A Duke University cancer scientist resigned Friday amid concerns about his research that arose after the university started probing whether he’d lied on a grant application.
School spokeswoman Debbe Geiger also said another researcher at the school is asking the journal Nature Medicine to retract a paper he published with Anil Potti, the scientist who’s stepping down. Potti’s collaborator Joseph Nevins said some of the tests in the research they produced for that paper can not be duplicated.
A state-owned Chinese telecommunications firm re-routed around 15 per cent of all web traffic through its own servers during a brief period on April 8, the report said.
The incident has raised fears that China may have harvested highly-sensitive information from re-routed emails.
Another theory is that it could be testing a cyberweapon that could disrupt internet traffic from foreign servers.
A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting … now.
And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went ”” the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills ”” that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.
I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.
Kathy DeGrego’s T-shirt lets you know right away she isn’t an old-school librarian.
“Shhh,” it says, “is a four-letter word.”
That spirit of bookish defiance has guided the makeover of the suburban Denver library system where DeGrego works. Reference desks and study carrels have been replaced by rooms where kids can play Guitar Hero. Overdue book fines have been eliminated, and the arcane Dewey Decimal System has been scrapped in favor of bookstore-like sections organized by topic.
“It’s very common for people to say, ‘Why do I need a library when I’ve got a computer?’ ” said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. “We have to reframe what the library means to the community.”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, showed off the company’s next Android-powered phone, which will contain a chip that will allow people to make payments via their handsets.
Opening this year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt showed off the new phone, which had the manufacturer’s label deliberately covered up, but is assumed to be the next Nexus device, following the Nexus One, and will contain a Near Field Communication chip, that will allow people to use their phones like credit cards.
Walt Disney Co. has begun rolling out its plan to spur digital movie purchases by removing the technological obstacles that thus far have stymied growth.
The studio has quietly launched Disney Movies Online, which lets consumers buy or rent digital versions of Disney and Pixar films and watch them on the Internet. The site was conceived as a bridge to gently transition the family entertainment company’s mainstream consumers from the physical to the digital world. It debuted in May without fanfare.
How much without fanfare? Disney still isn’t promoting the site beyond including the Web address on a sleeve inside DVDs and Blu-ray packages. There isn’t even a link to it on the company’s main website.
As the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid.
All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring.
The police reached the house undetected, barreled in and found rooms crammed with about 50 machines used to copy CDs and make counterfeit versions of software like Microsoft Office and Xbox video games. They arrested three men on the spot, who were later released while the authorities investigate the case. “The entire operation was very complicated and risky,” says a person close to the investigation, who demanded anonymity out of fear for his life.
The progress made in scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, in all its various disciplines, has led to a greatly improved awareness of the place that man and this planet occupy in the universe. In all sciences, the common denominator continues to be the notion of experimentation as an organized method for observing nature. In the last century, man certainly made more progress ”“ if not always in his knowledge of himself and of God, then certainly in his knowledge of the macro- and microcosms ”“ than in the entire previous history of humanity. Our meeting here today, dear friends, is a proof of the Church’s esteem for ongoing scientific research and of her gratitude for scientific endeavour, which she both encourages and benefits from. In our own day, scientists themselves appreciate more and more the need to be open to philosophy if they are to discover the logical and epistemological foundation for their methodology and their conclusions. For her part, the Church is convinced that scientific activity ultimately benefits from the recognition of man’s spiritual dimension and his quest for ultimate answers that allow for the acknowledgement of a world existing independently from us, which we do not fully understand and which we can only comprehend in so far as we grasp its inherent logic. Scientists do not create the world; they learn about it and attempt to imitate it, following the laws and intelligibility that nature manifests to us. The scientist’s experience as a human being is therefore that of perceiving a constant, a law, a logos that he has not created but that he has instead observed: in fact, it leads us to admit the existence of an all-powerful Reason, which is other than that of man, and which sustains the world. This is the meeting point between the natural sciences and religion. As a result, science becomes a place of dialogue, a meeting between man and nature and, potentially, even between man and his Creator.
Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.
The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,” the brief said.
The latest exposure by Wikileaks of thousands of secret documents about the aftermath of the Iraq war has once again provoked debate about transparency and the implications of the indiscriminate cascade of disclosure. Exposures like these and notoriously, the MP expenses scandal before the last election, have fostered the belief that transparency is now a necessary condition for a functioning democracy.
Transparency advocates argue that the public disclosure of information is more important than the right to privacy because it is vital to rebuild trust, that this is impossible if politicians continue to “hide secrets” from the public, that democracy is a sham unless it is forced into honesty by radical campaigners like Julian Assange, pictured right.
But does this compulsive desire to publish every note, leak every memo, really do anything to bolster trust in society?
The short answer is that it does the opposite: it fuels mistrust rather than nurturing a climate of trust. It breeds suspicion and fosters secrecy.
Update: If you missed it, make sure to see “The Web Means the End of Forgetting” by Jeffrey Rosen, which was posted back in the summer, as it covers the theme from another angle.
