Category Archives: Post Human

Software application developers have long sought to manipulate and exploit the processing power available to them in order to get the most out of the applications and systems that they seek to program. In this post-millennial era of app enlightenment, a huge percentage of us know that the brains of a computer is called the Central Processing Unit or CPU for short. So when programmers need something faster and more powerful than a CPU, where do they go?

Software developers working on geospatial intelligence systems, bio molecular research programs, scientific research and (perhaps surprisingly) high-end computer games will often look to use a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) alongside their CPU-based power.

How GPUs accelerate computers

Sometimeslabeled High Performance Computing (HPC), this type of software development relies on the GPUs ability to manipulate and alter a computers calls to memory at extremely high speeds. This allows the machine to accelerate the creation, delivery and presentation of image-related data that will end up being displayed on screen. In simple terms, it means we can make computers do really cool and often really insightful stuff. So like what?

Mapping out a human beings genome structure involves a lot more graphics power than Space Invaders ever did, so GPUs fit the bill well. The human genetic instruction book contains roughly three billion base pairs of DNA. While the genome in every cell of the body is identical, each type of cell needs to be different to serve its specific purpose e.g. growing, fighting disease, creating hormones or one of several other hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So how do your bodys individual cells get programmed to do the right thing on any given day? Developers and researchers have used Nvidia GPUs to work out what appears to be the answer.

The human genome folds into 10,000 loops

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, MIT and Harvard University used Nvidia Tesla GPUs to time-map how the human genome folds itself to form a computing instruction set for our own body to work from. They created the first high-resolution 3-D maps of entire folded genomes and found the human genome is folded into around 10,000 loops.

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Human Genome Folds Form Computer Program For Life

Climate change "is not a hoax," according to theU.S. Senate, which voted 98 to 1 in favor of an amendment stating as muchWednesday. Explaining his vote, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that there was "Biblical evidence" of climate change, but that humans were not responsible for it.

With this amendment,Democrats had hoped to force Republicansto take a stance onthe reality of global warming. They didn't succeed. Two other amendments attributing climate change to human activity failed to achieve the 60 votes needed to advance.

There are somewhat intellectuallyrespectable positions to take against climate-change legislation -- for example, that the costs of stopping global warmingmightoutweigh the benefits -- but the Senate's is notone of them.

"In conclusion, the Senate is pretty clearly a hoax," Brad Plumer wrote.

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What's in Wonkbook:1) Quantitative easing in Europe2) Opinions, including Warren on discrimination in housing 3) Climate votes, abortion and more

Number of the day:$30.35. That's the average hourly wage for an Uber driver in New York, according to an analysis commissioned by the company -- about twice that of conventional taxi drivers. Emily Badger in The Washington Post.

1. Topstory: European Central Bank considers buying bonds

The bank's decision Thursday will be an important one for Europe and the euro. Quantitative easing "marks a critical juncture in the history of the currency and the European unity it embodies. The prospect of large-scale government-bond buying to fight the threat of deflation has not only reinforced national trench lines at the heart of the single currency. A failure of the institution's most controversial measure to date, combined with government dawdling on economic reforms, risks condemning the region to a spiral of dissatisfaction in which unemployment and economic weakness drive voters to politicians who say regional integration has gone too far." Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale for Bloomberg.

European investors weren't impressed by the bank's proposal, though. "The European Central Banks executive board proposed buying roughly 50 billion ($58 billion) a month in bonds for at least a year, according to people familiar with the matter, but Markets largely shrugged as investors pondered whether the ECB will do enough to stoke Europes fragile economy. ... Investors are counting on the ECB to unveil a program that will shock and awe the market." Brian Blackstone in The Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading here:
Wonkblog: Senate rejects link between human activity and climate change

Boris Groys The Post-human Condition according to Alexandre Kojeve... July 1 2014
Boris Groys The Post-human Condition according to Alexandre Kojeve: Life after the End of Love July 1 2014 According to Kojeve, the post-historical reality...

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Boris Groys The Post-human Condition according to Alexandre Kojeve... July 1 2014 - Video

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I wanted the Halo weapons to have depth, so I began thinking about all the guns that were in the matrix. I needed to understand what they were, and how they fit into the design.

