Science that threatens… and promises wonders

George Dvorsky has a piece on iO9, How Artificial Intelligence Will Give Birth to Itself,  summarizing many of the worrisome aspects of a possible runaway effect, when self-improving artificial intelligences (AI) get faster and faster at designing new and better versions of themselves. A thoughtful reflection on how the Singularity might (or might not) go out of control.

Alas, George left out a process issue that makes all the difference. That issue is Secrecy, which lies at the root of every Michael Crichton science-goes-wrong scenario. (Not one of Michael's plot drivers would have taken place, if the "arrogant scientists" had done their innovating in the open - as most scientists have been trained to prefer - exposing their new robots/dinosaurs and so on to truly public, error-correcting criticism.)

Efforts to develop AI that are subject to the enlightenment process of reciprocal scrutiny might see their failure modes revealed and corrected in time. Those that take place in secret are almost one hundred percent guaranteed to produced unexpected outcomes. And most likely dangerous ones.

The worst example of AI research that is secret and extremely well-funded, while creating AI systems that are inherently amoral, predatory and insatiable? It's a danger that I explore here: Why a Transaction Fee Matters to You. Automated investment programs... of which High Frequency Trading is only one example... represent probably the most dangerous AI research on our planet today.

== But who needs AI, with brainy-folks like this? ==

Robert Kuhn’s television series Closer To Truth “gives you access to the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover the fundamental issues of existence. Enjoy new ways of thinking. Appreciate diverse views. Witness intense debates. Express your own opinions. Seek your own answers. Get smarter.”

Wow… that’s a pretty hefty promise! So why not check out this fabulous series, now available online? Full disclosure: I contributed a few bits to the program, on topics ranging from cosmology and SETI to religion and ESP.

But scan the impressive lists of other folks, some of them - heck, most of them - way smarter than me! Such as David Deutsch, Freeman Dyson and Francisco Ayala. Mind-blowing stuff.

== We can do that! Should we? ==

You’ve got to wonder why this politically self-destructive course has been chosen.   Perhaps something isn’t being told. China building Dubai-style fake islands in the South China Sea. All in service of asserting extremely aggressive territorial claims.

Also. Dubai is planning the largest indoor theme park in the world, which will be covered by a glass dome that will be open during the winter months. The project will also house the plant's largest shopping mall with an area of 8 million sq. ft., which will take the form of an extended retail street network. Oil is creating whole climate controlled cities in the middle east, prototypes for space colonies?

Meanwhile, America declines into superstition. Nation apparently believed in Science...at some point. (I guess the Greatest Generation truly was better than us boomers.)

Stirling cycle engines have long been considered an under-developed opportunity in power generation. Using a closed gas cycle to tap energy from any substantial heat difference, these external combustion devices have been used in spacecraft. They can - at very low maintenance - draw power from burning just about anything.   Now… Segway inventor Dean Kamen thinks his new Stirling Engine will get you off the grid for  under $10,000.

== Physics and astronomy ==

A massive solar storm -- or Coronal Mass Ejection -- barely missed the Earth in 2012. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker, about the biggest storm in at least 120 years. Looking around and taking prudent precautions in a dangerous universe is what both science fiction and sanity are for. Ostriches who stick their heads in the ground will lose everything.

Long predicted — the Age of Amateurs in astronomy! Astronomers have long known that combining the data from several astrophotographs can reveal dramatically more detail about astrophysical objects. So what will they discover by combining all the astrophotographs on the Web? They’ve developed a system that automatically combines images from the same part of the sky to increase the effective exposure time of the resulting picture. And they say the combined images can rival those from much professional telescopes.

Cool. The Curiosity lander on Mars happened to be perfectly situated to catch images of the tiny (14 miles) moon Phobos eclipsing the Sun. Wow.

Oh!  Hot off the presses... (when will that phrase lose all relation to its origins?)...  NASA has revealed the suite of instruments that will likely fly on the next (2020) Mars roving laboratory, or “son-of-Curiosity.”  A way cool set of new scientific methods… though again nothing to explicitly check for life itself.  Meanwhile, NASA's Opportunity Rover sets an off-world driving record: 25 miles covered!

Astronomers announced the discovery of the fifth known triple supermassive black hole system in the universe. Some galaxies have more than one central black hole — each orbiting the other in relatively close proximity — and scientists say this is probably the result of two or more smaller galaxies merging. The two closest black holes are separated by a distance of 140 parsces (one parsec equals about 3 light years). The third supermassive black hole is much farther away.

