The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft’s sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other American rivals.

It was unclear whether the drone’s mission took it over Iran or whether it strayed there accidentally because of technical malfunctions, the official said.

Though the drone flight was a CIA operation, U.S. military personnel were involved in flying the aircraft, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy involved.

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The ongoing argument about whether the Internet is a boon or a bust to civilization usually centers on the Web’s abundance. With so much data and so many voices, we each have knowledge formerly hard-won by decades of specialization. With some new fact or temptation perpetually beckoning, we may be the superficial avatars of an A.D.D. culture.

David Weinberger, one of the earliest and most perceptive analysts of the Internet, thinks we are looking at the wrong thing. It is not the content itself, but the structure of the Internet, that is the important thing. At least, as far as the destruction of a millennia-long human project is concerned.

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Google’s Chrome Web browser has leapfrogged Firefox to claim the number two slot in the browser battle, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

Chrome held 25.69 percent of the worldwide market in November 2011 compared with Firefox’s 25.23 percent. Internet Explorer remains the top browser globally with a 40.63 percent share of the market.

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Guess please where ths U.S. is and what the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average is first. Then go and check it out.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Watch it all–wonderful fare from Theoryfilms; KSH.

Is the prospect of group marriage far-fetched? Probably not. There are several avenues that could soon lead to legal recognition of unions involving three or more people. The efforts come from the fringes of the left, from the darkest corners of the fundamentalist right, and from the laboratories of fertility clinics and hard scientists around the world….

All of which begs questions: How do children feel when they are raised by three or more persons called their parents, especially when those people disagree? If their three-plus parents break up, how many homes do we expect these children to travel between? And why would anyone watching news coverage of arrests at polygamist compounds in Texas or British Columbia — seeing hundreds of pale women wearing identical ankle-length dresses and braided hair amid reports of widespread abuse of and pregnancy among girls — think that polygamy is compatible with a society that values women’s rights and children’s safety?

Get ready for the debate. And in the meantime, wedding planners: start figuring out how many brides and grooms you can fit down that aisle.

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

One of the major dilemmas in secular society is that we’re taught that we should “embrace our sexuality,” and should therefore express this sexuality with multiple partners. How would you use the theology of the body to speak to a secular culture that is struggling to understand the idea of chastity and the celibate life?

West: You’ll see how I attempt to do that tonight at the Fill These Hearts event. But, first, I think what needs to be affirmed is this ache we all have for love — this yearning, this hunger, this desire. We all experience it. It is universal. The question is: Where do we take that desire, and what really satisfies it?
The imagery I’ve developed, and the imagery I use at this Fill These Hearts event, to speak of this hunger: I say there are three gospels out there — and by gospel I mean some promise of happiness, what to do with the hunger. Most of us were raised on what I call the “starvation diet gospel.” We’re raised in Christian homes, but we often get the impression that our desire is bad, and it’s only going to get us in trouble, so we need to repress it. Then we need to follow all these rules and we’ll be good, upstanding Christian citizens. Well, that doesn’t last very long, because you can only starve yourself for so long before the culture’s gospel — which I call the “fast-food” gospel — starts to look very attractive. And the fast-food gospel is the promise of immediate gratification. You’re hungry? Eat this. Well, fast-food might not be very good for you, but if the only two choices are starvation or fast-food, I’m going for the fast-food, which is what most of us do.

Part one is here and pat two is there; please do read it all.

Ah uh–guess first–then take a look.

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Harvard scientists have built a new type of flexible robot that is limber enough to wiggle and worm through tight spaces.

It’s the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied robots. Researchers are increasingly drawing inspiration from nature to create machines that are more bendable and versatile than those made of metal.

The Harvard team, led by chemist George M. Whitesides, borrowed from squids, starfish and other animals without hard skeletons to fashion a small, four-legged rubber robot that calls to mind the clay animation character Gumby.

