-
Excerpts: The article traces the history of SFI from its 1984 beginnings through today, with a focus on new
scientific research directions and as well as our innovative Business Network Program. (...)
Researchers say they have found striking similarities between the two brands of virus, so having the biological side of the sciences working with the computer side provides data for both.
"Perhaps one of the big values is as a network," Bell said. "The people they (SFI) attract and the problems they go after are just very useful. I think when you bring that collection of people together, you really redirect. Everybody goes away thinking quite differently about what they're doing.
-
Excerpts: The
StarMine service, free on Yahoo, measures "analyst recommendation performance."(...)
StarMine measures analyst recommendation performance on a 1-to-5 scale, representing the return performance of an analyst's recommendations relative to his or her peers. To reach the scocres, StarMine analyzes every recommendation, upgrade and downgrade published by thousands of sell-side analysts around the world. Analysts are measured in two ways: on an absolute scale (used in the industry rankings) and on a coverage-relative scale (used for an analyst's overall score). Only analysts scoring 4 or 5 stars are displayed.
The Origin Of Speech, Science 
Excerpts: Archaeologists have identified various milestones in human behavior in the 5-million-year evolutionary void between animal communication and human speech, but there is no consensus on which achievements imply the capacity for language. For example, the first stone tools date to 2.4 million years ago; some researchers think this may indicate linguistic facility, but others argue that toolmaking is far removed from speech. (...) 2 million years ago, when the hominid brain began a period of rapid expansion, including in the primary brain areas associated with producing or processing language (...).
- Source: The Origin Of Speech, Constance Holden, DOI: 10.1126/science.303.5662.1316, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1316-1319, 04/02/27
Evolution of Language, Science
Excerpts: Complex language is clearly among the key traits that separate humans from our ape ancestors. A special section of the 27 Feb 2004 Science investigated how this powerful ability to communicate evolved and how language, (...), has changed over time. Five News stories delved into the history and prehistory of language evolution, from the origin of speech to modern efforts to organize the world's thousands of languages. Three Viewpoints explored the rapid changes occurring in our language systems as new technologies and international communication strive to keep pace with global population expansion.
- Source: Evolution of Language, Elizabeth Culotta, Brooks, DOI: 10.1126/science.303.5662.1315, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1315, 04/02/27
The First Language?, Science
Excerpts: Genetic and linguistic data indicate--but can't quite prove--that our ancient ancestors spoke with strange clicking noises
(...) suggest that our early ancestors depended on such clicks to communicate. The latest linguistic work points to clicks as having deep roots, originating at the limits of linguistic analysis sometime earlier than 10,000 years ago, and genetic data suggest that click-speaking populations go back to a common ancestor perhaps 50,000 or more years ago.
(...) "population that was ancestral to all living humans lived in the savanna and used clicks," (...).
- Source: The First Language?, ElizabethPennisi, DOI: 10.1126/science.303.5662.1319, Science Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1319-1320, 04/02/27
Why Anatolia?, Science
Excerpts: (...) both the seeds of the Indo-European language and the gateway for the spread of agriculture into Europe some 8000 years ago. Recent research at a number of Anatolian sites has shown that this huge plateau was teeming with human populations, rich with art and culture, and home to the grains, cereals, and legumes key to the expansion of farming. "Everybody agrees that farming came to Europe from Anatolia," says (...) Colin Renfrew, chief partisan of the farming-dispersal model of Indo-European origins. "So Anatolia must be the point of departure [for languages too]."
- Source: Why Anatolia?, MichaelBalter, DOI: 10.1126/science.303.5662.1324, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1324, 04/02/27
Continuing The Debate On Words And Seeds, Science
Excerpts: What we find is not unexpected: the history of the world is more complex than the farming-language dispersal hypothesis suggests. Scratch the archaeology of any one continent and what had once been argued as a simple case of Neolithic dispersal becomes a mosaic of multiple processes that may have produced quite independent patterns of economic, linguistic, and biological change within the populations concerned.
Similarly, scratching the surface of any one discipline exposes methodological difficulties. (...) cultural change originates in the spread of people or of new ideas and technologies.
The Future Of Language, Science
Excerpts: The world's language system is undergoing rapid change because of demographic trends, new technology, and international communication. (...) English may not be the dominant language of the future, and the need to be multilingual will be enhanced. Although many languages are going extinct, new ones are emerging in cities and extended social groups (...).
In the mid-20th century, nearly 9% of the global population grew up speaking English as their first language, but that proportion is declining-toward nearer 5% by 2050.
- Source: The Future Of Language, David Graddol, DOI: 10.1126/science.1096546, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1329-1331, 04/02/27
Towards a New Functional Anatomy of Language, Cognition
Abstract: The classical brain-language model derived from the work of Broca, Wernicke, Lichtheim, Geschwind, and others has been useful as a heuristic model that stimulates research and as a clinical model that guides diagnosis. However, it is now uncontroversial that the classical model is (i) empirically wrong in that it cannot account for the range of aphasic syndromes, (ii) linguistically underspecified to an extent that prohibits contact with the language sciences, and (iii) anatomically underspecified. We briefly summarize some of the central issues that motivate why a new functional anatomy of language is necessary, in the context of introducing a collection of articles that describe systematic new attempts at specifying the new functional anatomy. The major convergent observations are highlighted and the emergent conceptual and empirical trends are identified.
