July 1, 2006, 9:01 AM CT

Going beyond the Great Firewall of China

The Great Firewall of China is an important tool for the Chinese Government in their efforts to censor the Internet. It works, in part, by inspecting web traffic to determine whether or not particular words are present. If the Chinese Government does not approve of one of the words in a web page (or a web request), perhaps it says "f" "a" "l" "u" "n", then the connection is closed and the web page will be unavailable - it has been censored.

This user-level effect has been known for some time..... but up until now, no-one seems to have looked more closely into what is actually happening (or when they have, they have misunderstood the packet level events).

It turns out [caveat: in the specific cases we've closely examined, YMMV] that the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection - and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

July 1, 2006, 8:40 AM CT

Whale meat on sale

With the prospect of Japan getting the go-ahead to resume commercial whaling in the not so necessarily distant future, the people in power are desperately trying to get rid of the nation's growing stock of scientific research by-products - or whale meat as it's more usually known.

School children in certain prefectures are being served it for lunch, one restaurant chain is offering whale burgers, and, in a rather desperate measure, dogs are allegedly being fed the stuff, whether they like it or not.

Yet as the sale of the meat helps in part to fund Japan's very important whale-related research, it's imperative that the stuff is sold, with these brightly coloured and jolly looking tins surely tempting both dedicated devourers and the uninitiated alike.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

July 1, 2006, 8:29 AM CT

The Game Theory of Penalty Kicks

As the World Cup reaches its final stages, it is likely that at least one of the remaining matches will be tied after 120 minutes and then decided in soccer's peculiar endgame: Which team can make more penalty kicks in a shootout. In 2002, Korea advanced to the semifinals after knocking off Spain on PKs. In 1998, France could never have won the tournament had it not edged Italy in PKs in a quarterfinal match. And, of course, had Roberto Baggio not shanked his PK in 1994 (YouTube), the Italians could have been world champions themselves. So the ability to make penalty kicks (and stop them if you are a keeper) is tremendously important.

For Ignacio Palacio-Huerta, that ability is the focus of an exhaustive study [PDF] that reveals how keepers and shot-takers alike deal with penalty kicks. But Palacios-Huerta, who grew up in the soccer-mad Basque region of Northern Spain, doesn't analyze player tendencies in order to help a particular team. Rather, he's an economist at Brown University whose interest in soccer has led him to write several papers about how motivations, risk, and reward influence decision-making on the pitch.

by David Goldenberg and Rachel Bialik........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

July 1, 2006, 8:20 AM CT

Brazil 1822

How did Brazil look like in 1822?

The Portuguese royal court fled Europe in 1808 for Brazil so as to avoid the advancing armies of Napoleon. In 1816 after Queen Maria I's death the Prince Regent became King João VI of Portugal, but he remained in exile, establishing an absolutist monarchy.

An independence movement gathered some momentum, despite scientific, literary, artistic and military successes generated under the King's patronage. An uprising was suppressed in 1817 but the desire for a republic continued.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

June 27, 2006, 11:35 PM CT

Middle Back Seat Is The Safest In A Car

In a full car, some poor soul is relegated to the middle of the back seat, the least desirable, most uncomfortable, most "un-cool" spot in the vehicle.

It also happens to be the safest.

University at Buffalo scientists studied all auto crashes involving a fatality in the U.S. between 2000 and 2003 where someone occupied the rear middle-seat.

They found that occupants of the back seat are 59 percent to 86 percent safer than passengers in the front seat and that, in the back seat, the person in the middle is 25 percent safer than other back-seat passengers.

"After controlling for factors such as restraint use, vehicle type, vehicle weight, occupant age, weather and light conditions, air-bag deployment, drug results and fatalities per crash, the rear middle seat is still 16 percent safer than any other seat in the vehicle," said Dietrich Jehle, M.D., UB associate professor of emergency medicine and lead author on the study.

Results of the study were presented at the May meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in San Francisco, Calif.

Jehle and his colleagues at the Center for Transportation Injury Research (CenTIR), conducted a retrospective cohort study of fatal crashes in which there were rear-seat occupants and at least one fatality in the vehicle. CenTIR is headquartered in the Erie County Medical Center and is affiliated with the Calspan UB Research Center (CUBRC).........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

June 26, 2006, 6:40 PM CT

Securing America's power grid

Terrorists attack Colombia's electrical grid hundreds of times a year.

What's to stop attacks on America's power lines?