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As a younger man Jobs had visited Japan and become a Zen Buddhist. By contrast with Martin Luther King who “just wanted to do God’s will”, he never did. There was no God in Steve Jobs vision of the universe, just the overwhelming mandate to “become yourself” untrammeled by dogma, or other people’s thinking. To Stanford students in 2005 he said: “Your time is limited”¦follow your heart and intuition”¦know what you want to become.” Of course, if this life is all there is, then that will pass about as much muster as any other earth-bound philosophy. “Death doesn’t happen to life,” as a former classmate of mine once said. “Death happens in life.” But all such
att empts to romanticize the hard reality of the grave still cause one to ask: “Is that all there is?”

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When the tech firm Yipit moved last month from General Assembly, a communal office campus on 20th Street and Broadway, to its own loft space on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, its 14 employees simply grabbed their coffee cups and MacBook Airs and did the job on foot.

Arriving at their new home, they milled about, admiring the water-cooler, and the breath mints in the bathroom, and then got down to work, requiring no more than a power source and a pass code for the Wi-Fi. By the time the two guys from Moishe’s Moving Company arrived with a half-dozen boxes of office sundries, Yipit was back in business. There had already been a staff meeting, conducted while a handyman knelt in the rec room setting up a Ping-Pong table. All told, the move took about 10 minutes.

With a recent $6 million Series-B (or second round) financing deal, and plans to double its workforce in a year, Yipit sits in the mid-to-low range of New York’s thriving tech spectrum, below the behemoths, like AOL and Twitter, and the happily mid-sized, like Foursquare and Gilt Groupe, but above the sort of start-ups that had been their neighbors at General Assembly’s shared tables.

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In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some””or all””of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.
Journal Community

In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools.

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Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

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In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined.

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

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Facial recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology ”” essentially, the democratization of surveillance ”” may herald the end of anonymity.

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The list of scientific heretics who were persecuted for their radical ideas but eventually proved right keeps getting longer. Last month, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, having spent much of his career being told he was wrong.

“I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying,” he recalled, adding that the doyen of chemistry, the late Linus Pauling, had denounced the theory with the words: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
The Australian medical scientist Barry Marshall, who hypothesized that a bacterial infection causes stomach ulcers, received similar treatment and was taken seriously only when he deliberately infected himself, then cured himself with antibiotics in 1984. Eventually, he too won the Nobel Prize.

Drs. Shechtman and Marshall are on a distinguished list…

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24 Hours on an Aircraft Carrier from The Seventh Movement on Vimeo.

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The lessons of Incognito, The Social Animal, and other popular books drawing on new research on the brain should make us think more highly of the church as the body of Christ, an organism of which we are members. We should think of our spiritual pursuits not as solitary pilgrimages but as an immersion into a wide river. Spiritual disciplines aren’t just enforced time with God, they’re rewiring the circuitry of our brains, forming and shaping disciples. The findings of Eagleman and other researchers call into question evangelicals’ emphasis on a correct worldview as the defining trait of a faithful Christian. How we cognitively rationalize our beliefs is of smaller consequence; those beliefs are shaped more than we think by our passions and desires, our behaviors and habits, which are in turn formed by our families and cultures, genes and neural pathways.

The lesson is not that we cannot help being who we are. The lesson of recent neuroscience is that who we are is much more than what we think. We are not separable from our bodies. The disciple swims in a river pushed by the saints of earlier eras, the biology of our families, and the culture they developed. We swim between banks, pulled by the habits we form, the disciplines we enact, the community we inhabit.

This view of humanity has little in common with the Enlightenment conception of man, the Romantic’s isolated individual, or the evangelist’s decision-maker who at a specific moment chooses for Christ. Instead it sounds like the Old Testament’s covenant community, formed by the ritual of the law into a chosen people, and through whom salvation comes to the world.

–Rob Moll in a review of David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon, 2011) in Books and Culture, November/December 2011 edition, p.19

An investigation into commercial online filtering technology reveals the prevalence of devices from Blue Coat, an American firm, being used to censor the Web in Syria and Burma. Ron Deibert of Toronto’s Citizen Lab discusses the report’s importance.

