[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: August 30, 2008 9:35:56 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: I guess you could say this is Not Good News

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking from the permafrost under the Siberian seabed, a researcher on an international expedition in the region told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on Saturday.

“The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed,” [SNIP]

<http://tinyurl.com/636kbg>

[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: August 31, 2008 7:04:21 AM PDT
Subject: The Bank Account That Sprang a Leak

The Bank Account That Sprang a Leak

By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
August 30, 2008

They are a staple of consumer-complaint hotlines and Web sites:
anguished tales about money stolen electronically from bank accounts,
about unhelpful bank tellers and, finally, about unreimbursed losses.

But surely customers of the elite private banking operation at
JPMorgan Chase, serving only the bank’s wealthiest clients, are safe
from such problems, right?

Wrong, says Guy Wyser-Pratte, an activist investor on Wall Street for
more than 40 years who uses his hedge fund’s war chest of roughly
$500 million to wage takeover fights and proxy battles in the United
States and Europe.

In May, Mr. Wyser-Pratte learned that someone had siphoned nearly
$300,000 from his personal account at the private bank through many
small electronic transfers over a 15-month period.
Then he was told by the bank that he could stop the theft only by
closing his account and opening a new one – an enormous hassle, he
said. And finally, JPMorgan Chase told him that the bank would cover
only $50,000 of his losses.

…

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/yourmoney/30theft.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>

[Note: This item comes from friend John McMullen. DLH]

From: “John F. McMullen” <johnmac13@gmail.com>
Date: August 31, 2008 6:06:59 PM PDT
To: “johnmac’s living room” <johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: “Dewayne Hendricks” <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Anne Eisenberg: Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

From the New York Times — <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>

Novelties
Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data
By Anne Eisenberg

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. “We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience,” he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

“The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database,” he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. “The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books,” Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. “It’s great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats” on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. “So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that’s where the conversation starts.”

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called “NorthStar Nerd Tutorials.”

[snip]

[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: August 30, 2008 4:55:05 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: The Brits lose laptops. OUR guys lose nuke parts.

Air Force Searches For Lost Launch Devices –Three Crew Members Removed Over Allegations of Sex Abuse and Equipment Tampering
28 Aug 2008

The Air Force says at least three ballistic missile crew members at bases in North Dakota and Montana have been taken off the job while the military investigates allegations ranging from sexual abuse to missing classified components used in underground launch control centers. The Air Force announced Thursday that an officer who earlier worked at Minot Air Force Base’s 91st Space Wing notified the military in May that he and another officer had lied about destroying classified launch components in July 2005. “They were supposed to destroy them and they signed documents saying they destroyed them,” said Maj. Laurie A. Arellano, an Air Force spokeswoman. Instead, she said, “they took them home.” In May, one of the officers notified the Air Force of the incident and “turned his launch components over to the government.” Arellano said the devices are used on equipment inside the launch control center to detect equipment tampering. One of the devices remains missing. “We only know of the whereabouts of one for sure,” Arellano said.

<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/28/national/main4392286.shtml>

[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: August 31, 2008 7:33:32 AM PDT
Subject: Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring

Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring

By BRAD STONE
August 12, 2008

As an international ring of thieves plundered the credit card numbers
of millions of Americans, investigators struggled to figure out who
was orchestrating the crimes in the United States.

When prosecutors unveiled indictments last week, they made a stunning
admission: the culprit was, they said, their very own informant.

Albert Gonzalez, 27, appeared to be a reformed hacker. To avoid
prison time after being arrested in 2003, he had been helping federal
agents identify his former cohorts in the online underworld where
credit and debit card numbers are stolen, bought and sold.

But on the sly, federal officials now say, Mr. Gonzalez was
connecting with those same cohorts and continuing to ply his trade,
using online pseudonyms – including “soupnazi” – that would be his
undoing. As they tell it, Mr. Gonzalez had a central role in a
loosely organized online crime syndicate that obtained tens of
millions of credit and debit card numbers from nine of the biggest
retailers in the United States.

The indictments last week of 11 people involved in the group give a
remarkably comprehensive picture of how the Internet is enabling new
kinds of financial crimes on a vast international scale.

In interviews over the last few days, investigators detailed how they
had tracked Mr. Gonzalez and other members of a ring that extended
from Ukraine, where a key figure bought and sold stolen numbers over
the Internet, to Estonia, where a hacker infiltrated the servers of a
Dallas-based restaurant chain.

The criminals stored much of their data on computer servers in Latvia
and Ukraine, and purchased blank debit and credit cards from
confederates in China, which they imprinted with some of the stolen
numbers for use in cash machines, investigators say.

…

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/technology/12theft.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>

How To Build A Better Being

August 28, 2008 by Sam Sloan
<http://www.sliceofscifi.com/2008/08/28/how-to-build-a-better-being/>

How To Build A Better Being is a new documentary from the National Geographic Channel (NGC) which examines unexpected genetic truths behind Spore, the upcoming highly anticipated simulation game from EA and Will Wright.

