- INTO THE MATRIX DEPARTMENT -

Artificial Intelligence, Future Humanity and the UFO Enigma
by Micah Hanks

Read more about Kammerer’s ideas at his website: http://maximkammerer.blogspot.com/

Readers love -- and occasionally fear -- ghosts that share their homes.

Someone whispers your name, but when you look up, no one's there. You hear footsteps in the next room on a night you're home alone.

You brush it off as imagination or the house settling. Is it really nothing? Or is it something supernatural?

"Ghosts haunt places because there is a connection to their past or present," said Guillermo Fuentes, director of San Antonio Paranormal Investigations in Texas.

"Other ghosts arrive without an invitation and decide they have found a place where they feel comfortable," he added.

Fuentes has conducted more than 450 investigations into what he calls ghosts, spirits, entities and presences. Ninety-nine percent of the requests for investigations were made by women, he said.

"Women are more perceptive and sensitive to feel and perceive these things," Fuentes said. "Women are also more open to talk about it. Men, well, are more closed-minded."

So it's not surprising that when we asked readers to tell us about the ghosts in their houses, we heard from seven women and one man. Most of the stories they had to share were positive, some even comforting.

Karen Nies and her husband lost their first baby, a daughter, at childbirth in 1997. In 2005, they and their two sons moved from their first house to another home in Erie. One night, the couple was watching television and heard loud footsteps running in the upstairs hallway. They went up, only to find both boys asleep.

"We were a bit creeped out," Nies said.

They heard the hallway footsteps many times until Nies invited in a psychic who said their daughter, Mary Faith, was the source of the sound. Nies said it was the psychic's "opinion that our daughter wanted us to know she was still with us after we moved from our old house.

"I hesitate to call these 'hauntings' because we know who it is and it gives us more of a comforting feeling than anything," Nies said.

Fuentes said he thinks if families know who their ghost is, they're more comfortable.

'Grandma Bu'

Jeanette Manendo also knows the identity of a ghost. She said her mother, who died in 2005, moved to Ohio after her death.

Veronica Bukowski, known as Grandma Bu, is staying with Manendo's daughter and two grandsons. Greg Gaydos, 11, who has Down syndrome, was the first to hear from his great-grandmother.

His brother, Jerry Gaydos, 10, got mad that Grandma Bu wasn't talking to him, too. So he prayed she would, and now he hears her calling his name, Manendo said.

She takes comfort in knowing that her mother is talking to the boys.

"It just makes me feel good that she's happy," Manendo said.

Although her family knows its ghost, Fuentes says most ghosts are strangers.

'The woman'

Maryann Ferris said she believes "the woman" in her Girard house is a protective presence, although she's also been known to take sewing supplies. Ferris first encountered her in 2006, not quite a year after getting the house.

"I was sleeping in my bed and, it being in the morning, I had slowly opened my eyes to an older woman's face peering right into mine, only an inch or so from my nose," Ferris said.

"She was wearing no makeup and had silver-gray hair pulled back and was wearing some type of old-fashioned glasses ... and she had on a black dress with tiny flowers on it and a small white Peter Pan collar."

Ferris closed her eyes. When she reopened them, the woman was gone. A previous owner of the house told Ferris that the woman would cover her children up during the night.

"The presence is not malicious, and if 'the woman' is going to help me look after my little ones, she is welcome," Ferris said.

She has no desire to dig into the identity of the woman in the 108-year-old house, she said. Fuentes said old houses tend to have more history, echoes and energy from the people who lived there. Ghosts may have lived or died in the houses they haunt. However, they can manifest anywhere, even in a new house, Fuentes said.

'Our very own Casper'

Kathy Findlay's 2004 Victorian house was meant to appear old.

"We built it so it looks like it's been there 100 years," she said.

The Millcreek woman was excited when a ghost took up residence. The first incident happened one night when she turned off the light in the range hood above the stove. Her husband quickly pointed out that it was back on. Other signs followed.

A peanut appearing on a step when the bowl full of nuts had been nowhere near. A bathroom door slamming shut for no reason as a guest approached it. A garage door opening and closing by itself.

"We are certainly not interested in calling in the ghost hunters for a paranormal investigation, because frankly, we are quite content with our sporadic, harmless visits from our very own Casper, the friendly ghost," Findlay said.

Although she referred to the ghost as Casper, Findlay doesn't know whether it's male or female. Fuentes said ghosts can be either. They also can be any age.

'The little old lady'

Kathleen Waterhouse, of Erie, describes herself as "a normal, hardworking person" who "can truly attest to the fact that ghosts are very real."

