Brian links

"Are more people doing wrong or are more people speaking up? Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication. When worries about somebody's work reach a critical point, it falls to a peer, supervisor, junior partner or uninvolved bystander to decide whether to keep mum or step up and blow the whistle. Doing the latter comes at significant risk, and the path is rarely simple. Some make their case and move on; others never give up. And in what seems to be a growing trend, anonymous watchdogs are airing their concerns through e-mail and public forums. Here, Nature profiles three markedly different stories of individuals who acted on their suspicions. Successful or otherwise, each case offers lessons for would-be tipsters."

Reuters photographer Carlos Barria spent time documenting Mongolian neo-Nazi group Tsagaan Khass, one of several ultra-nationalist groups that have expanded in the country. The 100-plus members of Tsagaan Khass have recently shifted their focus from activities such as attacks on women it accuses of consorting with foreign men to environmental issues. The group is rebranding itself now as an environmentalist organization fighting pollution by foreign-owned mines, seeking legitimacy as it sends Swastika-wearing members to check mining permits

"These are the top 10 countries to request user data from tech companies in 2012. Guess who's leading the pack? In other national security news, The Atlantic reports "defenders of Edward Snowden's leaks got a bit trickier Wednesday afternoon, with revelations about his embarrassing past. Turns out, Snowden was once a teenager and, worse, that time period was encapsulated online.""

"GENEVA - A United Nations expert called Thursday for a global moratorium on the testing, production and use of armed robots that can select and kill targets without human command."

"The boundless wisdom and humor of Terry Pratchett get immortalized in a series of motivational posters that you only wish were hanging in your office right now. They don't seem to be the kind of thing Buzzfeed normally posts, but that's where I found them. No source or attribution, natch :|"

"International Space Station switches from Windows to Linux, for improved reliability"

Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? I've probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar.

"If you're running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not "admin." According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the 'admin' account that every WordPress site sets up by default."

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time.

"In the Harry Potter world, Ravenclaws are known for being the smart ones. That's their thing. In fact, that was really all they were known for. In the books, each house could be boiled down to one or two words: Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are evil and/or racist, and Hufflepuffs are pathetic loyal. (Giving rise to this hilarious Second City mockery.)"

"On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. Of course, not everybody feels it will help achieve the patent system's goal of protecting inventors while fostering innovation, and its effect could be even more pronounced on the DIY inventor."

"If there was a single nerdy subtext that Bill Gates brought to his closing keynote at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, it was the importance of data. Useful data. Education data."

"In recent years, researchers in the messy world of biology have been able to build systems that function like the clean, binary switches on computer chips-and we've covered a number of reports in this area. Unfortunately, most of these share a significant limitation: they rely on proteins from bacteria that act as switches to turn genes on and off under specific conditions. We know about only a limited number of these genetic switches, which may set a severe limit on the number of logical operations we can string together inside a cell."

The march of science is stumbling and easily sidetracked, fraught with bias, fads and dead ends. A new research initiative based at the University of Chicago and the Computation Institute will use the latest computational tools to scrutinize this imperfect path and better understand how knowledge was and is created. Such understanding could transform the process of research, calling out past missteps while revealing unanticipated new directions for the future.

"Security researchers warn that cybercriminals have started using Java exploits signed with digital certificates to trick users into allowing the malicious code to run inside browsers. A signed Java exploit was discovered Monday on a website belonging to the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany that was infected with a Web exploit toolkit called g01pack, security researcher Eric Romang said Tuesday in a blog post. "

Last week as part of its glitzy annual conference in Long Beach, California, TED awarded its $1 million prize to Sugata Mitra to support his wish to build a "School in the Cloud," a self-organized learning environment based on his "Hole in the Wall" and "Granny Cloud" research. Next week Pearson, the largest and most powerful education company in the world, will publish Dale Stephens' book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, a personal experience narrative and guide about dropping out of college and making it in Silicon Valley.

"The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists."

"The issue of wealth inequality across the United States is well known, but this video shows you the extent of that imbalance in dramatic and graphic fashion. The video, which started going viral on Friday and whose traffic continues to climb on YouTube - reflects the facts as seen from many different sources. We present it without comment, letting you, our readers, be the judge."