What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. Perhaps if we understand the reasons why groups make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help groups make good decisions.

This article in Slate came out a few days ago and it sums up nicely what I always felt about the matrix after seeing the first film - in the matrix we can do anything. Since the late 1980's after probing in depth the potential of consciousness becoming software via nanotechnology and perhaps quantum computers, I have endeavored to visualize the future of reality enhanced by fully customized hyper-intelligent neurological circuits and synthaesthic hyper-sensory pathways. This potential is the primary theme of my book-in-progress. As this article points out Neo shows us the way:

"The real source of the fascination with The Matrix is that, despite all appearances, the movie is not a dystopia. Rather, it's a utopia, a geek paradise. The Matrix is a sci-fi John Hughes movie, in which a misfit learns that he's actually cool. (Think Harry Potter with guns.) At the software company where Keanu Reeves works, his boss might as well be the principal castigating Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club when he says: "You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special. That somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken." Of course, we learn that the oppressive Figure of Authority is the one who is mistaken. But instead of going to the prom, Keanu gets to pack heat, learn kung fu, wear a black trench coat and sunglasses, and, to top it off, he gets a hot, ass-kicking girlfriend who sports fetish wear. What kind of dystopia is this?"

Madan Kataria writes: In March, 1995, I thought of writing an article on 'Laughter - the best medicine' for 'My Doctor' a health magazine that I edited. When I found a large amount of scientific literature on the benefits of laughter on the human mind and body, I was amazed that very few people laugh and smile in Mumbai. I was very impressed by American journalist Norman Cousins' book 'Anatomy of an Illness' in which he described how he laughed his way out of incurable disease of the spine - Ankylosing Spondylitis. I also read about the research work done by Dr. Lee S. Berk from Loma Linda University, California, who showed how mirthful laughter reduced the stress hormone levels in the body and the effects of laughter on the immune system. Early morning at 4 a.m. on 13th March 1995, I was walking up and down in my living room and suddenly an idea flashed into my mind: If laughter is so good why not start a laughter club? Then I decided not to publish the article, but instead I went to a public park at Lokhandwala Complex, Andheri, in Mumbai and spoke to people about starting a Laughter Club. The remarkable thing about this idea was that I conceived it at 4 a.m. in the morning and within 3 hours a plan was put into action.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- An Israeli policeman responding to neighbors' complaints about a rowdy all-female party received an unexpected welcome at the door when revellers mistook him for a stripper and began to take off his clothes and stroke him. "The women had ordered a stripper dressed as a police officer," national police spokesman Gil Kleiman said on Monday. The policeman showed the women his badge but they thought it was part of the act.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- A masked and caped do-gooder has been sweeping through an English town, performing good deeds and scattering terrified bad guys, a local newspaper reported on Friday.

The Kent and Sussex Courier said it had received letters from "stunned residents" of the town of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, who saw the man in a brown mask and cape scare off hooligans and return a woman's dropped purse.

"To my great surprise," the paper quoted 21-year-old psychology student Ellen Neville as saying, "a masked man wearing a brown cape rushed past me to assist a woman who was having a bother with a group of youths.

"He swept in, broke up the commotion and ran off, leaving myself and the woman in a state of shock," she said.

A man wrote to say he was being chased by some youths when the hero appeared and "shocked the gang so much they ran off."

Another woman wrote to say the crusader had tapped her on her shoulder to return her purse.

"If only there were more people around with this kind-hearted spirit," she said.

An experiment is under way in Paris that aims to turn the city into one huge Wi-Fi hot spot, making it what could be the first large wireless city in the world.

A dozen Wi-Fi antennas have been set up outside subway stations along a major north-south bus route, providing Internet access to anyone near them who has a laptop computer or personal desk assistant equipped to receive the signals.

The access is free until June 30 but will require paid subscriptions afterward.

If all goes as planned, the private partners building the system expect to make a decision before the end of the year to install at least two antennas, and possibly three, outside each of Paris's 372 Metro stations and to link them through an existing fiber optics network in the subway tunnels.

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.