An Iowa State University research team led by Arun Somani, chair and Jerry R. Junkins professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working to develop a network of wireless sensors that could monitor the country's electricity transmission system. While the sensors could pick up suspicious activity at power poles, they'd be particularly useful at quickly locating any breakdowns. That could allow power companies to react in time to prevent power disruptions from cascading into blackouts. And the monitoring system could also help power companies quickly locate problems when severe weather tears down electrical lines.

With networks of sensors, "Power companies would have additional abilities to view their systems and that would assist in disaster recovery," Somani said.

America has a lot of transmission lines, substations and generators that could use some monitoring. The Department of Energy reported the country had 157,810 miles of transmission lines in 2004. And the department reported that America's power plants produced 3.97 billion megawatt hours of electricity in 2004.

The monitoring system depends on sensors housed in black boxes just a few inches across. Somani recently picked up one of the sensors inside Iowa State's Wireless and Sensor Networking Laboratory and showed off the electronics capable of watching out for conductor failures, tower collapses, hot spots and other extreme conditions. A tiny camera can also be mounted in the sensor to look for suspicious movements around power lines.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

June 25, 2006, 3:18 PM CT

Light Pick from Santa Cruz Wells

Light Pick is a nice cool gadget from Santa Cruz Light Wells, it's a metronome and a guitar pick, all-in-one. It has a features called "Kick The Light Pick" that gives light on the down stoke when picking adjacent string sets. This means that those who play fast just between two strings will be able to play even faster than before!.

Light Pick has three modes of operation: blink mode, metronome mode and hold mode. When it is in hold mode, it will automatically turn off when your thumb is removed from the contact screws for more than 16 seconds. When it is in metronome mode, the Light Pick acts as a metronome, you can set the tempo, as well as the number of beats per measure and the light will flash accordingly. Blink Mode is primarily used as a visual light display, it flash as per the tempo that you set. The LEDs are synchronized to the music or can be set up to flash at random. Price: USD60.........

Posted by: Gina      Permalink         Source

June 25, 2006, 0:10 AM CT

Cheap Thrills

This the sort of saturation advertising I'm exposed to driving around town. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it given the nature of my job. Personally, I find this particular image cheap and sleazy. No class.

It's Brittany Spears, looking like a cheap star, at the door of a hotel room. In the background lurks the shadowy image of a pensive young bloke, wet behind the ears. The caption under his baby face reads, Do you dare ? (click on image).

Mate, my advice to you would be, don't do it ! Or if you must, at least organise some protection, before engaging in any thrill seeking !........

Posted by: Gina      Permalink         Source

June 22, 2006, 9:33 PM CT

Music Enhances Intelligence

A recent volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences takes a closer look at how music evolved and how we respond to it. Contributors to the volume believe that animals such as birds, dolphins and whales make sounds analogous to music out of a desire to imitate each other. This ability to learn and imitate sounds is a trait necessary to acquire language and scientists feel that many of the sounds animals make may be precursors to human music.

Another study in the volume looks at whether music training can make individuals smarter. Scientists found more grey matter in the auditory cortex of the right hemisphere in musicians compared to nonmusicians. They feel these differences are probably not genetic, but instead due to use and practice.

Listening to classical music, particularly Mozart, has recently been thought to enhance performance on cognitive tests. Contributors to this volume take a closer look at this assertion and their findings indicate that listening to any music that is personally enjoyable has positive effects on cognition. In addition, the use of music to enhance memory is explored and research suggests that musical recitation enhances the coding of information by activating neural networks in a more united and thus more optimal fashion.........

Posted by: Gina      Permalink         Source

June 22, 2006, 6:14 PM CT

Iraqi Attitudes: Survey Documents Big Changes

There have been big changes in the attitudes of general Iraqi population over the last two years. During this period, Iraqi political values have become more secular and nationalistic, even though attitudes toward Americans have deteriorated, according to surveys of nationally representative samples of the population conducted in November 2004 and April 2006.

The Iraqi surveys, part of the ongoing World Values Surveys, are a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and Eastern Michigan University.

The percentage of Iraqis who said they would not want to have Americans as neighbors rose from 87 percent in 2004 to 90 percent in 2006. When asked what they thought were the three main reasons why the United States invaded Iraq, 76 percent gave "to control Iraqi oil" as their first choice.

But at the same time, significantly more Iraqis support democratic values, including the separation of religion and politics.

In 2004, 27 percent of the 2,325 Iraqi adults surveyed strongly agreed that Iraq would be a better place if religion and politics were separated. In 2006, 41 percent of 2,701 adults surveyed strongly agreed.

"The findings of this second survey show that even though Iraqis have a more negative attitude to foreigners, particularly Americans, they are moving closer to American values and are developing a much stronger sense of national identity," said Mansoor Moaddel, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University and at the ISR.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

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