A very interesting and challenging and smart series of cartoons explaining tough fields of physics, like magnetohydrodynamics. Also black holes and weird geometries. I do sniff a little crack-pottery, around the edges, so be aware some of it is… non-paradigm. Still, very good tours of difficult topics!

Savoir Sans Frontieres: Scientific Comic Books

The Silence Barrier: The Adventures of Archibald Higgins

The Black Hole: The Adventures of Archibald Higgins

A Caltech prof’s new theory suggests a highly unusual class of stars -- 1 in 10,000 -- may be made entirely of metal. Wow. I wonder how long they last.

Microscopically structuring steel like bamboo makes it stronger yet more flexible.

Finally, I have been putting in queries to Kip Thorne and other General Relativity experts about Hawking Radiation at the fringes of a gravity well... do any of you out there know such an expert with an open mind? I really do have a physics PhD!  So a little professional courtesy? ;-)

FLASH BOYS versus SKYNET – How Wall Street may be even more dangerous than Michael Lewis thinks

Michael Lewis's new book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, has certainly gathered tons of well-deserved attention. He was on the Daily Show and his interview on NPR is an absolute must-listen podcast in which you'll painlessly (except for an angry gut reaction) learn an awful lot about how Wall Street is (surprise) cheating the rest of us.

Lewis focuses especially on an area about which I've inveighed heavily for two years… the perils of High Frequency Trading.

You don't have time for books or podcasts? Then if you read or even skim any in-depth article this month, make it this one… an excerpt from FLASH BOYS about how the world of fast-pitched Wall Street trading has become rife with computerized cheating, so pervasive that any justification is impossible through the usual rationalizations of "market forces" and "correct price equilibration." No little guy can win the full value of his trades. No retirement fund manager can use keen insights to maximally benefit her clients without paying a large "tax" or overhead in stolen value.

Lewis's article appears to have a relatively happy ending, with the creation of a new trading center that corrects some of the grotesque advantages of behemoth banks and super-empowered Hugh Frequency Trading (HFT) operations. And I hope the sunny optimism of the final paragraphs comes true! (Failure to correct the cheating will lead us to French Revolution levels of anger, with tumbrel-riding lords losing much more than their "genius" predatory gains.)

What is more likely is a moderate series of reforms that -- like those our ancestors performed under Teddy Roosevelt -- restore just enough fairness and flatness and wary trust to keep it all in motion for another generation… and maybe restoring a bit of strength to the beleaguered middle class.

Indeed, the hoo-row over this one book appears to be affecting markets! It has prompted a few traders to bet against shares of the Nasdaq OMX Group, the parent of the NASDAQ exchange. One analyst estimates that about 25% of Nasdaq's revenue, and about 33% of earnings, are attributable to high-frequency trading. The Wall Street Journal offers: The Responsible Way to Rein in Super-Fast Trading. 

If HFT is reined in - maybe with timing measures but far better with a tiny Tobin Tax -- then this one particular cheating mode will be controlled.

== Would that solve it? ==

But the danger remains… that we might return to the normal patter of 99% of human cultures across 6000 years. And that is the lesson of this book. Those who manipulate and distract us from getting mad and reforming capitalism are not only our enemies… but they are the enemies of the very same flat-fair open capitalism that they claim to admire.

Rationalization and excuse-making for the predatory depredations of a monopolistic cartel of financial "wizard" parasites.

Alas, the relatively optimistic tone of FLASH BOYS must be viewed with caution. The "solution" of a new, neutral exchange can easily be perverted by the next round of cheating -- both Adam Smith and Karl Marx called cheating the ultimate enemy of fair and flat and free competitive and creative markets.

Indeed, so long at the stock exchanges are controlled by closed cartels of conniving "seated members" there will be an inherent incentive for them to trade with each other, commission-free, which is the essential unfairness of HFT… and not the timing factor that Lewis dwells upon.

I have also offered another, more science fictional but chillingly plausible reason to fear the many billions of dollars that major trading firms are pouring into the HFT versions of artificial intelligence (AI). It is a failure mode that grown more credible by the day. It could wind up wreaking devastating harm.

And you can find it here: A Transaction Fee Might Save Capital Markets…and Protect us from the Terminator!

See also: The Contradiction of Capital Markets.

