Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA
veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the
agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary,
and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that
the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the
Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:
Any data in any third party, like any commercial data that’s held about U.S. citizens ….
(relevant quote starts at 4:19).
I called Binney to find out what he meant.
I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was
correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret
interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign
company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on
Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of
spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.
Binney replied no … it was broader than that.
Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any information about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:
Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.
I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying,
asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of
the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as
long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic.
In other words, the government is using the antiquated, bogus legal
argument that it was not using its governmental powers (called “acting
under color of law” by judges), but that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).
Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism
program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based
upon. Since all digital communications go through private company
networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn them over.
usnews |The spy in your pocket. And that doesn’t even get
into the personal, portable surveillance tools practically everyone in
the country voluntarily carries around with them: mobile phones and
other wireless devices. Pew Research reported this week that for the
first time a majority of Americans own a smart phone
of some kind, while fully 91 percent of the adult population now owns
some flavor of cell phone. (The wireless industry lobbying group CTIA
reports that wireless devices have now reached 102 percent penetration in the U.S. and its territories, which means that the machines now outnumber the people.)
And if you’re using your mobile phone, you’re being tracked. “I don’t
think people realize they’re revealing their location to their carrier
just by using their device,” says Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy
researcher and consultant. A 2011 investigation by the Wall Street
Journal (on which Soltani consulted) found that Apple and Android smart phones routinely send location information,
including information about local Wi-Fi networks, back to Apple and
Google. Separately, the Journal reported in 2011, Apple’s iPhone
collected and stored location data even when users had turned off
“location services” – which is to say when they thought they had opted
out of being tracked.
Why? This information is a potential treasure trove for these companies. From the Journal:
Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their
race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s
locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the
$2.9 billion market for location-based services – expected to rise to
$8.3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Gartner, Inc.
Google uses this information to help show on its maps where
automobile traffic is especially heavy or light. Verizon sells aggregate
location data to advertisers, according to Soltani, so they can know
where to place billboards. The wireless companies' viewpoint, according
to Soltani, is “we got this information for free, let’s use it for this
other use-case, which is the marketing data.”
And there are a lot of companies trying to get a piece of this
financial pie. In another story, the Journal surveyed 101 popular iPhone
and Android apps and found that “56 transmitted the phone’s unique
device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent.
Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone’s location in some way. Five sent
age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.” As Soltani told a
Senate subcommittee in 2011, “applications can access and transmit data
which includes text messages, emails, phone numbers, contacts stored
and even browser history stored on the device.”
So if you woke yourself up this morning with an alarm clock app on
your phone, the instant it went off, says Soltani, not only did it
transmit noise to your ears but location data back to people you don't
know. “There are times where there are 50 or 100 third parties –
companies that you’ve never had a relationship with – who are able to
monitor your … activities,” he says.
Not big on apps? Consider your next visit to the local mall. Carriers
and other companies are installing sensors around shopping malls,
Soltani says, allowing them to track where people are lingering, what’s
popular and what’s not, analytics that then go to the mall.
Perverse incentive. All of this creates what Soltani
calls a “perverse incentive that creates this worst case scenario for
consumers.” Companies have an incentive to collect and keep user data;
and that trove proves an irresistible target for the government in its
ongoing war on terrorists.
Which brings us back to the current uproar over the NSA’s data
collection and data mining. The outrage is justified, as is the broader
concern about how the cult of secrecy has infected and distorted the government.
But there is something somewhat comforting to the notion that
government agencies are ultimately responsible to the voters, even if
that process has become calcified and overly complex.
But the surveillance state is built upon its corporate counterpart. And who watches those watchers?
WaPo | Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee,
unmasked himself Sunday as the principal source of recent Washington
Post and Guardian disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs.
Snowden, who has contracted for the NSA and works for the
consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, denounced what he described as
systematic surveillance of
innocent citizens and said in an interview that “it’s important to send
a message to government that people will not be intimidated.”
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Saturday
that the NSA had initiated a Justice Department investigation into who
leaked the information — an investigation supported by intelligence
officials in Congress.
