Joelette_Espot_Josep_Ma_Blanc

Excursionisme inclusiu amb CIM  Project: 

Ruta d’Espot al Refugi Josep M.Blanc amb una cadira tot terreny monoroda (Joëlette).

Et convidem a participar en una sortida especial, on la inclusió i l’estima per la natura van plegats. 

A través d’aquest vídeo, on cap escena ha estat preparada, podrem comprovar com es pot fer possible el que semblava impossible. Les paraules de l’Albert ho diuen tot: “ha estat un regal poder tornar a llocs on hi havia estat escalant”.

El vídeo no pretén ser una crònica completa de l’excursió, sinó que se centra en la realitat de la conducció de la cadira. Les imatges, gravades des d’una mirada acadèmica, poden servir com a eina pedagògica per a la formació i la sensibilització sobre la inclusió en l’esport.

Enllaç a Wikiloc del track realitzat on trobareu els detalls tècnics de la ruta

Vídeo en HD a Youtube.

Del medi urbà al rural

Conjunció Jupiter - Saturn

Avui resulta un dia curiós!  

  

Kiss the Ground - (2020)

Bikes vs Cars

Reciclant

puppylinux.org

Amics del Nepal

Amics del Nepal

Trobada amb els amics del Nepal a les portes del Tinell després del terratrèmol. Una de les moltes activitats que es duen a terme per recaptar fons.

AmicsNepal & Tarannà - Viatge 20 Anys

Amics del Nepal tenia previst una festa per celebrar els 20 anys de l'associació el 9 de maig. Aquesta festa ha sigut reconduïda a una festa solidaria per recaptar fons per les víctimes del terratrèmol.

Igualment, ens agradaria poder compartir amb vosaltres el vídeo que hem preparat per aquesta celebració dels 20 anys on expliquem la feina que hem fet aquests anys.

Per aquest motiu organitzem amb l'agència Tarannà un viatge al Nepal per conèixer els nostres projectes.

www.amicsnepal.org

Phenomena

Anar al cinema phenomena és tota una experiència, recuperar el plaer del 35mm és com pensar en el Vinil. I per fer temps un vol pels voltants. http://www.phenomena-experience.com/

14J

# tots junts som majoria

#eleutheromania

Treballadors TV3 Declaració 7 de març

ELS TREBALLADORS DE TV3,

ALS CIUTADANS DE CATALUNYA,

PROPIETARIS DE TV3:

#SalvemTV3

En els darrers anys els treballadors de TV3 ens hem abaixat el sou voluntàriament per fer de TV3 una empresa més competitiva i pel bé del país. Però no podem tornar-ho a fer simplement per alimentar un grup privat. 

La direcció actual de la CCMA té previst concedir en un futur proper al Grup Godó la gestió de la publicitat de TV3. Això suposaria per a TV3 perdre uns ingressos que estarien entre els 17 i els 25 milions d’euros l’any.

Si la cessió de la gestió de la publicitat de TV3 al Grup Godó es consuma, els ingressos de TV3 estarien any rere any per sota de les previsions i es tornaria a intentar rebaixar sous en un cercle viciós que aniria empetitint TV3.

 Quan s’entra en una espiral de baixada és molt difícil invertir la tendència: 

• menys Publicitat és menys Pressupost, menys Producció, menys Audiència, menys Publicitat. 

• menys Pressupost  és més Retallades, menys  Motivació,  menys Rendiment, menys  Producció, menys Audiència, menys Publicitat.

Necessitem confiar en un projecte empresarial de futur per a TV3 i Catalunya Ràdio, i la situació actual és d’extrema desconfiança per la malversació de diners en la gestió del servei públic de Televisió de Catalunya.

Per això, els treballadors de TV3 reunits de forma urgent davant la gravetat i la urgència de la situació, alertem els ciutadans  de Catalunya, única propietària de TV3, perquè es defensi d’una opaca operació empresarial privada que pot destrossar el patrimoni amb que durant dècades la població s’ha dotat.

Sant Joan Despí, 7 de març del 2014

___________________________________________

                

IMPACTE ECONÒMIC PER A TV3 DEL FET QUE LA CCMA CEDEIXI LA GESTIÓ DE LA SEVA PUBLICITATAL GRUP GODÓ.

TV3 PODRIA DEIXAR D’INGRESSAR ENTRE 17 I 25 MILIONS L’ANY. LA CONCESSIÓ ES PODRIA ALLARGAR FINS AL 2019, AMB UNES  PÈRDUES TOTALS QUE PODRIEN ARRIBAR ALS 150 MILIONS.

