will Shatner appear as a reminiscing older Kirk in the beginning, setting up the rest of the movie as a flash-back, or will geriatric-Kirk and young-Kirk meet?
There are ten or fifteen posts here with people suggesting that people should use dd, or wipe to write over these removable media to stop people recovering the data. Most people seem to be suggesting doing a dd from/dev/random TWENTY times.
What I would like to know is what the most effective method is. Someone should take a bunch of these cards (and harddrives etc) and do a little controlled test to see how much of a photo/file is recoverable after one round of dd, after 10 rounds of dd, etc. In short - what's the most effective (time v.s. security) method for cleaning these things?
Yeah - this is the problem with these, they sound far too urban-legend-y to be true. The stories do have a "Confirmed True by Darwin" note, but I only counted ONE that backed things up with a link to a newspaper story.
With things like google news, it's certainly not hard to find five or six million versions of the same article, so until they do this, the Darwin awards are just a collection of mildly funny stories that happened to someone's Aunt's cousin twice removed. ( Seriously - one of them starts with "I am 14, and I know this is a true story..." -- WTF? ).
I believe this is one of those news stories that sits around waiting for a slow news day. The original paper was released in November. It's written by Kevin Lafferty and was published in Proc. Roy. Soc. B.
It's a really quite fascinating paper - I recommend tracking it down if you can get access. Here's how it goes: Toxoplasmia gondii is adapated to live in cats and reproduces in felid intestinal cells & is shed, encysted, in their feaces. Then it can directly infect cats who come into contact with the cysts, or it encysts in brains of smaller mammals, and moves up the food chain as they get eaten until it hits a cat, and can reproduce again.
Fascinatingly, T.g. appears to affect rodent behavior to increase predation risk - i.e. the rodents become more active, less fearful of cat/cat smells, and have increased dopamine levels (which supposedly leads to novelty seeking behavior and neuroticism-type behaviors, or at least, they do in humans).
Despite humans not having any major cat predators, it could still affect us as a byproduct type of thing. Particularly that whole dopamine increase - this is should increase neuroticism levels.
So - the big question - does prevalence of T.g. correlate with cultural variation in neuroticism in humans? Lafferty finds a fairly strong correlation ( r2 of 0.38 ) between population aggregate neuroticism (as measured by the fairly standard NEO PI-R personality inventory ).
Unfortunately I think the populations he uses for his stats are a little bit suspect (always the problem with worldwide analyses though), but it's definitely worth a read. You should also keep in mind that so far it's only an interesting correlation and not a direct demonstration that T.g. causes large scale cultural differences.
Ok, point taken, and I shouldn't have used "urbanisation" in my first post - must have been lack of coffee, I was meaning something along the lines of "the increased urbanisation of modern human societies" (but hey, post hoc redefinition is cheating). It *is* urbanisation. However, rap music is not the only genre with those characteristics, you'll find most, if not all, of these aspects in punk and (heavy) metal music.
I was more vexed with the hinting ( & I've seen this in a few news articles on this story ) that similar processes are underlying both the development of rap music and this change in bird song. Don't get me wrong, usually I'm all for explaining human societies and cultures in terms of evolution (my Ph.D topic is "the evolution of language and culture in the Pacific"), but I'd be very careful about conflating rap music with the territory defense and mate attraction songs of Parus major.
Are rap songs shorter with an upshift in frequency? I doubt it.
Sure, I may be being a little bit uh, anal here, but a glib report along the lines of "it's like a rap song" just trivialises and dumbs down the research which is actually quite neat: these birds have adjusted their songs to compete with the other noises in their environment, showing a high level of behavioral plasticity.
Dear god that's just stupid - It's got absolutely nothing to do with rapping or urbanisation, just communication. The more I see of science reporting, the more depressed I get (hence I'm trying to do it better myself).