Snowden, whose full name is Edward Joseph
Snowden, said he understands the risks of disclosing the information but
felt it was important to reveal.
“I intend to ask for asylum from
any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization
of global privacy,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has
been staying. The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden.
Both media organizations made his name public with his consent.
“I’m
not going to hide,” Snowden said Sunday afternoon. “Allowing the U.S.
government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for
revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”
Asked
whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: “I
think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad
things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power
to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their
privacy to the surveillance state.”
Snowden said nobody was aware
of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn’t a
single event that spurred his decision to leak the information.
“It
was more of a slow realization that presidents could openly lie to
secure the office and then break public promises without consequence,”
he said.
Snowden said President Obama hasn’t lived up to his
pledges of transparency. He blamed a lack of accountability in the Bush
administration for continued abuses. The White House could not
immediately be reached for comment Sunday afternoon.
“It set an
example that when powerful figures are suspected of wrongdoing,
releasing them from the accountability of law is ‘for our own good,’ ”
Snowden said. “That’s corrosive to the basic fairness of society.”
whyevolutionistrue | The great step forward made by Watson and Crick in their second paper was to take these pre-existing ideas and reshape them in a less literal form. The sequence of bases was no longer seen in terms of a physical template for protein synthesis, but as something far more abstract – a code carrying genetical information.
What is intriguing is where this novel interpretation came from. The first person who explicitly suggested that genes contained a ‘code-script’ was the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in 1943. Although his ideas were widely-read, there were few attempts to explore the idea of a ‘code’, because the physical nature of the gene was unknown.
The importance of ‘information’ as an abstract concept – so widespread in our modern view – was a direct product of war-time work on electronic transmissions by Claude Shannon, and on the development of control systems to guide anti-aircraft guns carried out by Norbert Wiener. In 1948, these two mathematicians each published a popular book – Information Theory and Cybernetics, respectively. (For best-sellers they contained a surprising number of mathematical formulae. Maybe people were more maths-savvy back then. Or more tolerant of things they didn’t quite understand.)
There were a growing number of meetings at which physicists, mathematicians and biologists tried to see how they could forge a new way of looking at life (the cyberneticians were particularly bold in this respect). In the end, nothing came of these attempts, but at some point along the way, the idea of seeing that genes contain ‘information’ seeped its way into Watson and Crick’s thinking, leading them to explain the implications of the double helix structure in this radically novel way.
How exactly the pair came up with the idea is not known (that’s why yesterday I asked Jerry to ask Watson this question when they met – we should get a post on this later today). We know that Crick wrote most of this article, in a terrible hurry. Did either of them read Shannon or Wiener? Or were these just terms they heard floating about on the Cambridge air, or idly discussed in the corridors at conferences? Whatever the case, today it is impossible to think about genes – or evolution – without using this powerful metaphor.
wikipedia |What Is Life? is a 1944 non-fiction science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin.
The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned "that
the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not
be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon,
mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized."[1]
Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the
events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of
a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?"[1]
In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic
crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of
covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule. Although the existence of DNA
had been known since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical
shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture. In
retrospect, Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a
well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been
looking for during their search for genetic material. Both James D. Watson,[2] and independently, Francis Crick,
co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, credited Schrödinger's book
with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each respectively acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.[3]
exploratorium | We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose
nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of
considerable biological interest.
A structure for nucleic
acid has already been proposed by Pauling (4)
and Corey1.
They kindly made their manuscript available to us in advance of publication.
Their model consists of three intertwined chains, with the phosphates
near the fibre axis, and the bases on the outside. In our opinion, this
structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons:
(1) We believe that
the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free
acid. Without the acidic hydrogen atoms it is not clear what forces would
hold the structure together, especially as the negatively charged phosphates
near the axis will repel each other.
(2) Some of the van
der Waals distances appear to be too small.
Another three-chain
structure has also been suggested by Fraser (in the press). In his model
the phosphates are on the outside and the bases on the inside, linked
together by hydrogen bonds. This structure as described is rather ill-defined,
and for this reason we shall not comment on it. We
wish to put forward aradically different structure
for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (5).