LES PÈRDUES PER A TV3 SERIEN BÀSICAMENT PER TRES CONCEPTES:

1. Per la concessió:    16 milions.

El concessionari, Godó,  s’emportaria un mínim de 16M€ en 3 anys (6 anys si hi hagués pròrroga), és a dir, 5,3 anuals, o 2,6 si es prorrogués la concessió. 

2. Per la comercialització en paquet:     8-10 milions.

Godó comercialitzaria la publicitat de TV3 en paquets conjunts TV3+8TV. Com a conseqüència, si una empresa té 10M€ per invertir en publicitat a Catalunya i els vol invertir a TV3, n’acabaria invertint aproximadament 8 a TV3 i 2 a 8TV. Això suposaria una pèrdua addicional per a TV3 d’uns altres 8-10M€.

3. Per espionatge industrial:     7-10 milions.

Com que 8TV tindria les graelles de programació de TV3 amb molta antelació, podria planificar una forta contraprogramació. Això podria fer perdre a TV3 uns 2-3 punts d’audiència i, com a conseqüència, TV3 perdria el lideratge a Catalunya i passaria a ocupar la tercera posició, darrere de Tele5 i d’Antena3. Això implicaria noves pèrdues d’ingressos publicitaris, en aquest cas, doble: pèrdues per tenir menys audiència, i més pèrdues per perdre el lideratge. Això podria suposar per a TV3 la pèrdua addicional d’uns 7-10M€ més.

En total, TV3 perdria entre 17 i 25 milions l’any.

Les pèrdues totals d’ingressos publicitaris de TV3 per l’externalització de comercial seria entre 17 i 25 milions l’any, entre 2014 i 2016, que en cas de pròrroga s’allargaria fins al 2019, amb unes pèrdues totals que podrien arribar als 150 milions.Aquestes pèrdues serien al marge que l’evolució del mercat publicitari impulsi a l’alça o a la baixa la facturació global.

Impacte del fet que TV3 deixi d’ingressar 17-25 milions l’any.

Els milions que TV3 deixés d’ingressar per via publicitària difícilment es compensarien amb una subvenció pública més gran. Probablement s’intentaria eixugar el dèficit que es generaria retallant novament la massa salarial de TV3 i de Catalunya Ràdio. Com a conseqüència, TV3 podria entrar en un cercle viciós que l’aniria empetitint com a empresa, amb constants pèrdues de quota de mercat i d’ingressos. Cal  tenir present que el pressupost de la CCMA de 2011 era un 50% superior al de 2014.

A causa de la mida del mercat català, la dinàmica de seguir empetitint TV3 portaria, segons els especialistes, a un model català basat en dues televisions petites (una de pública i una de privada) en lloc d’una de gran, potent i pública, com tenen tots els països europeus de mida similar a Catalunya.

Millores en la gestió?    

 L’estructura del mercat publicitari impossibilita que el Grup Godó millori la gestió publicitària de TV3.

 Hi ha televisions que han externalitzat la gestió de la publicitat i els ha sortit a compte. Això pot passar si la gestió de la publicitat la porta una empresa que té una major quota de mercat i gestiona un paquet de publicitat més gran, i, per tant, pot obtenir proporcionalment més ingressos. En aquest cas, tots hi guanyen. Aquest no és el cas del Grup Godó.

El mercat publicitari audiovisual espanyol el monopolitzen des del 2010 dos grans grups: Mediaset (Telecinco, Cuatro, etc) i A3Media (Antena3, la Sexta, etc). Conjuntament tenen un 56% de l’audiència, però aconsegueixen prop d’un 90% de la contractació publicitària, per la venda per paquets a l’engròs. Aconsegueixen una ràtio de publicitat/audiència de l’1,60 mentre que la resta de grups no arriben al 0,30.

TV3 és el tercer grup mediàtic espanyol, amb una ràtio d’un 1,02 molt per sobre que la resta de grups, tret dels dos grans. Només els dos grans grups tenen capacitat per aconseguir millorar els resultats comercials de TV3, però no es poden presentar al concurs per gestionar la publicitat de TV3 perquè Mediaset  i A3Media  ja tenen tota la quota publicitària que els permet la llei.

Malgrat tot, el concurs d’externalització del Departament Comercial de TV3 tira endavant amb dues ofertes: una del Grup Godó i una altra del Grup Zeta (El Periódico). Cap d’aquestes empreses té la capacitat ni l’experiència per fer-ho millor que TV3, més aviat al contrari. Tot indica que Zeta s’ha presentat només per fer un favor a CiU o per dificultar les coses al Grup Godó.

