Link dump

hey guys (well ok guy)

here are a couple of links that I think people should read firstly:

911.wikileaks.org - transcript of 500million (I think) pager messages sent in the 24 hours surrounding 9/11 from the DC and NY areas

As a follow up to one of my earliest posts there is this report in the Guardian with the full report here.

Finally another follow up (of sorts) to this: there is a list here of "8 awesome cases of vigilantism".

The first I think was one of the most poignant things I have read in years and I'll say no more about it. I want to put up a blog posting as to my thoughts on it but at the moment im too tired and they're too conflicted so it'll happen another day - maybe.

The second was mainly for historic purposes and that it interests me.

The last is the one (surprise surprise ) that is most worrying. Aside from the standard "anonymous did it" fallacy (seriously guys the hint is in the name they're not organised they're anarchists even if they don't know it) it is a little worrying the pure psychological terror that the internet can aim at someone. Yes the people in this piece at least deserved something; but not the ire of 4chan.

Having watched the swell of a 4chan mob against someone its a sight to wonder at as well as flee from.

I wonder how many more people will find this out the bad way?

This is just cool

Howdy net!

This is going to be a very short post as I'm currently struggling to keep my eyes open (hooray for 12 hour day with 4 hours on public transport)

so I'll just leave you all with some awesome pictures

pretty pictures!

THE LHC HAS DATA!

Seriously cool stuff - they should be slowly stepping up the power over the next few months.

the FUD is coming! the FUD....

This is a quick post. I don't want it to be but currently I can't quite form up a good post about it (needs some work me thinks)

So until I get round to writing a post on it here's an interesting link.

Personally I think its FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but it holds the promise of some interesting impending debates about the internet as well as some big problems if it does go through as written.

It may be a religious view but that doesn't mean you can use it to investigate

This is a somewhat depressing story, I don't have the full details but going on what's in this report the guy was sacked for believing that pyschics should be used to investigate crime. Fine by me, believe what you want; but if you try and follow through on that then expect to get sacked, psychic evidence is not permissible in court and should not be used as a resource.

If the guy was sacked for merely stating his opinion that psychics should be used then he's being persecuted, he's an idiot for suggesting it but he's allowed to voice such an opinion. If he tried to use or pushed for psychics to be used then its another matter.

Ah well

What's more irritating is this, again it's a case of not know enough: either the police force were (hopefully) following up the tip to reassure the family and on the off chance that a real tip was being obscured as pschic, or they actually wasted time and money on a psychic tip off. That being said it should have been obvious after finding no petrol in the guy that the tip off was rubbish

ah well

mmmmm retinal projection...

This is insanely cool. Near real time translations subtitled and beamed onto your retina. Who doesn't want one? while I get the impression this will (initially) be like the voice recognition software of the late 90's (ie requires a fair bit of work for 50/50 results) it has several features that are very significant.

The actual translation system is the not too surprising amalgamation of voice recognition and translation software. While both these technologies have been around in vague forms for the last 10 or so years it has only been in the last 5 years that they have become truly viable. Voice recognition interfaces are pretty common now on dial in services (eg for national rail) and while they do get it wrong from time to time they are pretty good. The same goes for translation, most things can be translated by, for example, google translate; it may have some interesting turns of phrase but the fundamental message gets through and this is a free, web-based tool.

The most exciting feature of this though is the retinal projection, this is something that has been slowly emerging of the last year or so (either as micro screens or direct projection) and is one of the last technologies needed to achieve complete augmented reality. We nearly have complete internet data coverage (it may not be fast but there are fewer and fewer places where I can't get some sort of net) and with technologies like 4G, BT openWorld (all BT customers can jump onto free open net connections from BT) or the cloud all poised to become very common it shouldn't be too long before people are wondering how they coped without being able to access wikipedia while walking down a street.

