Slashdot Mirror

Obfuscate your access. Use tools like trackmenot http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ to obfuscate your searches. Now you just need additional tools to randomly access web sites to obfuscate web access. Same can be done to background send email to mutual member's of a random email network (random addresses with random content content purposefully tongue in cheek).

Floor some privacy invasive freaks desk with ten thousand times as much stuff as you actually access.

I found a simple fun site http://www.randomwebsite.com/ for when you are bored.

This is even uglier than you think. It is basically a licence for incumbent telecoms to data mine their customers 24/7. It's like it was written by them to allow carte blanche interception of all their customers communications.

It is also a powerful tool for political black mail ensuring the government in power can monitor and control their own sitting representatives and also target opposition representatives. Any site they or their family visited can be used against them in the next election.

It has absolutely nothing to do with policing at all. In fact the whole thing can be readily corrupted with simple tools like track me not http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ which obfuscates searches. So new tools that completely randomly access sites in the background.

Note that for political blackmail of political attack adds, those are no protection because the accusation can still be levelled for maximum political benefit during the election cycle. Of course for policing obfuscating technology is a great defence, burying peoples access under ten times, a hundred times even thousands of times more random garbage data.

Definitely still the work of incumbent data mining Telecom who can't see beyond their own greed.

Install trackmenot http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ for your browser and search engines will be pushing out a lot of random search noise all day and night.
Randomized search-queries will flood your logs and make your user profile fun :)

These people have no idea at all. I have younger relatives who don't have an email address at all, preferring to do everything via social networks. Then there is of course Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo et al.

Then there are tools like this Track Me Not http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/. Tools like this will extend to every communications medium to flood records with junk connections, basically multiply by a factor of thousands the information to be stored.

Computers are great at filtering and correlating data, they are even better at creating junk data making any filtering and correlation impossible, GIGO.

Mass is a measurement of the amount of matter something contains, while Weight is the measurement of the pull of gravity on an object

http://www.nyu.edu/pages/mathmol/textbook/weightvmass.html

a fundamental measure of the amount of matter in the object.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mass.html

In scientific contexts, mass refers loosely to the amount of "matter" in an object

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_versus_weight

Essentially every single large banking and rating agency has at some point crunched the numbers. Governments (and specifically financial ministries) crunch them. Finally, investigative press crunches these numbers as well.

Suggestion for google search terms: real income in US last 20 years. This produces (for me) hits to: Wikipedia and CNN money as first two links that do a pretty decent job of presenting and narrating the basics. By digging deeper you will find press quoting larger financial institutions as well, and those start to get into the actual meat of the issue rather then populist stuff (as they earn money by advising investment, and reduction of real income in large population means readjustment of profits between companies serving these people). Outcome generally depends on what numbers those chose to crunch and what to leave out, and what kind of weight was given to each number.

Finally there's a really good collection of links that will get you started here (as it presents argument in less of a populist and more scientific way): http://people.stern.nyu.edu/nroubini/INEQUALI.HTM

I'm sorry, but I don't have a simple bite-size "truth is here" source. Reality is, modern economy is exceedingly complex and getting numbers on even a small part of it is a full time job of many decently earning people in City and Wall Street. If you're really interested in the subject (and honestly, you should be, this is about the entire context of your ability to enjoy a financially secure life), these will get you started. Do note that most of what you will find is press-filtered, because to get real numbers, the "pay wall" has a whole lot of zeroes as major banks like Goldman Sachs and Nakamura who are probably best (or at least best-informed) number crunchers out there don't do the number crunching for free.

Depending on how large your dataset is, you may have luck using Matlab (or the opensource gnu octave). These programs will let you do *whatever* you want with the data (plotting, correlation, fft, etc).

With at least Matlab, there are some MySQL plugins available that will let you get data out of your database and into arrays rather quickly. And of course, both matlab and gnu octave let you import csv and plaintext datafiles.

Here is the matlab plugin I have used very successfully (and it's open source. No idea if it would work with octave):
http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~almgren/mysql/

You will need some background with math, statistics, and programming to effectively do this. If you don't have the skills, learn them or pay up for some overpriced commercial product...

If you get a chance, I recommend Out of Their Minds http://cs.nyu.edu/shasha/outofmind.html which details some of the amazing feats of McCarthy and some of his contemporaries.