The Human weapons were easy to understand. Im a Human, and I know what we use guns for.But the weapons used by the aliens of the Covenant were another matter. The easiest place to start would be to simply say that the alien guns were simply analogs to the Human weapons on the matrix. The pistols, assault rifles etc. could bebasically the same, only with different visual presentation. Easy, yes. But that seemed like a huge missed opportunity to add depth and richness to the game. So I started thinking why would the Covenant choose these particularweapons in the first place?

We (Humans) have guns. And once guns were developed, Humans developed systems to protect people from bullets (bullet proof vests, riot shields etc.) And then in the relentless march of progress, people invented ways to kill other people inside of their body armor (armor piercing bullets etc.)Remember that at the time there wasn't a lot of settled "lore" about the game story. I decided that in my model, Human Spartan armor was created as a desperate response to the Covenant attacks. It had similar functions, like a personal shield, but was based on different technology.

So how about the Covenant?

There were some notes about the bad guys and their guns, but the honest truth was that the aliens shot light-up bolts of energy because they looked a lot more visually impressive coming towards the player on screen. If the bad guys shot nearly invisible bullets and you couldn't see them coming at you, it would be a total drag every time you died. But just knowing that they were colored lights wasn't going to helpme balance my combat data.

Clearly they had guns. And they had an equivalent to our body armor personal energy shields. I could imagine Covenant warriors facing off against enemies across the universe with their plasma weapons blazing. Or more specifically, their PlasmaRifles. As an poor man's analog to the Human pistol, the Plasma Pistol was a pretty dull thing, only useful as a desperation choice forone of the two gun slots you were limited to. I stared at the various data fields in the Halo toolset for quite a while, trying to imagine what to do with the Plasma Pistol to make it cool. And then a question occurred to me: What if the Covenant had to fight an enemy with shields like their own? Or what if they had to fight themselves?Theyd need their own armor-piercing capability.

In the Halo tools, every projectile had a shield damage value. Most were set so that they would damage shields at a rate that matched the damage that their bullets would do to the player's health bar. None of the projectiles were really aggressively balanced against shields. And you know how I feel about data balance in a matrix! I started to experiment with making Plasma Pistol bullets designed to specifically shred shields. It was a snap to make a projectile that blew them off quickly, but then it seemed overpowered to also make those bullets do good levelsof body damage as well. Then it occurred to me: maybe the shield-shredding effect could be assigned to a different bullet. The one assigned to the secondary fire-mode for the gun the overcharge.

This proved to be very fun. In my early playtests, I'd grab the Plasma Pistol and use the overcharge specifically to blow up the shields on enemies that I ran across. But it was frustrating when I missed the overcharged shot (full disclosure: I am a much better designer than I am a player) So to compensate, I gave the shield-busting projectile aterrifyingamount of magnetism so that it would track towards whatever I shot it at. I loved it I could overcharge the Plasma Pistol and let the shot fly, and it would whip around corners and blast targets, stripping off their shields just as I came running in behind and mowed 'em down!

See the article here:
Weapon balance in Halo: Combat Evolved

United States Senators stood up for what they believed in todayand it wasnt pretty. During a debate over construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, intended to carry oil from Canada to the United States, the Senate voted on an amendmentjust for show, reallyon whether climate change is real and not a hoax. Easy questioneveryone said yes, its real. (Well, not everyone. Good job, Senator Roger Wicker, Republican from Missouri. You do not believe science.) But then Brian Schatz, Democrat from Hawaii, decided to push the issue. He introduced another amendment adding that human activity was a significant contributor to the aforementioned climate change. And the Senate voted again.

The results? Ahem. Fifty US senators affirmed that they indeed do believe that the activities of human beings contribute to climate change. OK. But 49 senatorsfully half the upper house that represents our grand republicdo not. So, hey, you go out there and burn whatever carbon you want to? Not sure what to make of that. But we thought you might want to know just which representatives have absolved you of your responsibility to the planet. So heres a listof the senators who think climate change is some other species problem, and then the senators who wish wed maybe do something about it.

