paul jones's Public Library

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Scientists have discovered proof that the evolution of intelligence and larger brain sizes can be driven by cooperation and teamwork, shedding new light on the origins of what it means to be human. The study appears online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin: PhD student, Luke McNally and Assistant Professor Dr Andrew Jackson at the School of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Dr Sam Brown of the University of Edinburgh.

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Animal groups such as bird flocks, fish schools and insect swarms frequently exhibit complex and coordinated behaviors that result from social interactions among individuals. A fundamental problem in a wide range of biological disciplines is understanding how functional complexity at a macroscopic scale (such as the functioning of a biological tissue) results from the actions and interactions among the individual components (such as the cells forming the tissue). Since they can be readily observed and manipulated animal groups present unrivaled opportunities to link the behavior of individuals with the functioning and efficiency of the dynamic group-level properties. The CouzinLab is a highly interdisciplinary environment with a closely integrated experimental and theoretical research program to elucidate the fundamental principles that underlie collective behavior across levels of biological organization.

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.@cheeflo http://t.co/bnf9XOlP charges US1390 for publication. Unusual for soc sci. Interesting coauthorship of Barabasi, Dunbar, & assoc

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The two teams’ findings did not completely line up. One found size-related genes that the other did not. But they agreed on two findings: one gene that correlated strongly with overall brain size, and another that correlated with the rate at which the hippocampus atrophies, or shrinks, with age.

People who carried one variant of the overall-size gene had brains that were about 1 percent larger than those of people who carried another variant. The two variants are equally distributed — about half of people have one and half have the other.

In a separate analysis in Australia, Dr. Martin and Dr. Wright found that size correlated with I.Q. People with the larger brains scored slightly higher on a standardized test. The results are all averages, meaning that they hold for the group but say nothing about any individual. (Some very smart people have relatively small brains.)

The collaborators also found that about 10 percent of people carried a gene variant that correlated with a slightly accelerated rate of atrophy in the hippocampus. The hippocampi — there are two, each deep in the brain, one in the right side and one in the left, about level with the ears — are needed to form new memories. People with dementia often show pronounced atrophy in this region. The study was not set up to find a link between the gene variant and dementia, but experts suspect a connection.

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Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.”

Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year.

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Disguising Tor Traffic as Skype Video Calls: One of the problems with Tor traffic is that it can de detected and... http://t.co/4Bq7ObrI

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More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It's still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we're more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google.

A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.

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I mention this 1993 article only because it seems increasingly likely that email in a formal sense will disappear.

The evidence for this is partly anecdotal. When I send an email to anyone under the age of 25, or anyone in California, it often does not get answered for at least a week, if at all. The reply typically comes with an explanation along the lines of, “Sorry, I mostly use [insert new communication platform I’ve never heard of] now.”

Or they just live on Twitter and Facebook. Parents of teenagers now do most of their parenting by stalking the kids’ Facebook pages. It’s remarkable how often young people send messages to one another in a open comment thread. (Also, the photos always show the young people at play. There is never a photo of them in the library, or doing homework. I assume this is selection bias, and not a documentary account of their life.)

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One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”
It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

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A question near the beginning asked how they feel about email.  The answer was a resounding, “We can’t stand it.  It is a time waster.”  Then, another question at the end asked (paraphrased), “What is the best way to communicate information to you?”

The answer? Overwhelmingly EMAIL.

Ask yourself the same questions and, if you are like most people, you will probably have to admit that you would have answered the same way. (You may nervously laugh now.)

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Given the intellectual influence she's had, it's important to understand how what she's saying is different from other privacy theorists. The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they've "lost control" of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem "is the inapproproriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology." In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can't direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is "context-relative informational norms." Bust a norm and people get upset.

This may sound simple, but it actually leads to different analyses of current privacy dilemmas and may suggest better ways of dealing with data on the Internet. A quick example: remember the hubbub over Google Street View in Europe? Germans, in particular, objected to the photo-taking cars. Many people, using the standard privacy paradigm, were like, "What's the problem? You're standing out in the street? It's public!" But Nissenbaum argues that the reason some people were upset is that reciprocity was a key part of the informational arrangement. If I'm out in the street, I can see who can see me, and know what's happening. If Google's car buzzes by, I haven't agreed to that encounter. Ergo, privacy violation.