Indeed. There is an interesting SIGGRAPH paper by Rob Fergus that shows how one can use natural image statistics to recover a kernel from a single image. Historically this has been pretty easy in the astronomy domain because they can observe the kernel formed by a point light source (stars). It's much more difficult for arbitrary photographs.

This page is using the term "multitouch" a full year earlier. And even if Apple were the first to use the term, they didn't trademark it before it became a more generic term, used on synaptics touchpads as mentioned.

Add in some http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ to your browser too.
As for this, http://blog.intego.com/2011/09/23/mac-pdf-trojan-horse-surfaces-threat-is-low/
A Mac security company notes: 'threat to be very low, as this is not found in the wild."

Since when did this international campusing became the vogue?

U. California Los Angels at Shanghai anyone?

Universities have been setting up international campuses and research centers for quite a while now... Unfortunatly the UC system is broke (as it depends on the State of California for funding) so you won't be seeing a UC-S campus anytime soon, but NYU (a private university) is taking the plunge in china...

http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/papers/drights.pdf

The present Human Service Network (HSN) providing plugging interface for human brain to machine for active participation and interaction via this communication media, wherein brain to brain communication is established via Human Operating System (HOS) thus forming Human Grid (HG) by means of systematically designed taxonomies, ontology and filtering mechanisms with plurality of ways of exploiting Human Services offered via plurality of accredited human agents or knowledge sources selection in terms of HSN Messenger, HSN Mail service and HSN online portal.

The entire section strongly reminds me of Alan Sokal's famous "Social Text" experiment, in which he carefully constructed a morass of contradictory, fallacious bullshit comprised mostly of postmodern humanities buzzwords and random physics terms, and then submitted it to a sociology journal, which reviewed and published it.

I've been watching progress of Yann LeCun on this topic for years now. Cool to finally see an application.

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/objreco/index.html

Of course it was Chief Judge Kozinski who wrote that, who is known for being one of the most brilliant/hilarious members of the judiciary. Here's an example: Can you find all 200 hidden movie titles in this court opinion by him? http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~wgreene/entertainmentandmedia/Syufy.pdf The guy is also a huge video game buff too.

As Notorious B.I.G. put it, Mo Money Mo Engineers. I'm just finishing a book that has a long section on this exact topic and I'll karma whore with a link to this excellent paper with handy charts:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/pr_rev2.pdf
"Skill Biased Financial Development: Education, Wages and Occupations in the U.S. Financial Sector." Scroll down to Figure 6 in particular, which compares the salaries of people with graduate degrees when they go into finance or engineering. They were roughly equitable for decades and then split in the late 80s. Currently, controlled for education level, people with grad degrees make 110K in finance vs 80K for engineers. Even the tight tech job market of the dot-com years didn't close the gap much. The paper also has good stuff on job risk and other factors.

After talking with plenty of people in both sectors, I was surprised the bankers are quick to admit that it's a "quants beget quants" situation. The more sophisticated analysis and arcane devices they come up with, the greater the demand for math and similar hard science PhDs to figure them out, improve them, and keep up with the competition. (MIT and other schools are now offering Financial Engineering, of course.) The managers of the banking companies have even less understanding of these things than the average Fortune 500 tech CEO has about the cutting edge engineering going on in the company he runs. They can only go on what the models and results say, which, considering how unregulated these markets are, means they are basically testing powerful new drugs on the general population.

All of this research hasn't made me think more regulation is the solution, however, at least not how people take that to mean. Monitoring and making data public is essential. Even the banks would appreciate an outside agency that could provide perspective on an industry that is still basically a black box even to the participants. (Current derivative market: $1.4 quadrillion. Enjoy.) That's really what is lacking, sunlight and the context to understand what is really happening system-wide. Goldman and others figure out ways to shave points here and there, but they're making money on concessions, not on the movie tickets.

Getting vaguely back on topic, the conclusion of the book I'm working on is that this is a cultural problem, not just a money problem. Risk aversion is at a peak after building for decades and the relative sure thing of a good salary on Wall St is beating out the chance to change the world or become the next [insert tech billionaire here] in Silicon Valley. This isn't about the current downturn, it's been going on for decades. The American appetite for risk is disappearing. In the same industry, this is why we see half of Valley startups being launched by immigrants these days. Not just because they are qualified, which of course they are, but because they have the entrepreneurial spirit.

