Group items tagged

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who's who. The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language "People have wondered for a long time what makes one person cognitively different from another person," said cognitive psychologist Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, coauthor of the study published Jan. 7 in Current Biology. "Our study is one tiny piece of the answer to this question." The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it's crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes. To test this, Kanwisher's team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable."

" It is critically important to not just get work done but to also ensure the people doing the work feel a sense of connection."

"My late father, Lou Shapiro, was an early leader of UNICEF, so relief work was baked into the genetics of my family. His work was centered on emergency relief for the survivors of earthquakes and other natural disasters. Whenever there was an earthquake in the world, "

[Laws affecting funding, requiring registration and prohibiting protest are among controls that are making it difficult for NGOs and other campaign groups ...]

[Laws affecting funding, requiring registration and prohibiting protest are among controls that are making it difficult for NGOs and other campaign groups ...]

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

"Most people probably have an idea about what a hacker looks like. The image of someone sitting alone at a computer, with their face obscured by a hoodie, staring intently at lines of code in which their particular brand of crime or mischief is rooted, has become widely associated with hackers. You can confirm this by simply doing an image search for "hackers" and seeing what you come up with"

"Linux is at a major tipping point, yet it faces being undermined from within. Jack Wallen calls for the Linux community to end the fighting between the Linux camps. By Jack Wallen | in Linux and Open Source, June 3, 2013, 1:01 AM PST"

"If asked, what would you think is the biggest challenge facing Linux mass adoption? Jack Wallen takes on this question with an answer you might not expect. By Jack Wallen July 22, 2015, 8:43 AM PST // jlwallen RSS "

"In her Texas Linux Fest keynote, Joan Touzet talked to us about how to improve our open source communities. Joan's talk was a series of stories about communities who have faced a crisis and then rose above it."

"LibrePlanet is an annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and address challenges facing the free software movement"

[... It has been sixteen months since I retired - or thought I was retiring - from my monthly column. A lot has happened since. First, my company was purchased by Seagate, and I am now part of the Seagate Government Solutions organization. That, of course, now changes what I write about in this column a bit as I am now a vendor, but I am still going to deal with the big issues facing storage and data movement. I will do my best to continue to not mention vendors unless I am referencing things that are in the news. Secondly, this will not be a monthly column - I'll likely post something every few months. And lastly, I want to thank those who have written in and asked me to keep writing. Thank you! The topic this month is going to be rootkits, which are nasty security issues that I think we all need to start thinking about, as well as what to do about them. ...]

"You can now be ushered out of a shop, even if you haven't done anything wrong yet. by Sebastian Anthony - Dec 17, 2015 1:15pm CET"

"...Before I joined GitHub, I worked at an organization called the XPRIZE Foundation. For those of you unfamiliar with it, XPRIZE runs incentive competitions that solve major challenges that face humanity. ..."

"Christine Hall Microsoft announced on Thursday that the end-of-life is coming soon to its free upgrade-to-Windows 10 scheme. Afterwards, the operating system won't be cheap."

"Christine Hall Microsoft announced on Thursday that the end-of-life is coming soon to its free upgrade-to-Windows 10 scheme. Afterwards, the operating system won't be cheap."

"by Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer, and Brian Resnick on July 14, 2016 "Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths." - Paul Kalanithi, neurosurgeon and writer (1977-2015) Science is in big trouble. Or so we're told. In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted with a serious case of doubt - doubt in the very institution of science."