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In 1960, a quadruple murder occurred in a small rural Kansas town. The murder of the well-liked Clutter family devastated the tiny community of Holcomb, Kansas. But it was not until a curious pair of eyes spied the crime report in the New York Times that the case gained nationwide notoriety. Outgoing novelist and playwright Truman Capote spent six years of his life exhaustively researching this then-obscure case and turning it into a novel called In Cold Blood. With the help of his dear friend Harper Lee, he explored even the most minute details of a gruesome four-victim homicide in the sleepy town. Capote arrived in the town early enough that he was able to record the chronicle of the events - the investigation, arrests, and subsequent trial - while they occurred in real life.
The crime itself was a robbery gone terribly awry. Two ex-convicts, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith traveled several hundred miles to the house of the Clutter family because Hickock's prison cellmate had implied the family was extremely wealthy. In actuality, the agriculturally based family was not poor but did not have a safe full of cash as the cellmate had claimed. Panicking, empty-handed, and afraid of being arrested for attempted robbery, Hickock and Smith tied up the family of four and shot them to death at point-blank range. They escaped to Mexico but ultimately were apprehended, tried, and convicted. Capote read a small blurb about the crime in a side column of the New York Times and was immediately taken with it.
Capote packed his things, picked up Harper Lee, and went down to Kansas. He interviewed nearly all the members of the town - curiously without taking notes, claiming a memory with "99% accuracy." He made the story of the murders into a narrative and it was picked up by a publisher. His book was a roaring success. Newspapers raved about Capote's seamless weaving of factual narrative with engaging prose. This book jump-started the true crime genre, which, prior to In Cold Blood, had not really existed. The wildly popular book was made into an equally successful film. The film was notable for the accuracy with which it portrayed the city in which the murders took place. Director Richard Brooks went so far as to use real jurors from the actual trial to play themselves in the trial scene. Actor Robert Blake who portrayed killer Perry Smith famously went on to kill his own wife in real life, several decades later.
The entire process caused Capote a large amount of grief and anxiety and was hugely emotionally draining for him. He had become very close to one of the murderers, Perry Smith, with whom he believed he had many similarities. Both, for example, had alcoholic mothers. After they had been sentenced to death, Capote kept up an extensive and frequent postal correspondence with both of them. He was wracked with guilt after failing, out of fear and trepidation, to attend their execution. After their deaths, he became a terrible alcoholic, and never fully recovered from the whole experience. Capote became very prestigious in the publishing industry, but the price he paid was his mental health.
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In 1960, a quadruple murder occurred in a small rural Kansas town. The murder of the well-liked Clutter family devastated the tiny community of Holcomb, Kansas. But it was not until a...
By: Mark Boardman
In April and May of 1997 the Red River, bordering North Dakota and Minnesota flooded across the Red River valley causing $3.5 Billion worth of damage, making it one of the most expensive natural disasters ever.
The winter of 1996-97 was particularly harsh in the area with a succession of winter storms piling up massive amounts of snow over the large floodplain. Two of the worst-hit towns were Fargo and Grand Forks which had a record amount of 117 inches and 98.6 inches of snowfall on the two towns respectively over the winter.
The Red River flows north into Lake Winnipeg and as it flows north the temperatures get colder. This causes a problem with ice jamming, where the river freezes and the waters flowing from further south begin to back up against the ice dam. This is a frequent concern for the local community and in an effort to prevent ice jamming sand was dumped on the icy river to help melt the ice and increase the flow.
Flood warnings were put out for the region as early as February and the National Weather Service (NWS) predicted a 49-foot crest at Grand Forks. This peak prediction was not updated until April 14th which was just 4 days before the start of the flood. There were some complaints that the NWS could have made earlier and better crest predictions, but what isn't in doubt is the efforts the residents of Grand Forks and Fargo made in trying to save their towns.
The community built up dykes with sandbags and clay to a height of 52 feet, which was 3 feet above the NWS prediction. Students were even excused classes to help in the efforts. With the 52 feet barriers to the river in place, the residents thought they would be spared. Alas, the sudden thaw of this brutally harsh winter's snowfall over such a large floodplain was more than the residents could have imagined. In Grand Forks, the waters peeked at 54 feet and completely overwhelmed the town. The flooding began on April 18th and town after town along the Red River became inundated with floodwaters well above previous records.
The topography of the Red River valley is very wide, and very flat, leaving nothing to bar the way of the floodwaters once they had broken through their banks. As a result, the floods reached up to 3 miles inland (imagine being flooded by a river 3 miles away!) The waters in Grand Forks, at 54 feet, were now 26 feet above the usual flood stage. A massive evacuation of the residents (75% of a population of 52,000) had taken place and this was repeated in all the towns affected by the flood. This evacuation helped with the remarkable statistic that not a single death occurred as a result of the flood despite its massive scale. Also, a large fire ignited in Grand Forks engulfing 11 buildings, including 60 apartments.