Two of the book's co-authors are VC and angel veterans (Max Levchin, Peter Thiel) and they argue strongly that this is having serious effects even among those staying in tech. Instead of working on a big idea for years, some of the best and brightest are cashing out in various ways. Selling their IP, going with a quick-to-market improvement instead of the Big Idea, etc. It's hard to criticize someone for making a buck, but cumulatively it's a slow-moving disaster for innovation -- both by having less in tech and by having more on Wall St.

Take a look at tagged filesystems. You can do the same thing by hand using symlinks but with much greater pain.

http://www.tagsistant.net/

http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/

http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemFS

The following are not really filesystems. You need to use specific programs to search the tag space.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/oyepa/

http://blueslugs.com/2005/07/12/tag1-delicious-style-file-tagging/

Obscuring your tracks with noise? You might consider TrackMeNot.

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

It most certainly is a Republican/Democrat position. The difference is that Republicans who don't understand something dismiss is altogether, while OTOH as the Sokal incident pointed out, some Democrats held too much faith in scientists. I would hope that, in matters of science, politicians have more faith in scientists and in, say, religion. I mean, this is pretty chilling.

I don't see what bearing the Sokal incident has on "Democrats held too much faith in scientists." The cultural studies/lit. crit. crowd may be heavy with Democrat voters, but they do not have "too much faith in scientists" by any measure. By and large they are highly anti-science and, arguably, anti-intellectual. The only reason Sokal, a scientist, was published in Social Text was that he pandered to their anti-scientific beliefs with Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.

You are talking about Adrian Thompson's 1996 work on evolving FPGAs. From an ASCII copy of a New Scientist article :

"... Thompson realised that he could use a standard genetic algorithm to evolve a configuration program for an FPGA and then test each new circuit design immediately on the chip. He set the system a task that appeared impossible for a human designer. Using only 100 logic cells, evolution had to come up with a circuit that could discriminate between two tones, one at 1 kilohertz and the other at 10 kilohertz. ...
That repertoire turns out to be more intriguing than Thompson could have imagined. Although the configuration program specified tasks for all 100 cells, it transpired that only 32 were essential to the circuit's operation. Thompson could bypass the other cells without affecting it. A further five cells appeared to serve no logical purpose at all--there was no route of connections by which they could influence the output. And yet if he disconnected them, the circuit stopped working.

It appears that evolution made use of some physical property of these cells -- possibly a capacitive effect or electromagnetic inductance -- to influence a signal passing nearby. Somehow, it seized on this subtle effect and incorporated it into the solution. ..."

Here it is.

Maybe this. I think I first saw it in a PopSci article.

Yes the joy of the http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines.
Now we need a browser extension to help this effort track all the random data it likes.

According to this paper (sorry for the PDF), the results of approval voting and a Condorcet method are almost always the same:

Although it is theoretically possible in close elections that the Condorcet candidate will
not be the most approved candidate, it has almost never occurred.

Then in the footnote:

The 1999 election for president of the Social Choice and Welfare Society, which was decided by 2
approval votes among 76 cast, is the only exception we know of: the second-place AV candidate in this
election would have defeated the AV winner by 4 votes in a head-to-head contest, based on the
hypothetical use of BV, for which voters ranked candidates. Brams and Fishburn (2001) deem this “nail-
biting” election essentially a toss-up, whereas Saari (2001a) argues that most positional methods would
have chosen the Condorcet candidate (including BC, wherein the Condorcet winner would have defeated
the AV winner 60-59); see Laslier (2003a) for more details on voting patterns in this election. Regenwetter
and Grofman (1998), using a random-utility model to reconstruct voter preferences in several elections—
including some discussed here— show that AV, BV, and Condorcet winners generally coincide. Laslier (2003b) and Laslier and Vander Sraeten (2003) analyze data from a field experiment with AV in the 2002
French presidential election, which involved over 5,000 voters in two French towns, and conclude that AV
was easily understood, readily accepted, and provided a more complete picture of the “political space.”
Earlier theoretical analyses as well as computer simulations (Brams and Fishburn, 1983; Lijphart and
Grofman, 1984; Nurmi, 1987; Merrill, 1988) demonstrate that AV almost always elects a Condorcet winner
if there is one. If there is not one, as in the 1985 TIMS election experiment, then proponents of AV argue
that AV provides a compelling way to break either a cycle or a tie.