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The backdoors are installed by exploiting critical holes in two pieces of software that are widely used by Mac users. One of the vulnerabilities, a buffer overflow flaw in Microsoft Office for the Mac, was patched in 2009, while the other, an unspecified bug in Java, was fixed in October. The Java exploit is advanced enough that it reads the user agent of the intended victim's browser, and based on the results unloads a payload that's unique to machines running either Windows or OS X.

Reports of malware that targets the Mac have risen steadily over the past 36 months. Most of the reported infections rely on the gullibility of users, tricking them into believing their systems are already compromised and can be disinfected by downloading and installing a piece of rogue antivirus software. Others have exploited software weaknesses to install data-stealing trojans, often requiring little interaction on the part of users. While these reports are more rare, they date back to at least July 2010.

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He said many details of the trust's get-tough policy were to be determined, but one idea was to make institutions "take some responsibility" for the compliance of their Wellcome-funded researchers. He noted that open-access compliance at the trust's own Sanger Institute near Cambridge was 85 per cent.

He said the trust might require institutions to officially confirm that all publications associated with a grant had been made open access before the final instalment was paid. Another idea was to take Wellcome-funded researchers' open-access records into account when they reapplied for funding and activate further grants only once their previous research was openly accessible.

The trust also intended to follow RCUK's lead and require papers to be published according to the terms of a Creative Commons "CC-BY" licence, which allows unlimited reuse of content subject to proper attribution to the original author.

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Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’”

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Egan said Facebook is prepared to take some kind of action to protect its users' information — though it wouldn't specify what kind of action the social network would take:
Facebook takes your privacy seriously.  We’ll take action to protect the privacy and security of our users, whether by engaging policymakers or, where appropriate, by initiating legal action, including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges.

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Anonymous, for its part, has spawned a variety of spinoffs. Anybody can be Anonymous. And anybody who calls himself Anonymous can carry out an attack in its name. One hacker in Britain last week, calling himself a member of Anonymous, stole the health records of thousands of women registered with an abortion service provider in Britain. His boasts on Twitter put other Anonymous members in an awkward position, considering that Anonymous also took credit for attacks on the Vatican.

Some factions of Anonymous use brute force to shut down target Web sites. Other factions break into systems and steal data.

They have threatened to take down Internet root servers — part of the Web’s basic infrastructure — on April Fools’ Day, which would effectively shut down the global Internet.

Mary Landesman, a security researcher who now works at Cisco, has tracked cybercrime from its early days, when virus writers showed off their wares on message boards and hackers defaced porn sites for fun. In December 2000, Ms. Landesman saw a lament: A virus writer wondered on a message board where her fellow virus writers had gone. Ms. Landesman took it as a harbinger of the danger ahead: The virus writers had begun to work for people who could pay them, and they kept quiet.

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The prosecutions are part of a wave of coordinated efforts to rein in a leaderless, multinational movement called Anonymous, which has drawn attention for its protests against the Church of Scientology and in support of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. It has spawned spinoffs with different names and insignias, among them LulzSec, which claimed to attack computer security companies for laughs, or lulz, and of which Sabu was a prominent, outspoken member.

Just last week, Interpol announced the arrests of 25 people suspected of being Anonymous members in Europe. Sabu reacted to that news on Twitter by urging others to attack Interpol’s Web site.

Mr. Monsegur’s base of operations seems to have been his late grandmother’s sixth-floor apartment in a public-housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was apparently self-trained, and he appears to have been equally skilled at hacking and deceiving his fellow hackers. His downfall, if nothing else, will sow even more distrust and dissension in the ranks of Anonymous.

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I got the sense that Fred was saying US agents could physically do it
in another country. Perhaps I just misunderstood what he was trying to
say, because I find that really hard to believe (as rendition is not
an option in this case, which is why I brought up the fact that some
Republican congressmen are trying to call Assange a "terrorist" now).

Basic fact is that any move to arrest the guy (assuming they get an
indictment for him) would require that a friendly government do it and
then extradite him. Nick Miller told me the Australians have already
offered to do this, as Assange is an Australian citizen, and Australia
is the Canada of the southern hemisphere when it comes to its
relations with the US.

Also, Karen had a very good point about the sex charges. Weren't those
dropped months ago after the initial allegations? What do ya know,
after the US explictly warned him time and again to stop publishing
the cables, it pops back up all of a sudden.

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