| Aug. 4, 2010 | Science | Technology | Health and Medicine Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding
Biochemists and computer scientists at the University of Washington two years ago launched an ambitious project harnessing the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems. The game, Foldit, turns one of the hardest problems in molecular biology into a game a bit reminiscent of Tetris. Thousands of people have now played a game that asks them to fold a protein rather than stack colored blocks or rescue a princess. Results published Thursday (Aug. 5) in the journal Nature show that Foldit is a success. It turns out that people can, indeed, compete with supercomputers in this arena. Analysis shows that players bested the computers on problems that required radical moves, risks and long-term vision -- the kinds of qualities that computers do not possess. "People in the scientific community have known about Foldit for a while, and everybody thought it was a great idea, but the really fundamental question in most scientists' minds was 'What can it produce in terms of results? Is there any evidence that it's doing something useful?'"said principal investigator Zoran Popović, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. "I hope this paper will convince a lot of those people who were sitting on the sidelines, and the whole genre of scientific discovery games will really take off,"he said. Scientists know the pieces that make up a protein but cannot predict how those parts fit together into a 3-D structure. And since proteins act like locks and keys, the structure is crucial. At any moment, thousands of computers are working away at calculating how physical forces would cause a protein to fold. But no computer in the world is big enough, and computers may not take the smartest approach. So the UW team tried to make it into a game that people could play and compete. Foldit turns protein-folding into a game and awards points based on the internal energy of the 3-D protein structure, dictated by the laws of physics. Tens of thousands of players have taken the challenge. The author list for the paper includes an acknowledgment of more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication. "We had to talk to the editors a bit about getting that in there,"said first author Seth Cooper, a UW doctoral student in computer science. "I think it's not the standard style of doing things.” The author list is a first step toward the original goal of having many people contribute to scientific research. Players come from all over the world, and are of all ages and educational backgrounds. "I don't think that there's any sort of real demographic profile that would be a typical Foldit player,"Cooper said. A major challenge in developing the game was to make it fun while still producing valid scientific results, Cooper said. There was a constant back-and-forth between scientists, game developers and players to achieve the best balance. The class of problems in which humans were able to do better than computers required intuitive leaps or major shifts in strategy. Future work will aim to better combine the strengths of experts, computers and thousands of game players. "It's a new kind of collective intelligence, as opposed to individual intelligence, that we want to study,"Popović said. "We're opening eyes in terms of how people think about human intelligence and group intelligence, and what the possibilities are when you get huge numbers of people together to solve a very hard problem.” The Foldit blog lets players know about updates to the game, upcoming competitions, and special events like online chats with the scientists or game developers. The Foldit energy calculations are carried out by Rosetta, the procedure for computing protein structures developed by co-author David Baker, a UW biochemistry professor. Baker's group has previously used donated computer cycles through Rosetta@home to help crunch through the trillions of possible orientations for the chains of amino acid molecules that make up proteins. The human thinking patterns may now help bolster Rosetta's skills. Researchers in Baker's group are analyzing the most successful Foldit strategies and trying to replicate them in the computer-powered version. This summer the Foldit community has been focused on problems in the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction competition, the world's largest comparison of protein-folding computation strategies. Last year Foldit competed as part of the Baker lab team. This year for the first time Foldit players have their own team, taking on the most sophisticated supercomputers in the world. Contest results will be announced in December. Now, Foldit players will focus on designing novel proteins. Last year a Texas player who goes by the name "BootsMcGraw"was the first Foldit player to have his new protein design synthesized in the Baker lab. Although this particular structure did not work, the researchers plan to try again and are optimistic about the possibilities. "I think that design problems are an area where human computing has huge potential,"Baker said. "People are good at building things, so I'm expecting that people will be very good at building proteins for different purposes. That's where I'm expecting really great things from Foldit.” Players may someday design proteins to disable the flu virus or tackle HIV, or perform tasks outside the body such as cleaning up waste or generating energy. Cooper has years of experience with computer games and says he "might be classified as a gamer."Now he's found a way to turn this global pastime to the benefit of science. "We're taking the effort that people put into games and channeling that into something productive and useful for humanity,"he said. "We're combining computational power and human brainpower to tackle important problems that neither one of them can do alone.” Other co-authors are Firas Khatib, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Baker's group; Adrien Treuille, a former UW computer science doctoral student now on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University; former UW undergraduate computer science students Janos Barbero and Michael Beenen; Jeehyung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University; and Andrew Leaver-Fay at the University of North Carolina, a former postdoctoral researcher in Baker's lab. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. ### For more information, Popović is in Norway until Aug. 11 and is best reached at zoran@cs.washington.edu. Cooper is in Japan and can be reached at scooper@cs.washington.edu. Baker is out of the office this week and best reached at dabaker@uw.edu.
