Author: Brian

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics
is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. Plato

Recently, the folks behind Reddit.com confessed that a backup copy of their database had been stolen. Reddit developers confirmed their data contained user passwords. Reddit admits the information was stored as plain, unprotected text.

Reddit’s response seems poor:

[quote]
what a week…
Again, we’re sorry about yesterday’s outage — the DNS troubles were entirely our fault.

On a separate note, we want to make you aware that media of ours that contained a backup of a portion of the reddit database was stolen recently.

Although the media did not contain any personally identifiable information about our users and we have no reason to believe that reddit data was the target of the theft, we wanted to alert you to the possibility that your username, password, and — in some cases — e-mail address may have been compromised.
[unquote]

Puts an entirely new meaning to ‘fire in the theatre’.

Darn. Perhaps you see an annoying light on the film screen?
Sorry. We’ve opened the doors.
We’re quite sure you’re not the target of the arsonist,
but there’s a good chance you’ll burn if you fail to notice the fire.

If sites using our property fail as poorly as Reddit in this case,
we WILL need law to govern errors, omissions and disclosure.

Humans may be able to understand a dog’s bark
because all mammals speak a universal language.

All appear to communicate basic emotions, such as fear, aggression and submission in somewhat the same acoustic way, according to a new study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

The find suggests a primitive communication system may unite virtually all mammals.

The theory could help explain why previous research has found that many mammals, including humans, understand the vocalisations of different species.

…the researchers suspect dogs and humans share a unique ability to communicate with one another that goes beyond the proposed universal mammal ‘language’.

The scientists believe years of domestication have improved the way that dogs, versus their wolf ancestors, can communicate with us. They point out that such communication isn’t limited to vocalisations. It also includes visual signals, such as changes in looks.

Common house cats also appear to have evolved improved means of communicating with humans, according to a study conducted by Cornell University researcher Nicholas Nicastro. Cats, however, seem more intent on manipulating us. “Though they lack language, cats have become very skilled at managing humans to get what they want – basically food, shelter and a little human affection,” …

story at ABC.au

The secret of fantastic poached eggs is to NOT make a whirlpool.

Nicholas Carr posits in “Sharecropping the long tail“

…by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.

Richard MacManus’s new analysis of web traffic patterns helps illustrate the point. Despite the explosion of web content, spurred in large part by the reduction in the cost of producing and consuming that content, web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less.

Over the past five years alone, some 60 breeds of cattle, goats, pigs, horses and poultry have become extinct, the Rome-based UN agency said in a draft document, blaming globalization as the “biggest single factor” in the erosion of livestock biodiversity.

“Of the more than 7,600 breeds in FAO’s global database of farm animal genetic resources, 190 have become extinct in the past 15 years and a further 1,500 are considered at risk of extinction,” the draft says.

Some 150 experts from 90 countries met in Rome this week to review the findings, the first of their kind on a global scale.

Rearing livestock contributes to the livelihoods of one billion people in the world.

link to Yahoo News

A researcher has found the same virus that causes cervical cancer in cells of breast cancer tumors.

It’s the first study of its kind in Australia, although other international studies have also found cervical cancer-related HPV in breast cancer cells.

He says while the evidence is far from conclusive, “it’s possible and totally worthy of investigation” to suspect that HPV could also cause breast cancer.

Lawson says it’s possible that HPV is spread by sexual activity or during showers or baths, when the virus could be transferred from the genital area to the breasts via the nipple ducts.

Story at ABC.au

What makes the human brain unique? Of the many explanations that can be offered, one that doesn’t come readily to mind is — myelin.

Myelin may also be the cause of “our unique vulnerability to highly prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders.”

Conventional wisdom holds that myelin, the sheet of fat that coats a neuron’s axon — a long fiber that conducts the neuron’s electrical impulses — is akin to the wrapping around an electrical wire, protecting and fostering efficient signaling.

But the research of UCLA neurology professor George Bartzokis, M.D., has already shown that myelin problems are implicated in diseases that afflict both young and old — from schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s. Story at scienceBlog

The Times publishes a terrifyingly wonderfully concise piece on schizophrenia , helping us understand:

Schizophrenia may not directly cause one’s death but it does take one’s life.

The introduction:

Our writer had her first bout of suicidal depression at the age of 7. In the past 18 years she has suffered a range of mental illness. With words and paint she creates a unique and moving insight into her breakdown.

Selecting a font is a big deal,
often requiring hours and hours
of exploration and careful thought.

But in the end,
the effort pays off
in a readable and effective design.

We all know that.

Number Seventeen enjoys the process
and publishes a witty comic to show it.

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And Joho the Blog says, “…taste enables us to see the beauty that’s there, ideally in ways we can articulate and discuss. It may not be convincing the way a test for gold flecks is, but it is defensible. What we need to learn to see frequently is precisely the particulars that time has obscured. Taste, as the discussion of the beauty that’s there, thus is always unearthing more beauty.

