Tao


‎"Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend. Non-being is the greatest joy." Lao Tzu

Definition:


Sojourner comes from the Old French, séjourner, meaning "to stay for a time."

Monday, December 20, 2010

Ben Webster / Coleman Hawkins 1957 ~ It Never Entered My Mind


Recorded: Capitol Studios, Hollywood, California October 16, 1957

Personnel:
Ben Webster - Tenor Sax
Coleman Hawkins - Tenor Sax
Oscar Peterson - Piano
Herb Ellis - Guitar
Ray Brown - Bass
Alvin Stoller - Drums


Monday, December 6, 2010

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Julian Assange: the man behind WikiLeaks



With WikiLeaks again in the news, there is demand to know more about its editor in chief Julian Assange, the public face of the whistle-blowing website.


By many published accounts, the 39-year-old internet activist is as controversial as WikiLeaks is transparent.


Assange is extolled by human rights groups on the one hand and despised by governments and institutions around the world on the other — often for the same reason.


WikiLeaks, the website he founded in 2006, is known for posting classified government documents supplied by whistle-blowers in their entirety. The most controversial ones so far have been the hundreds of thousands of secret reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gotten him attention from the CIA.


Both WikiLeaks and Assange are again in the spotlight after classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies were released Sunday and major news publications began publishing details of frank and sometimes unflattering assessments of world leaders, as well as candid views of rogue nations and discussions about global crises.


To some Assange is a hero. He won an Amnesty International Media Award last year, was named in Utne Reader this month as one of 25 visionaries changing the world and is being considered for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.


In a TedTalk last July, Assange provided some insight about why he encourages leaks of secret information.


“There’s a question as to what sort of information is important in the world — what sort of information can achieve, reform, and there’s a lot of information. So information that organizations spend economic effort in concealing that’s a really good signal that when the information gets out there’s a hope of it doing some good … and that’s what we’ve done in practice….”


He also spoke of his core value.


"Capable, generous men do not create victims. They nurture victims and that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life," he said. "I am a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurturing but there's another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crimes."


But despite his good intentions, he's still viewed by some as a dangerous troublemaker, one that the U.S. government and other countries, including his native Australia, are trying to prosecute. There are even some who would rather see him dead.


Former U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to stop Assange and wrote in a Facebook posting, "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"


North of the border, Tom Flanagan, the prime minister's former chief of staff, told CBC News on Tuesday that he'd like to see Assange assassinated. In a panel interview on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, he said Obama "should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." But on Wednesday, Flanagan said that he regretted his remarks.
A secretive man


For someone who espouses openness and transparency, Assange is a private and secretive man. His current whereabouts are unknown, no surprise given the implied death threats he has received. He doesn't appear to have a fixed address and has acknowledged the use of "four bases" in the past several years, including ones in Iceland, Kenya and Sweden.


He is said to be constantly on the move, a way of life he's known since he was a child.


Born in July 1971 in Townsville on Australia's northeastern coast, Assange's parents ran a touring theatre company that travelled a lot. His mother later divorced and remarried a man who was part of a cult that Assange has joked about spending time running away from when he was young.


In his youth, Assange reportedly attended 37 schools and six universities. He studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne, but never completed a degree. In his twenties and early thirties, he was a computer programmer of free software in Melbourne before starting WikiLeaks.


Because of WikiLeaks, Assange said he has had to take security precautions. After the website published 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq in October, he brought bodyguards with him during a TV interview, Israel's Channel Two confirmed.


Not only is he trying to dodge possible physical danger, he's also fighting extradition to Sweden. He was placed on Interpol's "red notice" of wanted people on behalf of Sweden where he is wanted on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. The exact nature of the allegations is not clear because formal charges have not been filed.


His lawyer Mark Stephens has previously said that the allegations were made after Assange had consensual sex with two women who turned on him after becoming aware of each other's relationships. Swedish prosecutors have disagreed about whether to label the most serious charge as rape.


Sweden's Supreme Court was reviewing Assange's appeal of the order to detain him. Court official Kerstin Norman, who is handling the case, said a decision is expected late Wednesday or Thursday.



Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/12/01/profile-assange.html#ixzz17Hn50DjN

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks | Video on TED.com

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks | Video on TED.com



The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.


At the start of Session 12 of TEDGlobal 2010, Chris Anderson announced a mystery guest. “There’s a site some of you may know, called WikiLeaks.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange steps onstage for a surprise appearance at TEDGlobal 2010, in a Q&A with Chris.
We learned how WikiLeaks works: “We’re using state-of-the-art encryption and anonymizers to get information. And we get submissions by mail, regular postal mail. If we happen to find out the identity of a source, we destroy that information.”
[Corrected quotes from TED's official transcript follow] Chris asked about the recent controversy over leaked diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has tweeted that it was not given the documents.) Chris asks: “If you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables …” Assange replies: “We would have released them. Yeah.”
Why? “Because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that’s the sort of material that’s there.”
Watch now on TED.com: Julian Assange’s Q&A with Chris Anderson. (To see the clickable interactive transcript, click on the small red text to the right of the player window that says “Open interactive transcript.”)
After he spoke, Assange spoke briefly to attending press. Some reports:

Internet activist Julian Assange serves as spokesperson for WikiLeaks, a controversial, volunteer-driven website that publishes and comments on leakedYou could say Australian-born Julian Assange has swapped his long-time interest in network security flaws for the far-more-suspect flaws of even bigger targets: governments and corporations. Since his early 20s, he has been using network technology to prod and probe the vulnerable edges of administrative systems, but though he was a computing hobbyist first (in 1991 he was the target of hacking charges after he accessed the computers of an Australian telecom), he's now taken off his "white hat" and launched a career as one of the world's most visible human-rights activists.

He calls himself "editor in chief." He travels the globe as its spokesperson. Yet Assange's part in WikiLeaks is clearly dicier than that: he's become the face of creature that, simply, many powerful organizations would rather see the world rid of. His Wikipedia entry says he is "constantly on the move," and some speculate that his role in publishing decrypted US military video has put him in personal danger. A controversial figure, pundits debate whether his work is reckless and does more harm than good. Amnesty International recognized him with an International Media Award in 2009.

Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote Strobe, the first free and open-source port scanner, and contributed to the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.

"WikiLeaks has had more scoops in three years than the Washington Post has had in 30."Clay Shirky documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.




Girl and Sheep



Winslow homer