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Think metadata isn't intrusive? Read this

Kade Crockford
Common Dreams
Wed, 08 Jan 2014 14:17 UTC
Metadata
© EWSolutions
You've probably heard politicians or pundits say that "metadata doesn't matter." They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn't need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn't all that revealing, they say, it's just numbers.

But the digital metadata trails you leave behind every day say more about you than you can imagine. Now, thanks to two MIT students, you don't have to imagine - at least with respect to your email.

Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov's Immersion program maps your life, using your email account. After you give the researchers access to your email metadata - not the content, just the time and date stamps, and "To" and "Cc" fields - they'll return to you a series of maps and graphs that will blow your mind. The program will remind you of former loves, illustrate the changing dynamics of your professional and personal networks over time, mark deaths and transitions in your life, and more. You'll probably learn something new about yourself, if you study it closely enough. (The students say they delete your data on your command.)

Whether or not you grant the program access to your data, watch the video embedded below to see Jagdish and Smilkov show illustrations from Immersion and talk about what they discerned about themselves from looking at their own metadata maps. While you're watching, remember that while the NSA and FBI are collecting our phone records in bulk, and using advanced computer algorithms to make meaning from them, state and local government officials can often also get this information without a warrant.
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Info

Invisible light patterns help bees find food even on cloudy days

Ranjini Raghunath
RedOrbit
Wed, 08 Jan 2014 12:28 UTC
Bee
© Thinkstock
Bees are excellent navigators. Once they stumble upon a food source, they keep coming back to the same spot without faltering. They also have a great sense of smell and can recognize color patterns and symmetry in flowers - admirable feats for an insect whose brain is the size of a sesame seed.

Scientists have long known that bees use the sunlight like a compass to map their route to the flowers full of succulent dew. They also know that bees use a seemingly complex and deceptively random waggle dance to let their mates know where to find the food source. Scientists are now able to "understand" most of the dance movements, and have striven to figure out how bees translate the map in their tiny heads into these movements.

For some time now, scientists have also believed that bees use a pattern of light in the sky called polarized light in their navigation system. Polarized light is created from sunlight scattered in the sky by particles in the air, and is invisible to the human eye.

New research shows that bees use this polarized light to guide their movements, even when there's no sunlight.

The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

In the study, the researchers directed bees down a tunnel towards a sugar source. The tunnel blocked out sunlight and only polarized light was made to shine down on the bees from above. At times, the light was shining along the direction of the tunnel, at times at right angles to it. The researchers then watched to see how the bees waggled about the location of the food source to their mates.
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Snowflake Cold

It's time to get rid of meaningless wind chill numbers

Daniel Engber
Slate
Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:47 UTC
weatherman
© Rob Donnelly

A cold snap is setting record low temperatures across the United States. Yes, it's very cold. But wind chill is not a useful way to describe the weather, as Daniel Engber explained in 2007. The original article is below.

If the weather makes headlines only when it's horrendous out, wind chill is its PR agent. This week, when temperatures in New York City dropped to single digits, newspapers and TV meteorologists breathlessly reported that the wind chill had hit minus 11. In Ohio, they told us, the thermometers read close to zero, but gusts of cold air made it feel like 25 below. Banner stories proclaimed a wind chill of 35 below in Chicago.

The weathermen trot out these arctic, pumped-down numbers to put an exclamation point on the banality of winter. Wind chill readings make excitement out of mere inconvenience; they imbue a miserable day with the air of epic calamity. A temperature of 5 degrees is unpleasant. A wind chill of 20 below - well, that's something to talk about.
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Arrow Down

Motorola patents e-tattoo that can read your thoughts by listening to unvocalized words in your throat

John Hewitt
Extreme Tech
Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:37 UTC
E-Tattoo
© TechClick
Imagine trying to patent the smartphone, or for that matter, the tattoo. Any company that could swing that, could probably also patent the fork and knife. Incredibly, a new application from Google-owned Motorola Mobility seeks a patent not for any particular utensil, but rather, for setting the table. In other words, if you have an electronic smart tattoo, and want it to speak to your mobile communications device, you may soon be able to do it in spades, but you will have to do it Google style.