Emergent Properties Of CNS Neuronal Networks As Targets For Pharmacology, Progress in Neurobiology
Abstract: CNS [Central Nervous System, Ed.] drugs may act by modifying the emergent properties of complex
CNS neuronal networks. Emergent properties are network characteristics that are not predictably based on properties of individual member neurons.
Neuronal membership within networks is controlled by several mechanisms, including burst firing, gap junctions, endogenous and exogenous neuroactive substances, extracellular ions, temperature, interneuron activity, astrocytic integration and external stimuli. The effects of many CNS drugs in vivo may critically involve actions on specific brain loci, but this selectivity may be absent when the same neurons are isolated from the network in vitro where emergent properties are lost.
Cortical processing of complex sound: a way forward?, Trends in Neurosciences
Abstract: The organization of the cortical auditory system remains controversial. In
particular, the extent to which there is regional specialization in the cortical
processing of complex sound is unclear. Here, we ask whether we are
currently asking the right questions of auditory cortex, or using the appropriate
techniques to do so. A key factor that will promote such understanding in the
future will be increasing dialogue between workers using electrophysiological
recording methods to assess the response properties of single neurons and
those using imaging techniques to map regional organization. In the future,
further insights will be obtained by efforts to test hypotheses developed on the
basis of one approach by the use of the other. Imaging can tell the
neurophysiologists where to look, and work on single neurons can constrain
network models based on imaging. There is a crucial need for better
understanding of the anatomy of the auditory cortex in different species and for
comparative studies that will underpin both approaches.
Memories Light Up The Corners Of Our Minds, ScienceDaily
Excerpts: Memories do indeed light up the corners of our mind, just as the songwriter said. Scientific evidence for this notion comes from studies using magnetic resonance imaging to examine the living human brain. These studies show that certain brain areas "light up" as an individual is learning information. Scientists had previously established that people remember emotionally charged events and facts better than neutral ones. Now researchers at MIT have discovered that memories with an element of arousal or excitement are remembered by a different area of the brain-the amygdala-from memories of a calmer nature, which are remembered by the prefrontal cortex
Understanding Environmental Complexity Through A Distributed Knowledge Network, BioScience
Abstract: Understanding environmental complexity and other dimensions of ecological systems necessitates a holistic approach that can be achieved only by identifying, retrieving, and synthesizing diverse data from distributed sources; by collaborating with other scientists from a broad range of disciplines; and by investigating many different systems. Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity is developing new software tools to advance ecological understanding through discovery, access, retrieval, and management of distributed and heterogeneous ecological and environmental data. To address the need for cultural change in ecologists and other environmental scientists (...) training a cadre of young investigators (...) with emphasis on multiscale integration and synthesis.
Evolving a Stigmergic Self-Organized Data-Mining, arXiv
Abstract: Self-organizing complex systems typically are comprised of a large number of frequently similar components or events. Through their process, a pattern at the global-level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system's components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern, which, as in many real-world problems is not easily accessible or possible to be found. Stigmergy, a kind of indirect communication and learning by the environment found in social insects is a well know example of self-organization, providing not only vital clues in order to understand how the components can interact to produce a complex pattern, as can pinpoint simple biological non-linear rules and methods to achieve improved artificial intelligent adaptive categorization systems, critical for Data-Mining. On the present work it is our intention to show that a new type of Data-Mining can be designed based on Stigmergic paradigms, taking profit of several natural features of this phenomenon. By hybridizing bio-inspired Swarm Intelligence with Evolutionary Computation we seek for an entire distributed, adaptive, collective and cooperative self-organized Data-Mining. As a real-world, real-time test bed for our proposal, World-Wide-Web Mining will be used. Having that purpose in mind, Web usage Data was collected from the Monash University's Web site (Australia), with over 7 million hits every week. Results are compared to other recent systems, showing that the system presented is by far promising.
Learning User Similarity And Rating Style For Collaborative Recommendation, Info. Retrieval
Abstract: Information filtering is an area getting more important as we have long been flooded with too much information, where product brokering in e-commerce is a typical example. Systems which can provide personalized product recommendations to their users have gained a lot of interest in recent years. Collaborative filtering is one of the commonly used approaches which normally requires a definition of user similarity measure. In this paper, we propose the use of machine learning techniques to learn the optimal user similarity measure as well as user rating styles for enhancing recommendation acurracy. We have evaluated our proposed (...).
Cancer Without Disease, Nature
Excerpts: (...) body's inherent capacity to prevent the majority of these in situ tumours from recruiting their own new blood supply, thus preventing further growth owing to a lack of oxygen and nutrients. In the absence of a new supply of blood vessels by a process known as angiogenesis, an in situ tumour can remain dormant indefinitely. Paradoxically, it is proposed that angiogenesis itself is under the control of many genes in our body known to promote cancer (oncogenes) or suppress growth of tumours (tumour suppressors)
(...).
A Move To Sort Life From Death, Nature
Excerpts: Nerve growth factor determines neuronal cell fate during development or after injury. A newly identified 'death factor', an unprocessed form of this protein, induces cell death by activating two receptors in concert.
