The Narrative Fallacy

Redmond Opens Source Code to KGB Successor ZDNet reports that Microsoft has given access to source code for Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server to the Russian Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the Soviet-era Cheka, NKVD and KGB, with hopes of improving Microsoft sales to the Russian state in an agreement that will allow Russia to study the source code and develop cryptography for the Microsoft products through the Science-Technical Centre 'Atlas', a government body controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Press. "The purpose of the GSP (Government Security Program) is to increase trust with national governments," says Microsoft in a statement. "In the case of the Russian agreement, GSP participation will facilitate the development of the next generation of secured solutions for Russian government agencies based on the latest Microsoft technologies and Russian cryptography." The agreement is an extension to a deal Microsoft struck with the Russian government in 2002 to share source code for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000. Not everyone is pleased with the agreement. Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton says that opening up source code could enable a government to find security holes that the state could use to launch attacks against other nations, adding that there are tens of thousands of bugs in Microsoft products, in part due to the sheer volume of source code and that an attacker only has to find one hole and exploit it successfully to gain access to other systems. "It's completely asymmetrical," says Clayton. Microkernel Proven Formally Correct Against Bugs ZDNet reports on SeL4, the first microkernel verified using Formal Methods, meaning it is possible to "prove the code" and guarantee against bugs. SeL4 lead designer Dr Gerwin Klein sees the world's most popular operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple) as bloated with millions of lines of code offering users massive levels of functionality, but opening a swathe of security vulnerabilities. "It is ubiquitous: from high-level Linux, to Microsoft, they are all the same - they are way too big," says Klein. "They have forgotten what the operating system was meant to be; they have left their past behind." By comparison, SeL4 has about 10,000 lines of code, all verified using Formal Methods, that allows software stacks to be isolated, meaning trusted software can run adjacent with untrusted applications. The software has the potential to provide a secure and reliable environment for mission-critical defence data, operating on the same platform as everyday applications like email or protect medical devices from hackers because the formal proof of functional correctness implies the absence of whole classes of common programming errors including buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, pointer errors in general, memory leaks, and arithmetic overflows and exceptions. According to Gernot Heiser "verification of operating-system kernels has been attempted since the 1970s, we pulled it off." Researchers Find that Money Can Buy Happiness You've heard many times that money can't buy happiness. but that probably never stopped you from shopping. Now a new study shows that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them. "Purchased experiences provide memory capital," says Ryan Howell, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. "We don't tend to get bored of happy memories like we do with a material object." The study looked at 154 people enrolled at San Francisco State University, with an average age of about 25. Participants answered questions about a recent purchase -- either material or experiential -- they personally made in the last three months with the intention of making themselves happy. While most people were generally happy with the purchase regardless of what it was, those who wrote about experiences tended to show a higher satisfaction at the time and after the experience had passed. Researchers found that people felt a greater sense of vitality or "being alive" during the experience and in reflection. "As nice as your new computer is, it's not going to make you feel alive," says Howell. How Facebook Ships Code yeegay has a very interesting article about how Facebook develops and releases software that he has gathered from talking with friends at the company. The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week "Boot Camp" training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. "All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to," writes yeegay. "It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in." What is interesting for a compnay this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day: many times a day and every employee is using a version of the site that includes all the changes that are next in line to go out. All employees are strongly encouraged to report any bugs they see and these are very quickly actioned upon. Facebook has about 60,000 servers with the smallest level comprising only 6 servers and there are nine levels for pushing out new code. For new code the ops team observes those 6 servers at level 1 to make sure that they are behaving correctly before rolling forward to the next level. If a release is causing any issues (e.g., throwing errors, etc.) then the push is halted, the engineer who committed the offending changeset is paged to fix the problem, and then the release starts over again at level 1. Evolution May Lead to Shorter, Heavier Women Yale University researchers report that while survival to reproductive age is no longer such a hurdle for humans, other evolutionary pressures Đ including sexual selection and reproductive fitness Đ are still working away in full force and if the trends detected in their study are representative and continue for another 10 generations, the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter the menopause 10 months later. "There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans," said Stephen Stearns of Yale University. "That's just plain false." Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. "The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals," said Stearns. ""These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things." Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women Yale University researchers report that if evolutionary pressures of sexual selection and reproductive fitness continue for another 10 generations, the trends detected in their study may mean that the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter menopause 10 months later. "There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans," says Stephen Stearns of Yale University. "That's just plain false." Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. "The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals," says Stearns. ""These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things." 'Carpet Cloak' Could Fix Flaws on Chip Masks Xiang Zhang and his team at the University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated a "carpet cloak" that renders objects invisible for light at optical wavelengths. Such a device could be used in the electronics industry, to hide flaws on the intricate stencils or 'masks' that are used to cast processor chips. "This could save the industry millions of dollars," Zhang says. "It would allow them to fix flaws rather than produce an entirely new mask." Invisibility cloaks work by steering light around an object, fooling an observer who sees nothing but the background view. Unlike previous such "cloaks", the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking. "Essentially, we are transforming a straight line of light into a curved line around the cloak, so you don't perceive any change in its pathway," says Zhang. Zhang's team was able to alter optical density of an object with small holes strategically "drilled" into a sheet of silicon. "In some areas we drill lots of very densely packed holes, and in others they are much sparser. Where the holes are more dense, there is more air than silicon, so the optical density of the object is reduced." Should Touch-Typing be Mandatory in High School? With the perspective of forty plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life, so it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the four cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. "Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time," writes Rayner. "Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives - so why are our schools so blind to this?" Matzoh Ball Soup May Fight High Blood Pressure With the Jewish holiday of Passover beginning at sundown on Wednesday, April 8, a staple of the traditional dinner ĐĐ chicken soup with matzoh balls may take on medicinal importance based on findings published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The popular home remedy for the common cold sometimes known as "Grandma's Penicillin" may have a new role alongside medication and other medical measures in fighting high blood pressure, scientists in Japan are reporting. Ai Saiga, Ph.D., and colleagues cite previous studies indicating that chicken breast contains collagen proteins with effects similar to ACE inhibitors, mainstay medications for treating high blood pressure. In the study, Saiga and colleagues extracted collagen from chicken legs and tested its ability to act as an ACE inhibitor in the laboratory studies and identified four different proteins in the collagen mixture with high ACE-inhibitory activity. "By incorporating these foods into meals, normalization of blood pressure will be achieved without compromising the quality of life of those who need such foods," says the study. Superguns Helped Defeat Spanish Armada With the discovery last year of the first wreck of an Elizabethan fighting ship off Alderney in the Channel Islands, thought to date from around 1592, marine archeologists are revising their ideas on how the English defeated the Spanish Armada. Replicas of two cannon recovered from the Alderney wreck were recreated in a modern foundry, and tests carried out showed that the Elizabethans were throwing shot at almost the speed of sound. Elizabeth's "supergun", although relatively small, could hit a target a mile away. At a ship-to-ship fighting distance of about 100 yards, the ball would have sufficient punch to penetrate the oak planks of a galleon, travel across the deck and out the other side. Tests on cannon recovered from the Alderney wreck also suggest the ship carried guns of uniform size, firing standard ammunition. "Elizabeth's navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage," says Marine archaeologist Mensun Bound from Oxford University adding that Elizabeth's navy had worked out that a few big guns were less effective than a lot of small guns, all the same, all firing at once. "[Elizabeth's] navy made a giant leap forward in the way men fought at sea, years ahead of England's enemies, and which was still being used to devastating effect by Nelson 200 years later." How Baseball Players Catch Fly Balls With the crack of the bat, the ball sails deep into the outfield. The center-fielder starts his run back and to the right, trying to keep his eyes on the ball through its flight path. His pace quickens initially, then slows down as the ball approaches. He arrives just in time to make the catch. What just happened? Years ago, physicist Seville Chapman proposed a model to explain how players manage the path of a fly ball so that they arrive to intercept it at just the right time. His theory, called Optical Acceleration Cancellation (OAC), used the acceleration of the ball through the vision field as a guide for player movement. As a fielder watches the ball rise, he moves either forward or backwards so that the ball moves at a constant speed through his field of vision. By managing the ball's position with his movement, a fielder will end up at the right spot at the right time. To test the OAC geometric equations against real life, researchers led by Dinant Kistemaker of the University of Western Ontario, compared the predicted running paths from their mathematical simulation with the real running paths of fielders. "We have found that running paths are largely consistent with those observed experimentally," says Kistemaker. However fielders tend to step forward first, irrespective of the fact that they have run either forward or backwards to catch that fly ball. "For a fielder, making a step is a way of changing the magnitude of the optical acceleration, while preserving its informative value." So, if you're coaching Little Leaguers, be patient. Their brains may still be learning the math. Digital Dashboard Device Detects Driver Drowsiness With one in four highway traffic fatalities the result of momentary driver drowsiness, a simple fraction of a second can decide the difference between life and death. Now Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology have developed an self-contained dashboard mounted assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. "What we have developed is a small modular system with its own hardware and programs on board, so that the line of vision is computed directly within the camera itself," says Professor Husar. "Since the Eyetracker is fitted with at least two cameras that record images stereoscopically -- meaning in three dimensions -- the system can easily identify the spatial position of the pupil and the line of vision." The cameras, which an be installed in any model of car, evaluate up to 200 images per second to identify the line of vision and if the camera modules detect that the eye is closed for longer than a user-defined interval, it sounds an alarm. The Eyetracker also has applications in computer games where players could look around themselves without requiring a joystick to change their viewing direction and in marketing and advertising where researchers could determine which parts of a poster or advertising spot receive longer attention from their viewers. Beware the Hidden Moons of Pluto With nearly two-thirds of its journey complete, the New Horizons spacecraft is still alive and well but when the spacecraft reaches Pluto in July 2015, it may find the region more hazardous than anticipated with the discovery of several moons around Pluto - and the potential for other, hidden moons too small and faint to detect - that increase the risks during the probe's flyby. Pluto's first known moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978, Hubble Space Telescope discovered two more in 2005, and in July a fourth moon was located, leading scientists to believe there may be more. The main problem is debris because the small moons are under constant bombardment from the Kuiper Belt, but the moons' low gravity prevents the chunks of rock from being captured so they are caught in orbit around Pluto, where they could pose a serious threat to New Horizons. "The most likely problem we would encounter is to be hit by something that is large enough to instantly destroy the spacecraft," says New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. Experts recently convened to analyze the hazards and determined the need for a good "safe haven bailout trajectory," or SHBOT - an orbit that New Horizons could shift into that would keep it away from the most likely danger zones. "There is no wounded here," adds Stern, "only dead or alive." Years of Failure Led Steve Jobs to Success at Apple With Apple stock at record heights, it is easy to forget that without the lessons Steve Jobs learned during twelve years of failure at Next after he left Apple in 1985, Jobs and Apple probably would never have arrived at their present pinnacle of success. "The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader - precisely because he had been badly banged up," writes Randall Stross. "He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable." For example, Jobs has always been able to attract great talent but one thing he learned before returning to Apple was the necessity of retaining it. In 1992-93, seven of nine Next vice presidents were shown the door or left on their own while one aspect of Apple's recent story is the stability of the executive team - no curb filled with dumped managers. Another thing Jobs learned from Next was not to try to do everything himself. "He's the same Steve in his passion for excellence," says Kevin Compton. "but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision." Stross concludes that it took 12 dispiriting years, "much bruising, and perspective gained from exile" but if Jobs had stayed at Apple in 1985, his huge success since 1997 would probably never have happened. China Dominates in NSA-backed Coding Contest With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia and two from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone -- from student to professional -- through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Previous TopCoder winner Jiazhi Wu says TopCoder's contests mesh well with the mentality of young Chinese developers, who appreciate the spirit of competition. "I'm not good at sports at all, so programming was the most competitive aspect of my life," says Wu. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. "We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there." Why Japan Hates the iPhone With a high level of technical sophistication, critical customers, and high innovation rate, Japan is the toughest cell phone market in the world so it's not surprising that although Apple is the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, selling 10 million units in 2008, in Japan the iPhone is selling so poorly it's being offered for free. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are into video and photos - and the iPhone has neither a video camera, multimedia text messaging nor a TV tuner. Pricing plans in Japan are also very competitive, which equates to relatively low monthly rates for handsets and the iPhone's monthly plan starts at about $60, which is too high compared to competitors, A survey showed that among Japanese consumers 91% don't want to buy an iPhone so what's the cellular weapon of choice in Japan? The Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV and features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors for Wii-style games. "When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they're amazed," according to journalist Nobi Hayashi. You Too Can Learn Echolocation Wired reports that with just a few weeks of training, you can learn to "see" objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do. Acoustic expert Juan Antonio Martinez at the University of Alcal‡ de Henares in Spain has developed a system to teach people how to use echolocation, a skill that could be particularly useful for the blind and for people who work under dark or smoky conditions, like firefighters - or cat burglars. "Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you," says Martinez. "Within another couple weeks you can tell the difference between trees and pavement." To master the art of echolocation, you can begin by making the typical "sh" sound used to make someone be quiet. Moving a pen in front of the mouth can be noticed right away similar to the phenomenon when traveling in a car with the windows down, which makes it possible to "hear" gaps in the verge of the road. The next level is to learn how to master "palate clicks," special clicks with your tongue and palate that are better than other sounds because they can be made in a uniform way, work at a lower intensity, and don't get drowned out by ambient noise. With the palate click you can learn to recognize slight changes in the way the clicks sound depending on what objects are nearby. "For all of us in general, this would be a new way of perceiving the world," says Martinez. 'Staying Alive' keeps Saving Lives Wired reports that doing chest compressions to the beat of the BeeGees' disco classic 'Stayin' Alive' can get a person's heart going again after cardiac arrest and has saved more than one life. After Tom Maimone, an experienced jogger who'd been given a clean bill of health by his doctor, suffered a heart attack during a 10 mile run and collapsed in the street, a passerby stopped to perform CPR recalling that the latest CPR technique could be done to the 1970's disco hit and was able to maintain the proper rhythm until EMTs arrived to take over. The song saved another person recently in Massachusetts as a woman was taking a walk in the woods with her 53-year-old husband one morning when suddenly he collapsed. As it turns out, 'Stayin' Alive' has a beat that's almost exactly 100 beats per minute - the same rate the American Heart Association now recommends for chest compressions during CPR. Going too slow doesn't generate enough blood flow, and going too fast doesn't allow the heart to fill properly between compressions. Just as importantly, nearly every American born in the last half-century knows the song by heart. Interestingly enough, the reason the song has such an unchanging rhythm throughout the song is that 'Stayin' Alive' was recorded without a live drummer. The BeeGees selected two bars from already-recorded "Night Fever," re-recorded them to a separate track, and proceeded with sessions for "Stayin' Alive". As a joke, the group listed the drummer as "Bernard Lupe" who became a highly sought-after drummer - until it was discovered that he did not exist. Hackers' Next Target - Your Brain? Wired reports that as neural devices become more complicated - and go wireless - some scientists say the risks of "brain hacking" should be taken seriously. "Neural devices are innovating at an extremely rapid rate and hold tremendous promise for the future," said computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington. "But if we don't start paying attention to security, we're worried that we might find ourselves in five or 10 years saying we've made a big mistake." For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don't build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb. "As these medical devices start to become more and more complicated, it gets easier and easier for people to overlook a bug that could become a very serious risk," says Kohno. "Because the internet was not originally designed with security in mind, it is incredibly challenging - if not impossible - to retrofit the existing internet infrastructure to meet all of today's security goals" but until now, few groups have considered how neural devices might be hijacked to perform unintended actions. "The first thing is to ask ourselves is, ÔCould there be a security and privacy problem?'" Kohno says. "Asking ÔIs there a problem?' gets you 90 percent there, and that's the most important thing." Who is your Favorite Actress from Geeky Movies? Wired has an amusing post on the "Ten Favorite Actresses from Geeky Movies & TV" that includes Sigourney Weaver for her roles in the alien series, Galaxy Quest, and Ghostbusters II; Linda Hamilton as Sarah Conner in the Terminator series and on TV's "Beauty and the Best"; and Cate Blanchett for her role in the latest Indiana Jones movie and as Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but the actress we never would have guessed would make the list was Academy Award winner Helen Mirren until we were reminded of her roles as Morgana in "Excalibur", Commander Kirbuk in "2010", the unnamed Egyptian Queen in "Prince of Egypt", and the voice of Deep Thought in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Who is your favorite actress from Geeky Movies & TV? Wind Turbines Make Bat Lungs Explode Wind turbines have long been recognized as a potentially life-threatening hazard for birds but at most wind facilities, bats actually die in much greater numbers. Researchers say that ninety percent of the bats they examined after death showed signs of internal hemorrhaging consistent with trauma from the sudden drop in air pressure at turbine blades, a condition known as barotrauma. Bats' lungs, like those of other mammals, are balloon-like, with two-way airflow ending in thin flexible sacs surrounded by capillaries so when outside pressure drops, the sacs can over-expand, bursting the capillaries around them. Bird lungs, on the other hand, are more rigid and tube-like, with one-way circular airflow passing over and around capillaries. "Given that bats are more susceptible to barotrauma than birds, and that bat fatalities at wind turbines far outnumber bird fatalities at most sites, wildlife fatalities at wind turbines are now a bat issue, not a bird issue," says Erin Baerwald of the University of Calgary in Canada. All three species of migratory bats killed by wind turbines fly at night, eating thousands of insects per day - including many crop pests - so bat losses could have very real effects on ecosystems along the bats' migration routes. Hackers Prefer Opera, Firefox to Launch Attacks While the most generous Web measurements peg Opera at a 2% share of the global market, 26% of the hackers use Opera says Paul Royal, a principal security researcher with Atlanta-based Purewire adding that Firefox is used by 46% of the hackers identified. "Exploit kit operators do use mainstream browsers, but they're much more likely to use Opera than the average user, because they know that the browser isn't targeted by other hackers," says Royal. Purewire obtained this insight by infiltrating hackers' systems using a bug in the analytics software included with a pair of hacker toolkits, notably one dubbed "LuckySploit," says Royal. "We forged a 'refer' field and put in a little JavaScript," he explains, "and that revealed the hackers to us via their IP addresses." Out of 51 exploit kit-using hackers, Purewire's tactic successfully identified the IP addresses of 15, as well as the browsers they ran. "We essentially did a code audit," said Royal. "Even criminals who attack others cannot architect reliable software," talking about the vulnerabilities in the toolkits. Purewire also found that of the 15 hackers identified, only two -- both with IP addresses traced to Latvia -- resided in the same country that also hosted the system containing their attack kit and most had at least one country between where they lived and where their malware-serving machine was located. "If we can discover the IP addresses of exploit kit operators, we can then turn that over to law enforcement." Ponzi Schemes Multiply on YouTube While it's probably not true that P. T. Barnam was the originator of the saying "there's a sucker born every minute," the proliferation of nearly 23,000 Ponzi schemes on YouTube with an astounding 59,192,963 views proves that the sentiment is still alive and well. The videos usually don't ask for money directly, but send viewers to Web sites where they are urged to sign up for the "gifting program," usually for fees ranging from $150 to $5,000. One of the videos recently added on YouTube featured Bible quotes, pictures of stacks of money and a testimonial from a man who said he not only got rich from cash gifting but also found true happiness and lost 35 pounds. "They make it seem like it's legal and an easy way to make money, but it's nothing more than a pyramid scheme," says Better Business Bureau spokeswoman Alison Southwick. Some of the videos claim that because it's "gifting," it's somehow legal. "They talk about 'cash leveraging,' whatever that means, and other vague marketing talk," says Southwick but the basic scheme is that participants are told to recruit more people who will put in more money. "It's just money changing hands," says Southwick, "and it always goes to people at the top of the pyramid." A spokesman for YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., said the company doesn't comment on individual videos. The 12 Most Useless Wikipedia Pages When you document everything, you're going to end up with some incredible, but inconsequential, entries. To prove the point, Asylum has an interesting article about twelve of the most interesting but useless Wikipedia entries including Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitatenhaupt betriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, a single word in German that means the Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services. Another is Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, an arrangement of nouns, verbs, adjectives and place names that makes perfect grammatical sense describing a herd of buffalo in the city of Buffalo who intimidate ("buffalo") other buffalo beneath them. The sentence can be clarified by substituting the synonym "bison" for the animal "buffalo" and "bully" for the verb "buffalo", leaving "Buffalo" to refer to the city: 'Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison'. Finally consider Uncombable Hair Syndrome, a condition whereby an unusual structural anomaly of the hair means the mess on your scalp cannot be combed flat. The underlying structural anomaly is longitudinal grooving of the hair shaft, which appears triangular in cross section. Our personal favorite though is The Katzenklavier, an actual piano-like musical instrument except instead of hitting tuned strings, the hammers hit special, tonally selected cats' outstretched tails, making them meow out in pain. Interestingly enough, the instrument is a favorite of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet When you are pushing 90, have written scores of famous novels, short stories and screenplays like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and have fulfilled your goal of taking a simulated ride to Mars, you're allowed to pursue your passions and to hold a grouchy attitude or two. The NY Times reports that among Ray Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. "Libraries raised me," Bradbury says. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years." That's why Bradbury is helping raise $280,000 to keep libraries in Ventura County open. As for the Internet? Don't get him started. "The Internet is a big distraction," Bradbury says. "Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ÔTo hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.' Not to be equivocal Bradbury added that, "It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere." It's Soak or be Soaked with Squirt-Gun Assassins When StreetWars started on September 7, each of the 250-plus contestants was handed a black envelope marked "Shadow Government," with the name, home address, workplace, e-mail address, cellphone number and photograph of a player to kill by squirting. After each kill, the shooter acquires the dead rival's target and begins stalking this new person, all the while looking over a shoulder for whoever is hunting him. The idea is to squirt your assigned victim before you get squirted by the player who has been assigned to squirt you. Entering the game costs $35, whoever gets squirted is out of the game, and the last person left dry gets $500. Michael Deane shaved the beard he wore for the picture his pursuer is carrying and is considering borrowing a wheelchair to use as part of a disguise. By Friday evening, he had logged four kills; and was one of 16 players left. "I've been walking around like a crazy person," he said, "wondering when they're going to get me." Sign up now for 2009. YouTube Video Sends Guatemala into Crisis When Rodrigo Rosenberg turned up dead on Mother's Day in an upscale neighborhood in Guatemala City, his murder was seen as little more than another execution-style shooting in one of Latin America's most dangerous countries. Now a video has emerged in which Rosenberg accuses Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom of orchestrating his murder. The killing has sparked civic unrest that threatens to topple the President of this fledgling democracy. "This is the most serious political crisis the country has faced since the signing of the peace accords" in 1996, said Anita Isaacs, a Haverford College political science professor who studies democratization in Guatemala. "The country is hanging on by a thread." In the 18-minute tape, a seemingly calm Rosenberg, sitting behind a desk and microphone, alleges that Colom, the First Lady and two associates were involved in murder, corruption and money laundering. In the video, Rosenberg declares, "If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom, with help from [presidential secretary] Gustavo Alejos." New Google Search Index 50% Fresher with Caffeine When Google started, it would only update its index every four months, then around 2000, it started indexing every month in a process called the "google dance" that took a week to 10 days and would provide different results when searching for the same term from different Google data centers. Now PC World reports that Google has introduced a new web indexing system called Caffeine, that delivers results that are closer to "live" by analyzing the web in small portions and updating the index on a continuous basis. "Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale," writes Carrie Grimes on the official Google Blog. "Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day." Now not only does Caffeine provide results that are 50 percent fresher than Google's last index, adds Grimes, but the new search index provides a robust foundation that will make it possible for Google to build a faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online. Toxic Mystery of Hitchcock's 'The Birds' Solved When dying and disoriented seabirds rammed themselves into homes across California's Monterey Bay in the summer of 1961, the avian incidents sparked local visitor Alfred Hitchcock's interest, along with a story about spooky bird behavior by British writer Daphne du Maurier, helping to inspire his 1963 thriller "The Birds," a cautionary tale of nature revolting against man, now ranked among the American Film Institute's Top 10 thrillers of the last century. Now scientists looking at the stomach contents of turtles and seabirds gathered in 1961 Monterey Bay ship surveys have found toxin-making algae were present in 79% of the plankton that the creatures ate. "I am pretty convinced that the birds were poisoned," says ocean environmentalist Sibel Bargu of Louisiana State University. "All the symptoms were extremely similar to later bird poisoning events in the same area." But in a Hitchcock-style twist, plankton expert Raphael Kudela of USC points to leaky septic tanks installed amid a housing boom around Monterey Bay in the early 1960s as the ultimate culprit that may have fed the toxic algae (PDF). "It is to some extent a natural phenomenon, and the best thing we can do is monitor for the presence of toxins, and treat impacted wildlife." Apple Sued For Upgrade that iBricked 3G's When Apple released the iPhone 4, it also offered an OS update to customers with older iPhone 3G and 3GS models. Now Information Week reports that an angry iPhone owner is accusing Apple of purposely designing the software upgrade so it would break older iPhones, forcing customers to upgrade to the iPhone 4. According to the complaint by Biana Wofford, Apple knew that the update from iOS 3.x would turn her iPhone 3G into a "device with little more use than that of a paper weight" and also criticized Apple over the difficulty in downgrading to the previous operating system without having to become a hacker. "A lot of customers - myself included--found that the "upgrade" to iOS 4 created crippling performance problems on older phones," writes Matt Rosoff in the San Francisco Chronicle. Although Apple probably isn't as devious as the plaintiffs imagine- - it probably just didn't test iOS 4 on older phones very thoroughly adds Rosoff. "But the plaintiffs do make one good point: once you upgraded the OS, it was impossible to downgrade without violating Apple's terms and conditions." New iPhone App Finds Cheating Wife When Apple released its new iOS 5 operating system, it touted a new app called "Find My Friends" as a great way to track and meet up with friends. but the app's enterprising customers are already finding other uses. Saturday night on MacRumors, a man saying he lived in New York City posted this: "Divorcing wife. Thanks iPhone 4s and Find My Friends. I got my wife a new 4s and loaded up find my friends without her knowing. She told me she was at her friends house in the east village. I've had suspicions about her meeting this guy who live uptown. Lo and behold, Find my Friends has her right there." It could not be determined whether the comments posted on MacRumors were authentic, but more than 100,000 people have viewed the posts and more than 300 of them replied with expressions of sympathy, skepticism and -- this being the Internet -- a few less-than-savory jokes. Our favorite: "I wonder if Apple will use this story in their next keynote, or in their commercials to promote the iPhone, and this app?" Apple Benefits from Grassroots "Brand Community" When Apple released its iPad, people lined up for hours to get their hands on the latest shiny techno-gadget stamped with the Apple logo and while there likely wasn't reason to worry iPads would become unavailable, still the lines persisted - as they often do when Apple comes out with something new. Now Rachel Rettner writes in Live Science about "brand communities" - groups that seem to rise up around companies like Apple and Harley-Davidson through grassroots movements with their own rituals and traditions. While Harley riders have their group rides; Apple users have store openings or a new product releases where Apple loyalists choose to camp out despite the fact that, if they simply wanted the product, they could have ordered it online. A key component of a brand community is what researchers call "consciousness of kind," which really means a sense of "we-ness." Today, this element is driven home in the Mac community by the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ad campaign that the company started running in 2006 but the bond between Mac users stretches back decades as Lynn Kahle, a professor of marketing at the University of Oregon who studies consumer psychology, points to the famous "1984" Macintosh Super Bowl ad as an image of a brand that's associated with independence and freedom. "Apple has done a good job of becoming symbolically part of one type of lifestyle, or one type of concept," says Kahle. "The brand becomes more than just a set of attributes to get you somewhere, it's a core part of who you are." New Kevlar Tape Reinforces Walls Against Hurricanes When a hurricane or tornado looms, a new tape could soon help homeowners keep their walls from blowing apart. X Flex tape, a clear, Kevlar-reinforced tape tested and developed in conjunction with the US military, is set to become available to civilians within the next year. X Flex is three layers sandwiched together. The outer two layers are standard plastic wrap. Inside that are clear strands of Kevlar, the synthetic fabric used by soldiers for body armor, woven together at a 45 degree angle. The Kevlar strands allow the tape to bend and flex more than six inches but not break, stopping terrorist munitions or Mother Nature's fury. "You can paint over it or put wall paper over it," said Abboud Mamish of Berry Plastics Inc. who worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop X Flex. "Putting nails through it [to hang a picture] should not affect its ability to stop a two-by-four going 100 [m.p.h.]." A specially formulated adhesive system allows X-Flex to be applied to the primed interior side of an exterior wall simply by removing the protective film liner and sticking the product to the wall. Berry Plastics claims that X Flex can stop a wood two-by-four from puncturing a home wall at 85 mph (hurricane conditions) and even 100 mph (tornado conditions). US Army Has New Weapon Against Snipers What the army needs in an urban or mountain environment where you're fighting a war against snipers is a weapon that can kill an enemy who's behind cover. Now Gary Brecher reports that the US Army's new XM-25, an Individual Air Burst Weapon with a range of roughly 2,300 feet that shoots 25mm fragmentation grenades that explode at a pre-set distance before, on, or behind the target, is now being doled out to combat units in Afghanistan and is being called a "game-changing" weapon that will literally blow the Taliban out of their hiding places. The XM-25's laser sight measures the distance to the target and lets the soldier set his rounds to explode behind the target so, if you're trying to kill a sniper in an Iraqi house, you set the shells to explode one meter inside the window. But some say that even if the weapon works as advertised, it won't really change the fundamental equation of warfare in Afghanistan, but will just force an accelerated evolution in the same direction guerrilla war's been evolving for more than 100 years: away from trying to fight the invading army on its own terms and toward assassination, bombs, and betrayal. Most of our GIs are not dying or being wounded in the kind of firefight the XM25 is designed to win says Brecher and the US Army's own newspaper says IEDs now account for 75 percent of American casualties in Afghanistan. "And unfortunately, the only effect a gee-whiz weapon like the XM25 is likely to have is raising that figure closer to 100 percent." Ghana Hosts Conference on Bushpunk Technology What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from across the African continent together and add resources to the mix? The answer is instead of steampunk technology, you get bushpunk low-fi tech as Ghana plays host to Africa's first Maker Faire, a grassroots innovation conference bringing hardware hackers and art technologists together to create useful and whimsical projects. The Maker Faire in Ghana was practically focused with Africans from across the continent showing inventions like a low-power radio station, a bicycle-powered saw and a simple corn planter. Shamsudeen Napara, from the north of Ghana, showed off the simple but excellent projects he builds in his metal shop like a $10 corn planter based on a pill dispenser helped speed up crop planting, while he also makes an inexpensive roaster for shea nuts - an important cash crop. Bernard Kiwia, a bicycle mechanic from Arusha, Tanzania, has created windmills, water pumps, mobile phone chargers and a pedal-powered hacksaw for the disabled, all from old bike parts. The faire was timed to coincide with the International Development Design Summit normally held at MIT to bring technologists closer to "potential end users of the projects". "What's different about African mechanics and gadgetry is that it's generally made with much fewer, and more basic, materials. Where you might find a story on how to make hi-tech robots at home in Make, its counterpart in Africa might be how to create a bicycle out of wood," says Erik Hersman, who grew up in Kenya and Sudan and runs Afrigadget. "No less ingenuity needed, but far more useful for an African's everyday life." Obamas Give Queen Elizabeth an iPod What did the Obamas give Queen Elizabeth II on Wednesday when they arrived at Buckingham Palace? An Obama aide reported the queen was given an iPod loaded with video and photos of her 2007 trip to the United States, as well as songs and accessories. She also received a rare songbook signed by the composer Richard Rodgers. The gift issue had come up after Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the White House last month. Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship, receiving in return a DVD box set of American movies, igniting a torrent of criticism in the British press. According to news reports, the queen gave the Obamas a silver-framed signed photograph - a gift she gives to all visiting dignitaries. Righthaven Suffers Setbacks In Copyright Lawsuits Wendy Davis reports that Righthaven recently filed papers asking that it be allowed to drop its lawsuit against political site Democratic Underground after earlier suing the group because a visitor to its Web site allegedly posted five sentences of a 50-sentence Las Vegas Review-Journal article titled "Tea Party power fuels Angle." Righthaven says in its papers that it now seeks to withdraw the case against Democratic Underground due to a recent loss in another lawsuit -- a copyright infringement case against a blogger who allegedly lifted eight sentences of a 30-sentence Las Vegas Review-Journal article. US District Court Judge Larry Hicks dismissed Righthaven's lawsuit, ruling that the blogger was protected by fair use principles. Given that ruling, Righthaven is afraid that it could be on the hook for Democratic Underground's legal bills as the copyright statute gives judges the discretion to order the losing side to pay the winner's legal fees -- though judges need not do so. In related news, Righthaven appears to have lost its main booster, publisher Sherman Frederick, in a shake up at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson said the changes announced at the Review-Journal "in no way diminishes the Righthaven business model." The Mnemonic Secrets of Mind-Gaming We've all heard of people who have "photographic memories" but the NY Times magazine has an interesting story about Joshua Foer who trained his brain to became a world-class memory athlete winning the competition last year in speed cards at the USA Memory Championship by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute forty seconds. According to Foer, memory training is a lost art that dates from antiquity. "Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn't so long ago that culture depended on individual memories," writes Foer. "It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics." Foer says that the secret to supermemory is a system of training and discipline that uses a set of mnemonic techniques discovered by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century BC that works by creating "memory palaces" filled with lavish images on the fly, painting in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity. "Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average," concludes Ed Cooke who recently invented a code that allows him to convert every number from 0 to 999,999,999 into a unique image that he can then deposit in a memory palace. "What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly." Secrets of a Mind-Gamer We've all heard of people who claim to have "photographic memories." Now Joshua Foer writes in the NY Times magazine (reg. may be required) that a "skilled memory" can be acquired and proves it by explaining how he trained his brain to became a world-class memory athlete winning first place in the speed cards competition last year at the USA Memory Championship by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute forty seconds. According to Foer, memory training is a lost art that dates from antiquity. "Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn't so long ago that culture depended on individual memories," writes Foer. "It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics." Foer says that the secret to supermemory is a system of training and discipline that works by creating "memory palaces" on the fly filled with lavish images, painting a scene in the mind so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. "Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average," concludes Ed Cooke who recently invented a code that allows him to convert every number from 0 to 999,999,999 into a unique image that he can then deposit in a memory palace. "What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly." Bee Barrier Buzzing Defends Against Elephants We all know how dangerous angry bees can be but now BBC reports that Dr Lucy King has put their stingers to good use with a clever contrivance that won the Unep/CMS Thesis Prize at the Convention on Migratory Species - a beehive barrier whose buzzing scares elephants away from African farmers' fields and villages. Working in Kenya, King showed that more than 90% of elephants will flee when they hear the sounds of buzzing bees as adults can be stung around their eyes or inside their trunks, while calves can potentially be killed by a swarm of stinging bees as they have yet to develop a thick protective skin. King's insight was to incorporate beehives into a fence (video), keeping the elephants away from places where people live and grow food. "Dr King's work spotlights an intelligent solution to an age-old challenge," reads the award, "while providing further confirmation of the importance of bees to people and a really clever way of conserving the world's largest land animal for current and future generations." Measuring Water Usage from the Sky Water management is serious business in the American West, where precipitation is scarce, irrigated agriculture is a major industry, new housing subdivisions spread across arid landscapes and water rights are allocated in a complicated seniority system but until now trying to determine how much water is diverted from rivers and how much is pumped from hundreds of thousands of wells has been an inexact and expensive science. Now using surface temperature readings from government satellites, air temperature and a system of algorithms, officials can measure how much water is "consumed" on a certain piece of land through evapotranspiration. The program, called METRIC for Mapping EvapoTranspiration with High Resolution and Internalized Calibration, allows a more exact definition of how much water is being removed from the system by a given individual or entity. "There's not enough water for all uses, so you use METRIC to see exactly where water is being consumed," said Tony Morse, manager of geospatial technology at the Idaho Department of Water Resources. METRIC uses images from the two Landsat satellites, which orbit Earth every 16 days, making an image of a given field available every eight days unless cloud cover interferes. The data have already been used to help settle a century-long fight between Colorado and Kansas over water in the Arkansas River and a dispute between Idaho irrigation districts. "This tool would allow the state of Wyoming or Colorado to independently verify what's going on in California," said Tony Willardson, executive director of the Western States Water Council. "It probably wouldn't be safe for someone in a Colorado Department of Natural Resources truck to drive around in California to see how much water they're using." Is it Time for a New Theory of Gravitation? Was Newton wrong? Newton's theory of gravitation has had to be modified three times over the past hundred years: when high velocities are involved (through the Special Theory of Relativity), in the proximity of large masses (through the theory of General Relativity), and on sub-atomic scales (through quantum mechanics). Now physicists are pondering if another 'special case' may be in order to explain the behavior of so-called "satellite galaxies". A detailed study of these stellar agglomerates has revealed some astonishing phenomena: most of these satellite galaxies rotate in the same direction around the Milky Way Đ like the planets revolve around the Sun - a phenomenon that can be explained if the satellites were created a long time ago through collisions between younger galaxies. But there is an interesting catch to this crash theory, "theoretical calculations tell us that the satellites created cannot contain any dark matter". This assumption, however, stands in contradiction to another observation. "The stars in the satellites we have observed are moving much faster than predicted by the Gravitational Law. If classical physics holds this can only be attributed to the presence of dark matter", says Professor Manuel Metz. Or one must assume that some basic fundamental principles of physics have hitherto been incorrectly understood. "The only solution is to reject Newton's theory," says Metz. "If we live in a Universe where a modified law of gravitation applies, then our observations would be explainable without dark matter." Warren Buffett Says Stop Coddling the Super-Rich Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway and ranked as the third wealthiest person in the world, writes in the NY Times that managers who earn billions from our daily labors are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate along with "other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species." Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and Buffet's percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. "According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends, writes Buffett. "I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone - not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 - shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain." Buffett says that for those making more than $1 million - there were 236,883 such households in 2009 - I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice. " If Search is Google's Castle, Android is the Moat Warren Buffet once said that the best businesses were economic castles protected by unbreachable moats. Now Erick Schonfeld writes that if Search is Google's economic castle, Android is a moat, Chrome browser is a moat, and Google Apps is a moat - all free products, subsidized by search profits, intended to protect the economic castle that is search. "Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not "products" in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own "economic castles," says Benchmark Capital VC Bill Gurley. "They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free)." So don't measure the success of Google's new businesses by how much revenue or profit they generate directly but measure it by how much they shore up Google's core search business. "Google is [ ] scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it." Microcar Gets 235 MPG Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets 235 mpg. Called the One-Liter because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers, the body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight and the One-Liter makes extensive use of magnesium, titanium and aluminum so the entire vehicle weighs in at 660 pounds. Aerodynamics plays a big role in its fuel economy so the car is long and low, coming in at 11.4 feet long, 4.1 feet wide and 3.3 feet tall with a coefficient of drag of 0.16, a little more than half that of an average car. The One-Liter could have a sticker price of anywhere from $31,750 to $47,622 and VW plans to build a limited number in 2010. Technology Transforms the Peace Corps Experience VOA reports that up until five years ago many Peace Corps volunteers served in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in places where the only contact with the outside world were letters that would take weeks, or months, to arrive, so volunteers lost track of friends and family back in the United States and had no choice but to integrate into the community. "I was placed somewhere in the middle part of the country," says Gordy Mengel who served as a volunteer in an isolated community in what was then called Zaire, now Congo. "And in the small community where I lived there was no post office, so getting letters out, which was basically the only means of communication, was very challenging." But now computers, cells phones and the Internet have changed the way Peace Corps volunteers do their work and stay in touch. "I can't imagine having been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 70s or the 80s or even the early 90s," says Sonia Morhange who serves in Rwanda. "I'm just so used to everyone having a cell phone that works internationally. I'm very, very lucky in the fact that where I live I have wireless internet and that makes it a lot easier." Still Peace Corps staff say the changes are a mixed blessing. If a volunteer is "having a really bad day--and we've all had them as Peace Corps volunteers - they call home, which sometimes is the worst thing they can do," says former Peace Corps director Ron Tschetter. "Volunteers need to learn to work out their problems within their communities." Debt Reduction Super Committee Fails to Agree VOA reports that the latest effort to cut the US government's debt apparently has ended in failure as leaders of the special 12-member debt reduction committee plan to announce that they failed in their mandate from lawmakers to trim the federal debt by $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Democrats and Republicans blame each other for the collapse of the effort. "Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms," said Republican Senator Jon Kyl. "They weren't going to do anything without raising taxes." Democratic Senator Patty Murray, one of the committee's co-chairs, says that the Republicans' position on taxes was the sticking point. "The wealthiest Americans, who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven't seen Republicans willing to cross yet," Now in the absence of an agreement, $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts to domestic and defense programs are set to take effect starting in January 2013 and the lack of a deal will deprive President Barack Obama of a vehicle for extending a payroll tax cut and insurance benefits for unemployed Americans, which expire at the end of the year. Himalayan Glacier Disaster Claims Melt Away VOA News reports that leaders of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have apologized for making a "poorly substantiated" claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 as scientists who identified the mistake say the IPCC report relied on news accounts that appear to misquote a scientific paper that estimated the glaciers could disappear by 2350, not 2035. Jeffrey Kargel, an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona who helped expose the IPCC's errors, said the botched projections were extremely embarrassing and damaging. "The damage was that IPCC had, or I think still has, such a stellar reputation that people view it as an authority -- as indeed they should -- and so they see a bullet that says Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and they take that as a fact," says Kargel, one of four scientists who addressed the issue in a letter that will be published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science. Experts who follow climate science and policy say they believe the IPCC should re-examine how it vets information when compiling its reports. "These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," write the researchers. Gettysburg Recreated from Lee's Point of View Visitors to Gettysburg can climb to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary, where Gen. Robert E. Lee stationed himself on July 2, the second day of fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg; or stand on Seminary Ridge, where the next day Lee watched from behind the Confederate lines as thousands of his men advanced across the open farmland to their deaths in the notorious Pickett's Charge. But they won't see what the general saw because the intervening years have altered the topography. Over the decades a quarry, a reservoir, different plants and trees have been added, and elevations have changed as a result of mechanical plowing and erosion. Now Patricia Cohen writes that a new generation of digital maps allows historians to recreate a vanished landscape making it possible to see what Lee could actually see when he issued a series of fateful orders that turned the tide against the Confederate Army nearly 150 years ago in three blood-soaked days in July 1863. The new academic field known as spatial humanities shows that nineteenth-century military leaders relied primarily on their own eyes, and small differences in elevation were strategically important. "Lee probably could not have possibly seen the massive federal forces building up on the eastern side of the battlefield on Day 2 during the famous attack on Little Round Top," says geographer Anne Kelly Knowles. "He had to make decisions with really inadequate information." Social Gaming is Eclipsing PC and Console Games Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. For instance, Farmville is today the most popular game on Facebook with close to 55 million people playing it every month. Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women who now outnumber men on the internet says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win. "Unlike men who like to first invest lots of money in a game console and then exploit it, women are more casual and like to do things on a daily basis, like the way they shop for instance," says Kejriwal. "Hence, these game activities also gel with their life psychographic." Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, predicts that someone is going to create a social game in short order that pulls in a billion dollars a year and adds that gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. "Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results," says de Halleux. "It's about ÔLook how I run my farm, look how smart and expressive I am'." The New Reality of Gaming Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff and devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. "Reality it would seem is the new escapism." Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women, says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win, an online gaming company. The tipping point in the US came in 2008 when women outnumbered men on the Internet. Combined with millions of parents and grandparents who're new to the Internet, the traditional face of the gamer is changing from that of a 25-year-old male to a band stretching from 16 to 40 years comprising men and women in almost equal numbers, says Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, who predicts that someone is going to create a social game very shortly that pulls in a billion dollars a year. Gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. "Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results," says de Halleux. "It's about ÔLook how I run my farm, look how smart and expressive I am'." Grandma's on the Computer Screen this Thanksgiving Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use and two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters - the nursery school set and their grandparents. According to the AARP, nearly half of American grandparents live more than 200 miles from at least one of their grandchildren and Prof. Merril Silverstein has found that about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that. "We would be strangers to them if we didn't have the Web cam," said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who will be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner today with her grandchildren in Jersey City. Internet companies are also promoting "video chat" as an enhancement to standard instant-messaging and Internet phone services with Google, for example, introducing video capability in its popular Gmail Web-based e-mail software this month. Still, some veterans of the technology fear that the video cam has started to substitute, rather than supplement, actual time together. "She still comes," says Jennifer Ray of her mother, Diane Heyman, who lives in Arizona. "But not nearly as often." Heyman, 49, admitted: "It's probably true. You feel like you're actually seeing them and interacting with them, so it eases that longing." Biden Promises 'Right Person' as Copyright Czar Vice President Joe Biden lauded Hollywood at a gala dinner in Washington, assailed movie piracy, and promised film executives that the Obama administration would pick "the right person" as its copyright czar. Biden warned of the harms of piracy at the private event organized by the Motion Picture Association of America in the sumptuous, newly renovated Great Hall of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. "It's pure theft, stolen from the artists and quite frankly from the American people as consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income," Biden said, according to a White House pool report. Biden addressed President Obama's forthcoming decision about who will be named the intellectual-property enforcement coordinator, better known as the copyright czar. Under a law approved by the U.S. Congress last October, Obama is required to appoint someone to coordinate the administration's IP enforcement efforts and prepare annual reports. Copyright industry lobbyists sent a letter to the president asking him to pick someone sympathetic to their concerns, while groups that would curb copyright law sent their own letter (pdf) urging the opposite approach. We "will find the right person for intellectual property czar," Biden said. Visual Hallucinations Are Normal Grief Reaction Vaughn Bell has written an interesting essay on Scientific American about grief hallucinations, a normal reaction to bereavement that is rarely discussed although researchers now know that hallucinations are more likely during times of stress and mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. A study by Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. It's not unusual for people who have lost a partner to clearly see or hear the person about the house, and sometimes even converse with them at length. "Despite the fact that hallucinations are one of the most common reactions to loss, they have barely been investigated and we know little more about them. Like sorrow itself, we seem a little uncomfortable with it, unwilling to broach the subject," writes Bell. "We often fall back on the cultural catch all of the "ghost" while the reality is, in many ways, more profound." Doctor Performs Amputation by Text Message Vascular surgeon David Nott performed a life-saving amputation on a boy in DR Congo following instructions sent my text message from a colleague in London. The boy's left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous, there were just 6in (15cm) of the boy's arm remaining, much of the surrounding muscle had died and there was little skin to fold over the wound. "He had about two or three days to live when I saw him," Nott said. Nott, volunteering in with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation requiring removal of the collar bone and shoulder blade and contacted Professor Meirion Thomas at London's Royal Marsden Hospital, who had performed the operation before. "I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it," Nott said. The operation is only performed about 10 times a year in the UK and requires the back-up of an intensive-care unit because patients usually lose a lot of blood during the procedure. Nott had just one pint of blood and an elementary operating theatre, but the operation was a success and the teenager made a full recovery. "I don't think that someone that wasn't a vascular surgeon would have been able to deal with the large blood vessels involved," said Nott. "That is why I volunteer myself so often, I love being able to save someone's life." Doctor Who to Become Hollywood Feature Film Variety reports that David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, is teaming up with the BBC to turn its iconic sci-fi TV series "Doctor Who" into a Hollywood franchise. "We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," says Yates. "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena." But not everyone is enamored with the idea of Doctor Who on the big screen. "I fear that high production values and the inevitable sexualisation of the lead characters that a Hollywood treatment brings will destroy the show," writes Andrew M. Brown in the Telegraph. "The ecosystem of a great television programme is a delicate thing. Please, Hollywood, don't spoil Doctor Who." Getting Human Hands Back into Digital Design Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common as products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen and typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made but G. Pascal Zachary has an interesting essay in the NY Times highlighting a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands. "A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation," says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. "You can't simulate everything." Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention and making refinements with your own hands - rather than automatically, as often happens with a computer - means "you have to be extremely self-critical," says Richard.Sennett, whose book "The Craftsman" examines the importance of skilled manual labor. Even in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. "You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn't exist," says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab. Online Call to Shoot President Ruled Free Speech USA Today reports that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the conviction of a man who threatened to shoot President Obama, saying his Internet message board comments amounted to free speech and ruled that prosecutors "failed to present sufficient evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt" that the man "had the subjective intent to threaten a presidential candidate." Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against the presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 am on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama's impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time. The observation that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon" and a call to "shoot the [racist slur]" weren't violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn't criminalize "predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president," said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt. "On a practical level, it's a very thin line between Bagdasarian's free speech and the guy who doesn't just spew threats online but actually carries them out," writes journalist Paul Whitefield. "It's remarkable how inconvenient the law can be at times, isn't it?" Senators to Facebook: Quit Sharing Users' Info USA Today reports that Senators Al Franken (D-Minn.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), have joined New York Senator Chuck Schumer in asking the Federal Trade Commission to take a look at Facebook's controversial new information sharing policies, arguing that the massively popular social network overstepped its bounds when it began sharing user data with other websites. "We've asked the FTC to promulgate some rules," says Schumer. "You know a violation when you see one and this is one of those." Schumer said he learned about the new rules from his daughter, who is in law school but added that he's noticed no difference on his own Facebook page, which, he assured reporters, "is very boring." "I can attest to that," deadpanned Franken, who made his living as a comedian before entering the Senate and whose facebook page outnumbers Schumer's in followers ten to one. Cisco Launches its First Consumer Router USA Today reports that Cisco is releasing its first consumer router, the Valet, that promises to take the hassle out of setup and automatically puts a home wireless network together. To set up the Valet, a USB dongle is inserted in the USB slot on the computer. Passwords and Web keys are automatically set via Cisco's software. "Normally, if you were going to install a secure wireless network, you'd have to create a password for the router, change the name of the router and create a password for the wireless part of it," says IDC analyst Jonathan Gaw. "Now that's all preset in the key. You don't have to type in anything. ... This is a significant step." Research firm IDC says that only a third of U.S. homes have a home network leaving plenty of room for growth and Jonathan Kaplan, head of Cisco consumer products, says consumers' appetite for a new generation of TVs, Blu-ray players and even clock radios that can connect wirelessly to the Internet will help bring him new customers. "Eighty percent of routers are sold to experts, and the 20% of the mainstream who buy them end up returning them because they're just too hard to use and set up." To get the word out about the Valet, Cisco is launching an extensive national advertising campaign beginning this week. "We will spend more to market the Valet than the entire category has in five years," says Simon Fleming-Wood, senior director of marketing. "Tens of millions of dollars. This will be the first mass-market networking product." Acupuncture May Trigger Natural Painkiller US News and World Reports reports that the needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering a natural painkilling chemical called adenosine, and that acupuncture's effectiveness can be enhanced by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug -- deoxycoformycin -- that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual. Working exclusively with mice, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group with paw discomfort. The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain. By contrast, mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine function gained no benefit from the treatment. However many remain skeptical of acupuncture claims. Ed Tong writes in Discover Magazine that previous clinical trials have used sophisticated methods to measure the benefits of acupuncture, including "sham needles", where the needle's point retracts back into the shaft like the blade of a movie knife to determine if the benefits of acupuncture are really only due to the placebo effect. "Last year, one such trial (which was widely misreported) found that acupuncture does help to relieve chronic back pain and outperformed "usual care". However, it didn't matter whether the needles actually pierce the skin, because sham needles were just as effective," writes Tong. "Nor did it matter where the needles were placed, contrary to what acupuncturists would have us believe." NGA Satellite Photos used to Fight Drug Smugglers US News and World Reports reports that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a part of the Department of Defense, is using satellites to track the activities of drug cartels operating along the U.S.-Mexican border and supplying photos to pinpoint Mexican narcotics operations and anticipate smuggling attempts into the United States. During a Phoenix conference on border security last week, Scott Zikmanis said his agency already has supplied some data to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a federal clearinghouse for the investigation of drug cartels. Any border-security surveillance will be done over Mexico, not the United States says Zikmanis because a federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act, strictly limits US military operations on American soil unless such operations are authorized by Congress and the use of satellite imagery for border security has been limited because of concerns about a military agency assisting domestic law enforcement. Zikmanis said he has worked for a federal drug-interdiction agency in Florida and is eager to help with border security. "I've got pictures of me (from Florida) sitting on a half-million dollars of cocaine. I love those pictures. I want more of them." Civil rights attorneys question the use of satellite technology in law enforcement. "We are in the midst of a really dangerous time in terms of technology," said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The idea that such a powerful tool might be turned on U.S. citizens is really troubling." Devil Dogs use Solar Power in Afghanistan US Marines, long known as innovators, are using cutting-edge energy technology that promises to make them leaner, meaner and a whole lot greener as the NY Times reports that in Afghanistan, with enemy fighters increasingly attacking American fuel supply convoys crossing the Khyber Pass from Pakistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels. "Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan," says Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary, "and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people." The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, bringing portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment replacing diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment. The new goal of the Devil Dogs is to make the more peripheral sites sustain themselves with the kind of renewable technology carried by Company I, since solar electricity can be generated right on the battlefield. The renewable technology that will power Company I costs about $50,000 to $70,000; a single diesel generator costs several thousand dollars. But when it costs hundreds of dollars to get each gallon of traditional fuel to base camps in Afghanistan, the investment is quickly defrayed. "It's going to make Marines more lethal because they will be able to move from one place to the other without having to wait for a logistics convoy to follow them around on the battlefield," says Capt. Adorjan Ferenczy, an engineer officer at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. The Catcher's Sequel Goes Awry US District Court Judge Deborah Batts issued a preliminary injunction this week barring the US publication and sale of a parody of J. D. Salinger's famous 1951 coming of age novel "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" by Swedish author Frederik Colting. Colting's lawyer had argued at a hearing that, like a previous parody of "Gone with the Wind" called "The Wind Done Gone" his client's work was covered by fair use provisions because it is a critical parody of Salinger's iconic novel and was therefore tranformative, rather than derivative of the original work by the reclusive author. During the hearing Judge Batts expressed skepticism toward that argument and while acknowledging that Colting's book is mildly tranformative of the original work--mainly because it includes Salinger himself as a character bent on killing off the septuagenarian Holden Caulfield. But Caulfield may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists. While still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth, teachers say young readers today don't like Holden as much as they used to and what once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as "weird," "whiny" and "immature." In the meantime Colting's attorney said he plans to seek an expedited appeal of the ruling with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit so the book, already published in the UK can be published in the United States.. "Members of the public are deprived of the chance to read the book and decide for themselves whether it adds to their understanding of Salinger and his work." New Programming Language Weaves Security Into Code Until now, computer security has been reactive. "Our defenses improve only after they have been successfully penetrated," says security expert Fred Schneider. But now Dr. Dobbs reports that researchers at Cornell are developing a programming platform called "Fabric," an extension to the Java language, that builds security into a program as it is written. Fabric is designed to create secure systems for distributed computing, where many interconnected nodes - not all of them necessarily trustworthy - are involved, as in systems that move money around or maintain medical records. Everything in Fabric is an "object" labeled with a set of policies on how and by whom data can be accessed and what operations can be performed on it. Even blocks of program code have built-in policies about when and where they can be run. The compiler that turns the programmer's code into an executable program enforces the security policies and will not allow the programmer to write insecure code (PDF). While your medical record, for example, could be seen entirely by your doctor, your physical therapist might be able to see only the doctor's prescription for your therapy, and your insurance company could see only the charges. "It's a paradigm shift," says Andrew Myers. "By making security policies part of the process of building software, we can make it much easier to build secure systems." The initial release of Fabric is now available at the Cornell website. Couch Potato Gene Identified in Fruit Flies University of Pennsylvania biologists have discovered a mutation in fruit flies aptly named the "couch potato" gene that allows them to simply chill out - entering a mild state of quasi-hibernation known as diapause, when winter arrives. "It's not like they're bears sleeping in a cave," says Paul Schmidt. "They just look like they're a little bit more sluggish." The couch potato gene, first discovered in the early 1990s, got its nickname because flies with mutations in the gene became really sluggish and behaved abnormally. Little is known about the underlying evolutionary genetic architecture but in diapause, the slacking off is far less severe, the flies' bodily functions slow down, and they are better able to tolerate stress. The fruit fly gene may have implications for human health, as it can help biologists study the function of the nervous system and diseases such as epilepsy refuring a recent statement by a political candidate that fruit fly research has "little or nothing to do with the public good." Judge Blocks Florida's Welfare Drug-Test Law U.S. District Court Judge Mary Scriven issued a temporary injunction blocking a controversial Florida law requiring all welfare applicants to be drug-tested ruling that based on the evidence, "there is a substantial likelihood" that Florida's law could be found unconstitutional. Florida Gov. Rick Scott has championed the enforcement of the law's "suspicionless drug testing" of adults seeking federal welfare, saying it provides "personal accountability," adding that it was "unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction." Navy veteran Luis Lebron, an unemployed adult college student who cares for a 4-year-old son and disabled mother, was denied temporary cash assistance because he refused to be drug tested contending that the law violates his rights and adds he has never used illegal drugs. The ACLU says the state's own study found that of the 2,000 people who took the state drug test, only a small percentage tested positive. "It shows that a little bit more than 2% of the welfare applicants tested positive for drugs where it's about 8?% in the general public," says Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. "This is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, that you can't condition getting some benefit from the government by surrendering your constitutional rights." World's Largest Solar Plants Planned in California Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California covering 12.5 square miles that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. "If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big," said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. Optisolar will employ 550 MW of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project while SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plans Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent by following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. "These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy," said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E. New iPhone Apps Help Drivers Beat Speed Traps Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap. Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data with users reporting camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers via the iPhone or their web-based application creating the ultimate speed trap repository available to you when you need it most Đ while you're driving. To thwart false alarms and eliminate inaccuracies, Trapster enlists its community of nearly 200,000 members to rank speed traps on their accuracy. NMobile founder Shannon Atkinson declined to provide detailed data, though he did estimate that "well over 1,000" users had downloaded the $4.99 application since it became available last week. While NMobile is now only available for the iPhone, the company hopes to expand to Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian. The company insists they've received only positive feedback from law enforcement officials and police officers regarding their products. "If the application gets people to slow down, I think it's generally considered to be a good thing," said Atkinson. Neuroscientists Identify Brain's Centers of Wisdom Two geriatric psychiatrists at the University of California have analyzed decades of research and found that wisdom is made up of a collection of attributes: good of the group, pragmatism, emotional balance, self-understanding, tolerance and the ability to deal with ambiguity. Now they have identified that wisdom can be found in the brain's primitive limbic system as well as its more evolutionarily advanced prefrontal cortex and may be accounted for by a surprisingly small number of brain regions: a putative wisdom network. "What was striking was that some regions appeared time and again," says Dilip Jeste. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is involved in control of emotions and processing ambiguity), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which is involved in empathy, morality, self-reflection and decision-making), the anterior cingulate (which is important to detecting conflict) and the limbic striatum (part of the brain's reward system). As Jeste and his colleague Thomas Meeks continue developing their model of wisdom in the brain, they plan to study the distribution of wisdom in the general population and examine brain-damaged individuals to confirm the regions involved. Jeste and Meeks concede that some might call their conclusions reductionistic because they based their "map" not on the idea that wisdom is a single trait, but a collection of attributes but add that the tale of Phineas Gage, a railway worker whose allegedly wise attributes such as amiability and good judgment were said to vanish after a spike penetrated his left frontal lobe - "makes you think it's not a cultural phenomenon but biologically consistent." US. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels Tthe NY Times reports that it can cost hundreds of dollars to get each gallon of traditional fuel to forward base camps in Afghanistan, so with enemy fighters increasingly attacking American fuel supply convoys crossing the Khyber Pass from Pakistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels. "Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan," says Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary, "and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people." The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, bringing portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment replacing diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment. The new goal of the Marines is to make the more peripheral sites sustain themselves with the kind of renewable technology carried by Company I, since solar electricity can be generated right on the battlefield. "It's going to make Marines more lethal because they will be able to move from one place to the other without having to wait for a logistics convoy to follow them around on the battlefield," says Capt. Adorjan Ferenczy, an engineer officer at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. ATT is Paying the Cost of its Own Success Tricia Duryee writes on PaidContent that for all its well-documented network and service problems, AT&T actually deserves a debt of gratitude from all mobile phone users, not just its own subscribers for completely changing the way the wireless industry does business in the US. If you can remember back more than two years ago, Apple was looking for a partner that would not only subsidize an expensive piece of hardware, but hand over complete control of the device - something unheard of in those days. "The iPhone changed all that, and today all consumers are benefiting, not just AT&T subscribers.," writes Duryee adding that before ATT&T and Apple teamed up "the carrier owned and dominated the experience. If you wanted to sell mobile games or ringtones, you did it through the carrier, and after each sale, you gave a sizable chunk of the revenues back to the carrier." But why is AT&T's network so overwhelmed? Duryee says it's because they are a victim of their own success because no one "knew back then how phenomenally successful the iPhone would be." Duryee says if it wasn't for AT&T and Apple we would still be using our Razr and downloading ringtones and StarTrek wallpaper "so beat up on AT&T all you want, it probably isn't fair that you are spending $100 a month for lousy service," writes Duryee. "But remember that you might not have all the advanced web-surfing capabilities and popular apps-to the extent we do today-if AT&T hadn't plunged into the brave new world of the internet." Package Size Linked to Overeating Treats offered in small package sizes presumably help consumers reduce portion sizes yet new research is finding that people actually consume more high-calorie snacks when they are in small packages than large ones because large packages triggered concern of overeating and conscious efforts to avoid doing so, while small packages were perceived as innocent pleasures, leaving the consumers unaware that they were overindulging. "The increasing availability of single-serve and multi-packs may not serve consumers in the long-run, but - because they are considered to be innocent pleasures - may turn out to be sneaky small sins," write researchers Rita Coelho do Vale, Rik Pieters, and Marcel Zeelenberg. Participants in the study watched episodes of Friends interspersed with commercials believing they were there to evaluate the ads but researchers were really monitoring their consumption of potato chips. Chips were available to participants in large packages or small ones. The study found that consumption was lowest when dieting concerns were activated and package size was large. People were less likely to open large packages, and participants deliberated longer before consuming from the larger packages. Military Uses Virtual Iraq to Treat PTSD Traditionally the best treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] - being raped, narrowly escaping the collapse of the Twin Towers, or witnessing a buddy die on the battlefield - is to have the person relive the trauma using his or her imagination. Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it. Now Clinical Psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo has developed a program that has had great success in treating returning troops from Iraq. A soldier with PTSD recounts what happened, and a therapist seated before a computer then creates an environment in the program Virtual Iraq that captures the essential elements of the episode. By donning special goggles, the soldier can see a reenactment and while the simulation starts off relatively tame over the course of several weeks, the therapist monitors the patient's response and more elements of the episode are introduced until the individual can finally go through an intensely vivid recreation of it without being overpowered by terror. Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam. HP TouchPad To Be Liquidated at Fire Sale Prices Tony Bradley writes that news is spreading quickly online that HP is going to clear out its vast TouchPad inventory by dropping the price to an offer you can't refuse. Rumor has it that beginning Saturday the 16Gb TouchPad will be $99, and the 32Gb TouchPad will be a measly $149. "It is actually a fairly capable tablet. It's just not an iPad 2," writes Bradley. "For $500 it was a joke. For $300 it was still a shady deal. For $99 it's a steal." HP has learned the hard way, and quickly pulled the plug on its tablet proving that HP never had a solid tablet or mobile strategy and that it was really just looking for an excuse to get out. "The reality is that my Best Buy is swimming in unsold HP TouchPad inventory," adds Bradley. "I went out tonight and picked mine up at the regular $400 price to beat the rush. Situations like this are why they invented price matching. I can just go back with my receipt once the fire sale starts and get the price adjusted and the difference refunded." Why Nobody Wants You on OKCupid Tons of folks are hooking up with future life partners (or dates or flings or accommodating couples) via the Web nowadays - people who aren't completely awkward, that is. And social awkwardness has the most opportunity to shine in your very first message to a potential sweetheart write Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich at CNN. Bartz and Ehrlich enumerate and humorously describe the seven types of message senders whose opener will get them deleted from a digital dater's heart faster than a gamer can double click his mouse: the generalizer, the autobiographer, the "eccentric," the creeper, the gusher, and the wordless wonder. Our favorite: the generalizer whose typical first message may be "hey, wuts up?" Why does no one want the generalizer? "You're probably stupid. Or possibly illiterate," write Bartz and Ehrilich. According to OKTrends, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs in a first message. "Our negative correlation list is a fool's lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang." Other tips from OKTrends' analysis of successful keywords and phrases from over 500,000 first contacts on OKCupid: Avoid physical compliments, bring up specific interests, and if you're a guy, be self-effacing. Pope Benedict Says Facebooking Not A Sin Tom's Guide reports that the Pope has officially blessed the use of Internet communication tools, especially social networks, but warned about risks. "In the search for sharing, for 'friends', there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself," stated Pope Benedict XVI in his statement of "Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age" reminding Christians not to forget the interaction with others in the real world: "It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives." The Pope reminded followers that the Vatican is using the new tools as well adding that he would like to "invite Christians, confidently and with an informed and responsible creativity, to join the network of relationships which the digital era has made possible." Verizon Droid Tethering Comes at a Hefty Price Tom Bradley reports in PC World that the new Motorola Droid smartphone will cost users $199.99 with a 2-year contract, with an additional $30 per month for the mandatory 'unlimited' data plan that has a monthly cap of 5Gb. Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5 Gb limit on the unlimited data plan. Verizon has confirmed that tethering will cost another $30 per month for an additional unlimited data plan that is also limited to 5Gb. If you want tethering you will pay $60 above and beyond the monthly contract for service for an 'unlimited' 10Gb of data per month and if you plan on connecting with an Microsoft Exchange email account you have to pay another $15 a month. "Verizon seems to be doing everything it can to make the Droid as unappealing as possible by nickel and diming customers so that actually using it is not cost-effective," writes Bradley. "After all of the hype around Verizon's marketing efforts, and generally favorable reviews of the Motorola Droid, users that rush out to get the new device may be in for a shock." Droid users will have to wait until sometime in 2010 for tethering. "That service is on our schedule for next year," says Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney. The delay is due to the fact "the service has to be tested on the phone so until we know it works, we don't offer the service. It is not uncommon for us to introduce the phone and continue to test the service and offer it later." DARPA to Fund Cognitive Computer Today's computers, based on the algorithmic-computational paradigm, are less efficient than biological systems by a factor of one million to one billion in complex, real-world environments, so DARPA is funding a project to build a "cognitive computer" that can mimic the brain to be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making and image recognition. The project will have an ultimate goal of creating a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain but "even a computer with the ability of a rat brain would be a success," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration. The key to the problem is not the neurons but the synapses, the electrical-chemical-electrical connections between those neurons that form, break, and are strengthened or weakened depending on the signals that pass through them. "The brain is much less a neural network than a synaptic network," Modha says. Another fundamental shift in the project is to put the problem-solving before the problem making the potential applications for such devices practically limitless. "The issue with neural networks and artificial intelligence is that they seek to engineer limited cognitive functionalities one at a time. They start with an objective and devise an algorithm to achieve it," says Dr Modha. "We are attempting a 180 degree shift in perspective: seeking an algorithm first, problems second." Let's Rebuild the Berlin Wall Today on the the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest and grimmest construction projects in history - the building of the Berlin Wall - AFP reports that there is a move to put parts of the wall back up, "as accurately as possible, with barbed wire, watch towers, and spring guns, so the brutality of the system is evident," says Berlin's former Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. "It was wrong to take all those pieces of Berlin Wall, paint them and send them off into the world as souvenirs of a peaceful revolution." Meanwhile some historians are making a reappraisal that the toppling of the wall in 1989 had little to do with Reagan, and even less to do with bellicose confrontation arguing that the wall created the stability between the superpowers that was the precondition for the peaceful demise of communism several decades later. "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war," said President Kennedy when construction began in 1961. The wall forced West Germans to face reality: "The U.S. wasn't going to war over the Berlin Wall; East Germany wasn't going away; and trying to isolate it would only strengthen the hand of communist hard-liners," writes Jacob Heilbrunn. "The shrewder policy was to encourage as much contact as possible with the West." Editing Wikipedia Helps Professor Win Tenure To win tenure, junior professors spend years building a portfolio that demonstrates teaching, research, and service to the discipline, then face a committee who evaluates the portfolio to determine whether the professor gets a lifetime position or is asked to leave. Now Lianna Davis writes in Watching the Watchers that Michel Aaij has won tenure in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama in part because of the more than 60,000 edits, a couple of Good Articles, a Featured List, and almost 150 "Did You Knows" he's written for Wikipedia. "I've written articles in many areas, and in many cases I could show my colleagues what I had done in their field," says Aaij. "I'd like to think that by now most of them have a favorable opinion of Wikipedia." Aaij felt that his contributions to Wikipedia merited mention in his tenure portfolio and a few weeks before the portfolio was due, two of his colleagues suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under "research" as well as well as "service." "It took a bit of shuffling and organizing, but in the end I had a meaty section on Wikipedia and my work there under research, based on the claim that Did You Knows, Good Articles, and Featured Articles are all scrutinized more or less during a peer-review process." Scientists Track Viruses Using Quantum Dots To infect a cell, viruses have to subvert the cell's proteins to survive and replicate inside but working out exactly what a virus is doing is difficult because they are so small. Now virologists have a new weapon in the war against viruses Đ a way to tag and track individual viruses with quantum dots. Pin Wang and colleagues at the University of Southern California use GFP, a fluorescent protein that is a kind of nanoscale crystal just a few nanometres in diameter whose small size makes it subject to quantum effects that make it shine very brightly for hours after being hit with laser light. Wang says that quantum dots could be used to track a much wider range of viruses. "We believe that many kinds of enveloped viruses could be labelled by our method," Wang says. While some viruses can be labelled using dye molecules, they are quickly bleached by the powerful light of microscopes. but quantum dots retain their brightness for several hours. "It unquestionably represents a significant result in terms of using quantum dots as virus markers," says Maxime Dahan at the Ecole Normale SupŽrieure in Paris. "It holds great promise to unravel the infection pathway in a detailed manner." Dreyfuss Gives Dramatic Reading of iTunes EULA To get themselves into the proper mood for a discussion of end user license agreements and terms of service, the Reporters' Roundtable asked master thespian and Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss to do a dramatic reading of the Apple EULA. Some say the results are sidesplittingly funny. Our personal favorite is "Effective Until." Time's Person of the Year is 'The Protester' Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on 'The Today Show' that "The Protester" is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. "For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century." The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the "Arab Spring." In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as "Machine of the Year" and Earth as "Planet of the Year," proving "that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person," writes Dashiell Bennett. "By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one." Time Warner to Spin Off AOL Time Warner is inching closer to untangling one of the worst mergers in American corporate history that began with the merger of Time Warner with America Online, a deal that has resulted in the evaporation of more than $100 billion of shareholder value. "Although the company's board of directors has not made any decision, the company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner's stockholders, in one or a series of transactions," Time Warner said in the filing. Tech industry analysts have speculated for years that Time Warner would spin off AOL; the two companies merged in 2001 with the idea that AOL's strengths as a new media company could benefit an old media company like Time Warner, and vice versa. But few synergies ever arose from the marriage and even AOL founder Steve Case, who is no longer with the company, has said that he believes the two companies should be separated. Who Stole 40 ton Bridge? Metal Theft on the Rise Time Magazine reports that police in North Beaver Township, Pa are searching for a missing steel bridge weighing 40-tons with an estimated value of $100,000. The most likely scenario is that the thieves used a blowtorch to cut apart the bridge and haul it away. "I thought that with the rain it got washed away," says New Castle Development spokesman Gary Bruce. The theft highlights the growing crime of metal theft caused by rapid industrialization in Asia that has inflated the international demand for scrap metals. Aluminum guardrails. Brass fittings. Bronze plaques. Aluminum siding. Sprinkler fittings. Catalytic converters on church vans. Bronze urns. Storm drain grates. Street signs. Copper downspouts. The US is the No. 1 exporter of scrap metal, and because of increasing demand, its annual exportation to developing nations tripled from 6 million to 18 million tons between 2002 and 2007. "Because of the massive amount of construction that's happening, there's a need for building supplies. Meanwhile the U.S. has been industrialized for quite some time, which allows our trash to become their gold, so to speak," says Brandon Kooi, a professor of criminal justice at Aurora University in Chicago. Scott Berinato believes frequent media reports of metal thefts also have contributed to the rise. "Thieves have caught on: There's metal everywhere and much of it is, understandably, unguarded," writes Berinato. "You don't notice how much metal there is for the taking until it starts getting taken." For Sale: Aircraft Carrier, One Only, Lightly Used Time Magazine reports that just in time for the holidays, the British Navy has put the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible up for sale on an eBay-like website. The proud 690-foot warship sailed Her Majesty's seas from 1980 to 2005, and took part in the Falklands, Balkans and Iraq campaigns. A crew of more than 1,000 manned the ship as she steamed at speeds topping out at 28 knots, thanks to its four Rolls-Royce turbine engines. The ship underwent a major refit in 2004 but was decommissioned in 2005 with the proviso that she could be "reactivated" at 18 months notice if a crisis beckoned but over the years her engines, pumps and gear boxes were cannibalized for use in other ships. Of her total weight of 17,0000 tons, 10,000 is composed of metal which makes her attractive on the scrap market. If interested go to the like auction web site and put her to your "wish list," or add her to your "cart." Interestingly enough, the Australian government had originally planned to purchase the ship in 1982 but the Falklands war intervened and in July 1982 the British Ministry of Defence announced that it had withdrawn its offer to sell Invincible and that it would maintain a three-carrier force. Kids with High IQs More Likely to Take Drugs Time Magazine reports that based on the 1970 British Cohort Study, a large ongoing population based study of just under 8000 people, which looks at lifetime drug use, socioeconomic factors, and educational attainment, people with high IQs are more likely to smoke marijuana and take other illegal drugs, compared with those who score lower on intelligence tests. Men with the highest IQs were nearly 50% more likely to have taken amphetamines and 65% more likely to have taken ecstasy and the results held even when researchers controlled for factors like socioeconomic status and psychological distress, which are also correlated with rates of drug use. "It's counterintuitive," says lead author James White. "It's not what we thought we would find." So why might smarter kids be more likely to try drugs? "People with high IQs are more likely to score high on personality scales of openness to experience," says White. "They may be more willing to experiment and seek out novel experiences." The high IQ group also isn't likely to see occasional drug use as particularly harmful, says White, both because there is little data to suggest great risk of harm from such use and because evidence of harm is rare among their peers. "With smoking, the evidence [about its dangers] is overwhelming," says White, "whereas when you look at things like cannabis use, since they are more likely to associate with people who are similar to them, they are likely to see that smoking cannabis relatively infrequently doesn't have huge impact." More Schools Go to 4 Day Week to Cut Costs Time Magazine reports that as schools return to session in South Dakota, more than one-fourth of students in the state will only be in class from Monday through Thursday as budget constraints lead school districts to hack off a day from the school week. Larry Johnke, superintendant of the Irene-Wakonda school district, says the change will save his schools more than $50,000 per year and in order to make up for the missing day, schools will add 30 minutes to each of the other four days and shorten the daily lunch break. "In this financial crisis, we wanted to maintain our core content and vocational program, so we were forced to do this," says Johnke. