The presentation is based on her recent book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth about Climate Change. N

Nussbaum holds that tragedy places importance on the contingent factors of our lives -- our relationships with loved ones and friends, our wish for power and success in the world, and so on; for her, tragedy's typically complex treatment of these issues leads to a 'learning through suffering' and conveys a sophisticated ethical world-view.

This can push us towards a narrowing in our definition of the good. In pursuit of ethical self-sufficiency we can be led to redefine the good life so as to exclude the things which are vulnerable to chance. The tdesire to limit vulnerability can take us in the other direction--to make us try to control the course of things, to get a grip on events, to be in control. This leads to maximizing power.

Sex is a coffee table book written by Madonna with photographs by Steven Meisel Studio and film frames taken from film shot by Fabien Baron. The book was edited by Glenn O'Brien. Sex was released on October 21, 1992 by Warner Books. The book was released by Madonna as an accompaniment to her fifth studio album Erotica, which was released a day earlier.

Sara Marcus in How Madonna liberated America at Salon.com says that Madonna's cultural significance was her assault on American prudery her revelatory spreading of sexual liberation to Middle America, which changed this country for the better. Marcus says that throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, her protean personae and erotic gambits were consistently a step ahead of what Middle America was ready for. She dared us to catch up with her.

In the early ’80s, when the Material Girl owned the dance floor at Manhattan nightclubs and reveled in the downtown scene’s polysexual utopia, the political advances of feminism and gay liberation had stalled out and were hurtling toward backlashville. By the end of that decade, when gay rights laws were being repealed in cities across the country, Madonna was bringing the ball culture of gay and transgender blacks and Latinos — the true voguers — to junior high school gymnasium dances worldwide, popularizing an ecstatic ethos of freedom, sexual and otherwise, sprung directly from big-city club scenes that millions of suburban kids might never get to experience firsthand.

In an era when photographers and performance artists were being blasted in the halls of Congress and the courts of public opinion for using religious iconography or homoerotic images or referring to self-gratification, Madonna hit upon danceably glamorous versions of all of these things. She managed to smuggle the values of the sexually fluid, multiracial art underground into the dead center of American culture before the old-school guardians of moral rectitude could gather their forces to protest.

The acoustic set preceded their standard two electric sets; the first time since 1970 and the acoustic music deliberately harks back to the band's origins in the folk, bluegrass, and country groups:

The October 30 and 31 performances were edited into a home video release--Dead Ahead in 1981 and then remastered as a music video on DVD in 2005.

In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. He became friends with the artists and photographers Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott.

In 1929 Outerbridge returned to New York and set up a country studio where he began to do challenging work in carbro color photography. Achieving mastery quickly, he became a successful commercial color photographer and worked in earnest on his color nude studies.

This body of work from California and Mexico was shot in bold, luminous Kodachrome, his photographs explore the quirkiness of 1950s leisure culture. This forgotten body of photographs bridges the art historical gap between modern and contemporary practice.

The bit I liked the best was the policy idea: that we do nothing for the next several decades:

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

The summary message of this study is that climate change is a complex phenomenon, subject to great uncertainty, with changes in our knowledge occurring virtually daily. Climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for serious damages in the long run. There are big economic stakes in designing efficient approaches. The total discounted economic damages with no abatement are in the order of $23 trillion..... In the author’s view, the best approach is one that gradually introduces restraints on carbon emissions. One particularly efficient approach is internationally harmonized carbon taxes – ones that quickly become global and universal in scope and harmonized in effect.

As he argues here the need for taxes on energy externalities such as carbon emissions is central to our ability to reduce the harmful side effects of economic growth. Environmental taxes are efficient taxes because they tax “bads” rather than “goods.” Environmental taxes have the unique feature of raising revenues, increasing economic efficiency, and improving the public health.

Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing

This is a video of the talk by Suelette Dreyfus:

War on the Internet event #2 - Suelette Dreyfus from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.

Her text Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier is a 1997 book that is researched by Julian Assange. It describes the exploits of a group of Australian, American, and British black hat hackers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, among them Assange himself. The book is freely available in electronic form.

'Electricity' is from the Safe as Milk album (1967). I've just started listening to Strictly Personal (1968). I'm finding it fascinating, in spite of all the layering of the extraneous sound effects like heartbeats and excessive use of psychedelic-era clichés like out-of-phase stereo panning and flanging) by Bob Krasnow, the producer.