Augmented reality is a while off yet (and still limited by battery life) but as more technologies start to use it (see the phone app layers) it is fast becoming reality. I would say that within the next 10 years at the latest people will have augmented reality headsets (most likely glasses) and that they will be common within 15 years. As a technology I suspect that it will be similar to voice recognition in that for the next year or so everyone will be claiming to use it with no actual utility. After that, and especially with things like the translator specs, it will start to re-emerge as general utility, to steal an idea from Charles Stross: wouldn't it be cool to have a map of the city your in over-laid on your vision and then be able to watch the progress of your bus towards you?

This is, I think, the most significant part of these glasses: not so much what they can do (which is very cool) but that they represent a protrusion of what so far as been a fun toy in labs into useful utility.

DNA databases, Charlie and Ben

This is going to be a pretty short post as there isn't much to add to this discussion other than what is said in these two reports: first Ben Goldacre on the bad evidence used to justify long term retention (ie 24 years retetion) of DNA data taken from those who are arrested but not convicted or cautioned. Second is this article by Charles Stross on the odds of being a false positive in a government database check (in this case CRB check and why he doesn't give school readings of his books).

The only thing really that I want to add to the debate on a database of our DNA etc run by the government is that the risk in terms of security of a database that will ultimately link ALL your information in one place if breached is pretty horrible. I'll briefly expand this: the DNA database would be likely allowed to expand (through ID cards etc) to cover everyone and be multi-use, ie your medical history would be there you NI number what ever. Even if this doesn't happen a single source of information would make identity theft a utterly crippling crime, especially as it would be most likely a random person who would be used to act as a patsy for someone else. Although this is less likely given the current technological state it is likely only a matter of time before the current DNA system starts leaking.

Chiropractic and other fun

Two interesting posts that I'm linking to today. First is a very funny letter being sent out to various chiropractic peoples informing them that they should be very careful about what they claim to be able to help with. Second is an interesting (American) post on the break-down of their government's spending.

Starting with the latter (the government spending) click here the blog itself is a favourite of mine with lots of interesting physics and astrophysics posts but what is genuinely interesting is how the break down of spending appears: only 0.8% is on science and technology combined. all it beats is general government. That's NOTHING, I find it highly annoying when people complain about the costs of for example the LHC; especially as they rarely realise that the $5 billion (I think ~£4bn) is spread over about 25 years of total R&D compared to the Olympic games which will no doubt run to more than its predicted £4bn budget for not even 1 year of heavy use. Anyway an interesting post and one well worth sending to the 'science is a waste of money' brigade.

The former post I won't comment on other than to say that considering that Simon Singh currently has to prove that the claims of the BCA were deliberately misleading this seems to be a wonderful piece of evidence that they may have been...

This, sign it, NOW

This is a petition on the Simon singh case - sign it.

Disgust

It takes a lot to sicken me online and this manages it. What I find sad about it is the utter contempt, it takes true work to write something so utterly hate-filled, then to publish it and pretend to be the good-guy is amazing.

I don't have a huge interest in the whole abortion debate - personally I think that abortion should be an option and in late cases where the woman's life is in danger it may be the only sensible option.

The other thing that shocked me a bit about this article is the whole-hearted love for capital punishment this isn't someone who thinks that it is whats needed as a deterrent but that it should be loved and used as such.

and I thought reading fundies say the darnedest things helped expose me to the extremes of human belief - looks like I have to work harder.

4chan iz in ur mainstream, corruptin ur yoof!

This made me smile this morning. 4chan (for those of you sane enough to avoid it) is the internet cess-pit. All those mind searing images? those terrifying memes? They come from 4chan (and a few similar sites).

I've been wondering how long before it was mentioned by name in the main stream news for a while. Whats interesting is that obliquely 4chan and its ilk are mentioned often - normally confused with the 'terrorist group' anonymous. This is explicitly wrong. Anonymous is not a group - it is the outward affect of the anarchy of 4chan and co. These are the places that have no rules and upon which anything goes.

The reason anonymous isn't a terrorist group is that it is not organised, Project Chanology was a meme. Lots of people thought it would be fun or interesting or agreed - so it happened.

