Food, Fertilizer, Fuel

Through WSJ Online which I follow on Twitter, I was alerted to Kuroda’s Wall Street Journal timely and informative opinion piece on Asia’s Food Crisis (2008-05-05). I realized that this article was rich in research-based information and provided an excellent summary of a pivotal moment in the social history time-line of the way in which “Wealth Disparities Will Intensify.” See Drummond and Tulk (2006). First I dugg Kuroda’s article.

Then I began a slow world rhizomic process using the semantic web with its microblogs, blogs, social bookmarking, aggregators and folksonomies locating this article at the centre of a dendronic cartography.

Leaving all the windows and tabs open on Firefox I worked with and between Adobe Photoshop, notepad, blogs, etc to produce this series of layered images which I call digitage. They conform to Powerpoint’s default size and highest resolution (1440 x 900). I saved them as .jpg to upload to the Flickr account using my new handy Flickr desktop uploader. These images Circum Asian Pacific Globe http://snurl.com/27ekf 2. “Globalization: Food, Fertilizer and Fuel“, http://snurl.com/27el3 3. On the Tomato Trail 4. Consuming Questions: East and West http://snurl.com/27en3 were then combined into a .ppt PowerPoint file entitled “Food, Fertilizer, Fuel” which conforms to the slidenet.com default size. Once the slidenet.com presentation was uploaded I collected all the urls and transformed them into snurls. (Snurls are shortened urls that can also be used with microblogging services like Twitter.)

This article then on the East and West was a catalyst to my first “snurl cloud” or “snurl roll” on on Twitter. (A second snurl cloud links to the first: “Wealth Disparities Will Intensify also on Twitter (2008-05-06).

In a sense this is a virtual faint echo of Barndt’s Tangled Routes (2001). See also Flynn-Burhoe (2006-11-17) on the layered digitage linking tomatoes, French Fries, fast foods, high-meat-protein-consumption, Milton Friedman’s “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits” (1970), Cannibals with Forks and Barndt’s Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (2001).

Webliography and Bibliography

Barndt, Deborah. 2001. Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Aurora, ON. Garamond Press.

Drummond, Don & Tulk, David (2006 ) Lifestyles of the Rich and Unequal: an Investigation into Wealth Inequality in Canada. TD Bank Financial Group.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2006. “Wealth Disparities Will Intensify (Drummond and Tulk 2006).” >> December 15, 2006.

Kuroda, Haruhiko. 2008. “Solving Asia’s Food Crisis“. Wall Street Journal Asia. May 5, 2008.

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Future of Film is Film less: Digital Multiplex not Cineplex

Adina Lebo, Executive Director of ShowCanada in “Rollin’ in the Rockies” about the 22nd Film Industry Annual Convention, Banff, AB claimed that the cinema of the future will be based in digital projection technology. In 2008 5000 Canadian theatres switched to pricey large digital screens. In 2009 that will increase by 150%.

HTML test: [digg=http://digg.com/url_to/story_on_digg]

read more | digg story

See also http://snurl.com/26ixa [oceanflynn_wordpress_com] , http://snurl.com/26i1s [www_filmjournal_com] , http://snurl.com/26iw9 [www_marxists_org]

Complex Financial Instruments and Testosterone-Driven Trading: Algorithm of Market Chaos

The combination of increasingly complex high-risk financial instruments (unknown, under-acknowledged, under-estimated and/or misunderstood by public and private policy sector workers at all levels of governance) and a thriving culture of testosterone-driven traders

with their hands firmly on the throttle of oil-dependent muscle vehicles, flooring-it on shared virtual highways with silently condoned (albeit) unwritten permission and even enthusiastic encouragement to exceed safe speed limits, the exponential growth in wealth of the upper quintile of the upper quintile accompanied by the exponential increase in poverty of the lower quintile of the lower quintile, the global expansion and implementation of the belief-system based on unfettered, self-regulated market political economies (loosely called market liberalism although best-served by political conservatism) promulgated around the planet through mass media content packaged to sell imagery of the invisible hand of the market as the right hand of the new secular god surrounded by soldiers of the user-pay, private-is-better, blame-the-poor, monetize-everything, blame-the-ill, social-justice-vs-economic-efficiency, base-minumum-wage-on-pin-money-workers, minimum-government, trickle-down-affect, legal-but-not-ethical, group-think-culture led by the Triad of Mises-Friedman-Hayek has led to market chaos that is not theoretical but Really Real.

According to this article (2008-04-19) by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times, “Movements in financial markets are correlated to the levels of hormones in the bodies of male traders, according to a study by two researchers from the University of Cambridge.”

This is twisted curve in the winding road of ancient arguments that prohibited participation of hormone-driven women (emotional versus logical, intuitive versus deductive, feelings versus reason) in pivotal positions of decision-making.

read more | digg story

Does this mean the invisible hand of the market should be wearing a glove? Should the use of Viagra be monitored on the trading floor?

Webliography and Bibliography

Coates, J. M. and J. Herbert. 2008. “Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://snurl.com/250a7

Emarketer. 2008-03-18. “Online Advertisers To Spend Through Turbulence.” http://snurl.com/250e6

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2008-04-19. “Complex Financial Instruments and Testosterone-Driven Trading: Algorithm of Market Chaos.” http://snurl.com/250a6

Mitchell, Dan. 2008-04-19. “Trading on Testosterone.” New York Times. http://tinyurl.com/5tvolz permalink

Palmer, Jason. 2008-04-14. “Traders’ raging hormones cause stock market swings.” NewScientist.com. http://snurl.com/2508n

Rubel, Steve. 2008-04-17. “Study: A Billion Dollars in Internet Advertising is Wasted.” Micro Persuasion. http://snurl.com/250au

Rubel, Steve. 2008-04-19. Twitter.

Notes:

1. Algorithm: a “problem-solving procedure: a logical step-by-step procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps, often involving repetition of the same basic operation” or a “problem-solving computer program: a logical sequence of steps for solving a problem, often written out as a flow chart, that can be translated into a computer program,” a term used in the late 17th century. It is an alteration, “after Greek arithmos “number,” of algorism, via Old French and medieval Latin based on the Arabic al-Ḵwārizmī , the name of the 9th century mathematician who introduced algorithms to the West.” See MSC (1998-2005) Encarta.

The combination of increasingly complex high-risk financial instruments (unknown, under-acknowledged, under-estimated and/or misunderstood by public and private policy sector workers at all levels of governance) and a thriving culture of testosterone-driven traders with their hands firmly on the throttle of oil-dependent muscle vehicles, flooring-it on shared virtual highways with silently condoned (albeit) unwritten permission and even enthusiastic encouragement to exceed safe speed limits has led to market chaos that is not theoretical but Really Real.