The world's oldest clove tree www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18551857

Afo survived the destruction of clove trees in the 1700s

India's Forgotten Faces  www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2009/02/indias-forgotten-faces/18

The adivasi, or indigenous, people of southern India are among the poorest in the world. Ignored by the classical caste structure and shunned by the government, adivasi communities have relied for centuries on India's forests for food, fuel, and cultural identity. But with increasing pressures from large scale agriculture, and the growth of conservation zones and national parks, today their open access to the forest has almost(?) disappeared. Some particularly marginalized communities were forcefully relocated out of the forest into government-built houses.

 

internet pollution

  Front groups is one astroturfing technique, which typically creates the appearance of being an organization that serves the public interest, while masking a corporate sponsor.
-content farm
Critics allege that content farms provide relatively low quality content, and that they maximize profit by producing "just good enough" material rather than high-quality articles. Articles are usually composed by human writers rather than automated processes, but they may not be written by a specialist in the subjects reported. Some authors working for sites identified as content farms have admitted knowing little about the fields on which they report. Search engines see content farms as a problem, as they tend to bring the user to less relevant and lower quality results of the search. The reduced quality and rapid creation of articles on such sites has drawn comparisons to the fast food industry and to pollution:

Information consumers end up with less relevant or valuable resources. Producers of relevant resources receive less cash as a reward (lower clickthrough rate) while producers of junk receive more cash. One way to describe this is pollution. Virtual junk pollutes the Web environment by adding noise. Everybody but the polluters pays a price for Web pollution: search engines work less well, users waste precious time and attention on junk sites, and honest publishers lose income. The polluter spoils the Web environment for everybody else.

-internet water army
 The U.S. military is developing "Operation Earnest Voice" to use sockpuppetry software that will "fake online personas to influence net conversations and spread US propaganda
 Online forum manipulation strategies can take many forms, and firms (or, depending on the context of interest, political parties and special interest groups) are getting more sophisticated about them by the day. The simplest firm strategy is to anonymously post online reviews praising its own products, or bad-mouthing those of its competitors. There is ample evidence that such manipulation takes place.

 Data mining expert Bing Liu (University of Illinois) estimated that one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. According to the New York Times, this has made it hard to tell the difference between "popular sentiment" and "manufactured public opinion." According to an article in the Journal of Business Ethics, astroturfing threatens the legitimacy of genuine grassroots movements. The authors argued that astroturfing that is "purposefully designed to fulfill corporate agendas, manipulate public opinion and harm scientific research represents a serious lapse in ethical conduct." A 2011 report found that often paid posters from competing companies are attacking each other in forums and overwhelming regular participants in the process. George Monbiot said persona management software that supports astroturfing, "could destroy the Internet as a forum for constructive debate."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
 www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/view/2850/3274

newsy items

 
www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-renewable-energy-tax-breaks
 www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/books/review/Essay-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 
www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/neil-tyson-cosmos-comets-creationists
blog.mondediplo.net/2010-06-17-Les-predicateurs-de-la-genetique-extreme

www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?src=me
www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez-appraisal-entwining-tales-of-time-memory-and-love.html?action=click&contentCollection=Books&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

historical technologies

glas
In de zestiende eeuw voor Christus werd in Mesopotamië de zogenaamde "zandkerntechniek" uitgevonden. Deze techniek bleef gedurende de volgende 1500 jaar de voornaamste methode voor het maken van glas. Een mengsel van mest en klei werd om een ijzeren staafje geboetseerd en vervolgens met verwarmde dikke glasdraden omwikkeld, al dan niet in kleur. Na afkoeling van het glas werd de gedroogde kern uit het voorwerp geschraapt. De techniek verbreidde zich snel. In de vijftiende eeuw voor Christus was er in Egypte een echte glasindustrie, met als belangrijkste productiecentrum de stad Tell el-Amarna. De meest voorkomende vormen in de zandkerntechniek zijn kleine glazen cosmeticaflesjes, waarin parfum, oliën en make-up werden bewaard.