So while I agree that the Schulze Method is closer to the ideal, in practice it probably makes sense to use the simpler method that only breaks down when the result is in the noise anyway.

"So far, Wikileaks has published approximately nothing that is shocking or surprising or that reveals unlawful activity."

You only think that because apparently you are relying on most of the mainstream media reporting of the diplomatic cables, who have downplayed the significance of the leaks. Consider the following:

Diplomat covering up the pimping of Afghan boys (aged 13ish) for anal sex by a US taxpayer funded company DynCorp.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wikileaks-is-evil-releasing-documents-dyncorp-gets-pass-pimping-young-boys-to-afghan-cops.shtml
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php

As if I need to go on after that. Clinton ordered spying on other UN officials, including obtaining frequent flier number and biometric data. (And Wikileaks is responsible for spying?)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-spying-un

And then there is the very fact that much of the 'secrets' that were classified were done so illegally.

If you don't realize it by now, then you have made up your mind regardless of evidence. Do your own research if you are interested, but I doubt you are.

For the others who wonder how there are people like parent who apparently blindly defend wrongdoing (such as government abuses, racism etc), there is actually a growing body of research into this phenomenon. It's called system justification theory, and essentially it describes the conscious and unconscious tendencies to protect and bolster the status quo, even to one's own disadvantage (i.e. the black and/or gay Republican who can't see that his comrades implicitly or explicitly hate him). Basically, people like parent feel so comforted by the status quo, and they implicitly fear change even for the better, that they defend the status quo when it otherwise appears to make no sense.

Read for yourselves: [pdf]
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Jost,%20Banaji,%20&%20Nosek%20(2004)%20A%20Decade%20of%20System%20Justificati.pdf

The image in the summary is really quite blurry compared with the same thing on the original article, which is crystal clear.

Original article: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

This font depends on the brightness values, and not the colors. Being red-green color blind would make the color fringing a little less annoying.

Make sure you're viewing the original:

  http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

Just because the font is designed to take advantage of sub pixel rendering doesn't mean that it can't be rendered without it.

Yes, in this case it does. RTFA?

Heres the class that draw the stuff

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/Grid3b.class

If you check the original source, a e an o are distinguishable: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

In JPG format.

Heres the original source (you skip two useless blogs)
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

Skip the blogspam, go to the source: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

This seems very similar to a decade old input method called Quikwriting.

Based on the video this is the same idea as QuickWriting that I played around with on my PalmPilot a number of years ago. See: http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/ The Quikwriting site says it has a patent on the method. So are we in for another litigation in the handheld area? Or is this the same technology under a different name?

Reminds me more of Quikwriting, actually...
http://slashdot.org/hardware/99/04/29/1734246.shtml ...yup, 11 years old. Ken Perlin dabbled with input methods for a while there...
http://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/

Looks a lot like Quikwriting that I had installed on my palm 10 years ago.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/demos/quikwriting2_1-rel-notes.html

As another poster points out, the microwaves are being used as a heat source (not for patterning), instead of oven annealing. It turns out that a microwave can cause the material to assemble much faster than conventional oven annealing, which is pretty exciting.

As for the "Why use self-assembly for lithography?" the basic idea is this: Conventional optical lithography is limited by the diffraction of light (as you mention). So for typical visible-light optical schemes, the best you can do is pattern features on the order of ~100 nm (using a bunch of tricks you can push a bit below this, which the semiconductor industry has done with fantastic results). In self-assembly, you design molecules that spontaneously form nanostructures of a well-defined size. So instead of enforcing a particular size-scale using light and patterning masks (top-down fabrication), you design the required size-scale into the molecules themselves (bottom-up fabrication).

