nswd

pipeline

I had never seen that. My friend had never seen it, either. What’s more, I couldn’t care less.

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How Flawed is the Nation’s Most Watched Economic Indicator

Last October, when the government released its monthly tally of how many people had jobs, there was a collective groan. The September report, which came out the first Friday in October, said the number of employed people in the U.S. had dropped by 95,000, worse than the 57,000 job drop the month before. After looking like we had finally hit an economic rebound, the jobs market was again slipping back again perhaps toward the dreaded double-dip recession. Or was it?

A month later the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks and releases the employment numbers for the government, revised its jobs count for September. In fact, the economy, it turned out, had lost only 41,000 jobs that month. Is that right? Actually no. A month later, the BLS revised the number again. The final tally: In September, the number of people working in America fell by just 24,000. So the economy was improving? Not quite. Remember that month before figure of 57,000 jobs lost. Yeah, well, that was wrong, too, off by nearly all of the drop, or 56,000 jobs.

{ Time | Continue reading }

illustration { Joe Heaps }

‘A hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one.’ –Heraclitus

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Sybil accounts are fake identities created to unfairly increase the power or resources of a single malicious user. Researchers have long known about the existence of Sybil accounts in online communities such as file-sharing systems, but have not been able to perform large scale measurements to detect them or measure their activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts to detect, characterize and understand Sybil account activity in the Renren online social network (OSN). We use ground truth provided by Renren Inc. to build measurement based Sybil account detectors, and deploy them on Renren to detect over 100,000 Sybil accounts. We study these Sybil accounts, as well as an additional 560,000 Sybil accounts caught by Renren, and analyze their link creation behavior. Most interestingly, we find that contrary to prior conjecture, Sybil accounts in OSNs do not form tight-knit communities. Instead, they integrate into the social graph just like normal users. Using link creation timestamps, we verify that the large majority of links between Sybil accounts are created accidentally, unbeknownst to the attacker. Overall, only a very small portion of Sybil accounts are connected to other Sybils with social links. Our study shows that existing Sybil defenses are unlikely to succeed in today’s OSNs, and we must design new techniques to effectively detect and defend against Sybil attacks.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

images { 1. Vitaly Virt | 2. Melvin Sokolsky }

Through smoke and oil

By a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be


Out here, due process is a bullet

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Lanchester Theory and the Fate of Armed Revolts

Major revolts have recently erupted in parts of the Middle East with substantial international repercussions. Predicting, coping with and winning those revolts have become a grave problem for many regimes and for world powers. We propose a new model of such revolts that describes their evolution by building on the classic Lanchester theory of combat.

The model accounts for the split in the population between those loyal to the regime and those favoring the rebels. We show that, contrary to classical Lanchesterian insights regarding traditional force-on-force engagements, the outcome of a revolt is independent of the initial force sizes; it only depends on the fraction of the population supporting each side and their combat effectiveness.

{ arXiv | Continue reading | Related: Lanchester’s Theory of Warfare }

photo { Clint Eastwood photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin }

‘Move not unless you see an advantage.’ –Sun Tzu

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Is male libido the ultimate cause of war?

Across four experiments Lei Chang and his team showed that pictures of attractive women or women’s legs had a raft of war-relevant effects on heterosexual male participants, including: biasing their judgments to be more bellicose towards hostile countries; speeding their ability to locate an armed soldier on a computer screen; and speeding their ability to recognise and locate war-related words on a computer screen.

Equivalent effects after looking at pictures of attractive men were not found for female participants.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Big Joe and Phantom 309

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Satanism typically conjures thoughts of dark-cloaked figures in deeply wooded areas, where they sacrifice livestock over a makeshift altar and whisper mysterious incantations in hopes of appeasing their dark lord. Maybe every once in a while they get creative and throw a baby doll off an overpass or vandalize a Catholic church with swastika graffiti to garner a bit of attention. Chances are, however, that anyone who participates in these types of activities is also a regular at IHOP, works at a mall, and thinks Marilyn Manson is a real person.

Truly terrifying entities don’t advertise their presence, which is the main reason traditional satanic cults have eluded the public and thrived in every sector of our society. For hundreds of years, these secret organizations have relied on the simplest method to recruit and convert: fear. In fact, the only reason we are certain satanism still poses a danger is because it continues to produce victims of severe ritualistic abuse.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

photo { Harry Callahan }

Don’t really talk much (uh huh)


As Zadie Smith argued in a recent New York Review of Books article, Facebook’s private-in-public mode of operation traps us:

It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.)