The original report said that the urban birds have shorter songs with an upshift in frequency, all the better to compete with traffic noise. You can read a more sciency report on it at Science Daily. The paper's abstract:
Worldwide urbanization and the ongoing rise of urban noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Urban environments typically homogenize animal communities, and this results, for example, in the same few bird species' being found everywhere. Insight into the behavioral strategies of the urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that songs that are important to mate attraction and territory defense have significantly diverged in great tits (Parus major), a very successful urban species. Urban songs were shorter and sung faster than songs in forests, and often concerned atypical song types. Furthermore, we found consistently higher minimum frequencies in ten out of ten city-forest comparisons from London to Prague and from Amsterdam to Paris. Anthropogenic noise is most likely a dominant factor driving these dramatic changes. These data provide the most consistent evidence supporting the acoustic-adaptation hypothesis since it was postulated in the early seventies. At the same time, they reveal a behavioral plasticity that may be key to urban success and the lack of which may explain detrimental effects on bird communities that live in noisy urbanized areas or along highways.
Not much on specifics in TFA, but apparently the major increase in spam (mainly those pump'n'dump stock scams) appears to due to the Spamthru trojan which is being dropped by Warezov.
We've had a few stories on this before here and here.
The reason the Apocrypha is not included in the normal canon of the bible is usually accredited to lacking authenticity, or conflicting with established books.
that, and there's only four corners of the world. Irenaeus argued that there should only be four gospels as those ones were good, but also because there are four corners of the world, four winds, animals have four legs, etc. The choice was really quite arbitary.
Shall we rephrase that without the inflammatory semi-racism:
by this logic in 2000 people can say that having different shades of skin color was a genetic mutation that offered people with such skin a significant advantage in certain environments. As a result, people with darker skin became more prevalent in tropical regions where the darker pigmentation helped protect them against melanoma, whilst those with lighter skins became more prevalent in northern regions as the lighter skin helped them not get rickets. None of which has anything to do with getting infected with HIV.
What - are you going for the incomprehensible babble award? Is the joke wooshing over my head?
evolution of man and squirrel alike indeed continued apace until ~approx 100 000 years ago, when modern man first left Africa and the laws of evolution ceased to apply to humans, due to the plasticity of spandrels.
The "laws of evolution" are still with us, and spandrels are not necessarily plastic. Nor does the presence of spandrels lead to plasticity at all. I think you're just joining evolutionary-sciency words to sound clever.
Hence, positing evolution of humanity is incorrect in timespans extending much further back than a mere 6000 years.
Skin color? This must have arisen in the last 150kya after humans moved out of Africa. I could list other examples, but it's quite obvious you're talking out your arse here.
It is hard to determine if this study and many other recent similar ones implying recent evolution in humans are driven by mere ignorance or if more sinister motives are at work.
Yes. It appears that this study was funded by the evil Dairy-conglomerate to promote milk-drinking behavior.
The author referenced here, one Nicholas Wade, is notable for engaging in ideologically dubious activities
Nicholas Wade is a very well respected science writer. I guess that science could be consided "ideologically dubious" to some.
Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe
A SNP in the gene encoding lactase (LCT) (C/T-13910) is associated with the ability to digest milk as adults (lactase persistence) in Europeans, but the genetic basis of lactase persistence in Africans was previously unknown. We conducted a genotype-phenotype association study in 470 Tanzanians, Kenyans and Sudanese and identified three SNPs (G/C-14010, T/G-13915 and C/G-13907) that are associated with lactase persistence and that have derived alleles that significantly enhance transcription from the LCT promoter in vitro. These SNPs originated on different haplotype backgrounds from the European C/T-13910 SNP and from each other. Genotyping across a 3-Mb region demonstrated haplotype homozygosity extending >2.0 Mb on chromosomes carrying C-14010, consistent with a selective sweep over the past 7,000 years. These data provide a marked example of convergent evolution due to strong selective pressure resulting from shared cultural traits--animal domestication and adult milk consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
That Pachelbel guy's going to be so RICH once he starts sueing!