De Egyptenaren zagen glas als een door mensen gemaakte edelsteen. Het kleurige glaswerk leek dan ook gemaakt van bijvoorbeeld turkoois, amethist en lapis lazuli. Vanwege de kostbaarheid was het alleen voor de elite bestemd. In de twaalfde eeuw voor Christus stagneerde de glasproductie, gelijktijdig met het verval van de Bronstijdculturen in het oostelijk Middellandse Zeegebied. Aan het einde van de achtste eeuw wordt er weer zandkernglas gemaakt in het Nabije Oosten, en op de Griekse eilanden.

uit: www.historischeverenigingleerdam.nl/het-maken-van-glas-in-de-oudheid_221.html

gold & copper

The paper deals with the different use of gold and copper in the Early and Middle Copper Age on one side and the Late Copper Age cultures of the Carpathian Basin on the other side. Transylvania was in the antiquity one of the richest gold mining areas of Eurasia. This is demonstrated on the basis of Roman and Medieval texts, expecially on hand of those about the Decebalus gold treasure found by the troups of Trajan in 106 A.D.

In strong contrast to the wide use of gold (and also of copper) in the very gold rich area of Transylvania during Early and especially Middle Copper Age cultures (i.e. the Tiszapolgár and Bodrogkeresztúr and their corresponding cultures in other parts of the Carpathian Basin, among others the Lasinja culture in Transdanubia with its gold discs) there is no trace of the use of gold in the Late Copper Age. In the Late Copper Age also a very strong decrease in the number and also weight of the copper artifacts can be observed, too, and it is very remarkable that the few copper objects were daggers. This stays to indicate wartime or at least a continuing armed unrest during Late Copper Age. Invasions, conquests and similar events never promote production, accumulation, hoarding and public use of gold.

link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-015-1292-3 

The Copper Age, also called the Eneolithic or the Chalcolithic Age, has been traditionally understood as a transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, in which a gradual introduction of the metal (native copper) took place, while stone was still the main resource utilized. Recent archaeology has found that the metal was not introduced so gradually and that this entailed significant social changes, such as hierarchical leadership, developments in the type of habitation (larger villages, launching of fortifications), long-distance trade, and copper metallurgy.
Roughly, the Copper Age could be situated chronologically between the 5th and 6th millennium BC in places like the archaeological sites of Majdanpek, Јarmovac and Pločnik (a copper axe from 5500 BC belonging to the Vinča culture). Somewhat later, in 5th millennium BC, metalwork is attested at Rudna Glava mine in Serbia, and at Ai Bunar mine in Bulgaria.
 3rd millennium BC copper metalwork is attested in places like Palmela (Portugal), Cortes de Navarra (Spain), and Stonehenge (United Kingdom). However, as often happens with the prehistoric times, the limits of the age cannot be clearly defined and vary with different sources.
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Age_in_Europe
www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba101/feat1.shtml
Defining characteristics of the Chalcolithic include the introduction of copper, and some changes to the material culture visible in the archaeological data, including a much richer artistic and cultic tradition.

neareast-prehistory.com/html/chalcolithic.html 

Diffusion of metallurgy in Europe and Asia Minor. The darkest areas are the oldest
 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age

 Iron technology did not come to Africa from western Asia via Carthage or Merowe as was long thought, concludes "Aux origines de la métallurgie du fer en Afrique, Une ancienneté méconnue: Afrique de l'Ouest et Afrique centrale". The theory that it was imported from somewhere else, which - the book points out - nicely fitted colonial prejudices, does not stand up in the face of new scientific discoveries, including the probable existence of one or more centres of iron-working in west and central Africa andthe Great Lakes area. 
portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3432&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html 

lol

silicon solutions

Silicon Valley Doesn't Just Help the Surveillance State—It Built It

More than a decade ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden began enlisting the private sector to build the NSA's data ops.

www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/silicon-valley-doesnt-just-help-the-surveillance-state-it-built-it/276700/


motherboard.vice.com/blog/obamas-plan-to-privatize-surveillance-could-hit-silicon-valley-too
Why Obama’s NSA Reforms Won’t Solve Silicon Valley’s Trust Problem
www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/obama-nsa-2/