The Contradiction of Capital Markets

I will have some unusual and skew-perspective takes on all the transparency-related news, from Google Glasses to the NSA revelations.  In fact, an article of mine should appear in the July 16 issue of Variety: Google Glass: In the Long Run, the Benefits Outweigh the Risks. And another one in a major newspaper.  Till then, and while I am traveling to Chicago and Ft. Worth, here is a riff that I've stored too long.  Something that needs saying.

== Can companies really gain investment capital via the stock market? ==

Elsewhere I have commented on how easily capitalist/entrepreneurial markets can and do get warped by cheating and parasitism.  Some of it is inherent, as Adam Smith described way back in 1776. What could be  more natural for human beings to do – for example – than insider trading? Even primly honest folks will do it, inadvertently, We set up rules, and then lay patches on cracks that inevitably open in the rules, then bandaids on the patches….

Across 6000 years, no civilization ever tried so hard to create fair and open arenas within which humans can engage in creatively cooperative and creatively competitive positive-sum games.  Those who claim that markets are “natural” are romantics who know no human history and who have never even cracked open Smith's classic, Wealth of Nations. 

Markets are far from natural!  They are marvelous, wealth generating machines. Human inventions that need constant tuning, tweaking and re-adjusting.  Especially since cheaters (in other words humans) are all over the place, looking for ways to exploit those cracks. If they must, they will use camouflage and call themselves socialists… or oligarchs… or champions of enterprise, -- whatever garb will let them blend into the favored sanctimony of their environs.  But pay less attention to surfaces and polemics than to outcomes.

Witness how the emphasis in the U.S. economy has shifted, since the 1940s, away from goods and services to finance. Companies once founded by innovators start to fail when taken over by “business majors.” The clade of parasitical meddlers has an endless supply of rationalizations, such as those concocted by the HFT or High Frequency Trading industry, claiming that – by leaping to suck away the intermediate value between buyers and sellers – they are somehow doing both parties a service, by helping markets to settle on the "proper (intermediate) market price."  This catechism-incantation allows them to shrug aside the blatant fact that they benefit while producing nothing, even as the buyers and sellers and producers of goods and services starve for capital, languish and fade.

(Aside: one reflex will be to to accuse me at this point of "socialism" - even though every word of mine so far has been in praise of honest trade and competitive market forces, in a capitalism free of what biologists and disease experts call "parasitic-burden.")

(Another aside: some have written in to suggest that I should distinguish between new shares issued as dilution (described above) and those issued in an initial stock offering or IPO.  The latter events are often filthy affairs, rife with cronyism, insider trading, corrupt under-the-table dealings and grotesque market distortions in which the little guy seldom has a chance.  Almost anyone could design a system that would "bleed" into the market enough option-warrants in an open fashion, that would serve to help set an actual price for the IPO, instead of the bizarre and self-serving activities we see performed by most IPO underwriters. It is one more way in which we are not served by the cartel of "seated exchange members." Still do note. Much of the IPO cash does go to the company. Purchasers should always know how much.)

== The "mutant" CEO ==

Elsewhere I have also discussed the flawed reasoning that defends today’s outrageous compensation packages for CEOs and other managers who create no product or service whatsoever. Think about it. Market forces are supposed to correct imbalances!  Hence, by the very logic of capitalism, high CEO salaries should attract new talent to the field of corporate management until the supply of brilliant corporate managers outstrips demand and the prices -- or compensation for such managers -- finally fall. That is capitalism!

It is the absolute core catechism of their faith… completely ignored when convenient. Members of the collusive CEO caste never ever, ever mention this -- that the system they claim to admire should result in a smooth and natural limitation on these French Royalty level compensations. And the failure of a correction to appear - after decades of incessant pay raises to stratospheric levels - is essential proof of a collusive market distortion.

The one excuse I've heard is that the very best managers are mutant-level good. They are like tall, fast NBA players, nonlinear and by far worth any price! But there's a rub.  NBA mutants can prove they are worth it by clear statistical performance measures and ticket sales! In contrast, there is famously almost no correlation between CEO compensation and company health.  Rather, studies have shown a near-perfect correlation with how many members of a very small clade of 5,000 or so lordlings you play golf with. Stuff each others' corporate boards with pals and what else do you need?  Can anyone out there point to a "market force" that would prevent this?