In the work described in TFA, they were using block-copolymers, which are polymers (long chain-like molecules) that are have two chemically-distinct "blocks". So one half of the chain is of one kind of material, and the other half of the chain is another type of material. Like so:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB

Because the "A" and "B" subunits don't like each other (they are sufficiently chemically distinct), they want to separate from one another (like oil and water not mixing). But because they are bound to one another using a covalent bond (the "-" in my diagram), they can't fully separate, and instead form nano-structures with a size-scale dictated by the length of the A and B blocks. So you can control the size using the lengths of the blocks, control the segregation using the chemistry of the two blocks, and control the morphology (the structures that form) using the ratio of the A block length to the B block length.

This process is fantastic at making well-defined structures at the nano-scale (down to 10 nm has been demonstrated; down to 5 nm seems do-able). However one still has to control the positioning of these structures. So a lot of work has gone into combining self-assembly with conventional photo-lithography. The conventional lithography defines the long-range registry and pattern; the self-assembly lets you fill in that pattern with ultra-small structures. In case you think this is all theoretical, Toshiba recently announced a working prototype hard-drive with magnetic dots made using these techniques.

Disclaimer: Part of my research is in this area, so I may be biased towards thinking this is cool/novel/useful.

Well .. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/Refs_Math_Books.html
http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

I'll also again plug my own two free textbooks :) http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

Jiri

The great anecdote demeaning peer-reviewed journals is The Social Text Affair, where a prominent peer-reviewed journal published with enthusiasm the article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", only to be informed it was, in fact, computer-generated gibberish submitted as a joke.

Look, I'm not going to wast my time arguing with someone who doesn't understand basic atmospheric physics and thermodynamics. It's not worth my time. There are an incredible amount of books, research articles, etc. that cover the topics. If you are unwilling to even make the most basic effort to understand what you're talking about, you aren't a rational skeptic or any kind of skeptic. Your just another torch-and-pitchfork, burn-the-witch ignoramus.

You want some sources? You can't figure out to use google? Here's a good book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Climate-Peixoto-P-Jose/dp/0883187124

And there are dozens of others recommended on Amazon that would also be good reading.

For modeling, you can try: http://kiwi.atmos.colostate.edu/group/dave/at604.html

This is a free (as in beer) introduction into the rudimentary concepts. Or you can start with simple zero dimension energy balance models such as this one:

http://www.math.nyu.edu/caos_teaching/physical_oceanography/numerical_exercises/ebm/zero_dim_ebm.html

And work your way up from there. Or if these are too advanced for you, you can start out with just about any introductory college level physics book that covers basic atmosphere and thermodynamics principles.

Or, if you're one of the climate science conspiracy nuts and you don't trust any materials related to climate science, then you can start with a good book on meteorology like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Meteorology-Understanding-Atmosphere-CengageNOW-Printed/dp/0495108928/ref=pd_sim_b_7

This should at least dispel your erroneous assumptions and reasoning from your earlier post.

I ENCOURAGE rational skepticism. It adds to a discussion. It makes people think in different ways. IT IS A GOOD THING.

I DO NOT encourage blatant willful ignorance, which is what you are demonstrating. It adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, and is a general waste of time for both skeptics and supporters.

If you are unwilling to expend the effort to truly educate yourself (and it seems like you are), then there is nothing further to discuss.

Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. [...] Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.

While an ad hominem attack has no place in a legitimate debate, but as you point out there is no actual debate here, since no amount of evidence or logic is ever enough to convince the deniers. So it's pretty hypocritical to complain that someone making a throwaway (and by your assessment insightful) joke at the end.

Surely you realize that with all manufactured controversies, always responding to the allegations in a thoughtful and reasoned manner only further legitimizes the idea that there is a controversy, especially in a world where journalism has been replaced with stenography seeking out and presenting two sides (and only two sides) to every "issue" imaginable, in order to maintain access and foster an imagine of neutrality and respectability. They aren't liberal or conservative, they are aloof. We see it with climate change. We've also seen it with torture. From the 1930s to 2004, waterboarding was uniformly described as "torture" in the media, then it suddenly wasn't. What changed? The United States government started torturing people. Most damningly, waterboarding remained "torture" when done by non-Americans. When one's goal is simply to muddy the waters and sow confusion, being treated with respect is victory.

Global warming deniers are no different from creationists, homeopathic healers, psychics, UFOlogists, believers in moon landing hoaxes, 9/11 truthers, birthers, and the like. They are illegitimate because the do not wish to face up to facts and arguments, but rather paint themselves as as persecuted martyr that brings the "truth."

