Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear
With a little practice, one could learn to tell a lie that may be indistinguishable from the truth.
New Northwestern University research shows that lying is more malleable than previously thought, and with a certain amount of training and instruction, the art of deception can be perfected.
People generally take longer and make more mistakes when telling lies than telling the truth, because they are holding two conflicting answers in mind and suppressing the honest response, previous research has shown. Consequently, researchers in the present study investigated whether lying can be trained to be more automatic and less task demanding.
O farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear
China is the world’s top producer of honey: it turns out about a quarter of the world’s supply.
Chinese honey is cheap and the US had been a major importer. But in 2001, in the wake of a US government investigation that found domestic honey producers being harmed by significant price disparities between Chinese and American honey, the US levied an anti-dumping duty of roughly $1.20 per pound (454 gm) on Chinese honey. This tariff, its imposition implying that this honey was being sold below its real cost of production, was intended to level the playing field for American beekeepers who could not compete with imported honey selling in America at half their cost.
For companies like ALW that were importing tonnes of Chinese honey into the US every year, this was a big business setback. To evade the duty, some of them started getting shipments via third countries, with the honey’s point-of-origin relabelled accordingly. After all, no tariff was due on honey from India, Malaysia, Mongolia or Russia.
The operation soon came to be called ‘honey laundering’. ALW was one among several firms doing it, but it has been in the spotlight ever since the arrests. According to a 44-count indictment of the firm, over 2004-06, it laundered over 2 million pounds—900 tonnes—of Chinese honey through India, evading nearly $80 million in duties.
Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south beyond the seaward reaches of the river.
Check Point has revealed how a sophisticated malware attack was used to steal an estimated €36 million from over 30,000 customers of over 30 banks in Italy, Spain, Germany and Holland over summer this year.
The theft used malware to target the PCs and mobile devices of banking customers. The attack also took advantage of SMS messages used by banks as part of customers’ secure login and authentication process.
The attack worked by infecting victims’ PCs and mobiles with a modified version of the Zeus trojan. When victims attempted online bank transactions, the process was intercepted by the trojan.
Under the guise of upgrading the online banking software, victims were duped into giving additional information including their mobile phone number, infecting the mobile device. The mobile Trojan worked on both Blackberry and Android devices, giving attackers a wider reach.
{ Net Security | Continue reading }
Onity, the company whose locks protect 4 million or more hotel rooms around the world, has agreed to reimburse at least some fraction of its hotel customers for the cost of fixing a security flaw exposed in July.
Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft — basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically.
Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception.
She made me cry, she done me wrong, she hurt my eyes open
From an office on Sunset Boulevard, a dapper 69-year-old has emerged as a go-to guy for musicians and songwriters looking for quick cash.
His name is Parviz Omidvar, and over the past two decades, he has been lending to artists and securing those debts with royalty payments his clients earn from their work. Michael Jackson was a customer, as is the son of late Motown legend Marvin Gaye. Omidvar’s website carries an old testimonial from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Bobby Womack: “Thank you so much for always being there for me.”
Today, Womack is suing Omidvar for fraud. He alleges the financier tricked him into selling for $40,000 full control of a royalty stream that annually pays many times that amount on Womack-penned hits, including blaxploitation classic “Across 110th Street” and “It’s All Over Now,” the first U.S. No. 1 record for the Rolling Stones. Womack’s lawyer says the 68-year-old musician was misled into signing the deal in April last year, when he was incapacitated by painkillers following prostate cancer surgery.
Omidvar calls Womack’s claim “a simple case of buyer’s remorse.” Womack understood he was selling his royalties, and his allegations are “a complete lie,” Omidvar says.
Omidvar’s quick cash can come at a steep price. Reuters found scores of loans with interest rates ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 percent every 10 to 15 days - annualized rates potentially ranging from 43 percent to 81 percent.
Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me
People who recall being absolved of their sins, are more likely to donate money to the church, according to research published today in the journal Religion, Brain and Behavior.
photo { Michael Wolf }
‘Why belabor the point, except out of some nagging anxiety that one is wrong?’ –Emily Cooke
{ Jesus Monterde }
The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible
{ Driving school for dogs in New Zealand | Thanks Tim }
We burn day-light
In 1979, Brenda and Richard Jorgenson built a split level home in the midst of a large ranch outside the tiny town of White Earth, North Dakota. […] For most of their lives the landscape of the region has been dominated by agriculture – wheat, alfalfa, oats, canola, flax, and corn. The Jorgensons always figured they would leave the property to their three children to pursue the same good life they have enjoyed.