Voted against the amendment (nayhuman activities dont contribute to climate change)

Barrasso, John (R WY) Blunt, Roy (R MO) Boozman, John (R AR) Burr, Richard (R NC) Capito, Shelley Moore (R WV) Cassidy, Bill (R LA) Coats, Daniel (R IN) Cochran, Thad (R MS) Corker, Bob (R TN) Cornyn, John (R TX) Cotton, Tom (R AR) Crapo, Mike (R ID) Cruz, Ted (R TX) Daines, Steve (R MT) Enzi, Michael B. (R WY) Ernst, Joni (R IA) Fischer, Deb (R NE) Flake, Jeff (R AZ) Gardner, Cory (R CO) Grassley, Chuck (R IA) Hatch, Orrin G. (R UT) Heller, Dean (R NV) Hoeven, John (R ND) Inhofe, James M. (R OK) Isakson, Johnny (R GA) Johnson, Ron (R WI) Lankford, James (R OK) Lee, Mike (R UT) McCain, John (R AZ) McConnell, Mitch (R KY) Moran, Jerry (R KS) Murkowski, Lisa (R AK) Paul, Rand (R KY) Perdue, David (R GA) Portman, Rob (R OH) Risch, James E. (R ID) Roberts, Pat (R KS) Rounds, Mike (R SD) Rubio, Marco (R FL) Sasse, Ben (R NE) Scott, Tim (R SC) Sessions, Jeff (R AL) Shelby, Richard C. (R AL) Sullivan, Daniel (R AK) Thune, John (R SD) Tillis, Thom (R NC) Toomey, Patrick J. (R PA) Vitter, David (R LA) Wicker, Roger F. (R MS)

Voted for the amendment (yea human activities contribute to climate change)

Alexander, Lamar (R TN) Ayotte, Kelly (R NH) Baldwin, Tammy (D WI) Bennet, Michael F. (D CO) Blumenthal, Richard (D CT) Booker, Cory A. (D NJ) Boxer, Barbara (D CA) Brown, Sherrod (D OH) Cantwell, Maria (D WA) Cardin, Benjamin L. (D MD) Carper, Thomas R. (D DE) Casey, Robert P., Jr. (D PA) Collins, Susan M. (R ME) Coons, Christopher A. (D DE) Donnelly, Joe (D IN) Durbin, Richard J. (D IL) Feinstein, Dianne (D CA) Franken, Al (D MN) Gillibrand, Kirsten E. (D NY) Graham, Lindsey (R SC) Heinrich, Martin (D NM) Heitkamp, Heidi (D ND) Hirono, Mazie K. (D HI) Kaine, Tim (D VA) King, Angus S., Jr. (I ME) Kirk, Mark (R IL) Klobuchar, Amy (D MN) Leahy, Patrick J. (D VT) Manchin, Joe, III (D WV) Markey, Edward J.(D MA) McCaskill, Claire (D MO) Menendez, Robert (D NJ) Merkley, Jeff (D OR) Mikulski, Barbara A. (D MD) Murphy, Christopher (D CT) Murray, Patty (D WA) Nelson, Bill (D FL) Peters, Gary (D MI) Reed, Jack (D RI) Sanders, Bernard (I VT) Schatz, Brian (D HI) Schumer, Charles E. (D NY) Shaheen, Jeanne (D NH) Stabenow, Debbie (D MI) Tester, Jon (D MT) Udall, Tom (D NM) Warner, Mark R. (D VA) Warren, Elizabeth (D MA) Whitehouse, Sheldon (D RI) Wyden, Ron (D OR)

Original post:
Here Are All the Senators Who Do and Dont Believe in Human-Caused Climate Change

Stressing that the United Nations is built around the three pillars of peace and security, development and human rights, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, today underlined the need pay attention to their interdependence, during an address to the Security Council.

"The founders of the United Nations well understood that if we ignore one pillar, we imperil the other two," said Mr. Ban during today's Security Council debate on inclusive development for the maintenance of international peace and security.

"The post-2015 sustainable development agenda is an important opportunity to reinforce the interdependence of development, peace and security, and human rights," he told the Council debate, which coincides with the opening of the General Assembly's three-day informal 'stock-taking' in the process of intergovernmental negotiations on that future agenda.

The Secretary-General said he was encouraged that during debates so far held about completing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the end of this year, launching a post-2015 sustainability agenda, and reaching an agreement on climate change, Member States had paid considerable attention to peace and security and to human rights.