== The myth that equity markets efficiently raise capital ==

But let's go back to the stock markets. You can step back and question the fundamental rationale for equities trading, altogether! Oh, sure, people should be able to sell their shares to others who deem the company has better prospects. But for the most part its sense of importance masks a gambling den. It is justified by the claim that companies use the NYSE and NASDAQ and other exchanges as “capital markets,” to fund their RandD plus the building of productive plants and equipment. (Ironically, much of their catechism on this goes back to Karl Marx!)

The whole notion that a company benefits very much, when its stock price rises, is absurd. It is a Big Lie on the scale of an Emperor who people suddenly realize has no clothes.  Companies can draw new investment funds from the stock market only when the price rises AND the company's board issues new shares to sell at that higher price. 

That will, indeed raise capital! Current stockholder value is diluted, but presumably it rises back up as a result of  new activities and products that the fresh capital allows. To do this requires sober calculation and convincing existing stockholders that the dilution will prove beneficial.  And it just doesn't happen that much.  Nowhere near enough to justify the 99% of trading that is pure speculation, gambling and manipulation.

Let me reiterate; I am not calling for an end to equities markets! Current stock-owners should be able to trade, fine, but let's stop pretending that companies benefit from any but the tiniest fraction of NYSE or NASDAQ activity. To the contrary, managers are terrorized by stock value fluctuations into making rapid, near-term decisions that can prove short-sighted, even catastrophic.  (Secondary note: none of this applies to commodities markets, though those have their own problems.)

In any event, that cycle of ownership dilution and re-investment via new share issuance is the activity that should be tax favored, and NOT the passive clipping of gambling profits from the trading of old shares to "greater fools." Re-stating that again… the issuance of new shares - the proceeds of which go to new products, capital equipment and so on - should be tax-favored, and not (gambling) dividends and capital gains that benefit competitive capitalism not... one... iota.

Aside #1- The favored flows would go directly to the company's investment in productive capacity and competitive activities.

Aside #2- Assuming we also constrain cheat-methods like proliferating a zoo of share types with sneaky-variable voting rights, the result of new issuance would be a steady decline in the power of large bloc stockholders as dilution spreads ownership ever-wider.  In order to hold onto control, large-bloc owners would have to keep plowing dividends back into buying new shares.  So, either the ownership becomes more broadly spread (resembling democracy), or else the "kings" are forced to be hands-on, involved and committed to the firm.  Either way, vigorously competitive investment in new goods and services would be the favored outcome.

Indeed, although it is a separate matter, I believe that these "radical" measures to save capitalism from cheaters should include a limit to shell holding companies.  No share of voting stock in any company should be more than two layers from a living, breathing human being. (Or charitable foundation or pension plan.)

React viscerally.  Call this "socialism."  In fact, there is not one molecule of socialism in this proposal.  Just anti-parasitism, plus a will and eagerness to see so-called "capital markets" actually function as advertised, for a healthy version of capitalism.

Let me swivel now and point my finger in the opposite direction: left-wingers who blame "capitalism" for our recent messes should replace the word with "cheaters."  I consider healthy "Smithian" capitalism to be one of the top five victims of the malignantly incompetent rule of the recent U.S. GOP.  There are no outcome metrics of national health under which the Republican Party's tenure in command did not wreak harm upon the people of the United States, on human civilization, and upon healthy capitalism… and upon the spinning ghosts of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley.

Okay.  It's been said. When was the last time you saw such a fiercely radical "j'accuse" denunciation, issued in defense of our present economic system, against the enemies of enterprise, who claim to be its great defenders?  Well well.  This is Contrary Brin!

More… anon… Meanwhile… and just to clear the decks… here are some political miscellany.

== Who won the Iraq War? ==

“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.”

Not to mention that Iraq is now largely a satrapy of Iran.  What a great idea that pair of trillion dollars was.  And you would even consider trusting those goofballs with a burnt match, let alone any role in political life?  

(And while this proves the American right to have been completely loony, the far-left is little better, if they continue to nurse the insane delusion that these wars ever, ever, ever had anything at all to do with "grabbing oil." Um... show me the oil? Moderates rise up! The left-and-right wings are out of their freaking minds.)

== Political-News ==

An infographic rates countries based on the state of freedom of the press. Many criteria are used, including violence against journalists to legislative measures to curb press freedoms.

An interesting look at how unusual it is to see the Republican Party without a clear next front-runner.  "For decades, the party has drawn from a small pool. There was a Bush or a Dole on every national ticket from 1976 through 2004. For 20 years before that, Richard Nixon was on the ballot in every election but one."