The floodwaters eventually began to subside on 23rd April but took a long while to completely recede. The cleanup operation was on a massive scale. 20,000 volunteers flew in to help the beleaguered residents who had to throw away virtually all of their possessions. Slowly but surely the area returned to normal but those who lived through it will never forget the spring flood of 1997 and will be hoping the next great flood won't be in their lifetime.
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By: Mark Boardman
In April and May of 1997 the Red River, bordering North Dakota and Minnesota flooded across the Red River valley causing $3.5 Billion worth of damage, making it one of the most expens...
When someone uses your name or personal information, such as your credit card number, driver's license number, Social Security number, telephone number, or other account numbers, without your permission, you become a victim of identity theft.
Thieves steal your personal information and use it to open credit accounts, bank accounts, telephone service accounts, and make major purchases in your name. These criminals use your sensitive information to take over existing accounts, or open new accounts. Their criminal activities can result in damage to your credit rating and denials to credit and job offers.
Protecting Your Identity
While there are no guarantees that your identity will never be stolen or compromised, there are several steps you can take to minimize the risks.
Here are a few of them:
- Before you discard your personal information that you no longer need, such as credit card receipts, billing statements, and pre-approved credit card offers, shred them using, at best, a diagonal-cut shredder.
- Create unique passwords and personal identification numbers (PINS) and avoid using easily available information such as mother's maiden name, date of birth, or last four digits of your Social Security number.
- Do not give your Social Security number to people or companies that you do not know.
- Guard your mail from theft. Promptly remove your incoming mail from your mailbox and place outgoing mail in locked collection boxes at your local Post Office.
- As an extra measure of security, install a lock on your mailbox, even if mail theft is not an identified problem in your neighborhood.
- Before disclosing personal information, even to people you know where you shop or do business, insist on knowing the reason(s) your personal information is required and how it will be used.
Thieves can do much damage with what they remove from your mailbox.
Criminals are increasingly creative in the methods they use to get their hands or eyes on your personal information, and ultimately, your money. Here are some of the low-tech techniques they employ:
- Dumpster Diving, one of the easiest ways for them to appropriate your personal information.
- Mail Theft from unsecured residential mailboxes. According to statistics, mail theft most often takes place at unprotected and easily accessible mailboxes in public places.
- Shoulder surfing takes place when a thief watches or listens literally over your shoulder as you enter your PIN into an ATM machine. They may even follow you home or your place of work to gather additional information about you.
Data transferred across the Internet can be intercepted during its journey.
- Phishing and Pharming: While phishing is a scam in which consumers are tricked into entering their personal information via a bogus email and website form, pharming occurs where hackers steal personal information from numerous people simultaneously through something known as "domain spoofing". They take over a DNS server and redirect user information to a new website that they use to gather, collect, "pharm" illegal information.
- Skimming: Thieves quickly and temporarily steal a credit card and run it through a skimmer, a credit card reader that has been reprogrammed to steal information off the card.
Make education about the scams, schemes, and frauds criminals use to steal your identity your priority in view of the rising occurrence of this multi-million-dollar-problem. With education comes prevention. Here are some prevention tips to help reduce the risks:
- Safeguard your personal information. Never take simple things for granted.
- Carry with you only the information you need. Always keep your personal information and documents in a safe and secured place of your choosing.
- Order and review a copy of your credit report at least once a year.
- Shred documents containing your sensitive information before discarding them.
Known as The Master Blog Builder, Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, helps small business owners and non-profit organizations improve their customer relationship marketing. Often he comes across cases that are red flags calling identity thieves to come in. Hence, he started the "Protecting Your Identity" blog. Contact him at www.MasterBlogBuilder.com for more information.
"The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. . . . The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach."
Such is the optimistic conclusion of Manuel Castells in his massive trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Within the same conclusion, however, this professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, cites as prerequisites many miraculous changes for society and culture in this global social conscience. And the likelihood that these miracles will be realized seems as remote as the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.
Consider several "if only" rainbows that society and culture must chase before we can walk the yellow-brick road to Castells's utopia: "If people are informed, [are] active, and communicate throughout the world; if business assumes its social responsibility; if the media become the messengers, rather than the message; if political actors react against cynicism, and restore belief in democracy; . . . if we assert intergenerational solidarity by living in harmony with nature; if we depart for the exploration of our inner self, having made peace among ourselves."
What Castells doesn't seem to realize is that human nature is the wizard behind this curtain, and unfortunately he doesn't see that for what it really is. In his conclusion he states that "there is no eternal evil in human nature." Yet he warns in his third volume that the Information Age has the potential to greatly expand the gap between rich and poor nations, that the weakest in society (especially children) stand to be exploited by the new global economy as never before, and that a rising global criminal economy will wield unprecedented power.