The General Assembly Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals had discussed the importance of inclusive growth and decent work, called for reducing inequality and ensuring universal access to basic services, including health care and education, had explicitly linked peace with social inclusion and access to justice for all, and had called for inclusive, representative decision-making.

In the so called 'synthesis' report he presented to the General Assembly last month - The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet - Mr. Ban underscored the importance of justice to building peaceful and inclusive societies, emphasising the need for strong and responsive institutions.

"With the full membership of the United Nations beginning its negotiations later this morning, we now have an important opportunity to broaden the development agenda and highlight the fundamental importance of inclusive societies in building a more peaceful world," he said.

Every country could benefit from sustainable and inclusive development, tackling persistent exclusion and inequality, ensuring that the most vulnerable have access to basic services and can participate in political dialogue, tackling the "blatant injustice" of discrimination against women and girls, and extending social security provision to the world's population still lacking a safety net for times of illness or unemployment.

Post-conflict societies in particular need to prioritize social, economic and political inclusion in order to rebuild trust between communities. Women's participation in reconciliation and reconstruction also depended on gender equality and women's empowerment, he said.

"The Peacebuilding Commission provides coordinated international support targeted at countries emerging from conflict," continued Mr. Ban. "The current review of the UN's peacebuilding architecture should help to make that support more robust and flexible."

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Africa: Post-2015 Agenda Must Boost Links Among of Development, Security, Human Rights - UN Chief

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- The UN post-2015 agenda will focus on common security, development and human rights, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said here on Monday.

The new universal compact will be people-centered and also planet-sensitive, Ban said at the opening ceremony of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) informal session on the sidelines of intergovernmental negotiations on the future agenda.

"Member states want an ambitious agenda that can end poverty, achieve shared prosperity and peace, allow us to live in harmony with our environment and leave no one behind," he stressed.

The three-day session is underway for countries to exchange views on the components that the post-2015 agenda should contain.

At the opening ceremony, UNGA President Sam Kutesa urged the international community to spare no effort to support countries in their final push to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or come as close as possible to doing so.

"Building on the foundation and valuable legacy of the MDGs, the new development agenda will provide a framework for development and international cooperation for the next 15 years," he said.

The MDGs, a set of anti-poverty goals, was adopted as a UNGA resolution in September 2000, with a deadline of 2015. The goals include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, combating HIV/AIDS, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

According to the UN schedule, the post-2015 agenda is to be approved in September this year.

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UN post-2015 agenda to focus on security, development, human rights

SEOUL North Korea has seized upon recent admissions by Shin Dong-hyuk, the prison camp escapee who now says parts of his harrowing tale were inaccurate, to pillory the international movement to condemn the totalitarian states human rights abuses.

Kim Jong Uns regime is seeking to capitalize on the admission and dismiss all human rights efforts against it. But human rights advocates say that Shin is just one of hundreds of defectors from North Korea who have together painted a collective picture of brutal treatment at the hands of the regime.

Now that Shin had changed his story, all data on North Koreas human rights and related reports must be nullified, and plots on human rights must be stopped, said Uriminzokkiri, a Web site with close ties to the North Korean regime that often acts as a mouthpiece for it.

Anti-republic human rights liars should feel embarrassed and repent their crimes, the Web site said Tuesday in article entitled Lies and plots are bound to be revealed.

Shin became internationally renowned for his tale of life and escape from Camp 14, a brutal total control political prison in the mountains north of Pyongyang. His story was the subject of Escape from Camp 14, a best-selling book by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden, and Shin was a star witness at the U.N. commission of inquiry into North Koreas human rights abuses.

The commissions report with its details of torture, infanticide, executions and brainwashing became the impetus for an international campaign to indict North Koreas leaders for crimes against humanity.

But last Friday, Shin admitted to Harden that he had changed the times and places of some events in his telling of the story, although he insisted the worst parts such as the torture, for which he bears the scars remained true.

North Korea has been alarmed at the mounting campaign against it and particularly at the prospect of Kim Jong Un, the states third-generation leader, being personally named in any referral to the International Criminal Court. It had launched its own counter-campaign, publishing its own human rights report and releasing videos calling Shin a liar.

With Tuesdays statement on Uriminzokkiri, it has stepped up those efforts.