But hold on for a minute, as there is a bit more to the whole concept than might first appear. The tattoo they have in mind is actually one that will be emblazoned over your vocal cords to intercept subtle voice commands - perhaps even subvocal commands, or even the fully internal whisperings that fail to pluck the vocal cords when not given full cerebral approval. One might even conclude that they are not just patenting device communications from a patch of smartskin, but communications from your soul.

Or maybe not. It has been known for decades that when you speak to yourself in your inner voice, your brain still sends neural spike volleys to your vocal apparatus, in a similar fashion to when you actually speak aloud. The main difference between the two, is that the nervous action driving covert speech as it is called, is subthreshold, and does not generate the full muscle contraction. The same might also be said for imagining throwing a baseball - it is probably not possible to even do so without simultaneously calling up and at least partially launching unamplified motor programs. Stated another way, your thoughts are your motor intentions, only they are not always recognizable as such if they are sufficiently abstracted.
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R2-D2

Forget artificial intelligence. It's artificial idiocy we need to worry about

Tom Chatfield
The Guardian
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 06:07 UTC
Image
© Carsten Koall/AFP/Getty Images
If a computer could learn to identify you with absolute accuracy, would that mean it knew what it means to be you?
Machines are good at some things and OK at others, but completely useless when it comes to understanding.
Massive, inconceivable numbers are commonplace in conversations about computers. The exabyte, a one followed by 18 zeroes worth of bits; the petaflop, one quadrillion calculations performed in a single second. Beneath the surface of our lives churns an ocean of information, from whose depths answers and optimizations ascend like munificent kraken.

This is the much-hyped realm of "big data": unprecedented quantities of information generated at unprecedented speed, in unprecedented variety.

From particle physics to predictive search and aggregated social media sentiments, we reap its benefits across a broadening gamut of fields. We agonise about over-sharing while the numbers themselves tick upwards. Mostly, though, we fail to address a handful of questions more fundamental even than privacy. What are machines good at; what are they less good at; and when are their answers worse than useless?

Consider cats. As commentators like the American psychologist Gary Marcus have noted, it's extremely difficult to teach a computer to recognise cats. And that's not for want of trying. Back in the summer of 2012, Google fed 10 million feline-featuring images (there's no shortage online) into a massively powerful custom-built system. The hope was that the alchemy of big data would do for images what it has already done for machine translation: that an algorithm could learn from a sufficient number of examples to approximate accurate solutions to the question "what is that?"
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Cassiopaea

Supernovas could be galactic dust factories, according to new observations

Lee Rannals
RedOrbit
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:46 UTC
Supernova 1987A
© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
This artist's illustration of Supernova 1987A is based on real data and reveals the cold, inner regions of the exploded star's remnants (in red) where tremendous amounts of dust were detected and imaged by ALMA. This inner region is contrasted with the outer shell (lacy white and blue circles), where the blast wave from the supernova is colliding with the envelope of gas ejected from the star prior to its powerful detonation.
A new image of a recent supernova could offer up insight to scientists about how galaxies became so dusty. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have observed the remains of supernova 1987A located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 168,000 light-years from Earth. This is the closest observed supernova explosion since Johannes Kepler's observation of a supernova inside the Milky Way in 1604.

The new observations, reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, show the remains of a supernova, complete with freshly formed dust. If this dust is able to make it out into interstellar space, then it may explain how galaxies become dusty.