Then the oil wells arrived. They began appearing in 2006, and within just a few years dominated the area landscape. Today at least 25 oil wells stand within two miles of the Jorgensons’ home, each with a pump, several storage tanks, and a tall flare burning the methane that comes out of the ground along with the petroleum.
Like most people in North Dakota, the Jorgensons only own the surface rights to their property, not the subsurface mineral rights. So there was nothing they could do when, in May 2010, a Dallas-based oil company, Petro-Hunt, installed a well pad on the Jorgensons’ farm, next to a beloved grove of Russian olive trees. […] Some 80 trees were dead by the summer of 2011.
artwork { Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 }
related { Ukraine Crushed in $1.1bn Fake Gas Deal | Thanks GG }
I’ll make death love me
Verizon is arguing before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that broadband providers have a right to decide what they transmit online. […] According to Verizon’s argument:
In performing these functions [providing the transmission of speech from Point A to Point B], broadband providers possess ‘editorial discretion.’
Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others.
In effect, Verizon claims that by transmitting bits – providing Internet access – it gains the rights of a newspaper like the Washington Post or the New York Times. This assertion has no basis in constitutional law, and in fact repudiates many positions taken by Verizon before Congress, courts and the FCC over the years.[…]
“Verizon and its predecessors have argued exactly to the contrary time after time — including when they were fighting for open access to cable companies’ wires a decade ago and when they have claimed immunity from liability based on their status as a transmissions provider for the content they carry,” said Tyrone Brown, who served as an FCC Commissioner from 1977-1981.
I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air, alive
For thousands of years, a core pursuit of medical science has been the careful observation of physical symptoms and signs. Through these observations, supplemented more recently by investigative techniques, an understanding of how symptoms and signs are generated by disease has developed. However, there is a group of patients with symptoms and signs that, from the earliest medical records to the present day, elude a diagnosis with a typical ‘organic’ disease. This is not simply because of an absence of pathology after sufficient investigation, rather that symptoms themselves are inconsistent with those occurring in typical disease. In times past, these symptoms were said to be ‘hysterical’, a term now replaced by the less pejorative but no more enlightening labels: ‘medically unexplained’, ‘psychogenic’, ‘conversion’, ‘non-organic’ and ‘functional’.
There are numerous historical examples of patients identified as having hysteria who would now be diagnosed with an organic medical disorder. Some have assumed that this process of salvaging patients from (mis)diagnosis with hysteria would continue inexorably until a ‘proper’ medical diagnosis was achieved. Slater (1965), in his influential paper on the topic, described the diagnosis of hysteria as ‘a disguise for ignorance and a fertile source of clinical error’. In other words, with increasing medical knowledge, all patients would be rescued from a diagnostic category that did little more than assert that they were ‘too difficult’.
This has not come to pass (Stone et al., 2005). Recent epidemiological work has demonstrated that neurologists continue to diagnose a ‘non-organic’ disorder in ∼16% of their patients, making this the second most common diagnosis of neurological outpatients.
photo { Paul Himmel }
‘They say we are almost as like as eggs.’ –Shakespeare
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the type of person who would rather eat five cookies or none at all. I’d rather give a desert away than share it, would rather devour than savor. My hormones fluctuate on a reliable monthly cycle, delivering a week of ravenous hunger against a week of complete ambivalence toward food. During the times when I’m eating-crazed, I love food and feel intensely happy because of my love of it. During the times when I’m eating-apathetic, I feel like food has no impact on my life, my interests, or my desires. These are not states I summon. They are states that occur and subside of their own accord. […]
The assumption in most food consumption advice directed toward women is that they are in the process of trying to lose weight or, at the very least, maintain it, hence the popular “guilt-free” title for so many recipes in women’s magazines. Any woman who pays attention to her food consumption is assumed to be interested first and foremost in body modification.
