Category Archives: Transhuman News

Crysis 3 | Playthrough | Part 1 | Post Human | HD
I forgot to say that I #39;m going to playthrough this with all of the stuff I #39;ve unlocked just to keep it interesting because I don #39;t wan #39;t to unlock everything...

By: Jerycurls

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Crysis 3 | Playthrough | Part 1 | Post Human | HD - Video

A just released book by University of Canterburys Associate Professor Kate van Heugten examines the experiences of workers and managers from a broad array of human service organisations in post-earthquake Christchurch.

Van Heugtens book Human Service Organisations in the Disaster Context (Palgrave Macmillan) explores the efforts of welfare, health, education, justice, psychological and community development organisations in supporting communities that have experienced large scale disasters. The work draws on confidential interviews with sources working to support communities in post-earthquake Christchurch, and integrates this with international literature to analyse the challenges and opportunities that arise for such organisations after large-scale disasters.

The book developed out of a previous work, looking at stress, fatigue and burnout in the workplace, on which she was working when the Canterbury earthquakes began.

Essentially, the idea for new book arose from a chapter in the first one," van Heugten says.

Talking to those working during the response really puts a human face on recovery efforts and draws the issues and opportunities into stark relief in an engaging way. These are people who are doing the absolute best they can for individuals, families and communities, often at times of considerable stress in their own personal situations.

It is very clear that these people play a very valuable supportive role. Often, they are more effective because of their own personal motivations to help, which keep them going-but it is also very clear that they need to be very well supported to remain effective over any period of time.

The human service organisations in which these people are employed advocate for communities, champion social justice, and help ensure that vulnerable people are not left isolated. They are a key driver of recovery, individually, as communities and as a region."

Van Heugten says her book is an academic text and uses the experiences of Christchurch workers as a case study to make the literature and theory on disaster responses accessible to readers. She does not intend the book to be a criticism of local earthquake recovery efforts-though some might see it that way.

Her participants commentaries reach beyond descriptive accounts of their own work, to more analytic commentaries about the need for collaborative rather than top-down approaches to emergency interventions and about the impacts of poverty and discrimination on long-term community recovery. While some recovery and community wellbeing needs were well catered for and funded, others were reported to be overlooked or sidelined.

There will always be a range of views about what works and what doesnt after a disaster. This book relies on qualitative research and international literature to develop theory. Qualitative research makes clear comparisons difficult, but it does offer observations about things that are internationally identified as being absolutely necessary--such as attention to the views of local communities and to the provision of affordable social housing."

Link:
UC academic looks at role of post-earthquake social services

Evolution is a funny thing. All organic creatures evolve in response to changes in their environment. And then in turn, the environment changes in response to new behaviors from the organisms that inhabit it. The same dynamic applies to the Internet and the people who use it. Innovation begets behavioral change. Behavioral change inspires new innovation.

But what happens when pace of environmental change begins to outpace human change? What happens when the Internet experiences such massive new strains on it from an exponential increase in the data, applications and interactions that have grown so dependent on it? And what must the industry do to prepare the network for this shift and ensure people can continue to take advantage of emerging technological capabilities?

The changes in our digital environment are stunning. According to the research firm Telegeography, global Internet capacity has reached 77 Tbps, more than doubling between 2010 and 2012. A lot of this growth is driven by the popularity of social media and high-bandwidth apps such as video. With Cisco predicting that there will be more than 50 billion connected devices in the world by 2020 (embed live counter from this page), how can we ensure that the global connectivity infrastructure can cope under this strain?

What has been discussed less is the increased unpredictability in network needs. This is not simply a question of network capacity, but of how we connect with our technologies as a species. Managing a reliable global utility requires a continual dedication to configuration data and infrastructure management. Without that, trust in the utility is not possible.

The Internet of Things will present similar challenges for all who are involved in creating it, as the reliability of physical objects, vehicles and even human wearables and cybernetics takes on a whole new meaning. When a computer crashes, you can reboot. What happens when a network outage impacts personal belongings, vehicles or body parts? Thats why the Internet must be built on a solid network, because any faults could have consequences far more serious than any we have yet imagined.

From a security point of view, the key challenge is controlling access to billions of devices on the network. How do you protect the devices from attacks when at the same time you need to ensure that the devices have configuration enabled? How do you control access with devices such as pace makers or vehicle steering systems that cannot be switched off?

You also need to ensure that you have the right building blocks, including configuration data and infrastructure management, in place. You need robust platforms to ensure that the network is protected against the unexpected. Connectivity involves context and automation and with data there are often ripples when something goes wrong. For example, if 100,000 devices kick off an action, this can quickly impact the whole network due to the huge number of connected devices. Policing the interaction between the devices is key to ensuring that the whole network is protected.

Good security isnt cheap, and you must also make security controls flexible enough so connectivity retains agility. Any issues with software bugs or network mal-performance will be amplified with the Internet of things. Its up to service providers to deliver these mechanisms and policies, and the industry needs to recognize it.