The death of nerve cells is a key aspect in the establishment of functional neural circuits during development, but inevitably also features in injury or degenerative conditions. (...) Two unrelated cell-surface proteins, (...), collaborate to induce death in responsive cells - including neurons. This joint effort involves direct interactions (...).
Shotgun Sequencing Of The Ocean Reveals 1.2 Million New Genes, The Scientist
Excerpts: More than 1.2 million new genes were identified, revealing a level of microbial diversity in seawater that was only previously guessed at. More than 700 of those were new rhodopsin-like photoreceptors.
(...) there must be between 10 and 20 billion different genes in the planet Earth';s repertoire,(...)
"We basically know very little about the genomic composition of the microbial community in the ocean, and the genes that we know about are only from the tiny fraction of cultured organisms,"
Genetically Engineered Organisms, NPR Audio
Excerpts: In this hour NPR's Ira Flatow and guests discuss what we really know about
the risks of genetically engineered organisms.
DNA Chip Will Catch Beefed Up Chicken, NewScientist
Excerpts: A single test can now reveal the presence of meat from any of 32 different species in food samples, enabling a wide range of important questions to be answered.
These include whether chicken has been bulked up with beef or pork extracts; whether expensive albacore tuna is really cheap skipjack tuna; whether rats, mice or even bits of people fell into the mincer when your burger was being made; and whether unscrupulous companies are risking spreading mad cow disease by adding beef to cattle feed?
-
Excerpts: In a study of changes in gene expression covering taxa from bacteria to human (...) report their discovery of a fundamental governing principle to the dynamics capable of producing the heterogeneous distribution of gene expression. The basic dynamics that underlie and produce this power-law distribution have yet to be worked out, (...) now propose that the proportional dynamic operating in gene expression changes might be described as a "rich-travel-more" mechanism, a counter concept to the "rich-get-richer" metaphor that has been used to explain other power law-based distributions, such as the growth of network connections in the World Wide Web.
- Source: Rich Genes Travel More, ScienceDaily & RIKEN Center For Developmental Biology, 2004/03/04
- Contributed by Atin Das - dasatin
yahoo.co.in
Gulf Stream Probed For Early Warnings Of System Failure, Nature
Excerpts: "Complete collapse of the north Atlantic circulation is a worst-case scenario," (...).
The team will use 22 moorings across the subtropical Atlantic: (...). Sensors will travel up and down wires from buoys to the moorings on the sea floor. Differences in water density will be calculated from the temperature and salinity measured throughout these water columns. With US measurements from the Florida Strait and satellite observation of wind-driven surface currents, these will help researchers understand water flow in the north Atlantic.
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare, Fortune
Excerpts: Global warming may be bad news for future generations, (...) most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point.
US Military Creates Second Earth, BBC News
Excerpts:
The copy of the original should be finished by
September
|
The US Army is building a second version of Earth on computer to help it prepare for conflicts around the world.
The detailed simulation will be drawn from a real-world terrain database and will be drawn to the same scale as the original.
The software Earth is being created for the US Army by gaming company There, (...).
world being created will not be a game but instead will be a "massively multi-user persistent environment" that will model real world physics as closely as possible.
The Complex Interaction Of Aerosols And Clouds, Science
Excerpts: Aerosols have an important effect on atmospheric chemistry throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere. They influence the radiative budget of Earth directly and indirectly by the modification of the cloud droplet size spectrum and precipitation at the surface. Researchers are beginning to incorporate these effects into the most sophisticated climate models for shallow clouds. This is because aerosol-cloud interactions are seen as one of the most important single forces that drive climate change, but there are big uncertainties in the current understanding of these processes.
Measurement Of The Effect Of Amazon Smoke On Inhibition Of Cloud Formation, Science
Abstract: Urban air pollution and smoke from fires have been modeled to reduce cloud formation by absorbing sunlight, thereby cooling the surface and heating the atmosphere. Satellite data over the Amazon region during the biomass burning season showed that scattered cumulus cloud cover was reduced from 38%in clean conditions to 0%for heavy smoke (...). This response to the smoke radiative effect reverses the regional smoke instantaneous forcing of climate from -28 watts per square meter in cloud-free conditions to +8 watts per square meter once the reduction of cloud cover is accounted for.
- Source: Measurement Of The Effect Of Amazon Smoke On Inhibition Of Cloud Formation, Ilan Kren, Yoram J. Kaufman, Lorraine A. Remer, Jose V. Martins, DOI: 10.1126/science.1089424, Science, Vol 303, Issue 5662, 1342-1345, 04/02/27
Unification In The Century Of Biology, Science
Excerpts: Scientific progress is based ultimately on unification rather than fragmentation of knowledge. At the threshold of what is widely regarded as the century of biology, the life sciences are undergoing a profound transformation. (...), forming two major domains: one extending from the molecule to the organism, the other bringing together population biology, biodiversity studies, and ecology. Kept separate, these domains, no matter how fruitful, cannot hope to deliver on the full promise of modern biology. They cannot lead to an appreciation of life in its full complexity, (...).
-
Excerpts:
Less congestion means faster transport of food.