This structure has two helical chains each coiled round the same axis
(see diagram). We have made the usual chemical assumptions, namely, that
each chain consists of phosphate diester groups joining beta-D-deoxyribofuranose
residues with 3',5' linkages. The two chains (but not their bases) are
related by a dyad perpendicular to the fibre axis. Both chains follow
right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms
in the two chains run in opposite directions
(6) . Each chain loosely resembles Furberg's2
model No. 1 (7); that is, the bases are on the inside of the
helix and the phosphates on the outside. The configuration of the sugar
and the atoms near it is close to Furberg's "standard configuration,"
the sugar being roughly perpendicular to the attached base. There is a
residue on each every 3.4 A. in the z-direction. We have assumed
an angle of 36° between adjacent residues in the same chain, so that
the structure repeats after 10 residues on each chain, that is, after
34 A. The distance of a phosphorus atom from the fibre axis is 10 A. As
the phosphates are on the outside, cations have easy access to them.
wired | At the most basic level, scientists create phylogenetic trees by
grouping species according to their degree of relatedness. Lining up the
DNA of humans, chimpanzees and fish, for example, makes it readily
apparent that humans and chimps are more closely related to each other
than they are to fish.
Researchers once used just one gene or a handful to compare
organisms. But the last decade has seen an explosion in phylogenetic
data, rapidly inflating the data pool for generating these trees. These
analyses filled in some of the sparse spots on the tree of life, but
considerable disagreement still remains.
For example, it’s not clear whether snails are most closely related
to clams and other bivalves or to another mollusk group known as tusk
shells, said Rokas. And we have no idea how some of the earliest animals
to branch off the tree, such as jellyfish and sponges, are related to
each other. Scientists can rattle off examples of conflicting trees
published in the same scientific journal within weeks, or even in the same issue.
“That poses a question: Why do you have this lack of agreement?” said Rokas.
Rokas and his graduate student Leonidas Salichos explored that question by evaluating each gene independently
and using only the most useful genes — those that carry the greatest
amount of information with respect to evolutionary history — to
construct their tree.
They started with 23 species of yeast, focusing on 1,070 genes. They
first created a phylogenetic tree using the standard method, called
concatenation. This involves stringing together all the sequence data
from individual species into one mega-gene and then comparing that long
sequence among the different species and creating a tree that best
explains the differences.
The resulting tree was accurate according to standard statistical
analysis. But given that similar methods have produced trees of life
that are rife with contradiction, Rokas and Salichos decided to delve
deeper. They built a series of phylogenetic trees using data from
individual yeast genes and employed an algorithm derived from
information theory to find the areas of greatest agreement among the
trees. The result, published in Nature in May, was unexpected. Every gene they studied appeared to tell a slightly different story of evolution.
“Just about all the trees from individual genes were in conflict with
the tree based on a concatenated data set,” says Hilu. “It’s a bit
shocking.”
They concluded that if a number of genes support a specific
architecture, it is probably accurate. But if different sets of genes
support two different architectures equally, it is much less likely that
either structure is accurate. Rokas and Salichos used a statistical
method called bootstrap analysis to select the most informative genes.
In essence, “if you take just the strongly supported genes, then you recover the correct tree,” said Donoghue.Fist tap Dale.
technion | Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations. The breakthrough might someday create new possibilities in biotechnology, including individual gene therapy and cloning. The findings appear in (May 23, 2013) Chemistry & Biology (Cell Press).
Interest in such biomolecular computing devices is strong, mainly because of their ability (unlike electronic computers) to interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.
“Our results show a novel, synthetic designed computing machine that computes iteratively and produces biologically relevant results,” says lead researcher Prof. Ehud Keinan of the Technion Schulich Faculty of Chemistry. “In addition to enhanced computation power, this DNA-based transducer offers multiple benefits, including the ability to read and transform genetic information, miniaturization to the molecular scale, and the aptitude to produce computational results that interact directly with living organisms.”
The transducer could be used on genetic material to evaluate and detect specific sequences, and to alter and algorithmically process genetic code. Similar devices, says Prof. Keinan, could be applied for other computational problems.