The Foldit website is http://fold.it. The site is currently down while data is being moved to a new server. Foldit videos are on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/uwfoldit. ©2010 University of Washington News and Information | uwnews.org | uweek.org | ||||||||||||||||
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
uwnews.org | Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding | University of Washington News and Information
Monday, August 02, 2010
Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure | Media Maverick - CNET News
Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure
More details are surfacing about why Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was mysteriously booted from the Internet by its Web-hosting company.
The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.
But Marr said a Burst.net employee erred in telling Blogetery's operator and members of the media that the FBI had ordered it to terminate Blogetery's service. He said Burst.net did that on its own.
This past weekend, reports surfaced that Blogetery was shut down by the federal government and suggested that it was likely due to copyright violations. On Sunday, CNET reported that the shutdown had nothing to do with copyright violations and that a similar service, Ipbfree.com, a platform for message boards, was shuttered within days of Blogetery. It is still unclear why Ipbfree was cut off.
The disappearance of the sites has prompted users of each service to complain about the closures and speculate about possible reasons. Some guesses were more wild than others.
Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure | Media Maverick - CNET NewsThursday, July 29, 2010
<em>Shadow Elite</em>: WikiLeaks: Irresponsible or Indispensable?
1) Do not pay them anything (eg, taxes).
2) Do not give them your guns when they come to collect them.
3) Do not join their army and kill for them.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Gladiator School - montanakaimin.com
Gladiator School
by Roman Stubbs | July 14, 2010 | Montana Kaimin
This article was originally published on February 19, 2010. On July 13, the University of Montana announced that the NCAA cleared Jimmy Wilson to play the upcoming season of Griz football.
He sat at his grandmother’s dining room table late on that sweltering June night, dreaming. Eating his ribs and collard greens in silence, pondering his future with each bite.
For Jimmy Wilson, there were only seven hours left before deliverance. Duffel bags packed, alarm clock ready. At five o’clock in the morning, he was going to rise out of bed and drive 17 hours from his Southern California home to Missoula, Montana, and love every minute of it. When he arrived on the University of Montana campus for summer workouts they would see a polished cornerback, a reinvented man.
This was his year. To show what an All-American candidate was all about. To send the message that his legendary hits for this program were about to get a lot more vicious. And to make all those people who mocked his NFL dream think twice before they judged that dream again. Nothing was going to get in his way.
A half hour later, Jimmy Wilson had an AK-47 pointed to his chest.
Gladiator School - montanakaimin.com
Friday, July 23, 2010
Study: Deepwater Horizon workers were afraid to report safety issues - CNN.com
Study: Deepwater Horizon workers were afraid to report safety issues
(CNN) -- A confidential report on safety conditions aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, conducted about one month before the rig's explosion, points to widespread fear of reprisal for reporting employee mistakes that could undermine safety aboard the rig.
"There was a stated fear of reprisal related specifically to the reporting of dropped objects," states an executive summary of the report obtained by CNN.
"Only 46.3 percent of participants felt that, if their actions led to a potentially risky situation (e.g., forgetting to do something, damaging equipment, dropping an object from height), they could report it without any fear of reprisal," the report states. ....