© SPL
|
When it comes to traffic congestion, ants prefer the no-nonsense approach - they barge others out of the way, forcing them to take an alternative route. (...)
But problems can arise when too many ants try to use the route, (...) ants are surprisingly good at avoiding congestion, simply by shoving each other off the main highway and on to back streets.(...)
The re-routing strategy allows ants to maintain the same flow of food back to the nest even when things start to get crowded (...).
Mucus Good for the Local Economy, Science Now
Excerpts: Coral are nothing to sneeze at when it comes to generating mucus. One species common in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, for example, can exude up to 4.8 liters of mucus per square meter of reef a day. Scientists knew that the goo keeps the coral from drying out and protects them from infection, but now a research team proposes that the slime doesn't just help the coral. It helps the entire reef ecosystem save energy by recycling nutrients.
Phylogenetic Constraints And Adaptation Explain Food-Web Structure, Nature
Excerpts: Food webs are descriptions of who eats whom in an ecosystem. Although extremely complex and variable, their structure possesses basic regularities. (...) Until now, two models have been devised (...). Here, we propose a new model built on the hypothesis that any species' diet is the consequence of phylogenetic constraints and adaptation. Simple rules incorporating both concepts yield food webs whose structure is very close to real data. Consumers are organized in groups forming a nested hierarchy, which better reflects the complexity and multidimensionality of most natural systems.
-
Abstract: Sixty four members of the public were exposed to the same staged conversation either while waiting in a bus station or travelling on a train. Half of the conversations were by mobile phone, so that only one end of the conversation was heard, and half were co present face-to-face conversations. Analysis of variance showed that mobile phone conversations were significantly more noticeable and annoying than face-to-face conversations at the same volume when the content of the conversation is controlled. Indeed this effect of medium was as large as the effect of loudness. Various explanations of this effect are explored, (...).
- Source: Why Are Mobile Phones Annoying?, Monk A., Carroll J., Parker S., Blythe M., DOI: 10.1080/01449290310001638496, Behaviour and Information Technology, Jan.-Feb. 2004
- Contributed by Pritha Das - prithadas01yahoo.com
-
Abstract: This paper reports on a study assessing the consistency of usability testing across organisations. Nine independent organisations evaluated the usability of the same website, Microsoft Hotmail. (...) no two teams reported the same problem. Some of the unique findings were classified as serious. Even the tasks used by most or all teams produced very different results - around 70% of the findings for each of these tasks were unique. Our main conclusion is that our simple assumption that we are all doing the same and getting the same results in a usability test is plainly wrong.
- Source: Comparative Usability Evaluation, Molich R., Ede M., Kaasgaard K., Karyukin B., DOI: 10.1080/0144929032000173951, Behaviour and Information Technology, Jan.-Feb. 2004
- Contributed by Pritha Das - prithadas01yahoo.com
Long-Term Working Memory And Interrupting Messages In Human - Computer Interaction, Behav. & Info. Tech.
Abstract: The extent to which memory for information content is reliable, trustworthy, and accurate is crucial in the information age. Being forced to divert attention to interrupting messages is common, however, and can cause memory loss. The memory effects of interrupting messages were investigated in three experiments. In Experiment 1, attending to an interrupting message decreased memory accuracy. In Experiment 3, an interrupting message was shown to be most disturbing when it was semantically very close to the main message. (...) it is argued that interrupting messages can both disrupt the active semantic elaboration (...) and cause semantic interference upon retrieval.
The Minority Game: An Introductory Guide, arXiv
Abstract: The Minority Game is a simple model for the collective behavior of agents in an idealized situation where they have to compete through adaptation for a finite resource. This review summarizes the statistical mechanics community efforts to clear up and understand the behavior of this model. Our emphasis is on trying to derive the underlying effective equations which govern the dynamics of the original Minority Game, and on making an interpretation of the results from the point of view of the statistical mechanics of disordered systems.
-
Abstract: Inequality among social classes or castes is a frequent cause of conflict in human society. In social insects such as ants, bees and wasps, individuals can develop as one of two castes, queen or worker. (...) studied Melipona stingless bees native in tropical America where each individual bee can determine its own caste development. If each bee chose its caste only for the good of the colony, almost all should be workers. But this is not what happens. Up to 15% were selfish, developing as queens even if they carried out no work in the colony.
Patterns And Coevolutionary Consequences Of Repeated Brood Parasitism, Alphagalileo & Biol. Lett.
Abstract: While many parasitic cuckoos lay eggs mimicking host eggs, other brood parasites, including cowbirds, lay distinct eggs. Yet cowbird hosts do not typically eject odd-looking eggs. During our colourbanding studies of two species of cowbird hosts, many females were parasitised multiple times during their lifespan. We then examined mathematically the role of such repeated experience with parasitism in the evolution of egg-ejection by would-be foster parents. Increasing repeated parasitism delayed the evolution of rejection, especially in species that paid higher costs when raising cowbird chicks. These observations help us understand the counterintuitive patterns of non-rejection by vulnerable hosts of parasites.
Self-Coiling Nanoribbons, Science
Excerpts: Ceramic materials are generally thought to be much more brittle than metals or
polymers. (...) ceramics can exhibit surprising flexibility. (...) can be induced to grow by a spontaneous self-coiling process and fuse to form a
single crystal ring tens of nanometers thick and several micrometers across.
