Climates of suspicion: 'chemtrail' conspiracy narratives and the international politics of geoengineering

Concurrent with growing academic and policy interest in ‘geoengineering’ the global climate in response to climate change, a more marginal discourse postulating the existence of a climate control conspiracy is also proliferating on the Internet. Here, the term ‘chemtrails’ is used interchangeably with the term geoengineering to describe the belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large scale weather and climate modification is on-going. Despite recent calls for greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to ideas of climate control, and widespread acknowledgement of the importance of democratic public engagement in governance of geoengineering, the chemtrail conspiracy narrative has received very little attention in academic work to date. This paper builds on work highlighting the instability of the distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘normal’ views, and examines the chemtrail conspiracy narrative as a discourse rather than a pathology (either psychological or sociological). The analysis finds that while some elements of the chemtrail narrative do not lend themselves to democratic processes of deliberation, and potential for engagement with more mainstream discourse appears to be low, nevertheless certain elements of the discourse (such as the moral outrage at the idea of powerful elites controlling the climate, or the importance of emotional and spiritual connections to weather and climate) highlight concerns of relevance to mainstream geoengineering debates. Furthermore, the pervasive suspicion that characterises the narrative and its reminder of the key role that trust plays in knowledge creation and the justification of beliefs, signals what is likely to be a perennial issue in the emerging international politics of geoengineering

Psychic embedding — vision and delusion

The paper introduces the idea that the human brain may apply complex mathematical modules in order to process and understand the world. We speculate that the substrate of what appears outwardly as intuition, or prophetic power, may be a mathematical apparatus such as time-delay embedding. In this context, predictive accuracy may be the reflection of an appropriate choice of the embedding parameters. We further put this in the perspective of mental illness, and search for the possible differences between good intuition and delusive ideation. We speculate that the task at which delusional schizophrenic patients falter is not necessarily of perception, but rather of model selection. Failure of the psychotic patient to correctly choose the embedding parameters may readily lead to misinterpretation of an accurate perception through an altered reconstructed of the object perceived

De retibus socialibus et legibus momenti

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cutting edge topic. Almost everybody --users, marketers, brands, companies, and researchers-- is approaching OSNs to better understand them and take advantage of their benefits. Maybe one of the key concepts underlying OSNs is that of influence which is highly related, although not entirely identical, to those of popularity and centrality. Influence is, according to Merriam-Webster, "the capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways". Hence, in the context of OSNs, it has been proposed to analyze the clicks received by promoted URLs in order to check for any positive correlation between the number of visits and different "influence" scores. Such an evaluation methodology is used in this paper to compare a number of those techniques with a new method firstly described here. That new method is a simple and rather elegant solution which tackles with influence in OSNs by applying a physical metaphor.Comment: Changes made for third revision: Brief description of the dataset employed added to Introduction. Minor changes to the description of preparation of the bit.ly datasets. Minor changes to the captions of Tables 1 and 3. Brief addition in the Conclusions section (future line of work added). Added references 16 and 18. Some typos and grammar polishe

A Systematic Review of The Potential Use of Neurofeedback in Patients with Schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by positive symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), negative symptoms (anhedonia, social withdrawal) and marked cognitive deficits (memory, executive function, and attention). Current mainstays of treatment, including medications and psychotherapy, do not adequately address cognitive symptoms, which are essential for everyday functioning. However, recent advances in computational neurobiology have rekindled interest in neurofeedback (NF), a form of self-regulation or neuromodulation, in potentially alleviating cognitive symptoms in patients with SCZ. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of the literature for NF studies in SCZ to identify lessons learned and to identify steps to move the field forward. Our findings reveal that NF studies to date consist mostly of case studies and small sample, single-group studies. Despite few randomized clinical trials, the results suggest that NF is feasible and that it leads to measurable changes in brain function. These findings indicate early proof-of-concept data that needs to be followed up by larger, randomized clinical trials, testing the efficacy of NF compared to well thought out placebos. We hope that such an undertaking by the field will lead to innovative solutions that address refractory symptoms and improve everyday functioning in patients with SCZ

Addressing Very Short Stimulus Encoding Times in Modeling Schizophrenia Cognitive Deficit

It is well known that encoding times in persons with schizophrenia are longer than those of normal controls. Neufeld and others have argued that this is the consequence of additional subprocesses being executed during the encoding process in the case of schizophrenia. In general they expressed an encoding time as the sum of $k^{\prime}$ independent exponentially-distributed subprocesses, each executed with rate $v$. A troubling consequence of their application of this model to real data was that under some circumstances some individuals appeared to encode instantaneously. This was accommodated in Neufeld et al. by placing a Poisson distribution on $k^{\prime}$. In this thesis the view is taken that $k^{\prime}=0$ is not realistic and an alternative model is developed in which $k^{\prime}$ is restricted to positive integers. This is made compatible with very short encoding times by introducing a task parameter \al into the model. The problem of estimating \al is addressed

A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search method that combines the precision of tree search with the generality of random sampling. It has received considerable interest due to its spectacular success in the difficult problem of computer Go, but has also proved beneficial in a range of other domains. This paper is a survey of the literature to date, intended to provide a snapshot of the state of the art after the first five years of MCTS research. We outline the core algorithm's derivation, impart some structure on the many variations and enhancements that have been proposed, and summarize the results from the key game and nongame domains to which MCTS methods have been applied. A number of open research questions indicate that the field is ripe for future work

Frodo: Take off the ring! Practical, quantum-secure key exchange from LWE

Lattice-based cryptography offers some of the most attractive primitives believed to be resistant to quantum computers. Following increasing interest from both companies and government agencies in building quantum computers, a number of works have proposed instantiations of practical post-quantum key exchange protocols based on hard problems in ideal lattices, mainly based on the Ring Learning With Errors (R-LWE) problem. While ideal lattices facilitate major efficiency and storage benefits over their nonideal counterparts, the additional ring structure that enables these advantages also raises concerns about the assumed difficulty of the underlying problems. Thus, a question of significant interest to cryptographers, and especially to those currently placing bets on primitives that will withstand quantum adversaries, is how much of an advantage the additional ring structure actually gives in practice. Despite conventional wisdom that generic lattices might be too slow and unwieldy, we demonstrate that LWE-based key exchange is quite practical: our constant time implementation requires around 1.3ms computation time for each party; compared to the recent NewHope R-LWE scheme, communication sizes increase by a factor of 4.7×, but remain under 12 KiB in each direction. Our protocol is competitive when used for serving web pages over TLS; when partnered with ECDSA signatures, latencies increase by less than a factor of 1.6×, and (even under heavy load) server throughput only decreases by factors of 1.5× and 1.2× when serving typical 1 KiB and 100 KiB pages, respectively. To achieve these practical results, our protocol takes advantage of several innovations. These include techniques to optimize communication bandwidth, dynamic generation of public parameters (which also offers additional security against backdoors), carefully chosen error distributions, and tight security parameters