Black and white transparency: contradictions of a moral metaphor

Transparency has evolved from an individual, dangerous power in Plato to a desirable, collective property in the contemporary world. This paper intends to give a brief account of this long and somehow surprising path and extract some interesting consequences for economic and political activities, as well as for information technologies. Six literary masterpieces are used to highlight the contradictions and dangers entailed by the abuse of the fascinating metaphor of transparency. In the end, what is usually intended when demanding transparency from a corporation, a firm or a state is more (or more accessible) information about it, i.e., understandable and abundant black and white data. This means reporting, picturing, producing material, becoming apparent, which is precisely the contrary of being transparent. We don’t want to look through, but to look directly at. The question, then, is not transparency, but opacity: what do we need and want to see, and how is this going to be produced?     

关于发展上海黑白感光材料的建议

<正>我们都是感光材料行业离退休的高级工程师,从事感光材料三、四十年。 感光材料是现代社会的一种重要信息记录材料,而且又是大量的消耗材料。它已渗透到国民经济、科学技术、国防建设和人民生活各个方面,用途十分广泛,现在进入了电子信息时代,就更离不开感光材料。在国际上已发展成为     

南美白对虾健康养殖技术

从南美白对虾生物学特性、养殖条件、池塘清理、虾苗选择及放养密度、饲料投喂及日常管理、病害防治等几个方面对美白对虾的健康养殖进行了阐述。     

Event-triggered control for second-order multi-agent systems under denial-of-service attacks and white noises

Under the influence of additive communication noises and system noises, we investigate the event-triggered control problem for second-order multi-agent systems composed of double integrators or LC oscillators under random denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Different from the previous cases where the attackers completely interrupt communication networks, we consider that attackers interrupt the communication network with a specific probability and can attack part or all communication links randomly. Based on this, the conditions on the attack duration and attack success probability are given when the system can still achieve consensus under random DoS attacks. In addition, the consensus bounds are expressed. Finally, two types of LC oscillator systems are used to illustrate the effectiveness of results.