“What are the things that evolution has at its disposal to define a creature, to mix and match the parts, and eventually come up with a unique organism that’s going to live its life and try to reproduce?” — Will Wright, gaming innovator, EA’s Maxis Studio

Premiering on NGC Tuesday, September 9 and 10pm ET, How To Build A Better Being is the companion documentary to Spore. The show, which is also included in the limited run of the collectable “Spore Galactic Edition,” joins Wright and leading scientists in exploring the genetic information we share with all animals — even creatures we could never have envisioned. How To Build A Better Being follows Will Wright as he meets with geneticists, paleontologists, and other scientists as they strive to design the “ultimate animal” by using extensive knowledge of animal diversity.

[snip]

[Note: This item comes from friend Robert Berger. DLH]

From: “Robert J. Berger” <rberger@ibd.com>
Date: August 30, 2008 12:22:59 AM PDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>, David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Court: U.S. can bar mad-cow testing

Court: U.S. can bar mad-cow testing

<http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-08-29-mad-cow_N.htm>

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court says the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease.
Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the deadly disease, Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. The government says it can’t.

Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday overturned a lower court ruling that would have cleared the way for the testing. The appeals court said restricting the test is within the scope of the government’s authority.

[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: August 29, 2008 10:32:46 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com, dave@farber.net
Subject: Whit Diffie aand Susan Landau: Internet Eavesdropping

<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=internet-eavesdropping>

As telephone conversations have moved to the Internet, so have those who want to listen in. But the technology needed to do so would entail a dangerous expansion of the government’s surveillance powers

By Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau

As long as people have engaged in private conversations, eavesdroppers have tried to listen in. When important matters were discussed in parlors, people slipped in under the eaves—literally within the “eaves drop”—to hear what was being said. When conversations moved to telephones, the wires were tapped. And now that so much human activity takes place in cyberspace, spies have infiltrated that realm as well.

Unlike earlier, physical frontiers, cyberspace is a human construct. The rules, designs and investments we make in cyberspace will shape the ways espionage, privacy and security will interact. Today there is a clear movement to give intelligence activities a privileged position, building in the capacity of authorities to intercept cyberspace communications. The advantages of this trend for fighting crime and terrorism are obvious.

The drawbacks may be less obvious. For one thing, adding such intercept infrastructure would undermine the nimble, bottom-up structure of the Internet that has been so congenial to business innovation: its costs would drive many small U.S. In ternet service providers (ISPs) out of business, and the top-down control it would require would threaten the nation’s role as a leader and innovator in communications.

Furthermore, by putting too much emphasis on the capacity to intercept Internet communications, we may be undermining civil liberties. We may also damage the security of cyberspace and ultimately the security of the nation. If the U.S. builds extensive wiretapping into our communications system, how do we guarantee that the facilities we build will not be misused? Our police and intelligence agencies, through corruption or merely excessive zeal, may use them to spy on Americans in violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, with any intercept capability, there is a risk that it could fall into the wrong hands. Criminals, terrorists and foreign intelligence services may gain access to our surveillance facilities and use them against us. The architectures needed to protect against these two threats are different.

Such issues are important enough to merit a broad national debate. Unfortunately, though, the public’s ability to participate in the discussion is impeded by the fog of secrecy that surrounds all intelligence, particularly message interception (“signals intelligence”).

[SNIP]

<http://tinyurl.com/6oolcn>

RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>

[Note: This comment comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: August 30, 2008 12:49:33 AM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com
Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] Is EVERYTHING we know /wrong/?

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>

Date: August 29, 2008 6:34:51 PM PDT

To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Is EVERYTHING we know /wrong/?

<http://arxivblog.com/?p=596>

Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun?

I sent this bit to Dr. Jess Brewer, who is an honest-to-god muon physicist at TRIUMF (the Canadian particle accelerator) and he replied thus, with the caveat that I should note that this is NOT his area of expertise, but that this is his opinion (or Wild-Assed Guess):

From: “Jess H. Brewer” <jess@jick.net>

Date: Friday, August 29, 2008 22:07

Subject: Re: Is EVERYTHING we know /wrong/?

To: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>

Pretty much. But this isn’t necessarily an example.

I have not looked at their papers (and probably won’t) so

I am merely explaining the basis for my skepticism: any

measurement of decay rates involves careful measurements

of background. One must reject certain types of events

that might mimic the thing you’re looking for (i.e.

“false positives”), and that rejection will always

produce “false negatives” (good events that get thrown

out with the bathwater). I’m sure these guys worked

very hard to make sure they had thought of every way

they could possibly produce biases one way or the other;

I’m also sure they failed, since no one ever gets it

exactly right — just “good enough for the desired

accuracy”. So the question is, what solar background

events could either jack up the decay rate with false

positives or suppress it via false negatives? Any such

backgrounds will drop off as the inverse square of the

distance from the sun. Solar flares also contribute.

Since there are many environments visible to astronomy

that are so extreme they make ours look like dead flat

pond water, if there were any such effects they would

show them in spades. Do they? Does the CMB?

Personally I’ve always liked the idea that the Laws of

Physics might be more local than we think — there was

a PRL decades ago about the energy stored in “domain

walls” between regions with different signs of CP

violation, etc., which would be really cool; but so far

this universe looks pretty uniform and boring. Let’s

move to a more diverse one!

I hope I turn out to be wrong, but I doubt it.

— Jess

RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>

[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: August 29, 2008 10:05:33 PM PDT
Subject: Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

By JOHN MARKOFF
August 30, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO – The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the
Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s
first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United
States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given
country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been
impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the
long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no
central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly
flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence – and
conceivably military – consequences.

…
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>