One simple equation can generate a vast diversity of natural shapes, a Belgian biologist has discovered. The Superformula, as its creator Johan Gielis has christened it, produces everything from simple triangles and pentagons, to stars, spirals and petals. ... The Superformula is a modified version of the equation for a circle1. Changing one term in the formula varies the proportions of the shape - moving from a round circle to a long and skinny ellipse. Changing another varies the axes of symmetry - shifting from a circle to triangle, square, pentagon and so on. Varying both proportion and symmetry together produces shapes with any number of sides, regular and irregular. It can also produce three-dimensional structures, and non-biological shapes such as snowflakes and crystals. "It's a new way of describing nature," says Gielis.

A Swedish firm has invented a new type of material that is half chalk, half plastic. The mixture makes lightweight packaging with an extra twist: When burned, it neutralizes the acid fumes generated by waste incinerators.

"It’s beautiful", said Per Gustafsson, managing director of Ecolean. The firm’s chalk packaging, developed from scratch in 1996, weighs on average half as much as the paper/plastic mix used in milk and juice cartons. Better still, the chalk -- a natural mineral -- can neutralize acidic soil or the fumes from incinerators when burned as waste.

"You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.

"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation."

[...]As I continued to press for legal counsel, a female officer who had been busy typing on her laptop in the front of the restaurant, walked over and put her finger in my face. "We are at war, we are at war and this is for your safety," she exclaimed. As she walked away from the table, she continued to repeat it to herself? "We are at war, we are at war. How can they not understand this."

Guerrilla Masquerade Party is a monthly event consisting of large groups of people dressed in costumes of all sorts, arriving unannounced at various locations (most often bars). The concept comes from the tradition of Guerrilla Queer Bar -- where gays, lesbians, fags, dykes, trannies, bisexuals, and their friends show up en masse at 'straight' bars, effectively turning them queer for the nite. The agenda of GMP is simply to dress up and have fun. Nothing political, nothing complicated. We just want to add a little variety to Seattle's nitelife, and a little chaos while we're at it.

With the geo enabled foaf adhoc mesh internet in your pocket you should be able to turn a big piece of cheese into a hat no problem

broadcast your cheese, your location, and your need for a hat

..maybe money will come into the equation maybe not
..maybe you'll get a free hat and give away your cheese
..maybe you'll meet some friends of friends

the internet is a collaboration, exchange and transformation mechanism soon to have more cool features than money

"Chronic multi-tasking over many years poses a strong risk for ultimate brain damage," says David E. Meyer, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. He is drawing on 30 years of laboratory research and published studies in the field.

Tension and confusion, those consequences wouldn't have surprised me. But brain damage?

Meyer explained: As we force ourselves to bounce from task to task and back again, we generate stress. Body and mind gear up to cope by releasing adrenaline and other hormones. This powerful medicine is good for a crisis, but hard on the machinery.[..]

Apart from brain damage and consequent depression, Meyer also noted the alarming likelihood that multi-taskers are losing the ability to concentrate.

"Finally, today,14th April 2003 with the contineous effort of the virtual yeti team comprising of DINESH SHILPAKAR, SANJAY SHRESTHA, BISO BAJRACHARYA, TSEWANG DORJEE, PAVAN SHAKYA and myself combined with constant support and advice from great veteran like DAVE HUGHES and GORDON COOK and DILEEP AGRAWAL, we have been able to link EVEREST BASECAMP at an altitude of 5300m at 1300 HRS Nepal standard time to our server based at the base of KALAPATHAR at an altitude of 5450m) wirelessly by using CISCO AIRONET 350 and then to AAP-1 satellite provided by SES Americom and this is the first email."

Proverbs for Paranoids 3: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, page 251

"Are the people who are caught up in a mass delusion ever aware that they are living in a malignant fantasyland? Did the puritans of the Salem colony suspect that they were not hanging real "witches," but instead were collectively engaged in a monstrous injustice? Did the "good Germans" in the 1930s ever doubt that Adolf Hitler was anything less than what the captive press said he was: the "savior of the nation and the protector of the Aryan race?" Did the "good patriots" of the 1950s ever ask for proof that Senator Joe McCarthy really had a list in his hand of "known communists in the State Department?" (The number changed with each speech). How long did we persist in believing the telegenic generals' reassurances that "we've turned the corner in Viet Nam," and that "there was a light at the end of the tunnel?"