In the same volume he readily admits that "we are all inhabited, at the same time, by humanity's angels and devils, [and] whenever and wherever our dark side takes over it triggers the release of unprecedented, destructive power." Castells is to be applauded for recognizing that human nature is at the crux of the success or failure of the Information Age, but his optimism is not supported by his analysis of these monumental changes. In fact, he identifies the potential for more negative than positive scenarios as the world speeds blindly into what many believe will be the greatest social upheaval in the history of humanity.
To be fair to Castells, he does not intend to suggest a coming utopia. His intent with this work was not to engage in futurology, but to present the situation as it presently exists and to identify the social and economic factors that would be most affected by the technological revolution. He acknowledges his optimism but defends it when he writes, "I believe in rationality . . . without worshipping its goddess. I believe in the chances of meaningful social action . . . without necessarily drifting towards the deadly rapids of absolute utopias." The question that remains is whether the new technologies will bring society and culture a better world or whether they will be used for destruction, as were all too many technological advances in the 20th century.
NETWORK VS IDENTITY
Castells will certainly have a major impact on the debate about what traditional institutions should or should not do to influence the progress of the Information Revolution. The author of more than 20 books, many dealing with the impact of information technology on society, he is recognized by business leaders and academicians alike as the premier expert on the social ramifications of the Information Age.
Castells has long been a citizen of the subject on which he is an expert--the new global economy and culture. He himself is a globalized social theorist. Born in Spain in 1942, he taught at the University of Paris for 12 years before moving to California. He has taught and conducted research all over the world and has been an advisor to heads of state from Europe to Latin America to Asia. He has been a member of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on the Information Society and is a member of the European Academy.
In the last year, Castells has also become a star speaker at major conferences on the Information Age. He was one of a very few academics to address the World Economic Forum earlier this year, with an audience that included George Soros, Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.
In his trilogy, Castells describes a tension that new information technologies have created within the society and culture. He identifies it as a battle between "network" and "identity."
Volume One is titled The Rise of the Network Society. In it he introduces a new term, informationalism--a new economic model evolved from capitalism. In the new economy, information is the most important currency, and new models of production are forming as a result. Castells illustrates how the global economy is now reliant on the continuous and instantaneous flow of information, and how that flow has changed consumption and production. Enormous power has been invested in those who control the information pipelines, and very often that power goes politically and legally unchecked.
Volume Two, titled The Power of Identity, shows the major counterforce to networks and globalization: old and new groups expressing their collective identity. Here Castells identifies social (and to a lesser degree economic) communities that are emerging, and he comments on their shifting and transitory nature and how they are undermining the old structures, including ethnic cultures, the family and the nation-state.
In his final volume, End of Millennium, Castells brings together the findings from the first two and sums up where he believes society and culture is as it enters a new millennium. And while he focuses on Africa, the rise of inequality, the growing criminal economy, urban poverty, and the plight of children, he still has faith that "there is nothing that cannot be changed by conscious, purposive social action" that is informed and legitimate. Yet he resists making firm predictions and concentrates on, as he puts it, "what we know the Information Age brings to us."
EMPIRICAL WEAKNESS
The three volumes work together to establish the fact that a new global economy and culture are emerging, driven by the engine of capitalism. This new state of affairs will in turn come under threat from the pressure of other social movements, ethnic groups and virtual cultures that are arising in response to the rapid shrinking of the globe. All of these forces will utilize the speed and pervasiveness of the network to stake out, defend and promote their identity. Information capitalists, nation-states and traditional institutions will have to take each potential threat seriously, no matter how insignificant it may seem initially.
Castells cites the success of the Mexican Zapatistas rebellion as evidence. This relatively small and isolated group, devoted to preserving the culture of those native people of Mexico who were threatened by global interests such as NAFTA, was able to hold the Mexican government at bay by appealing to the greater global community for support via the Internet.
Yet it seems the new technologies put all entities at risk. The very same special-interest groups and individuals that are empowered by unlimited information will also have their identity threatened by competing social movements. Thus no one will have a secure sense of identity.
It is no surprise that Castells, a former Marxist, concentrates on the plight of workers through all of this change. He believes a major consequence will be great uncertainty in employment resulting from a dramatic change in how we work: labor pools will be defined increasingly by temporary ventures that Castells terms "projects"; corporate firms and businesses will constantly shift their focus; and many firms will become sources of capital as opposed to producers of goods and services in the traditional sense. These factors may work together to produce a situation not unlike that of the 19th century, when vast groups of people were uprooted to fulfill the labor needs created by the Industrial Revolution.