Tron did indeed showcase "the kinds of computer-generated special effects that later become commonplace," but in a sense the light cycles did not. As sequence designer Ken Perlin, now of NYU, has remarked, after Tron polygon-based 3d graphics became the new hotness, with the light cycle sequence as its acme. The trouble was, they didn't use polygons. The light cycles were actually constructed out of volumetric primitives using boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT). True curves like NURBs and Hash patches wouldn't have really been practical on the systems they were working with. (Nor had they -- you know -- been invented yet.) Most of what you seen on movie screens to this day are approximated hollow polygon shells that immitate curved solids. CAD makes common use of boolean primitives, but the light cycle sequence was less the ancestor of modern film CGI than an all but extinct evolutionary branch. Tron was the Burgess Shale of computer animation.

Very entertaining. I don't know why you're taking medical advice from a physicist though.

NYU - Langone Medical Center
http://www.med.nyu.edu/patientcare/library/article.html?ChunkIID=94085

Children who lived less than 200 meters away from a high voltage power line at birth were 70% more likely to develop leukemia than children who lived more 600 meters away at birth. Children who lived between 200 and 599 meters away from a high voltage power line at birth were 23% more likely to develop leukemia than children who lived more than 600 meters away.

Dr. David Carpenter, MD, Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at University at Albany, SUNY
(Dr. Carpenter is a public health physician trained at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York at Albany)
http://weeksmd.com/?p=3226

There is definitive scientific evidence that exposure to magnetic fields from power lines greater than 4 milligauss (a level significantly less that what is expected to occur near this proposed power line) is associated with an elevated risk of childhood leukemia. Some scientific research indicates an elevated risk at levels of 2 milligauss. A home not near a power line will usually have a level of less than 1 milligauss.

University of Oxford and National Grid owners, Transco
(note: Transco would have an interest to find no correlation between power lines and any ill effects)
http://www.powerlinefacts.com/large_study_links_power_lines_to_leukemia.htm

Comparing the children who had cancer with a control group of 29,000 children without cancer but who lived in comparable districts, found that children whose birth address was within 200 metres of an overhead power line had a 70% increased risk of leukemia. Children living 200 to 600 m away from power lines had a 20% increased risk.

Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,158193,00.html

One of the most telling results was that the cancer risk grew in proportion to the strength of the electromagnetic field. Children with constant exposure to the weakest fields, calculated at less than 1 milligauss (about the same that a coffee maker generates when it is brewing), had the lowest incidence of cancer. Those exposed to fields of 2 milligauss showed a threefold increase in their risk, while children exposed to 3 milligauss showed a fourfold increase in the risk of leukemia. Such a clear progression makes it difficult to argue that factors other than exposure to the electromagnetic field were responsible for the extra cases of leukemia.

The Straight Dope
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2699/electrifying

I'll say this, though. Evidence for a link between EMF exposure and childhood leukemia turns up just often enough that it can't be entirely dismissed.

Thanks to Track-me-not, I lead the market demographic for Green Wasabi Thimble Machines.
Oh sure, it violates Google TOS. I weep not.
http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
You have to go into the plugin and manually enable it fyi.

Jay Rosen on saving CNN

I'm not sure that everything he says is a good idea, but he's much more on the right track than CNN is. By combining two bad operations into one, you don't create anything good. All you create is one bad operation. These companies need to revamp their programming from the ground up.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/ for your MAC.
You boot, a slight pause as you get a new MAC for the day :)

It's one thing to ask whether these tests make you "smarter". But even the story says they improve speeds in taking the brain tests. I also notice that the control group didn't just sit there doing nothing, they used the Internet, which may have "exercised the brain" in some fashion, assuming they weren't reading /.

Also, there does seem to be evidence that mental activity can ward off Alzheimer's and "Research has also found that cognitive leisure activities reduce the risk of cognitive decline."

Maybe it doesn't serve a practical purpose for some people, but it seems among the elderly at least there may be some benefit (?)

Thanks!, and your post Reminds me of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by Alan D. Sokal.

"""
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics4; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science5; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics6; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.
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http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/ is a nice start for firefox to pump out random digital chaff when your online.