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
FW: [Ageless-Nooz] Armenian Genocide Matters - Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
From: "laodog" <laodoggie@yahoo.com>
To: Benner-Nooz-List@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Ageless-Nooz] Armenian Genocide Matters - Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them Again
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:15:03 +0000
Shut Up About Armenians or We'll Hurt Them AgainTurkish Prime Minister Erdogan's latest sinister threat.
Posted Monday, April 5, 2010, at 10:43 AM ET
April is the cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling events ever occurred or that the killings constituted "genocide."
This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the parliament of Swedenjoined the growing number of political bodies that have decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:In a technical and pedantic sense, the word genocide does not, in fact, apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America's then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words "race extermination." (See the imperishable book The Slaughterhouse Province for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible enough in itself, Morgenthau's expression did not quite comprehend the later erasureof all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place.
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.
Where to begin? Turkish "guest workers" are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan's xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of "tolerated" economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?
The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli President Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well "how to kill"—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the Washington Post—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan's evidently fragile composure.
In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 foracknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.
The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsore
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey's unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament thatshould be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.
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Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life - life - 20 June 2010 - New Scientist
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life
- 20 June 2010
- Magazine issue 2765.
Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life - life - 20 June 2010 - New Scientist
Law.com - Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
Mandatory minimum sentences are too high, restitution for crime victims should be available in all cases, and judge-specific data on sentencing should not be reported, according to a survey of more than 600 federal trial judges.
From January through March of this year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission for the first time questioned federal judges on their views about sentencing under the advisory guidelines system in effect since 2005. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the mandatory sentencing guideline system in its 2005 ruling U.S. v. Booker.
The survey, released last week, drew responses from 639 of the 942 judges to whom it was sent -- a 67.8 percent response rate. The 639 judges who responded had sentenced 116,183 offenders, or 79 percent of those sentenced during fiscal 2008 and 2009.
Sixty-two percent of the judges said the mandatory minimums that they were required to impose were too high, particularly for crack cocaine (76 percent), receipt of child pornography (71 percent) and marijuana (54 percent). However, strong majorities believed the sentencing guideline ranges for most federal offenses were appropriate, with the exception again of those for crack cocaine, marijuana, and the possession and receipt of child pornography, which they said were too high.
....
Law.com - Judges Give Thumbs Down to Crack, Pot, Porn Mandatory Minimums
Fw: swr Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana; What Is It That Scientists Do Not Yet Know?
--- On Tue, 7/13/10, Gnostic Media <hemperor@sheremembers.org> wrote:
|
Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land | LiveScience
Animals
Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writerposted: 21 June 2010 12:01 pm ET
Chimpanzee Gangs Kill for Land | LiveScience
Monday, July 12, 2010
SpyTalk - Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
Jeff Stein
Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, deliberately “leaked” word to North Vietnam that U.S. forces planned to invade Cambodia, in a failed attempt to intimidate Hanoi into retreat, declassified U.S. documents reveal.
Nixon and Kissinger also used a CIA double agent in Laos to concoct a false “leak” of U.S. plans to mine North Vietnam’s major port, Haiphong, in 1972, according to a separate set of documents, which were discovered in a new volume of Foreign Relations of the United States, the State Department's official history of the era.
But that ploy also failed to undermine North Vietnam’s resolve.
“In both of these cases the action was a covert psychological warfare ploy that was taken at the direction of the president and Kissinger and not on the initiative of the CIA," says Merle Pribbenow, a retired CIA expert on Vietnam who discovered the overlooked documents in State Department records.
The documents have never been written about, Pribbenow said.
“In both cases, the information was provided clandestinely by double agents who fed the information to North Vietnamese officials, claiming that they had obtained the information surreptitiously or fortuitously,” Pribbenow added.
"The idea was to make the North Vietnamese believe that they had obtained advance knowledge of a planned U.S. operation in order to frighten them into pulling their forces back, but in both cases the Nixon administration then went ahead and carried out the action,” Pribbenow said.
"The end result was that, not only were the North Vietnamese not frightened out of doing what Nixon wanted to scare them out of doing, Nixon unintentionally gave them advance warning of what the U.S. was about to do.”