All this leads us to some interesting new questions questions that shift our attention from supporting the network for the networks sake to supporting the network for humans sake. How do you balance the evolution of the Internet with the evolution of how people use technology?

Its true that technology now evolves faster than human behavior. And yet, human imagination is an infinite resource, whereas network capacity is not. This two-way tension raises some interesting questions:

More here:
Internet and Human Capability: A Study In Parallel Evolution

Racially diverse emoji characters look to be on their way after the Unicode Consortium proposed a plan to introduce five color options, for people and body parts, to go alongside the current extremely limited offerings with which allemoji users, and non-users for that matter, are more than familiar.

The consortium, a non-profit group that works to develop and promote software internationalization standards for how text and characters are represented on electronic devices, said this week that next year it hoped to offer emoji fans greater choice when it comes to selectingparticular characters.

Related:You can now do a Bing search using emoji

People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone, the consortium wrote on its website this week.

It continued, The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (non-human) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette.

The proposed skin tones are based on the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognised classification schema for human skin color, and would be presented as five color swatches that can be used to modify the appearance of the existing human emoji characters.

To simplify the process, the consortium suggests how a long press on an existing emoji could bring up a mini-palette of various skin tones (below), leaving the user to tap on the desired character.

Related:Emojli social network only allows emoji

And yes, the consortium is well aware that now that its having a go at tackling racial diversity with emoji, someusers are likely tostart raising the question ofother types of diversity.different hair styles and color, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on.

However, dont expect any changes along those lines, as the group insists that coming up with an encoding-based mechanism for all types of human appearance is beyond the scope of Unicode, though it does suggestsome possible solutionsfor the future.

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Proposed emoji update means you may soon be able to choose a characters skin tone

6th November, 2014

PETALING JAYA: The post of the National Sports Council (NSC) director-general is open to both locals and foreigners and hence the advertisement in English.

Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said this when responding to criticism from Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka director, Datuk Awang Sariyan for publishing the advertisement in an English daily, yesterday.

He also stressed that there would be no problem if a foreign national held the post because the task was professional in nature, that of to boost the performance of sports in the country.

No problem because we find the best individual for the job, the issue of not being a local citizen does not arise because what is important is the individuals commitment towards boosting national sports, he told reporters after delivering a Ministerial Luncheon Keynote Address at the 2014 Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi Human Capital Summit here, yesterday.

Khairy also said the spirit of patriotism would not be affected if the post was held by a foreign national, but to look, instead, to professional goals and emulate the success of developed sporting nations.

Its not about patriotism, many football coaches who are behind teams that become world champions are from other countries. Coaches and policymakers abroad too are not from their own countries, he said.

The post of NSC director-general fell vacant when previous director-general Datuk Seri Zolkples Embong was appointed the 2017 SEA Games Chief Executive officer and the vacancy for the post was advertised in an English daily and on the ministrys official website from yesterday.

The post was being offered on a two-year contract basis.

Meanwhile, in his address, Khairy said 80 per cent of Institut Kemahiran Belia Negara graduates have been employed despite some parents being sceptical.

See more here:
Khairy: NSC D-G post open to foreigners

Government and companies are complicit in violating the freedom of assembly and land rights of local communities, say three rights groups.

Baram Dam permanent blockade

Malaysian and international human rights organisations have united to publicly condemn the actions taken by authorities and logging company representatives to intimidate Indigenous Peoples in Sarawak at the proposed site of the Baram Dam.

On 21 October, coercive action was taken by police from the General Operation Force (GOF), Forest Department officers and personnel representing logging interests from the company M M Golden to pressure residents of Long Kesseh to abandon their customary lands and disperse from the site, where they had set up a barricade.

As a result of the violation of rights outlined in the national constitution and provisions of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples, an urgent appeal was submitted on 22 October to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

The appeal calls on her to raise concerns with the government of Malaysia about the actions taken to forcefully dismantle the barricade, which had been set up a year ago by local residents of Long Kesseh to assert their native customary rights (NCR) to land being allocated against their will for the Baram Dam site.

Exactly one year ago, on 23 October 2013, the people of Long Kesseh set up a barricade on an area of native customary land that would be submerged if the 1200MW Baram hydroelectric project is built as proposed by Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB).

If this dam is completed, it would inundate 26 villages, including Long Kesseh, flooding 400 square kilometres of land and displacing between 6000 and 20,000 people. In response to SEBs efforts to begin preparatory work for the Baram Dam, residents of Long Kesseh and surrounding areas symbolically marked their defiance by building a barricade on their own land.

The members of longhouses to be affected by the Baram Dam, including Long Kesseh, have never given consent for any timber clearance or other preparatory project works to proceed on customary lands.

Yet, agents working with M M Golden Sdn Bhd are claiming the land is part of a concession they were granted. Although the circumstances related to the issuing of their logging permit remain ambiguous, the company has become associated with Sarawak Energy Berhads efforts to clear timber around the Baram River and help pave the way for the construction of the proposed Baram hydroelectric project.

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Baram Dam: Bid to expel indigenous people denounced