Tactics include: writing must-have lists and storytelling scenarios; compiling visual scrapbooks, drawing in sketchbooks and journaling daily; establishing a blog with a regular creative challenge; launching your own cute product line; collecting color and texture swatches and constructing atmospheric mood boards; experimenting with still and video cameras and recording experiences and environments; sourcing ephemera and found objects from flea-markets to build and display inspirational collections; volunteering and working pro-bono; and taking day trips and longer excursions to discover archival resources

It marks the marks the closing of a historic San Francisco music landmark. The Dead celebrated the Closing as an approximately five hour long party (complete with breakfast with the audience at dawn) and invited some guests

The set list itself was intriguing from the unusual opening salvo of Sugar Magnolia, Scarlet Begonias, and Fire on the Mountain to the third set’s stratospheric cruise through such notable fan favorites as Dark Star, The Other One, Wharf Rat, St. Stephen, and Good Lovin’.

This is set 3. It's better music than Set 1which tended to go downhill after the opening sequence.

This DVD is the only multi-track video project that exists from the ’70s and the two-DVD collection is an audio-visual time capsule of musical history.

The US US House Bill 3261 Stop Online Piracy Bill, or SOPA goes further, as it cracks down on internet piracy and counterfeit goods with what critics say are draconian penalties. It proposes that search engines blackball sites alleged to have infringed on copyright and for internet service providers to bar users from getting access to them. It does this in a way that undercuts a new security standard that thwarts malicious redirects of web traffic, which often go to criminal and phishing sites.

The Bill asserts that this kind of crackdown to combat the theft of U.S. property, will prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Silicon Valley disagrees. The proposed congressional legislation they argue poses a stark, existential threat to the core architecture of the free and open Internet.

In The Atlantic David Sohn and Andrew McDiarmid argue that SOPA's breathtaking scope means that:

To protect themselves, platforms of all kinds would be pressured to actively monitor and police user behavior. This new de facto duty to track and control user behavior would significantly chill innovation in social media and undermine social websites' central role in fostering free expression. It would also set the dangerous international precedent that governments seeking to block online content -- be it infringement, or hate speech, or political dissent -- should look to online communications platforms as points of control.

The distinguishing feature of this series is their generalised nature. Detail has been all but eliminated from this painting and the landscape reduced to horizontal bands (or fields) of colour. These are designed to evoke an emotional and contemplative response. The specifics of locality are less important than the symbolic content embodied by the landscape.

These landscapes are based on places I have seen and known ... Unlike many other parts of the country the landforms of North Otago suggest both age and permanence. They have been formed, not by violence, but by the slow processes of normal erosion on more gentle landscape faulting than has happened elsewhere. In painting this landscape I am not trying to show any simple likeness to a specific place. These paintings are most certainly about my long love affair with North Otago as a unique and lonely place, they are also about where I am now ... These paintings stand now as a part of a search begun in Dunedin, continued in Oamaru and developed by the processes of normal erosion since then. The real subject is buried in the works themselves and needs no intellectual striving to be revealed – perhaps they are just North Otago landscapes.

This is a stark image and in such a contrast to the standard trade views produced for clients that celebrated the clearing of the land to make way for farming and grazing.

When photography is introduced it is usually in relation to modernism (Max Dupain’s iconic image, Sunbaker is illustrated); feminism (with an illustration by Ponch Hawkes) and postmodernism that involved constructed imagery (represented by Anne Zahalka, Fiona Hall and Bill Henson). What is lacking is an account of the significance of photography in colonial Australia or bringing any new scholarship on colonial photography to light, even though there is a dearth of deep, object-based research into photography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

So I've been digging around a bit in what has been uncovered and made public about photography in colonial South Australia:

The inescapable historical reality is the imperialist and colonialist underpinnings of 19th century settler Australia and so the interaction between Indigenous and settler Australians is therefore central to any understanding of specific local conditions and circumstances.

Bowie's persona this time around was the Thin White Duke and mood is one of existential crisis. He'd become a paranoid coke freak, but the album pulls together more elements of his ever-changing style (epic ballads, disco to synthesized avant pop than any other. It's a a collection of songs not a concept album.