(...) Compared to the macromolecular building blocks of living systems like
proteins, (...), the ZnO nanoribbons are quite simple. However, in the context of
our attempts to replicate nature's complexity in artificial inorganic material-
based systems, (...) possibility of creating more complex
and unusual structures in the future.
- Source: Single-Crystal Nanorings Formed by Epitaxial Self-Coiling of Polar Nanobelts
, Xiang Yang Kong, Yong Ding, Rusen Yang, Zhong Lin Wang, DOI: 10.1126/science.1092356, Science, 303: 1348-1351, 04/02/27
Superconductivity: Symmetry Not Required, Nature
-
Excerpts: The best way to combat casual crime is not to search for persistent offenders but to deter people from committing their first crime.
(...) people who do and don't commit crimes appear to be governed by slightly different statistical rules. The two types live in different mathematical worlds, the researchers say. A switch in statistical behaviour occurs just once, when a young person crosses the divide. Once having committed a single crime, a youth is statistically likely to go on to commit any number of further crimes, (...).
Disease Control: Virtual Plagues Get Real, Nature
Excerpts: Mathematical models incorporating ecological data are starting to be deployed (...).
During Britain's epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, the government culled some 4 million cattle, pigs and sheep. These drastic measures were introduced following the advice of a new breed of epidemiologist - those who deploy mathematical models of disease ecology to predict the progress of an outbreak and the probable effectiveness of different control strategies. In this case, the modellers crunched data on the distribution of farms, the size of herds, wind patterns and records of recent animal transport.
Haitians Again Relying On U.S. Military To Bring Order, NY Times
Excerpts: Now the United States military is back in Haiti for the third time in 90 years. It says its mission will last 90 days. On June 1, the United States plans to hand off to an international force under the United Nations. Planning for that force has barely begun, and Haiti's 15 neighbors in the Caribbean, furious at Mr. Aristide's ouster under American pressure, say they want no part of it.
(… ) last American military deployment, in 1994, to build lasting institutions, like the police, courts and schools.
Toss Out The Toss-Up: Bias In Heads-Or-Tails, Science News
Excerpts: If you want to decide which football team takes the ball first or who gets the larger piece of cake, the fairest thing is to toss a coin, right? Not necessarily.
A new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased: A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on. (...)
This slight bias pales when compared with that of spinning a coin on its edge. A spinning penny will land as tails about 80 percent of the time.
Opinion Polling: Taking The Voters' Pulse, Nature
Excerpts: Political strategies and careers are built and broken on the results of opinion polls. But polls' apparently small margins of error can hide large uncertainties. (...)
Before the Iowa caucuses kicked off the US presidential primary elections on (...), most polling organizations were predicting a virtual tie between the top (...) candidates. (...)
What looked like a serious polling blunder was more likely due to a last-minute surge of support for Kerry, and the quirky rules of the Iowa caucuses, which allow voters to switch their support after the voting begins.
Why Is Washington Going Easy On Pakistan's Nuclear Black Marketers?, The New Yorker
Excerpt: A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, "One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation. Suppose Edward Teller had suddenly decided to spread nuclear technology and equipment around the world. Do you really think he could do that without the government knowing? How do you get missiles from North Korea to Pakistan? Do you think A.Q. shipped all the centrifuges by Federal Express? The military has to be involved, at high levels."
-
Excerpts: Dubai's involvement is no surprise to those who follow the murky world of nuclear technology sales. For the last two decades it, along with other points in the emirates, has been the main hub through which traffickers have routed their illegal commerce to hide their trails. Yet the United States, which has depended on the emirates as a pillar of relative stability in the Middle East and, since 1991, as a host to American troops, has done little to pressure it to crack down on illicit arms trade.
- Source: Nukes 'R' Us, Gary Milhollin, Kelly Motz, NY Times, 04/03/08
Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
U.S.-Pakistan Struck Deal On Bin Laden, NPR
Excerpts: The New Yorker reports that U.S. officials agreed to support Pakistan's pardon
of Abdul Qadeer Khan -- a scientist who admitted passing nuclear secrets to
Iran, Libya and North Korea -- in exchange for permission to hunt for Osama
bin Laden in Pakistan. Pentagon officials deny they struck such a deal. Hear
German Judges Order A Retrial For 9/11 Figure, NY Times
Excerpts: Complaining that crucial evidence had been withheld by the German and American authorities, a five-judge panel threw out the year-old conviction of Mr. Motassadeq and sent the case back to the lower court in Hamburg, which had sentenced him to 15 years in prison on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder.
(...) was denied a fair trial because the United States refused to allow testimony by Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspect in American captivity who is believed to have played a central role in the Sept. 11 plot.
Editor's Note: This example seems to suggest that the fight against global terrorist networks is made less effective by weakening the global network of legal prosecution.
How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web, NY Times
Excerpts:
Sylvain Savolainen for The New York Times
|
SIM cards connect cellphones to networks. A Swiss company once sold such
Subscriber Identity Module cards without asking buyers for identification,
making its cards a favorite with criminals. But investigators were able to match
the numbers with terror suspects and track some down in Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Indonesia and several countries in Europe. Switzerland is ending
anonymous card sales on July 1.