You're quite right, and the word you're looking for is Plagiarism.
will Shatner appear as a reminiscing older Kirk in the beginning, setting up the rest of the movie as a flash-back, or will geriatric-Kirk and young-Kirk meet?
I really don't care, as long as it doesn't involve him doing any type of singing.
There are ten or fifteen posts here with people suggesting that people should use dd, or wipe to write over these removable media to stop people recovering the data. Most people seem to be suggesting doing a dd from /dev/random TWENTY times.
What I would like to know is what the most effective method is. Someone should take a bunch of these cards (and harddrives etc) and do a little controlled test to see how much of a photo/file is recoverable after one round of dd, after 10 rounds of dd, etc. In short - what's the most effective (time v.s. security) method for cleaning these things?
Please feel free to correct any and all mistakes I made in the summary, rather than just bitching about it.
Ok. Make that ONE with a link, and two referencing "BBC News" or "MSNBC.com", i.e. useless.
Yeah - this is the problem with these, they sound far too urban-legend-y to be true. The stories do have a "Confirmed True by Darwin" note, but I only counted ONE that backed things up with a link to a newspaper story.
With things like google news, it's certainly not hard to find five or six million versions of the same article, so until they do this, the Darwin awards are just a collection of mildly funny stories that happened to someone's Aunt's cousin twice removed. ( Seriously - one of them starts with "I am 14, and I know this is a true story..." -- WTF? ).
I believe this is one of those news stories that sits around waiting for a slow news day. The original paper was released in November. It's written by Kevin Lafferty and was published in Proc. Roy. Soc. B.
It's a really quite fascinating paper - I recommend tracking it down if you can get access. Here's how it goes: Toxoplasmia gondii is adapated to live in cats and reproduces in felid intestinal cells & is shed, encysted, in their feaces. Then it can directly infect cats who come into contact with the cysts, or it encysts in brains of smaller mammals, and moves up the food chain as they get eaten until it hits a cat, and can reproduce again.
Fascinatingly, T.g. appears to affect rodent behavior to increase predation risk - i.e. the rodents become more active, less fearful of cat/cat smells, and have increased dopamine levels (which supposedly leads to novelty seeking behavior and neuroticism-type behaviors, or at least, they do in humans).
Despite humans not having any major cat predators, it could still affect us as a byproduct type of thing. Particularly that whole dopamine increase - this is should increase neuroticism levels.
So - the big question - does prevalence of T.g. correlate with cultural variation in neuroticism in humans? Lafferty finds a fairly strong correlation ( r2 of 0.38 ) between population aggregate neuroticism (as measured by the fairly standard NEO PI-R personality inventory ).
Unfortunately I think the populations he uses for his stats are a little bit suspect (always the problem with worldwide analyses though), but it's definitely worth a read. You should also keep in mind that so far it's only an interesting correlation and not a direct demonstration that T.g. causes large scale cultural differences.
Well, if I had a sense of humor, I guess I could laugh at the teeth.
Ok, point taken, and I shouldn't have used "urbanisation" in my first post - must have been lack of coffee, I was meaning something along the lines of "the increased urbanisation of modern human societies" (but hey, post hoc redefinition is cheating). It *is* urbanisation. However, rap music is not the only genre with those characteristics, you'll find most, if not all, of these aspects in punk and (heavy) metal music.
I was more vexed with the hinting ( & I've seen this in a few news articles on this story ) that similar processes are underlying both the development of rap music and this change in bird song. Don't get me wrong, usually I'm all for explaining human societies and cultures in terms of evolution (my Ph.D topic is "the evolution of language and culture in the Pacific"), but I'd be very careful about conflating rap music with the territory defense and mate attraction songs of Parus major.
--Simon
Are rap songs shorter with an upshift in frequency? I doubt it.
Sure, I may be being a little bit uh, anal here, but a glib report along the lines of "it's like a rap song" just trivialises and dumbs down the research which is actually quite neat: these birds have adjusted their songs to compete with the other noises in their environment, showing a high level of behavioral plasticity.
