Sociologist Saskia Sassen proposes that international business at one end and poor immigrants at the other are shaping a new status of individual rights no longer tied to citizenship in a national state.
“I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship.”
Is citizenship going the way of the nation-state in our new globalized world? Saskia Sassen thinks so. The University of Chicago sociologist told a UCLA audience why at a March 25 talk sponsored by the International Institute. She began by acknowledging that there have been no really dramatic changes in the laws defining the standing of citizens in recent years. But that can be misleading, she said, because the legalities of who is a citizen and who is an alien have always had rough edges that are being redefined without the need to draft new legislation. “Their very incompleteness contains the possibility of change, and they must be incomplete to retain flexibility.” Professor Sassen’s talk reported on the research for her forthcoming bookDenationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age to be published this year by Princeton University Press.
Sassen’s central point was that legal rights that used to be given only to citizens are more and more being claimed by large groups of people who rest their claims on international rather than national law or on relatively new legal concepts such as human rights vested in individuals rather than governments. These changes, which weaken governments but are good for individuals who change states or travel internationally, are a consequence of globalization, which moves more people longer distances more often than the societies in which nation-states were first forged and their legal systems constructed.
For Sassen, the clear definition of a citizen is being eroded at the high and low end: at the top of society by growing numbers of employees of companies with a global reach, staff members of United Nations-type organizations, and people with dual citizenship. At the bottom by growing de facto legal rights of undocumented immigrants. Read the rest of this entry »
Om een dieper inzicht te krijgen in de problemen waarmee België momenteel wordt geconfronteerd, en die tot een splitsing kunnen leiden, is het nuttig een theoretisch onderzoek te doen naar de factoren die natievorming en nationalisme beïnvloeden en dus eventueel ook de teloorgang ervan kunnen veroorzaken. Om dit onderzoek een wetenschappelijk statuut te verlenen, moet het sine ira et studio gebeuren: men moet geen voorafgaande vooroordelen hebben betreffende het al dan niet positief of negatief karakter van nationalisme en ‘identiteit’ of voor het al dan niet voortbestaan van bepaalde staten. Read the rest of this entry »
One way to define contextual information search would be intelligent search. In this article we explore one of the origins of human intelligence: mirror neurons. As to prominent linguists like Arbib and Lakoff mirror neurons explain the adaptive evolution of the human language faculty and the development of conceptual knowledge (Arbib, 2005; Gallese, Lakoff, 2007). The problem is our easy and accepting relationship with Google. We are geesing at Google and engage with it more and more every day, uncritically unthinkingly.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is concerned about the fact that:
“….we do not properly understand the nature of the nature of the transaction between us and Google. …into our relationship with Google we do not grasp that we are not really Google’s costumers. Google calls us users, but in fact we are Google’s products. Our attention is what Google sells to its customers, which are the advertisers.” (BBC interview)
The thesis I want to develop here and in the articles to come is that by using Google we stop developing our conceptual knowledge. Googling is not an intelligent information search strategy. But we are always communicating something. In using Google we express our intentions and the cleverness of Google is to incorporate our intentions in its advertising system and giving us the feel we are finding what we are looking for, but for all this is what Google wants us to look at. One of the things that intrigues me why Google does not disclose to its users their personal user profile, though it shares it with third parties:
We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.” ((http://www.google.be/intl/en/privacy_highlights.html)
The stunning paradox is that Google says that it wants to use our personal data for “research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services”, but is far to slow in improving search technologies. What about improvement? Google only recently (24 March 2009) implemented “a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search” as to ‘The Official Google Blog’. It was about time Google implemented this because this feature was implemented earlier in the search results of Google’s main competitors. Ask displays ‘Related Searches’ next to the page results and formulates additional relates Questions and Answers about the topic. Cuil lets you explore answers by category and subcategory. Ask and Cuil didn’t only offer associations and concepts earlier they offer more than Google does. Yahoo’s versions of concepts is comparable with the one of Google, only it was implemented much earlier. and Wikia Search doesn’t only offer conceptual associations it is also letting the user add suggestions interactively. So it looks rather like Google felt the heat from its competitors than it implemented a novel improvement. (see Search Engine History);
Is Google stupid or does it thing we are stupid? I’m afraid the latter is the case. Google has collected the best research brains and is funding top research at universities worldwide but the use of this knowledge conflicts with its business model. If a Google search would deliver only relevant results, it would reduce the opportunities to show pay-per-click advertisements. These ads are the main income of Google.
About Mirror neurons
Mirror Neurons were discovered in 1994 in the macaque brain by Galese and Rizzolatti. What do Mirror Neurons do? They mirror observed actions:
“The observation of an object-related hand action leads to the activation of the same neural network active during its actual execution. Action observation causes in the observer the automatic activation of the same neural mechanism triggered by action execution.” (Galese, 2005).