As U.S. Detains Iraqis, Families Plead For News, NY Times
Excerpts: Part of the reason so many are being held is that soldiers' work is not police work. Tips are not as reliable. Artillerymen are not detectives. The troops cast a wide net and then sort through the catch, with much of the investigation coming after the arrest, not before. (...)
Under international law, the American authorities have the right as occupiers to detain anyone who poses a security threat, even without enough evidence to prosecute. But in Iraq, unlike in postwar Japan or Germany, occupation has come without pacification.
Links & Snippets
Other Publications
- Bush Envoy Briefs Panel After Talks on A-Bombs, DAVID E. SANGER, James A. Kelly told a Senate panel that it was "quite possible" that North Korea
had turned all 8,000 of its spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium to fuel nuclear
weapons.
- U.S. Sees No Rebel Role in New Haiti Government, CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS, The Bush administration declared that paramilitaries will not play a role in
Haiti's political reconstruction and urged them to lay down their arms and go
home.
- 9/11 Panel Rejects White House Limits on Interviews, PHILIP SHENON, The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict
conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney.
- International Journal of Unconventional Computing, Specific topics include but are not limited to:
(...) complexity (e.g. computational complexity of non-standard computer
architectures; theory of amorphous computing; artificial chemistry),
- New Doubts Over Dino Death Theory, A group of researchers is challenging the theory that a single asteroid crashing
into the Earth caused the dinosaurs to disappear 65 million years ago. They
say the Yucatan Peninsula's Chicxulub crater is too old. But others stand by the
crater as the smoking gun. NPR's Richard Harris reports.
Monday, March 1, 2004
- Genetically Engineered Organisms , Allison Snow, C. S. Prakash, In this hour NPR's Ira Flatow and guests discuss what we really know about
the risks of genetically engineered organisms.
- GM crop go-ahead 'irresponsible', MPs say it would be irresponsible to allow GM crops to be grown commercially
in the UK on the basis of the recent trials.
- 2003 summer hottest in 500 years, The scorching heatwave in Europe made last summer the hottest in five
centuries, a study say
- Tribes take to wireless web, Wireless technology is helping native Americans in California go online and
learn computing skills.
- Bush Policy on Human Stem Cells Faces New Challenges, NICHOLAS WADE, The White House's policy on research with human embryonic stem cells has
been put under new pressure by the development of new stem cell lines by a
Harvard researcher.
- Gnawing Away at Human Family Tree
- Common Virus Protects Against HIV
- A Message From Her Majesty Eggs
- The Penis Plan
- UNurgesstandoninternetdrugs
- PeskyNetskytops virus warnings
- Haitians Again Relying on U.S. Military to Bring Order
- LabNetworkEyesCloserTiesForTacklingWorldHunger, DennisNormile, Science Feb 27 2004:1281-1283
- Microbe exhibits out-of-body activity
- Feral breed lacks domestic dogs' skill
- The calculus of love
- Primate virus found in zoo workers
- How agriculture ground to a start
- Blocked gene gives mice super smell
- Inflammatory Fat
- Averting Pain:Epilepsy drug limits migraine attacks
- Old Colonies:Ancient formations are termites 'legac
- Fox Selection:Bottleneck survivors show surprising variety
- Astronomy:Out of the Dark Ages, S. George Djorgovski, 04/02/26, Nature427,790-791, DOI: 10.1038/427790a
- Mars rocks once 'water drenched', 04/03/04, Nasa says one of its rovers has shown the Red Planet would have had the
necessary water environments to support life.
- Stronger evidence for desktop fusion, Valerie Jamieson, 04/03/04, NewScientist
- Robo-talk helps pocket translator, 04/03/05, Tourists landing in Tokyo can hire out a handheld gadget that translates in a
second.