Reply to everything someone says with “that’s what you think”
Uptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech. Women tend to use uptalk more frequently than men do, though the reasons behind this difference are contested. I use the popular game show Jeopardy! to study variation in the use of uptalk among the contestants’ responses, and argue that uptalk is a key way in which gender is constructed through interaction. While overall, Jeopardy! contestants use uptalk 37 percent of the time, there is much variation in the use of uptalk. The typical purveyor of uptalk is white, young, and female. Men use uptalk more when surrounded by women contestants, and when correcting a woman contestant after she makes an incorrect response. Success on the show produces different results for men and women. The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use uptalk; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk.
{ SAGE }
photo { Billy Kidd }
Demographic curves are very hard to bend
The sperm count of French men fell by a third between 1989 and 2005, a study suggests.
The semen of more than 26,600 French men was tested in the study, reported in the journal Human Reproduction.
The number of millions of spermatozoa per millilitre fell by 32.3%, a rate of about 1.9% a year. And the percentage of normally shaped sperm fell by 33.4%. [..]“To our knowledge, this is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period.” […]
Prof Richard Sharpe, from the University of Edinburgh, said: “Something in our modern lifestyle, diet or environment like chemical exposure, is causing this. “We still do not know which are the most important factors, but perhaps the most likely is a combination, a double whammy of changes, such as a high-fat diet combined with increased environmental chemical exposures.”
{ BBC | Continue reading | Thanks GG }
Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful
With everything from banking records and health data to contacts lists and photos available through our mobile phones, the ability to securely access this data is an increasingly important concern. That’s why many phone manufactures and data holders are keen on biometric security systems that reliably identify individuals.
The question of course is which biometric system to use. Face, fingerpint and iris recognition are all topics of intense research. But the most obvious choice for a mobile phone is surely voice identification. However, this approach has been plagued with problems.
For example, people’s voices can change dramatically when they are ill or in a hurry. What’s more, it’s relatively easy to record somebody’s voice during authentication and use that to break the system. So many groups have steered away from voice biometrics.
That could be set to change. Today, RC Johnson at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a couple of pals lay out a new approach to voice biometrics which they say solves these problems. The new system provides secure authentication while also preserving the privacy of the user.
In the new system, users set up their accounts by recording a large number of words and phrases which are sent in encrypted form to a bank, for example. This forms a template that the bank uses to verify the user.
Hades
With a homicide rate historically more than three times greater than the rest of the United States, Newark, N.J., isn’t a great vacation spot. But it’s a great place for a murder study.
Led by April Zeoli, an assistant professor of criminal justice, a group of researchers at Michigan State University tracked homicides around Newark from 1982 to 2008, using analytic software typically used by medical researchers to track the spread of diseases. They found that “homicide clusters” in Newark, as researchers called them, spread and move throughout a city much the same way diseases do. Murders, in other words, did not surface randomly—they began in the city center and moved in “diffusion-like processes” across the city.
The study also found that the there were areas of Newark that, despite being beset by violence on all sides, remained almost completely immune to the surrounding trends over the entire course of the 26 years studied.
Every day, the same, again
Chinese astronauts are preparing to grow fresh vegetables on Mars and the moon.
In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.
Researchers confirm the ‘Pinocchio Effect’: When you lie, your nose temperature raises.
Mixed weight couples experience more relationship conflict.
Men with erection problems are 3 times more likely to have inflamed gums.
Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge.
Who Can Stop Psychopaths from Ruining Companies? Insurers.
Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test.
How to track roadkill on your smartphone. [more]
About 100 years ago, we’re told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole “pink-blue reversal” is a ‘urban legend.’
Jessica Simpson is pregnant again even though she just gave birth 20 minutes ago.
Why was Margaret Thatcher interrupted so often in interviews?
The only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex.
Nabokov’s letter to Hitchcock.
This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. [New York is by far the least free state.]
‘Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.’ –Plutarch
This was terrible news for neuroscience—if six studies led to six different answers, why should anybody believe anything that neuroscientists had to say? […] And then, surprisingly, the field prospered. Brain imaging became more, not less, popular. The technique of PET was replaced with the more flexible technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allowed scientists to study people’s brains without the use of the risky radioactive tracers, and to conduct longer studies that collected more data and yielded more reliable results. […]
After two decades of almost complete dominance, a few bright souls started speaking up, asking: Are all these brain studies really telling us much as we think they are?
related { Neuroscience Team Explains Why Old People Get Scammed }
