with machines actually decrease the amount of empathy fellow humans feel for them?

For anyone interested in privacy, security and surveillance issues, Roger Clarke’s website is a must. Well-researched and insightful, it has become a regular read for me since he covers a lot of issues that have arisen from technology-saturated societies and the natural marriage between IT, governments and corporations in creating ubiquitous surveillance.

Today’s quote is from a paper Clarke wrote in 2006 entitled “What’s Privacy?“, in which he offers this wonderful definition of privacy:

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a ‘personal space’, free from interference by other people and organisations.

We would do well to keep this definition in mind before privacy simply comes to mean that corporations and governments can still conduct massive surveillance and collect information on you, but they’ll try make sure it’s secured from unauthorized access. Privacy is not, and should never be, the same as data security.

Business Week are running a piece on motion capture technology, saying that it is transforming the way companies do business, as well as advertise. From the article:

Motion capture is starting to transform how businesses market their products as well as design and manufacture them. This spring the Las Vegas McCarren International Airport will set up large plasma screens with a motion- tracking component that lets advertisers bring pedestrians into their commercials. When you walk past a car ad, for example, the vehicle might move at the same speed you’re walking. When you turn to look at the driver, he’ll turn to look at you, and you’ll be staring into an image of your own face. Dozens of blue-chip aerospace, auto, and heavy-equipment makers, from Lockheed Martin to BMW to Caterpillar already use motion tracking to let workers collaborate in shared virtual environments, sometimes when they are thousands of miles apart. Together they can test the ergonomics of a design for a car or a plane. “Any company that creates a product used by people needs to understand how the human body moves,” says Iek van Cruyningen, head of securities at Libertas Capital Group, a specialist investment bank. “Motion-tracking systems and virtual simulations accelerate product development and boost productivity.”

Some interesting questions arise from all this, all of them to do with privacy (aside from the fact that most billboards are just damn ugly monstrosities invading our personal space). What if I don’t consent to having my face and body displayed on a massive billboard or an advert? Whose permission do they ask for in order to film me? How do I opt out so that any possible cameras they’re using don’t film me? How long before ubiquitous advertising such as this essentially becomes out-sourced surveillance for the city’s/country’s law enforcement?

I’m pretty sure that Second Life - or, at least, a business in Second Life - must be looking at this and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a motion capture system that overlaid our real world store into the virtual world?” Tie that in with arphid store-loyalty cards, and you’ve got a perfect real-world simulation of your store and everyone in it.

Pretty much what I had pictured before. Yeah, pretty cool. Too bad it’ll be used to just track everything you do.

I’m also curious as to how long it’ll be before ad busters and culture jammers start hacking into these 21st Century billboards to replace them with their own. Looking forward to that one.

Ever wonder how a robot might look like dancing? Have a look at Keepon, “a small creature-like robot developed to perform emotional and attentional interaction with children”. Insanely addictive little critter! [Via New Scientist]

The International Herald Tribune have a wonderful article up on why we laugh. Through a study conducted by neuroscientists Robert Provine and Jaak Panksepp, they produced some rather interesting evidence to suggest that we laugh not because something is funny, but because “It is a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.”

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

This expands on previous research from Panskepp that showed animals laugh, too. There is also a fascinating paper available from the 1996 issue of American Scientist written by Provine, which gives further detail of his previous research into the subject.

I’m still curious why I laugh at a funny film or TV show when there’s no-one around. Surely that’s not a social function?

The Milgram Experiment remains one of the most interesting (and controversial) psychological experiments of the 20th Century. Conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, the experiment was designed to test whether or not ordinary people were willing to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks on the orders of a figure of authority to a test subject who, in reality, was an actor pretending to be electrocuted. Astonishingly, 65% of all participants were willing to do so. Some great footage here.

Update: the old object to the video I linked to was removed from You Tube, so I’ve added in the new one.

Keeping in mind that realism as a political school only appeared when first used by the international relations theorists E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, the basic principles have a rich history. One of the most common historical examples of this tradition is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, dating back more than 2400 years.

In a nutshell, Realism is considered to be a set of laws for elites that span both time and space i.e. history and geopolitics. Those laws have common strands threading throughout history. Of course, there are a wide variety of different schools within realism (far too many to cover here) but all of them contain some basic principles.

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