“All biological systems, and even entire living organisms, are natural molecular computers. Every one of us is a biomolecular computer, that is, a machine in which all components are molecules “talking” to one another in a logical manner. The hardware and software are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical tasks. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, programmed changes, following a specific set of rules (software) and the output of this chemical computation process is another well defined molecule.”
newyorker | Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the
public earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the
phone records of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information
it obtained was only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of
the phone conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon
subsidiary, of who called whom when and from where. In addition, she
said in a prepared statement, the “names of subscribers” were not
included automatically in the metadata (though the numbers, surely,
could be used to identify them). “Our courts have consistently
recognized that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this
type of metadata information and thus no search warrant is required to
obtain it,” she said, adding that “any subsequent effort to obtain the
content of an American’s communications would require a specific order
from the FISA court.”
She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully
done”—and noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized
the vast intelligence collection. A White House official made the same
points to reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not
allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was
subject to “a robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in
contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of
secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had
authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual
words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad
could it be?
The answer, according to the mathematician and
former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while
reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.
“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about
so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She
explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary
information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can
track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the
content.”
globalresearch | Over millennia, numerous enterprises have sought the status of science. Few have succeeded because they have failed to discover anything that stood up to scrutiny as knowledge. No body of beliefs, no matter how widely accepted or how extensive in scope, can ever be scientific.
In the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the epicycle is a geometric model of the solar system and planetary motion. It was first proposed by Apollonius of Perga at the end of the 3rd century BCE and its development continued until Kepler came up with a better model in the 17th century, and the geocentric model of the solar system was replaced by Copernican heliocentrism. In spite of some very good approximations to the problems of planetary motion, the system of epicycles could never get anything right.
Phrenology was originated by Franz Joseph Gall [right] in the late 1700s. After examining the heads of a number of young pickpockets, Gall found that many of them had bumps on their skulls just above their ears and suggested that the bumps, indentations, and shape of the skull could be linked to different aspects of a person’s personality, character, and abilities. Gall measured the skulls of people in prisons, hospitals, and asylums and developed a system of 27 different “faculties” that he believed could be directly diagnosed by assessing specific parts of the head, and he chose to ignore any contradictory evidence. After Gall’s death in 1828, several of his followers continued to develop phrenology. Despite some brief popularity, it was eventually viewed as a pseudoscience much like astrology, numerology, and palmistry. All of these, too, could never get anything right.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who is known as the father of psychoanalysis which is a clinical method for treating psychopathology by having a patient talk to a psychoanalyst. Results on the mental health of patients were scanty at best. Some contend that Freud set back the study of psychology and psychiatry “by something like fifty years or more”, and that “Freud’s method is not capable of yielding objective data about mental processes”. Others consider psychoanalysis to be perhaps the most complex and successful pseudoscience in history. Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that no experiment could ever disprove Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and thus were totally unscientific. Now Freud’s work has little relevance in psychiatry. It could never cure anyone. But it was not Freud who created a pseudoscience, it was the people who uncritically adopted his views.
Today the great fraudulent science is economics, but I don’t intend to beat that carcass. It has been shown not to be a science by numerous astute people. Even some renowned economists have been convinced of it. Paul Samuelson has said, “Economics has never been a science—and it is even less now than a few years ago.” Even Nassau William Senior knew it: “The confounding Political Economy with the Sciences and Arts to which it is subservient, has been one of the principal obstacles to its improvement.”
Yet many working economists continue to claim that it is or at least that it is more of a science than its siblings in the social enterprises of study. Perhaps these people feel that their work lacks dignity if it is not scientific, being unable to say exactly what it is if it is not science. So let’s look at some things that economists regularly do to see if what they are doing can be defined.
project-syndicate | One of the dirty secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as
“economic theory.” There is simply no set of bedrock principles on which
one can base calculations that illuminate real-world economic outcomes.
We should bear in mind this constraint on economic knowledge as the
global drive for fiscal austerity shifts into top gear.
Unlike economists,
biologists, for example, know that every cell functions according to
instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists begin
with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles, plus the
three-dimensionality of space, tell us about stable electron
configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of
nature.