Taste doesn’t just respond to beauty. It makes beauty.”

Edwin Black has produced an explosive, eye-opening exposé of the corporate forces that have for more than a century sabotaged the creation of alternative energies and vehicles in order to keep us dependent on oil.

“Since the beginning of history, there has never been a time when fuel and transportation has not been controlled by monopolists…“

“Since the first fuel was wood and since depleted trees took years to replace, the control of wood is the first cause of the conquering of new territory…”

“Edwin Black takes off the gloves and reveals the people whose invisible hands have been shaping and controlling energy markets. Internal Combustion describes forces that have brought us to the brink of disaster, and raises a call for a green revolution to restore sanity and regain control over our destiny.”

Here’s snippets about the first uses of coal and the continuing aggressive efforts to control our fuel.

Coal use began not with the well-known ore extracted from subterranean seams, but with a similar substance called “sea coal” that washed up along the coast near Durham in England’s northeast. Later, the more familiar rock was also discovered inland, exposed in the hillsides and the banks of the nearby River Tyne. The Romans certainly employed it in the early centuries of the Common Era. The combustible nuggets produced the fuel to forge Roman military metal and operate Caesar’s war fortifications. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the peasant class, especially those without access to peat, was compelled to rediscover coal as a substitute for wood.

The royal wood monopolies and hoarding regimens had made the repugnant sea coal a necessity for the average man’s survival, as well as for industrial and commercial growth. In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 percent, while sea coal only increased only 23 percent. Coal became affordable.

The glissando of coal cartels began in the Church, which owned the original northeastern coastal lands that contained the ore deposits, especially around Durham. In the late eleven hundreds and throughout the twelve hundreds, the Prince Bishops of Durham controlled much of northeast England’s best coal. The holy men of the Durham diocese were called “Prince Bishops” because they enjoyed the independent power to convene their own parliament, raise armies, levy taxes, and control the woods and mines of Durham County. A steward to Anthony Bek, a Prince Bishop from 1284 to 1311, openly declared: “There are two kings in England, namely the Lord King of England, wearing a crown in sign of his regality and the Lord Bishop of Durham wearing a miter in place of a crown, in sign of his regality in the diocese of Durham.”

For many years, the ecclesiastic monopoly was able to manipulate coal prices by restricting its supply. After a bitter feud with the Prince Bishops, the merchants of Newcastle wrested the monopoly from the church, and built their own powerful coal cartel.

The successor cartel, not controlled by any church or crown, was a combine of private merchants known as the “Hostmen of Newcastle””

Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes.

The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say.

Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School is pleased to present the results of the sixth year of our project, “Surveying the Digital Future.” The six years of longitudinal research comprise an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and, now, social networking.

This year’s report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail. Readers can compare the social networking data and correlate it to six years of attitudes and behaviors on-line.

The highlights of the report are available here:
digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-Digital-Future-Report-Press-Release-112906.pdf

…at 15 years, http://www.clearification.com/

San Francisco Chronicle:

A bus shelter usually isn’t the kind of place where people want to breathe deeply. But that may change in San Francisco at a few of the shelters that will be infused with the scent of fresh-baked, chocolate-chip cookies.

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories , working in conjunction with professor Shigeru Naito of Osaka University, have developed a device that uses waves to draw text and pictures on the surface of water.

The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes.

AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.

[link]

There’s a smart part and a dumb part of your brain, and the problem is…the dumb part talks.

You can look healthy and thin, but have a lot of fat inside.

Even slim people can have internal fat collected inside or around the liver, gut, heart and pancreas, or streaked through under-used muscles.

Images from MRI scanners suggest that up to four out of 10 people could be a “Tofi” — thin outside, fat inside.

Professor Jimmy Bell, head of the molecular imaging group at the Medical Research Council’s centre at Imperial College, London, said this hidden fat could trigger heart conditions and diabetes.

The findings are raising questions about the BMI (Body Mass Index), the indicator of obesity used by doctors and public health campaigners.

The BMI is a relatively crude measure which takes into account a person’s height and weight. Some doctors believe the BMI is flawed because it pays no attention to the nature of the weight. story at the Telegraph UK

Update:
Deposits of fat (ectopic fat) in a lean body such as in the liver, muscle, heart, pancreas and kidneys may shed light on the development of insulin resistance and type-2 diabetes. A short abstract is online at the International Journal of Body Composition Research.

Update:
MSNBC reports an AP story:

According to Professor Bell, people who are fat on the inside are essentially on the threshold of being obese. They eat too many fatty, sugary foods — and exercise too little to work it off — but they are not eating enough to actually be fat.

“If you just want to look thin, then maybe dieting is enough,” Bell said. “But if you want to actually be healthy, then exercise has to be an important component of your lifestyle.”