Calling Shin human garbage, the Web site said that it wasnt parts of his story that were wrong, but that all of it was lies and based on fabrication.

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North Korea calls for human rights campaign to be dropped

Over the past two years, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have pushed for sexual and reproductive health and rights to be included in the U.N. post-2015 agenda. This wording has generally been understood to represent a push for abortion rights. But it was not openly recognized until Friday, at the Stakeholder Forum in New York, that this wording also included LGBTQ rights (the moderator, Alanieta Vakatale of the Pacific Islands Association, added the Q).

The speaker was Ambassador Peter Wilson, deputy permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations. His statement was in response to a question from a representative of the International Gay and Human Rights Commission, over the problems that could occur from disaggregated data that keep track of members of the LGBT community and could lead to criminalization, stigma and stereotypes in our communities.

I think this is clearly a really important question, said Wilson. My country is deeply, deeply committed to making sure that a rights-based approach is part of this. The way we are feeding that into the post-2015 agenda is on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Other speakers also focused on the need to separate sexual health and rights. Irene Kagoya, from Akina Mama Wa Afrika and representing the Womens Major Group, claimed the right to control our own bodies and the need for full realization of sexual rights. She urged the U.N. to promote comprehensive sexuality education to allow young people to make their own decisions.

We would also like to emphasize that sexual and reproductive rights are human rights, Kagoya said. If we cannot control our own bodies, sexualities and fertilities, we cannot exercise any of our other civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights.

Kagoya's comments echoed a statement produced in November 2014 at the Asia Pacific Beijing+20 Civil Society Forum. This meeting was in preparation for the official Beijing+20 meetings to be held at the U.N. in March, commemorating the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action created in 1995.

The Asia Pacific document said that women with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are the most likely to experience marginalisation and a denial of their human rights and The single greatest barrier to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is the lack of binding, meaningful accountability mechanisms.

Interestingly, the accountability mechanisms brought up this subject at the Stakeholder Forum, as the LGBT community was opposed to having LGBT members identified, for fear of creating criminalization, stigma and stereotypes.

The Asia Pacific Forum also requested governments to review and remove laws and policies that discriminate and/or criminalize sex workers and people who use drugs.

On the reproductive side of the issues, the Asia Pacific Forum requested governments to provide reproductive health information and services, including safe and legal abortion, provided through the public sector, without any form of stigma, discrimination, coercion or violence.

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Susan Roylance: NGOs call for sexual rights in UN post-2015 agenda

PYONGYANG, North Korea, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- North Korea demanded a stop to international pressure on its human rights record Tuesday, after a celebrated defector partially retracted his claims.

The defector and star witness at a United Nations inquiry into North Korea's human rights abuses, Shin Dong-hyuk, 32, admitted some parts of his tale of life in a North Korean prison were incorrect. Over the weekend he admitted to Blaine Harden, author of the book "Escape from Camp 14," that although episodes of torture and other elements of his story were true, some of the details, including dates and places of some experiences, were not.

Escapees from North Korea have painted a harrowing picture of life in prison camps there, and an exhaustive United Nations Human Rights Commission report recommend a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the country.

The website Uriminzokkiri, which has close ties to North Korean government, commented Tuesday, "All data on North Korea's human rights and related reports must be nullified, and plots on human rights... must be stopped. Anti-republic human rights liars should feel embarrassed and repent their crimes. It's not 'parts' of his story that are untrue. Everything he said and the things the so-called 'defectors' said and submitted to their American boss and the United Nations Human Rights Commission are all lies, woven with trickery."

Although it is unlikely the global movement to condemn North Korea's human rights abuses, including the possibility the International Criminal Court will take up the matter, will stop, the North Korean regime is seizing on Shin's admissions to persuade world opinion that information on torture and hardship at prison camps is untrue.

Shin's admissions should not stall or interrupt momentum to hold North Korea liable for abuses, Michael Kirbyy, the Australian judge who led the U.N. commission of inquiry and wrote its report, told the Washington Post Tuesday.

"It's a trivial issue. This is a traumatized person and the fact that he misstated some things is not at all surprising. This is one witness out of 300. His name is in the report only a couple of times, and North Korea should not get away with riding on the back of this disproportionate coverage.

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North Korea calls for end to human rights campaign