The Future of Lying Can society survive if computers can tell fact from fib?

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." By Brian David Johnson|Posted Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013, at 8:45 AM This article arises from Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. On Feb. 28-March 2, Future Tense will be taking part in Emerge, an annual conference on ASU's Tempe campus about what the future holds for humans. This year's theme: the future of truth. Visit the Emerge website to learn more and to get your ticket. Here's something I bet we all believe: Lying is bad. Telling the truth is good. It's what our parents told us, right up there with "eat your vegetables," "brush your teeth," and "make sure you unplug the soldering iron." (What? I was raised by engineers). But there's something else none of us can argue: We are all liars. According to a 2011 survey of Americans, we humans lie about 1.65 times a day. (Men lie a little more than woman, 1.93 lies to 1.39 lies a day.) Perhaps this is why people got really excited in 2007 when Jeff Hancock, a communications professor at Cornell University, starting talking about how we could use computers and algorithms to help detect lies. His research pulled from a study he had done with two other professors, Catalina Toma and Nicole Ellison, about how people lie in online dating profiles. It turned out that nine out of 10 people fibbed when describing themselves to prospective mates. This fact may not be so surprising if we are honest with ourselves about our own dating lives. But Hancock went one step further. He began to develop a computer program that could detect the lies that people were telling online. People have a terrible track record for picking out a lies—we can detect a lieabout 54 percent of the time. Hancock's algorithms, on the other hand, were able to establish patterns for how people told lies. One of the telltale signs that the programs look for is fewer words. Liars give less information when they describe events, people, and places. Those who are telling the truth, on the other hand, give more details. For instance, they talk about spatial relations, like how far a hotel was from a coffee shop or how long it took to get to the subway. So that's it, it's the end of lying as we know it. With the help of computers and software, lying could become a thing of the past. And that scares the hell out of me. The idea of technology delivering us from the shackles of vicious liars calls to mind Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984, especially this specific passage: "A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white over the grimy landscape. … The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight.* It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out of its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." In the novel, Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, changing and destroying the past to keep the present in line with the current goals of the oppressive party. Orwell explains, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." The Ministry of Truth is an enormous apparatus for telling lies, for manipulating the past to serve the good of the ruling party. Could an algorithm start to act like the towering Ministry of Truth? If so, whom would it serve? Who defines truth? Using technology to control and police the truth in our communications with other people seems frighteningly dystopic. If all humans lie, then doing away with the ability to fib or fabricate might feel like doing away with a little piece of our very humanity. Orwell's vision was important because he was showing us a future that we should avoid. The future isn't an accident. It's made every day by the actions of people. Because of this, we need to ask ourselves: What is the future we want to live in? What kinds of futures do we want to avoid? For the past 56 years, since Russia's launch of Sputnik birthed the Space Age, we've imagined a very specific kind of future, one with sleek angles, shiny-clean homes, and good-looking people using amazing new devices. We've seen these images in movies, advertising, and corporate vision videos. As a futurist, I don't like these visions of tomorrow. I find them intellectually dishonest. They lack imagination and fail to take into account that humans are complicated. In fact, the bright and chrome future is as scary to me as Orwell's visions. To design a future that we all want to live in, a future for real people, we need to embrace our humanity and imagine it in this future landscape. To be specific, we need to embrace the fact that we are all liars—in certain ways. "Not all lies are created equal," my Intel colleague Dr. Tony Salvador, a trained experimental psychologist, told me recently. There are really two kinds of untruths. First, you have the bad lies, the ones we tell to actively deceive people for personal gain. These are the lies that hurt people and can send you to jail. At the other end of the spectrum are the white lies, the little lies we tell to just be nice—"social lubricant," as Tony puts it. "It's like when you bump into someone and say, 'Oh, I'm sorry.' You're really not sorry, but you say it so you can both just move on. These kinds of lies just keep our days moving forward. They keep the friction down between people so that we can get done what we need to do in a world full of people." You know, the kind of fibs that keep us humans from killing one another. Between deception and comfort lies a vast expanse of bullshit. Bullshit isn't lying. Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt explains in his book On Bullshit that the bullshitter's intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. It is to conceal his or her wishes. Bullshit can be the gray area between doing harm to someone (taking advantage) and making them feel better (white lies). It comes down to a question of intent. Are you bullshitting to be nice, or are you bullshitting to deceive and gain an advantage? This Liars' Landscape is helpful because it makes us examine how we could use technology to make people's lives better while at the same time not making them less human. One misconception about technology is that it is somehow separate from us as human beings. But technology is simply a tool, a means to an end. A hammer becomes interesting when you use it to build a house. It's what you can do with the tool that matters. As we move into a future in which we have more devices and smarter algorithms, how do we design a future that can detect harmful deception while at the same time allowing us to be the lovely lying humans we all love? The first step is to imagine a more human future, with none of that metallic sheen. Perhaps, if we can get the technology right, there will be no deception, a little less bullshit, but just as many white lies. Correction, Feb. 26, 2013: This article misquoted George Orwell's 1984. The Ministry of Truth is called Minitrue in Newspeak, not Miniture. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

