Sounds like it might have been a bit of business from a novel by Bruce Sterling or Charles Stross:
Nasdaq OMX Group said on Friday it will launch options trading on its three-week old Government Relief Index, which tracks the performance of companies bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.
Heroic Randian capitalists — masters of the universe, if you will — will save us.
[Image: Tony the Misfit; story tip: Atrios]
Here we go again – it’s your weekly dose of free science fiction to read on the intertubes! Dive on in…
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Just the one from Feedbooks:
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SpaceWesterns presents “Semantica” by Fredrick Obermeyer
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Strange Horizons presents “The Shangri-La Affair” by Lavie Tidhar
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Subterranean Press Online presents “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden” By C S E Cooney
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Here’s an untitled snippet from Paul McAuley
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A couple of stories from Interzone have made their way onto the BSFA Awards shortlist, and so TTA Press have set them free in PDF format so everyone can get a taste:
Escape Velocity celebrates similar nomination by going one further: you can download their first three issues in PDF format for a limited time.
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Here’s a week’s worth of Everyday Weirdness:
Rather than enter all of these manually each week, I’ll just recommend you grab the Everyday Weirdness RSS feed.
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As always, both you and we owe the inclusion of these little morsels to our vigilant buddies over at SF Signal:
Plus another huge batch from the Free Speculative Fiction site. Phew!
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Finally, here are a few bite-sized morsels of Friday Flash Fiction. The theme this week was ‘bad film title puns’…
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And that’s it for another week – don’t forget you can let us know about stuff that you or someone you know has published; if it’s free, science fictional and on the internet, we want to know about it!
In the meantime, have a great weekend, ladies and gents.
If there’s one thing that the recent United States elections made plain to me, it’s that, sadly, there’s a lot more racism still about than I had realised – and that goes for this side of the pond as well, and pretty much everywhere.
But what if there was a way to ‘cure’ racism? It’s a tricky question, because prejudice of any kind isn’t a disease or pathology as such; it’s part of the way our minds are wired, but (to use an analogy which I hope isn’t too inaccurate) it’s more of a software issue rather than a hardware problem.
Nonetheless, a team of university researchers believe they may have found a short-cut method for eroding the race-focused deep bias:
Tarr’s findings overlap with other results suggesting that the key to reducing racial bias — at least in a short-term, laboratory setting — is exposure to people in personalized ways that challenge stereotypes. This is hardly a new notion: it’s the essence of the contact hypothesis, formulated in the mid-20th century and the basis of integrated schooling.
But unlike carefully structured social mixing, with precisely controlled conditions of interdependence and equality, Tarr and others raise the possibility of a a lab-based shortcut to bias reduction.
Even if this method turns out to be genuinely effective and harmless, I doubt we’ll be seeing it deployed en masse any time soon. Maybe it would be applied to serious recidivists as a punitive correctional method, but the legal implications of rewriting someone’s mind are going to be an ethical minefield for years to come. And to receive the cure voluntarily would be an admission of being racist, which is the principle barrier to defeating the bias in the first place… even so, an interesting insight into mental plasticity.
I wonder if they could remove my positive bias towards unhealthy foods?
Then you may want to take a tip from this band. The Wikipedia rules state that everything on the site needs at least one verifiable mention in a reliable external source, otherwise everyone and his dog could have their own page. But you’re not allowed to write your own entry, either…
A member of the band, Killian’s Angels, noticed this when she checked the Wikipedia article about the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto IV video game, upon which the band appears. Every other band had a Wikipedia entry, so eventually one of the band’s fans wrote one about them — and it was deleted later that day because the band wasn’t, according to Wikipedia editors, “notable.” Cue the newspaper article…
… which, being a verifiable print publication, met Wikipedia’s notability criteria and allowed the page to go back up.
In other words, if you’re not in Wikipedia yet, get someone to run a story about how you’re not yet in Wikipedia. Ta-daah! I predict phones ringing in local newrooms in five, four, three…
As formats wither and die and the digital dark age trundles ever on enterprising hackers are already developing techniques for extracting data from older formats. Here a gentleman has extracted discernible sound recording from a photograph of a vinyl disk:
Remember those flat round things you may have found lying around the house. Those that never really worked well as flying saucers? Well, the other day I happenned to have a good look at one through a magnifying glass. I was able to discern something waveform’esqe in the shape of the groove. I thought, “groovy, there must be a way to extract something sensible off of that” (actual thought quoted).
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Once the image was ready, writing the decoder was very simple. All it did was rotate a “needle” around a given center at some predefined angular velocity, attempting to keep track of the groove the needle was initially positioned on. The offsets (dr) between this track and the basic radial were bunched into a sequence of samples. these were later converted into wav files.
It’s a beautiful project – and it actually sorta works. You can listen to the results and compare it to a recording direct from the disk (or were they called discs?).
