Several strange creatures including a psychedelic octopus have been found in frigid waters off Antarctica in one of the world’s most pristine marine environments.
Others resembled corals and shrimps. At least 30 appear to be new to science, said Julian Gutt, chief scientist of an expedition that was part of the International Polar Year research effort set to launch on March 1. The researchers catalogued about 1,000 species in an area of the Antarctic seabed where warming temperatures are believed to have caused the collapse of overlying ice shelves, affecting the marine life below.
“This is virgin geography,” said expedition member Gauthier Chapelle. “If we don’t find out what this area is like now following the collapse of the ice shelf, and what species are there, we won’t have any basis to know in 20 years’ time what has changed and how global warming has altered the marine ecosystem.”
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Cool! Freezing even.
Great news.
Pardon the digression but I want to get back to your topic on Google because frankly there’s a much bigger point that you missed entirely.
The reason Google wants your legal name is so they can profile you and package you up for their advertisers, with a degree of intimate detail about your life that would make NSA envious.
What they and their advertisers ultimately want is a Pavlovian social ecology of Newtonian billiard-balls who respond predictably to “Buy now!” stimuli. Years ago I called it “the illusion of free will.”
Free speech be damned, privacy be damned, it’s all about profile, predict, and control. And knowledge is power: when they know all about you, and you know nothing about them, who has the power?
But the truly insidious side is that the same data that enable you to be irresistibly spammed, also enable you to be turned down for a job, a mortgage, an apartment rental, a security clearance, health insurance, etc. etc., ad infinitum. And don’t doubt for one minute that this is going to happen.
Stalkers are only the tip of a very large iceberg.
Oh, and should we ever have another tyrannically-oriented administration in power, don’t doubt for one second that they’ll be drooling over the data too.
Bottom line: avoid all of those “social” networks, they are nothing more than private-sector intel collectors on a vast scale, serving the gods of The Market at the expense of civic values.
One more thing: the algorithm you need for understanding the behavior of corporations is “reptile behavior.” Eat, compete, reproduce, and grow; or as we say, “feed, fight, f—, and fester.” They do not share our mammalian values of nurturance of offspring or any of the rest of that stuff. They are immortal reptiles given the legal status of persons.
This line of reasoning leads to a few specific conclusions, but I’ll leave it for you to reason them out the rest of the way.
g724 I’m sure you are correct in Google’s person-packaging intentions, but for instance, if I wanted to sell a set of nice binoculars to someone, I would not care if Grrl Scientists name was Poly Wannacracker or Nora Nighthawk. All I need to know is which computer screen she’s looking at and that she’s an avid birder, which I would know by intertubual analysis of her on line behavior as Grrl Scientist. If I was google, and I insisted on using and knowing her real name, I’d totally miss that opportunity.
People who want to create fake ephemeral ID’s can easily do that and google can’t stop them or sell to them. But on line pseudonyms are not that.
Not that psychedelic. Also old. Pareledone turqueti has been known to taxonomy since 1905.
Katharine, it is actually impossible to tell from this story what the heck they are talking about except they are very excited. Many new species were found, others found where they were not previously seen (no one having looked)…. It’s all very muddled.
However, it looks like an interesting story because of the nature of the problem.
The original publication is a newsleter: EOS. Closed source and I don’t get it.
Well, that’s what’s in the picture.
Greg, there is that; but again, the main point is to correlate *all* the datapoints in each person’s life as far as possible and then sell the analytic output of that to whoever wants to pay for it. This isn’t about selling John Q a new widget: the widget isn’t the product, John Q is the product, and the goal is to sell the data about him to third parties. Including third parties who can exercise coercive power over individuals by e.g. denying them access to necessities such as jobs and housing.
Anyway I don’t want to digress this topic so I’ll leave it there until you run another article on Google. Thanks…
G724: I’ve been using the same exact pseudonym for over 40 years.
Thinking of pyschedelic cehck out this critter :
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3160792.htm
& http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GgAbyYDFeg
& http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacock_spider