Update:
Early warning of deep belly fat
Measuring levels of a chemical found in blood offers the best indicator yet of the amount of fat surrounding abdominal organs, according to a new study of lean and obese individuals reported in the July issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. The buildup of such “visceral fat” is of particular health concern as it has been linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease risk.

The researchers, including Barbara Kahn and Timothy Graham of Harvard Medical School and Matthias Blüher of the University of Leipzig in Germany, showed that “retinol-binding protein 4” (RBP4) is produced in much greater amounts by visceral fat compared to the subcutaneous fat that lies just beneath the skin. Moreover, they report that blood serum levels of RBP4 jump in people who are obese, who have double or even triple the concentrations found in individuals of normal weight.

“We believe that in the near future, measurements of RBP4 serum concentrations might serve as a novel biomarker for visceral obesity and increased risk for type 2 diabetes and other adverse outcomes of visceral obesity.” [story]

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The U.S. obesity prevalence increased from 13 percent to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Human Nutrition.

The prevalence of obesity and overweight has increased at an average rate of 0.3–0.8 percentage points across different sociodemographic groups over the past three decades. Some minority and low socioeconomic status groups—such as non-Hispanic black women and children, Mexican-American women and children, low socioeconomic status black men and white women and children, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders—are disproportionately affected. The meta-analysis was published online on May 17, 2007, in advance of the 2007 issue of the journal Epidemiologic Reviews. [story]

Fortunately, the true nature of the Internet isn’t hard to understand.

Jon Christensen, a research fellow for the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at Stanford University says, “There’s good news about the power of conservation in the West.”

Christensen compared the study to Agriculture Department data on land lost to development. Across the country, some 2.2 million acres were developed between 2000 and 2005. Conservation efforts protected about 2.6 million acres during the same years.

Full story at New West

Rankism, discrimination or exploitation based on rank.

All around us, a powerful “somebody” is bullying a “nobody.”

Someone can hold a high rank in one setting (for example, at home) and simultaneously be low on the totem pole in another (at work). Likewise we can feel powerful at one time and powerless at another, as when we … experience the loss of a job, a partner, or our health. As a result, most of us have been victims and perpetrators of discrimination based on rank.

…our capacity for empathy as individual human beings — fails to address the darker side of our relationship to authority.

For three decades, the gap between the rich and everyone else has grown in the United States.

… both employers and governments have cut back on measures such as pensions and health insurance that helped mitigate the uncertainties of life. Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker calls this the great risk shift—transferring the burden of risks in life from collective institutions to individuals.

The greatest victims of this shift are the poor, and the biggest beneficiaries are the rich. However, in The Great Risk Shift, Hacker uses statistics and illuminating anecdotes to show how the shift also threatens the “middle class.”

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Gapminder – Visualizing Human Development
The Stockholm based website Gapminder provides wonderful interactive visualizations of important global trends. [a design demo from Max Kiesler]

We Feel Fine
Every few minutes, this site searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling.’ When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence and identifies the feeling expressed in that sentence. The results is a database of several million human feelings.

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, in his November 22, 2006 column (no longer free) titled “Harmony versus Democracy: Stay Tuned”, writes,

China is not in the business of exporting war, development models or political blueprints. It wants to do business, morality be damned. Democracy, in its world view, comes in a very distant second to growth – if it comes in at all. The kindest view of the Chinese position is this: Growth solves most problems, and no problems, be they of poverty or enslavement, are solvable without it.

Nowhere have the Chinese differences with Washington been clearer than in Africa. While the leading industrial nations of the G-8 tie aid for Africa to democracy and “zero tolerance for corruption,” China does energy deals of the kind cemented at the recent China-Africa forum in Beijing.

“African countries can now play to multiple audiences,” said Jeffrey Herbst, the provost of Miami University and an Africa expert. “The G-8 has been eclipsed and the big losers are Bono and Jeffrey Sachs and the charity crowd. The Chinese are not interested in the internal governance or human rights affairs of African states.”

The Chinese approach has the merit of seeing potential rather than cause for conscience-salving charity in Africa; it has the drawback of helping thugs like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

So, what is particularly important for other countries — and environmentalists — is to recognize that China has emerged as an independent actor in world affairs, and that everyone besides China and Africa may well be watching from the sidelines on this one.

From a smart synopsis at worldchanging

There is one darkened corridor in the Musee Guimet which will take your breath away, as it winks at you with a glittering light.

This exhibition is not only about gold – there is also fabulous Indian-looking ivory and Egyptian glass.

But the gold cannot help stealing the show.

This is the treasure of Tilya Tepe, the Hill of Gold, from near the Oxus river in northern Afghanistan – and it has quite a story to tell.

Called the Bactrian Gold, after the area at the crossroads of the trade routes between China, India and the Mediterranean, it was unearthed in 1978 by a Russian team.

They had found the graves of nomadic aristocrats who died about the time of the birth of Christ. More than 20,000 individual gold items – from tiny beads and hearts sown onto costume, to the shimmering golden crown of a queen. Even golden sandals.