The ploy, in short, ended up foiling Nixon’s main goal for invading Cambodia: to annihilate Hanoi’s command post for staging attacks on South Vietnam.
“I have to say that when I read these documents I was absolutely appalled,” said Pribbenow, who spent 27 years in the CIA as a Vietnamese language and operations officer. “I have never been a big fan of psychological warfare and covert propaganda, as I think it is mostly just a waste of time and money, but in this case it could have cost us more than just time and money.”
Pribbenow and other Vietnam scholars said was impossible to say with certitude whether the disinformation attempts resulted in increased U.S. casualties.
“No U.S. aircraft were lost on 9 May 1972, when the mining of Haiphong Harbor occurred, so there certainly were no U.S. casualties from that warning,” Pribbenow said.
But in regard to Cambodia, the picture is muddier, said Pribbenow and historian John Prados, author of several books on the Vietnam War and the CIA.
Tipping Hanoi about American plans to invade Cambodia “might have” caused additional U.S. casualties, Prados said. Casualties “increased significantly” during the two months preceding the April 29, 1970 invasion, he noted, and “spiked” in May.
The Nixon-Kissinger ploy probably foiled any chance to destroy North Vietnam’s command post in Cambodia -- known by its acronym COSVN, the Central Office for the War in Vietnam -- which Nixon repeatedly cited as his goal for the invasion.
“If they were being explicit about invading Cambodia, it would have allowed them to move COSVN and to prepare the battlefield for the invasion,” Prados said in an interview.
“The effort to intimidate Hanoi ahead of the invasion of Cambodia would certainly have helped the North Vietnamese prepare for it more successfully than if it had been more of a surprise,” agreed Gareth Porter, author of “Peace Denied: United States, Vietnam and the Paris Agreement,” among other histories of the war.
Pribbenow added a further damning detail. After analyzing a Vietnamese-language account of the operation, he said that the Nixon-Kissinger ploy probably prompted the communists to move COSVN only hours before a “massive B-52 strike.”
“There is no explanation of why that particular time was chosen to leave,” he added, “but it is quite possible that the decision to move was either caused or at least influenced by the Nixon-directed warning.”
“It looks like a couple of classic cases of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing,” Pribbenow said.
“In the Cambodian case, when the order to pass the [false] information was given, no one had any plan to send U.S. troops into Cambodia -- the plan was only to use South Vietnamese troops in selected areas -- and not against COSVN.
"And indeed," Pribbenow continued, "CIA Director Richard Helms suggested 10 days before the Cambodian invasion that to improve the [disinformation agent’s] ‘credibility,’ the U.S. should consider sending ‘selected’ U.S. troops up to points near the Cambodian border to make it appear as if the story was true. “
“Nixon did not make the decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia until several days later,” Pribbenow added, “but apparently forgot to tell the agency to call off the operation, with the result that we ended up unintentionally giving the North Vietnamese advance warning of the upcoming attack on COSVN.”
The documents also reveal a CIA operation that employed a double agent in North Vietnam’s ruling circles to plant false information about a nonexistent antiwar faction in Hanoi’s politburo.
“I was especially fascinated by the stuff on trying to convince North Vietnamese that the U.S. was in touch with a dissident faction,” said Porter.
“I’m not so sure that one played so well, simply because of the [Hanoi’s] consensus on prosecuting the war strategy, at least in broad outlines. They wouldn't have believed that that there were Central Committee guys ready to give in to the U.S. “
Porter called the CIA’s plan “the usual self-delusions at work -- all familiar territory by now.”
Indeed, a memo from George A. Carver, then-CIA Director Helms’s special assistant for Vietnam, reported that things hadn’t gone so well with that operation.
“Our project to convince the Hanoi leadership that the U.S. government is in clandestine communication with a high-level dissident faction within North Vietnam hit a snag when our double agent … muffed his lines in a 22 May session with the North Vietnamese intelligence officer with whom he has been in contact,” Carver wrote to Richard T. White, a National Security Council staffer at the time.