A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.
Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six months, is not due to be completed by Mr. Dongarra until next week, he said the Chinese computer “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.” He added, “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.”
Since the birth of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, there has been a welcome transformation in the language of global conservation. Policymakers and even some businesses have started to express a view of nature as a store of wealth””or “natural capital”. Talk of “ecosystem services” now draws attention to the helpful things that nature does unbidden, such as providing fresh soil and clean water.
This approach not only has the advantage of moving conservation from the domain of lofty morality down to earth, reflecting a pragmatism more likely to support and sustain action.
For decades this central Indian city was vintage old India: crumbling Mughal-era ruins and ancient Buddhist caves surrounded by endless parched acres from which farmers coaxed cotton.
But this month Aurangabad became an emblem of an altogether different India: the booming, increasingly urbanized economic powerhouse filled with ambition and a new desire to flaunt its wealth.
A group of more than 150 local businessmen decided to buy, en masse, a Mercedes-Benz car each, spending nearly $15 million in a single day and putting this small but thriving city on the map. Frustrated that the usual Chamber of Commerce brochures were slow to attract new investment, the businessmen decided to buy the cars as a stunt intended to stimulate investment in Aurangabad, one of several largely unknown but thriving urban centers across India’s more prosperous states.
“In and around Aurangabad there are companies worth a thousand crores,” an amount of Indian rupees equivalent to about $225 million, said Sachin Nagouri, 40, a hyperkinetic local real estate mogul who came up with the idea. “But Aurangabad is not known even in this state. There is plenty of money here. We just need to show it.”
We’ve been waiting a long time for technology to deliver us an alternative reality, like the future in H.G. Wells’s “Time Machine,” Nemo’s Matrix, or the universe of code navigated by the “Neuromancer” hacker, Case. The future has arrived, finally ”” by the prosaic hand of our cellphones. Chances are it will soon be sponsored by laundry detergent or a fast-food chain.
Just the other day, my iPhone showed me an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that most people around me didn’t know was there. Looking at the galleries through the phone’s camera, I saw a chunk of the Berlin Wall floating before me. There were faces suspended in midair in the museum’s immense atrium. Over the sculpture garden hovered a path through the desert along which illegal immigrants often die.
Other than being the venue, MoMA had nothing to do with the show….
The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil.
The system would mirror that used when the military is called on in natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires. A presidential order dispatches the military forces, working under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Under the new rules, the president would approve the use of the military’s expertise in computer-network warfare, and the Department of Homeland Security would direct the work.
Michael Skinner at Washington State University in Pullman says epigenetic effects are swinging the pendulum of scientific attention from the genetic code back toward the impact of environment.
“I think that we’re eventually going to have sort of a merger of this,” he says. “I think that we’re going to have an appreciation of the fact that there is an environmental influence on biology that probably through more epigenetic mechanisms. There’s also a baseline genetic element of biology. And the two combined will actually give us more information about how things work.”
Much of epigenetics is still a mystery. Scientists would like to know, for instance, how often epigenetic signals are passed on from parent to child, or even grandchild. So Morris, in Australia, is hoping to repeat her experiment and see if the effect persists over multiple generations.
China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of some of those same materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.
The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further ratchet up already rising trade and currency tensions with the West. Until recently, China typically sought quick and quiet accommodations on trade issues. But the interruption in rare earth supplies is the latest sign from Beijing that Chinese officials are willing to use their growing economic muscle.
“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities. They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader shipment restrictions Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official had summoned international news media Sunday night to denounceUnited States trade actions.
A leaked draft of the national security document suggested that military conflict with another state will come only fourth in a list of potential threats to the UK, behind terror outrages by groups like al Qaida, cyber-attacks and natural disasters.
Today’s launch comes just days after the head of the Government’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre, Iain Lobban, warned of the very real danger of cyber-terrorism directed at the UK’s critical computer infrastructure.
He said that there were 20,000 malicious emails on Government networks every month, and significant disruption had been caused to official systems by electronic “worms”. Cyberspace had “lowered the bar for entry to the espionage game for states and criminals”.
Reports suggest that cyber-warfare could receive a £500 million boost in tomorrow’s SDSR.
If frontlist publishing is a hare dashing to bestsellerdom, then Bible publishing, in the words of one publishing executive, is the tortoise, steadily plugging away toward a better bottom line.
Every publisher would like to have a big Bible or, even better, two. Around 25 million units are sold annually, by conservative estimates. More than 91% of American households own Bibles, and those households own an average of three, according to the Somersault Group, which consults on digital publishing. Widespread distribution started with Gutenberg, and the Bible is today a Kindle bestseller.
The diversity and proliferation in Bible publishing that can challenge retailers and confuse consumers benefits publishers, who can roll out what seems like a limitless number of niche editions offering something for everyone. This year, Catholics and kids are target markets; a new translation is rolling out; a major study Bible releases; and digital publishing is big.