This is the new face of protest: flash memes that spread across the internet in a matter of days and then die or explode. Two other good examples are the circle line pub crawl last year (spread via facebook) and the G20 protests this year (spread via facebook and twitter). These are the early sightings of the net truly showing its power - not just breaking news faster and better but impacting upon the world.

The original version of these phenomena were flash mobs - these were light hearted displays of surreality. They have changed and become a method of demonstration as well as a method of anarchy. Which is the only way to describe a lot of the internet.

Stories like the one on the bbc today are just a way of showing how powerful peoples urges and mob mentality can be and online a mob can be huge (4chan's /b section has several million hits a day and managed to get its founder posted as the Time magazine's number one person in the top 100 as a prank as well as a proper interview).

It's things like this that make it easy to see why so many people want to control the internet. It also makes it pretty clear why they will fail. The music industry tried to stop napster and got winMX and so on - these got shut down and we got bittorrents if these die more dark nets will occur (invite only networks for p2p file sharing). The same is happening more generally with content. A lot of the reactions to this story on the bbc page were "why doesn't every youtube video get checked" and "how can this be allowed to happen". This kind of thinking doesn't work online. The responsibility is for the person to stop things to moderate themselves.

Big brother may be watching you online but can't really stop anything - only the people online can change the internet. This doesn't mean that 4chan will be stopped - but it does mean that people need to take things into their own hands and moderate, mark down and report.

oh and supervise their kids online if they don't want them to see porn.

Weighing in (feather weight stylee) on Simon Singh..

For those of you haven't heard of this story click here otherwise keep reading (a copy of Simon's piece can be found here).

This is going to be pretty quick as I expect what I'm about to say has been said before by people much better at it that myself but here is my take.

Firstly Simon did say something a bit dumb.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact they still possess some quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything. And even the more moderate chiropractors have ideas above their station. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

That is not a statement to win friends. Equally though it doesn't deserve to be labeled libel. The piece is clearly comment/opinion to begin with and within the realms of comment/opinion the claim that there "is not a jot of evidence" should be reasonably permissible - the argument should be clearly that within the author's opinion there is no reputable evidence that supports the BCA's claims.

This isn't how the court has seen it.

In fact the court didn't even hear the case as the judge read a pre-written judgment as soon as the parties had said their piece.

This judgment was impressive in taking the case far beyond what was expected (even I expect by the BCA) in that by using the word "bogus" Simon supposedly meant that BCA made its claims with fore-knowledge that they were harmful (some of them are but I don't think many chiropractors believe this). That the BCA practices maliciously is clearly far more than Simon meant through the use of the word "bogus" (in fact I've never known it to have the connotation that something was maliciously false just false).

This case is terrible on two fronts - firstly it highlights some of the problems with libel rules, secondly it shows just how important good scientific reporting is and how hard it is to produce.

In terms of libel like a lot of the grayer areas of law its a very difficult thing to balance - too much on the side of the plaintiff and it becomes to write anything without either filling it with 'apparently's and 'maybe's or being sued. Too far the other way and you can say what you want with impunity.

Whats interesting about this in terms of the law though is it highlights the problem of online blogging. If Simon had initially published his piece as a blog would the reaction have been the same? whats going to happen when blogs start getting picked up and published by papers? Will it be libel in the country posted from? from the country its hosted? In the US blogs are protected speech and cannot be sued for libel. As more of our journalism is done from the net these sorts of problems will arise.

Moving on from the legal aspects (which I can only question as my law knowledge is pretty poor) the journalism aspect is even more interesting. This sort of case is a huge problem for scientific reporting. The bottom line is that this case represents a large group suing someone for being critical of their methods.

Scientifically Simon is reasonably well supported - there isn't much good evidence that chiropractic treats much other than bad backs. Saying that shouldn't get you sued. Even in a national paper - if there is a genuine scientific basis for a statement saying so shouldn't land you in trouble.

If we're being fair so long as you set it as opinion you should be allowed to say pretty much what you want. It doesn't work but it might encourage people to be a little more critical in their assessment of claims made by people. Libel laws are their to protect people from unfounded claims - unfortunately a lot of organisations know how to avoid them and a lot of individuals don't.