Tracking progress toward US energy independence: a handy chart, from Popular Science.

A provocative essay, Radical Centrism and the Return of Ricardo, reminds us that Adam Smith was not the only founder of enlightenment economics. Ricardo also played a major role. I cite both of them in that they knew what most "free market" economists have forgotten, that economic distortions will always be generated by toxically massive accumulations of wealth. A healthy market system - like an ecosystem - needs recycling, not just for "liberal" reasons of justice and equity and outcomes, but for the very health of the system itself, so that competition remains a real, vibrantly creative force, with a maximum number of empowered participants on a relatively flat playing field.  This proposal for a radically altered tax and property system has no chance of ever being implemented outside of a sci fi novel. And I only agree with half of the aspects.  Still it shows real thought.

See statistical proof that obstruction of appointments has skyrocketed under the Tea Party House of Representatives.

How 1% of 1% dominate U.S. elections.  Yes it is Mother Jones and I don't always agree with their polemics.  But unlike Fox, they use actual facts. And they show where all of this will head, so long as the agenda of The Insatiables is the re-establishment of feudalism.

It would be one thing if -- as I portray in Existence -- the re-emerging oligarchy took seriously their need to be intelligent rulers. It is another thing to blithely assume they are smart while undermining every institution and enlightenment system that brought them all they own. Do they actually plan to ignore where history says that this will lead?

Finally, a science-fictional side: Here's hoping that Hugo voters will consider that Stanley Schmidt has just retired after his long and brilliant tenure as editor at ANALOG Magazine.  It is his last year of eligibility and it might be nice to honor him, at long last.

Why a Transaction Fee Matters to You

Elsewhere I've long pushed the idea of a financial transactions fee to rebalance the playing field in securities markets, so they will no longer lean so hard in favor of giant Wall Street brokerage houses, now running a scandalous scam called commission-free High Frequency Trading (HFT).  Extremely modest in scale, the transaction fee would not even slightly inconvenience normal traders, like you and me. But it could prevent disastrous bubbles and other calamities.

Indeed, recent months have shown dramatic moves toward this metric of sanity. Eleven Eurozone members, including France and Germany, will use it to discourage speculative trading. Also known as a Tobin tax after the economist who originally came up with it 40 years ago - the fee will charge 0.1% of any trade in shares or bonds, and 0.01% of any financial derivative contract.

Now, following the Europeans' lead, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa  and Rep. Peter DeFazip of Oregon have introduced a bill to institute a U.S. version of the transaction fee.  By raw extrapolation, this zero-point-zero-three-percent (o.03%) fee  could raise a whopping deficit-curbing $352 BILLION dollars in ten years, while helping capital markets to settle down, avoid bubbles and computer runaway-meltdowns, while returning to both individuals and regular companies a fighting chance to participate in capital markets on an equal footing.

Question: at three cents for every $100 traded, who among us would notice?  Only those who pour billions each year into shaving off microseconds in computerized systems that sense when any of us are about to make a buy or sell order and pounce before we can act. And pounce hundreds or thousands of times per second. These predatory HFT trades now constitute the vast majority of transactions on today's exchanges. How did that happen?

Only the fact that they are participants in a cartel -- "seated members" of exchanges like the the NYSE or NASDAQ -- lets them get away with an activity that none of the rest of us could engage in.  Even a savvy billionaire would soon be wiped out by commissions if he or she tried to do HFT from outside the cartel -- a blatant case of insider manipulation and restraint of fair competition that ought rightfully to be broken up under anti-trust laws.  (In this computerized day and age, why not have a hundred times as many "seats" or exchange members competing with each other? Indeed, though it be blasphemy, let me ask: why have "seats" at all?)

Have a look at  the vast amounts of data now handled by huge, fantastically well-funded HFT systems (they recently laid their own fiber cable across the Atlantic, to shave a few more milliseconds), making NASA's space probe data crunching look pale in comparison.

== Why you should want - and help - this to happen ==

A couple of points:  First - all right - we would not actually get $320 billion; because the fee would succeed in its goal of reducing volatility.  Still, lots of income would come in from those who caused the Near Depression and seem bent on provoking another. At minimum, the new fee would pay all costs of running the SEC and other agencies charged with maintaining transparency and accountability in Wall Street, removing those burdens from the taxpayers. It could also serve as an alternative funding source for the bond rating agencies, like Standard & Poors, freeing them from the present incestuous conflict of interest -- rating the bonds of those who pay their wages.