These are just a few of the general trends that Castells attempts to identify. While the three volumes are long on data and short on firm conclusions about the future, the specifics he addresses in illustrating his points make for interesting reading and prompt the reader to consider various what-if scenarios. But one comes away from the trilogy recognizing that the subject is so big that even the best minds writing in such magna opera as Castells's are incapable of giving us the full sense of the revolution we are witnessing.
The advance of the Information Age is in many ways like the development of a new empire, though this empire is not limited, as others before it have been, to time and space.
Several questions remain, however. At what stage are we currently in the life of this new global empire? Will the global economy and culture prevail, or will society fragment? Can the dark side of human nature be overcome before the full power of the Information Age is unleashed? This is the drama for which Castells wisely refuses to provide an ending.
So often in the past, the real enemy of empires was not the foe without but the dark side of human nature within. More often than not, empires collapsed because of internal social forces at work--the moral decline and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire being perhaps the most notable example.
The astonishing powers being unleashed by the explosion of information technologies will demand strong ethics and morality from the citizens of this new global empire if it is to enjoy a happier fate.
Author, Edwin Stepp, is Director of Development for Vision Media. More information about these and other article topics can be found at http://www.vision.org.
Article Source: http://www.articlebiz.com/article/54963-1-society-and-culture-the-informational-age/
"The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. . . . The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would ...
The Nobel Laureate is a heavyweight in this field having earned a prize for work on the strong nuclear force and he indicated that what is happening today is very similar to what happened at the 1911 Solvay meeting. Back then, radioactivity had recently been discovered and mass energy conservation was under assault because of its discovery. Quantum theory would be needed to solve these problems. Gross further commented that in 1911 "They were missing something absolutely fundamental," as well as "we are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then."
Coming from a scientist with establishment credentials this is a damning statement about the state of current theoretical models and most notably string theory. This theoretical model is a means by which physicists replace the more commonly known particles of particle physics with one dimensional objects which are known as strings. These bizarre objects were first detected in 1968 through the insight and work of Gabriele Veneziano who was trying to comprehend the strong nuclear force.
Whilst meditating on the strong nuclear force Veneziano detected a similarity between the Euler Beta Function, named for the famed mathematician Leonhard Euler, and the strong force. Applying the aforementioned Beta Function to the strong force he was able to validate a direct correlation between the two. Interestingly enough, no one knew why Euler's Beta worked so well in mapping the strong nuclear force data. A proposed solution to this dilemma would follow a few years later.
Almost two years later (1970), the scientists Nambu, Nielsen and Susskind provided a mathematical description which described the physical phenomena of why Euler's Beta served as a graphical outline for the strong nuclear force. By modeling the strong nuclear forces as one dimensional strings they were able to show why it all seemed to work so well. However, several troubling inconsistencies were immediately seen on the horizon. The new theory had attached to it many implications that were in direct violation of empirical analyses. In other words, routine experimentation did not back up the new theory.
Needless to say, physicists romantic fascination with string theory ended almost as fast as it had begun only to be resuscitated a few years later by another 'discovery.' The worker of the miraculous salvation of the sweet dreams of modern physicists was known as the graviton. This elementary particle allegedly communicates gravitational forces throughout the universe.
The graviton is of course a 'hypothetical' particle that appears in what are known as quantum gravity systems. Unfortunately, the graviton has never ever been detected; it is as previously indicated a 'mythical' particle that fills the mind of the theorist with dreams of golden Nobel Prizes and perhaps his or her name on the periodic table of elements.
But back to the historical record. In 1974, the scientists Schwarz, Scherk and Yoneya reexamined strings so that the textures or patterns of strings and their associated vibrational properties were connected to the aforementioned 'graviton.' As a result of these investigations was born what is now called 'bosonic string theory' which is the 'in vogue' version of this theory. Having both open and closed strings as well as many new important problems which gave rise to unforeseen instabilities.
These problematical instabilities leading to many new difficulties which render the previous thinking as confused as we were when we started this discussion. Of course this all started from undetectable gravitons which arise from other theories equally untenable and inexplicable and so on. Thus was born string theory which was hoped would provide a complete picture of the basic fundamental principles of the universe.
Scientists had believed that once the shortcomings of particle physics had been left behind by the adoption of the exotic string theory, that a grand unified theory of everything would be an easily ascertainable goal. However, what they could not anticipate is that the theory that they hoped would produce a theory of everything would leave them more confused and frustrated than they were before they departed from particle physics.
The end result of string theory is that we know less and less and are becoming more and more confused. Of course, the argument could be made that further investigations will yield more relevant data whereby we will tweak the model to an eventual perfecting of our understanding of it. Or perhaps 'We don't know what we are talking about.'
Michael Strauss is an engineer and author of Requiem for Relativity the Collapse of Special Relativity. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.com