This annoys me

This story really annoys me. It is worrying that a paper is willing to publish something that is quite so wrong.

Gah... stupid paranoid ....

The anarchistic social experiment that is the internet

There's an interesting story here of a family in America who were very upset to find that photos of their daughter's death were available online. The girl had died in a car crash and some cops had taken photos as a cautionary tale which then escaped online.

I think there are a lot of interesting aspects to this story: firstly the wonderful way that pretty much all censorship attempts online eventually fail (google search for the images they're trying to ban they're still readily available), secondly how pretty much all legal systems fail online and finally how depressing how anarchistic (and deprived) the internet can be.

The first point I think is most simply shown here, a very daft woman on LBC radio said some very poorly thought out things about how taking MMR jab was optional because no one ever got those diseases any more. Ben Goldacre responded by posting the radio debate online as an example of truly poor science and got asked to removed it. Soon after the radio clip was available and talked about on more than 150 other blogs either in bits or as a whole. The internet doesn't like censorship - stop trying it on.

The legal aspect is interesting. Privacy is a right, but online you only have as much privacy as you protect yourself and that's not easy. This is especially true when something like /b/ decides to come after you (I won't link there its easy enough to find). Well I say 'decides'....

This comes down to something that pretty much all governments, people and organisations don't seem to have realised: the internet is anarchy. There is no law in any way, not yet and so sites like /b/ proliferate, not because people are suddenly worse online - just that they can relax and these sites become the ultimate games of dare - you can do what ever you can think of and type. Just every now and then someone is stupid and actually does it. The internet has brought out some truly nasty sides of people; but I hope this will fade.

The internet is still socially very young - people are still adapting to it in a social way and the anarchy is to be expected - sooner or later some form of law will emerge as will more of a social ethos, and no just because Facebook is a social site doesn't mean the internet has a social code or ethic - this will take a while to evolve.

Anyway moral of the story: nothing is private online so think before you upload other people's personal information (I think that the cops involved should face charges).

It's truly terrible what some people have done to the family. Emailing them with pictures from the crash scene is vile but I think their time would be better spent ignoring it.

Hopefully stories like this will be few and far between and hopefully people will learn from them.

Pirate bay fun...

Well this is a little late but for those that haven't heard the pirate bay people lost their case and have been sentenced to a year in jail as well as a large fine.

Interestingly an appeal has been filed based on an alleged bias on the part of the main judge (here's the story). I've got to say that if nothing else this should have been declared (which it wasn't).

A final interesting fact (the one I find the funniest) is that the membership of the pirate bay political party in Sweden has now gone up 150% (see here).

Ah the fun and games of the weird mess that is the internet....

Facebook in the news...

As a 'netizen Facebook accounts for a reasonable amount of my time online, certainly while in procrastination mode, even when I'm not I probably check it daily. This makes stories like this all the more interesting for me.

I can understand the rationale that "those who are well enough to use Facebook with a migraine are well enough to work with a migraine" but it does raise an interesting point: what activities are reasonable if you are off sick?

For me I would be deeply angry if I was sacked for checking Facebook when ill - firstly my computer is logged on almost 24/7 so it would be hard to tell when I was actually using Facebook and not just logged in. Secondly I would consider checking the net (if not Facebook certainly gmail) as normal as checking my snail-mail; its just one of those things I do everyday (yes, I'm an addict but I like it).

It seems daft that an employer would expect you to spend the whole day immobile in bed if you are ill; even if that illness is a migraine you might listen to quiet music or read a book for a bit between sleeping. While superficially this seems the same as being caught out and about in town when ill I would argue that it is very different. Its akin to being caught out of bed when ill. I suppose this is just part of the penalty we pay for being more connected at all times; we get more information on each other and so everyone else gets a little more information on us.

Hopefully situations like this will be few and far between. I certainly hope that no employer (should I ever get one) thinks that it's okay for them to follow me online. I don't mind work colleges, even my boss following my Facebook or similar but when it becomes the company as a whole or is done for reason other than genuine friendship I get worried. The age of privacy is essentially dead - but that doesn't mean that we can't protect what privacy we do have (which is one of the reasons I don't like to make it too obvious who I am in the blog).

