Brian links

Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction? Philosophers and scientists at Britain's Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could "threaten our own existence," the institution said Sunday. "In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology," Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.

Since his diagnosis with Alzheimer's in 2007, beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett has kept up his rigorous writing and touring schedule, despite his growing health difficulties. These days, he writes entirely with the help of voice-activated software and his assistant Rob Wilkins. Now he's done an extensive interview with New Statesman's Laurie Penny, where he reveals what his life is like now, and what's coming next for Discworld.

"Climate change could severely reduce the areas suitable for wild Arabica coffee before the end of the century. That is the conclusion of work by a UK-Ethiopian team published in the academic journal Plos One. It supports predictions that a changing climate could damage global production of coffee - the world's second most traded commodity after oil. "

Heated political rhetoric is everywhere. It sets us apart from one another and erodes what's left of civil discourse. It grinds the worthy concept of "logic" into dust. Not any more. Not when we fight back with an open source game I'm calling Logic Shrink. I'm not selling a thing. You don't need an app, a console, even a board. It's entirely your game. Play a solitary version. Play it during a get-together with your extended family. Play it with kids, especially teens. Bring it to the classroom, community center, or secret Super PAC meeting. It will entertain. Afterwards, when the lively score-keeping has ended there will be something new in the room. It may be unfamiliar at first. It's a state of being that requires no name calling, no slippery slope. It's logical thinking.

Predicting the future is fraught with risk, but the greater risk is in failing to plan for our destiny. As a nation, we face a choice: to drift into our future or to actively shape it. That is why I commissioned the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper. I took a clear decision that our nation should actively plan for and shape our national future. Only by doing so can we realise our vision of being a land of increased opportunity, prosperity and fairness. Whatever else this century brings, it will bring Asia's rise.

chronological and thematic studies on the history of information and media

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

"THE cassette tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way. From the updates posted by Facebook's 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organisations worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need for something to store huge tranches of data is greater than ever. And while hard drives have traditionally been the workhorse of large storage operations, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives that pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy, is set to replace them."

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users' online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found. The researchers identified 41 applications in Google's Play Market that leaked sensitive data as it traveled between handsets running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and webservers for banks and other online services. By connecting the devices to a local area network that used a variety of well-known exploits, some of them available online, the scientists were able to defeat the secure sockets layer and transport layer security protocols implemented by the apps. Their research paper didn't identify the programs, except to say they have been downloaded from 39.5 million and 185 million times, based on Google statistics.

"As we get more data, we can fit more model. But at some point we become so overwhelmed by data that, for computational reasons, we can barely do anything at all. Thus, the curve above could be thought of as the product of two curves: a steadily increasing curve showing the statistical ability to fit more complex models with more data, and a steadily decreasing curve showing the computational feasibility of doing so."

"Dropbox is holding a promotion for students in which you can gain 3GB of extra Dropbox space for two years, plus more depending on how many people in your school sign up. To sign up for Dropbox's "Great Space Race," all you need to do is head to the link below and type in a valid .EDU email address (which you probably have even if you aren't a student anymore). After you confirm it, you should see 3 extra GB of space in your account. If you get others at your school to sign up too, you'll get even more space, going all the way up to 25GB. So sign up, tell your friends, and invite them if you haven't already for bigger bonuses!"

Alpha One Labs co-founder Sean Auriti and a group of like-minded hackers have launched a campaign to build Hackert0wn, a Brooklyn hackerspace the likes of which the world has never seen. As planned, Hackert0wn will be an  entire hacker ecosystem complete with retail shops stocked with spare parts, sleeping pods, a gym that feeds power back into the building, a co-working space, private offices, a cafe with a coffee dispensing robot, a dumpling shop, an aquaponic farm that raises fish and produce for nearby residents and restaurants, and a state-of-the art CNC machine shop. Oh, and all the buildings will be built out of recycled shipping containers.

""In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone's online e-mail without their permission doesn't violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute."

"Would you like to send a confidential note to a friend that self-destructs after it has been read so that no one else (including your friend) can ever see that secret note again? Maybe it has a password that shouldn't be stored anywhere. Or you are worried that the private note can get leaked online. "

"Here's an issue we don't talk about enough. Every year, peer-reviewed research journals publish hundreds of thousands of scientific papers. But every year, several hundred of those are retracted - essentially, unpublished. There's a number of reasons retraction happens. Sometimes, the researchers (or another group of scientists) will notice honest mistakes. Sometimes, other people will prove that the paper's results were totally wrong. And sometimes, scientists misbehave, plagiarizing their own work, plagiarizing others, or engaging in outright fraud. Officially, fraud only accounts for a small proportion of all retractions. But the number of annual retractions is growing, fast. And there's good reason to think that fraud plays a bigger role in science then we like to think. In fact, a study published a couple of weeks ago found that there was misconduct happening in 3/4ths of all retracted papers. Meanwhile, previous research has shown that, while only about .02% of all papers are retracted, 1-2% of scientists admit to having invented, fudged, or manipulated data at least once in their careers."

It's impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker. That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isn't just a place to connect with your friends. It was a place to be more public than ever before. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time," he said. "But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

January 22, 1939 Assistant Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. Department of Anthropology Chapman Hall 227B Marshall College Dr. Jones: As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Following past policies and procedures, proceedings from the committee's deliberations that were pertinent to our decision have been summarized below according to the assessment criteria.

Harbor Research Newsletter: Data Constellations and the Magic of Emergence Data Constellations and the Magic of Emergence: "Is there really an image of a bear in the nighttime sky? How about an archer, or some girls, or a big and little dipper? Across the planet and the centuries, people have seen pictures in the stars-and more or less the same pictures, too. It takes a special kind of intelligence to do that. Dogs, for example, are intelligent creatures, but they don't see the pictures.

When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren't seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Something was apparently missing in the social experience. As one LinkedIn manager put it, "It was like arriving at a conference reception and realizing you don't know anyone. So you just stand in the corner sipping your drink-and you probably leave early."

For me, roller derby began with a very steep learning curve. I didn't know how to skate, I didn't know the rules, and so every practice left me physically and mentally exhausted. I did bring my own skill set to the sport: I've been an athlete my whole life, and played many a contact sport, and so some parts of roller derby - the physical fitness, hitting, body awareness, cross-training and nutrition - came easily.