The juvenile mentality built in the medium pushes us to broadcast our private lives and expect that the details we share will be obsessively dissected. We sense, more or less consciously, that with the capability to broadcast our lives comes an obligation to be entertaining. (…)

Thanks to social media, we are no longer obliged to disguise our voyeuristic impulses. Voyeurism has been culturally legitimized. We can turn to the real events of our lives as we have retold them and to the reactions they have prompted. On the internet, our personal lives have become our television shows.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

related { Facebook Lost Nearly 6 Million Users in U.S. in May }

Every four days in PA I move another brick


After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

You can’t touch me, but I can touch you

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Is Pole Dancing Art? Court Rules No.

Nite Moves, a Latham, New York-based adult dancing club that features pole- and couch-dancing, had been seeking to argue that erotic dances counted as “dramatic or musical arts performances,” thereby qualifying for a tax exemption. A Tribunal had rejected that claim.

This means that Nite Moves must pay up on a $125,000 tax bill dating back to 2005 — though the club is appealing the ruling. (…)

To distinguish erotic dancing from, say, ballet, the court finds that real art requires you to go to school. In other words, stripping — or at least, the stripping that goes down at Nite Moves — doesn’t count as art because anyone can do it.

{ Art Info | Continue reading }

photo { Shomei Tomatsu }

Sun and flesh (Credo in unam)

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Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.

The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

{ Space | Continue reading | + video | Read more: Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted }

artwork { Richard Serra, out-of-round X, 1999 | On view through Aug. 28, 2011, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC }

What is more harmful than any vice?

{ Thanks Glenn! }

‘We don’t eat, we don’t sleep, we don’t stop.’ –Blacky II

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Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.

Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

Standing at a black-stained fence, Doyle explained that the distillery had been trying to solve the mystery for more than a decade. Mycologists at the University of Windsor were stumped. A team from the Scotch Whisky Association’s Research Institute had taken samples and concluded it was just a thick layer of normal environmental fungi: Aspergillus, Exophiala, stuff like that. Ubiquitous and—maybe most important—in no way the distillery’s fault.

Scott shook his head. “David,” he said, “that’s not what it is. It’s something completely different.”

Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.

If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

‘I am about done with CableVision… they need to come get their equipment or take my ass to collections cuz I ain’t payin’ 336 dollars for this box and modem…’ –A. Hamilton

{ Thanks Tim }

‘Always contented with his life, and with his dinner, and his wife.’ –Pushkin

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{ screenshot from Naked Ambition An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry, 2009 }

related:

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Sawyer: Doesn’t sound like he said anything about anything. Hurley: That’s kind of true, dude. He’s worse than Yoda.

‘Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it’s time for me to drink my cocoa.’ –Ivan Turgenev

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{ A rocket that could one day act as a capsule for a single human passenger makes its first test flight. }

‘The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.’ –Henry Miller

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The nothing to hide argument is one of the primary arguments made when balancing privacy against security. In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal to trivial, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security. Sometimes the nothing to hide argument is posed as a question: “If you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?” Others ask: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?”

In this essay, I will explore the nothing to hide argument and its variants in more depth. Grappling with the nothing to hide argument is important, because the argument reflects the sentiments of a wide percentage of the population. In popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument’s superficial incantations can readily be refuted. But when the argument is made in its strongest form, it is far more formidable.

In order to respond to the nothing to hide argument, it is imperative that we have a theory about what privacy is and why it is valuable.

{ Daniel J. Solve, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy | SSRN | Continue reading }

‘By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.’ –Cioran

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When we hear about stalkers, we generally think of men. But there are certainly women who stalk [estimated at 6% to 26% of stalkers] and now we have some research to give us information on identifying them. Like their male stalker counterparts, women who make threats are more likely to be violent; women who write letters are less likely to be violent; and women [and men] who stalk their prior sexual intimates are the most likely to be violent.

This research article was based on a large database of stalkers (N=1005) from which a sample of 143 female stalkers was gathered. 

{ Keene Trial Consulting | Continue reading }

A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly.



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