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Bruce Schneier was invited to testify about the TSA to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but at the last minute he was disinvited, after the TSA objected to having him in the room.

The Sith Lord Darth Vader, of Star Wars fame, often gets a bad rap, particularly in what we all think of as his 'dark years.' From a certain perspective his mass murder, brutal oppression, and frequent deception to serve his own ends makes him seem like a pretty bad guy. But if you look past all that to his action, you will find a very capable and effective project manager.

There is no proverbial silver bullet to creating a safer city, but analytics technology is assisting law enforcement agencies all over the world to sort through information - part of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create and consume every day - to get ahead of crime. Having access to all that information is an invaluable resource for law enforcement agencies, but it can also be pretty paralyzing. After all, only a fraction of the bits and bytes can actually be relevant, right? But how do you know and, more importantly, how do you find and act on it?

Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet's ecological means, according to "Getting Eco-Efficient" by the Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Reproducibility is a key part of science, even though almost nobody does the same experiment twice. A lab will generally repeat an experiment several times and look for results before they get published. But, once that paper is published, people tend to look for reproducibility in other ways, testing the consequences of a finding, extending it to new contexts or different populations. Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that's already been published, though. But maybe they should. At least that's the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.

So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E's submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher. My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I'm certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain't going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.) I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two.

Star Trek: The Next Generation may be coming to your living rooms soon courtesy of some hot new Blu-ray pressing, but one of the most compelling pieces of the technology shown on that series still remains elusive: the holodeck. Don't get down, sunshine, because we might soon be making our first, tentative steps into a virtual courtesy of Project Holodeck. It's underway at USC's School of Cinematic Arts as well as the Viterbi School of Engineering and starts out with a pair of Project Oculus glasses. These glasses, which were shown off at E3 by none other than John Carmack, cram a 1,280 x 800 display into a pair of glasses that present a wide, truly immersive field of view. Pair that with a PlayStation Move for head tracking and a Razer Hydra controller and you have the beginnings of a proper virtual reality environment.

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range. 

Last week, the Iranian government apparently started a new censorship program that blocks encrypted Internet traffic. Even Iranians who had taken steps to evade government firewalls were being stymied-and the immediate impact can be seen in usage of the Tor network.

Secretariat was famous for coming up from behind in a race to win, and the same may be true for the U.S. in the global push to build exascale technologies. Because for now, when it comes to delivering the needed funding to build these systems, the U.S. is just getting out of the gate.

Each month Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects' studio gets a makeover and the latest installation to be unveiled is a tented experimental mushroom farm! Design team CityLab7 collaborated with the architects to create an educational and interactive space that displays 215 oyster mushroom growbags, giving an example of how small-scale urban farming really works. As an homage to a city renowned for its coffee culture, visitors to the space will also see how coffee grounds donated from local cafes can be recycled into compost, becoming an essential component of city agriculture. Read more: Urban Mushroom Farm Pops Up in Olson Kundig Architects' Seattle Storefront | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World 

Caffeine will get you going during the day but could leave you tossing and turning at night  unless you're  a "night owl" to begin with, a new study suggests.

For starters, don't call them slackers or hipsters -- unless you want to get "decaffed."

Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie. It was November 2007 and Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, was at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, to speak. Siroker-who today is CEO of the web-testing firm Optimizely, but then was a product manager on Google's browser team-tried to cut the enormous line by sneaking in a back entrance. "I walked up to the security guard and said, 'I have to get to a meeting in there,'" Siroker recalls. There was no meeting, but his bluff got him in.

The Tor Project is considering paying operators to host exit relays in efforts to increase the speed and security of its global anonymity network. Under early consideration is a suggestion by Tor founder Rodger Dingledine that operators receive $100 a month to cover bandwidth costs. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has already donated an undisclosed amount of funds over 12 months to provide for at least 125 fast exit relays which would provide extra capacity for Tor users.