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance but many of the 120 districts that have the shortened schedule nationwide say they've seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance while others say that not only did they not save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren't in class enough and didn't have enough contact with teachers. "Teachers tell me they are much more focused because they've had time to prepare. They don't have kids sleeping in class on Tuesday," says LaKeisha Johnson, a parent in Peach County Georgia, who sends her fourth-grade daughter to the Boys & Girls Club on Mondays. "Everything has taken on a laser-light focus." US Army to Develop "Thought Helmets" Time Magazine reports on a $4 million US Army contract to begin developing "thought helmets" to harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops that the Army hopes will "lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone." The Army's initial goal is to capture brain waves with software that translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. "It'd be radio without a microphone," says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. "Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way." The key challenge will be to develop software able to pinpoint speech-related brain waves and pick them up with a 128-sensor array that ultimately will be buried inside a helmet. Scientists deny charges that they're messing with soldiers' minds. "A lot of people interpret wires coming out of the head as some sort of mind reading," says Dr. Mike D'Zmura. "But there's no way you can get there from here" One potential civilan spin-off: a Bluetooth Helmet so people around you can't hear you when you talk on your cell phone. Internet Inventor Becomes Web Scam Victim Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the worldwide web, has revealed that he fell victim to online fraudsters while trying to buy a gift over the internet admitting that he bought a present from an online shop and when the present didn't arrive that he realized he had been conned. "The worst thing that has happened to me was when I tried to buy a Christmas present from a company that looked like a bona fide company on the internet and then actually they were a completely fake company," said Berners-Lee. "The moment I called the 0800 number listed on the website, there was a very polite message saying this number is available if you would like to use it, so a little bit of due diligence on my part would have revealed it wasn't what it was set up to be." Berners-Lee says that online crime needs to be enforced as rigorously as crime in the real world, within international agreements to help prevent internet criminals escaping prosecution by hiding in countries outside the jurisdiction of the law where their victims live. "We need to tackle issues of enforcement instead, as the laws on fraud, for example, already exist but is hard to find and catch the people responsible." Power Companies Brace for Solar Storms Three large explosions from the Sun over the past few days have prompted US government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days that could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites, leave thousands without power for weeks to months, and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin. "The concern is if the electric grid lost a number of transformers during a single storm, replacing them would be difficult and time-consuming," says Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The largest solar storm in recorded history was in 1859 when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs. Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, papers caught fire, and the Northern Lights appeared as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. The first of the three solar explosions from the sun already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact and the second is passing the Earth now and "seems to be stronger." "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days," says space weather scientist Joseph Kunches. "[The third storm] could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all." Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record Thomas O'Toole writes that President Obama's choice for Associate Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, authored several cyberlaw opinions regarding online contracting law, domain names, and computer privacy while on the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor wrote the court's 2002 opinion in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., an important online contracting case. In Specht, the Second Circuit declined to enforce contract terms that were available behind a hyperlink that could only be seen by scrolling down on a Web page (pdf). "We are not persuaded that a reasonably prudent offeree in these circumstances would have known of the existence of license terms," wrote Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor wrote an opinion in a domain name case, Storey v. Cello Holdings LLC in 2003 that held that an adverse outcome in an administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy did not preclude a later-initiated federal suit (pdf) brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In Leventhal v. Knapek, a privacy case, Judge Sotomayor wrote for the Second Circuit that New York state agency officials and investigators did not violate a state employee's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched the contents of his office computer for evidence of unauthorized use of state equipment. While none of these cases may mean much as far as what Judge Sotomayor will do as an Associate Supreme Court Justice "if confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court," writes O'Toole. As America Scorches, Pipes Burst Across the Nation Thom Patterson writes that, triggered by this summer's record high temperatures, hundreds of crucial water pipelines have burst across the nation, temporarily shutting off water to countless consumers just when they need it most - a clear sign that Americans should brace for more water interruptions, accompanied by skyrocketing water bills. "It's the heat and the high water usage," says Debbie Ragan of Oklahoma City's Utilities Department, adding that as days of 100 degree-plus temperatures bake the region, the utility has reported 685 water main breaks since July alone, four times the normal rate. Much of the nation's underground water lines are 80 to 100 years old -- and approaching the end of their lives as the shifting climate brings more droughts, record high temperatures and other weather conditions that will damage water infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation's water infrastructure at a D minus as the EPA estimates that the cost of replacing these aging drinking water utilities will be $334 billion between 2007 and 2027 in new infrastructure. "I don't see that there's any way, other than rate increases for most cities given the size of the financial need," says George Hawkins, general manager of Washington, DC's Water and Sewer Authority. "I think this industry is in for huge challenges with our customers." Pipes Pop Nationwide, No not the Internet Thom Patterson writes that critical water pipelines are bursting from coast to coast, triggered by this summer's record high temperatures, a clear sign that Americans should brace for more water interruptions, accompanied by skyrocketing water bills. "It's the heat and the high water usage," says Debbie Ragan of Oklahoma City's Utilities Department, adding that as days of 100 degree-plus temperatures bake the region, the utility reported 685 water main breaks since July alone, four times the normal rate. Much of the nation's underground water lines are 80 to 100 years old -- and approaching the end of their lives as the shifting climate brings more droughts, record high temperatures and other weather conditions that will damage water infrastructure. The cost of replacing these aging systems is stunning as the EPA estimates that between 2007 and 2027, drinking water utilities will have to invest $334 billion on new infrastructure. "I don't see that there's any way, other than rate increases for most cities given the size of the financial need," says George Hawkins, general manager of Washington, DC's Water and Sewer Authority. "I think this industry is in for huge challenges with our customers." Facebook's Gnarliest Programming Challenges Think you have what it takes to go to work in Silicon Valley? George Anders writes that companies like Facebook are finding that old-fashioned hiring channels aren't paying off fast enough and are publishing gnarly programming challenges and inviting engineers anywhere to solve them as a way to find and deliver the right kind of people to the California startup. "We developed this theory that occasionally there were these brilliant people out there who hadn't found their way to Silicon Valley," says Facebook engineer Yishan Wong who volunteered to draft puzzles so hard that he couldn't solve them. "They might be languishing in ordinary tech jobs. We needed a way to surface them." The problems aren't the superficial brainteasers that some companies use, like estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago or explaining why are manhole covers are round but developing sophisticated algorithms like ways of automatically seating a clique of people in a movie theater, given that best friends want to be side by side and rivals need to be far apart. David Eisenstat has compiled an unofficial guide to the Facebook Engineering Puzzles. Our favorite: Refrigerator Madness. "The free food and drinks at Facebook have revealed a surprising empirical fact: the drinks an engineer prefers determines who they are best at working with," says the description of the problem. "By analyzing a list of available drinks in the refrigerator, and a table of employee drink preferences, you wish to provide the company with the arrangement that benefits everyone the most with happy and productive engineers." Europe's Largest IT Company to Ban Internal Email Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, Europe's Largest IT Company, wants a "zero email" policy to be in place in 18 months, arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful and that staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week. "The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool," says Breton. "The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently." Instead Breton wants staff at Atos, an international information technology corporation which operates in 42 countries worldwide, with over 78,500 employees, to use chat-type collaborative services inspired by social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter as surveys show that the younger generation have already all but scrapped email, with only 11 per cent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it,. For his part Breton hasn't sent a work email in three years. "If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word." Research Shows People Spend Less When Paying Cash There is fresh evidence that people spend less when paying cash than using credit, cash-equivalent scrip or gift certificates. The conclusion arises from four studies that examined two factors in purchasing behavior: when consumers part with their money (cash versus credit) and the form of payment (cash, cash-like scrip, gift certificate or credit card). "The more transparent the payment outflow, the greater the aversion to spending, or higher the 'pain of paying," write the researchers. Cash is viewed as the most transparent form of payment. In the study 114 participants estimated how much they would pay using various payment forms for a vividly described restaurant meal. The results showed that "People are willing to spend (or pay) more when they use a credit card than when using cash," the researchers wrote. The difference in spending behavior is attributed to the way cash can reinforce the pain of paying. Apple Products Banned from Bill Gates' Home There is an interesting profile in Vogue Magazine of Bill Gates' wife Melinda in which she says that their three children (two daughters, aged twelve and six, and a nine-year-old son) are banned from using Apple products. "There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household," Gates says. "But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids." Melinda Gates, who arrived at Microsoft at the age of 22 and quickly made her mark, helping to develop such products as Encarta and Expedia, then running a division that produced several hundred million dollars in sales each year, also disclosed that husband Bill was shocked when she decided to leave Microsoft in 1994. He said, ÔBut you love your job so much, how can you do that?,' and I said, ÔCome on, Bill. I can't work and have you with a full-time career and think this is a family.' Which he got." Melinda Gates now spends much of her time helping run the family's foundation applying the principles of the business world to charity and last year disbursed over $1.5 Billion to fight infectious disease in developing countries. "At the end of the day, Bill and Melinda care more about results than about feeling warm or fuzzy," says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "They are perfectly willing to gamble on a project, even if it ultimately fails. But they are not willing to give up on something they care deeply about." Microsoft's Kinect to Revolutionize Gaming? There is an interesting non-paywalled story in the Times with a preview of Microsoft's Kinect, an add-on for the Xbox 360 console, that peers out into a room, locks onto people and follows their motions. Players activate it with a wave of a hand, navigate menus with an arm swoosh and then run, jump, swing, duck, lunge, lean and dance to direct their on-screen avatars in each game. "I think this is the first thing out of the consumer side of Microsoft in a long, long time where they are in front of everyone else," says Joel Johnson, an editor at large at Gizmodo. "I want a Kinect in every room of my house, watching me and listening to what I am saying. It's so sci-fi and next level that it would be amazing." For Kinect's eyes, a pair of sensors offer depth perception. One sensor emits light near the infrared range, giving Kinect its own light source impervious to ambient conditions while the other sensor monitors users' distance from the device. Adding the smarts required Microsoft's artificial-intelligence experts and thousands of test subjects of varying shapes and sizes who were recorded by monitoring 48 joints in their bodies. Kinect recognizes someone it has seen before by body shape, so there's no need to log into the system each time a game is played. It knows your left hand from your right and can distinguish between two players even when their paths cross. The mass-market introduction of Kinect - with its almost magical gesture and voice-recognition technology - stands as Microsoft's most ambitious, risky and innovative move in years. "It really is a toy, and I mean that in the best sense of the word," says Ted Brown, a game designer at Buzz Monkey, which produces games for the major console makers. "There is magic there when you can sort of put on a skin and perform on the stage." What Makes Angry Birds So Incredibly Successful? There has been much speculation regarding the cause of the recent worldwide economic recession, but we all know the truth. It was 'Angry Birds' and its effect on the productivity of the global work force. The 50 million individuals who have downloaded 'Angry Birds' play roughly 200 million minutes of the game a day, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year, more than ten times the 100 million hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia over the entire life span of the online encyclopedia. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Charles L. Mauro performs a cognitive teardown of the user experience of Angry Birds by reverse engineering the game to determine what interaction attributes the successful interface embodies that result in a psychologically engaging user experience. To summarize Mauro's detailed analysis, success is bound up in slowing down that which could be fast, erasing that which is easily renewable, and making visual that which is mysterious and memorable. "Over the past 10 years, our firm has conducted user engagement studies on hundreds of user interfaces. The vast number did not get one principle right, much less six," writes Mauro. "You go Birds! Your success certainly makes others Angry and envious." Is NASA Flying Blind? There are a lot of questions swirling around NASA lately: When will it ground the space shuttle for good? When will it launch Constellation, the next manned program? Where should it ultimately go, what kind of rocket should it use, and how much will it cost? How much money should unmanned programs get? Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin resigned when President Barack Obama took office and the space agency remains leaderless nearly three months after Griffin's resignation with associate administrator Christopher Scolese acting as agency chief in an interim capacity. The new president's first budget proposal would raise NASA's annual budget slightly to $18.7 billion next year. It would keep the shuttle on schedule to retire in 2010, and maintain funding to develop Constellation but it doesn't set a target for the program's first launch. It suggests the White House supports returning to the moon, but it's unclear about going to Mars. President Obama hasn't brought much clarity to these issues. Obama began his presidential campaign calling for delaying Constellation and spending the savings on education but three months before Election Day, while campaigning in Florida, he reversed engines and declared his support for the original timetable. In an editorial last week, the Orlando Sentinel decried the mixed signals coming from the White House and called for the President to appoint an administrator for the space agency. "NASA badly needs a leader and a plan," the op-ed said. "The future of the US space program, billions of dollars, and thousands of jobs, depend on it." The 5-year Console Cycle is Dead The Xbox 360 turns five this week and with no known successor on the horizon for the Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, Cnet reports on the the death of the 5 year console cycle - one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. "I've been saying since 2002," says analyst Michael Pachter, "that the generation [started] in 2005 might be our last one." To observers like Pachter, a lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers. For example, while Nintendo's Wii didn't break new ground in its graphics capabilities, its innovative and intuitive Wii controller made it possible to design games that appealed to millions of people who had never considered themselves gamers in the past. By the time that Wii's juice finally runs out and a more powerful piece of hardware becomes necessary, Pachter sees Nintendo releasing what he calls "Wii Plus" - a Wii with graphics more on par with 360 and PS3, to make it easier for game publishers to port games between all three consoles. Finally the ability to put high-quality games in the cloud--via services like OnLive or Trion Worlds could mean that the basic concept of requiring gamers to buy sophisticated hardware goes by the wayside. "If the content [is in the cloud]," Pachter concludes, "why would I buy another box? So we really might not see another console." How Nebraska Became Saudi Arabia The WSJ reports that the discovery of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota have already helped move the US into third place among world oil producers and according to Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, if fully developed the field in Bakken contains 24 billion barrels, doubling America's proven oil reserves. "Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," says Hamm. "We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years." Hamm adds that with the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century." One reason for America's abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques including "horizontal drilling" that allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet. But Hamm thinks America's energy priorities are misplaced and says the government floods green energy with billions of dollars of subsidies a year. "Wind isn't commercially feasible with natural gas prices below $6 per thousand cubic feet," says Hamm "I told [Obama] of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this." The Rise And Fall Of America's Jet-Powered Car The WSJ reports that the automobile designs of these 1950s and 1960s were inspired by the space race and the dawn of jet travel but one car manufacturer, Chrysler, was bold enough to put a jet engine in an automobile that ran at an astounding 60,000 rpm on any flammable fluid including gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, peanut oil, alcohol, tequila, or perfume. Visionary Chrysler designer George Huebner believed that there was plenty to recommend the turbine. "Turbines weighed less than piston engines, had fewer moving parts and were easy to work on. What's more, they never needed a tuneup or an oil change and could cruise all day at 100 miles per hour," writes Steve Lehto in Chrysler's Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Coolest Creation. People loved the car. In a publicity scheme to promote its "jet" car, Chrysler commissioned Ghia to handcraft 50 identical car bodies and each car would be lent to a family for a few months and then passed on to another. Chrysler received more than 30,000 requests in 1962 to become test drivers and eventually 203 were chosen who logged more than one million miles (mostly trouble free) in the 50 Ghia prototypes. "Some wanted a turbine car so badly they sent in blank checks made out to Chrysler," Lehto writes. "All Chrysler had to do was name the price and deliver a car." In the end Chrysler killed the turbine car after OPEC's 1973 oil embargo. "How different would America be now if we all drove turbine-powered cars? It could have happened. But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US.dependence on Middle East oil." Do Cops Need a Warrant to Track Your Cell Phone? The WSJ reports that federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker" for more than a year, using a stingray - a little known cellphone-tracking device designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call that the FBI considers so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities. A stingray works by mimicking a cellphone tower, getting a phone to connect to it and measuring signals from the phone letting the stingray operator "ping," or send a signal to, a phone and locate it as long as it is powered on. But now the stingray's role in nabbing the alleged "Hacker" - Daniel David Rigmaiden - is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. Rigmaiden maintains his innocence and says that using stingrays to locate devices in homes without a valid warrant "disregards the United States Constitution" and is illegal. The prosecutor says the government obtained a "court order that satisfied [the] language" in the federal law on warrants but the judge then asked how an order or warrant could have been obtained without telling the judge what technology was being used. The legal question is whether stingrays-which can track someone to his home (as in Rigmaiden's case) or to other places where he has a reasonable expectation of privacy-is more akin to a trap or trace device, which can be used without a warrant, or to a wiretap, which requires a warrant. "The law is uncertain," says Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former computer-crime attorney at the Department of Justice. Meet 'Future You.' Like What You See? The WSJ reports that computer scientists, economists, neuroscientists and psychologists are teaming up to find innovative ways of turning impulsive spenders into patient savers and one way to shock Americans into saving more for their retirement is software that lets users stare into a camera in a virtual-reality laboratory and see an image staring back of how they will look in the year 2057. By enabling the young to see themselves as they will be when they are old, virtual-reality technology can transform their urge to spend for today into a willingness to save for tomorrow because to the extent that people can more vividly imagine how badly they will feel in the future with little to no retirement savings, they can be motivated to save more money now. In one test experimental subjects who saw a persuasive visual analog of a 70-year old version of themselves by morphing the shape and texture of his avatar to simulate the aging process reported they would save twice as much as those who didn't (PDF). "An employee's ID photo could be age-morphed and placed on the benefits section of the company's website," says Dan Goldstein of London Business School. "From there, we're just a few clicks and a few minutes away from someone making a lasting decision that can be worth thousands [of dollars]." Insects to Alleviate World Protein Shortage The WSJ reports that as the global population booms and demand strains the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate animal proteins and with over 1,000 edible species of insects identified, bees, ants, grasshoppers, and beetles can fill the breach. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, they're low in fat and are easier to raise than livestock. "Raising insects for food would avoid many of the problems associated with livestock. For instance, swine and humans are similar enough that they can share many diseases" say entomologists Marcel Dicke and Arnold Van Huis. "Because insects are so different from us, such risks are accordingly lower." Insects are more environmentally friendly requring relatively little water and producing far less ammonia and other greenhouse gases per pound of body weight. There is an energy savings too because insects are cold-blooded and they don't need as much feed to maintain their body temperatures so ten pounds of feed yields up to six pounds of insect meat while the same feed only produces one pound of beef, three pounds of pork, and five pounds of chicken.. And the taste? It's often described as nutty. "Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren't widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn't include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights." Arizona Governor Proposes Flab Tax The WSJ reports that Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer has proposed levying a $50 fee on some enrollees in the state's cash-starved Medicaid program, including obese people who don't follow a doctor-supervised slimming regimen and smokers and says the proposal is a way to reward good behavior and raise awareness that certain conditions, including obesity, raise costs throughout the system. "If you want to smoke, go for it," says Monica Coury, spokeswoman for Arizona's Medicaid program. "But understand you're going to have to contribute something for the cost of the care of your smoking." Coury says Arizona officials hadn't yet finalized how they would determine whether a person was obese or had sufficiently followed a wellness plan, but that measures such as body-mass index could provide some guidance. Estimates for the costs of obesity in America range from about $150 billion to $270 billion a year. According to the latest CDC statistics, from 2009, 25.5% of Arizonans are obese, about 1.7 million people. Only Colorado and the District of Columbia come in under the 20% mark, and the highest rate is in Mississippi, with a population that is 34.4% obese. eBooks Now Outsell Hardcovers at Amazon The WSJ reports that Amazon says it is now selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books with Jeff Bezos Amazon's chief executive adding that the growth rate of Kindle sales has "reached a tipping point," having tripled since the company lowered its price to $189 from $259 last month. "That is dramatic evidence of how powerful the e-book is now," says Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. "What the iPad and other book reading devices have done is just raise the overall e-book market-and Amazon is extremely well positioned to take advantage of it." Still, the hardback comparison figure doesn't necessarily mean the end is near for paper books as Amazon says its hardback book unit sales also continue to increase. Moreover, while Amazon has become one of the largest booksellers in the US, it still attracts an online audience that is more inclined to be early adopters of new reading technology and one leading publisher says that it is too early to link the increase in Amazon's e-book and hardcover sales to any possible decrease in the sale of paperbacks. "We need a few more months under our belts," says David Young, CEO of Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group. Giant Lab Replicates Category 3 Hurricanes The WSJ reports that a new $40 million research center built by the Institute for Business & Home Safety in Richburg, SC features a massive test chamber as tall as a six-story building that can hold nine 2,300-square-foot homes on a turntable where they can be subjected to tornado-strength winds generated by 105 giant fans to simulate a Category 3 hurricane. The goal is to improve building codes and maintenance practices in disaster-prone regions even though each large hurricane simulation costs about $100,000. The new IBHS lab will be the first to replicate hurricanes with winds channeling water through homes and ripping off roofs, doors and windows. The new facility will give insurers the ability to carefully videotape what happens as powerful winds blow over structures instead of relying on wind data from universities or computer simulations. The center will also be used to test commercial buildings, agriculture structures, tractor-trailers, wind turbines and airplanes. "We will be the only lab on the planet that can do what we do," says Julie Rochman, chief executive of IBHS. "We will just put them on a turntable and test them under a very realistic replication of natural hazard conditions." However there are still some disasters beyond the capabilities of the lab. Tsunamis, for one. "You have to have an earthquake under the seabed to cause the tsunami itself," says Joseph King. "We're not able to do it and certainly don't know anyone who can." AOL Buys TechCrunch The WSJ reports that AOL is buying Michael Arrington's technology blog TechCrunch, an influential tech blogs in Silicon Valley that reaches more than 10 million unique visitors and draws more than 33 million page views per month and operates a global network of dedicated properties from Europe to Japan, as well as specialized industry websites including MobileCrunch, CrunchGear and GreenTech. The companies didn't disclose the terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter said AOL paid about $30 million for TechCrunch. "I look forward to working with everyone at AOL as we build on our reputation for independent tech journalism and continue to set the agenda for insight, reviews and collaborative discussion about the future of the technology industry.," says Arrington. The acquisition shows that AOL is doubling down on ad-supported Web media content, a business that has largely been a disappointment for the traditional media industry, which is shifting toward online subscription models as a way to generate revenue from digital businesses. For its part, AOL has recently hired hundreds of writers to create more original news and local and entertainment content while it aggressively restructures its mix of assets during sharp declines in revenue and profits. A Verizon iPhone May Be on the Way The WSJ is reporting that Apple plans to produce a new iPhone later this year that will work with phone carriers other than AT&T. According to sources, the new iPhone will work with CDMA, used by Verizon Wireless, AT&T's main competitor, as well as Sprint Nextel Corp. and a handful of cellular operators in countries including South Korea and Japan. For AT&T, the Apple relationship has been crucial, helping to make the carrier the US leader in the lucrative smart-phone market and for several quarters, AT&T's growth has come almost single-handedly from the iPhone. Verizon has publicly stated its interest in the iPhone, but people familiar with the situation say Apple originally decided against developing a phone for Verizon to keep its development process simple since CDMA is incompatible with the GSM standard used by AT&T. The GSM iPhone will cotinue to be made by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. while the CDMA iPhone model will be made by Pegatron Technology Corp., the contract manufacturing subsidiary of Taiwan's ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Making the iPhone available through Verizon, which has over 91 million customers, as well as potentially other CDMA carriers could open up a significant new market for Apple. Since Apple already dominates smart-phone sales through existing partners, so "sooner rather than later, Apple is going to have to look to find incremental distribution," says analyst Toni Sacconaghi who estimates Verizon could help Apple nearly double the number of iPhone users in the US. A Verizon iPhone may still just be a pipe dream. Still, Yukari Iwatani Kane, co-author of the article, has previously reported some Apple rumors in the Wall Street Journal that turned out to be fairly accurate -- so maybe that grain of salt doesn't have to be quite so big. The Secret Dive Patterns of Whale Sharks The world's biggest fish - the whale shark - doesn't have a reputation for speed but researchers have discovered that although the fish seem sluggish on the surface, deep down they are deceptively fast. A research team studying male whale sharks off the coast of Western Australia, noticed they used their weight and gravity to nose-dive to the ocean floor like airborne hawks hunting for mice. "We found they are basically not using any energy to move - they are diving down in a glide like an eagle or a falcon. Because they are using no tail beats they are literally sinking," says Brad Norman of Murdoch University in Perth. The team believes the discovery reveals how these ocean giants manage to travel across the world and find enough food to fuel their large bodies, which can measure up to 12 meters in length. Besides diving to feed, the Ningaloo Reef whale sharks also seem to use their dives as part of a 'bounding' pattern - swimming up and down in this way might allow them to take advantage of gravity for propulsion. Information about the whale shark's deep-water life was collected using an electronic tag attached to its fin by a clamp mechanism. The clamp is designed to corrode over time and then drop off, leaving the tag to float to the surface where it transmits a location signal to researchers. Norman and his colleagues hope this discovery will inspire people to contribute to a global database used to identify and document whale-shark movement around the globe. EPA Plans to Buy Small Town in Kansas The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called chat and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. "It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10, the threshold for lead poisoning. "It is our hope that this will give them the opportunity to raise their children, run their businesses, and get on with their lives free of the burdens of pollution and environmental degradation," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Database Error Costs Social Security Victims $500M The Washington Posts reports that the Social Security Administration has agreed to pay more than $500 million in back benefits to more than 80,000 recipients whose benefits were unfairly denied after they were flagged by a federal computer program designed to catch serious criminals. At issue is a 1996 law, which contained language later nicknamed the "fleeing felon" provision, that said fugitives were ineligible to receive federal benefits. As part of its enforcement, the administration began searching computer databases to weed out people who were collecting benefits and had outstanding warrants. The searches captured dozens of criminals, including some wanted for homicide but they also ensnared countless elderly and disabled people accused of relatively minor offenses such as shoplifting or writing bad checks and in some cases, the victims simply shared a name and a birth date with an offender. The lead plaintiff in the class-action suit, Rosa Martinez, 52, of Redwood City, Calif., was cut off from her $870 monthly disability benefit check in January 2008 because the system had flagged an outstanding drug warrant in 1980 for a different Rosa Martinez from Miami. Officials said it is difficult to estimate how many social security recipients might be affected by the agreement but said the number is fewer than 1 percent nationally. "What's remarkable about this case is the sheer number of individuals who were unfairly denied benefits and the size of the financial settlement they will receive," said David H. Fry of Munger, Tolles & Olson, one of the pro bono attorneys who represented victims. "Hundreds of thousands of impoverished seniors and people with disabilities will once again receive their benefits, and countless others will avoid the same problem in the future." Riled Reciept Retaliates with Robocall Revenge The Washington Post reports that Virginia resident Aaron Titus jumped out of bed in a panic at 433 am awakened by a ringing phone thinking maybe something terrible had happened. In a blurry rush, Titus answered the phone halfway into the second ring, listening in disbelief to an automated caller tell him what he already knew: It was a snow day. School would open two hours late. In other words, he and his family could sleep. Sometime later in the day, the 31-year-old father, a lawyer who knows a thing or two about technology, made a decision that might well bring amused satisfaction to like-minded parents everywhere. He found a robocall company online, taped a message and listed every phone number he could find for nine school board members so at 430 the next morning phones began ringing with 29 seconds of automated, mocking objection: "This is a Prince George's County School District parent, calling to thank you for the robocall yesterday at 4:30 in the morning. I decided to return the favor. While I know the school district wanted to ensure I drop my child off two hours late on a snow day, I already knew that before I went to bed. I hope this call demonstrates why a 4:30 a.m. call does more to annoy than to inform.'' School board member Edward Burroughs III said he had not personally gotten one of Titus's robocall rebukes, but considered it "very clever." The robocall, he concluded, made a point. "It's certainly something that I welcome all parents to do - communicate with us, by any means necessary." Decline in US Newspaper Readership Accelerates The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success -- but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. "Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination," says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. "Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die," writes Mutter. "The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late." Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets. Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine The Washington Post reports that under Obama's new "Nuclear Posture Review," released today the US will foreswear the use of the nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries, in contrast to previous administrations, which indicated they might use nuclear arms against nonnuclear states in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack. But the new policy included a major caveat: The countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. The problem for Iran and North Korea is that the pledge does not cover them because the US regards them as in non-compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The new policy will also describe the purpose of US weapons as being fundamentally for deterrence. Some Democratic legislators had urged Obama to go further and declare that the United States would not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict but officials worried that such a change could unnerve allies protected by the US nuclear "umbrella." Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, describes the new policy as a big, positive step forward. "It could go further, faster, but it is the best we can hope for under the circumstances. It is a solid, pragmatic document that strives to be transformational. It is transformation in two aspects: It re-orients the US nuclear forces away from massive retaliations and towards today's threats of nuclear terrorism and new nuclear states. It orients US policy towards dramatically fewer weapons and greatly reduced roles." FTC Could Gain Enforcement Power over Internet The Washington Post reports that under a little-known provision in financial overhaul legislation before Congress the Federal Trade Commission could become a more powerful watchdog for Internet users with the power to to issue rules on a fast track and impose civil penalties on companies that hurt consumers. "If we had a deterrent, a bigger stick to fine malefactors, that would be helpful," says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz who has argued in favor of bolstering his agency's enforcement ability. This power would stand in stark contrast to a besieged FTC whose ability to oversee broadband providers has been cast into doubt after a federal court ruled last month that the agency lacked the ability to punish Comcast for violating open-Internet guidelines. The provision to strengthen the FTC is in the regulatory overhaul legislation passed by the House and although it is absent from the legislation before the Senate, some observers expect the measure to be included when the House and Senate versions are combined. The proposal to expand the FTC's authority has sparked a flurry of lobbying by advertisers, industry groups and the US Chamber of Commerce, who are seeking to block it citing concerns about possible overreach by the agency. "The bottom line is that these powerful special business interests want to keep the Internet as their private financial playground -- where they get to reap the big bucks without any regulatory oversight," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. 