”Unfortunately, at the point in the conversation, where the agent was to allude to information about American contact with dissidents allegedly provided by the agent’s notional ‘American friend’ (the purported source of the earlier data on mining), the agent strayed from his prepared script and the North Vietnamese did not pick up the point or pursue it.”
Carver pleaded that double agent operations were “tricky.”
”As you recognize, structuring this kind of disinformation in a manner that whets the target’s appetite and remains plausible is a tricky proposition, which cannot be rushed, and which is always subject to the vagaries of chance and human nature,” he told White.
“We will keep you advised of progress as it occurs.”
Neither Kissinger nor White could not be reached for comment.
Categories: Foreign policy , Intelligence , Military
SpyTalk - Nixon-CIA spy ploy in Vietnam backfired, new records show
Saturday, July 03, 2010
DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
Chairman: mi2g, ATCA, The Philanthropia
Posted: July 1, 2010 07:58 AM
The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
We are witnessing accelerating trends of exponential growth in the Bio-Info-Nano (BIN) revolution unfolding all around us. Just as soon as we have grasped the relevance of some new BIN innovation, we are challenged by yet more extraordinary technological developments that completely supersede our expectations and understanding. The paradigm shifts, taken together, present asymmetric opportunities for unparalleled growth as well as rising asymmetric risks for human society's globalized structure, its sustainability and longevity. This phenomenon of constant acceleration in new technologies is referred to as the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity within our network of organizations including mi2g.net, ATCA and The Philanthropia.....
DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity
Monday, June 28, 2010
After 44 years, North calls top party meeting - INSIDE JoongAng Daily
June 28, 2010
By Jung Ha-won [hawon@joongang.co.kr]
North Korea plans to hold a meeting of core party delegates in September for the first time in 44 years, probably in preparation for a transfer of power from current leader Kim Jong-il to his youngest son, Pyongyang watchers said.
According to the official Korean Central News Agency on Saturday, the political bureau of the Worker’s Party - North Korea’s only political party - has scheduled the rare meeting in early September to reflect “new challenges” for a party going through “seismic changes.” The political bureau is the highest decision-making body within the party.
North Korea has held meetings of core party delegates to discuss pressing political issues and policies only twice before, in 1958 and 1966.
“It is highly likely that the matter of power succession will officially take center stage during the core delegates’ meeting, which will be the first large-scale political gathering since a party convention in 1980,” said Jang Yong-suk, political professor at SungKongHoe University.
“There will likely be a big reshuffle within the party to lay the groundwork for the power transfer.”
Koh Yoo-hwan, political professor at Dongguk University, said North Korea’s long-held “military-first” policies have allowed the military to grow disproportionately, and Kim may need to reorganize and beef up party mechanisms before a delicate power succession.
In recent years, Pyongyang has taken a series of steps to smooth the way for an unprecedented third-generational power transfer from Kim to his youngest son, Jong-un, 27, especially in light of Kim’s suspected stroke in 2008, experts said.
Intelligence officials in South Korea have said that Kim has relied more on his relatives - most notably younger sister Kim Kyong-hui and her husband Jang Song-thaek - to maintain his grip on power.
Kim Kyong-hui has been seen accompanying the leader on visits and she was given a senior post at the party’s industrial supervision agency after 2008.
North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly met earlier this month to name Kim’s brother-in-law Jang as vice chief of the National Defense Commission, the most powerful institution in the country.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service chief Won Sei-hoon said last week that Kim Jong-un accompanied his father on recent visits to industrial and military installations and was “expanding his participation in policy-making.”
“Now there are sweeping campaigns to idolize Kim Jong-un by distributing songs and poems worshipping him and even holding recital competitions [for songs and poems],” Won told lawmakers on June 24.
A party convention, supposed to be held every five years, has not been convened since 1980 when Kim Jong-il was promoted to the powerful political bureau, putting him in a leadership role.