In the years that follow, Galese and others (also called the Parma Group because they all work at the university of Parma in Italy) explore the Mirror Neuron system. The Mirror Neuron system is also demonstrated in the human brain. What is special about this is that the neural system for action execution is triggered but the execution of the action is inhibited. It’s not mere a system that is mirroring action it also performs simulations. When a given action is planned, its expected motor consequences are forecast. This means that when we are going to execute a given action we can also predict its consequences. The action model enables this prediction. Since the Mirror Neurons uses the same neuronal circuits this mechanism allows us also to predict actions of others. Read the rest of this entry »
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
The Boundaries of Civilization Orientalism in a nutshell. Slavoj Žižek shows you the the actual physical dividing line between Oriental despotism and Western European enlightenment.
Een Turkse rechtbank heeft de Koerdische politica Leyla Zana veroordeeld tot een gevangenisstraf van tien jaar. Omdat haar straf meer dan twee jaar bedraagt kan ze zich ook niet meer verkiesbaar stellen voor het Parlement. Zo maakt men in Turkije politici monddood. Haar misdaad. Ze heeft in haar speeches gezegd dat: “de strijd van de PKK er een was voor vrijheid en democratie”. Dat wordt in Turkije geïnterpreteerd als een terroristische daad. Haar advocaten hebben gezegd dat ze in beroep zullen gaan.
Turkije wil bij de Europese Unie komen maar veegt het Recht op vrije meningsuiting aan zijn laars. Het is daar ook nog niet pluis met de persvijheid trouwens. Het is niet de eerste keer dat Zana werd veroordeeld omwille van haar politieke optreden als Koerdische. Ze werd in 1991 verkozen als eerste Koerdische vrouw in het Turkse Parlement. Ze werd prompt met drie andere Koerdische parlementsleden gevangen genomen en hun partij de Democratische Partij, DEP, werd buiten de wet gesteld. Reden waarom ze gevangen werd gezet? Ze had haar eed afgelegd in het Turks zoals het moest, uit eerbied voor het Turkse volk maar had na haar eedaflegging het volgende in het Koerdish toegevoegd:
“Ik zweer in eer en geweten voor het grote Turkse Volk dat ik de integriteit en de onafhankelijkheid van de staat zal verdedidgen, de onverrdeelbare eenheid van het volk en het land, en de onbetwistbarre en onvoorwaardellijke soevereiniteit van het volk. Ik zweer loyaliteit aan de Grondwedt. Ik leg deze eed af voor de Broederschap tussen het Turske volk en het Koerdische Volk.”
Download artikel in PDF Wat is er mis met nationalisme? In de jaren zeventig werd de onafhankelijkstrijd van de onderdrukte volkeren in de derde wereld door Links verheerlijkt. Mao, Che Guevara hebben allebei op hun manier die strijd gepromoot. Links volgde. Op een bepaald moment bestond JP Sartre het zelfs van Pol Pot en de Rode Kmers te verdedigen. Elke nationalistische strijd was ‘in se’ goed en verdedigbaar. Is het dan niet hypocriet nu het Vlaams Nationalisme aan te vallen? Zelfs de nationale strijd van de Koerden, de Basken en de Katholieke Ieren, die ook een socialistisch tintje had, werd aktief door Links omarmd terwijl de Vlaamse strijd ter Linkerzijde op geen of toch heel weinig bijval kon rekenen. Een eerste antwoord ligt voor de hand. De Vlamingen worden niet meer onderdrukt door een imperialistische macht. Ja, want daar ging het toen tegen, tegen het imperialisme, het neo-kolonialisme. OK, maar volstaat dat antwoord. Heeft een volk niet het recht zich sterk te maken om alle mogelijke aanvallen reeds bij voorbaat te counteren. Wat is er mis met exclusieve empathie voor zijn volksgenoten, buren, streekgenoten, cultuurgenoten? We hebben het niet meer over ras vandaag. Het VB misschien, maar de NVA toch niet? Read the rest of this entry »
Hieronder vind je de feed van enkele degelijke Gentse Blogs. Het zijn wel allemaal totaal verschillende werelden, maar ze huizen wel in dezelfde stad. Ik vind ze allemaal de moeite waard, maar ze hebben weinig conatct met mekaar, de ene overschreeuwt de andere. Wat meer contact tussen de ene en de andere wereld? In Gent moet dat kunnnen!
Despite the fact that summer 2009 had more sea ice than in 2007 or 2008, scientists are seeing drastic changes in the region from just five years ago and at rates faster than anticipated.
A United Nations-backed gathering of experts kicked off today in Panama to initiate for the first time an assessment of the effect climate change has on the future threat of natural disasters and how nations can better manage an expected rise in severe weather patterns.
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