Hopefully Anonymous

"Technocracy versus Democracy" looks like a great book, though ancient (1981). Written by professors and well reviewed according to amazon. Focuses on international airport planning by experts vs. community responses.

http://www.amazon.ca/Technocracy-Versus-Democracy-Comparative-International/dp/0865690634

Interesting account of nuclear sub crash, 100 million in damages from human error:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gwjH5j0UJKIZcgxOhJ5LPF4Ar12QD9C28D981

Brain Droppings November 21, 2009

-psychosocial decision theory
-microsocial decision theory
-microsocial decision engineering
-computational microsocial decision theory
-mathematical microsocial decision theory
-quantitative microsocial decision theory
-qualitative microsocial decision theory

Organizations, societies, and macrosocial entities are coordinations (coordination game theory) of subcomponent units, such as individual psychosocial agents.

Eigen value, wikipedia definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalue,_eigenvector_and_eigenspace

The use of it for data compression was the most interesting to me.

The new corruption perceptions index:

http://transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table

South Korea ranks high in a good way (#34 out of 180 slots?), which corresponds to my sense of it not being a "low trust society" -although I'm far from an expert on that topic.

Awesome paternalism:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006702.html

As a note, I link to future pundit in my blog roll, rather than the folks that link to me or that I cite most for my own psychopaternalist reasons. I feel I should be reading him, though it feels like medicine, rather than TGGP, who more often feels like porn.

I'm developing a huge fascination with posturing, as it deals with social epistemology and Goffman type analysis of social dynamics.

I'm going to try to find the experts on this and ongoing research in this area.

Also, I note that typepad has improved its idea capture technology, making it easier to post. Enhancing idea-capture technology has been an interest of mine for a while, though I haven't blogged about it recently.

Superfreakonomics vs. Climateprogress

Interesting description of it from Superfreakonomics' perspective. Has a techie vs. mythie vibe to it.

Brain Droppings November 17, 2009

1. Good article, a few years old, on global administrative law.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:oLuHq1mlPVgJ:www.iilj.org/GAL/documents/TheEmergenceofGlobalAdministrativeLaw.pdf+%22global+administrative+law%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk

2. Steve Sailer writes recently about Professor Pinker's apparently excellent criticism of Gladwell, the best take down of a non-expert by an expert I've observed since Finkelstein's critique of Dershowitz.

3. It occurs that most agents actively seeking immortality are at the level of living in the medium of aggregations of human beings, rather than individual humans such as me. I think this is a huge short term challenge for me, because to such agents I represent a replaceable element of the medium -their motivation is not for immortality technology at the individual human level. They are constituents for Bostrom's technologies, but not for de Gray's.

Rating of this post for maximizing my persistence odds: 9.8.

The Public Sociology Wars

http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/PS/Handbook.pdf

Interesting article from Prof. Burawoy of Berkeley. He's a sociologist studying sociologists, and an expert on Public Sociology in particular.