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information””in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names””to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.
Even when, in 2009, this column observed that innovation of the like going on at Soho-based behavioural targeting company Struq was “essential to the online ad industry”, it was scarcely conceivable that less than two years later the start-up would be recording 978 per cent year-on-year growth and is valued in the market at £30 million. But that is precisely what has happened since then. Just as impressively, Struq has artfully dodged any accusations of “snooping” on users, which had been a concern in the wake of the widely reported Phorm disaster.
So what does the company’s technology do, exactly? “Our focus is on delivering more efficient, intelligent and personalised ads on the internet,” says CEO Sam Barnett. ”¨”¨“The technology is based on complex algorithms that learn human behaviour by modelling and adjusting to patterns and trends, in real time.”¨”¨ We can target our ads based on user intent using complex data like time of day, frequency of viewing and basket size to make specific and personal ads that achieve far greater results than standard display advertising. Plus, we only target people that we know have an interest and are most likely to buy.””¨”¨
What does it mean to be human? In traditional thought there has always been a clear distinction between “natural” beings, derived from the natural order, and those that were “artifacts,” a product of human ingenuity and craft. For many centuries our embodied human nature was the last frontier of the natural order. Although human beings could modify and instrumentalise every other aspect of their environment, they could not escape the “given-ness” of their own humanity.
But the rapid development of emerging technologies is about to create a new and profoundly troubling assault on human identity in the 21st century. This new assault cuts to the quick of our anthropology: it focuses on the fundamental relationship between our artifacts and our own nature, between our manipulative capabilities and our own selves. It was this recognition that drove C.S. Lewis, back in the dark days of 1943, to write his prophetic essay on “The Abolition of Man,” perhaps the most penetrating statement yet made of the greatest question that will confront the 21st century. The pivotal significance of the Christian belief that we are made in the image of God is about to be tested as never before.
Lewis argued that while technology appeared to extend the human race’s ability to control and subdue nature, “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” There can be no “increase in power on Man’s side. Each new power won by Man is a power over Man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides the general who triumphs, he is a prisoner who follows the triumphal car. . . . Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. We shall ”¦ be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? . . . . Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”
Watch it all–my favorite moment is when the miner falls to his knees as soon as he emerges and the whole crowd goes silent as he prays–KSH.
The patent, which was filed by Apple in 2008, concerns “systems, devices and methods” for filtering “text-based messages” that contain “objectionable content”.
It aims to ensure youngsters aren’t able to use their iPhones to send text messages that contain swear words or suggestive language, sometimes known as “sexting”.
Religion in America is on the defensive.
Atheist books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith have, by exposing the dangers of faith and the lack of evidence for the God of Abraham, become best-sellers. Science nibbles at religion from the other end, relentlessly consuming divine explanations and replacing them with material ones. Evolution took a huge bite a while back, and recent work on the brain has shown no evidence for souls, spirits, or any part of our personality or behavior distinct from the lump of jelly in our head. We now know that the universe did not require a creator. Science is even studying the origin of morality. So religious claims retreat into the ever-shrinking gaps not yet filled by science. And, although to be an atheist in America is still to be an outcast, America’s fastest-growing brand of belief is non-belief.
But faith will not go gentle. For each book by a “New Atheist,” there are many others attacking the “movement” and demonizing atheists as arrogant, theologically ignorant, and strident. The biggest area of religious push-back involves science. Rather than being enemies, or even competitors, the argument goes, science and religion are completely compatible friends, each devoted to finding its own species of truth while yearning for a mutually improving dialogue.
As a scientist and a former believer, I see this as bunk….
Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.
Sunday is the big day for saying “I do.”
More than 39,000 couples chose 10/10/10 as their wedding day ”” a nearly tenfold increase over the number of nuptials on Oct. 11, 2009, the comparable Sunday last year, according to figures gathered by David’s Bridal, the wedding superstore chain.
The reason for the surge is a blend of superstition and symbolism, said Maria McBride, the wedding style director at Brides Magazine. “You cross your fingers and hope it lasts a lifetime,” she said, and so “a perfect 10, times 3” suggests good luck.
Besides, Ms. McBride said, “You’ll never forget your anniversary.”
Mr. [JOHN] DABIRI: I started studying jellyfish during a summer project when I was still in college. I came out to CalTech to work with Morey Gharib, who was my later Ph.D. advisor. And at the time I was primarily focused on studying rockets and jets as an engineering major at Princeton, and when I came to CalTech he said well let’s take a trip to the aquarium to see if you can find something interesting there. And it was there that I sort of fell in love with jellyfish.
{MICHEL] MARTIN: Why jellyfish? I mean a lot of us have our relationship with jellyfish but love is generally not one of them. I mean they’re lovely to look at, but.
Mr. DABIRI: Right, something, certainly not to study and for me I think it was because on the one hand they looked very simple but there’s a lot of interesting complexity there, especially when you start to study how they swim and the field of fluid dynamics, which tries to understand the physics of the water motion that they create.