Jo, Sant Jordi

guifibaix amb eticom

How Networks Become Conscious

A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious

Neural pathways in the brain of a fruit fly. Image: Hampel et al./Nature Methods

It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where doesconsciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.

Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works.

“The electric charge of an electron doesn’t arise out of more elemental properties. It simply has a charge,” says Koch. “Likewise, I argue that we live in a universe of space, time, mass, energy, and consciousness arising out of complex systems.”

What Koch proposes is a scientifically refined version of an ancient philosophical doctrine calledpanpsychism — and, coming from someone else, it might sound more like spirituality than science. But Koch has devoted the last three decades to studying the neurological basis of consciousness. His work at the Allen Institute now puts him at the forefront of the BRAIN Initiative, the massive new effort to understand how brains work, which will begin next year.

Koch’s insights have been detailed in dozens of scientific articles and a series of books, including last year’s Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. WIRED talked to Koch about his understanding of this age-old question.

WIRED: How did you come to believe in panpsychism?

Christof Koch: I grew up Roman Catholic, and also grew up with a dog. And what bothered me was the idea that, while humans had souls and could go to heaven, dogs were not suppose to have souls. Intuitively I felt that either humans and animals alike had souls, or none did. Then I encountered Buddhism, with its emphasis on the universal nature of the conscious mind. You find this idea in philosophy, too, espoused by Plato and Spinoza and Schopenhauer, that psyche — consciousness — is everywhere. I find that to be the most satisfying explanation for the universe, for three reasons: biological, metaphysical and computational.

A map of neural circuits in the human brain. Image: Human Connectome Project

WIRED: What do you mean?

Koch: My consciousness is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I’m conscious. I might be confused about the state of my consciousness, but I’m not confused about having it. Then, looking at the biology, all animals have complex physiology, not just humans. And at the level of a grain of brain matter, there’s nothing exceptional about human brains.

Only experts can tell, under a microscope, whether a chunk of brain matter is mouse or monkey or human — and animals have very complicated behaviors. Even honeybees recognize individual faces, communicate the quality and location of food sources via waggle dances, and navigate complex mazes with the aid of cues stored in their short-term memory. If you blow a scent into their hive, they return to where they’ve previously encountered the odor. That’s associative memory. What is the simplest explanation for it? That consciousness extends to all these creatures, that it’s an imminent property of highly organized pieces of matter, such as brains.

WIRED: That’s pretty fuzzy. How does consciousness arise? How can you quantify it?

Koch: There’s a theory, called Integrated Information Theory, developed by Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin, that assigns to any one brain, or any complex system, a number — denoted by the Greek symbol of Φ — that tells you how integrated a system is, how much more the system is than the union of its parts. Φ gives you an information-theoretical measure of consciousness. Any system with integrated information different from zero has consciousness. Any integration feels like something

It's not that any physical system has consciousness. A black hole, a heap of sand, a bunch of isolated neurons in a dish, they're not integrated. They have no consciousness. But complex systems do. And how much consciousness they have depends on how many connections they have and how they’re wired up.

WIRED: Ecosystems are interconnected. Can a forest be conscious?

Koch: In the case of the brain, it’s the whole system that’s conscious, not the individual nerve cells. For any one ecosystem, it’s a question of how richly the individual components, such as the trees in a forest, are integrated within themselves as compared to causal interactions between trees.

The philosopher John Searle, in his review of Consciousness, asked, “Why isn’t America conscious?” After all, there are 300 million Americans, interacting in very complicated ways. Why doesn’t consciousness extend to all of America? It’s because integrated information theory postulates that consciousness is a local maximum. You and me, for example: We’re interacting right now, but vastly less than the cells in my brain interact with each other. While you and I are conscious as individuals, there’s no conscious Übermind that unites us in a single entity. You and I are not collectively conscious. It’s the same thing with ecosystems. In each case, it’s a question of the degree and extent of causal interactions among all components making up the system.

WIRED: The internet is integrated. Could it be conscious?

Koch: It’s difficult to say right now. But consider this. The internet contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a couple of billion transistors in its CPU. So the internet has at least 10^19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion) synapses in the human brain. That’s about 10,000 times more transistors than synapses. But is the internet more complex than the human brain? It depends on the degree of integration of the internet.

For instance, our brains are connected all the time. On the internet, computers are packet-switching. They’re not connected permanently, but rapidly switch from one to another. But according to my version of panpsychism, it feels like something to be the internet — and if the internet were down, it wouldn’t feel like anything anymore. And that is, in principle, not different from the way I feel when I’m in a deep, dreamless sleep.

A map of the internet, circa 2005. Image: The Opte Project

WIRED: Internet aside, what does a human consciousness share with animal consciousness? Are certain features going to be the same?

