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Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.

The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.

Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.

Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.

One of the complications is that the effective environment is defined by the life activities of the organism itself.

Thus, as organisms evolve, their environments necessarily evolve with them. Although classic Darwinism is framed by referring to organisms adapting to environments, the actual process of evolution involves the creation of new “ecological niches” as new life forms come into existence. Part of the ecological niche of an earthworm is the tunnel excavated by the worm and part of the ecological niche of a tree is the assemblage of fungi associated with the tree’s root system that provide it with nutrients.

, the distinction between organisms and their environments remains deeply embedded in our consciousness. Partly this is due to the inertia of educational institutions and materials

The Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer argue that people do not appreciate the real cost of a long commute. And especially when that commute is unpredictable, it takes a toll on our daily well-being.

imagine if we shared our commuting information so that we could calculate the average commute from various locations around a city. When the growing family of four pulls up to a house for sale for in New Jersey, the listing would indicate not only the price and the number of bathrooms but also the rush-hour commute time to Midtown Manhattan. That would be valuable information to have, since buyers could realistically factor the tradeoffs of remaining in a smaller space closer to work against moving to a larger space and taking on a longer commute.

In a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, the writer Gary Wolf documented the followers of “The Data-Driven Life,” programmers, students, and self-described geeks who track various aspects of their lives. Seth Roberts does a daily math exercise to measure small changes in his mental acuity. Kiel Gilleade is a "Body Blogger" who shares his heart rate via Twitter. On the more extreme end, Mark Carranza has a searchable database of every idea he's had since 1984. They're not alone. This community continues to thrive, and its efforts are chronicled at a blog called the Quantified Self, co-founded by Wolf and Kevin Kelly.

he application uses GPS technology and is available for the iPhone and Android devices. The over-the-air (OTA) downloadable app has access to New York City's more than 1,000 free condom outlets. When a user launches a search for rubbers, the nearest five locations are shown, allowing for enough time to act before the mood is lost.

The smartphone application that locates free condoms was a huge hit for New Yorkers this Valentine's Day, users said Tuesday, Feb. 15. The program was launched by the New York City Health Department to help the turned-on find protection at a moment's notice--no matter where they are.

The health department has come under significant fire for its free condom initiative. Parents have complained that it urges children to experiment with sex. "We're not promoting sex," Sweeney said. "We're promoting safer sex. In New York City and around the country, adolescents and pre-adolescents have sex whether you give them condoms or not."

That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of "No dogs and no Chinese allowed,"a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities.

Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to "push forward" with the project.

"It goes beyond ironic," he said. "The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their citizens."

A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems.

Apple is a monarchy, albeit with a wise and benevolent king. Android is burgeoning democracy, inefficient and messy, but free. Apple is the last, best example of the Industrial Age and its top-down, mass market/mass production paradigm.

They manufacture cool. They rely on “consumers”, and they protect those consumers from too many choices by selecting what is worthy, and what is not.

the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

The economic problem of society

a very natural way for atheists to react to religious claims: to ask for evidence, and reject these claims in the absence of it. Many of the several hundred comments that followed two earlier Stone posts “Philosophy and Faith” and “On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response,” both by Gary Gutting, took this stance. Certainly this is the way that today’s “new atheists”  tend to approach religion. According to their view, religions — by this they mean basically Christianity, Judaism and Islam and I will follow them in this — are largely in the business of making claims about the universe that are a bit like scientific hypotheses. In other words, they are claims — like the claim that God created the world — that are supported by evidence, that are proved by arguments and tested against our experience of the world. And against the evidence, these hypotheses do not seem to fare well.

But is this the right way to think about religion? Here I want to suggest that it is not, and to try and locate what seem to me some significant differences between science and religion

To begin with, scientific explanation is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge. It requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus and (in the case of the most profound scientific theories) considerable mathematical knowledge and ability. No-one can understand quantum theory — by any account, the most successful physical theory there has ever been — unless they grasp the underlying mathematics. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

This retraction notice made me go, "WTF were you folks thinking?"