"We have found a remarkably large dust mass concentrated in the central part of the ejecta from a relatively young and nearby supernova," Remy Indebetouw, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the University of Virginia, both in Charlottesville, said in a statement. "This is the first time we've been able to really image where the dust has formed, which is important in understanding the evolution of galaxies."
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Cloud Lightning

Lightning can shape MOUNTAINS: African peaks were formed by strikes capable of blowing 10 metres of rock into the air

Ellie Zolfagharifard
Daily Mail, UK
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 12:00 UTC
  • Previous theories claim mountains break down over thousands of years
  • This is said to be due to temperature changes in the mountainous rock
  • Scientists now believe mountains in Africa were shaped by lightning
  • They proved their theory by monitoring changes on a compass needle
  • Areas where a lightning struck caused the needle to swing 360 degrees
  • This suggests the mountains evolved 'very quickly and very dramatically'
Image

Lighting storms are impressive displays of nature's power - but up until now scientists hadn't realised that they could also sculpt mountains
Lighting storms are impressive displays of nature's power - but up until now scientists hadn't realised that they could also sculpt mountains.

A team of researchers from Johannesburg recently discovered that a single lightning bolt could, for example, blow three to 10 cubic metres (100 to 350 cubic feet) out of bedrock.

This goes against the current assumptions that the peaks above 3,050 metres (10,000ft) tend to break down over hundreds of thousands of years.
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Comet 2

Oceans to Ice: Marine diatoms found in Greenland ice core suggests pummeled planet in 530′s AD

George Howard
The Cosmic Tusk
Fri, 03 Jan 2014 17:15 UTC
Earlier abstract

Link to current abstract

Dallas Abbott 2013 PP on 530′s Event and Marine Diatoms in GISP2 Ice Core by George Howard

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Bizarro Earth

Risk of supervolcano eruption big enough to 'affect the world' far greater than thought, say scientists

Steve Connor
The Independent, UK
Sun, 05 Jan 2014 14:20 UTC
Yellowstone Volcano
© The Independent, UK
Scientists have analysed the molten rock within the dormant supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park and found that eruption is possible without any external trigger
The eruption of a "supervolcano" hundreds of times more powerful than conventional volcanoes - with the potential to wipe out civilisation as we know it - is more likely than previously thought, a study has found.

An analysis of the molten rock within the dormant supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park in the United States has revealed that an eruption is possible without any external trigger, scientists said.

Scientists previously believed many supervolcanic eruptions needed earthquakes to break open the Earth's crust so magma could escape. But new research suggests that this can happen as a result of the build-up of pressure.

Supervolcanoes represent the second most globally cataclysmic event - next to an asteroid strike - and they have been responsible in the past for mass extinctions, long-term changes to the climate and shorter-term "volcanic winters" caused by volcanic ash cutting out the sunlight.

The last known supervolcanic eruption was believed to have occurred about 70,000 years ago at the site today of Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It caused a volcanic winter that blocked out the sun for between six to eight years, and resulted in a period of global cooling lasting a thousand years.

A supervolcano under Yellowstone Park in Wyoming last erupted about 600,000 years ago, sending more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of ash and lava into the atmosphere - about 100 times more than the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1982, which caused a noticeable period of global cooling.
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Nebula

Co(s)mic Influences in Nuclear Decay?

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Sott.net
Sun, 05 Jan 2014 08:48 UTC
Cosmic Rays
© Simon Swordy (U. Chicago), NASA
This article is a continuation of the previous one "Cosmos reflecting on a nuclear level". Here I will deal with some details of the whole co(s)mic story. Indeed, it has cosmic proportions, but it also has a bit of a comic side.

Just few days ago I finished writing a preliminary version of a chapter for my book on Quantum Fractals. The title of this particular chapter is "Stochastic nature of quantum measurement processes." "Stochastic" is just a different name for "random", and "random" is just a different word for "we do not understand why things happen and we can't predict the outcomes, though we seem to be able to predict averages". There are many things around us that may be considered as "random", not only lottery numbers. But are they really random? This is the subject of the chapter that I wrote, where I had in mind "quantum events" that are often considered as "truly random" - no one can predict, for instance when a given radioactive atom is going to split into parts. Or so we think. But is that really so?
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