She said her home had too many incidents to mention them all, so she shared a bit about the most amusing spirit, one she called "the little old lady."

One dark summer night, Waterhouse's family came home to find the spirit in a lit-up window, where they could see her swaying in a rocking chair.

"You knew what you saw but could not believe it, and this made it all so silly and amusing," Waterhouse said.

Ghosts manifest in many ways, Fuentes said. Besides an apparition, they can include a physical touch, a voice or a smell.

"One of the most common manifestations is the change of temperature," he said. "You're in a room, and your baseline temperature reading is 74.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and in a matter of seconds, the temperature drops to 38 degrees Fahrenheit and you can see your own breath."

Bumps in night

Paula Schlopy has lived in two haunted houses.

The dining room in her Corry house, built in about 1935, always feels cooler than the others, she said. On a recent warm day, the room suddenly filled with chilly air, and she and the other two people in it got goose bumps.

Just before moving into the house, she was cleaning in the dining room when it became filled with the smell of french toast, Schlopy said.

In her old Erie house, built in 1888, she was awakened one night by the sound of someone falling down the stairs. No one had. Pots and pans would rattle in cupboards. Schlopy described "flashes of movement and the feeling that you weren't in the room alone."

Shadow in corner

Another reader, Frank Grande, believes he and his brothers weren't the only ones in a bedroom at their grandmother's Farrell home one night about 30 years ago.

Grande said he was 6 or 7 years old. He woke up and noticed a dark figure, no taller than he was, in the corner.

"You could not see any distinct figures on the face," he said. "No eyes, nose or mouth."

It started slowly coming toward him, and he yelled to his mother that someone was in the room.

She called the police. The "shadow person" remained in the room until the police came and shone flashlights in the corner, Grande said. After the police left, the figure reappeared and didn't go away again until the police returned with their lights, he said.

"I'll never forget that night as long as I live," Grande said.

While such ghostly experiences can be frightening to humans, Fuentes said ghosts can be scared, too. He also characterized them as caring, confused or apprehensive.


Some don't want to be bothered, but "most ghosts are seeking for attention," he said.

One way they try to get it is by taking things.

The misplaced remote

Becky Shafer was used to the occasional unexplained footsteps, voices and shadows in her turn-of-the-century Fairview home. She didn't really take notice until the television remote control went missing. Days of searching turned up nothing.

"Not until coming home from purchasing a new remote did we find the original," she said. "It was laying in the middle of the living room floor."

Fuentes said this is pretty common behavior for ghosts.

"It's a polite way to say, 'I'm here,'" he said.

Source: Erie Times News
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071014/LIFESTYLES03/
710140396/-1/LIFESTYLES08

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As protests financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Source: New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-
network-that-runs-the-world.html

When this photograph was taken in 1883 it was heralded as the first photographic evidence of UFOs.

But now scientists from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México believe it could have been a massive comet that came as close as 335 miles to the Earth - with a similar mass to the object that killed the dinosaurs.

Mexican astronomer José Banilla took the image, which appears to show something passing in front of the sun, on August 12 1883.

When it was released publicly in 1886 in the magazine L'Astronomie it was dubbed the first photo of a UFO - a series of 447 objects that looked 'misty' and 'left behind a similar misty trace.'

A new study by the Univeridad Nacional Autónoma de México now suggests that it was a comet in the process of breaking up.

'Our working hypothesis is that what Bonilla observed in 1883 was a highly fragmented comet, in an approach almost flush to the Earth’s surface,' writes Hector Javier Durand Manterola, the lead author of the report.

'Using the results reported by Bonilla, we can estimate the distance at which the objects approach to the Earth’s surface.

'According to our calculations, the distance at which the objects passed over was between 538 km and 8,062 km, - and the width of the objects was between 46 m and 795m'

The mass of the original comet could have been up to eight times the mass of Halley's comet.

Using the time that it took the object to cross the sun combined with the location of Bonilla's observatory, the report calculated that the object would be at most 8,000km away, and possibly much less.

'The only bodies in the Solar System which are surrounded by a bright mistiness are the comets, so it is appropriate to suppose that the objects seen by Bonilla were small comets,' said the scientists.

And as well as being shockingly close to earth, the scientists believe that the comet could have had the same mass as the object that wiped out the dinosaurs - eight times the mass of Halley's comet.

The report's claims have been questioned, though, as a comet breaking up so close to earth should have resulted in a meteor shower, and no astronomers detected one.

The regular Perseid meteor shower, which occurred shortly after Bonilla's photograph was described in reports as 'not a fine one by any means.'

Source: Daily Mail (UK)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2049896/Was-photographed-
UFO-comet-nearly-hit-earth-1883.html

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