Here's the text of the retraction notice: This article has been retracted. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have plagiarised part of several papers that had already appeared in several journals. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologise to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. From a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised from the following list of sources: Dihydroxyacetone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Dihydroxyacetone

From a quick scan, I found this section in the paper ... In the 1950s, Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone. Her studies involved using dihydroxyacetone as an oral drug for treating children with glycogen storage disease (Wittgenstein and Berry, 1960). The children received large oral doses of dihydroxyacetone, and sometimes spit or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of dihydroxyacetone exposure. Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting dihydroxyacetone liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that dihydroxyacetone did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer. which is very similar to this section in the Wikipedia entry: In the 1950s Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone.[4][5][6][7] Her studies involved using DHA as an oral drug for assisting children with glycogen storage disease. The children received large doses of DHA by mouth, and sometimes spat or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of DHA exposure. Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting DHA liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that DHA did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer.

Some have argued that piracy is rampant in those countries where the online Android Market is not yet available. But a recent KeyesLabs research project suggests that may not be true. KeyesLabs created a rough methodology to track total downloads of its apps, determine which ones were pirated, and the location of the end users. The results were posted in August, along with a “heat map” showing pirate activity. 

In July 2010, Google announced the Google Licensing Service, available via Android Market. Applications can include the new License Verification Library (LVL). “At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users,” according to a blog post by Android engineer Eric Chu. “It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.”

Justin Case, at the Android Police Web site, dissected the LVL. “A minor patch to an application employing this official, Google-recommended protection system will render it completely worthless,” he concluded.

A button called "See Friendship" aggregates onto a single page all of the information that two friends share: photos both people have been tagged in, events they have attended or are planning to attend, comments they have exchanged, etc. To see this stuff, you need only be "friends" with one of the people. So let's say I've turned down an ex-boyfriend's request for friendship; he can still peruse my pictures or trace my whereabouts by viewing my interactions with our mutual pals.

The "See Friendship" feature was launched by Facebook developer Wayne Kao, who credited his inspiration to the joy of browsing through friends' photos. "A similarly magical experience was possible if all of the photos and posts between two friends were brought together," he wrote on the Facebook blog. "You may even see that moment when your favorite couple met at a party you all attended."

Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto professor who studies social networks and real-life relationships, thinks Facebook developers don't understand the fundamental difference between life online and offline. "We all live in segmented, diversified worlds. We might be juggling girlfriends, jobs or different groups of friends," he says. "But [Facebook thinks] we're in one integrated community."

Another long-standing myth is that we allow one negative referee to determine the rejection of a paper. On the contrary, there were several occasions last year when all the referees were underwhelmed by a paper, yet we published it on the basis of our own estimation of its worth. That internal assessment has always been central to our role; Nature has never had an editorial board. Our editors spend several weeks a year in scientific meetings and labs, and are constantly reading the literature. Papers selected for review are seen by two or more referees. The number of referees is greater for multidisciplinary papers. We act on any technical concerns and we value the referees' opinions about a paper's potential significance or lack thereof. But we make the final call on the basis of criteria such as the paper's depth of mechanistic insight, or its value as a data resource or in enabling applications of an innovative technique.

controversies over scientific conclusions in fields such as climate change can have the effect — deliberate or otherwise — of undermining the public's faith in science.

One myth that never seems to die is that Nature's editors seek to inflate the journal's impact factor by sifting through submitted papers (some 16,000 last year) in search of those that promise a high citation rate. We don't. Not only is it difficult to predict what a paper's citation performance will be, but citations are an unreliable measure of importance. Take two papers in synthetic organic chemistry, both published in June 2006. One, 'Control of four stereocentres in a triple cascade organocatalytic reaction' (D. Enders et al. Nature 441, 861–863; 2006), had acquired 182 citations by late 2009, and was the fourth most cited chemistry paper that we published that year. Another, 'Synthesis and structural analysis of 2-quinuclidonium tetrafluoroborate' (K. Tani and B. M. Stoltz Nature 441, 731–734; 2006), had acquired 13 citations over the same period. Yet the latter paper was highlighted as an outstanding achievement in Chemical and Engineering News, the magazine of the American Chemical Society.

Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.

True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.

It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."