If you live in Burma or Syria, good luck trying to access pro-democracy websites, overseas news networks, even dating websites. Thanks to devices made by Blue Coat Systems, portions of the Net are inaccessible to residents in these countries, and a recent report reveals how a number of these filtering devices have been found in the regions, despite the manufacturer claiming they never sell their products to embargoed countries.

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The National Association of Evangelicals on Tuesday (Nov. 8) called for greater precautions with nuclear weapons and a renewed effort toward disarmament.

“The rules have changed in the past 25 years,” NAE President Leith Anderson said. “Nuclear weapons don’t serve as a deterrent to the dangers of our post-Cold War era, which include rogue nations and terrorist groups.”

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When the novelist Murong Xuecun showed up at a ceremony here late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written.

It was a meditation on the malaise brought on by censorship. “Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,” he planned to say. “This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”

The ceremony’s organizers forbade him to deliver the speech. On stage, Mr. Murong made a zipping motion across his mouth and left without a word. He then did with the speech what he had done with three of his best-selling novels, all of which had gone through a harsh censorship process: He posted the unexpurgated text on the Internet. Fans flocked to it.

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United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings, drawn from evidence of far greater scope and depth than the agency has previously made public, have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.

Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion ”” and has complicated American moves on Iran ”” the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from a range of independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.

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Ben White asked his sixth-grade students if his hair looked OK.

As he prepared to be on camera, his Webb School of Knoxville students opened video apps on their iPads to record White giving them their homework assignment.

At home, students could watch their teacher explaining exactly how to diagram nouns and verbs. The assignment was also loaded on iCalendar.

White said the iPad takes away excuses for not doing homework.

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“The only time I watch TV news now is when I’m staying in a hotel and I feel so old….There’s the stock ticker and the news crawl and those flashing graphics and eight heads screaming at each other and one’s in Tel Aviv and the other in Atlanta. It’s crazy. But after a week of it, I find myself craving it. I find my brain expanding in that chaos.”

–Composer Nico Muhly in this morning’s Wall Street Journal

Privately, U.S. officials have long complained that China and Russia are out to steal U.S. trade secrets, intellectual property and high technology. But in public they’ve been reluctant to point fingers, and instead have referred obliquely to “some nations” or “our rivals.”

That changed Thursday, with the release of a new report by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive to Congress titled “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace.” The report names China as the world’s leading source of economic espionage, followed by Russia.

“China and Russia, through their intelligence services and through their corporations, are attacking our research and development,” said Robert Bryant, U.S. national counterintelligence executive, during an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., presenting the espionage report.

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As Daniel Yergin writes in “The Quest,” his gripping history of energy innovation, [George] Mitchell fought through waves of skepticism and opposition to extract natural gas from shale. The method he and his team used to release the trapped gas, called fracking, has paid off in the most immense way. In 2000, shale gas represented just 1 percent of American natural gas supplies. Today, it is 30 percent and rising.

John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.

The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.

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it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.

This was a problem when I was an undergraduate from 1978-1982 (and, yes, I am a science major [chemistry]). Read it all–KSH.

Most straight single women who find themselves at a fertility clinic are not thrilled to be there. Many arrive feeling they wasted prime reproductive years in long relationships and are “pretty upset,” says Sherry Dale, a counsellor at LifeQuest Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Toronto. “What woman has ever said, ”˜I can’t wait until I’m 40 so I can get some donor sperm?’ ”

Nevertheless, Dale and other counsellors who give advice on donor insemination (DI) say business is booming among single women aged 35 to 42. Most fertility clinics mandate at least one visit with a DI counsellor, but, Dale explains, they’re not gatekeepers. “They are not meeting me to get the go-ahead, or so I can see if they’re sane or nice people. I’m meeting them so they can know what’s ahead, not medically but emotionally.”

On average, about 20 single women attend Jan Silverman’s monthly meetings at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto; others see her one-on-one. “The sentence I hear most is, ”˜I just didn’t think this would be my life.’ Some have said to themselves, ”˜I’ll do this if I haven’t met a man by 35.’ Then they turn 38, and then 42. That’s a pattern I see over and over.”

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