'Cash for Clunkers' Program Runs Out of Gas The Washington Post reports that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood chas alled members of Congress to inform them that the "cash for clunkers" program will be suspended because the program has run out of money and congressmen say they intend to ask the Obama administration to divert some funding from the existing economic stimulus package to maintain a scheme that they see as genuinely stimulative. "Clearly, this has been a very stimulative program that's got consumers back into the car market. It's our hope that possibly more funds can be made available," says Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association. The $1 billion program was set up by the US government in June to entice consumers to trade in their gas-guzzling cars for more fuel-efficient models, both to boost auto sales and improve the nation's fuel efficiency. Under the program, trade-in vehicles, 1984 models or newer, must have average fuel economy of no more than 18 miles per gallon and the new car or truck must get better gas mileage than the one that was scrapped and the payoff grows depending on the difference in the fuel efficiencies of the old and new cars. The $1 billion program, which can finance about 225,000 clunker trade-ins, may receive another $2 billion in government funding. "I don't think anybody expected the program to be this popular," said Greg Martin, a spokesman for General Motors. "There's no doubt it has jump-started sales." US Alarmed Over Japan's Nuclear Crisis The Washington Post reports that the US is urging Americans who live within 50 miles of Japan's earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to evacuate as Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that no water remains in a deep pool used to cool spent fuel at the plant and that radiation levels there are thought to be "extremely high." Jaczko's testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee suggests that damage to the plant is worse than the Japanese government and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has acknowledged. On Tuesday, the company said water levels in the three of the site's seven fuel pools were dropping, but did not say that the fuel rods themselves had been exposed. Left exposed to the air, the fuel rods will start to decay and release radioactivity into the air and lack of water in at least one spent-fuel pool sparked fears of a worst-case scenario: the fuel could combust. "If there's no water in there, the spent fuel can start a fire," says Eric Moore, a consultant to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on nuclear plant design and safety issues. "Once you have that fire, there's a high risk of radiation getting out, spewed by the fire." The power company says a reduced crew of 50 to 70 employees - far fewer than the 1,400 or more at the plant during normal operations - had been working in shifts to keep seawater flowing to the three reactors now in trouble. Their withdrawal on Wednesday temporarily left the plant with nobody to continue cooling operations. US Changes How Air Travelers Are Screened The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is abandoning its policy of using nationality alone to determine which US-bound international air travelers should be subject to additional screening and will instead select passengers based on possible matches to intelligence information, including physical descriptions or a particular travel pattern. Under the new system, screeners will stop passengers for additional security if they match certain pieces of known intelligence. The system will be "much more intel-based," a senior administration official says, as opposed to blunt force. "It's much more tailored to what the intelligence is telling us, what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals of a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular passport." For example if US intelligence authorities learned about a terrorism suspect from Asia who had recently traveled to the Middle East, and they knew the suspect's approximate age but not name or passport number, those fragments would be entered into a database, shared with commercial airline screeners abroad, and screeners would be instructed to look for people with those traits and to pull them aside for extra searches. Administration officials have said that, in hindsight, the central failure in the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, involved inadequate sharing of information. It is not clear whether the new screening measures would have been sufficient to block him. Obama Proposes Spy Training Corps for Colleges The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) run by the military services creating a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies." Students attending participating colleges and universities who agree to take the specialized courses would apply to the national intelligence director for admittance to the program, whose administrators would select individuals "competitively" for financial assistance. The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal. The intelligence officer training program would build on previous pilot programs including the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRIST) that provides monetary incentive to college students who pursue studies in critical language specialties, area studies, and technical and scientific specialties. Applicants to the PRIST are cautioned that they "must generally not have used illegal drugs within the last 12 months" and that although "friends, family, individuals, or organizations may be interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of the CIA," their interest, "may not be benign or in your best interest." Obama Takes to Twitter to Fight Tax Hike The Washington Post reports that shortly after Republicans in the House of Representatives nixed the two-month extension to the payroll tax cut that passed the Senate 89 votes to 10, the White House launched a campaign on twitter to win over public opinion in the fight as the White House asked its 2.6 million followers what $40 would mean to them and Obama's campaign Twitter account re-published the message to its 11.6 million followers - turning #40dollars into a trending hashtag. Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, wrote on his Twitter account Tuesday night that responses were coming in at the rate of 2,000 per hour. "Opponents of the payroll tax cut dismiss its impact by insisting $40 isn't a lot of money," says David Plouffe in an email to supporters, "but that's not the case for many families who are already working hard to make ends meet. Forty dollars buys a tank of gas or a fridge and pantry full of groceries. It covers a water bill or the cost of a prescription." However at least one Twitter user named @dcseth, who describes himself as "the Bitter Clinger Obama warned you about" and features a profile picture of himself with Mitt Romney, wrote that $40 "means I'm still $34,960 short for a ticket to an Obama fundraiser." New Law Would Require ID to Buy Prepaid Phones The Washington Post reports that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) have introduced legislation that would require buyers to present identification when purchasing a prepaid cellphone and require phone companies to keep the information on file, as they do with users of landline phones and subscription-based cellphones. "This proposal is overdue because for years, terrorists, drug kingpins and gang members have stayed one step ahead of the law by using prepaid phones that are hard to trace," says Schumer. Civil liberties advocates have concerns about the proposal, saying there must be a role for anonymous communications in a free society adding that the space for such anonymous or pseudonymous communications has been narrowed since pay phones, for example, have largely disappeared. "They remain important for whistleblowers, battered spouses, reporters' sources," says James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. "I think everybody would admit in a free society there is a need for some ability to communicate without creating a full digital paper trail," Dempsey says. "We're just saying this proposal has to be considered in a broader context." Monkeys Born with Three Genetic Parents The Washington Post reports that scientists have produced monkeys with genetic material from two mothers, an advance that could help women with some inherited diseases have healthy children but that would raise a host of safety, legal, ethical and social questions if attempted in people. The researchers developed a way to replace most of the genes in the eggs of one rhesus macaque monkey with genes from another monkey by extracting DNA from the nucleus of monkey eggs then transplanting that DNA into eggs from other females that had healthy mitochondrial DNA but from which the nuclear DNA had been removed. They then fertilized the eggs with sperm, transferred the resulting embryos into animals' wombs and produced four apparently healthy offspring. "We believe this technique can be applied pretty quickly to humans and believe it will work," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. The work raises thorny ethical and legal issues, including questions surrounding the creation of offspring with DNA from two mothers and a father with some experts worried that germline genetic manipulation would give rise to a market in expensive elective genetic enhancements. "This type of gene therapy involves replacing genes in the germline which of course will be transmitted to next generations, which is a concern," Mitalipov said. "However, we're talking about patients and birth defects that cause terrible diseases due to these gene mutations. So the only way to prevent these birth defects is to replace these genes." Lab Produces Monkeys With Two Mothers The Washington Post reports that researchers have developed a way to replace most of the genes in the eggs of one rhesus macaque monkey with genes from another monkey by extracting DNA from the nucleus of monkey eggs then transplanting that DNA into eggs from other females that had healthy mitochondrial DNA but from which the nuclear DNA had been removed. They then fertilized the eggs with sperm, transferred the resulting embryos into animals' wombs and produced four apparently healthy offspring. "We believe this technique can be applied pretty quickly to humans and believe it will work," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. The work raises thorny ethical and legal issues, including questions surrounding the creation of offspring with DNA from two motherswith some experts worried that germline genetic manipulation would give rise to a market in expensive elective genetic enhancements. "This type of gene therapy involves replacing genes in the germline which of course will be transmitted to next generations, which is a concern," Mitalipov said. "However, we're talking about patients and birth defects that cause terrible diseases due to these gene mutations. So the only way to prevent these birth defects is to replace these genes." Video Games Can Provide Mental Health Benefits The Washington Post reports that researchers are discovering that depression and other disorders -- as well as everyday stress and worry -- involve systematic patterns of thought and self-doubt, and that video games can distract people and put them in a different mental zone providing relief. For example Gail Nichols has suffered from depression for years and says she discovered the mental health benefits of video games some years ago during a particularly bad spell of depression. She started playing a game called Bejeweled, which requires players to move gems into rows based on their color. In her favorite version, colored gems drop endlessly onto the screen, and Nichols said she falls into a trance of simultaneous concentration and relaxation that she calls Zen.. "In the day, you can find someone to talk to," Nichols says. "Games are a big help in getting through to the next morning." In a preliminary study that PopCap commissioned and funded, researchers found that volunteers who played Bejeweled displayed improved mood and heart rhythms compared with volunteers who weren't playing. Dr. Carmen Russoniello says results of this study are impressive and intriguing, given the extent of the effects of the games on subjects' stress levels and overall mood and says that some games seem to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which can reduce the heightened tension that is a natural response to stress.. "I believe there is a wide range of therapeutic applications of casual games in mood-related disorders such as depression and in stress-related disorders including diabetes and cardiovascular disease." More Professors Ban Laptops in the Lecture Hall The Washington Post reports that professors have banned laptops from their classrooms at George Washington University, American University, the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, among many others compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper. "This is like putting on every student's desk, when you walk into class, five different magazines, several television shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone, and saying, 'Look, if your mind wanders, feel free to pick any of these up and go with it,' " says David Cole at Georgetown Law who was among the first professors in the Washington region to ban laptops for most of his students. A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen but during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction as wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming -- all the diversions of a home computer beamed into the classroom to compete with the professor for the student's attention. Even when used as glorified typewriters, laptops can turn students into witless stenographers, typing a lecture verbatim without listening or understanding. "The breaking point for me was when I asked a student to comment on an issue, and he said, 'Wait a minute, I want to open my computer,' " says David Goldfrank, a Georgetown history professor. "And I told him, 'I don't want to know what's in your computer. I want to know what's in your head.' " Not all students agree with the ban. "The fact that some students misuse technology is no reason to ban it," writes Leslie Gehring in the student newspaper at the University of Denver. "After all, how many professors ban pens and notebooks after noticing students doodling in the margins?" Cyber-Gangs Now Targeting Small US Businesses The Washington Post reports that organized cyber-gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and mid-size companies in the United States, setting off a multimillion-dollar online crime wave that has begun to worry the nation's largest financial institutions. In many cases, the scammers infiltrate companies by sending a targeted e-mail to a company's controller or treasurer, a message that contains either a virus-laden attachment or a link that -- when opened -- surreptitiously installs malicious software designed to steal passwords. Armed with those credentials, the crooks then initiate a series of wire transfers, usually in increments of less than $10,000 to avoid banks' anti-money-laundering reporting requirements. "In the past six months, financial institutions, security companies, the media and law enforcement agencies are all reporting a significant increase in funds transfer fraud involving the exploitation of valid banking credentials belonging to small and medium sized businesses," says a confidential alert. Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner, says few commercial banks have invested in back-end technologies that can detect fraudulent or unusual transaction patterns for businesses and many victims don't want to talk because they fear it will endanger their ability to recoup the losses from their bank. "Nobody wants to talk about it. The banks certainly aren't going to talk about it," says Litan. "It's like a rape victim. The victims are scared of retribution by their bank, scared that they're not going to get their money back. But in most cases they're not going to get it back anyway." Times are Tough for Nigerian Scammers The Washington Post reports that online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times but succeeding in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown takes patience, resolve, and hard work. "We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there," said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. "They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want." US authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- still lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. 419 is cemented in Nigerian popular culture. and the scammers, known as "yahoo-yahoo boys," are glorified in pop songs such as "Yahoozee," which gained even more fame after former secretary of state Colin L. Powell danced to it at a London festival last year. "I'm selling greed," said Felix, 29, an e-mail swindler. "You didn't apply for any lotto, and all of a sudden you just see a mail in your mailbox that you're going to win money? That means you have to be greedy." But in these tough times, the scammers say they are relying more on a crucial tool: voodoo. At times, Banjo says, he has traveled six hours to the forest, where a magician sells scam-boosters. A $300 powder supposedly helps scammers "speak with authority" when demanding payment. A powder, rubbed on the face, reportedly makes victims viewing the scammer through webcams powerless to say no. "There is another thing scammers always say in Nigeria," Banjo says, "that every day, another maga is born in America." Students Flock to GMU for BFA in Video Game Design The Washington Post reports that officials at George Mason University are quickly finding out that they have vastly underestimated interest in the school's new bachelor's degree in video game design. "We've been overwhelmed," says Scott M. Martin, assistant dean for technology, research and advancement at GMU. "Our anticipated enrollment for the fall is 500 percent higher than we expected." George Mason first offered the program last fall when officials anticipated that it would enroll about 30 full-time students but currently 200 students are enrolled and that number is increasing. Course titles under the program include "History of Computer Game Design " while other courses focus on computer programming, digital arts and graphics and motion capture. Although many colleges offer courses and degrees in computer gaming in the United States, GMU offers the only four-year program in the DC area, an important market for gaming because serious games -- those used to train military and special operations, doctors and others who use simulators -- are becoming a market force in the region because of the proximity to federal government centers. "Gaming has been shifting from Silicon Valley," says Eugene Evans, general manager of Bioware Mythic, part of Electronic Arts located in Fairfax, Virginia. "The team at GMU is putting a strong emphasis on a broad set of disciplines and instilling an entrepreneurial spirit, which could mean many new start-ups within a few years." Riled Robocall Recipient Takes Robo-Revenge The Washington Post reports that Maryland resident Aaron Titus jumped out of bed in a panic at 433 am last week awakened by a ringing phone thinking maybe something terrible had happened. Answering the phone halfway into the second ring, Titus, a privacy officer at a company that offers software to help keep personal information on your computer secure and private, listened in disbelief to an automated caller tell him that it was a snow day and school would open two hours late. In other words, he and his family could sleep. Sometime later in the day, the 31-year-old father made a decision that might well bring amused satisfaction to like-minded parents everywhere. Titus found a robocall company online, taped a message and listed every phone number he could find for nine school board members so at 430 the next morning phones began ringing with 29 seconds of automated, mocking objection: "This is a Prince George's County School District parent, calling to thank you for the robocall yesterday at 4:30 in the morning. I decided to return the favor.'' School board member Edward Burroughs III said he had not personally gotten one of Titus's robocall rebukes, but considered it "very clever." The robocall, Burroughs concluded, made a point. "It's certainly something that I welcome all parents to do - communicate with us, by any means necessary." However a complaint has allegedly been filed against Titus with the Virginia State Bar, where Titus is admitted as an attorney because beginning September 1, 2009, prerecorded commercial telemarketing calls to consumers Đ commonly known as robocalls are prohibited, unless the telemarketer has obtained permission in writing from consumers who want to receive such calls. Young Patients to Get Best Kidneys Under New Rules The Washington Post reports that instead of giving priority primarily to patients who have been on the waiting list longest, new rules proposed by the nation's organ-transplant network would match recipients and organs to try to maximize the number of years provided by each kidney - the most sought-after organ for transplants. The current system, which dates to 1986, was first based largely on giving kidneys to the patients who matched the organs best, but it evolved to take a first-come, first-served approach made possible by safer, more powerful anti-rejection drugs. "It was just a fairness issue," says Kenneth Andreoni, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University who chairs the committee that is reviewing the system for the United Network for Organ Sharing. "You're next in line. It's your turn." The proposed changes, which would be part of the most comprehensive overhaul of the system in 25 years, are being welcomed by some bioethicists, transplant surgeons and patient representatives as a step toward improving kidney distribution but some complain that the new system would unfairly penalize middle-aged and elderly patients at a time when the overall population is getting older. "The best kidneys are from young adults under age 35 years. Nobody over the age of 50 will ever see one of those," says Lainie Friedman Ross, a University of Chicago bioethicist and physician. "There are a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who, with a properly functioning kidney, could have 20 or more years of life. We're making it harder for them to get a kidney that will function for that length of time. It's age discrimination." Accused of Hiding Defect, Toyota Faces $16M Fine The Washington Post reports that federal regulators are seeking to fine Toyota $16.4 million for waiting four months before notifying safety officials about vehicles with a "sticky pedal" defect, the largest financial penalty ever imposed by the US government on an automaker. Although the cause of unintended acceleration in Toyotas is a matter of debate, the automaker and safety regulators agree that sticky pedals were behind at least some of the incidents. "We now have proof that Toyota failed to live up to its legal obligations," says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "Worse yet, they knowingly hid a dangerous defect for months from U.S. officials and did not take action to protect millions of drivers and their families." Despite the stern rhetoric from regulators, the proposed fine is relatively small for an automaker that reported revenue of more than $200 billion last year but the company could face far heftier penalties in civil lawsuits. If each owner of the roughly 6 million Toyota vehicles that have been recalled were awarded $500, it would cost Toyota about $3 billion in damages, according to Tim Howard, a law professor at Northeastern University who is helping to coordinate class-action lawsuits. "Toyota embarrassed NHTSA," says Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety and officials are "looking for every opportunity to enforce the law and tell [Toyota] we will never give you another break again, and at the same time send a message to other automakers -- don't you do it." TSA Nominee Withdraws after Privacy Violations The Washington Post reports that Erroll Southers, the Obama administration's choice to lead the struggling Transportation Security Administration, has withdrawn his name from consideration just weeks after revelations that he had provided misleading information to Congress about incidents two decades ago in which he inappropriately accessed a federal database to obtain information about his estranged wife's new boyfriend, possibly in violation of privacy laws. In a statement released by the White House, Southers blamed congressional critics motivated by "political ideology" for the troubles that overshadowed his nomination. "It is apparent that this path has been obstructed by political ideology," says Southers. "My nomination has become a lightning rod for those who have chosen to push a political agenda at the risk of the safety and security of the American people." Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid had promised to rally votes to overcome a hold on Souther's nomination and force his nomination through but such a battle would have added to the political distractions caused by the outcome of Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, in which Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory to capture the seat long held by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy -- and deal a shocking blow to the Obama administration's domestic agenda by eroding the Democratic majority in the Senate. TSA Nominee's Snooping Raises Privacy Concerns The Washington Post reports that Erroll Southers, President Obama's nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration, gave Congress misleading information about incidents in which he inappropriately accessed a federal database, possibly in violation of privacy laws. Southers accepted full responsibility for a "grave error in judgment" when he accessed confidential criminal records twenty years ago about his then-estranged wife's new boyfriend. Southers's admission that he was involved in a questionable use of law enforcement background data has been a source of concern among civil libertarians, who believe the TSA performs a delicate balancing act in tapping into passenger information to find terrorists while also protecting citizens' privacy. In his letter to key senators on November 20, Southers said he simply forgot the circumstances of the searches, which occurred in 1987 and 1988 after he grew worried about his wife and their son, who had begun living with the boyfriend. "During a period of great personal turmoil, I made a serious error in judgment by using my official position with the FBI to resolve a personal problem," Southers wrote. Civil liberties specialists say that the misuse of databases has been common among law enforcement authorities for many years, despite an array of local, state and federal prohibitions intended to protect personal information and studies have found that police at every level examine records of celebrities, women they have met and political rivals. "I am distressed by the inconsistencies between my recollection and the contemporaneous documents, but I assure you that the mistake was inadvertent, and that I have at all times taken full responsibility for what I know to have been a grave error in judgment," Southers added. Password Hackers Do Big Business with ex-Lovers The Washington Post reports that disgruntled lovers and spouses considering divorce are flocking to services like YourHackerz.com that boast they have little trouble hacking into Web-based e-mail systems like AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail. The services advertise openly and there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it because while federal law prohibits hacking into e-mail, without further illegal activity, it's only a misdemeanor, says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. "The feds usually don't have the resources to investigate and prosecute misdemeanors," says Kerr. "And part of the reason is that normally it's hard to know when an account has been compromised, because e-mail snooping doesn't leave a trace." It's not clear where YourHackerz.com is located, but experts suspect that most password hacking businesses are based overseas. Experts said there are numerous ways to steal someone's e-mail password, from simply guessing at family names or pet names to high-tech infiltration that let's web-based e-mail, such as Google's gmail and Yahoo, be attacked through bugs in the Web browser. "The unfortunate news is there's rather less of computer security than we would want," says one computer expert adding that "if you're an ordinary person and afraid you have an ex-lover who wants to hack you, you're probably better off not using computers for the kinds of communications you want to keep secret." DHS Pathogen Lab to be Built in 'Tornado Alley' The Washington Post reports that Department of Homeland Security relied on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate the $700 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) for highly infectious pathogens in a tornado-prone section of Kansas. A GAO report says that it is not "scientifically defensible" to conclude that lab can safely handle dangerous animal diseases in Kansas. "They call it 'Tornado Alley' for a reason," says attorney Michael Guiffre. Such research has been conducted up to now on a remote island on the northern tip of Long Island, N.Y. "Drawing conclusions about relocating research with highly infectious exotic animal pathogens from questionable methodology could result in regrettable consequences," the GAO warned in its draft report. Critics of moving the operation to the mainland argue that a release could lead to widespread contamination that could kill livestock, devastate a farm economy and endanger humans. Along with the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, NBAF researchers plan to study African swine fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever and other viruses in the Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 and BSL-4 livestock laboratory capable of developing countermeasures for foreign animal diseases. GAO noted that the United Kingdom's outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, resulted from an accidental release at a biological research laboratory south of London and six million sheep, cattle and pigs had to be slaughtered to stop the contamination. "This really boils down to politics at its very worst and public officials who are more concerned about erecting some gleaming new research building than thinking about what's best for the general public," says Guiffre. Google and NSA Teaming Up to Battle Cyberattacks The Washington Post reports that an agreement is being finalized between the National Security Agency and Google to analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm says originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack. Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership but sources with knowledge of the arrangement say the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications. Any agreement would mark the first time that Google has entered a formal information-sharing relationship with the NSA, sources say. In 2008, google stated that it had not cooperated with the NSA in its Terrorist Surveillance Program. "The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?" says Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Federal Government Will Need 600,000 New Employees The Washington Post reports that according to the results of a government-wide survey, the federal government needs to hire more than 270,000 workers for "mission-critical" jobs over the next three years and 600,000 people for all positions over President Obama's four years, a surge prompted in part by the large number of baby-boomer federal workers reaching retirement age and reflecting the administration's intent to take on several enormous challenges, including the repair of the financial sector, fighting two wars, and addressing climate change. "It has to win the war for talent in order to win the multiple wars it's fighting for the American people," said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, the think tank that conducted the survey of 35 federal agencies, representing nearly 99 percent of the federal workforce. Despite the projected growth in federal jobs, the size of the government would be no larger than at most other times in the country's post-World War II history, both in relative and absolute terms. In 1970, for example, the number of civilians on the federal payroll numbered 2,095,100, a figure that represented a little more than 1 percent of the U.S. population while in 2008, the comparable figure was 2,020,200, or 0.66 percent. The nation's unsettled economy and high unemployment rate may ease the government's task, as workers turn to the federal sector for job security and good benefits. Stier says many federal agencies will have to fight to attract top talent, particularly in fields in which government cannot compete with private-sector salaries. "Most are going to see extreme competition with the private sector." Most HS Biology Teachers Don't Endorse Evolution The Washington Post reports that a new study by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer shows that most high school biology teachers are reluctant to endorse evolution in class with only 28 percent consistently implementing National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and crafting lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology. While 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light," Berkman and Plutzer dub the remaining teachers the "cautious 60 percent," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives and who "fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments." The researchers found the "cautious 60 percent" commonly use different strategies to avoid controversy. Some teach evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology, ignoring an opportunity to impart a rich understanding of the diversity of species and evidence that one species gives rise to others. Other teachers rationalize the teaching of evolution by referring to high-stakes examinations telling "students it does not matter if they really 'believe' in evolution, so long as they know it for the test." Berkman and Plutzer say the nation must have better-trained biology teachers who can confidently advocate for high standards of science education in their local communities. "Combined with continued successes in courtrooms and the halls of state government, this approach offers our best chance of increasing the scientific literacy of future generations." Carriers Cash Cow Challenged by Free Texting Apps The Washington Post reports that a new crop of messaging apps -- including one recently bought by Facebook -- are threatening the wireless industry's cash cow - the text message which costs a wireless carrier close to nothing to send and receive -- even though they charge about $10 a month for 500 to 1,000 texts. Beluga, bought by Facebook earlier this week, is among several free group messaging services that allows users to send texts to contact lists, Twitter followers and Facebook friends through a smartphone application. "Facebook is, at its core, a communications company. The move to acquire Beluga makes this explicit. Beluga puts Facebook squarely into competition with carriers for the first time," writes analyst Craig Moffett adding that a trend toward in-app texting could eat into the revenues of wireless carriers who don't get the same rate of returns from data consumption. "The question is: how long will it be until this inefficiency is addressed? Just because there is demand doesn't mean that consumers are willing to pay so much for a service that costs so little to the operator." Russia to Help NATO Build Anti-Missile Network The Washington Post reports that Russia has agreed to cooperate with NATO on erecting a US-planned anti-missile network in Europe protecting the continent against possible ballistic missile attacks from Iran or elsewhere. The anti-missile coverage would be anchored by a US land- and sea-based deployment, reconfigured by Obama from earlier plans devised under the Bush administration. The new idea would be to link individual national missile defenses into the US network and place them all under a NATO command and control center with authority to respond to an attack. "We see Russia as a partner, not an adversary," says President Obama, hailing the NATO-Russian accord. President Dmitri Medvedev warned that Russia's cooperation must be "a full-fledged strategic partnership between Russia and NATO" and not just a nod in Moscow's direction to spare Russian feelings while Europe tends to its own defenses in tandem with the United States. Meanwhile, Iran's continued nuclear enrichment program and work on ballistic missiles have established it as the main perceived threat among NATO nations. "Let's call a spade a spade," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a press conference. "The main threat is Iran. France would have refused the missile shield had it been hostile to Russia." Pre-Orders Brisk for Apple's new iPad The Washington Post reports that Apple racked up an estimated 91,000 iPad sales in the first six hours of availability, temporarily putting to rest the Internet's persistent "iPad fail" meme. Analysts now predict the first-year sales could reach 5 million. Still, despite the avalanche of pre-release hype, Friday's pre-order mania was tempered by considerable ambivalence among the geeked-out on discussion boards and on Twitter. "Early adopters," scoffed a poster on Appleinsider.com about the early buyers. "Avoiding the rush to pre-order an iPad today. Going to wait until the [basic] version is in the wild to see how people really like it," said a poster named Mash187 on Twitter. Engadget.com asked its tech-savvy readers whether they planned to buy an iPad, which starts at $499. The result: Nearly 19 percent of 60,000 respondents said yes; 65 percent were negative; and 16 percent clicked "What's an iPad?" Students' Scheduling Errors May Last Days The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. "The school year comes up the same time every year," said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. "When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, 'What have they been doing all summer?' " When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out. By Tuesday evening, that number was down to 4,000. As of noon Wednesday, 3,400 of the school district's 41,000 high school students had no class schedules, officials said. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said that some schools didn't realize there was a problem with schedules until school started and that the trouble was exacerbated by difficulties with SchoolMax, a $4.1 million computer system introduced last school year. SchoolMax went online in Prince George's a year ago to help the county track students' grades, attendance and discipline data. Last year, the program crashed at least four times and was plagued by errors that led to botched schedules, an overcount of students and mistakes on report cards. Jessica Pinkney, a junior, said she was moved to the cafeteria Wednesday morning after two days in the gymnasium because the cafeteria had air conditioning. "We just sit and do nothing," says Pinkney. "But I'm meeting new people, so it's getting more interesting." First Internet Election Takes Place in Hawaii The Washington Post reports that voting has ended in what is being touted as the nation's first all-digital election and city officials say it has been a success after some 7.300 voters in Honolulu's neighborhood council election were able to pick winners entirely online or via telephone. Although only 6.3 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, city officials say the experiment appears to have generated few problems and it even saved the financially strapped city around $100,000. "It is kind of the wave of the future," said Bryan Mick, a community relations specialist with the city Neighborhood Commission, "so we're kind of glad in a way that we got to be the ones who initiated it." Before the first day of balloting, voters living in 22 neighborhood board districts with contested races received a passcode that, along with the last four digits of their Social Security number, gave them access to an election Web site created by Everyone Counts. Voting also was conducted by phone, with results electronically fed into the same computer system that collected the Web votes. Lori Steele, head of Everyone Counts, the San Diego-based firm chosen by the commission to run the election, said the computer codes in her firm's system are available for auditing, and that each completed ballot is heavily encrypted and more secure than that used in Internet banking. Web voting, which produces no paper record, cannot be used in city council or state elections because state law bars voting systems that do not include a vote verification process. "The technology side, it works," said Joan Manke, executive secretary of the commission. "So my sense is because it's a change, it's something totally new, it takes time. I think, for people to buy into it, to want to actually try it." Blogger's Case Tests Limits of Free Speech The Washington Post has a report on the pending trial of internet "shock jock" and white supremacist Hal Turner charged with threatening the lives of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit after he posted photographs on his blog of the appellate judges and a map showing the Chicago courthouse where they work, noting the placement of "anti-truck bomb barriers" and wrote "Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed." Turner's case is likely to test the limits of political speech at a time when incendiary talk is proliferating on broadcast outlets and the Internet, from the microphones of well-known commentators to the keyboards of anonymous netizens. "He gave an opinion. He did not say go out and kill," says Turner's defense attorney Michael Orozco after unsuccessfully seeking bail. "This is political hyperbole, nothing more." Joseph Persichini Jr., chief of the FBI's Washington field office, says that "law enforcement's challenge every day is to balance the civil liberties of the United States citizen against the need to investigate activities that might lead to criminal conduct. No matter how offensive to some, we are keenly aware expressing views is not a crime and the protection afforded under the Constitution cannot be compromised." First Amendment scholar Martin H. Redish adds that much of what Turner wrote is protected by the Constitution, including his declarations that the judges should be eliminated but says that Turner probably crossed a line when he printed information about the judges, their office locations and the courthouse. "I would give very strong odds on a thousand bucks that once he said that stuff, it takes it out of any kind of hyperbole range." Leaking Oil Well Lacked Safeguard Device The Wall Street Journal reports that the oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated but US regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. On all offshore oil rigs, there is one main switch for cutting off the flow of oil by closing a valve located on the ocean floor. Many rigs also have automatic systems, such as a "dead man" switch as a backup that is supposed to close the valve if it senses a catastrophic failure aboard the rig. As a third line of defense, some rigs have the acoustic trigger, a football-sized remote control costing about $500,000 that uses sound waves to communicate with the valve on the seabed floor and close it. While US regulators have called the acoustic switches unreliable and prone, in the past, to cause unnecessary shut-downs, Inger Anda, a spokeswoman for Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority, said the switches have a good track record in the North Sea. "It's been seen as the most successful and effective option." Industry critics cite the lack of the remote control as a sign US drilling policy has been too lax. "What we see, going back two decades, is an oil industry that has had way too much sway with federal regulations," says Dan McLaughlin, a spokesman for Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson. "We are seeing our worst nightmare coming true." Crashed Copter Sparks Concern over Stealth Secrets The Wall Street Journal reports that the crash of a helicopter involved in the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout has prompted intense speculation about whether the aircraft was specially modified to fly stealthily-and whether its remains could offer hostile governments clues to sensitive US military technology. Remnants of the helicopter, including a nearly intact piece of its tail, suggested that the aircraft involved in the raid wasn't the typical Black Hawk flown by special-operations forces as aviation experts who scrutinized photos of the scene say the tail had unusual features that suggested the helicopter had been extensively modified to fly quietly, while appearing less visible to radar. "The odds are fair-based on my knowledge of the subject area-the vast majority of the special MH-60s aircraft were purpose-built to make those aircraft as stealthy as they could possibly be," says aviation expert Jay Miller adding that the remnants of the aircraft suggested extensive use of nonmetallic composite parts, which reflect less radar energy. Experts also say the tail rotor's design suggested an effort to reduce the "acoustic signature" of the helicopters to make them fly more quietly. Stealth features would have been particularly important in the bin Laden mission as the Navy assault team presumably wanted to give those in the compound as little warning as possible. Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor The Wall Street Journal reports that TerraPower, an energy start-up backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is in discussions with Toshiba Corp. to develop a small-scale nuclear reactor that would represent a long-term bet to make nuclear power safer and cheaper. Toshiba confirmed it is in preliminary discussions with TerraPower, a unit of Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding concern partially funded by Gates and Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Ohmori says the two sides are talking about how they could collaborate on nuclear technology although discussions are still in early stages and that nothing has been decided on investment or development. TerraPower has publicly said its Traveling Wave Reactor could run for decades on depleted uranium without refueling (PDF) or removing spent fuel from the device. The reactor, the company has said, could be safer, cheaper and more socially acceptable than today's reactors. Gates's recent focus on nuclear power has been fueled by an interest in developing new power systems for developing countries where he says that new energy solutions are needed to combat climate change. Terrapower faces a lengthy, multi-year process to get its "traveling wave" reactor concept reviewed by regulators but if TerraPower succeeds in advancing its plans, it could provide an alternative blueprint for the nuclear industry at a time when new reactors may be coming online. Rich Cling to Life to Beat Tax Man in 2010 The Wall Street Journal reports that starting January 1, 2010 the estate tax -- which can erase nearly half of a wealthy person's estate -- goes away completely for a year but is scheduled to return in 2011 at a 55% rate with an exemption of slightly more than $1 million presenting some families with unprecedented ethical quandaries. "I have two clients on life support, and the families are struggling with whether to continue heroic measures for a few more days," says estate lawyer Joshua Rubenstein. The macabre situation stems from 2001, when Congress raised estate-tax exemptions, culminating with the tax's disappearance next year. However, due to budget constraints, lawmakers didn't make the change permanent. So the estate tax is due to come back to life in 2011 -- at a higher rate and lower exemption. Estate-tax experts didn't expect Congress to allow the tax to lapse, and are flabbergasted that it is actually happening. "I've been practicing for more than 30 years, and never has the timing of death made such a financial difference," says Dennis Belcher, president of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. "People have a hard enough time talking about death and addressing estate planning without this." Of course, plenty of taxpayers themselves have been eager to live to see the new year. But one wealthy, terminally ill real-estate entrepreneur has told his doctors he is determined to live until the law changes. "Whenever he wakes up," says his lawyer, "He says: 'What day is it? Is it January 1 yet?'" US Trade Officials Tell China to Revoke PC Rule The Wall Street Journal reports that senior US trade officials have called on China to revoke an order for personal computers to be shipped with Web-filtering software, saying the requirement could conflict with Beijing's obligations under the World Trade Organization. US Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke urged the Chinese government to reverse its decision in joint letters submitted to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Commerce that "expressed that the US. government is seriously concerned about the Green Dam [requirement], including wide-ranging concerns about the scope of the measure, the censorship implications, trade impact and security flaws which create serious problems for the IT industry and Chinese consumers," a US official said. It was the highest-level U.S. complaint so far against the rule, which is due to take effect July 1 and has already angered free-speech advocates and industry groups. Meanwhile the Chinese companies that created the Web-filtering software have been accused of stealing software code from Santa Barbara-based Solid Oak Software, developer of Cybersitter, a program for parents to filter what their children view on the Web. "We're still analyzing [Green Dam], and it's difficult because of the language barriers in writing that program," says founder Brian Mulburn. "But some of it has our name right on it. If you put the programs side by side, you can see numerous things that are identical to ours." Can Tax Breaks Prolong Life? The Wall Street Journal reports that new tax laws that came into effect starting January 1, 2010 may have motivated at least some terminally ill taxpayers to cling to life to see the new year. The federal estate tax -- which can erase nearly half of a wealthy person's estate -- goes away completely for 2010 but is scheduled to return in 2011 at a 55% rate with an exemption of slightly more than $1 million presenting some families with unprecedented ethical quandaries. "I have two clients on life support, and the families are struggling with whether to continue heroic measures for a few more days," says estate lawyer Joshua Rubenstein. The macabre situation stems from 2001, when Congress raised estate-tax exemptions, culminating with the tax's disappearance in 2010. However, due to budget constraints, lawmakers didn't make the change permanent so the estate tax is due to come back to life in 2011 -- at a higher rate and lower exemption. Estate-tax experts didn't expect Congress to allow the tax to lapse, and are flabbergasted that it is actually happening. "I've been practicing for more than 30 years, and never has the timing of death made such a financial difference," says Dennis Belcher, president of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. "People have a hard enough time talking about death and addressing estate planning without this." Of course, plenty of taxpayers themselves have been eager to live to see the new year. But one wealthy, terminally ill real-estate entrepreneur told his doctors he was determined to live until the law changes. "Whenever he wakes up," says his lawyer, "He says: 'What day is it? Is it January 1 yet?'" Chinese Banks to Finance 600 MW Wind Farm in Texas The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese banks will provide $1.5 billion to a consortium of Chinese and American companies to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China. "This wind farm project came about thanks to the openness of the United States for investments in the field of renewable energy," says John S. Lin, chief operating officer of A-Power Energy Generation Systems, which is part of the consortium building the project. The wind farm will be built on 36,000 acres in West Texas, and will use 240 2.5-megawatt turbines providing enough power to meet the electrical needs of between 135,000 and 180,000 American homes. The wind farm will be the first instance of a Chinese manufacturer exporting wind turbines to the United States, says Yang Yazhou, vice mayor of the city of Shenyang, where the wind turbines will be manufactured. Cappy McGarr, managing partner of US Renewable Energy Group, a private-equity firm that is lead partner on the 600-megawatt development, says the partnership will seek tax credits and support from the federal stimulus package, which should amount to millions of dollars. McGarr says the project should create 2,800 jobs -- of which 15% would be in the US and the rest in China, where Shenyang employs 800 people. The project a "win-win-win for everyone. We're two great countries and we need to work together," says McGarr. China aims to be the front runner in wind- and solar-power generation and Thomas Friedman writes that China's decision to go green "is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik." Hewlett Packard's Cult Calculator Turns 30 The Wall Street Journal reports that Hewlet Packard's HP-12C financial calculator has remained outwardly unchanged since its introduction in 1981. "Once you learned it on the 12C, there was no need to change," says David Carter, chief investment officer of New York wealth-management firm Lenox Advisors, who has owned his 12C for 22 years and still keeps it on his desk. "It's not like the math was changing." The 12C, which costs $70 on HP's website, is HP's best-selling calculator of all time, though the company won't reveal how many units it has sold over the years and the 12C still uses on an unconventional mathematical notation called "Reverse Polish Notation," which eschews parentheses and equal signs in an effort to run long calculations more efficiently which may be one reason users are reluctant to switch and tends to render the calculator mystifying to the novice user. New employees in financial services businesses quickly learn that ignorance of the 12C can flash more warning signs than a scuffed pair of shoes. "The guy with the totally beat-up HP-12C - you know he's actually done things in business," says James Granberry, a student at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management. "And then there's the young guy who looks like he may have put on his suit for the first time-with a graphing calculator." The HP-12C is one of only four calculators permissible in the Chartered Financial Analyst exams, the others being its sister, the HP-12C Platinum, and the Texas Instruments BA II Plus and BA II Plus Professional. Lights Go Out Worldwide for Climate Awareness The Voice of America reports that international landmarks from Sydney's Opera House and the Forbidden City in China, to the glittering Las Vegas Strip and Buckingham Palace in London, will be plunged into darkness today as campaigners renew their efforts to highlight the dangers of climate change. Millions of homes in 125 countries are also expected to take part by switching off their lights for 60 minutes in a show of global solidarity. The environmental campaign began in Sydney, Australia in 2007, when more than 2 million people turned off their lights for 60 minutes to show their concern for the environment. "Earth Hour has been embraced by absolutely everyone across the world. This really is a world citizens' campaign," says Kirsten Hodgon, the project's global director. "We developed Earth Hour so that people could pick it up and make it their own." Organizers say the symbolic event is a potent sign that ordinary citizens care deeply about the environment and the threat of global warming. However critics of Earth Hour have called it part of the "rampant alarmism" surrounding global warming. "Earth Hour is not designed to be scientific, rational, or even constructive," writes the National Post. "It is designed to inspire fear and assuage guilt. " Vatican to Hold Debate on God and Evolution The Vatican is organizing an international congress on the evolution debate in Rome next year but organizers say the debate will not include proponents of creationism and intelligent design. Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc said that arguments "that cannot be critically defined as being science, or philosophy or theology did not seem feasible to include in a dialogue at this level and, therefore, for this reason we did not think to invite" supporters of creationism and intelligent design. The organizers said that the Roman Catholic Church had never condemned either evolution or Charles Darwin and Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said that evolution was not "a priori incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, with the message of the Bible". LeClerc said that a discussion of evolution was necessary because Darwin "is increasingly discussed in ideological terms rather than, as was intended, in scientific terms" adding that proponents of creationism and "intelligent design" had "generated much confusion, leading to a head-on confrontation between "creationism" and "evolutionism". Vatican Evolution Congress to Exclude Creationism The Vatican is organizing an international conference in Rome next year as one of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" but organizers say the debate will not include proponents of creationism and intelligent design. Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc said that arguments "that cannot be critically defined as being science, or philosophy or theology did not seem feasible to include in a dialogue at this level and, therefore, for this reason we did not think to invite" supporters of creationism and intelligent design. The organizers said that the Roman Catholic Church had never condemned either evolution or Charles Darwin and Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said that evolution was not "a priori incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, with the message of the Bible". LeClerc said that a discussion of evolution was necessary because Darwin "is increasingly discussed in ideological terms rather than, as was intended, in scientific terms" adding that proponents of creationism and "intelligent design" had "generated much confusion, leading to a head-on confrontation between "creationism" and "evolutionism". US Forgets How to Make Trident Missiles The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," says the report by a US congressional committee. Fogbank is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of the thermonuclear bomb on the Trident Missile and US officials say that manufacturing Fogbank requires a solvent cleaning agent which is "extremely flammable" and "explosive" and that the process involves dealing with "toxic materials" hazardous to workers. "This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them," says John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament adding that "perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept." Thomas D'Agostino, administrator or the US National Nuclear Security Administration, told a congressional committee that the administration was spending "a lot of money" trying to make "Fogbank" at Y-12, but "we're not out of the woods yet". Giant Rift in Africa Will Create a New Ocean The University of Rochester reports that a 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean in a million years or so connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa. Using newly gathered seismic data, researchers have reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions. "We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester. The results show that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory previously held and the sudden large-scale events pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events. "This work is a breakthrough in our understanding of continental rifting leading to the creation of new ocean basins," says Ken Macdonald, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara "Lost" and the Emergence of Hypertext Storytelling The tv series "Lost" involves a large cast of characters marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash with episodes that thread lengthy flashbacks of characters' backstories with immediate plots of day-to-day survival and interpersonal relationships, and a larger "mythos" involving the strange and apparently supernatural (or science-fictional) happenings on the island. Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation, that of the hypertext narrative. "In Lost, the connections between characters form the essential hypertext content, which is emphasized by the structure of flashbacks that give the viewer privileged information about characters," writes Beamer. "Paramount are the connections unfolding between characters, ranging from mundane, apparently coincidental meetings in the airport, to more unlikely and in-depth meetings, reaching back through their entire lives and the lives of their families." Beamer writes that the series also pays tribute to video games, another relatively recent interactive means of storytelling. "The introduction of new plot points is heavily foreshadowed, and when the characters finally do break through the hatch, or meet the so-called "Others" "there is a sense of "leveling up," writes Beamer, "passing through a transition point at which a game becomes more complex (and more potentially rewarding)." Another part of the hypertext content is the community created around the series that includes a "Lostpedia" with over 6,000 articles dedicated to the show that elaborate on connections and theories regarding the story. "Lost is evidence of a new kind of cultural creation made possible by technology, where viewers can access and contribute to a huge internet-based fan culture, and are no longer dependent on network broadcast schedules." Osage Oppose Wind Power at Tallgrass Prairie The Tulsa World reports that Principal Chief John D. Red Eagle of the Osage Nation says the tribe, although not opposed to alternative energy development in general, has found significant reasons to oppose wind farms on the tallgrass prairie, "a true national treasure" whose last small fragments remain only in Osage County and in Kansas. The Osage County wind farms would not be built in the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, located northeast of Ponca City, but would be visible from it and Preserve Director Bob Hamilton has urged the county and the state to steer wind development to areas of the county that are not ecologically sensitive. "Not all areas in the Osage are sensitive," says Hamilton. "What makes the tallgrass prairie so special is its big landscape. It's not just local - it has global significance." The Osage also fear that large wind farms will interfere with extracting oil and gas, from which royalties are paid in support of tribal members as the Osage retain their tribal mineral rights owned in common by members of the tribe. "They weren't thinking about the mineral estate - just about compensating landowners," says Galen Crum, chairman of the tribal Minerals Council. "How are we supposed to know the price of oil in 50 years?" Judge Closes Online Access to Info on Civil Case The Tulsa World reports that Judge Linda Morrissey has ordered online access to information about a civil case locked up on the court website for the duration of the trial out of concern that jurors might access the information be prejudiced. The first trial, which focused on a death amid allegations of negligent medical care, wound up in a mistrial because jurors did not reach a verdict, although they deliberated about 14 hours over two days. Lawyers involved in the second trial agreed to the order because they were concerned that jurors could be influenced by getting information, from a record of events in a case filed in February 2007, that could be inadmissible as trial evidence. Morrissey says litigants have a right to a fair trial before an impartial jury, and she routinely gives strong admonitions to jurors that they not search the Internet for information about a case being tried adding that a juror who would not intentionally violate a judge's instructions could still be exposed indirectly to internet information during a trial by contact with curious family members or friends. But not everyone agrees with the judge's decision. The lawyers involved in the trial "don't represent the public's interest in those records," says Joey Senat, an associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University who writes for FOI Oklahoma, adding that what might be convenient to trial participants does not outweigh "the public's right or need to know." Global Warming Begot the "Age of Dinosaurs" The Triassic period ended with a mass extinction that allowed dinosaurs to expand into many unoccupied niches and dominate the earth for the next 150 million years. Now Scientific American reports that for the first time scientists have linked the end-Triassic extinction (ETE) to catastrophic climate change through an analysis of carbon isotopes in wood and soil preserved in rocks and found that that the extinction event at the end of the Triassic occurred at the same time as carbon dioxide levels jumped. Geologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University and her team found a drop in carbon 13 suggesting that more of the lighter isotope of carbon (C 12) had suddenly become available, since plants prefer to use it, which in turn suggests soaring levels of CO2 in the atmosphere providing strong evidence that the eruption of a giant flood of basalt caused a climatic catastrophe resulting in the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic that early dinosaurs were apparently in a good position to exploit. "It does not paint a pretty picture of what happens when CO2 levels rise," writes David Biello adding that it remains to be seen which species might benefit from today's ongoing sixth extinction and its related climate change. "It usually isn't the dominant life forms on the planet at the time." Researchers Race to Recover Radioactive Rabbits The Tri-City Herald reports that radioactive rabbit droppings were recently found near the old Hanford Nuclear Site in southeast Washington that produced nuclear materials for 40 years and is now being decontaminated. The Department of Health looks for contamination off-site to make sure there is no public hazard and a rabbit trapped at the 300 Area caught the their attention because it was close enough to the site's boundaries to potentially come in contact with the public -- such as if it had been caught by a dog or if its droppings were deposited in an area open to the public. Joe Franco, an assistant manager for the Department of Energy, said workers erected fences, removed potential food sources and even sprayed the scent of a predator around the perimeter to prevent any other rabbit contamination and the Department of Energy said only one of 18 rabbits surveyed were deemed contaminated. Researchers narrowed the area of possible contamination to the 327 Building used during the Cold War for testing highly radioactive materials, particularly fuel elements and cladding that were irradiated at Hanford reactors as part of plutonium production for the nation's nuclear weapons program. Because the number of contaminated droppings being discovered on-site has decreased, officials now believe it's possible that just one rabbit might have been contaminated and they now are finding old droppings from it. One theory is that the rabbit might have been sipping water that collected in the building's basement after water was sprayed during demolition to suppress dust. "While this does not pose a worker safety or public health issue, we take our responsibility to prevent the spread of contamination seriously," said Franco. In 2009, personnel at the Hanford site handled 26,000 animal control requests. Records for the same year indicate 33 contaminated animals or animal-related materials were discovered. Text Messaging Helps People Quit Smoking The Toronto Star reports that supportive text messages can be an invaluable tool to help people quit smoking as a study demonstrated that messaging doubled the chances of people quitting smoking over the long term. "Quite a lot of smokers find it relatively easy to quit for a few weeks, but after that a lot start smoking again," says Dr. Caroline Free. "That's why we needed to assess how text messages contribute to quitting smoking." The study assessed the effect of an automated smoking cessation program delivered via mobile phone text messaging on continuous abstinence, which was biochemically verified at 6 months. Free and a team of researchers set up a randomized study, involving 5800 people: 2,915 of them were assigned to the group that received supportive text messages; the other 2,885 were allocated to the control group. The text-message group received five text messages a day for the first five weeks, then three text messages per week after that for the remainder of the six months. A personalized system allowed them to text the word "crave" or "lapse" so they could receive a message. The participants received a variety of text messages including: "Today is the start of being QUIT forever, you can do it!" while the control group in the study received only occasional messages thanking them for participating in the study. Free believes that text messages could become an important method of support for quitting smoking programs. "One of the lovely things about text messages is everyone has a phone. It's very convenient for people. They don't have to do much." Mathematical Model Predicts Extinction of Religion The tools of statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics have been used successfully in the past to analyze models of social phenomena ranging from language choice to political party affiliation to war and peace. Now the BBC reports that a mathematical model that explains historical census data of religious affiliation from 85 countries also predicts that religion is heading towards extinction in nine countries including Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland where increasingly high rates of citizens identify themselves as non-affiliated with religion. "In the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%," says Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The idea behind the model is pretty simple says Wiener. "It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility." The model presents a new framework for understanding of different models of human behavior in majority/minority social systems in which groups compete for members (PDF) and is similar to a model proposed in 2003 that put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages by examining the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another. "It's interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going. Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out." Iran Moves to End 'Facebook Revolution' The Times reports that the Iranian government is mounting a campaign to disrupt independent media organisations and websites that air doubts about the validity of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the nation's president. Reports from Tehran say that social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter were taken down after Mr Ahmadinejad claimed victory. SMS text messaging, a preferred medium of communication for young Iranians, has also been disabled. This is widely suspected to be the result of government interference, but could equally be caused by the poor quality of the network and the heavy demand it is experiencing. "The blocking of access to foreign news media has been stepped up. In addition to the blocking of the BBC's website, the Farsi-language satellite broadcasts of the Voice of America and BBC - which are very popular in Iran - have been partially jammed," says Reporters Without Borders, the media organisation that campaigns for a free press around the world. "The Internet is now very slow, like the mobile phone network. YouTube and Facebook are hard to access and pro-reform sites. . . are completely inaccessible." Mir Hussein Moussavi, the presidential challenger whom President Ahmedinejad claims to have defeated with 63.4 per cent of the vote and fellow presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi have urged the population not to accept the "rigged results." There have been violent clashes between opposition supporters and security forces, with at least one death in the capital. Has Superstition Evolved to Help Mankind Survive? The tendency to falsely link cause to effect Đ a superstition Đ is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but "if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around." Foster worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off and found as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored. In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. "The chances are that most of them don't do anything, but some of them do," Foster says. Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect Đ often falsely Đ science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition. "You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," Forstmeier says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often." Giant Nomura's Jellyfish Sink Japanese Trawler The Telegraph reports that the trawler, Diasan Shinsho-maru, has capsized off the coast of China as its three-man crew dragged their net through a swarm of giant jellyfish which can grow up to six feet in diameter and travel in packs and tried to haul up a net that was too heavy. The crew was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler. The local Coast Guard office reported that the weather was clear and the sea was calm at the time of the accident. Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures. Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish. "Jellies have likely swum and swarmed in our seas for over 600 million years," says "jellyologist" Monty Graham of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. "When conditions are right, jelly swarms can form quickly. They appear to do this for sexual reproduction." Children's Book on Evolution Wins Booktrust Award The Telegraph reports that the Booktrust Early Years Award has been bestowed on Chris Wormell for his children's book "One Smart Fish" that teaches the theory of evolution to under-fives by telling the story of a fish who yearns to walk. Wormell didn't set out to write about evolution but wanted to illustrate a book about fish "because they were one of my obsessions as a kid, when I collected fish in tanks. I had the idea of this very smart fish, and then I had the evolution idea - that the one thing this fish wants to do more than anything is walk on the land." Wormell adds it is important for young children to learn about evolution. "We have got to stand up for evolution. Lots of kids don't know about it, although there are quite a few who do, and when I do readings in schools a kid will always say, 'Are you telling me we all came from fish?' And it gets a great discussion going," says Wormell. "The kids are around five or six and it's really interesting having that conversation." Vatican Debates Possibility of Alien Life The Telegraph reports that the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church. For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God "made man in his own image" and Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused: would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal? Just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible's teachings. "Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God," says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organizers of the conference. Others do not agree. "If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations," says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist. "The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism." Vatican Warns that Internet Promotes Satanism The Telegraph reports that the Roman Catholic Church has warned that the internet has fueled a surge in Satanism that has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists. "The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism. In just a few minutes you can contact Satanist groups and research occultism," says Carlo Climati, a member of the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome who specializes in the dangers posed to young people by Satanism. "There is a particular risk for young people who are in difficulties or who are emotionally fragile." Organizers of a six-day conference that has brought together more than 60 Catholic clergy as well as doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and youth workers, co-sponsored by the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments and the Congregation for Clergy say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years. "There's been a revival," says Father Gabriele Nanni, a former exorcist. "We must be on guard because occult and Satanist practices are spreading a great deal, in part with the help of the internet and new technologies that make it easier to access these rituals." Need a Favor? Talk To My Right Ear The Telegraph reports that scientists have found that if you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear. Known as the "right ear advantage," scientists believe it is because information received through the right ear is processed by the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information than the right side of the brain. "Talk into the right ear you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain," say researchers. The team led by Dr Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University of Chieti in central Italy, observed behavior of hundreds of people in three nightclubs across the city where they intentionally addressed 176 people in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left. "These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized specialization of right and left hemispheres," say researchers. "We can also see this tendency when people use the phone, most will naturally hold it to their right ear." 'Flowers for Algernon' Becoming a Reality The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the world's cleverest rat, able to remember objects for three times longer than other rats and better at finding its way through mazes, by modifying a single gene in a technique they believe one day could be used to boost human brainpower. The rat, named Hobbie-J, was injected with genetic material when it was an embryo to boost the NR2B gene which controls memory. "Hobbie-J can remember information for longer. It's the equivalent of me giving you a telephone number and somehow you remembering it for an hour," says Dr Joe Z Tsien, who led the experiment at the Medical College of Georgia. "Our study provides a solid basis for the rationale that the NR2B gene is critical to enhancing memory. That gene could be used for memory-enhancing drugs." The success brings hope for future dementia patients, as it is thought the gene enhancement could one day be used in a drug treatment for human brain disorders. However mega-memory could be a major burden says Neuroscientist Guosong Liu. "The danger of extending memory in healthy people could be considerable," Liu says. "There is a reason we forget. We are supposed to leave our bad experiences behind, so they do not haunt us." Scientists Discover Biggest Star The Telegraph reports that scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered the most massive stellar giant, R136a1 measured at 265 solar masses, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and data from the Hubble Space Telescope, in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small 'satellite' galaxy which orbits the Milky Way. Previously, the heaviest known stars were around 150 times the mass of the Sun, known as the "Eddington Limit", and this was believed to be close to the cosmic size limit because as stars get larger, the amount of energy created in their cores grows, faster than the force of gravity which holds them together. "Because of their proximity to the Eddington Limit they lose mass at a pretty high rate," says Professor Paul Crowther, the chief researcher in the Sheffield team. Hyper-stars like R136a1 are believed to be formed from several young stars merging together, and are only found in the very heart of stellar clusters. R136a1 is believed to have a surface temperature of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius, and is 10 million times brighter than the Sun. Crowther adds that R136a1 is about as big as stars can get. "Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon." Dogs as Intelligent as Average Two-Year-Old Child The Telegraph reports that researchers using tests originally designed to demonstrate the development of language, pre-language and basic arithmetic in human children have found that dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, can count up to five and can perform simple mathematical calculations putting them on par with the average two-year-old child. While most dogs understand simple commands such as sit, fetch and stay, a border collie tested by Professor Coren showed a knowledge of 200 spoken words. "Obviously we are not going to be able to sit down and have a conversation with a dog, but like a two-year-old, they show that they can understand words and gestures," says Professor Stanley Coren, a leading expert on canine intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Coren has also found that dogs can count using established tests developed for young children. and when something unexpected happens with an object, children and dogs will stare at it for a longer period of time. "Dogs can tell that one plus one should equal two and not one or three.," says Coren adding that dogs "can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life." Coren believes centuries of selective breeding and living alongside humans has helped to hone the intelligence of dogs. "They may not be Einsteins, but are sure closer to humans than we thought." New Call Center Software Will Know When You're Angry The Telegraph reports that researchers have developed new voice recognition software that detects how users are feeling that could be used in automated call centers to route inquiries differently according to the emotional state of the caller. The researchers looked closely at the anger, boredom and doubt that people often experience when talking to automated call center voices and by examining tone of voice, the speed of speech, the duration of pauses, the energy of the voice signal and up to a total of sixty different Ôacoustic parameters', they have produced computer models of what people sound like according to the emotions they are feeling. "Thanks to this new development, the machine will be able to determine how the user feels and how the caller intends to continue the dialog (PDF)", claims David Griol one of its creators. "For example, a dialog management strategy could be as follows: If the emotional state is Angry apologize and transfer the call to a human operator immediately." Threatened Languages Digitally Archived for Future The Telegraph reports that of the world's 6,000 natural languages, half will probably not survive for another generation so experts are encouraging native people and anthropologists to capture myths, folk songs chants and poems in their dying languages through a collected oral literature compiled into a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the "nuts and bolts" of lost cultures readily available. "When a language becomes endangered so too does a cultural world view," says Dr Mark Turin of Cambridge University's Department of Social Anthropology. ""We want to engage with indigenous people trying to document their myths and folklore." The first batch of archives material includes a recording of folk music of the Lo Monthang region, Nepal, and ceremonial chanting in the VaupŽs Region of Colombia. The World Oral Literature Project has already handed out around 10 grants to tribes from Mongolia to Nigeria - and the researchers admitted traditional British languages such as Cornish and Gaelic are also at risk. ""People often think it's often only tribal cultures that are under threat," says Turin. "But all over Europe there are pockets of traditional communities and speech forms that have become extinct." Twins' DNA Foils Police The Telegraph reports that James and John Parr were both arrested after watches worth Ł10,000 were stolen from a shopping center after police found blood on a piece of glass at the scene of the crime and traced it back to the 25-year-old identical twins through DNA tests. But James and John both denied the theft and, because they have identical DNA, it has been impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which twin is responsible. "The police told us that they knew it was one of us, but we both denied it," says James. "I definitely know I didn't do anything wrong. I was watching my daughter that night." Now the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has concluded that it cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt who was responsible. "Unless further evidence becomes available, we are unable to authorize any charge at this time", says CPS spokesman Rob Pett. "This is certainly not something that we regularly encounter." Identical twins have hindered police investigations a number of times since the advent of DNA testing. In Malaysia last year, a man suspected of drug-smuggling and sentenced to death was released when the court could not prove whether it was he or his twin brother might have committed the crime. Google Search Leads to Mystery Countdown Clock The Telegraph reports that Google has sparked a mystery by launching an unexplained countdown that appears when users press the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the search engine when no words are entered into the search box. Simple calculations indicate that the number will fall to zero in 17 days Đ around the turn of the New Year but Google has released no statement explaining the hidden clock after initial speculation that the search giant had advance warning of the end of the world. This would be the latest in a long line of pranks and hidden treats dropped into Google products by the firm's engineers. For example, type "recursion" into the google search box and it suggests "recursion" as an alternative, sending you on a loop of clicks that all generate identical results; or spin round to the waterfront side of the Sydney Opera House in Google Earth and you'll find a model of the late wildlife expert and adventurer Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile; or type "answer to life, the universe and everything" into the google query box and the answer to the calculation will be "42". Texting Mimics Human Speech says Researcher The Telegraph reports that Dr Caroline Tagg, a British linguist who has studied thousands of SMS messages, says that the language used in texts is closer to the spoken word than that used on paper and that contrary to the belief that text messaging is destroying the art of communication, she claims it is actually enhancing language skills. "Text messaging is far closer to speech than formal writing, " says Tagg. "It is in a way a new form of communication between the two. Quite the contrary from destroying the English it is actually encouraging it." Tagg spent three-and-a-half years studying the spelling, grammar and abbreviations used in SMS text messaging analyzing 11,000 text messages (PDF), containing 190,000 words, sent by 235 people, aged between 18 and 65. From this analysis, Tagg discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words and often using grammatical abbreviations like "dunno". From her research Tagg believes that texts are much more about maintaining and building relationships rather than passing on raw facts and as such they tend to include a lot of information which is irrelevant but entertaining. "People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive." Some Overheating 3GS iPhones Glow Pink The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. "I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost," writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. "The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network. It doesn't get burning hot, but very noticeably warm." Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology to pinpoint their location and provide directions. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World that "I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot -- not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too." Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. "My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs," said Aaron Vronko who fixes iPods and iPhones. "If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more." Apple was not available for comment. Every British Citizen to Have a Personal Webpage The Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is about to announce that within a year everyone in Great Britain will be given a personalized webpage for accessing Government services as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online. The move could see the closure of job centers and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefit within 10 years as services are offered through a single digital 'gateway. [This] "saves time for people and it saves money for the Government - the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically," says Tim Berners-Lee, an advisor to the Prime Minister. However, the proposals are coming under fire from union leaders who complain that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data. ''Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole," says one union leader. Ten New Nuclear Plants Get Go-Ahead in UK The Telegraph reports that Britain's Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband has announced ten sites to house the new generation of nuclear power stations to expand Britain's nuclear power capability as consumer groups warned that fuel bills could rise to pay for building program. The new plants will be built on the sites of old nuclear power stations or those soon to be decommissioned and the first new power plant should be operational by 2018 as the Government hopes that by 2025, nuclear will generate a quarter of the country's electricity compared to 13 per cent now. "In a world where our North Sea reserves are declining, a more diverse, low-carbon energy mix is a more secure energy mix, less vulnerable to fluctuations in the availability of any one fuel," says Miliband. Conservatives attacked the plans for being "10 years too late" and Greg Clark, the shadow energy and climate change secretary, said: "Ed Miliband's statement is made necessary by the Government's admission in July that it expects power cuts in 2017 " adding that "15 successive energy ministers - a new one every nine months - behaved like the ostrich and stuck their heads in the sand rather than face up to the action that was needed to address our energy black hole." Apple Store is 'Most Profitable Shop in London' The Telegraph reports that based on sales per square foot, Apple's flagship store on London's Regent Street with sales of around Ł60 million per year is the most profitable store of its size in London. "To make Ł60 million a year from a shop of Apple's size is phenomenal," said Neil Saunders, a spokesman for Verdict. "Apple's Regent Street store has extremely strong footfall, since it has become a tourist attraction in its own right." The sales equate to Ł2,000 per square foot, way ahead of rival electrical retailers, which generate an average of Ł722 per square foot. and eclipses even Harrods, which makes Ł751 per square foot. Apple's Regent Street outlet Đ one of 21 in the UK Đ spans two floors and covers 28,000 square feet. "Shoppers pay a premium for the Apple brand, and there is never discounting, so customers don't waver over buying elsewhere," adds Saunders. Julian Assange's Online Dating Profile Leaked The Telegraph reports that an online dating profile created by Julian Assange in 2006 has been unearthed from OKCupid, the self-proclaimed "best dating site on Earth," disclosing that the WikiLeaks editor sought "spirited, erotic" women "from countries that have sustained political turmoil." Writing under the pseudonym of British science fiction author Harry Harrison, creator of "The Stainless Steel Rat," alias "Slippery Jim," a futuristic con man, thief and all-round rascal, Assange described himself as a "passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual." Assange said he was seeking a "siren for [a] love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy" adding that he was "directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated" and added enigmatically: "I am DANGER, ACHTUNG". Among Assange's listed interests were the "structure of reality" and "chopping up human brains" Đ although he added the caveat "(neuroscience background)" lest the latter put off potential admirers. "I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil," Assange wrote. "Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!" 'Obsessed' American Couple Wed at Apple Store The Telegraph reports that an an 'obsessed' American couple, Josh and Ting Li, have become the first to marry inside one of the technology giant's stores saying "iDo" at the city's Apple store on Fifth Avenue, at 12.01 on Valentine's Day in a ceremony dominated with the company's products and references to them. A video shows that the pair, who met in the Apple store, had their priest, dressed as Steve Jobs, read their vows from their iPhones while the rings were tied to a ribbon wrapped around a first generation iPod. Mrs Ling, dressed in a strapless wedding dress, had her vows written on a card that said "I love you more than this" followed by a picture of an iPhone. "We got to know each other because Ting was looking to buy an iPod and I managed to strike up a conversation that way," says Mr. Ting. "I used to joke that the Apple Store is my church because I am not religious, and I loved everything Apple." No word on where the couple honeymooned although some say they may have remained in "the big apple." New iPhone App May Make Divorce 'Too Easy' The Telegraph reports that a new iPhone app claims to offer easy to understand advice about divorce law, but family campaigners have raised concerns about whether the program risks trivializing marriage and divorce. The program, offering advice specific to England and Wales, was designed by an accredited specialist family lawyer but warns that it "is not a substitute for professional advice to which users are directed throughout the app when appropriate". However Campaigners Christian Voice accused the app of trivializing the process of divorce and says the app it "could encourage divorce by normalizing the decision, making it seem as easy to make as any other lifestyle choice. It could also deter the other partner from fighting to save their marriage." On the other hand Anastasia de Waal of the think tank Civitas says that she thinks that if "solely impenetrable legalese stands between you and spousal severance, some jargon-busting might be a good thing. But ultimately the chances are this app will be mainly used by the curious". Spaceworms to help Study Astronaut Muscle Loss The Telegraph reports that 4,000 microscopic worms were onboard Space Shuttle Atlantis when it launched today. Their mission - to help experts in human physiology understand more about what triggers the body to build and lose muscle. The worms are bound for the Japanese Experiment Module ''Kibo'' on the International Space Station (ISS) where they will experience the same weightless conditions which can cause dramatic muscle loss, one of the major health concerns for astronauts. ''If we can identify what causes the body to react in certain ways in space we establish new pathways for research back on earth," says Dr Nathaniel Szewczyk. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been carefully selected and brought to a dormant state for the journey, traveling in special cell culture bags. Once in space they will be brought back from their dormant state with the release of food, exposed to conditions in space for four days and then frozen in preparation for the return journey. The effect of this journey on their muscle mass will be investigated once the worms are returned to earth. "Some of our worms will be treated with RNAi against specific proteases to see if we can stop muscle protein degradation in space," adds Szewczyk. ''The CERISE payload is an important space medicine experiment as it will establish if RNAi, which was the subject of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine, is a viable technique for altering the biological response to space flight. Scientists Create Artificial Meat The Telegraph reports that scientists have created for first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to "exercise" the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time. "What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," says Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University. ""You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals." Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory grown meat announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection" while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical. "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust." World's First Battery Fueled by Air The Telegraph reports on the revolutionary 'STAIR' (St Andrews Air) battery could now pave the way for a new generation of electric cars, laptops and mobile phones. The cells are charged in a traditional way but as power is used an open mesh section of battery draws in oxygen from the surrounding air that reacts with a porous carbon component inside the battery, which creates more energy and helps to continually 'charge' the cell as it is being discharged. The battery has a greater storage capacity than other similar-sized cells and can emit power up to 10 times longer. "The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery," says Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at the University of St Andrews. "Our target is to get a five to ten fold increase in storage capacity, which is beyond the horizon of current lithium batteries." Craigslist's Most Bizarre Advertisements The Telegraph is running a story with a selection of some of the most bizarre advertisements, requests and personals listed from the site including an elderly woman looking for a lodger to live in her bathroom, a man selling 1,300 Pope hats, the chair Ralph Nader sat in, an autographed copy of Plato's Republic, a ferocious attack kitten, and a collection of ketchup packets from around the world including packets from Japan, Finland, Estonia, Greenland, Brazil, and Portugal. Linux fans may be interested in three hundred Stuffed Penguins being offered free "to a good home" by someone who "probably won't 'catch a man' or have anyone believe I'm about to turn 23 with 300 penguins and a bunch of purple furniture around," writes a seller from Austin adding that she "loved penguins as a child--long before they were trendy and had their own series of CGI movies or the godly voice of Morgan Freeman was involved--and collected them, often putting on penguin weddings and penguin ballet recitals where I made costumes for individual penguins, all of whom had names that I kept track of on my penguin censuses." Our personal favorite: a woman to sit in my bath tub full of noodles wearing a bathing suit specifying that "I will not be home, nor will anyone else while you do this. I will leave the key for you, and you will sit at your leisure. DO NOT bring any sauce. I will season the pasta after I return home prior to dinner." Can anybody top that one? No, on second thought, please don't try. The World's Most Pointless Inventions The Telegraph has an interesting story about the annual Landfill Prize, a brainchild of environmentalist writer John Naish, who invites members of the public to nominate products for the "most pointless, frivolous and wasteful consumer objects" of the year. Entries submitted this year included the "Plane Sheet," a cover that can be placed over airline seats to "transform a tired, overused airline seat into a cozy, happy place while keeping at bay germs, crumbs and spills from previous passengers," and the USB chameleon that plugs into a computer and sits on a desk while his eyes roll and he sticks out his tongue but doesn't change color, but this years winner was the motorized ice-cream cone, available in three colors, designed for people too lazy to twist their own wrists when eating ice-cream. Previous nominees have included the Philips Sonicare Flexcare brush that comes with it's own ultraviolet-light sanitizing equipment, the Ambi-Pur "three-fragrance" air freshener, and Gillette's six-bladed, battery-powered, wet razor. Readers are invited to provide their own nominations for the most unnecessarily convoluted consumer inventions that help to increase the teetering junkpile of refuse we produce every year. Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure The Tampa Tribune reports that Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Tampa about the three big failures he had before he started Wikipedia and what he learned from them. In 1996 Wales started an Internet service to connect downtown lunchers with area restaurants. "The result was failure," says Wales. "In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars." Next Wales started a search engine company called 3Apes. In three months, it was taken over by Chinese hackers and the project failed. Third was an online encyclopedia called Newpedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. Wales spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles and it failed. Finally Wales had a "really dumb idea," a free encyclopedia written by anyone who wanted to contribute. That became Wikipedia, which is now one of the top 10 most-popular Web sites in the world. This leads to Wales' theories of failure: Fail faster - If a project is doomed, shut it down quickly; Don't tie your ego to any one project - If it stumbles, you'll be unable to move forward; Real entrepreneurs fail; Fail a lot but enjoy yourself along the way; If you handle these things well, "you will succeed." The Ethics of Sex with Robots The Sonoma State Star reports that philosophy professor John Sullins says that as engineers work to design visually pleasing and life-like mechanical robots that simulate emotions, the potential psychological outcomes of this form of advanced technology may pose a threat to the way society functions as a whole. "Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things in their environment, like naming their car, for instance. People have a compelling need to make connections with things in their lives," says Sullins adding that engineers have the ability to access human psychological weaknesses when they build a computer that takes the shape of a visually pleasing and attractive mate that can say emotionally moving things, like "I love you," during physically intimate moments. Author David Levy says that these types of robots will be able to end pedophilia and prostitution and that robot sex will become the only sexual outlet for a few sectors of the population: the misfits, the very shy, the sexually inadequate and uneducable but although Levy enlightens his readers with the benefits that sex robots can provide humans, Sullins still believes that they will ultimately cause social isolation.. "Plato argues that in life, humans should not just try to obtain sexual gratification, but they should try to attain the erotic," says Sullins adding that the concept of "the erotic," can be described as a loving and meaningful relationship that transports lovers to a philosophically higher place and helps them become better people. Hackers Hijack 1 Million Cell Phones in China The Shangai Daily reports that more than 1 million cell phone users in China have been infected since September with a virus that automatically sends text messages costing users a combined $300,000 per day. The "zombie" virus, hidden in a bogus anti-virus application, sends the phone user's SIM card information to hackers, who then remotely control the phone to send URL links, usually pay-per-click ads, in text messages to contacts in the user's address book. Mobile security expert Zou Shihong at Beijing University Posts and Telecommunications likens the new attack to a pyramid scheme, since by texting everyone in an infected user's address book, the malicious code has the potential to spread exponentially. The cell phone virus attack mirrors the Troj/SymbSms-A malware seen earlier this year, which infects Symbian phones. That particular attack targeted Russian cell phone subscribers, infecting their phones with a virus that automatically texts premium-rate Russian phone numbers until the infected smartphone runs out of credit. According to Zhou Yonglin, an official with China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Team, mobile operators are having difficulty eradicating the malicious application, owing to the breakneck pace of new variations appearing. The Science of Humor The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says that humor (or mirth, in research speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. "We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain's reward for discovering its mistaken inferences," says Hurley, co-author of "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind," adding that with humor, the brain doesn't just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the funniest joke in the world by American men. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading. Humor is "when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You've made an assumption about the state of the world, and you're behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn't hold at all, and you get a little chuckle." The Painkilling Medication that Save Money but Costs Lives The Seattle Times reports that Medicaid patients are steered to a narcotic painkiller that costs less than a dollar a dose but since 2003 over 2,000 patients have died in Washington State alone by accidentally overdosing on methadone, a commonly prescribed drug used to treat chronic pain. Methadone belongs to a class of narcotic painkillers, called opioids, that includes OxyContin, fentanyl and morphine. Within that group, methadone accounts for less than 10 percent of the drugs prescribed - but more than half of the deaths and although Methadone works wonders for some patients, relieving chronic pain from throbbing backs to inflamed joints, the drug's unique properties make it unforgiving and sometimes lethal. "Most painkillers, such as OxyContin, dissipate from the body within hours. Methadone can linger for days, pooling to a toxic reservoir that depresses the respiratory system," write Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong. "With little warning, patients fall asleep and don't wake up. Doctors call it the silent death." Jeff Rochon, head of the Washington State Pharmacy Association, says pharmacists have long recognized that methadone is different from other painkillers. "The data shows that methadone is a more risky medication," says Rochon. "I think we should be using extreme caution to protect our patients." Global Outsourcing a Disaster on 787 Dreamliner The Seattle Times reports that Jim Albaugh, Boeing's Chief of Commercial Airplanes, says the 787's global outsourcing strategy - specifically intended to slash Boeing's costs - has backfired completely. "We spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we'd tried to keep the key technologies closer to home," says Albaugh. Boeing has been forced to compensate, support or buy out the partners it brought in to share the cost of the new jet's development, and now bears the brunt of additional costs due to the delays. One veteran employee on the 787 says he's witnessing "the perfect storm of manufacturing hell." The global supply chain is at a standstill, and outside the Everett factory the rows of partly finished jets will take many months to complete. "The purpose of flight tests is to find out what you did wrong," says a senior engineer who expects the 787 will ultimately prove successful. "But the amount of stuff we are finding is horrible. We shouldn't be dealing with this many issues this late in the program." Some Wall Street analysts estimate those added costs at between $12 billion and $18 billion, on top of the $5 billion Boeing originally planned to invest. The 787 outsourcing strategy was put place in 2003 by then-Boeing Chairman Harry Stonecipher. "It's easy to look in the rear-view mirror and see things that could have been done differently," adds Albaugh. "I wasn't sitting in the room and I don't know what they were facing." Boeing, Boeing ... Gone? The Seattle Times reports that as Boeing prepares to announce yet another delay for the 787 Dreamliner - at least three months, possibly six or more - the crucial jet program is in even worse shape than it appears with problems go well beyond the latest setback, an in-flight electrical fire last month that has grounded the test planes. Meanwhile, on the production side, one veteran employee on the 787 said he's witnessing "the perfect storm of manufacturing hell." The global supply chain is at a standstill, and outside the Everett factory the rows of partly finished jets will take many months to complete. "The purpose of flight tests is to find out what you did wrong," says a senior engineer who expects the 787 will ultimately prove successful. "But the amount of stuff we are finding is horrible. We shouldn't be dealing with this many issues this late in the program." Jon Talton writes that Boeing has bet the company on the Dreamliner and now faces cost overruns of $12 billion or more. "The experience of doing the 787 on the cheap with a globalized supply chain should shake the foundations of "Welchism," the brutal management style, intimidating anti-employee bias and mania for quick results of retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch," writes Talton. "Boeing is running out of time to ensure its "game changer" doesn't change the game permanently in favor of Airbus and new competitors." Boeing, Boeing ... Gone? The Seattle Times reports that problems with the 787 Dreamliner go well beyond the latest setback, an in-flight electrical fire last month that has grounded the test planes and that engine and electrical issues have raised crucial questions late in the program about the plane's reliability, potentially affecting regulators' certification of the airplane. One veteran employee on the 787 says he's witnessing "the perfect storm of manufacturing hell." The global supply chain is at a standstill, and outside the Everett factory the rows of partly finished jets will take many months to complete. "The purpose of flight tests is to find out what you did wrong," says a senior engineer who expects the 787 will ultimately prove successful. "But the amount of stuff we are finding is horrible. We shouldn't be dealing with this many issues this late in the program." Jon Talton writes that Boeing has bet the company on the Dreamliner and now faces cost overruns of $12 billion or more. "The experience of doing the 787 on the cheap with a globalized supply chain should shake the foundations of "Welchism," the brutal management style, intimidating anti-employee bias and mania for quick results of retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch," writes Talton. "Boeing is running out of time to ensure its "game changer" doesn't change the game permanently in favor of Airbus and new competitors." Iowa Rejects Video Privacy Protection for Cows The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports that an effort to outlaw the undercover recording of animal abuse in livestock operations appears to have stalled in Iowa after previously failing in Minnesota, Florida and New York with the pushback coming from citizens and activists complaining that the proposals were aimed at protecting an industry that doesn't exhibit enough concern for farm animal welfare. A bill introduced earlier this year to criminalize the actions of activists who make unauthorized hidden videos of animal abuse appeared to be headed for approval in the Iowa Legislature with proposed penalties including fines of up to $7,500 and up to five years in prison. "I feel it is wrong to absolutely lie to get a job to try to defame the employer," says Iowa representative Annette Sweeney, a farmer and Republican legislator who sponsored the bill. But District Attorney James R. Horton who filed animal cruelty charges against employees and the owner of a large-scale calf-raising farm says he probably "wouldn't have a case" if not for covert video provided by an animal protection group and says "we wouldn't have anything" in terms of evidence against the suspects in the beating deaths of dairy calves at E6 Cattle Co. Stand Up Comic makes Science Funny The San Fransisco Chronicle is running a story about Brian Malow, a stand-up comedian who has showcased his science-centric stand-up humor for more than a decade in comedy clubs, at conventions and for corporate clients across the country. Fortunately, club patrons don't need a degree in quantum mechanics to appreciate one-liners like "I used to be an astronomer, but I got stuck on the day shift," "I just started reading, 'The Origin of Species.' Don't tell me how it ends!" or that he "attended a magnet school for bipolar students." While his show is very rational and based on hard science, Malow cleverly infuses it with an abstract or surreal comic twist. Like observing that whenever his mother would lose weight, his father would gain weight, and then linking the two by a fundamental law of nature. "It was like the Conservation of Mass within our family," says Malow, adding that "fat can neither be created nor destroyed." Last year Malow performed for colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. "We found his humor delightfully nerdy, and he fitted right in," said Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and author. "It's one thing to make people laugh when they're sitting in a darkened club room, with a few drinks in them. It takes real talent to be funny in the afternoon, in a work environment." Malow's interest in science and nature also extends to his passion for insects, with Web site, www.InsectPaparazzi.com and he has even discovered a species of fly. "Of course, I found it in Golden Gate Park," he says. "So it may have just been a tourist." Kinect Creators To Make PC Controller The San Francisco Chronicle reports that PrimeSense, the privately held Israeli company that licensed core Kinect technology to Microsoft, is teaming up with PC and peripheral maker Asus to create a similar device for the PC that can be used for browsing multimedia content and accessing the Internet and social networks--basically, the main things consumers use their PCs for. Last month, a Korean game developer claimed that Microsoft was working on a version of Kinect for the PC, but Microsoft hasn't confirmed any such plans. However hackers figured out how to hook a Kinect up to a Windows PC almost immediately, and have already come up with some pretty interesting hacks including letting World of Warcraft players cast spells, fight opponents and maneuver their characters using simple hand gestures and body movements and combining the Kinect with a PC and a virtual reality headset to create a virtual reality experience that hints at what games may be like in the future. US Law Firms Targeted by Cyberscams The San Francisco Chronicle reports that last year a Long Beach law firm received an e-mail from a Hong Kong businessman seeking help collecting debts from American customers. After a month of signing paperwork and exchanging telephone calls, the attorney received word that one debtor had sent a $200,000 cashier's check to pay off his balance. The attorney deposited it in his firm's account, subtracted his $10,000 fee and wired the remaining $190,000 to his Hong Kong client. Then the attorney's bank called and told him the $200,000 check had bounced. "They send me a nice, big, worthless check," says the attorney. In this case, the bank was able to prevent the wire transfer from reaching its destination but attorneys say they are on the receiving end of sophisticated scams with increasing frequency that include attacks to steal client data that can be sold or used to learn the details of future litigation. "Six months ago I hadn't seen any of them," says attorney Brian Hoffman. "A couple of months ago I started seeing them once a week. Now I see them once or twice a day." Cyber-criminals now see law firms as particularly lucrative targets that can earn them hundreds of thousands of dollars per heist. "Most law firms are going to be in trouble if this is the level of adversary they're going to deal with," says attorney Alex Stamos. "It's impossible even for the largest law firms to have a dedicated security team that can hold their own against these people." Google Faces Privacy Audits For Next 20 Years The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Google has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over Buzz, a social blogging service that the company introduced through Gmail last year that will require that Google have regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Buzz drew heavy criticism at launch in February 2010 for a glaring privacy flaw. When users turned it on, it suggested people to follow based on their Gmail contacts list and their most frequent email partners. "Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective," says the FTC. Along with the 20 year oversight, the settlement also says that Google is barred from misrepresenting privacy or confidentiality of the user information it collects, Google must obtain user consent before sharing their information with third parties if it changes its privacy policy, and Google must establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program. NSA to Build 20 Acre Data Center in Utah The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that the National Security Agency will be building a one million square foot data center at Utah's Camp Williams. The NSA's heavily automated computerized operations have for years been based at Fort Meade, Maryland, but the agency began looking to decentralize its efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and accelerated their search after the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA -- Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer -- had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations. The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble January 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA's first-ever network crash taking the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations. The new data center in Utah will require at least 65 megawatts of power -- about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City so a separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand. "They were looking at secure sites, where there could be a natural nexus between organizations and where space was available," says Col. Scott Olson, the Utah National Guard's legislative liaison. NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center. "The stars just kind of came into alignment. We could provide them everything they need." Beep-Beep: Roadrunners Tracked by Telemetry The roadrunner is an icon of the open rangelands of Texas and the southwest, but until recently very little has been known known about the bird. In 2006 Dr. Dean Ransom, a wildlife ecologist at Texas AgriLife Research, began a study using radio telemetry to study more than 50 nests from a distance without disturbing them to research home range, habitat use, nesting ecology and dispersal of their young. Roadrunners' nests typically are located in a tree or shrub, about 3-5 feet high, and usually in dense brush not far from an edge, such as a fence line or ranch road. "We used nest cameras to document what the parents were feeding their young," says Ransom. "The diet is based solidly on reptiles, especially Texas horned lizards. We have also seen mice, snakes, grasshoppers and a tarantula, and importantly, no birds, particularly bobwhite quail." The home range of roadrunners can be quite large for a bird of its size, up to 250 acres and roadrunners actively defend their territory against intruders, including other roadrunners. "We witnessed a five-bird brawl that lasted about 90 minutes in 2006Éultimately the resident pair was triumphant," says Ransom. In spite of the Saturday morning cartoon depicting the continual struggle with Wile E. Coyote, the Roadrunner has few natural enemies, and mortality seems to be highest during extreme drought periods when alternative prey is not available. The only other source of mortality roadrunners face seems to be Grannies' speeding Buick, an artifact of the birds' tendency to hunt and travel along roadside right-of-ways. Rupert Murdoch Hates Google, Loves the iPad The Register reports that News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, reiterated his disgust at how search engines handle news and called on old media to rethink how their stories are distributed on the web. "It's produced a river of gold, but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers," said Rupert. "I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting." Murdoch added that the iPad was a "wonderful tool" for listening to music, watching videos and reading newspapers. "It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry", by making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience, Murdoch said. "I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper," Murdoch said. "(But) if you have less newspapers and more of these, that's OK. It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form." Later speaking at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, Murdoch valiantly declared that his rival networks -- MSNBC and CNN -- "tend to be Democrats" while those at his own Fox News "are not Republicans" but asked later during the question and answer session to name a single Democrat who worked for Fox News, Murdoch struggled. "They are certainly there... Greta Van Susteren is certainly close to the Democratic Party," Murdoch said, after blanking on names first and insisting that Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes would have a long list. Security Update Leaves Older iPhones Unprotected The Register reports that iOS 4.3 update, which includes a number of critical security fixes, is incompatible with the still widely used iPhone 3G leaving users of older iPhone at heightened risk of drive-by download attacks from booby-trapped websites that contain maliciously-crafted TIFF image files. "There might be a hardware reason why the latest version of the software can't be run on older devices," says a spokesman Security firm Sophos. "Even so, Apple could still release an update for Safari for older devices, the most problematic omission." The handful of malware strains to have infected iPhone devices thus far have only infected jailbroken devices and although it hasn't happened yet, mobile malware spreading via browser vulnerabilities is a potential threat adds Sophos. The problem with the 3G is reminiscent of the charges made last year, when Apple released an OS update that at least one angry iPhone owner said in a lawsuit was purposely designed to break older iPhones, forcing customers to upgrade to the iPhone 4. Plaintiff Bianca Wofford called her upgraded iPhone 3G "a device with little more use than that of a paper weight," and added that apps took longer to open, the phone calling interface hung and crashed more than usual, and that she frequently had to power her 3G off and on again to get it to work at all. Should Wikipedians Edit Stories for Pay? The Register reports that a longtime Wikipedia admin has been caught offering to edit the online encyclopedia in exchange for cash after someone noticed a post to an online job marketplace where he was advertising his services. "Besides technical writing, I also am an accomplished senior Wikipedia administrator with several featured articles to my name," read the post, which has since been changed. "If you need a good profile on Wikipedia, I can help you out there too through my rich experience." Wikipedia promptly opened a discussion page to try to reach consensus on the community view of "paid editing" and so far opinion seems to be divided between those who say it's ok as long as full disclosure is made and "edits are compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N," and others who say that paid editing automatically creates a conflict of interest. Back in 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales shot down a company known as MyWikiBiz, where you could "author your legacy on the Internet" which was forced to reinvent itself outside of Wikipedia. "It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc., I will personally block any cases that I am shown," wrote Wales. But as the Register points out although Wales "frowns on individual editors making cash from the free encyclopedia, he has no problem doing so himself" making "upwards of $75,000 for each of his Wikipedia-centric speaking engagements." Britney's Twitter Hacked The Register reports that Britney Spears' Twitter profile was again seized by hackers, this time with a message apparently suggesting the troubled pop star had sold her body and soul to Satan in the hopes of speeding up the apocalypse. "I give myself to Lucifer each day for the new world order arrives as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!" The several unusual messages were deleted after a few hours after Spears' management regained control of the account and posted a message apologizing for "any offense the hacker's messages caused." Spears' Twitter feed boasts more than 3.7 million followers and is updated by herself and her "team" of handlers. The attack is at least the third to corrupt the star's micro-blogging feed. Followers of the singer were told in January that her vagina was four feet wide "with razor sharp teeth" and a fake Twitter update in June falsely stated that Spears was dead. Rik Ferguson, a security researcher at Trend Micro, was among the first to notice the latest Britney hack. "I'm thinking maybe she thought she was sending a DM [direct message]?" Secret Formula for Coca-Cola Leaked The recipe for Coca-Cola including "secret 7X flavor" has just been moved to a new vault on display at the World of Coca-Cola Museum in downtown Atlanta but what you probably didn't know is that the secret Coca-Cola recipe, at least as it was originally formulated by the drink's inventor, John Pemberton, has already been leaked. Pemberton's original Coca-Cola drink, which he formulated shortly after returning home from the Civil War and called Pemberton's French Coca Wine, was a knock-off of Vin Mariani, a French coca wine that was considered to be a 'nerve tonic' and said to have very beneficial effects says Mark Pendergrast. Originally, both Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola contained alcohol and cocaine but in 1886, Atlanta enacted prohibition legislation. "Pemberton thought they weren't going to continue to allow the sale of French coca wine, so he worked on trying to modify it and take the alcohol out of it," says Pendergast, author of "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It". "That made it really bitter, so he had to add a lot of sugar to compensate." When Asa Candler took over the company, he decreased the amount of caffeine in Coke, and varied the amount of sweetener, further altering the soda's taste. So which Coke version is "The Real Thing" and does it matter? "Even if you tried to make 'The Real Thing' now, it wouldn't make any difference," says Pendergrast. "Why would anyone go out of their way to buy a fake Coca-Cola that would cost more than the cheaply manufactured real ones?" Subversive Organizations Must Now Register in SC The Raw Story reports that terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina's Secretary of State and declare their intentions -- or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison. The "Subversive Activities Registration Act" passed last year in South Carolina and now officially on the books states that "every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States ... shall register with the Secretary of State." While the intention of the law is apparently aimed at Islamic terrorists, it's unclear in the law's wording whether it can be applied to militias, some of whom have in the past called for the overthrow of the US government. "In the long and storied history of utterly retarded legislation in South Carolina, we may have finally found the legal statute that takes the cake for sheer stupidity, which we think you'll agree is saying something," one unsigned blog posting scathingly commented. Maldives Government Holds Undersea Cabinet Meeting The president of the Maldives and 11 ministers, decked in scuba gear, held a cabinet meeting 4m underwater to highlight the threat of global warming to the low-lying Indian Ocean nation. While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century. President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet spent half an hour on the sea bed, communicating with white boards and hand signals and signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. The Maldives has already begun to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees. Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore. "We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn't checked," he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers. "If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world." Study says Inbreeding Led to Dynasty's Downfall The powerful Habsburg dynasty that ruled Spain for nearly 200 years came to an abrupt end in 1700 with the death of King Charles II, who left no heirs to the throne. Now a new study suggests that termination of that royal lineage may be the result of frequent inbreeding of the line, which may have left Charles II ill and infertile. Gonzalo Alvarez at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain calculated what is called the inbreeding coefficient for each individual across 16 generations of the Habsburgs, using genealogical information for Charles II and 3,000 of his relatives and ancestors. The inbreeding coefficient indicates the likelihood that an individual would receive two identical genes at a given position on a chromosome because of the relatedness of their parents. Alvarez's team found that the inbreeding coefficient increased considerably down through the generations, from 0.025 for Philip I to 0.254 for Charles II - almost as high as would be expected for the offspring of an incestuous marriage (parent-child or brother-sister). Based on the historical information they gathered and clinical genetic knowledge, Alvarez determined that the simultaneous occurrence in Charles II of two different genetic disorders: combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis, determined by recessive alleles at two unlinked loci, could explain most of the complex clinical profile of this king, including his impotence/infertility which in last instance led to the extinction of the dynasty. With the death of Charles II (at the age of 39) and the end of the Spanish Habsburg line, the House of Bourbon of France assumed the Spanish crown. Judge Declares Mistrial Because of Wikipedia The Palm Beach Post reports that a police officer convicted of drugging and raping a family member will get a new trial because the jury forewoman brought a Wikipedia article into deliberations. Broward Circuit Judge Stanton Kaplan declared a mistrial after Fay Mason admitted in court that she had downloaded information about "rape trauma syndrome" and sexual assault from Wikipedia and brought it to the jury room. "I didn't read about the case in the newspaper or watch anything on TV," says Mason. "To me, I was just looking up a phrase." Judge Kaplan called all six jurors into the courtroom and explained that Mason had unintentionally tainted their verdict and endangered the officer's right to a fair trial. Mason does not face any penalties for her actions. Oldest Nuclear Family Found Murdered in Germany The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany where the broken bones of these stone age people show they were killed in a struggle. Comparisons of DNA from one grave confirm it contained a mother, father, and their two children. "We're really sure, based on hard biological facts not just supposing or assuming," says Dr Wolfgang Haak, from The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. The stone age people are thought to belong to a group known as the Corded Ware Culture, signified by their pots decorated with impressions from twisted cords. The children and adult males had the same type of strontium - which was also found locally, but the nearest match to the women's teeth was at least 50km away, suggesting they had moved to the area. "They were definitely murdered, there are big holes in their heads, fingers and wrists are broken," says Dr Alistair Pike from Bristol University noting that one victim even had the tip of a stone weapon embedded in a vertebra. "You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it's a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. ...We don't know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love," added Dr. Haak. $1.2B Allocated For Electronic Health Records The Obama administration has unveiled $1.2 billion in federal grants for electronic health records systems to spur adoption of the equipment by doctors and hospitals along with the development of the networks that will link them all together. Billions more is set to flow to doctors, hospitals and other care providers next year in the form of reimbursements for the equipment they buy. Under the stimulus legislation, providers have until 2015 to make purchases and qualify for the reimbursements. The administration estimates that the stimulus program will eventually yield some $17 billion in savings. "With electronic health records, we are making health care safer; we're making it more efficient; we're making you healthier; and we're saving money along the way," says Vice President Biden. The health care industry has been moving toward electronic records for years, but the rate of adoption has been slow. Some providers are intimidated by startup costs, which can range anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars for a doctor's office to $100 million for a large hospital. There are also questions about ease of use, maintenance, compatibility with other systems and keeping all that data secure. "With so many unanswered questions, it's kind of ludicrous to go too far into it," said Joe Letnaunchyn, president of the West Virginia Hospital Association. "You run the risk of spending money inappropriately." New Web Site to Offer Portal for the Deceased The NYT reports that Jeff Taylor, founder of the online job search site, Monster.com and the site Eons.com for people born from 1946 to 1964, plans to open Tributes.com, a new Web site, to serve as a portal for those looking to memorialize and learn about the lives of the deceased. Taylor, who lured classified ads from newspapers, points out the deficiencies of newspaper obituaries. "Often, you might only see an obituary clipping stuck in a Bible. We've lost the stories of peoples' lives." There will no charge to place obituaries up to 300 words. but more elaborate entries with multimedia will cost up to $80 annually, or $300 for an unlimited placement period. Members can then create multimedia tributes on the site and share them with others, who can also add comments (for a fee). The company, which has received $4 million in equity financing says it intends to earn money from the user fees, revenue sharing with funeral homes, online advertising and the sale of flowers and grief-related books, CDs and videos. Members can ask the site to alert them by e-mail message when a person has died based on last name, school, military unit or ZIP code. Eventually, users will be able to download their address book to the site to keep abreast of the passing of friends and relatives. Restaurant Owners Use Zapper to Cook the Books The NY Times writes that thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners are siphoning cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials including a 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit that used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years. Zappers - also known as automated sales suppression devices - are a new twist on an old fraud. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat on taxes kept two sets of books but because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use: a dialog box shows the day's tally then the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till and the program calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes says only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States. ""Why aren't cases being identified in the United States? This is my tax money. It makes me mad." Restaurants Cook the Books with Zapper Software The NY Times writes that restaurant owners are siphoning cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials with a program called a zapper that can be carried on a portable flash drive so it can be run and then removed from the machine, leaving no trace. Zappers - also known as automated sales suppression devices - are a new twist on an old fraud. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat on taxes kept two sets of books but because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use: a dialog box shows the day's tally then the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till and the program calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes says only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States including a 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit that used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years and send the funds to Hezbollah in Lebanon. "Why aren't cases being identified in the United States? This is my tax money. It makes me mad," says Ainsworth. Pay-Per-View Journalism Burns Reporters Out Fast The NY Times reports that young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news - anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a "most viewed" list on their home pages and some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles. "At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you're actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file," says Jim VandeHei, Politico's executive editor. "Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out." The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. Departures at Politico have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the first half of the year - a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. "When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who's been working for a decade, not a couple of years," says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. "I worry about burnout." With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books The NY Times reports that with the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon, pirates are now turning to books on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire. "It's exponentially up," said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group. "Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented." Publishers and authors say they can learn from their peers in music, who alienated fans by using the courts aggressively to go after college students and Napster before it converted to a legitimate online store. "If iTunes started three years earlier, I'm not sure how big Napster and the subsequent piratical environments would have been, because people would have been in the habit of legitimately purchasing at pricing that wasn't considered pernicious," said Richard Sarnoff, a chairman of Bertelsmann. For some writers, tracking down illegal e-books is simply not worth it. "The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys," Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. "And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer." Others view digital piracy as a way for new readers to discover writers. Cory Doctorow offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover and believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers. "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy," says Doctorow. "It's obscurity." Doom Feared as Asian Carp Advances to LakeMichigan The NY Times reports that with the country's attention riveted on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the arrival of the Asian carp to the Chicago Area Waterway System, just six miles from Lake Michigan is an environmental crisis of the first order that is registering only a small blip on the radar of the national media. "The Great Lakes are on the brink of a great ecological and economic disaster that states in the region may never overcome," wrote Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio in a letter to President Obama. "We need immediate, decisive action." The impact of an invasion of Asian carp could be overwhelming as the fish are prolific breeders that can grow to over four feet, weigh up to 100 pounds, and the climate of the Great Lakes region is a close match to their native Asian habitats. In his letter, Strickland calls for the immediate construction of a permanent physical barrier on the Calumet River, where the live carp specimen was found, and Lake Michigan. One difference between oil and carp is that in the Gulf, the calamity has occurred but, at some point this summer - it's assured - the flow will stop and the cleanup will begin. With the carp, the damage has yet to occur, but, when it does, it will be permanent. "The situation facing the Great Lakes region is dire. If we fail to act now, we risk surrendering these lakes to an invasive species that could leave the Great Lakes an ecological wasteland," adds Strickland. Two Sunken Japanese Submarines Found off Hawaii The NY Times reports that two World War II Japanese submarines, including one meant to carry aircraft for attacks on American cities, have been found in deep water off Hawaii where they were sunk in 1946. Specifically designed for a stealth attack on the US East Coast - perhaps targeting Washington, DC. and New York City - the "samurai subs" were fast, far-ranging, and some carried folding-wing aircraft. Five Japanese submarines were captured by American forces at the end of the war and taken to Pearl Harbor for study then towed to sea and torpedoed, probably to avoid having to share any of their technology with the Russian military. One of the Japanese craft, the I-201, was covered with a rubberized coating on the hull, an innovation intended to make it less apparent to sonar or radar and was capable of speeds of about 20 knots while submerged, making it among the fastest diesel submarines ever made while the other, the I-14, much larger and slower, was designed to carry two small planes, Aichi M6A Seirans that could be brought onto the deck and launched by a catapult. The submarines were meant to threaten the United States directly, but none of the attacks occurred because the subs were developed too late in the war, and American intelligence was too good. "It's very moving to see objects like this underwater," says Hans Van Tilburg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "because it's a very peaceful environment, but these subs were designed for aggression." TSA Subpoenas Bloggers over New Security Directive The NY Times reports that TSA special agents have served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott demanding that they reveal who leaked a TSA directive outlining new screening measures that went into effect the same day as the Detroit airliner incident. Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents for about three hours and was forced to hand over his laptop computer after the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn't cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo outlining new security measures that would be apparent to the traveling public. ''It literally showed up in my box,'' Frischling told The Associated Press. ''I do not know who it came from.'' Frischling says he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect. The leaked directive included measures such as screening at boarding gates, patting down the upper legs and torso, physically inspecting all travelers' belongings, looking carefully at syringes with powders and liquids, requiring that passengers remain in their seats one hour before landing, and disabling all onboard communications systems, including what is provided by the airline. In a December 29 posting on his blog, Elliott said he had told the TSA agents at his house that he would call his lawyer and get back to them. Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how much the major game publishers can raise prices so makers cannot charge enough to cover the cost of producing most titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is twice that - $25 million is typical and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at games for consoles and saying, "This is too expensive and there are too many choices." Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. "The model as it exists is dying," says McGarvey. Gesture Based Computing Available Soon for PCs The NY Times reports that the old model of "one human, one machine, one mouse, one screen" is passe, according to John Underkoffler, who led the team that came up with the interface that Tom Cruise's character used in the 2002 movie "Minority Report," and co-founded a company, Oblong Industries, to make the gesture-activated interface a reality. Underkoffler says gesture technology is already being used in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and consumers will get the first taste of gesture-based interfaces later this year as Microsoft, Hitachi and PC makers are on the brink of rolling out game consoles, televisions and computers that use gestures to control the machines. In Underkoffler's conception of computing, the input and the output occupy the same space - unlike a conventional computer, in which the mouse and computer keyboard are separate from the screen, where the changes appear. Underkoffler recently demonstrated the interface - called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment - by pushing, pulling, and twisting vast troves of photos and forms that were on a screen in front of him, compressing and stretching as he went. In one part of his demonstration, Underkoffler reached into a series of movies, plucked out a single character from each and placed them onto a "table" together where they continued to move. "I think in five years' time, when you buy a computer, you'll get this." Early Adopters of Amazon Fire are Not Happy The NY Times reports that the Kindle Fire, Amazon's heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer. A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing and the touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky. Amazon's response was: "In less than two weeks, we're rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire," says Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener. The only problem with that is many of the complaints are hardware related and no amount of software can fix one of the early blunders: "The fire is shipped in a box that advertised on the outside of the box exactly what it is. ÔHello, you, thief, please come steal me!'" wrote one would-be customer who, as you might guess, had her Fire stolen and was left with the box. This was supposed to be an iPad killer, with its much lower price point but Apple is tough to beat because most of its mistakes are software-based. "This is the first time I pre-ordered a brand new device as it was coming on the market," one reviewer wrote. "Now I know why I don't do that." Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good for Decades to Come The NY Times reports that the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists that advises the federal government on issues of science and technology, has found that the aging nuclear arms are sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and other Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the United States' aging nuclear stockpile and that the possible need for new designs means that the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons. The warheads were originally designed for relatively short lifetimes and frequent replacement with better models but such modernization ended after the United States quit testing nuclear arms in 1992, and all weapons that remain in the arsenal must now undergo the refurbishment process, known as life extension. The Jason panel found no evidence that the accumulated changes from aging and refurbishment posed any threat to weapon destructiveness, and that the "lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss of confidence" but added that federal indifference could undermine the nuclear refurbishment program. "The study team," the report said, "is concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance and degradation of the work environment." Apple and Google Ties Investigated for Anti-trust The NY Times reports that the Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether close ties between Apple and Google amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry. Apple and Google share two directors, Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Arthur Levinson, former chief executive of Genentech. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 prohibits a person's presence on the board of two rival companies when it would reduce competition between them. The inquiry, which appears to be in its early stages, is the second antitrust examination involving Google to have surfaced in recent days suggesting that despite the company's closeness to the Obama administration, Google will not escape scrutiny from regulators. Antitrust experts say that investigations of interlocking directorates rarely lead to major confrontations between companies and the government because executives typically choose to resign from the board of a competitor if it poses a problem rather than face a lengthy investigation or a bruising legal fight. Schmidt joined Apple's board in 2006, about five months before it unveiled the iPhone. Google announced its plans for Android, its mobile phone operating system, nearly a year later. Since then, analysts have speculated that Schmidt's position on Apple's board could become untenable although Google has said Schmidt recuses himself when Apple's board discusses mobile phones. Cellphones Increasingly Used as Evidence in Court The NY Times reports that the case of Mikhail Mallayev, who was convicted in March of murder after data from his his cellphone disproved his alibi, highlights the surge in law enforcement's use of increasingly sophisticated cellular tracking techniques to keep tabs on suspects before they are arrested and build criminal cases against them by mapping their past movements. But cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review - through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation. "Cell phone providers store an increasing amount of sensitive data about where you are and when, based on which cell towers your phone uses when making a call. Until now, the government has routinely seized these records without search warrants," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. Last year the Federal District Court in Pittsburgh ruled that a search warrant was required even for historical phone location records, but the Justice Department has appealed the ruling. "The cost of carrying a cellphone should not include the loss of one's personal privacy," said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. BBC to Make Deep Cuts in Internet Services The NY Times reports that the BBC has yielded to critics of its aggressive expansion, and is planning to make sweeping cuts in spending on its Web site and other digital operations. Members of the Conservative Party, which is expected to make electoral gains at the expense of the governing Labor Party, have called for the BBC to be reined in and last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing "free news" on the internet making it "incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news. "After years of expansion of our services in the UK, we are proposing some reductions," says Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC. The BBC is proposing a 25 percent reduction in its spending on the Web, as well as the closure of several digital radio stations and a reduction in outlays on US television shows. The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union, which represents thousands of workers at the BBC, says that instead of appeasing critics, the proposed cuts could backfire. "The BBC will not secure the politicians' favor with these proposals and nor will the corporation appease the commercial sector, which will see what the BBC is prepared to sacrifice and will pile on the pressure for more cuts," says Gerry Morrissey, general secretary of the union. Uncle Sam Wants You - to Wikify Army Field Manuals The NY Times reports that the Army began encouraging its personnel - from the privates to the generals - to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life using the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army's array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals. "For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki," said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army's Battle Command Knowledge System. "The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change - that is a big challenge, culturally." Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued an ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. Reaction so far from the rank and file has been tepid but the brass is optimistic because, even in an open-source world, soldiers still know how to take an order. "One of the great advantages we have is that we are a disciplined force," says retired Coronel Christopher R. Paparone. "We are hierarchical. When the boss says Ôdo this,' it tends to get done. Even those who don't like to write will add something." WHO Says Swine Flu May Have Peaked in US The NY Times reports that the World Health Organization (WHO) says that there were "early signs of a peak" in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States while the American College Health Association, which surveys more than 250 colleges with more than three million students, said new cases of flu had dropped 27 percent in the week ending November 13 from the week before, the first drop since school resumed in the fall. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of vaccination and respiratory disease at the CDC, chose her words carefully. "We are in better shape today than we were a couple of weeks ago," Schuchat says. "I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet." Privately, federal health officials say they fear that, if they concede the flu has peaked, Americans will become complacent and lose interest in getting vaccinated, increasing the chances of another wave. However Dr. Lone Simonsen, a former CDC epidemiologist, says she expects a third wave in December or January, possibly beginning in the South again. Based on death rates in New York City and in Scandinavia, Simonsen argues that both 1918 and 1957 had mild spring waves followed by two stronger waves, one in fall and one in midwinter adding that in the pandemic of 1889, the bulk of the deaths occurred in the third wave. "If people think it's going away, they can think again," Dr. Simonsen says. The Scientist Who Mistook Himself for a Spy The NY Times reports that Stewart Nozette, who helped to discover water on the Moon and spent six years at a top-secret defense technology agency was arrested earlier this week on espionage charges, after telling an FBI agent that he was willing to sell some of America's "most guarded secrets" to a man he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer. Nozette worked at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, where he held a special security clearance described in the criminal complaint against him as "equivalent to the Defense Department's Top Secret and Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information clearances (PDF)." For most of the past decade Nozette "acted as a technical consultant for an aerospace company that was wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel" and when he took on this consulting work Nozette apparently concluded that he had already effectively become a spy. "I thought I was working for you already," said Nozette to the undercover officer posing as a Mossad recruiter according to an FBI transcript. "I mean that's what I always thought, [the foreign company] was just a front." Marc Ambinder writes in the Atlantic that Nozette's "Q" clearance from the Department of Energy, giving him access to data about nuclear weapons, might have been of interest to the Israelis. "Since Israel has nuclear weapons, its espionage efforts are probably more directed towards figuring out what the US knows about them, how the US monitors, say, Israeli launch preparation sites, and who the US shares this data with," writes Ambinder. "No doubt that Nozette would be in a good position to know how easily it is for US technologies to pierce the veil of Israel's secret nuke program." Measuring Real Time Public Opinion with Twitter The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. ""Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time." Dodds says he and his colleague are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. "All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being," Dodds says. Iranians Outwit Censors with Falun Gong Software The NY Times reports that since last year more than 400,000 Iranians began surfing the uncensored Web using software created for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. More than 20 countries now use increasingly sophisticated blocking and filtering systems for Internet content, according to Reporters Without Borders, including Iran, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The creators of the software seized upon by Iranians are members of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, based largely in the United States and closely affiliated with Falun Gong. Interestingly enough the United States government and the Voice of America have financed some of the circumvention technology efforts and a coalition is organizing to push for more Congressional financing of anti-filtering efforts bringing together dissidents of Vietnam, Iran, the Uighur minority of China, Tibet, Myanmar, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, as well as the Falun Gong, to lobby Congress for the financing. "What is our leverage toward a country like Iran? Very little," said Michael Horowitz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. "Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world." Colleges Save Food Removing Cafeteria Trays The NY Times reports that scores of colleges and universities across the country are shelving cafeteria trays in hopes of conserving water, cutting food waste, and saving money. "With the trays, you come in and often your eyes are bigger than your stomach," says cafeteria manager, Janet Olivieri, who frequently eats at the dining hall and has lost 10 pounds since the change. "This way they can only get what they can carry on one plate. If the customer wants more, they have to make a conscious decision to come back for it." The Sustainable Endowments Institute, a research organization that tracks environmental practices at the 300 colleges and universities with the largest endowments, said that 126 of them had curtailed use of trays, some of them banishing trays only from certain dining halls, and some introducing, for example, "trayless Tuesdays." At the Rochester Institute of Technology, which stopped using trays last summer, the manager of the Grace Watson Dining Hall, said she had seen a marked drop in food waste, estimating that the school saved 10 percent on food spending despite rising ingredient costs. Such moves are often part of a larger push to embrace environmentalism that includes hiring sustainability coordinators, introducing solar panels, composting dining-hall waste and encouraging students to turn off lights with catchy sayings like "Do It in the Dark." "I like not having to carry a tray around," said Peter McInerney, a freshman here at Skidmore College, as he grabbed a midafternoon snack of an egg sandwich, pancakes and apple juice. "It makes it feel like this is less of a machine just spitting food out. It's still not home, but it feels more homey without the tray." Rooks Reason Retrieving Rations with Rocks The NY Times reports that rooks, a relative of the crow, are able to use stones to raise the level of water in a container so they can reach a floating worm. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's similar to Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher, in which a thirsty bird adds stones to raise the water level in a pitcher in order to drink from it. Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan J. Emery of Queen Mary University of London experimented with four captive rooks, presenting them with a clear tube partly filled with water with a bug floating on top, and a pile of stones. In one variant, the starting height of the water changed from trial to trial. In another, the birds had a choice of two sizes of stone. The birds quickly caught on, and within a couple of trials had figured out how many stones they needed to bring the bug within reach. "It was a remarkable combination of some understanding of the task with really rapid learning," Bird says. Rooks don't use tools in the wild, because they don't need to - they have easy access to food like carrion. But in captivity, they can be presented with a situation like this, where it pays to figure out how to perform a task. "This fits nicely with Aesop's moral," Bird says, "that necessity is the mother of invention." Traditional News Media Leads Blogs by 2.5 Hours The NY Times reports that researchers at Cornell studying the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking some 90 million articles and blog posts which appeared from August through October 2008 on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. have discovered that for the most part, traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. The researchers studied frequently repeated short phrases, the equivalent of "genetic signatures" for ideas. The biggest text-snippet surge found in the study - "lipstick on a pig" originated in Barack Obama's colorful put-down of the claim by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that they were the genuine voices for change in the campaign. The researcher's paper, "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle," (PDF) shows that although most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media. For example, when Mr. Obama said that the question of when life begins after conception was "above my pay grade," the remark was first reported extensively in blogs and though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo. "This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world," said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft. "The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories." US Army Wages War on PowerPoint The NY Times reports that PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders reaching the level of near obsession and that the amount of time expended on PowerPoint has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan. "PowerPoint makes us stupid," says Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis while Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat. "It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," says McMaster. "Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable." Behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making however senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations are known as "hypnotizing chickens." Hybrid Cars May Soon Include Fake Vroom for Safety The NY Times reports that plug-in hybrid and electric cars not only reduce air pollution, but cut noise pollution so much with their whisper-quiet motors that they aren't noisy enough posing a threat to pedestrians, children and others who can't hear them approaching. Some electric-vehicle drivers have taken a low-tech approach to alerting pedestrians. When Paul Scott of Santa Monica, Calif., drives his 2002 Toyota RAV4 electric car, he often rolls down the windows along busy streets and turns up his radio so people know his virtually silent vehicle is there. But just as cellphones have ring tones, "car tones" may not be far behind - an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit. Working with Hollywood special-effects wizards, some hybrid auto companies have started tinkering in sound studios to customize engine noises. The Fisker Karma, an $87,900 plug-in hybrid expected to go on sale next year, will emit a sound - pumped out of speakers in the bumpers - that the company founder, Henrik Fisker, describes as "a cross between a starship and a Formula One car." Paul Scott, vice president of the advocacy group Plug In America, says he would prefer giving drivers control over whether the motor makes noise, unlike the Fisker Karma, which will make its warning noise automatically. "It should be a manually operated noisemaker, a button on the steering wheel triggering a recording of your choice," says Scott. "It could play ÔIn-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,' or anything you like." Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager The NY Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to "examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives" to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has not yet agreed to the president's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies, and inserted into this year's budget legislation a clause that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, and other NASA officials, but he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors. "It's enough for us to be extraordinarily concerned," said a Congressional staff member, who was authorized to speak only anonymously. "We just want the inspector general to follow the path and report back to us what he's finding." GPS Log Analysis Uncovers New York City Taxi Scam The NY Times reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission is using GPS data collected in every cab to review millions of trips in New York City over the past 26 months and has discovered a huge number in which out-of-city rates, twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs, were improperly charged. The drivers' scheme, the commission says, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip when drivers flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million. Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester. "We have not seen anything quite this pervasive," said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. "It's very disturbing." The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city's findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The commission says that 75% out of the city's 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate at least once. Several cabbies defended themselves and their colleagues and said it was easy to accidentally activate the higher rate because of the way the meters were designed and expressed dismay at the city's findings, which they said threatened to tarnish the image of their industry. "We are ashamed," says cabbie Bagicha Singh. "People will look at us as a thief." Officials hope to roll out a short-term fix in two or three weeks in which an alert will appear on the backseat monitor when a cabbie activates the out-of-town rate. NYC to Ban Use of Food Stamps for Buying Sodas The NY Times reports that New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as part of an aggressive anti-obesity push that has also included advertisements, stricter rules on food sold in schools and an unsuccessful attempt to have the state impose a tax on sugared drinks, is now seeking federal permission to bar New York City's 1.7 million recipients of food stamps from using them to buy soda or other sugared drinks. The ban would affect beverages with more than 10 calories per 8 ounces, and would exclude fruit juices without added sugar, milk products and milk substitutes. "In spite of the great gains we've made over the past eight years in making our communities healthier, there are still two areas where we're losing ground - obesity and diabetes," says Bloomberg. "This initiative will give New York families more money to spend on foods and drinks that provide real nourishment." But some public health experts are greeting Bloomberg's proposal cautiously. "The world would be better, I think, if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages," says George Hacker, a senior policy adviser for the health promotion project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest,. "However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not want to stigmatize people on food stamps." Earlier this summer, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to combat obesity banning the sale of Coke, Pepsi and Fanta Orange in vending machines on city property. Possible Link Between Dam and Earthquake in China The NY Times reports that nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake's geological fault line. Questions about the Zipingpu Dam are especially delicate because China is building many major hydroelectric dams in the southwest, a region which has abundant water resources but is considered prone to earthquakes. Christian Klose, a Columbia University researcher specializing in geophysical hazards, estimates that the weight of the water in the Zipingpu reservoir amounted to 25 times the natural stress that tectonic movements exert in a year. The added pressure, he wrote in an abstract to an unpublished study, "resulted in the Beichaun fault coming close to failure." Although scientists generally agree that a reservoir, no matter how big, cannot by itself cause an earthquake, Leonardo Seeber, a senior scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said the impact of so much water could hasten an earthquake's occurrence if geological conditions for a quake already existed. "It would have occurred anyway," Seeber said. "But of course the people who were affected might think the timing is an important difference." Motorola Splits to Fit 'Three Screens' Lifestyle The NY Times reports that Motorola plans to reorganize itself into two independent publicly held companies by the first quarter of 2011. The first company will own the Motorola brand and will include Motorola's mobile handset unit and home set-top box business which delivers home networking and digital video services. The new company will focus on the "three screens" lifestyle envisioned by carriers like AT&T and Verizon, where customers would watch content on TV, on their computers and on their mobile phones. "The combination of mobile devices and our home business brings together two highly complementary and innovative organizations," says Sanjay Jha, one of Motorola's two co-chief executives. "Together, we will be best positioned to lead in the convergence of mobility, media, and the Internet." The other company emerging from the split will include Motorola's wireless networking business and its enterprise radio systems operations. The wireless networking business, which focuses on telecommunications products, would likely be sold off leaving the second company with its profitable enterprise radio systems business, which generated $7 billion of the company's $22 billion in sales in 2009. Standalone GPS Receivers Going the Way of the Dodo The NY Times reports that more than 40 percent of all smartphone owners and 80 percent of iPhone users use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions driving down sales of traditional standalone GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008 while Garmin's unit sales fell 13 percent from the previous year. While smartphones are susceptible to interruptions from incoming phone calls and using the mapping features for a long time can chew through battery power, the list of the smartphone's shortcomings is dwindling as some of the latest navigation applications offer voice navigation and take advantage of the phone's always-connected state to offer real-time traffic updates, directions to contacts in the phone's address book and more. "I've not stopped using a GPS because I never bought one in the first place - they are expensive and inconvenient," says Steve Weller. "Now with the iPhone, I will actually use GPS - and the 10 other functions it replaces." The traditional GPS device companies are trying to adapt, seeking to expand their reach into the smartphone market. TomTom recently announced that it would introduce a portable navigation application for the iPhone that would feature turn-by-turn directions and audio prompts. "The simplicity of having one device and not needing to pull the Garmin out of my glove compartment is enough," says Andrew DiMarcangelo. "I want to get into my car and do as few things as possible." Michigan Battles Carp Invasion in Supreme Court The NY Times reports that Michigan has taken the fight against invasive Asian carp to the US Supreme Court, to force Illinois to immediately close the O'Brien Lock and Dam in the Calumet-Sag Channel and the Chicago Controlling Works in the Illinois River, a stopgap measure aimed at keeping the fish out of the great lakes. The 100-pound fish have voracious appetites and rapid reproduction rates that could ravage native lake species and experts fear that the invasive carp, which have been traveling up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades, will devastate the $7 billion Great Lakes fisheries. The carp were imported to the Mississippi River basin by catfish farmers in the 1970's to remove algae and suspended matter out of their ponds. During large floods in the early 1990s, many of the catfish farm ponds overflowed their banks, and the Asian carp were released into local waterways. "This is not political grandstanding or some kind of publicity stunt," says Noah Hall, a professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. "This is a very solid case." The lawsuit follows tests last month that show the carp may have crossed an electric fish barrier that pulses DC current into the water on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal meant to halt their advance, putting them within 6 miles of Lake Michigan. "The actions of Illinois and federal authorities have not been enough to assure us the Lakes are safe," says Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox. "That's why the waterways must be shut down until we are assured that Michigan will be protected." Michigan Battles Carp Invasion in US Supreme Court The NY Times reports that Michigan has taken its fight against invasive Asian carp to the US Supreme Court, to force Illinois to immediately close the O'Brien Lock and Dam in the Calumet-Sag Channel and the Chicago Controlling Works in the Illinois River, a stopgap measure aimed at keeping the fish out of the great lakes. The 100-pound fish have voracious appetites and rapid reproduction rates that could ravage native lake species and experts fear that the invasive carp, which have been traveling up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades, will devastate the $7 billion Great Lakes fisheries. The carp were imported to the Mississippi River basin by catfish farmers in the 1970's to remove algae and suspended matter out of their ponds. During large floods in the early 1990s, many of the catfish farm ponds overflowed their banks, and the Asian carp were released into local waterways. "This is not political grandstanding or some kind of publicity stunt," says Noah Hall, a professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. "This is a very solid case." The lawsuit follows tests last month that show the carp may have crossed an electric fish barrier that pulses DC current into the water on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal meant to halt their advance, putting them within 6 miles of Lake Michigan. "The actions of Illinois and federal authorities have not been enough to assure us the Lakes are safe," says Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox. "That's why the waterways must be shut down until we are assured that Michigan will be protected." NSA Overstepped the Law on Wiretaps The NY Times reports that legal and operational problems surrounding the NSA's surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court and that the NSA had been engaged in "overcollection" of domestic communications of Americans. The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The Justice Department has acknowledged that there had been problems with the NSA surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that "when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them." The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government's wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. Joe Klein at Time Magazine says that the bad news is that "the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law" but that the good news is that "one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it's overstepping - and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly." DNA Bar Coding Finds Mislabeled Sushi The NY Times reports that Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project to check 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique called DNA Bar Coding to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting and found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled: A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species. The project began over dinner with Stoeckle's father, a scientist and early proponent of the use of DNA bar codings. Instead of sequencing the entire genome, bar coders examine a single gene. Dr. Stoeckle said he was excited to see the technology used in a new way and compared the technique to GPS. "The smaller and cheaper you make something," he said, "the more uses it has." Unpaid Contributors Provide Corporate Tech Support The NY Times reports that Justin McMurry spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement - often selflessly - has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. "You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens," says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a "vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls" and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy and Nintendo. Lithium's customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. "That alone is addictive," says Fong. "They are revered by their peers." Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. "People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it." Centrifuge Problems Slow Iran Nuke Development The NY Times reports that international nuclear inspectors say that at Iran's nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems while others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran's program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure. These factors have led the administration's policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call "covert breakout" - the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon. "For now, the Iranians don't have a credible breakout option, and we don't think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years," said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran's enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz - down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June. Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and that the Iranians have made a series of manufacturing errors in their centrifuges. R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. "I suspect design problems," Kemp says. "The machines run hot and have short lives. They're terrible. It's a really bad design." Cyclists' Alpine Times Hint at Past Doping The NY Times reports that in most sports, progress is measured by advancement as runners go faster on the track and athletes strive to break records but in cycling, a sport plagued by doping problems, some measure its progress in a different way: by how much cycling has regressed in terms of times on steep climbs, particularly since the 1990s and early 2000s, when doping was thought to be rampant. The Alpe d'Huez climb, a route with 21 switchbacks and one of the legendary climbs in cycling, has changed slightly over the years, but Italian rider Marco Pantani still holds the record at 37 minutes 35 seconds, set in 1997, as well as three of the unofficial top five times. Pantani made those climbs before a test for the blood booster EPO was available and at that time, top cyclists often used EPO to increase endurance. "The speeds are lower in the climbs because there is no doping now, or less doping, in my opinion," says Aldo Sassi, an Italian exercise physiologist and longtime cycling coach. "If you look at Pantani's times, the power he produced was very close to 6.8 watts per kilo, and that is something no one can explain if you have physiological normal conditions for any athlete." Over his decades in the sport, Sassi has concluded that no rider can produce more than an average of 6.0 to 6.2 watts per kilogram of his weight over a ride of 30 to 40 minutes. But some say the reasons behind amazing performances cannot necessarily be proved. "When people are put into extreme situations, like when you see when people's kids are trapped beneath cars and they are able to lift up that car, they can go to unknown depths of human performance," said Matt Parker, the head of marginal gains for Team Sky. "Performances like that come out in sports once in a while, too. So when someone does something incredible, why not believe it?" Robots in Japan Face Unemployment The NY Times reports that in Japan the world's largest fleet of over 370,000 mechanized workers is being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets and tighter finances inject a dose of reality into some of Japan's more fantastic projects - like pet robots and cyborg receptionists - that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers. Across the industry, shipments of industrial robots fell 33 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to the Japan Robot Association. "We've taken a huge hammering," said Koji Toshima, president of Yaskawa, Japan's largest maker of industrial robots. At one large Yaskawa factory, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker stands with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return while its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair. "The recession has set the robot industry back years," says Tetsuaki Ueda, an analyst at the research firm Fuji Keizai, who expects the market to shrink by as much as 40 percent this year. Investment in robots, he said, "has been the first to go as companies protect their human workers." Colleague Comes Forward to Defend Anthrax Suspect The NY Times reports that Henry S. Heine, a former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the FBI has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a 16 member National Academy of Sciences panel that is reviewing the FBI's scientific work on the investigation that he believes it is impossible that the deadly spores could have been produced undetected in Ivins's laboratory, as the FBI asserts. Heine told the panel that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab, an effort that would not have escaped colleagues' notice and that lab technicians who worked closely with Ivins have told him they saw no such work. Heine adds that, in addition, the biological containment measures where Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. "You'd have had dead animals or dead people." Asked why he is speaking out now, almost two years after Ivin's suicide, Heine says that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory and although Heine says he does not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Ivins's flask, Heine says samples from the flask were widely shared. "Whoever did this is still running around out there," Heine says. "I truly believe that." Google Founders Buy Fighter Jet The NY Times reports that H211 LLC, a company controlled by Google's top executives, including billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, appears to have added a Dornier Alpha Jet, a light jet attack and advanced trainer aircraft manufactured by Dornier of Germany and Dassault-Breguet of France to its fleet. The 1982 German-and-French-built Alpha-Jet seats two and was originally used by European air forces, but is now being sold relatively cheaply to civilians. The jet has landing rights at Moffett Field, the NASA operated airfield that is a stone's throw from the Google campus. It is not clear who exactly flies the fighter jet although Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is an avid pilot. If the top Googlers indeed own the fighter jet, they would be following in the footsteps of Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has owned several aircraft, including fighter jets. Presumably no attacks on Microsoft are planned at this time. Uncle Sam Wants You - to Hack for your Country The NY Times reports that government's urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, giving rise to thousands of "hacker soldiers" within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation's war planning. Nearly all of the largest military companies - including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon - have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies and are scooping up the relatively small number of experts with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for "cyberninjas" at a time when other industries are shedding workers. At a Raytheon facility south of the Kennedy Space Center, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers create tools to protect the Pentagon's computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. "It takes a nonconformist to excel at what we do," says Terry Gillette, who ran SI Government Solutions before selling the company to Raytheon last year as the boom in the military's cyberoperations accelerated. Google Acquires Another Piece of the Tablet Puzzle The NY Times reports that Google has acquired a mysterious Silicon Valley start-up called Agnilux for help with porting Google platforms like its Chrome and Android operating systems onto other devices Đ like tablets, or possibly even television set-top boxes. "These are systems guys focusing on hardware-software integration," says one person familiar with the deal. "It's not chip design. It's getting software platforms to work on different kinds of hardware with lots of obscure back-end technologies." Another particular piece of expertise within Agnilux is "modular semi technology that allows you to regulate power more efficiently on the tablet form factor." In other words, Agnilux technology could help Google run its software platforms on tablets without draining the battery. A Google spokesman confirmed the acquisition, but declined further comment. 'Google TV' to bring Web into the Living Room The NY Times reports that Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes. "Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there," said one of the people with knowledge of the project. The Google TV software will present users with a new interface for TVs that lets them perform Internet functions like search while also pulling down Web programming like YouTube videos or TV shows from Hulu.com and will also allow downloadable Web applications, from games to social networks, to run on the devices. Google also intends to open the Google TV platform, based on its Android operating system for cellphones, to software developers in the hopes of spurring the same creativity that the consumers have seen in phone apps. The Google TV project is said to be sufficiently advanced that Google had begun testing it with Dish Network, one of Google's longstanding partners in the TV Ads program. GSM Decryption Published The NY Times reports that German encryption expert Karsten Nohl says that he has deciphered and published the 21-year-old GSM algorithm, the secret code used to encrypt most of the world's digital mobile phone calls, in what he called an attempt to expose weaknesses in the security system used by about 3.5 billion of the 4.3 billion wireless connections across the globe. Others have cracked the A5/1 encryption technology used in GSM before, but their results have remained secret. "This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate," Nohl told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress. "We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls." The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl's efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls. "This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely," says Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. "What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me." Simon Bransfield-Garth, the chief executive of Cellcrypt, says Nohl's efforts could put sophisticated mobile interception technology - limited to governments and intelligence agencies - within the reach of any reasonable well-funded criminal organization. "This will reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours," Bransfield-Garth says. "We expect as this further develops it will be reduced to minutes." Judges can't "friend" Lawyers in Florida The NY Times reports that Florida's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee has found in a recent opinion that judges and lawyers can no longer be Facebook friends. The committee says that when judges "friend" lawyers who may appear before them, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it "reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer Ôfriends' are in a special position to influence the judge." Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, says the Florida rule goes too far. "In my view, they are being hypersensitive" because in the case of a truly close friendship between a judge and a lawyer involved in a case, the other side can simply seek to disqualify the judge. Judges do not "drop out of society when they become judges," Gillers says. "The people who were their friends before they went on the bench remained their friends, and many of them were lawyers." Still, legal sycophants can take heart: lawyers can declare themselves Facebook "fans" of judges, the committee says, "as long as the judge or committee controlling the site cannot accept or reject the lawyer's listing of himself or herself on the site." "Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other" The NY Times reports that federal regulators plan a pilot project to test "high visibility" crackdown efforts to curb cellphone use by drivers in two cities, Hartford and Syracuse spending $200,000 in each city, while each state would contribute $100,000 more. The Transportation Department says it wants to send the message: "Phone in One Hand. Ticket in the Other" and plan ramping up enforcement on state bans of hands-free phones by motorists, advertising the campaigns and undertaking studies to see if the efforts curb behavior and attitudes. Safety advocates say that curbing the behavior requires enforcement and education, which they say has been clearly evident in past efforts with seat belts with the "Click It or Ticket Program" (PDF) that helped increase seat belt use to 83% nationally. "It's time for drivers to act responsibly, put their hands on the wheel and focus on the road," says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who last year called distracted driving an "epidemic." Shots Fired at White House The NY Times reports that federal authorities are investigating shots that struck the White House on Friday and seeking a man believed to have fled the scene shortly after gunfire was heard in the immediate vicinity. Secret Service agents heard multiple shots fired and witnessed a car speeding away, westbound, on Constitution Avenue. The car and an AK-47 assault rifle were found, abandoned, at a corner of Constitution Avenue and 23rd Street a couple of minutes later. The shooting occurred 750 yards from the White House, just outside the outer security perimeter of the White House complex, which extends to the south edge of the Ellipse and is one of the most heavily policed parts of the country with a uniformed force of 1,400 officers at fixed positions on the White House grounds, as well as patrolling in cars and on bicycles. Evidence at the scene has authorities seeking Oscar Ramiro Ortega who has a criminal record that includes domestic violence and drug charges. Police searched the Occupy DC protest camp, on McPherson Square just blocks from the White House, after reports that Mr. Ortega might have spent time there. The most recent White House shooting incident was in 1994 when four shots were fired from a 9mm handgun at the Executive Residence from an unknown point south of the Ellipse and one round penetrated a first-floor window and landed in the State Dining Room, and another was found in a Christmas tree near the South Portico. Ranchers Have Beef with USDA Program to ID Cattle The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System (NAIS) say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry, that small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, and that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database anyway. "Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture," says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS with one group issuing a bumper sticker that reads, "Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon." "They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this," says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. "This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it." New Plan Lets Top HS Students Graduate 2 Yrs Early The NY Times reports that education commissioners in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for a pilot project that would allow 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college. The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore. "We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon." says Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Kentucky's commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, says high school graduation requirements have long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate. "We've been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery - a system based around move-on-when-ready," says Holliday. However some school officials are concerned about the social and emotional implications of 16-year-olds going off to college. "That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old. . . . Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that," says Mary Anderson, headmaster of Pinkerton Academy. Conficker Lives The NY Times reports that despite efforts of top security experts to eradicate Conficker and trace its origins and purpose, the program's persistence and sophistication has squelched the belief of many experts that such global computer infections are a thing of the past. "It's using the best current practices and state of the art to communicate and to protect itself," Rodney Joffe, director of the Conficker Working Group, says of the malicious program. "We have not found the trick to take control back from the malware in any way." With over 5 million machines under its control, researchers speculate that Conficker could be employed to generate vast amounts of spam or steal information like passwords and logins by capturing keystrokes on infected computers but there is another possibility that concerns the researchers more: That the program was not designed by a criminal gang, but instead by an intelligence agency or the military of some country to monitor or disable an enemy's computers or be used as weapons in conflicts like Estonia in 2007 and in Georgia last year, and in more recent attacks against South Korean and United States government agencies. The Conficker Working Group continues to try to find ways to kill Conficker, meeting as recently as Tuesday but Joffe says he, for one, is not prepared to declare victory. Joffe adds that the working group's work did prove that government and private industry could cooperate to counter cyberthreats. "Even if we lose against Conficker," says Joffe, "there are things we've learned that will benefit us in the future." China Demands New PCs Carry Spyware The NY Times reports that China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that would allow the government to regularly update computers with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites filtering out pornography and other "unhealthy information" from the Internet. Called "Green Dam" - a reference to slogans that describe a smut-free Internet as "green" - the software is designed to filter out sexually explicit images and words, according to the company that designed it. However, experts warn that once installed, the software could be directed to block all manner of content or allow the government to monitor Internet use and collect personal information. PC makers including Dell, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, say they are studying the new rules and declined to comment but privately industry executives say they are unnerved by the new rules, which were issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with no consultation and no advance warning. "Many of us are going to take it in the neck with this mandate," says one executive. "It has put people into five-alarm mode." The Surreal World of Chatroulette The NY Times reports that Chatroulette , the social Web site created by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click "start" you're suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they're staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click "next," instantly calling up someone else. Entering Chatroulette is akin to speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers - some clothed, some not. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. "It's very strange, and not just because you are parachuting into someone else's life (and they yours), a kind of invited crasher," writes Nick Bilton. "It is also the eerie thrill of true randomness - who, or what, will show up next?" The Web has long allowed anonymous conversations among strangers. Text-based chat rooms are rife with deceit - people pretending they are someone else. Video makes this harder - even if you're wearing a mask. "From my experience on the site, echoed by those I've spoken to, it seems as if 90 percent of users are genuinely looking for novel and unexpected conversation," add Bilton. "The rest - well, let's just say they have debauchery in mind." Companies Skeptical of NASA's Commercial Space The NY Times reports that Boeing and Lockheed Martin will happily sell rockets to carry astronauts into space, but are leery about taking a leading role in President Obama's vision for a revamped NASA that relies on commercial companies to provide taxi transportation to the ISS. "I don't think there is a business case for us," says Lockheed Martin's John Karas about space taxis. Both Boeing and Lockheed were stung during the last burst of optimism for the commercial space business about a decade ago. They invested several billion dollars - Lockheed to develop its Atlas V, Boeing for the Delta IV - in the hopes that the huge market for commercial satellites would supplement their traditional business of launching American military spy satellites. The market did not materialize, and what business there was went to European and Russian rockets that were cheaper. The hoped-for commercial market for space taxis hinges on one small company, Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats that it hopes to market as research facilities to companies and foreign nations looking to establish a space program. "I think people who have been in the launcher business for many years find it hard to take the president's plan seriously," says Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute. "They think it sounds like an elaborate wake for the human spaceflight program more than a plan for moving forward." A Requiem for Saab The NY Times reports that auto enthusiasts across the country are dismayed by the news that General Motors is planning to shut down Saab, the Swedish carmaker it bought two decades ago, after a deal to sell it fell apart. Even with its modest and steadily declining sales, Saab, an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Company, long stood out as a powerful brand in spite of itself. "It wasn't designed to be a fashion statement," says Ron Pinelli, president of Autodata, which tracks industry statistics. "It was designed to provide transportation under miserable weather conditions." Many Saab owners consider the brand's glory days to be the 1980s, when Americans began buying cars again after a recession and energy crisis. "The cars were communicative," says Pinelli. "They didn't try to numb the experience like cars do today." The cars had odd touches and appealed to those who appreciate the unconventional. Swedish engineers assumed drivers would be wearing gloves, so they designed big buttons for the dashboard. Though the cars were compact, with long hoods and short rear ends, there was plenty of headroom inside. Now Saab, a brand that once had one of the clearest identities in the industry, seems headed for extinction just as automakers are searching for more distinctive designs to help set them apart. "It's a shame that Saab is a victim," adds Pinelli . Specter of Insecure Chips Haunts US Military The NY Times reports that as advanced systems like aircraft, missiles and radars have become dependent on their computing capabilities, the specter of subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis has come to haunt military planners as semiconductor industry executives and Pentagon officials say the United States lacks the ability to fulfill the capacity requirements needed to manufacture computer chips for classified systems. "The department is aware that there are risks to using commercial technology in general and that there are greater risks to using globally sourced technology," says Robert Lentz, the recently retired head of the Trusted Foundry program. Cyberwarfare analysts argue that while most computer security efforts have until now been focused on software, tampering with hardware circuitry may ultimately be an equally dangerous threat and that a Trojan horse kill switch may already have been used. A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected partly constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft and a report cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. "Compromised hardware is, almost literally, a time bomb, because the corruption occurs well before the attack," says retired general Wesley K. Clark. "Maliciously tampered integrated circuits cannot be patched. They are the ultimate sleeper cell." Nationwide Shortage in Supply of Swine Flu Vaccine The NY Times reports that as the number of swine flu cases grows to levels unprecedented for this time of year, health officials predict a shortfall in the supply of swine flu vaccine. Forty-three children have died from swine flu since August 30 - about the same number that usually die in an entire flu season."These are very sobering statistics," says Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, "and unfortunately they are likely to increase." Projections of the supply of swine flu vaccine have widely varied. During the summer, health officials said 120 million doses would be ready in October but later dropped the estimate to 40 million doses. Now officials expect only 28 million to 30 million doses, adding that the exact number is impossible to predict and could change daily as vaccine manufacturers report that production was behind schedule. "Vaccine production for influenza is pretty complex," says Schuchat explaining the delay, "and the complex process this year is taking a bit longer than we had hoped." Schuchat warned parents with sick children to be alert for signs that medical attention is required including not eating well, difficulties breathing, and turning blue or gray. A particularly important sign is when children start to get better, then have a relapse, usually a sign that pneumonia is developing, and immediate treatment should be sought. Steve Jobs to Cooperate on Authorized Biography The NY Times reports that Apple's chief executive is set to collaborate on an authorized biography, to be written by Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, author of two best-selling biographies, "Einstein: His Life and Universe" and "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life." While details about the deal are scanty, the announcement does represent an about face for Jobs, who in the past has reacted angrily to some books about him, and in some cases has directed Apple stores to temporarily remove other books from the same publishers from their shelves. The real question is why the sea change for Jobs now? Well, Jobs isn't getting any younger and given his recent history of illness, he may be interested in reviewing his legacy. "That's atypical for Jobs (and Apple), whose references to the past are usually few and far between," writes Dan Moren. "Then again, perhaps he merely wants to make sure that if somebody's going to write a biography, they do it his way. Which presumably means that you'll be able to read it on your iPad." Apple Surpasses Microsoft as New King of Tech The NY Times reports that Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft this week to become the world's most valuable technology company with $222.12 billion in market capitalization against Microsoft's $219.18 billion in one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history. Apple and Microsoft initiated the personal computing revolution in the late 1970s, but Microsoft quickly outflanked Apple and grew to become one of the most profitable businesses ever created so that a little more than a decade ago, Apple was widely believed to be on the path to extinction. Michael S. Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell computer, went so far as to suggest that Apple should shut itself down and return any money to shareholders while Microsoft's chief technology officer called Apple "already dead." But with the return of Jobs to Apple in 1996 - and an investment by Microsoft of $150 million - the company began a slow path to recovery. Jobs helped create "the best desktop computer, the best portable music device, the best smartphone and also now the best tablet," says Steve Perlman, a serial entrepreneur who was an executive at both Apple and Microsoft. As Apple grew increasingly nimble and innovative, Microsoft has struggled to build desirable updates to its main products and to create large new businesses in areas like game machines, music players, phones and Internet search. "Steve saw way early on and way before Microsoft that hardware and software needed to be married into something that did not require effort from the user," says Scott G. McNealy, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Sun Microsystems, which almost merged with Apple. "Apple's products are shrink-wrapped and ready to go." Google's President Resigns as Apple Director The NY Times reports that Apple has announced the resignation of Google's President Eric Schmidt from Apple's board of directors citing "potential conflicts of interest" as Google makes a play into the market for computer operating systems. Schmidt had been on Apple's board since August 2006. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest." Apple said Schmidt's resignation was a mutual decision, a statement echoed by Mr. Schmidt. "I have very much enjoyed my time on the Apple board," Schmidt said in a statement. "It's a fantastic company. But as Apple explained today we've agreed it makes sense for me to step down now." UN to Create Independent Panel to Review IPCC The NY Times reports that an independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world's top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report that included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, although there is no scientific consensus to that effect. That brief citation - drawn from a magazine interview with a glaciologist who says he was misquoted - and sporadic criticism of the panel's leader have fueled skepticism in some quarters about the science underlying climate change. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, said the review body would be made up of "senior scientific figures" who could perhaps produce a report by late summer for consideration at a meeting of the climate panel in October in South Korea. "I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue," says Nuttall. One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports. Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals, is crucial to seeking a complete picture of the state of climate science. High Tech Research Moving from US to China The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. "We're obviously not giving up on the US," says Pinto. "China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that." Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years. Pinto says that researchers from the United States and Europe have to be ready to move to China if they want to do cutting-edge work on solar manufacturing because the new Applied Materials complex here is the only research center that can fit an entire solar panel assembly line. "This opening represents a critical breakthrough for the photovoltaic industry and China and a tremendous benefit to our customers," says Applied Materials CEO Mike Splinter. "Establishing this center in China is an integral part of Applied's global strategy and an important step toward the industrialization of the global solar industry." NASA Unveils Sweeping New Programs for Next 5 Yrs The NY Times reports that after terminating the Constellation program, which was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon, NASA has announced that instead it will focus on developing commercial flights of crew and cargo to the ISS and long-range technology to allow sustained exploration beyond Earth's orbit, including exploration by humans. "We're talking about technologies that the field has long wished we had but for which we did not have the resources," says NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. "These are things that don't exist today but we'll make real in the coming years. This budget enables us to plan for a real future in exploration with capabilities that will make amazing things not only possible, but affordable and sustainable." Among the new programs is an effort known as Flagship Technology Demonstrations, intended to test things like orbital fuel depots and using planetary atmospheres instead of braking rockets to land safely, a program that will cost $6 billion over the next five years and will be run by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kennedy Space Center in Florida is to get $5.8 billion over five years to develop a commercial program for carrying cargo and astronauts to the space station. These new programs will be "extending the frontiers of exploration beyond the wildest dreams of the early space pioneers," added Bolden. Internet Helps Slave Descendants Reclaim History The NY Times reports that after collecting dust in government warehouses since the late 1800s, the Virginia portion of the Freedmen's Bureau records is now available electronically to the public. The Freedmen's Bureau, created by the government after the Civil War in an effort to ease four million former slaves into society, compiled lists of marriages, birth certificates, contracts and even some personal narratives and will offer a trove of detail to historians and to the descendants of slaves, who have struggled to piece together family histories obscured by the institution of slavery. The project which is the first in the nation, recruited hundreds of volunteers to transfer the records from microfilm and digitize them and will be repeated throughout the South. The Virginia records include vital statistics for 931,268 people and are accessible through FamilySearch, a Web site maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Ahmad S. Corbitt, a spokesman for the Mormon church, said there was a hunger among black Americans to learn more about their heritage. "There is a spiritual sense of connection to our ancestors, naturally," Mr. Corbitt said. "There is a sense of belonging, knowing the past and knowing your ancestors." Intergalactic Race Shows that Einstein Still Rules The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirming Einstein's proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others - in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom - to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space. The spread in travel time of 0.9 second, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length. "This measurement eliminates any approach to a new theory of gravity that predicts a strong energy dependent change in the speed of light," says Peter Michelson of Stanford. ""To one part in 100 million billion, these two photons traveled at the same speed. Einstein still rules." Paging Doctor Google The NY Times reports that according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, at least three-quarters of all Internet users look for health information online; 1 in 9 of those with a high-speed connection do health research on a typical day; and and 75 percent of online patients with a chronic problem told researchers that "their last health search affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition." But just adding a word makes all the difference. Searching for the name of a certain cancer will bring up the Wikipedia entry and several information sites from major hospitals, drug companies and other providers but add the word "community" to that search and "it's like falling into an alternate universe," filled with sites that connect patients says Susannah Fox, the associate director at Pew. As a result "patients aren't learning from Web sites - they're learning from each other," says Dr. Ted Eytan. But can online information be trusted? In a study earlier this year, a report in the journal Cancer looked at 343 Web pages about breast cancer that came up in online searches and found an error rate of 5.2 percent. Program Stalls to Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs The NY Times reports that a program to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers has stalled because the United States has run out of helium 3, a crucial raw material needed to build the 1,300 to 1,400 machines to be deployed in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year. Helium 3 is an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays but the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989 after accumulating a substantial stockpile of Helium 3 as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. "I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable," says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas - and sounds false alarms more often. In a letter to President Obama, Miller called the shortage "a national crisis" and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years. With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States, Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas. Climategate Scientists Exonerated by British Panel The NY Times reports that a British panel has exonerated scientists caught up in the controversy known as Climategate, saying it found no evidence that they had manipulated their research to support preconceived ideas about global warming and climatologist Phil Jones has been reinstated to a job resembling his old one at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. "On the specific allegations made against the behavior of C.R.U. scientists, we find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt," said the review, led by Muir Russell, a leading British civil servant and educator. Embarrassing e-mail messages sent by Jones and other scientists were stolen in November and posted to the Internet, leading to a deluge of accusations from climate change skeptics as well as admissions from some of the scientists that they had been guilty of poor behavior. The review was the fifth to come to essentially the same conclusion, though it was the most comprehensive and eagerly awaited of the investigations. However the report was not a complete vindication for Jones (PDF) or for the University of East Anglia, which commissioned it. Echoing the findings of an earlier report by a parliamentary committee in London, the reviewers criticized "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness" in responding to demands for backup data and other information under Britain's law governing public records. Quake Threat Halts Swiss Geothermal Project The NY Times reports that a $60 million project to extract renewable energy from the hot bedrock deep beneath Basel, Switzerland, has been shut down permanently after a government study determined that earthquakes generated by the project were likely to do millions of dollars in damage each year. The report concluded that residents of Basel would have felt from 14 to 170 earthquakes over the 30-year life of the project and although few if any of those earthquakes would likely cause bodily harm, the report found a 15 percent chance that the project could set off an earthquake that could cause over half a billion dollars in damage. The findings deal a serious blow to hopes that advanced geothermal energy could substantially cut the world's use of emissions-causing fossil fuels and comes as the United States Energy Department is preparing its own review of the safety of a closely related project, by a start-up company called AltaRock Energy, in the hills north of San Francisco. The AltaRock project has been plagued with technical problems and US government seismologists confirm that earthquakes around Anderson Springs were far less frequent in the past and that the geothermal project produces as many as 1,000 small earthquakes a year as the ground expands and contracts like an enormous sponge with the extraction of steam and the injection of water to replace it. "If they were creating tornadoes, they would be shut down immediately," says resident Douglas Bartlett. "But because it's under the ground, where you can't see it, and somewhat conjectural, they keep doing it." Britain Closes Airspace as Volcanic Ash Spreads The NY Times reports that British civil aviation authorities ordered the closure of the country's airspace as of noon on Thursday to shield aircraft from a high-altitude cloud of ash drifting south and east from an erupting volcano in Iceland. The perils of volcanic ash are well known to pilots and airline operators. After the 1982 eruption of Galunggung volcano in Indonesia, for example, a Boeing 747 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Perth, Australia, lost power in all four engines and descended from 36,000 feet to 12,500 feet before pilots could restart them and make an emergency landing in Jakarta. It was impossible to predict how long the disruptions might last or the extent of the flight cancellations, since the volcano was still erupting, says Deborah Seymour, a spokeswoman for Britain's National Air Traffic Service. "We are completely and utterly hostage to weather conditions." Judge Finds NSA Wiretapping Program Illegal The NY Times reports that a federal judge has ruled that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep one of Bush's most disputed counterterrorism policies shrouded in secrecy. Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers who were representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," the judge said that the government was liable to pay them damages. ""Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional," says Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer represented Al Haramain. "The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law." In 2008, Congress overhauled FISA to bring federal statutes into closer alignment with what the Bush administration had been secretly doing legalizing certain aspects of the warrantless surveillance program but the overhauled law still requires the government to obtain a warrant if it is focusing on an individual or entity inside the United States. The surveillance of Al Haramain would still be unlawful today if no court had approved it, current and former Justice Department officials say. The Buzz about Google's Apology The NY Times reports that Google moved quickly over the weekend to try to contain mounting criticism of Buzz, its social network, apologizing to users for features that were widely seen as endangering privacy and announcing product changes to address those concerns. Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Google had decided to alter one of the most-criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends the service provided to new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail. "We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback," Jackson wrote. "We'll continue to do so." David Coursey wrote in PC World that 'Google's millionaire genius-nerds' need to develop better people skills and that this is what happens when a company is too engineering driven and strives to make only fact-based decisions. "Google missed the fact that making automatically-generated contacts visible to the entire world--by default--might creep some people out and even endanger the safety of others," writes Coursey. "Google needs to be asking itself, 'How did this happen?' Another episode could earn the company the same sort of reputation for privacy cluelessness that Facebook has captured." Why Asexual Organisms Are on Their Last Legs The NY Times reports that asexual organisms are extremely rare but bdelloid rotifers reproduce asexually and seem to have speciated as extensively as sexually reproducing organisms. Now researchers say they can explain how the tiny freshwater invertebrates have been able to reproduce without sex for over 30 million years. Rotifers dwell in the most ephemeral of freshwater habitats. Not just in small puddles, but in the transient layer of moisture sometimes found on moss or lichens-even on mushrooms where dessication is a routine occurrence providing the key to how bdelloids evade the constraints of the Red Queen Hypothesis - the theory that asexual lineages are quickly ended by coevolving parasites and pathogens. The researchers raised populations of the rotifers in a lab, and observed that the asexual invertebrates could rid themselves of a deadly fungal parasite by drying themselves up completely and blowing away with the wind to new territory. By doing so, the rotifers became so desiccated that their parasites could not survive the punishing conditions. The rotifers were then able to ride the breeze and start afresh in new, presumably parasite-free pastures proving that there can be advantages to reproducing without sex: "You don't have to find a mate," says Johns Logsdon, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Iowa. "If you find a mate you don't have to worry about things like venereal disease, you don't have to worry about getting attacked in the process of a sex act." Have Asian Carp Reached Lake Michigan? The NY Times reports that genetic material from the Asian carp, a voracious invasive species long feared to be nearing the Great Lakes, has been identified for the first time at a harbor within Lake Michigan, near the Illinois-Indiana border, which could mean that the carp has found its way beyond an elaborate barrier system built at the cost of millions of dollars to prevent the fish's access to the Great Lakes and its delicate ecosystem, where it has no natural competitors and would threaten the life of native fish populations. "It's a big admission of failure," said Henry Henderson, the director of the Midwest program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It indicates the kind of thing we've been fearing since 1993." The positive DNA findings were announced on the same day the United States Supreme Court denied Michigan's request for an emergency injunction to force the closing of the locks of a Chicago shipping canal that gives direct access to the lake - a coincidence that drew intensified calls for help from some Great Lakes states. The White House has agreed to hold a 'carp' summit of Midwestern governors on keeping voracious Asian carp out of the Great Lakes after Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan and Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin called on the Obama administration to convene a summit and identify an emergency "rapid response" that Great Lakes states must adhere to to protect the waters from being overrun with Asian carp. Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over? The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days long past, having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years, from 1980 to 2000, when, he said, worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. "All you had to do was show up and not goof it up," Siebel says. "All ships were rising." Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent, Siebel says. Siebel's explanation for the sharp decline is that "the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized." Three successive inventions Đ the mini-computer, the PC, and then the Internet Đ were essentially "total market takeover" products, each wiping out the market for the product before it. No new technological advances, Siebel believes, will impel IT customers to replace the computer technology they now have: "I would suggest to you that most of what's going on today is not very exciting." In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was "where the action was" when he finished graduate school, he says, "if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai." National Ban Sought on Texting While Driving The NY Times reports that states that do not ban texting by drivers could forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in federal highway funds under legislation introduced in the Senate. Under the measure, states would have two years to outlaw the sending of text and e-mail messages by drivers or lose 25 percent of their highway money each year until the money was depleted. "Studies show this is far more dangerous than talking on a phone while driving or driving while drunk, which is astounding," said New York Senator Charles E. Schumer, one of four Democratic senators to introduce the proposal. Currently, texting while driving is banned in 14 states, including Alaska, California and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia. However the Governors Highway Safety Association, a group that represents state highway safety agencies in every state, opposes texting while driving but does not support the proposed legislation. "We oppose sanctioning states since there is not yet a proven effective method for enforcing a texting or cellphone ban," says association spokesman, Jonathan Adkins. Safety advocates respond that such concerns about enforcement were raised about seat belt laws but argued that the value of such laws - even if they could not be enforced all the time - created awareness about the issue and set societal guidelines for the behavior. Police to Probe Phone Hack Cases at Murdoch Papers The NY Times reports that Britain's most senior police officer said he had ordered a preliminary inquiry into reports that Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper subsidiary "News of the World" paid about $1.6 million to settle court cases involving allegations that its reporters worked with private investigators to hack into the cellphone messages of numerous public figures. Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns the Fox Broadcasting Company, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post said that he was not aware of any payments made to settle legal cases in which the company's reporters in Britain might have been involved in criminal activity. "If that had happened, I would know about it," said Murdoch. The Guardian cited an unnamed "senior source" at Scotland Yard as saying that staff members at News International had used private investigators to hack into cellphones to obtain confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized telephone bills and cited another source "with knowledge of the police findings" as saying that the investigators had tapped "two or three thousand" cellphones. Accessing stored phone messages covertly is illegal in Britain, except for the police or intelligence agencies acting with a warrant. Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil described the story as "one of the most significant media stories of modern times". "It suggests that rather than being a one-off journalist or rogue private investigator, it was systemic throughout the News of the World, and to a lesser extent the Sun," he said. "Particularly in the News of the World, this was a newsroom out of control." Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage CyberWars The NY Times reports that the Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials say, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. Obama is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks. The main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agency should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one proposal still being debated, parts of the NSA would be integrated into the military command so they could operate jointly. Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields. "We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment."

Ponca Stories: Ponca City History Mother of US President Grew Up in Ponca City Barack Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham lived in Ponca City for three years starting in 1948 when she was six years old. Stanley Ann attended first and second grades at old Jefferson Elementary School. The family purchased a home in Ponca City on North 13th Street in May 1950 and Stanley Ann attended third grade at Roosevelt Elementary School. Stanley Ann's father worked in Ponca City as a furniture salesman at Jay Paris Furniture. A number of people still living in Ponca City remember the Dunhams. President Barack Obama's grandfather Stanley Dunham, grandmother Madelyn Dunham, and mother Stanley Ann Dunham soon after Stanley came back after serving with the US Army in Europe in WWII. The Dunham family lived in Ponca City for three years while Stanley Dunham worked at Jay Paris Furniture store and Stanley Ann attended elementary school at Jefferson and Roosevelt schools. Click on the Blue Headlines to read more. A Ponca Icon The Pioneer Woman Models Should Return to Ponca City As a nine year old child, I thought Woolaroc was exciting and wonderful. The most fascinating items were the dioramas of the Native American tribes, the dinosaur egg from the Gobi Desert, the shrunken heads from the Amazon jungle, and a miniature of the Pioneer Woman Statue. What perplexed me was that in addition to a three foot model of the real "Pioneer Woman" statue I had seen all my life in Ponca City, there were eleven more models of "Pioneer Women" that looked nothing like the one I was so familiar with. I asked my father why the Pioneer Woman Statue was in Ponca City and these models were 75 miles away in Woolaroc. He wouldn't tell me and I forgot about it for forty years. The visit to Woolaroc made me remember my questions and do some research. Ponca Tourism What to See in Ponca City Standing Bear was a Ponca Native American chief who successfully argued in U.S. District Court in 1879 that Native Americans are "persons within the meaning of the law" and have the right of habeas corpus. Standing Bear spent many of his later years traveling the country to tell of his ordeal and to speak out for American Indians. In 1993 a twenty two foot statue of Standing Bear designed by Oreland C. Joe was commissioned and stands just south of Ponca City gazing over the Arkansas River Valley. Standing Bear ended his testimony in the landmark civil rights case with these words, "My hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both." A Map of Ponca Attractions Where to Find What to See in Ponca In 1908 E. W. Marland came to Ponca City after losing his fortune in the Pennsylvania oil fields in the panic of 1907 and by 1920 had reestablished himself and started the Marland Oil Company in Ponca City with a fortune estimated at $85 million (roughly $910 million in modern dollars). Marland was a visionary and not only pioneered the use of geophysical techniques in the oil industry but was years ahead of his time as an employer providing housing, loans, medical care, and other benefits for the thousands of employees who worked at his refineries and pipelines. The Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit Why I Enjoy Writing for Wikipedia On November 1, Marie Daulne came to Baltimore and appeared at the 8x10 club, so my wife and I attended the show, had a great time, and took some great photos of her and the group to use with the Wikipedia article about her. After the show we went backstage and introduced ourselves to Daulne. I told her that I was at least partially her biographer. "How so," she asked. I asked her if she ever surfed the internet and she said yes. I asked her if she knew what Wikipedia was and she said yes. "Well, I am the person who has written a lot of your biography on Wikipedia," I said. News for Nerds Why I Enjoy Writing for Slashdot I grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, a very unusual city in America's heartland which in the 1950's happened to be both the corporate headquarters for Continental Oil Company (Conoco) and also the center for all of Conoco's Research and Development .[9] With over 600 Ph.d's. living in a city of 25,000, Ponca City was more like a university town where knowledge and learning was revered by highly educated parents who insisted on a first class educational system for their children. Tales from the 1950s My Father and Bobwhite Quail My father always had one or two hunting dogs when we lived at the house he bought in 1949 at 437 Fairview right next to Speck's trailer court and I loved to play with our weirmeraner Ajax and our brittany Ginger but what I remember best of all is my father getting up early on Saturday mornings back in the mid-1950's and going out with his hunting buddies to spend a day in the fields around Ponca City hunting quail while I would stay at home and watch my favorite tv shows with my neighborhood buddies, Mike Eaton, Jay Holmes, Greg Lukehart, and Tom and Bob Monger. We were the first family on Fairview Street to own a television set and everyone would come over to watch Sky King, Roy Rodgers, and 3-D Danny on "Satellite 4." A Christmas Story My Favorite Christmas "My great-grandfather William Pickens came to Oklahoma before the turn of the century and put down roots near Boswell, Oklahoma – a small town of a couple of hundred people in Southeast Oklahoma about half way between Hugo and Durant. William Pickens was a veterinarian or horse doctor as he called himself and he would buy mustangs in Texas and bring them across the the river to Oklahoma and raise them and sell them. I met my great grandfather William in 1955 when I was five years old and I remember being taken to his house about a mile West of Boswell and going into a dark room where he lay in bed, waiting to die." The Maryland Returned Volunteers Thanks for the Memories After four years as an officer of the Maryland Returned Volunteers, this will be my last newsletter to you as President of the group. As many of you know, over a year ago Sunday and I scheduled a cruise to celebrate our 20th anniversary that leaves next week and we may not be back in time for the annual Christmas party so we thought that it would be nice to look back on the past four years and put together a personal scrapbook of some of the highlights of events sponsored by the Maryland Returned Volunteers that we will keep in our memories forever. Look at the photos below and see how many of these you remember. Thanks everybody for four years of wonderful friends, activities, and memories. Reservoir Hill A Victorian Mansion in Baltimore's Reservoir Hill The Victorians gave each floor a distinctive use. The first floor was the public area where guests were received and entertained. Once you go up the staircase to the second floor, you were in a private area only accessible to family and the closest friends. The third floor was servant's quarters and the attic was for storage of household goods. You will see one set of stairs on the right and a second set of stairs through the door. The stairs in the background are service stairs that lead from the kitchen and pantry to the second and third floors. These were used by the maid and butler and allowed them to go about their business while the owners were entertaining guests in the "public area" of the house. Life in a Victorian household was definitely "Upstairs, Downstairs." A Photo Essay I heard the Silence on Christmas Day Once a year the shopping stops, the stores empty, parking lots are vacated, the streets clear. Time stops and all is silent as everyone retires to their homes and churches to observe the day of Christmas. America Inaugurates a President The Peace Corps Community marches in Obama's Inaugural Parade President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden's Inaugural Committee officially extended an offer to the Peace Corps Community and AmeriCorps Alums to march in the 56th Inaugural Parade. Members of these service organizations will join representatives from across the country and our Armed Forces in the historic parade down Pennsylvania Avenue following President-elect Obama's swearing-in ceremony on the steps of the Capitol. "These organizations embody the best of our nation's history, diversity and commitment to service," said President-elect Obama. "Vice President-elect Biden and I are proud to have them join us in the parade." Ponca Photos Mar 28, 2011 Classical Guitarist Brad Richter and Cellist Viktor Uzur appear at the Poncan Theatre Nov 22, 2010 Chilocco Indian Agricultural School Nov 7, 2009 Veteran's Day Parade down Grand Avenue in Ponca City Nov 6, 2009 Will Rogers Tribute by Randall Reeder at the Poncan Theater Oct 25, 2009 "Rent" Cast at the Pollard Theater in Guthrie, Oklahoma Oct 21, 2009 Operation Pioneer Spirit at the Pioneer Woman Museum in Ponca City Oct 15, 2009 Boogie Woogie Pianist Silvan Zingg Appears at the Poncan Theater Oct 6, 2009 Red Dirt Rangers Appear at the Poncan Theater Oct 4, 2009 Rave On Tribute to Buddy Holly Appears at the Poncan Theater Oct 4, 2009 Ponca Opry at the Poncan Theater Oct 1, 2009 16th Annual Standing Bear Pow Wow in Ponca City, Oklahoma Sep 21, 2009 Ponca Playhouse looks to the Future with New Performance Space Sep 20, 2009 Wanda Jackson and Becky Hobbs perform at the Poncan Theatre Sep 14, 2009 Poncan Opry with "Patsy Cline" Sep 7, 2009 New Lighting at Donner Aug 5, 2009 Fiftieth Anniversary of 101 Ranch Rodeo in Ponca City Nov 30, 2008 Driving Up I-35 through Oklahoma and Kansas Nov 22, 2008 Ponca Opry at the Poncan Theatre Nov 16, 2008 Dedication of the Fluke Plaza Nov 10, 2008 Ponca City Wireless Internet Presentation Nov 7, 2008 Riders in the Sky perform with Les Gilliam at the Poncan Theater Nov 5, 2008 Rachel Barger Dances Lead to "Estória Cega" Oct 28, 2008 Paragon Ragtime Orchestra play at Hesston College Oct 25, 2008 Ponca Opry Oct 10, 2008 Ranch Sorting at the Play Pen Arena Oct 5, 2008 Paragon Ragtime Orchestra perform at Poncan Theatre Jul 14, 2008 Ponca Playhouse 50th Anniversary Gala May 7, 2008 Terry Fator performs at the Poncan Theater Apr 3, 2008 Lou Hale Moore's Sculpture of Deloris Pickens Sep 30, 2007 Standing Bear Memorial Park Dedication Sep 29, 2007 Riders in the Sky at the Poncan Theatre Sep 28, 2007 Poncan Opry at the Poncan Theater Sep 23, 2007 Chili Cookoff at Lake Ponca Sep 17, 2007 Visit to the Coleman Theater in Miami Oklahoma Sep 16, 2007 Annual Arts Festival at Soldani Mansion Sep 16, 2007 Ponca City Centennial Celebration Sep 15, 2007 Dennis James plays for the Silent Movie "Tumbleweeds" at Poncan Theatre Sep 9, 2007 Billings, Oklahoma Sep 9, 2007 Garber Oklahoma Sep 9, 2007 Enid, Oklahoma Sep 9, 2007 Guthrie Oklahoma Aug 23, 2007 The Murals of Alva Oklahoma Aug 23, 2007 Great Salt Plains Spillway Aug 1, 2007 Tour of Oklahoma State University Jul 22, 2007 NOC Production of Suburb at Poncan Theatre Jul 15, 2007 Water overflowing the spillway at Kaw Lake Jul 6, 2007 Son of a Sailor - Jimmy Buffett Tribute at Poncan Theatre Jul 5, 2007 4th of July Fireworks Celebration at Lake Ponca Jul 5, 2007 Fountain Lights in Front of Civic Center in Ponca City Jun 22, 2007 Blackfoot perform at the Poncan Theatre Jun 13, 2007 The Ginn Sisters Play at the Poncan Theatre Jun 7, 2007 1964, the Tribute at the Poncan Theatre Apr 8, 2007 Crossing the Arkansas River Mar 21, 2007 Flash Floods near Ponca at Hubbard and Waverly Mar 21, 2007 Flooding on North end of Lake Ponca Mar 21, 2007 Overflow at the Spillway at Lake Ponca Mar 21, 2007 Walking around Lake Ponca Park after a Heavy Rain Mar 21, 2007 Spillway at Lake Ponca Park from the Other Side Mar 19, 2007 Philbrook Museum in Tulsa Mar 11, 2007 Pawhuska Oklahoma Main Street Mar 2, 2007 Visit to Woolaroc Museum Mar 2, 2007 Pioneer Woman Statues at Woolaroc Museum Feb 25, 2007 Standing Bear Museum Construction Jan 18, 2007 Ponca City Digs Out Dec 26, 2006 Deserted Shopping Centers on Christmas Day Dec 24, 2006 Christmas Decorations on Donner Street in Ponca City Dec 18, 2006 ConocoPhillips Refinery at Sunset Dec 17, 2006 Ponca City High School Dec 17, 2006 Hutchins Memorial Dec 17, 2006 Robin Hood Flour Mill Dec 14, 2006 UML Signing at City Hall of Ponca City Dec 1, 2006 Ponca City - The Blizzard of 2006 Dec 1, 2006 Snow Lions in Ponca City Nov 25, 2006 Marland Mansion in Ponca City Oklahoma Nov 25, 2006 Poncan Theatre Nov 25, 2006 Standing Bear Native American Memorial Park Nov 25, 2006 Festival of Angels at Lake Ponca Park Nov 24, 2006 Tallgrass Prairie Nov 12, 2006 Ponca City Veteran's Day Parade Aug 20, 2006 Ponca City Rodeo Aug 19, 2006 Langston Oklahoma Prairie Tree Formation Jul 31, 2006 Skiatook Statuary Hugh Pickens writes: A Joyous Homecoming The Pioneer Woman Models Come Home to Ponca City “To me it was an easy answer” says Bob Fraser, Executive Director of Woolaroc Museum. “It was like ‘these statues used to belong to Ponca City’ now they belong to Woolaroc. Why don’t we have reproductions made of these statues and get them over to Ponca City. If people look at these statues and say ‘this is a nice gesture by Woolaroc or by Bartlesville’ that would be even better. The statues belong in Ponca City.” What Does the Future Hold? What are ConocoPhillips Plans for Ponca City? There has been a lot of talk around Ponca City that ConocoPhillips is interested in selling its Ponca refinery to another oil company and getting out of Ponca City especially after ConocoPhillips Chairman and CEO Jim Mulva met with corporate analysts in October 2009 for the ConocoPhillips Q3 2009 Earnings Call and announced that the company's capital budget would decrease by about 12 percent in 2010 and that ConocoPhillips planned to divest $10 billion in refining, exploration, and production assets in a bid to improve its financial position. A Native American Tradition Standing Bear Looks to the Future "The Standing Bear Foundation was born to bring the two cultures together" says TL Walker, the Executive Director of the Standing Bear Foundation. "Having the Pow Wow is a way for the two cultures to come together in a social setting." Held in late September and hosted by the Kaw Nation, Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria Nation, Pawnee Nation, Ponca Nation, and Tonkawa Nation, thousands of tribal members and citizens of Ponca City come together for two days to dance, sing, socialize, and honor American Indian culture. "The community of Ponca City and the community of all six tribes need to use the Pow Wow to celebrate together and embrace each other's culture with understanding," says Oliver Littlecook , member of the Ponca Nation. Lest We Forget We Remember I first learned about Uncle Donald when I was visiting my grandparents in Minnesota in the 1950's and saw Uncle Donald's purple heart in my grandparents' bedroom. I asked who the medal belonged to and my mother and grandparents told me about my Uncle and what had happened to him. Donald Cress was the older brother of my mother Deloris Pickens. He graduated from high school in Geneva, Minnesota in 1941 and after Pearl Harbor he volunteered to join the US Navy. When Donald volunteered, he asked to join the submarine service. "I want to come back from the war whole or not at all," Don told his family. Ponca Supports Our Men Overseas "Operation Pioneer Spirit" serves Oklahomans in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan In 2006 Megan Potter went to Iraq and after she had been in country about a week she sent a letter to her mother in Ponca City that said "The PX has hardly anything for the girls, so I'm going to send you a list of things that you can send to me because me and my friends are all in the same boat." Megan's mother, Mary Ann Potter, was reading the letter at the Farmer's Market in the the Pioneer Woman parking lot and Normal Erner came by and said let me see that letter. "Norma pulled seven dollars out of her pocket and said - here you go start something and I'll be right there with you and that's how the whole thing began, " says Potter. "We started in July 2006 and by August 3 had packed our first shipment of 19 boxes." Theatre in Oklahoma "Rent" in Guthrie and an Academy Award Winner in Ponca City Philip Seymour Hoffman who went on to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Truman Capote in the film "Capote" had a substantial role in "Twister" and if you go back and watch the movie you will see his over-the-top performance as a member of the tornado chase team. Hoffman called "Twister" the weirdest movie he ever made and says "That's not to slight Twister. But it is a weird movie. They're chasing tornados." Hoffman adds that he gained a lot of weight during the filming of "Twister" because he had just discovered "that the blockbuster budget extended to the on-set catering, which was free and plentiful." Boogie Woogie Piano Man A Surprise Announcement from Silvan Zingg Another wonderful performance tonight at the Poncan Theater this time by Silvan Zingg, the internatationally famous boogie woogie piano player who appeared at the theater only because one of his childhood friends, Martin Stucki, has made his home in Ponca City where he raises A1 Savannahs, the largest pet cat in the world. Silvan is godfather to one of Martin's children and used to play with Martin in concerts in Europe. The Greatest Generation Deloris Pickens writes: Remembering the Great Depression We are now in a downturn in our economy that is being compared to the Great Depression which started with the stock market crash in 1929 and didn't really end until World War Two. We of that generation were not able or did not prepare our children and grandchildren for this event. The bankers and credit card companies were extending credit to people that did not have the ability to pay their bills and a lot of manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. We are now in the process of trying to get our economy and our lives back to what we have perceived as normal. This is a strong country and we can put our minds to our problems and come out of this with a better knowledge of how to take care of ourselves. But we have to get back to helping each other and getting our priorities right. Red Dirt Road Red Dirt Rangers Appear at the Poncan Theater The Red Dirt Rangers appeared in a free concert this evening at the Poncan Theater courtesy of the Ponca City Arts and Humanities Council and there was a good audience - probably 500 people - and the band was well known to the audience. As an interesting side note the band said that they had played in Ponca City in their second public appearance twenty years ago so to them playing again in Ponca was like a homecoming for them. A Ponca Author Ponca City Native Joyce Carol Thomas honored by Writers Hall of Fame Award winning writer Joyce Carol Thomas, the author and illustrator of more than 50 children's books and winner of the National Book Award for Children's Fiction in 1983, was born in 1938 in Ponca City and was the fifth of nine children born into a family of cotton pickers. Although Thomas was about 10 when her family moved from Ponca City to California, she has always considered herself an Oklahoman and her memories of life in Ponca City and the surrounding areas have inspired much of Thomas' award-winning fiction, poetry and plays. Four of Thomas' novels are set in Ponca City: Marked by Fire (1982), Bright Shadow (1983), The Golden Pasture (1986) and The House of Light (2001). RPCV in the White House Meet Jon Carson Jon Carson is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Honduras from 2004 to 2006. Carson later served as national field director for Barack Obama’s campaign in the primaries and general election in 2007 and 2008, on the Obama transition team, as chief of staff at the Council on Environmental Quality in the Obama White House in 2009, and as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Public Engagement in 2011. Read the profile I wrote of Carson and the work he does in the White House. That'll Be The Day Buddy Holly Tribute at Poncan Theater One interesting story McGuigan told the audience was that Holly, born in Lubbuck, Texas, was a big John Wayne fan and that the title for one of Holly's most famous songs was taken from a line Wayne delivered several times in the 1954 classic movie "The Searchers" that many consider John Wayne's best role. John Wayne's line from the movie that became a song for Holly: "That'll be the day." Fifty Years of Success Ponca Playhouse Looks to the Future If necessity is the mother of invention, than the looming deadline of the opening of Ponca Playhouse's first play of the season, "Tuesdays with Morrie," galvanized members of the Playhouse to get the space prepared. The amazing thing is that the work on the seats and risers came together so quickly. "The work got done in one month. Three weeks before opening night you would never have dreamed we could do it," says Brian Hermanson. "We were out in the lobby rehearsing and there were twenty-two people inside the theater working so hard they were sweating.," says JoAnn Muchmore. "The actors said one night 'What is plan B? If the theater isn't ready and there is no place for us, what are we going to do?' I told them it would be ready because I didn't want to upset the actors, but I wasn't so sure myself." A Rock and Roll Legend Wanda Jackson and Becky Hobbs Perform at the Poncan Theatre Walkin' After Midnight "Patsy Cline" appears at the Poncan Theatre A Moslem Country Music Star Ponca City Native Kareem Salama Invited to White House Swamp Coolers and Horned Toads Life in Ponca City before Home Air Conditioning Change You Can Believe In My Wife and I attend Barack Obama's Inauguration in Washington DC Boswell Oklahoma, 1960 My Favorite Christmas (1960) Ask Not My Interview with the Head of the Peace Corps Looking to the Future Ponca City needs to go ahead with two big projects Two Lane Blacktop The Long Drive East Ponca City's Wireless Network Police Cars to Transmit Real Time Video with new Wireless Mesh An Oklahoma Icon Dedication of the Fluke Plaza Ghost Riders Les Gilliam performs with Riders in the Sky Thoughts on the Election A Dream Renewed My Neice's Dance Debut Rachel Barger Dances Lead to "Estória Cega" The Sound of Music A Musical Weekend A Unqiue Oklahoma Sport Ranch Sorting at the Play Pen Arena Alexander's Ragtime Band Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra Country Music Extravaganza Poncan Opry was a Big Success Fifty Years of Memories 50th Anniversary of Ponca Playhouse Wastin Away in Margaritaville Fourth of July Fountain Lights/Son of a Sailor I Want to Hear That Rock and Roll Music Blackfoot perform at the Poncan Theatre Three Stages of Ponca History The History of a Community Defines its Identity Rubber Soul 1964 the Tribute An Engineer's Engineer Death Be Not Proud America's Got Talent Terry Fator at the Poncan Theater Hunting with My Father My Father and Bobwhite Quail Ask Not Jack Vaughn: Peace Corps Legend Classic Rock Classic Rock Concerts Announced for Summer Oklahoma Melting Pot Muslim Country-Western Singer is from Ponca City The World's Encyclopedia Writing for Wikipedia Route 66 Revisited A Cross Country Marathon Mexican Delight Annual Chili Cookoff at Lake Ponca Too Much Happening Three Big Events in Ponca City Public Art The Murals of Alva Oklahoma Marland's Models The Pioneer Woman Statues at Woolaroc God Bless America Independence Day Celebration The E Street Band "Bruce in the USA" is coming to Ponca City Construction Update The Standing Bear Museum is coming along well The Snowstorm of the Century Ponca City digs out A Photo Essay I heard the silence on Christmas day A Ponca Christmas Joy to the World - Ponca City, 2006 Sent Down from Heaven The Festival of Angels at Lake Ponca Park Azure Blue "Ponca City, we love you" High Tech Returns to Ponca Ceremonial Signing for University Multispectral Lab at City Hall Craigslist Ponca Ponca Headlines

Ponca City, We Love You

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