Blowing away the corporate-fueled smoke, McChesney breaks through with insights like these: " “Most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet,” says Robert W. McChesney in his illuminating new book, Digital Disconnect." * “The corporate media sector has spent much of the past 15 years doing everything in its immense power to limit the openness and egalitarianism of the Internet. Its survival and prosperity hinge upon making the system as closed and proprietary as possible, encouraging corporate and state surreptitious monitoring of Internet users and opening the floodgates of commercialism.”
A lobbying organization that counts Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants among its clients has lent support to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act,
Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda Jeff Jarvis: Washington shows the morals of a clumsy spammer Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain The Guardian, Thursday 17 March 2011 "The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East."
A successful one-week short course on Complex Systems Beyond the Metaphor: Your Mathematical Toolset was held in the UNSW School of Mathematics and Statistics on Feb 5-9, 2007. It introduced the mathematical foundations and tools needed for a solid understanding of complex systems, an area often known for purely metaphorical or 'hand-waving' explanations. Aiming at a mathematically literate audience (e.g. engineers, quantitative biologists, computer modellers), leading Australian experts presented intensive introductions to the essential topics of complex systems theory, including self-organization, nonlinear dynamical systems, cellular automata, networks and statistical learning.
A. Capocci, F. Rao, S. Leonardi, and G. Caldarelli. Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)