March 1, 2012
Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking industry jargon, is the practice of parceling what would otherwise be a large financial transaction into a series of smaller transactions to avoid scrutiny by regulators or law enforcement. Structuring often appears in federal indictments related to money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. The term ‘smurfing’ is derived from the image of the cartoon characters, the ‘Smurfs,’ having a large group of many small entities. Miami-based lawyer Gregory Baldwin is said to have coined the term in the 1980s.
Typically each of the smaller transactions is executed in an amount below some statutory limit that normally does not require a financial institution to file a report with a government agency. Criminal enterprises often employ several agents (smurfs) to make the transaction. The term is also applied to activity associated with controlled substances such as pseudoephedrine. In this context the agent will make purchases of small, legal amounts from several drug and grocery stores, with the intent to aggregate the lot for use in the illegal production of methamphetamine.
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March 1, 2012
Salami slicing is a series of many minor actions, often performed by clandestine means, that together results in a larger action that would be difficult or illegal to perform at once. The term is typically used pejoratively. An example of salami slicing, also known as penny shaving, is the fraudulent practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities, usually by taking advantage of rounding to the nearest cent in financial transactions. It would be done by always rounding down, and putting the fractions of a cent into another account. The idea is to make the change small enough that any single transaction will go undetected.
In politics, the term salami tactics has been used since the 1940s to refer to a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. In academia, salami slicing refers to the practice of creating several publications out of material that could have been published in a single journal or review. Historically, actual physical ‘penny shaving’ may be considered a form of salami slicing. The edges of coins made of precious metals have been clipped or shaved by individuals in order to procure small quantities of said metals with the intention that the coin would still retain its nominal value.
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February 29, 2012
Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) was a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as ‘the father of public relations.’
He combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. He felt manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct’ that Trotter had described.
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February 29, 2012
Propaganda is a 1928 book by public relations pioneer Edward Bernays. It argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society: ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.’
‘This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. […] In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons […] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’
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February 29, 2012
The Century of the Self is a British television documentary film; it focuses on how Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have analyzed, dealt with, and controlled people.
Director Adam Curtis said: ”This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.’
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February 29, 2012
The Raspberry Pi (or RasPi) is a $35 single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation which aims to ‘promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.’ The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes a 700 MHz ARM CPU, VideoCore IV GPU, and 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage.
The foundation has released one model (Model B) initially, and a second model (Model A) will be released sometime later. Model A will have one USB port and no Ethernet controller, and will cost $25, while Model B contains two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller and costs $35. Though the Model A doesn’t have an RJ45 Ethernet port, it can connect to a network by using a user-supplied USB Ethernet or Wi-Fi adapter. As is typical of modern computers, generic USB keyboards and mice are compatible with the Raspberry Pi. The system will use a Linux kernel-based operating systems.
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February 29, 2012
Ecofont is a TrueType font developed by SPRANQ in the Netherlands. The font uses tiny circles placed in the characters to cut down on ink costs. It claims to cut down the amount of ink usage by approximately 15 percent.
In a 2010 test, Ecofont Vera Sans saved 20% more ink when compared to Bitstream Vera Sans. However, both sans-serif fonts used more ink than most typical serif fonts. Therefore Ecofont developed software to save ink when using any typeface, including serif fonts.
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February 28, 2012
Mel Ramos (b. 1935) is a U.S. figurative painter, whose work incorporates elements of realist and abstract art. Born in Sacramento, California, he gained his greatest popularity in association with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. The classification of Ramos within any particular school of art is disputed.
Some critical observers of the ‘art scene’ classify him as a pop artist. However, others believe identification of Ramos’ work within the Pop movement of the 1960s implies a satirical or parodic bent which does not reflect the broader context of his paintings, and instead defend his ‘parodies’ as respectful, affectionate tributes, a celebration of images with personal meaning.
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February 28, 2012
Cognitive inertia refers the tendency for beliefs or sets of beliefs to endure once formed. In particular, it describes the human inclination to rely on familiar assumptions and exhibit a reluctance and/or inability to revise them, even when supporting evidence no longer exists. The term is employed in the managerial and organizational sciences to describe the commonly observed phenomenon whereby managers fail to update and revise their understanding of a situation when that situation changes, a phenomenon that acts as a psychological barrier to organizational change.
However, not all instances of cognitive inertia result in negative outcomes. It is a key component of love, trust, and friendship. For instance, if evidence showed that a friend was dishonest, the cognitive inertia of the friendship would demand much more evidence to form an opinion than that required to form an opinion of a stranger.
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February 26, 2012
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. The book chronicles its subjects in three parts: National Delusions, Peculiar Follies, and Philosophical Delusions.
Despite its journalistic and rather sensational style, the book has gathered a body of academic support as a work of considerable importance in the history of social psychology and psychopathology. The subjects of Mackay’s debunking include economic bubbles, alchemy, crusades, witch-hunts, prophecies, fortune-telling, haunted houses, popular follies of great cities, and popular admiration of great thieves.
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February 26, 2012
The Wisdom of Crowds is a 2004 book written by American journalist James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts). The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood, however its title is an allusion to Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,’ published in 1841 (which chronicled economic bubbles, witch-hunts, crusades, and similar phenomena).
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February 25, 2012
‘One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society’ is a 1964 book by philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The work offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the society in the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies, as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West.
Marcuse argues that ‘advanced industrial society’ created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.
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