- Cellphone software creates bogus backgrounds, 04/03/05, NewScientist
- Global Organization of Metabolic Fluxes in the Bacterium, Escherichia coli, E. Almaas, B. Kovacs, T. Vicsek, Z. N. Oltvai, A.-L. Barabasi, 2004-02-28, arXiv, DOI: q-bio.MN/0403001
- Minimal Cut Sets In Biochemical Reaction Networks, Klamt S., Gilles E. D., 2004/01/22, Bioinformatics, DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btg395
- Zipf's Law In Phonograms And Weibull Distribution In Ideograms: Comparison Of English With Japanese, T. Nabeshima, Y.-P. Gunji - yukiokobe-u.ac.jp, 2004/01/28, Biosystems, DOI: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2003.11.002
- Hornbills Can Distinguish Between Primate Alarm Calls, H. J. Rainey, K. Zuberbuhler, P. J. B. Slater, 2004/03/01, Alphagalileo & Proceedings B (Biological Sciences)
- Unemployment Leads To Political Passiveness, A. Waara - anneli.waarauadm.uu.se, 2004/03/01, Alphagalileo
- Baby's Face Lights Up Emotional Center Of New Mom's Brain, 2004/03/01, ScienceDaily & University Of Wisconsin-Madison
- Anger, Hostility Linked To Atrial Fibrillation In Men, 2004/03/03, ScienceDaily & American Heart Association
- New Research Demonstrates That Social Interaction Determines Left Or Right-Side Bias, G. Vallortiga, S. Ghirlanda, 2004/03/04, Alphagalileo & Proceedings B (Biological Sciences)
- Firefly's Light Can Help Us Spot Life In Space, J. S.-Fransson - jacobsfadmin.kth.se, 2004/03/05, Alphagalileo
- Critical Periods Of Brain Growth And Cognitive Function In Children, Gale C. R., O'Callaghan F. J., Godfrey K. M., Law C. M., Martyn C. N., Feb. 2004, Brain, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awh034
- Ideas Are Not Replicators But Minds Are, Gabora L., Jan. 2004, Biology and Philosophy, DOI: 10.1023/B:BIPH.0000013234.87103.76
- Taking The Brand Promise Online: Challenges And Opportunities, Chernatony L., Christodoulides G., Jan./Mar. 2004, Interactive Marketing
- The Role of Biodiversity Scientists In A Troubled World, Gómez-P. A., Mar. 2004, BioScience
- Replicating Web Structure In Small-Scale Test Collections, Gurrin C. - cgurrincomputing.dcu.ie, Smeaton A. F. - asmeatoncomputing.dcu.ie, Sep. 2004, Information Retrieval, DOI: 10.1023/B:INRT.0000011206.23588.ab
Webcast Announcements
-
Science, Complexity, and the Ethics of Global Governance, Cork, Ireland, 04/02/26-28
-
Creative Education Exposition, , Taipei, Taiwan, 04/02/12-14
-
Voices of Public Intellectuals Lecture Series: Democracy's Response to the Terrorist Threat
Now in its fifth year, the Radcliffe Institute Voices of Public Intellectuals lecture series brings issues affecting civic life to a public forum. This year's series of three lectures features experts in the study of terrorism and the prosecution of terrorists to explore the effects of terrorism on democracy. These lectures take place in Cambridge on February 26, March 4, and March 11 at 4 p.m.
- World Economic Forum 2004, Davos, Switzerland
-
Riding the Next Democratic Wave,
Al-Thani, Khan, Vike-Freiberga, Wade, Soros, Zakaria, World Economic Forum, 04/01/25
- The Future of Global Interdependence, Kharrazi, Held, Owens, Shourie, Annan, Martin, Schwab, World Economic Forum, 04/01/25
-
Why Victory Against Terrorism Demands Shared Values
-
The Process of Curricular Review: Redefining a World-Class Education, Benedict Gross, Thomas Bender, Harvard@home, 04/01/21, Dean of Harvard College Benedict Gross discusses Harvard's first comprehensive review of the undergraduate curriculum in almost 3 decades. This program introduces the process of curricular review by presenting two segmented lectures. The first, by Dean Gross, outlines the approach and considerations in undertaking the current review. The second lecture, presented by NYU Professor Thomas Bender, presents a historical perspective on academic culture.
-
Cancer Biology , NPR Talk of the Nation, 04/01/16, How the spread of cancer is like wound healing gone awry.
- Tracking Ebola , NPR Talk of the Nation, 04/01/16, A new study might help scientists predict where Ebola may!
strike next.
- Animal Thought and Communication, NPR Talk of the Nation, 04/01/16,
How do animals think and communicate with each other? And what can studying animals tell us about the evolution of language in humans? In this hour, NPR's Ira Flatow and guests look at thought and communication in apes, gorillas and monkeys. What can non-human primates tell us about communication in humans?
- CODIS 2004, International Conference On Communications, Devices And Intelligent Systems, 2004 Calcutta, India, 04/01/09-10
- EVOLVABILITY & INTERACTION: Evolutionary Substrates of
Communication, Signaling, and Perception in the Dynamics of Social
Complexity, London, UK, 03/10/08-10
- The Semantic Web
and Language Technology - Its Po
tential and Practicalities,
Bucharest, Romania, 03/07/28-08/08
- ECAL 2003, 7th
European Conference on Artificial Life, Dortmund, Germany,
03/09/14-17
- New Santa
Fe Institute President About His Vision for SFI's Future Role,
(Video, Santa Fe, NM, 03/06/04)
- SPIE's 1st Intl Symp
on Fluctuations and Noise, Santa Fe, NM, 2003/06/01-04
- NAS Sackler
Colloquium on Mapping Knowledge Domains, Video/Audio Report,
03/05/11
- 13th Ann Intl Conf,
Soc f Chaos Theory in Psych & Life Sciences, Boston, MA, USA,
2003/08/08-10
- CERN
Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and
