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Five scientists spent a week in the wilderness to understand how heavy use of technology changes how we think and behave.

It's hard not to get lost in a data projection like the NYT's Mapping America: Every City, Every Block, which allows you to parse through 20 or so different projections of the American Community Survey data over the last five years from the Census Bureau.  When you can see the geographic correlations of education levels and income (check out the dividing line at 16th street in both cases), it's a stark reminder of the different Washingtons that exist. Be sure also to check out DCist's initial take (focused on demography and increase/decrease) and GGW's initial take (focused on population shift between wards) This is a data goldmine, and the sort of thing that yours truly is absolutely in love with. Parse through this with us over the next couple weeks.

On July 29th, returning from a trip to Europe, Jacob Appelbaum, a lanky, unassuming 27-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with the slogan "Be the trouble you want to see in the world," was detained at customs by a posse of federal agents. In an interrogation room at Newark Liberty airport, he was grilled about his role in Wikileaks, the whistle-blower group that has exposed the government's most closely guarded intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan. The agents photocopied his receipts, seized three of his cellphones - he owns more than a dozen - and confiscated his computer. They informed him that he was under government surveillance. They questioned him about the trove of 91,000 classified military documents that Wikileaks had released the week before, a leak that Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg called "the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers." They demanded to know where Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was hiding. They pressed him on his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appelbaum refused to answer. Finally, after three hours, he was released. Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the leading evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak possible. In a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's ambition is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our most intimate and personal information - our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, ph

Nasa estimates the odds of someone being struck by a falling part of the spacecraft at one in 3,200

Jesse Schell's talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it'll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you'll spend all week.

Anonymous uses its skills to extract user information from darknet websites specializing in child pornography. Tuesday, after hacking into Lolita City, a darknet website used by pedophiles to trade in child pornography, Anonymous released usernames and other information of 1,589 pedophiles trading in kiddie porn. The move comes after the group managed to take down more than 40 pedophile websites last week which were swapping images through the Tor anonymization network. A darknet website is a closed private network of computers used for file sharing. Darknet websites are part of the Invisible Web, sometimes called the Deep Web, containing content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines. Yesterday Pastebin release, Anonymous enthusiasts explain the technical side of how they were able to locate and identify Lolita City and access their user data base. In a prior Pastebin release, Anonymous offers a timeline of events detailing the discovery of the hidden cache of more than 100 gigabytes of child porn associated with Lolita City.

Barclays, the U.K. banking behemoth, is challenging Barclays To Host Blockchains Hackathon developers to assist refurbish the worldwide derivatives market next month at a hackathon. Disclosed to the media this week, DerivHack will take place at Barclays' Rise accelerator spaces at the same time in New York and London on September 20 and 21, 2018. The ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association), Thomson Reuters, and Deloitte are co-sponsoring the hackathon.