All that being said I can't help but wonder if this is something along the lines of the straw that broke the camels back. Unless the employer is truly draconian I suspect that the person concerned has probably had a few run-ins, especially if either they were spying on here or that the hear-say of a college spotting you online is enough to be sacked for.

Well its been a while since a health scare...

bbc report here.

Well who'd have funk it? WHO (the World Health Organisation) has been caught unawares; while bird flu has had a lot of medical types concerned (with good reason, the damn thing when transmitted to humans has been pretty good at killing us) out of left field comes swine flu.

According the to WHO there have currently been 60 suspected deaths due to this in Mexico City recently. The main reason this has got WHO's boss rushing back to Geneva to co-ordinate activities is that March-April is the end of the flu season and most of the deaths have been among young adults. This leaves the worrying question of what happens if it jumps to the southern hemisphere where the flu season is just starting and infects the vulnerable (ie very young or old).

The second worrying aspect of this is that as well as the 1,000 reported cases in Mexico City there are several in California, okay both are reasonably close together but it shows that it has already left Mexico so you have to wonder where else it has spread to.

Either way looks like bird flu has a challengers for 'most likely next pandemic' award.

This is probably worth following so I'll keep an eye out for it as if its still around in a month or so I'd say (with no basis behind it but as a blind guess) that we may still see it in a year or so - if its gone it'll be just another SARS....

science rage!

The media fails at reporting on science. This is a wonderful example of how much. Having read the actual article the bbc get the gist right but fails in the presentation.

My objection to this is that a lazy reading of the bbc article gives the impression that pollution is stopping global warming. It isn't. Not even a little. It is slowing the process a bit. It does raise the point that by cleaning our air the added removal of CO2 via this diffuse effect will be removed and that it highlights the incredibly complex nature of climate modeling for that I applaud it. It still utterly fails to point out that the paper doesn't mean driving a hummer is helping the environment.

That being said the bbc has better title than some...
"Climate change fight could raise CO2 levels" - thank you Glascow Herald

I raise this because this is exactly the sort of thing that denialists/the lazy/the unconcerned will point to and say 'see we're helping' without any comprehension of whats actually happening. That being said this is a perfect example of the constant problem in all science reporting - take a technical paper written to be read by experts. Pass to intelligent but non expert journalist. Speed read/research. Associate with something that public will understand. Condense to 10th original size and 1/100th scientific content.

Maybe I should have a go at this scientific wroting that everyone seems to think is such a good idea. Then again given my patience and spelling ability maybe not.

speaking of the post-biological era...

Well looks like my post yesterday may have been a bit off.

A project running on the blue gene super computers has (supposedly) modeled the action of the neo-cortex from molecular level up. The neocortex is the area of the brain that houses most higher-functions (my neuro-scientist friend would kill me for that simplification).

While it is unclear quite how accurate this model is or quite how it works the researches claim that upscaling it to full brains is only a matter of money. Sentient space lobsters here we come!

In all it looks like research to watch (main site is here) certainly if they get funding we may see some interesting results soon.

Yarr! a pirate's life in Somalia

This is (supposedly) an interview with a Somalian pirate by the bbc.

It's somewhat depressing as unsurprisingly they claim that they have been driven to it by loss of their own sources of income, the claim is illegal fishing and toxic dumping has removed their main employment as fishers. Which makes sense but I can't help but think that mainly it's greed. By the sounds of it the payout for three successful hijackings are significantly better than a lifetime of fishing. That being said given the difference it's a pretty understandable greed.

pah the world sucks

I did like the guys optimism that "Foreign navies can do nothing to stop piracy" having watched the US react to most things I think that sooner or later they will try - even if it just means training crews to kill and leaving escorts around Somalia.

ah well at least they didn't try and make a robin hood story from it.

A better poster

THIS is why banning the photographing of police constables is a bad idea