Economists
have none of that. The “economic principles” underpinning their
theories are a fraud – not fundamental truths but mere knobs that are
twiddled and tuned so that the “right” conclusions come out of the
analysis.
The
“right” conclusions depend on which of two types of economist you are.
One type chooses, for non-economic and non-scientific reasons, a
political stance and a set of political allies, and twiddles and tunes
his or her assumptions until they yield conclusions that fit their
stance and please their allies. The other type takes the carcass of
history, throws it into the pot, turns up the heat, and boils it down,
hoping that the bones will yield lessons and suggest principles to guide
our civilization’s voters, bureaucrats, and politicians as they slouch
toward utopia.
Not surprisingly, I believe that only the second kind of economist has
anything useful to say. So what lessons does history have to teach us
about our current global economic predicament?
douglasvalentine | "Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not
soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that
part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in
time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional
committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix
program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians
like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."
"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due
process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names
appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two
years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous
informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen
hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in
the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security
officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted
innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein
described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central
government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"
"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight
while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents
describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon"
of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages
that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win
the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut
deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other
things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare
tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with
their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire
population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for
propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by
the enemy.
"This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation
ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like
Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in
it, and by employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the
human psyche, the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which
the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This book
is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as
successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex
of covert operations - ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist
insurgencies - the American people gradually lose touch with the
democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This
book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."
guardian | The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone
records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest
telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The
document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration
the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected
indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected
of any wrongdoing.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the
government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified
three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the
blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as
is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and
duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not
covered.
The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates
in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying
powers.
Under the Bush administration, officials in security
agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call
records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and
top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a
massive scale under President Obama.
outpost-of-freedom | I've been following the concepts of digital cash and encryption since I read the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American on "encrypted signatures." While I've only followed the Digitaliberty area for a few weeks, I can already see a number of points that do (and should!) strongly concern the average savvy individual:
1. How can we translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life?
2. How can we keep the government from banning encryption, digital cash, and other systems that will improve our freedom?
A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally "revolutionary" idea, and I jokingly called it "Assassination Politics": I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly "predicted" the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.
I also speculated that using modern methods of public-key encryption and anonymous "digital cash," it would be possible to make such awards in such a way so that nobody knows who is getting awarded the money, only that the award is being given. Even the organization itself would have no information that could help the authorities find the person responsible for the prediction, let alone the one who caused the death.
It was not my intention to provide such a "tough nut to crack" by arguing the general case, claiming that a person who hires a hit man is not guilty of murder under libertarian principles. Obviously, the problem with the general case is that the victim may be totally innocent under libertarian principles, which would make the killing a crime, leading to the question of whether the person offering the money was himself guilty.
On the contrary; my speculation assumed that the "victim" is a government employee, presumably one who is not merely taking a paycheck of stolen tax dollars, but also is guilty of extra violations of rights beyond this. (Government agents responsible for the Ruby Ridge incident and Waco come to mind.) In receiving such money and in his various acts, he violates the "Non-aggression Principle" (NAP) and thus, presumably, any acts against him are not the initiation of force under libertarian principles.
The organization set up to manage such a system could, presumably, make up a list of people who had seriously violated the NAP, but who would not see justice in our courts due to the fact that their actions were done at the behest of the government. Associated with each name would be a dollar figure, the total amount of money the organization has received as a contribution, which is the amount they would give for correctly "predicting" the person's death, presumably naming the exact date. "Guessers" would formulate their "guess" into a file, encrypt it with the organization's public key, then transmit it to the organization, possibly using methods as untraceable as putting a floppy disk in an envelope and tossing it into a mailbox, but more likely either a cascade of encrypted anonymous remailers, or possibly public-access Internet locations, such as terminals at a local library, etc.
In order to prevent such a system from becoming simply a random unpaid lottery, in which people can randomly guess a name and date (hoping that lightning would strike, as it occasionally does), it would be necessary to deter such random guessing by requiring the "guessers" to include with their "guess" encrypted and untraceable "digital cash," in an amount sufficiently high to make random guessing impractical.