Note that under Harkin's bill,  initial stock offerings  - the "best" and most truly useful trades - would be exempt, along with other exceptions, like the first hundred trades you and I make any year, to ensure that HFT speculation will carry the main load.

If you talk to a "quant" -- one of the high-IQ dopes who have done the boffin work for High Frequency Trading -- you will hear them howl that HFT serves a valuable function toward "efficiently finding correct prices" and eliminating the differential between perceived value of buyers and sellers.  They actually believe this promotes market health, despite the sickness that has pervaded the capital markets ever since they took us down this road. Even though it can be proved, under basic thermodynamic and biological principles, that this incantatory premise of theirs is completely insane, a self-hypnosis mantra that's diametrically opposite to true.  (Engines and organisms and markets operate healthfully upon gradients, which HFT happily and eagerly and parasitically eliminate.) They need to go back to math and physics, where nature corrects delusion.

As the author of The Transparent Society, I like the way a Tobin fee would create a continuing open-audit of the giant banks and brokerage houses, a side benefit, letting us all see what they are doing. (Do you trust them, after decades of cheating and outrageously stupid behavior?)

Of course, wearing my other hat as a science fiction author, I have my own "terminator" reasons for wanting to see the Tobin enacted.  But you'll have to follow your curiosity to this older article: A Transaction Fee might save Capital Markets and protect us from the Terminator... in order to find wry/scary amusement in a "far-fetched" danger that could be very real.  One that only a sci fi author would think of! (That too is where you'll find the "thermodynamics" arguments explained.)

Now it's your turn. Please, despite its dry tech-speak, this reform really, really matters. If you can get up out of Facebook torpor enough to take the effort, write to your congress-critters and news-sites in support of Sen. Harkin and the Tobin Fee proposal!  You should have all the email addresses already on hand and ready for messages like this one, right?  If you don't, pause now to create a little file containing your standard opening and closing, plus the email addresses of both senators, your representative, the president and favorite media.   (Check the website: Find Your Representative. ) A little work this time... will empower you to speak up easy and quick, the next time some issue raises your ire.

Or the next time I ask it of you! ;-)

== Political-economic Miscellany ==

Compiled at last: Brin articles about emergency readiness, civil defense, citizen resilience -- how to make yourself - and civilization - more robust against the dangers and inevitable calamities that will strike us in this century.

Watch this excerpt from "Chasing Ice" - an amazing documentary of time-lapse photographers tracking the retreat of the world's glaciers. Watch a mass the size of Manhattan break off Greenland and flip with staggering violence! Then watch the whole film. Take your crazy uncles along.  The images are convincing.

A secretive funding organization in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming,  The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funneling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry. However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.  Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Now some context. A cool interactive site lets you sift and explore the world's top billionaires and sort them by self-made vs inherited or by gender or nationality.

David Ignatius on why America and Europe are seeing good reasons to start cheering up. That is... if we keep confidently investing in our strengths.

The rise of volunteerism in Russia is seen by folks-like-us as a hopeful sign. of an optimistic, can-do culture beginning to ferment in a land long dominated by dour cynicism. Alas, the older tradition is fighting back, as the powers-that-be have been clamping down hard on nonprofits and volunteer groups, even those with no political agenda at all.

Speaking of which... While the global nature of cyber-crime means the criminals can be anywhere, we tend to think of Eastern Europe and Russia as the hotbed of criminal activity. Trend Micro believes criminals will increasingly shift their operations over to Africa in 2013. 

Now and then we see proposals to remove tax exemption from churches. A measure came close to passing in Colorado some years ago. And now comes this We The People petition to the White House. I've long held that such proposals should offer a "floor" exemption. Say $100 per parishioner and ten sq ft per member, also the first $40K of pastor wages, all of it baseline tax-free. This would safeguard all poor churches and clearly distinguish basic from lavish. True charitable work would also be exempt. It would also make the measure one that might actually pass, someday, while a complete removal of tax-exemption won't.

The blanket exemption has been justified by the expression "the power to tax is the power to destroy." But nobody is out to destroy churches and the tax-free floor that I propose would end such talk and would remove that justification, allowing us to say: "you use our roads and cops and defense, same as anybody. Please help pay for them."