RTFA: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39166e30-5a7f-11dc-9bcd-0000779fd2ac.html

Economists on both sides of the Atlantic strongly agree that scientific research spending provides measurable impact on economic growth. The moral case for health research is even clearer.

So much for the input side of research. What about the output? After all, paying for research is not enough. We have to get it to the scientists who might use it which, in an increasingly interdisciplinary world, is hard to predict beforehand. In the case of health research, patients are also looking for information - trying to find out whether the latest research shows that oestrogen therapy increases breast cancer risks, or anti-inflammatory drugs the risk of heart disease.

The outputs of scientific research come in a variety of forms, but the most important is an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. While some journals, such as those produced by the Public Library of Science, are “open access” - available in full for free online - most are not.They can be extremely expensive. The cost of journals has dramatically outpaced both the rate of inflation and the cost of monographs over the past 15 years. These journals may be available online - but they are behind firewalls, available only on payment of a fee.

…another attempt to make the case for open access to scientific research.

RTFA: http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/steve-jobs-live-apples-the-beat-goes-on-special-event/

Steve Jobs live — Apple’s “The beat goes on” special event

Fresh info from the Apple demos today, via engadget.

RTFA: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295805,00.html

A woman accused of running a high-end Washington prostitution ring says the U.S. government may be targeting her because Muslim men used her escort service before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In court papers filed this week, Deborah Jeane Palfrey said she might have to divulge classified information to defend herself against racketeering charges. She said the information possibly including the identities of customers from the Middle East could have national security implications.

She is asking a federal judge to schedule a secret hearing to discuss the information.

Everybody is pulling the “national security” card. This reasoning appears to be a little contrived.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6979891.stm

Investigators say the virus that led to the foot-and-mouth outbreak in Surrey had probably been present in a pipe on the Pirbright laboratory site.

Health and Safety Executive findings, given to the BBC, identified biosecurity lapses at the nearby site.

It said the pipe, which runs from pharmaceutical firm Merial to a plant operated by a government-run lab, may have been damaged by tree roots.

Merial said it could not comment until the report was officially published.

It said it “cannot speculate on pipes or anything else”.

It is believed the pipe may have been damaged by tree roots before flooding pushed virus traces to the surface.

It is not known how the virus found its way on to farmland a few miles way following the flooding on 20 July.

Damn! These are sensitive systems, people.

RTFA: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070829/155106.shtml

“No portions of this website may be reproduced or copied without the express written permission of the owner.”

And then goes on to selectively highlight or quote certain parts of copyright law. Of course, this is wrong. As I did above, you can absolutely reproduce or copy portions of this company’s website without the express written permission of the owner. It’s called fair use, and while many copyright holders want to pretend it doesn’t exist — it absolutely does. Quoting a small portion of a website, especially for the purpose of, say, educating people about fair use, is fair use at work.

IP law is totally twisted by so many companies, and for so many reasons that have nothing to do with copyright or trademark, at all.

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070905/wr_nm/fossett_tech_dc

British billionaire Richard
Branson said on Wednesday he was hoping to trace Steve Fossett
through a satellite mapping service offered by Internet data
provider Google as the search for the missing U.S. adventurer
resumed.

Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried
that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after
taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated
the aircraft’s emergency tracking beacon.

Wild - one of the world’s best pilots disappears on a routine flight. Will Big Brother save him?

RTFA: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/05/fec-determines-that-blogs-count-as-media/

In two determinations handed down yesterday, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.

About damn time. I guess.

RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html?hpid=moreheadlines

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.
Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Several layers of interest in this story. Approximately, denial helps to strengthen myths. Also, although 9/11 is a major event, a surprising amount of mis-information surrounds it.

Also worth noting: Washington Post makes it tricky to quote and cite them. It’s almost as if they don’t want other people to comment on their story.

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/05/psychological-tortur.html

your jaw may drop when you read the chapter titles:

* The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects
Brain Function

* The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior:
A Review

* The Use of Drugs in Interrogation

* Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information

* The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation

* The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence

* Countermanipulation through Malingering

These articles were written by the people who were paid by the US
government, mostly in the 1950s, to research brainwashing and
interrogation techniques by giving people drugs, placing them under
sensory deprivation, hypnotizing them, etc. etc. Many of these
experiments essentially involve torture and are likely to be widely
regarded as highly unethical. This is fundamental research, and if
there was any followup research done, it has not yet been published
for public consumption.

Contains link to original text.

RTFA: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070905/D8RFH6C00.html

A B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states last week, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
The incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe, said Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell. He said, “At no time was the public in danger.”

Very reassuring. Like my buddy said, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

RTFA: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/OTIII/

The head of the Galactic
Confederation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here)
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion
or so per planet — 178 billion on
average) by mass implanting.
He caused people to be brought to
Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb
on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2)
and then the Pacific area ones
were taken in boxes to Hawaii
and the Atlantic Area ones to
Las Palmas and there “packaged.”
His name was Xenu. He used
renegades. Various misleading
data by means of circuits etc.
was placed in the implants.
When through with his crime Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him
after 6 years of battle
and put him in an electronic
mountain trap where he still
is. “They” are gone. The place (Confed.)
has since been a desert.

L. Ron Bumquist’s first sketched notes about scientology.

RTFA: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.

Comcast lowers its bandwidth bills by spoofing TCP RST packets. The net effect is that if their customers run normal TCP/IP stacks, the customer’s computer will think the remote host has disconnected. Right now, they use this on Bittorrent traffic, but the same technique is used in China to perform per-keyword HTTP-over-TCP filtering, too. One solution, presented in this paper, is to hack your TCP/IP stack to ignore, or at least be smarter, about spoofed TCP RST packets.

RTFA: http://www.duiblog.com/2007/09/04/secret-breathalyzer-software-finally-revealed/

10. Error Detection Logic: The software design detects measurement errors, but ignores these errors unless they occur a consecutive total number of times. For example, in the airflow measuring logic, if a flow measurement is above the prescribed maximum value, it is called an error, but this error must occur 32 consecutive times for the error to be handled and displayed. This means that the error could occur 31 times, then appear within range once, then appear 31 times, etc., and never be reported…
Based upon a .08% reading from this machine, American citizens are accused of drunk driving and, in court, presumed by law to be guilty.

Analysis of breathalyzer source code reveals the system is unable to produce reliable results! As the link points out, based on a breathalyzer reading, people are determined to be guilty or not guilty of a crime. That is to say, innocent people are turned into criminals - convicted of criminal behavior - when in fact no crime has even taken place.

RTFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether#Rotovators

The word rotovator is a portmanteau derived from the words rotor and elevator. Rotovators would be momentum exchange tethers, with a retrograde motion of the tip closest to their parent body relative to the center of the tether.
Because the tips have a significant speed (typically ~1-3 km per second), it can be possible in some cases to cancel the orbital speed such that the tips are stationary at their lowest point with respect to a planetary surface or lunar body.
On bodies with reasonably low orbital speed (such as the Moon and possibly Mars), a rotovator in low orbit can actually touch the ground, thereby providing cheap surface transport as well as launching materials into cislunar space.

Even better than space elevator: Space tether!