For example, if the target was, say, 50 years old and had a life expectancy of 30 years, or about 10,000 days, the amount of money required to register a guess must be at least 1/10,000th of the amount of the award. In practice, the amount required should be far higher, perhaps as much as 1/1000 of the amount, since you can assume that anybody making a guess would feel sufficiently confident of that guess to risk 1/1000th of his potential reward.
The digital cash would be placed inside the outer "encryption envelope," and could be decrypted using the organization's public key. The prediction itself (including name and date) would be itself in another encryption envelope inside the first one, but it would be encrypted using a key that is only known to the predictor himself. In this way, the organization could decrypt the outer envelope and find the digital cash, but they would have no idea what is being predicted in the innermost envelope, either the name or the date.
If, later, the "prediction" came true, the predictor would presumably send yet another encrypted "envelope" to the organization, containing the decryption key for the previous "prediction" envelope, plus a public key (despite its name, to be used only once!) to be used for encryption of digital cash used as payment for the award. The organization would apply the decryption key to the prediction envelope, discover that it works, then notice that the prediction included was fulfilled on the date stated. The predictor would be, therefore, entitled to the award. Nevertheless, even then nobody would actually know WHO he is!
It doesn't even know if the predictor had anything to do with the outcome of the prediction. If it received these files in the mail, in physical envelopes, which had no return address, it would have burned the envelopes before it studied their contents. The result is that even the active cooperation of the organization could not possibly help anyone, including the police, to locate the predictor.
Also included within this "prediction-fulfilled" encryption envelope would be unsigned (not-yet-valid) "digital cash," which would then be blindly signed by the organization's bank and subsequently encrypted using the public key included. (The public key could also be publicized, to allow members of the public to securely send their comments and, possibly, further grateful remuneration to the predictor, securely.) The resulting encrypted file could be published openly on the Internet, and it could then be decrypted by only one entity: The person who had made that original, accurate prediction. The result is that the recipient would be absolutely untraceable.
The digital cash is then processed by the recipient by "unbinding" it, a principle which is explained in far greater detail by the article in the August 1992 issue of Scientific American. The resulting digital cash is absolutely untraceable to its source.Fist tap Dale.
msu | Short interruptions – such as the few seconds it takes to silence
that buzzing smartphone – have a surprisingly large effect on one’s
ability to accurately complete a task, according to new research led by
Michigan State University.
The study, in which 300 people performed a sequence-based procedure
on a computer, found that interruptions of about three seconds doubled
the error rate.
Brief interruptions are ubiquitous in today’s society, from text
messages to a work colleague poking his head in the door and
interrupting an important conversation. But the ensuing errors can be
disastrous for professionals such as airplane mechanics and emergency
room doctors, said Erik Altmann, lead researcher on the study.
“What this means is that our health and safety is, on some level,
contingent on whether the people looking after it have been
interrupted,” said Altmann, MSU associate professor of psychology.
The study, funded by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, is one
of the first to examine brief interruptions of relatively difficult
tasks. The findings appear in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General.
newscientist | NO CREVICE of the human experience is safe. Our
deepest fears and desires, our pasts and our futures – all have been
revealed, and all in the form of colourful images that look like lava
bubbling under the skull.
That, at least, is the popular conception of neuroscience – and it's worth big money. The US and the European Union
are throwing billions of dollars at two new projects to map the human
brain. Yet there is also a growing anxiety that many of neuroscience's
findings don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not just sensational headlines
reporting a "dark patch" in a psychopath's brain, there are now serious concerns that some of the methods themselves are flawed.
The intrepid outsider needs expert guidance through this rocky terrain – and there's no better place to start than Brainwashed
by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld. Satel, a practising
psychiatrist, and Lilienfeld, a clinical psychologist, are terrific
sherpas. They are clear-sighted, considered and forgiving of the
novice's ignorance.