chaupadi in Nepal

In this tiny riverside town in Nepal's remote Far West region, a spitfire activist explains his fight against chaupadi, the local custom of isolating women from their families during menstruation. For generations here, menstruating women have slept outside of their homes, in small sheds or in the family stable. They are considered impure and treated as untouchable, so they cannot enter the house or touch communal water or food. The activist, Dhurbar Sunar, is not having it: "I think this is a social crime in terms of women's rights," he says. Mr. Sunar is the Project Coordinator at Samabikas, a local organization pushing to abolish chaupadi here in Achham district and elevate women's status. They work village by village, declaring them "chaupadi free" as they go. In Achham, villages are nestled into steep, arid mountains. Technically, Achham is in the hill region, one of three regional belts in Nepal, but the "hills" would be "mountains" in any country that didn't compare its foothills to the Himalayas. Roads are few and far between, and many communities have long lived isolated, agrarian lifestyles. More and more, the younger generation is attending school and migrating to work, learning new ideas, but ingrained social practices like chaupadi are slow to change. Some 95 percent of women in Accham practice chaupadi, according to a 2011 estimate by the government's Women's Development Officer in the district. So Samabikas staff climbs the mountains jutting up in all directions from their riverside office to talk to communities about the practice. They produce radio spots, warning villagers about the dangers of sleeping outside, where women are vulnerable to snake bites, animal attacks, and rapists. INSIDE THE SHED Up a steep, dusty, winding road from the Samabikas office is Siddheshwar, Sunar's hometown. Here, Radhika Sunar, fresh-faced at 14, is experiencing her first foray into the chaupadi "goth," the small shed specially designed for menstruating women. She squats to get through the door. Inside she stretches out her hands and touches both of the opposite mud walls. "When four people sleep here, it is very uncomfortable. With three it is slightly uncomfortable, but when two people sleep here, it's pretty comfortable," she says of the tight space. She walks awkwardly around the village, avoiding front yards and private paths; she refuses to sit down for an interview for fear of being reprimanded for sullying the chair. "I don't like it at all," she says. "When I'm walking, everyone yells at me 'don't touch this! Don't touch that!' " RADHIKA'S RELATIVE Radhika's isolation is typical in Achham. "Everyone in this village stays in the goth during their periods," Radhika says. "They say that once you get your period, you become a young woman…. But once we grow into young women, they ask us to do a lot of work and become angry at us." What makes Radhika unique, though, is that she is the first cousin of Sunar, the proud, anti-chaupadi activist in town. He goes to work and travels to other villages to promote an end to chaupadi, but in his own home, the practice continues. Sunar grows flustered when asked about his cousin. He explains first that Samabikas does not work in his village, but then backtracks to say that of course he was also pushing for social change at home. But no one listens, he says – he has no authority in the village to change the practice. One of the Samabikas' success stories is a village called Bhageshwar on an opposite peak facing Radhika's village. Sunar trekked up the hill to plan the ceremony to declare the community "chaupadi free." A RELUCTANT ACTIVIST Samabikas makes the declarations only after the villagers have stopped going to the sheds each month. In Bhageshwar, the catalyst for change came from Maheshwari Bista, a 40-year-old mother with a striking, chiseled face and deep black eyes who giggled nervously when she told us she had never been to school. Six years ago, when Maheshwari constructed a new house, she built it with a separate room for when she has her period. Now each month she sleeps apart from her husband and the family's sacred prayer space. She cleans the bedding and paints a new coat onto the smooth mud floor to purify the space. But she is inside, warm and safe from feared snakes or drunk passersby. "I think everyone believes you should not touch gods or go into other rooms, so I don't do it," she explains. "If I start doing everything people will stop having trust in me in the village…. But I touch things in the field, I touch the cows." In the intervening years, the community saw that the animals weren't dying, the fields continued producing, and little by little the women followed Maheshwari inside. Now almost no families in the village send their women to sheds during their period. The only ones that do are those that don't have space in the house for the women to sleep alone. Maheshwari had traveled to India with her husband, a migrant worker, years before. There she saw that women did not leave the house during their period. And besides, their rented room was too small for her to sleep separately. She is a reluctant activist. She didn't tell other people in the village to stop practicing chaupadi, but in such a small town everyone could see she no longer went into the shed. "We must bring about change ourselves," explains Kali Bista, a neighbor of Maheshwari who followed her example five years ago. Ms. Bista says years of campaigns like that of Samabikas did nothing to stop chaupadi in the village until Maheshwari led by example. "NGOs come and go, but we the villagers are here to stay."