By Jung Ha-won [hawon@joongang.co.kr]
After 44 years, North calls top party meeting - INSIDE JoongAng Daily
George F. Will - McChrystal had to go
By George F. Will
Thursday, June 24, 2010; A21
In 1932, during a lunch in Albany with Rexford Tugwell, an adviser, New York Gov. Franklin Roosevelt paused to take a telephone call from Louisiana Gov. Huey Long. When the call ended, FDR referred to Long as the second-most dangerous man in America. Who, Tugwell asked, is the most dangerous? FDR answered: Douglas MacArthur.
As Army chief of staff, MacArthur had just flamboyantly conducted the violent dispersal of the bedraggled "bonus army" in Washington. Nearly 19 years later, he was to become most dangerous to himself, as another commanding general has now done. But Stanley McChrystal is no MacArthur.
MacArthur had some of the genius and much of the egomania of a former artillery captain, Napoleon. This made MacArthur insubordinate and got him cashiered by a former artillery captain, Harry Truman. Although McChrystal is a fine soldier who rendered especially distinguished service in Iraq, there is no reason to ascribe to him either egomania or insubordination. He did, however, emphatically disqualify himself from further military service and particularly from service in Afghanistan. There the military's purely military tasks are secondary to the political and social tasks for which the military is ill-suited, and for which McChrystal is garishly so....
George F. Will - McChrystal had to go
Friday, June 25, 2010
Unicorn meat packers get cease and desist letter
National Pork Board targets ThinkGeek Web site: Blame the unicorns
If you ever wonder what kind of work the lawyers for powerful industry groups get paid good money for, consider the case of the National Pork Board v. ThinkGeek Inc.
Lawyers representing the board, based in Des Moines, Iowa, sent a detailed "cease-and-desist" letter to the Fairfax-based ThinkGeek Web site last month over its use of the well-known trademark "The Other White Meat."
There's just one problem: The meat in question comes from unicorns.....
Unicorn meat packers get cease and desist letter
Family: Oil disaster devastated captain who committed suicide - CNN.com
Recent BP spill news:
Family: Oil disaster devastated captain who committed suicide - CNN.comBBC News - BP names new chief of oil response team
Methane in Gulf astonishingly high: U.S. scientist | Reuters
Oil gushing at spill site after vent damaged - Disaster in the Gulf- msnbc.com
Floating nurseries hit by Deepwater Horizon spill - environment - 23 June 2010 - New Scientist
A yachting trip? The 10 worst BP gaffes in Gulf oil spill. - Yahoo! News
Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Safe Device - NYTimes.com
Birds frozen in oil: image of a desperate summer - Yahoo! News
Before Deepwater Horizon Explosion, BP E-Mail Called Doomed Rig A 'Nightmare Well' - cbs3.com
Documents: BP cut corners in days before blowout - Yahoo! News
Scientists Question BP's Claim That Cap Is Significantly Reducing Amount Of Crude Oil - cbs3.com
BP To Burn Some Oil It's Bringing Up From Deepwater Horizon Site In Gulf Of Mexico - cbs3.com
Second well on the way to cap Deepwater Horizon - environment - 18 June 2010 - New Scientist
Thursday, June 24, 2010
How to improve your grade point average
In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 21, 2010
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.
But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.....
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Short Sharp Science: Google faces global music over data sniffing
Google faces global music over data sniffing
To be a fly on the wall inside Google's legal department right now: the firm is about to find out whether or not its data sniffing activities - involving recording some of the data sent by domestic Wi-Fi routers - were legal.
Google's tactic of extreme openness over what it says was a mistaken data gathering operation involving its Street View car fleet doesn't seem to have helped much: information protection authorities around the world are apoplectic.
Authorities in at least ten countries and 30 American states are now investigating the company's self-confessed recording activities.
This not only includes gathering the names and hardware codes of the wireless routers active in the areas mapped by its Street View camera cars, but also - and much more controversially - collecting some of the traffic from those devices, such as passwords, emails and web page requests. ....
Short Sharp Science: Google faces global music over data sniffing