Such fishy results are troubling
enough, but even legitimate scans can be problematic. As the authors
point out, brain images should be used only alongside other kinds of
evidence. But all too often they are given the final say on human
behaviour. A common pitfall, assert Satel and Lilienfeld, is
"neurodeterminism" – the idea that a murderer, say, had been cursed with
a brain defect that destroyed their sense of morality.
notredame | Neuroscience is the study of the physiological mechanisms that give
rise to a manifold of human capacities, including perception, memory,
vision and the emotions. To achieve the goals of scientific
understanding, neuroscientists must of necessity advance claims and
hypotheses which are subjected to scientific experiment. In addition to
experimental techniques, neuroscientists need a conceptual framework
within which to make sense of the results of their empirical work. In
short, a necessary complement to empirical research is a coherent
conception of the phenomena under investigation, that is, human
psychological capacities.
Bennett - a distinguished neuroscientist - and Hacker - the
preeminent scholar of Wittgenstein's thought - have teamed up to produce
a withering attack on the conception of the mental that lies at the
heart of contemporary neuroscience. Although neuroscientists are
committed materialists, and adamantly insist on this aspect of their
anti-Cartesianism, they have, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely
jettisoned the dual substance doctrine of Cartesianism, but retained its
faulty structure with respect to the relation of mind and behavior.
theroot | "I'm a young black woman with what you would call a 'ghetto' name. I'd have no problem with my name if it weren't for the fact that for my entire life, white people have made fun of me. I've been made fun of by teachers, even professors in college when they call out my name. I've had people tell me, 'You seem like such a good person, though -- I can't believe you have such a ghetto name.' People have said my parents made a huge mistake. I've had hiring managers tell me that they would hire me only on the condition that I 'shorten' my name for the customers.
"My name is Laquita, so it really isn't even complicated. Anyway, I'm tired of it all.
"The problem with this is telling my family -- I have no idea why my mother gave me this name. I feel like it's a curse. So how do I tell her that I'm doing this without offending her? Do you think it's the right choice, or am I 'giving up'?"
nih | A social contingency analysis of religion is presented, arguing that
individual religious behaviors are principally maintained by the many
powerful benefits of participating in social groups rather than by any
immediate or obvious consequences of the religious behaviors. Six common
strategies are outlined that can shape the behaviors of large groups of
people. More specifically, religious behavior is shaped and maintained
by making already-existing contingencies contingent upon
low-probability, but socially beneficial, group behaviors. Many specific
examples of religious themes are then analyzed in terms of these common
strategies for social shaping, including taboos, rituals, totems,
personal religious crises, and symbolic expression. For example, a
common view is that people are anxious about life, death, and the
unknown, and that the direct function of religious behaviors is to
provide escape from such anxiety. Such an explanation is instead
reversed—that any such anxiety is utilized or created by groups through
having escape contingent upon members performing less probable behaviors
that nonetheless provide important benefits to most individual group
members. These generalized beneficial outcomes, rather than escape from
anxiety, maintain the religious behaviors and this fits with
observations that religions typically act to increase anxiety rather
than to reduce it. An implication of this theory is that there is no
difference in principle between religious and nonreligious social
control, and it is demonstrated that the same social strategies are
utilized in both contexts, although religion has been the more
historically important form of social control.
medicalexpress | As a person's IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more intelligent.
A brief visual task can predict IQ, according to a new study. This surprisingly simple exercise measures the brain's unconscious ability to filter out visual movement. The study shows that individuals whose brains are better at automatically suppressing background motion perform better on standard measures of intelligence.
The test is the first purely sensory assessment to be strongly correlated with IQ and may provide a non-verbal and culturally unbiased tool for scientists seeking to understand neural processes associated with general intelligence. "Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can't really track it back to one part of the brain," says Duje Tadin, a senior author on the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent." The unexpected link between IQ and motion filtering was reported online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 23 by a research team lead by Tadin and Michael Melnick, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. In the study, individuals watched brief video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Their sole task was to identify which direction the bars drifted: to the right or to the left. The bars were presented in three sizes, with the smallest version restricted to the central circle where human motion perception is known to be optimal, an area roughly the width of the thumb when the hand is extended. Participants also took a standardized intelligence test.
As a person's IQ increases,
so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background
motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better
understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more
intelligent.
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