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn is papabili

VIENNA (AP) — Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn is a soft-spoken conservative who is ready to listen to those espousing reform. That profile that could appeal to fellow cardinals looking to elect a pontiff with widest-possible appeal to the world's 1 billion Catholics. His nationality may be his biggest disadvantage: Electors may be reluctant to choose another German speaker as a successor toBenedict XVI. A man of low tolerance for the child abuse scandals roiling the church, Schoenborn himself was elevated to the its upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy after his predecessor resigned 18 years ago over accusations that he was a pedophile. ___ EDITOR'S NOTE: As the Roman Catholic Church prepares to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, The Associated Press is profiling key cardinals seen as "papabili" — contenders to the throne. In the secretive world of the Vatican, there is no way to know who is in the running, and history has yielded plenty of surprises. But these are the names that have come up time and again in speculation. Today:Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn. ___ Multilingual and respected by Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Benedict XVI's friend and former pupil was one of the cardinal electors in the 2005 papal conclave that chose the German as head of the Catholic church. A scholar who is at home in the pulpit, Schoenborn also is well connected in the Vatican — and appears willing to make it his home, if reluctantly. Asked if he would like to succeed Benedict on news of the pontiff's plan to step down, he said: "my heart is in Vienna, my heart is in Austria — but naturally with the whole Church as well." Such reticence is not unusual for a prince of the church known for a quiet management style focused on steering the Austrian church around controversy. That has not always been possible. The austere Schoenborn owed his own elevation to the scandal involving his predecessor, Hans Groer, who was accused of abusing young boys. Appointed Vienna's archbishop in 1995, Schoenborn initially stayed silent. But he showed courage three years later, personally apologizing "for everything that my predecessors and other holders of church office committed against people in their trust." In a measure of his dislike of confrontation, he fired his reform-minded vicar, Helmut Schueller, in 1998 by shoving a dismissal letter under Schueller's door. Yet, while grappling with the pornography scandal roiling the church in 2005, he took on the Vatican. "It's sad that it took so long to act," he said of Rome's reluctance to investigate the wrongdoing, saying later of the scandal: "The church is greater than its human weaknesses." He went further than that as cases of sexual abuse continued rocking the church, calling for a re-examination of priestly celibacy in 2010 — only to roll back in typical style shortly after, by having his spokesman issue a denial that he was questioning the rule on priests not marrying. While accepting the possibility of evolution, Schoenborn criticized certain "neo-Darwinian" theories as incompatible with Catholic teaching, writing in a 2005 New York Times editorial, that "any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." Ideologically, his tenure has been marked by a turn away from inner-church reform. Instead he has focused toward respect for Catholic dogma — while understanding those who fall by the wayside. "It is not easy for the church to find the right path between the ... protection of marriage and family on the one hand and ... compassion with human failings," he said in 2004, alluding to church opposition to — but his personal understanding of — divorce. His audience, at a funeral Mass for Austrian President Thomas Klestil, included both his widow and his divorced wife. Later, however, he made clear that he backed the sanctity of marriage, telling an Austrian weekly shortly after Benedict's resignation that its indissolubility "can be traced back to the instructions of Jesus" and thus could not be changed. He spoke out about bending church dogma in response to pressure in the same interview, saying: "If Christ communicated a teaching that we believe is true and brings salvation to humanity, then nobody gains if that teaching is falsified, even if he were to gain in popularity by doing so." Born Jan. 22, 1945, into an aristocratic Bohemian family, Schoenborn's destiny appeared to have been influenced by his heritage — 19 of his ancestors were priests, bishops or archbishops. After joining the Dominican order in 1963, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1970 by Cardinal Franz Koenig. Like most Austrians, Schoenborn idolized Koenig for his social engagement and courage to speak out on controversial issues — but was initially eclipsed by Koenig's overwhelming personality. In the late 1960s, when Koenig played tennis in Schoenborn's hometown of Schrunns, Schoenborn "always fought to be Koenig's ball-boy," said Schoenborn confidant Heinz Nussbaumer in a telling reflection of the later relationship between the two churchmen. Because of Koenig's strong persona, Schoenborn "had a difficult start," said Nussbaumer, publisher of a Catholic weekly. "But later he was able to develop his own personality." His reputation as a scholar — and bridge-builder to Orthodox Christians — began with a dissertation on icons even before he became a theology professor at the Catholic University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 1975. Fluent in French and Italian, proficient in English and Spanish, he is well-connected in the Vatican, as reflected by his role as a cardinal elector for Benedict. He built on his image as an ecumenist with visits to the patriarchs of Russia and Romania and met with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 11 years ago, on the first trip of a Catholic churchleader to the Islamic republic since the 1979 revolution. Normally above the fray of international politics, he spoke out sharply in 2002 about President George W. Bush's inclusion of Iran with prewar Iraq and North Korea as part of the "the axis of evil." "In the best case it's naive," he said, contending such comments could "alienate Iran's moderate factions."

Dividen saham Bank BRI 2013 (BBRI)

via detik finance BRI menggelar Rapat Umum Pemegang Saham Tahunan (RUPST) di Jakarta, Kamis (28/2). BRI akan membagikan dividen Rp 5,55 triliun atau sebesar 30% dari total laba bersih tahun 2012 sebesar Rp 18,5 triliun kepada pemegang saham The price of BBRI is already high..regret selling them too cheap..I am really amateur in this kind of investment..lack of knowledge. When writing this..BBRI is 9.450 while a month ago it was only 8.000

M-Paisa How Afghanistan Is On the Leading Edge of a Tech Revolution | TIME.com

http://world.time.com/2013/03/02/how-afghanistan-is-on-the-leading-edge-of-a-tech-revolution/

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