How many Americans today are aware, or if aware, care, that the Bush regime's justifications for the Iraq war were based upon lies, forgeries, and plagiarisms, and that the images of the "coalition's" "triumphs" (e.g., the toppling of the Saddam statue and the "rescue" of Private Lynch) were staged.

When society has gone mad, does the "conventional belief" somehow "feel different" to those within the society? The question virtually answers itself and history confirms that when reason departs and collective insanity takes over, it all seems "perfectly sensible" from the inside. True, in all such cases, a few discerning individuals stand apart, like the child who saw no clothes on the Emperor. But such individuals are quickly marginalized as they are denounced as "traitors," shouted into silence, exiled if they are lucky, and liquidated if they are not. After the madness has passed, statues are cast and monuments built in their name—names familiar to us all: Dietrich Bonheoffer, Klaus von Stauffenberg, Hans and Sophie Scholl ("The White Rose"), Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, George Ball, Daniel Ellsberg, John Dean.

These heroes see what almost anyone might see—anyone who prizes his and her liberty and independence, whose wits are operational, and whose moral principles are intact. Add to this, the courage to speak out against the madness and to defend the betrayed moral principles, whatever the cost, and you have a hero."

The Genesis HICEF is based on a revolutionary technology recently introduced by the Genesis Project in the form of the Edison Device - a residential and commercial energy generation unit that creates gas and electrical power through the separation of hydrogen and oxygen molecules contained in any source of water. At the core of this technology are the Genesis gCells, which break water down into its basic molecular structure through a series of electro-chemical processes, yielding ultra-pure hydrogen and oxygen gases. The reactant chemistry in the Genesis HICEF Technology is different from that of the Edison Device in that the gCells do not require many of the support processes needed in the Edison technology. The water supplying the gCells can be stored in special tanks that replace the ones currently used for gasoline in conventional fossil-fuel vehicles.

Carol said, "The name of my band is 'Failure to Disperse.'"

Which is the very activity we are called to right now. Some of the most important work to do now is to fail to disperse and to remind others to fail.

People with microphones who may be more interested in their own interests than in ours are strongly recommending that we disperse.

Suggestions popular now include being scared of the group or groups du jour--gays like me, immigrants like the family I come from, people in other countries we haven't met, poor people, people who aren't pale or aren't suit-bound or both, people who don't live inside.

Be scared of them, miss any connection you might have with them.

Disperse.

If you're in one of the recommended icky groups, be more scared of everyone else.

Disperse.

Also suggested to you by those who want to control you:

Watch lots of TV. Inside, in your own place. So what you mainly know about other groups is what people who plan to profit from your fear tell you to make you scared.

Stay in your car. See other people as good or bad drivers, in your way or not. Don't see their faces and possibly, in their faces, their story. Keep your face behind a windshield so they won't see your face and your story.

Stare at screens. Don't have very many times and places to look at people.

Disperse. Be alone with whatever manipulative info is coming at you through screens. Spend less and less time being in your own physical situation with your own body and your own impressions. Disperse; break < up the connection with your own physical life.

Watch TV and say how stupid it is. That's fine. Just as long as you watch it. Using your intelligence to say that TV is stupid is not really having a very strong connection with your own intelligence.

In fact, it is dispersing from the great new stuff you'd come up with to do if you applied your intelligence to the situation you yourself are actually in. If you came up with great new stuff, you might not follow orders from leaders, so please do watch TV and get off on knowing it's stupid.

The rate of carbon fixation through photosynthesis is a basic property of life on planet Earth. It is the basis for capturing and storing the energy that fuels our world’s living systems and forms the foundation of the food webs. The oxygen we breathe is a byproduct of this photosynthesis. According to its creators, these new net primary productivity maps provide a fascinating new insight into the intimate connection between the living world and the physical world.

"We are literally watching the global garden grow,” says Steve Running, MODIS Science Team member and director of the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group at the University of Montana. “We now have a regular, consistent, calibrated and near-real-time measure of a major component of the global carbon cycle for the first time. This measure can also be the basis for monitoring the expansion of deserts, the effects of droughts, and any impacts climate change may have on vegetation growth, health, and seasonality."