Koch: It depends on the sensorium [the scope of our sensory perception —ed.] and the interconnections. For a mouse, this is easy to say. They have a cortex similar to ours, but not a well-developed prefrontal cortex. So it probably doesn’t have self-consciousness, or understand symbols like we do, but it sees and hears things similarly.

In every case, you have to look at the underlying neural mechanisms that give rise to the sensory apparatus, and to how they’re implemented. There’s no universal answer.

WIRED: Does a lack of self-consciousness mean an animal has no sense of itself?

Koch: Many mammals don’t pass the mirror self-recognition test, including dogs. But I suspect dogs have an olfactory form of self-recognition. You notice that dogs smell other dog’s poop a lot, but they don’t smell their own so much. So they probably have some sense of their own smell, a primitive form of self-consciousness. Now, I have no evidence to suggest that a dog sits there and reflects upon itself; I don’t think dogs have that level of complexity. But I think dogs can see, and smell, and hear sounds, and be happy and excited, just like children and some adults.

Self-consciousness is something that humans have excessively, and that other animals have much less of, though apes have it to some extent. We have a hugely developed prefrontal cortex. We can ponder.

WIRED: How can a creature be happy without self-consciousness?

Koch:: When I’m climbing a mountain or a wall, my inner voice is totally silent. Instead, I’m hyperaware of the world around me. I don’t worry too much about a fight with my wife, or about a tax return. I can’t afford to get lost in my inner self. I’ll fall. Same thing if I’m traveling at high speed on a bike. It’s not like I have no sense of self in that situation, but it’s certainly reduced. And I can be very happy.

WIRED: I’ve read that you don’t kill insects if you can avoid it.

Koch: That’s true. They’re fellow travelers on the road, bookended by eternity on both sides.

WIRED: How do you square what you believe about animal consciousness with how they’re used in experiments?

Koch: There are two things to put in perspective. First, there are vastly more animals being eaten at McDonald’s every day. The number of animals used in research pales in comparison to the number used for flesh. And we need basic brain research to understand the brain’s mechanisms. My father died from Parkinson’s. One of my daughters died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. To prevent these brain diseases, we need to understand the brain — and that, I think, can be the only true justification for animal research. That in the long run, it leads to a reduction in suffering for all of us. But in the short term, you have to do it in a way that minimizes their pain and discomfort, with an awareness that these animals are conscious creatures.

WIRED: Getting back to the theory, is your version of panpsychism truly scientific rather than metaphysical? How can it be tested?

Koch: In principle, in all sorts of ways. One implication is that you can build two systems, each with the same input and output — but one, because of its internal structure, has integrated information. One system would be conscious, and the other not. It’s not the input-output behavior that makes a system conscious, but rather the internal wiring.

The theory also says you can have simple systems that are conscious, and complex systems that are not. The cerebellum should not give rise to consciousness because of the simplicity of its connections. Theoretically you could compute that, and see if that’s the case, though we can’t do that right now. There are millions of details we still don’t know. Human brain imaging is too crude. It doesn’t get you to the cellular level.

The more relevant question, to me as a scientist, is how can I disprove the theory today. That’s more difficult. Tononi’s group has built a device to perturb the brain and assess the extent to which severely brain-injured patients — think of Terri Schiavo — are truly unconscious, or whether they do feel pain and distress but are unable to communicate to their loved ones. And it may be possible that some other theories of consciousness would fit these facts.

WIRED: I still can’t shake the feeling that consciousness arising through integrated information is — arbitrary, somehow. Like an assertion of faith.

Koch: If you think about any explanation of anything, how far back does it go? We’re confronted with this in physics. Take quantum mechanics, which is the theory that provides the best description we have of the universe at microscopic scales. Quantum mechanics allows us to design MRI and other useful machines and instruments. But why should quantum mechanics hold in our universe? It seems arbitrary! Can we imagine a universe without it, a universe where Planck’s constant has a different value? Ultimately, there’s a point beyond which there’s no further regress. We live in a universe where, for reasons we don’t understand, quantum physics simply is the reigning explanation.

With consciousness, it’s ultimately going to be like that. We live in a universe where organized bits of matter give rise to consciousness. And with that, we can ultimately derive all sorts of interesting things: the answer to when a fetus or a baby first becomes conscious, whether a brain-injured patient is conscious, pathologies of consciousness such as schizophrenia, or consciousness in animals. And most people will say, that’s a good explanation.

If I can predict the universe, and predict things I see around me, and manipulate them with my explanation, that’s what it means to explain. Same thing with consciousness. Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now.

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