The original report said that the urban birds have shorter songs with an upshift in frequency, all the better to compete with traffic noise. You can read a more sciency report on it at Science Daily. The paper's abstract:
From Current Biology here and you can even listen to the songs yourself.
...they're just flying north for the winter. I'm sure they're all up in Hawaii working on their tans.
I believe so - according to Alexa, the top five (in order) are, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Baidu.com and MySpace.
So, yeah, MSN.com and not microsoft.com or even (we can only hope) windowsupdate.com
So, 2007's the year for neutering on the desktop? I guess linux will have to wait until 2008.
Not much on specifics in TFA, but apparently the major increase in spam (mainly those pump'n'dump stock scams) appears to due to the Spamthru trojan which is being dropped by Warezov.
We've had a few stories on this before here and here.
that, and there's only four corners of the world. Irenaeus argued that there should only be four gospels as those ones were good, but also because there are four corners of the world, four winds, animals have four legs, etc. The choice was really quite arbitary.
Yeah yeah, I'll let myself out :)
The sad thing is, I can't tell the difference anymore between satire/jokes and people who honestly believe bat-shit crazy stuff.
Ok, ignore the wooshing sound as the joke flies over my head :/
Shall we rephrase that without the inflammatory semi-racism:
by this logic in 2000 people can say that having different shades of skin color was a genetic mutation that offered people with such skin a significant advantage in certain environments. As a result, people with darker skin became more prevalent in tropical regions where the darker pigmentation helped protect them against melanoma, whilst those with lighter skins became more prevalent in northern regions as the lighter skin helped them not get rickets. None of which has anything to do with getting infected with HIV.
What - are you going for the incomprehensible babble award? Is the joke wooshing over my head?
evolution of man and squirrel alike indeed continued apace until ~approx 100 000 years ago, when modern man first left Africa and the laws of evolution ceased to apply to humans, due to the plasticity of spandrels.
The "laws of evolution" are still with us, and spandrels are not necessarily plastic. Nor does the presence of spandrels lead to plasticity at all. I think you're just joining evolutionary-sciency words to sound clever.
Hence, positing evolution of humanity is incorrect in timespans extending much further back than a mere 6000 years.
Skin color? This must have arisen in the last 150kya after humans moved out of Africa. I could list other examples, but it's quite obvious you're talking out your arse here.
It is hard to determine if this study and many other recent similar ones implying recent evolution in humans are driven by mere ignorance or if more sinister motives are at work.
Yes. It appears that this study was funded by the evil Dairy-conglomerate to promote milk-drinking behavior.
The author referenced here, one Nicholas Wade, is notable for engaging in ideologically dubious activities
Nicholas Wade is a very well respected science writer. I guess that science could be consided "ideologically dubious" to some.
Just to reply to myself - there's an earlier paper here (PDF!)(looks like a draft from '03).
Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe
A SNP in the gene encoding lactase (LCT) (C/T-13910) is associated with the ability to digest milk as adults (lactase persistence) in Europeans, but the genetic basis of lactase persistence in Africans was previously unknown. We conducted a genotype-phenotype association study in 470 Tanzanians, Kenyans and Sudanese and identified three SNPs (G/C-14010, T/G-13915 and C/G-13907) that are associated with lactase persistence and that have derived alleles that significantly enhance transcription from the LCT promoter in vitro. These SNPs originated on different haplotype backgrounds from the European C/T-13910 SNP and from each other. Genotyping across a 3-Mb region demonstrated haplotype homozygosity extending >2.0 Mb on chromosomes carrying C-14010, consistent with a selective sweep over the past 7,000 years. These data provide a marked example of convergent evolution due to strong selective pressure resulting from shared cultural traits--animal domestication and adult milk consumption.
You can get it fron Nature Genetics if you have institutional access.
If you want to know why Lactose tolerance is a big deal read this (mainly because it's a nice example of Gene-Culture co-evolution).
--Simon
Because it's a SNP (i.e. a point mutation) and not recombination.
Cool - I'll check it out, thanks :)