Live Events
- Dean
LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since
February 1998
- Edge Videos
Conference & Call for Papers Announcements
- Arbeitskreis
Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme Jahrestagung
(AKSOE), Regensburg, Germany, 04/03/08-12
- 11th Annual Winter Chaos Conference Dynamical Systems Thinking in Science and Society, Stony Creek, CT, USA, 04/03/12-14
-
Alife Mutants' Hackingsession on Systems and Organisms, Bielefeld (Germany), 04/03/06-13
- Capital
Science 2004, Washington, 04/03/20-21
- Fractal 2004,
"Complexity and Fractals in Nature", 8th Intl
Multidisciplinary Conf, Vancouver, Canada, 04/04/04-07
- 6th German Workshop on Artificial Life 2004 (GWAL-6), Bamberg, Germany, 04/04/14-16
- The
9th IEEE Intl Conf on Engineering of Complex Computer
Systems, Florence, Italy, 04/04/14-16
- Complexity Science and the Exploration of the Emerging World, Austin, TX, 04/04/17
- 2004
Advanced Simulation Technologies Conference (ASTC'04),
Arlington, VA., USA, 04/04/18-22
- NKS
(New Kind of Science) 2004 Conference and Minicourse,
Boston, Massachusetts, 04/04/22-25
- IDS'04 - Intentional Dynamic Systems Symposium, Memphis, TN, USA, 04/04/24-26
- Urban
Vulnerability and Network Failure: Constructions and Experiences
of Emergencies, Crises and Collapse, Manchester, UK,
04/04/29-30
-
What Really Matters ?The Global Forum 2004, Santa Fe, NM, 04/05/02-04
- 5th
International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS2004),
Boston, MA, USA, 04/05/16-21
- 3rd Intl Conf on
Systems Thinking in Management (ICSTM 2004) "Transforming
Organizations to Achieve Sustainable Success",
Philadelphia, Pa, USA, 04/05/19-21
- 4th Intl Conf on
Fractals And Dynamic Systems In Geoscience, München, Germany, 04/05/19-22
- 9th
Annual Workshop on Economics and Heterogeneous Interaction Agents
(WEHIA04), Kyoto, Japan, 2004/05/27-29
- 13th
International Symposium on HIV & Emerging Infectious
Diseases, Toulon, France, 04/06/03-05
- ECC8
Experimental Chaos Conference, Florence, Italy,
04/06/14-17
- An Intl Tribute to Francisco Varela, Paris,04/06/18-20
- 7th
Intl Conf on Linking Systems Thinking, Innovation,Quality, Entrepreneurship and Environment (STIQE),
MARIBOR, SLOVENIA, 04/06/24-26
-
NAACSOS 2004, North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, Pittsburgh PA, 04/06/27-29
-
Statphys - Kolkata V An International Conference on Complex Networks: Structure, Function and Processes , Kolkata, India, 04/06/27-30
-
ICAD 2004 10th International Conference on Auditory Display, Sydney, Australia, 04/07/06-09
-
3rd Intl School Topics in Nonlinear Dynamics Discrete Dynamical Systems and Applications , Urbino (Italy), 04/07/07-09
- `Perspectives on Nonlinear Dynamics 2004 (PNLD-2004), Chennai, India, 04/07/12-15
- From Animals To Animats
8, 8th Intl Conf On The Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior
(SAB'04), Los Angeles, USA, 04/07/13-17
- 14th Annual International Conference The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences , Milwaukee, WI, USA, 04/07/15-18
-
Facing Complexity, Wellington, NZ, 04/07/15-17
- Gordon Research Conference on "Oscillations & Dynamic Instabilities In Chemical Systems", Lewiston, ME, 04/07/18-23
- 3rd
Intl Conf Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2004), New York City, 04/07/19-23
- 7th
Intl Workshop on: Trust in Agent Societies , New York City, 04/07/19-20
- 8th
World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and
Informatics, Orlando, Florida, USA, 04/07/18-21
- 2004
Summer Simulation MultiConference (SummerSim'04), San Jose
Hyatt, San Jose, California, 04/07/25-29
- SME 2004 Symposium on Modeling
and Control of Economic Systems , University in Redlands, CA, 04/01/28-31
- 6th
International Mathematica Symposium (IMS 2004), Banff,
Canada, 04/08/02-06
- Fractals and Natural Hazards at
32nd Intl Geological Congress (IGC), Florence, Italy, 04/08/20-28
-
ICCC 2004, IEEE International Conference on Computational Cybernetics, ,
Vienna, Austria, 04/08/30-09/01
- ANTS
2004, 4th International Workshop on Ant Colony
Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, Brussels, Belgium,
04/09/05-08
- Dynamic
Ontology, An Inquiry into Systems, Emergence, Levels of Reality,
and Forms of Causality, Trento, Italy,
04/09/08-11
- 9th
Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems
(ALIFE9), Boston, Massachusetts, 04/09/12-15
- The
Verhulst 200 on Chaos, Brussels, BELGIUM, 04/09/16-18
- The
8th Intl Conf on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
(PPSN VIII), Birmingham, UK, 04/09/18-22
- XVII Brazilian
Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Sao Luis, Maranhao -
Brazil, 04/09/22-24
- TEDMED Conference ,
Charleston SC, 04/10/12-15
- Wolfram
Technology Conference, Champaign, Illinois,
04/10/21-23
- 6th Intl Conf on Electronic Commerce
ICEC'2004: Towards A New Services Landscape, Delft, The Netherlands, 04/10/25-27
- Complexity and Philosophy Workshop - 2-Day Conference , Rio de Janeiro, 04/11
-
Recognizing the world as one vast interconnected system is essential to understanding the level of complexity in today's global environment.
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This course is designed to give you a working knowledge of complexity science, and to show how to apply insights from the new science to your life and work, and to world events.
