----- Forwarded message from Dr Andrew Thorniley <andrew@...>
-----

From: Dr Andrew Thorniley <andrew@...>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 20:48:54 +0000
To: Critical Care Medicine Listserv <ccm-l@...>
Subject: [ccm-l] OpenCourseWare - More education
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Windows/20070221)
Reply-To: ccm-l@...


    Here's a news bulletin..
    According to EETimes, [1]MIT is planning on putting its entire 1800
    course curriculum online for free by the end of the year:

      On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the
      university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end.
      Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the
      MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120
      universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for
      independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums
      available online to date.
      Who are MIT's independent learners? One MIT calculation found that
      17% were educators elsewhere, 32% students everywhere, and 49% were
      self learners. Other learners come from nations all over the world,
      from Antarctica to Darfur. He notes that the highest traffic in the
      United States comes from leading high-tech states Massachusetts and
      California. South Korea has a sizable base, accounting for a higher
      number of learners than, for instance, in China, its neighbor. Many
      learners are college teachers and professors, who want to sharpen
      their own teaching courses and methods. In a typical example,
      physics professor Younes Attaourti of Marrakesh, Morocco, has used
      MIT materials for his courses on statistical physics and quantum
      theory.

    This address will get you to a page of the OCW consortium and the
    courses available.
    [2]http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/index.html
    and this one will get you to TUFTS and a section on infectious
    diseases.
    [3]http://ocw.tufts.edu/Course/6
    or
    [4]http://ocw.tufts.edu/CourseList
--
Dr Andrew Thorniley
Consultant Anaesthetist
Clinical Director of Anaesthesia and Surgery
The Hillingdon Hospital
Uxbridge

References

    1.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AVUPWC314LSUUQSN\
DLSCKHA?articleID=198000598
    2. http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/index.html
    3. http://ocw.tufts.edu/Course/6
    4. http://ocw.tufts.edu/CourseList

_______________________________________________
ccm-l mailing list
ccm-l@...
http://ccm-l.org/mailman/listinfo/ccm-l


----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

On 3/15/07, Anders Sandberg <asa@...> wrote:
>
>  This suggests that we should scrutinize our approaches to
>  maximize happiness carefully. It could be that a dopaminergic overdrive
>  flow state is less problematic than a serotonergic contentedness state in
>  keeping us fixing bad conditions (as well as giving us energy and will for
>  change).

We are not rational creatures, but we do tend to agree that rational
decisions are better decisions.  Given that, would we not agree we are
best served when we directly adjust our "happiness" only to the extent
that it reduces cognitive bias?  Happiness evolved to function as an
indicator of difference between our implicit "values" and our
perceived environment, driving one to act so as to minimize the
difference. It's one thing to adjust the gain, offset, time constant
of a feedback loop to improve its effectiveness, it's quite another
thing to run it open loop, even if the signal is max positive. Oh
joy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...(crash and
burn.)

The idea of "maximizing happiness" as an intrinsic moral good is yet
another example of the context confusion that leads people to reason
as if some invariant self could exist to enjoy the increased happiness
in some objective sense.  Sure, the blissful organism would report
bliss, but the values of the original entity would be effectively
gone.  What *rational entity* would decide against its values for the
sake of bliss?  [Here's where typical western minds will answer
something like "Well, duh, any rational mind that values blissful
euphoria, of course."  If you think this is coherent, you might what
to re-read the thought-seed about feedback loops.]

Buddhists figured this out, with their enlightenment not being the
bliss of euphoria, but the bliss of realizing the futility of trying
to hold on to that which can not be held.  Westerners are more likely
to be stuck in a paradigm of a discrete self grappling with good &
bad, with hell below us and heaven above, so *obviously* higher is
better, not realizing there is no actual "up" in the universe.

>  SSRIs might actually not work as contentedness drugs, since some studies
>  have shown that they increase assertiveness. Put them in the drinking
>  water and a lot of sad sheep may actually become balanced goats. Altruism
>  enhancers like oxytocin might cause people to be more pro-social, but
>  pro-social isn't the same thing as pro-government.

Right, and stated very diplomatically, as usual.


>  Eugen Leitl wrote:
>  >> That is another claim I wonder if there is any evidence for. Do people
>  >> using psychedelics show greater creativity, or are they just creatives
>  >
>  > It can increase ideation to the degree where it becomes overwhelming.
>  > Unfortunately, it impairs judment, too, so it's hard to select the
>  > useful things out of the deluge of rainbow-colored chaff.
>
>  Creativity requires both divergent thinking producing novelty, judgement
>  in selecting the good ideas and convergent thinking implementing the best
>  one. Since it is hard to shift between convergent and divergent thinking
>  when it is biased by a drug I am slightly sceptical to easy creativity
>  enhancement. The exception might be enhancing the incubation phase, for
>  example by taking a drug before going to sleep.

<snip>


>  Is it worse to dope your enemy than to shoot him?

Refactoring the phrase for easier commensuration:  Is it worse to
eliminate your opponent's freedom to act, revocably or irrevocably?

As Patrick Henry so famously (for Americans) said, "Give me liberty or
give me death."  In other words, it's the principle that matters most.

When assessing moral choice, due to our fundamental inability to
foresee extended consequences, it is always a higher order "good" to
act to promote our values in accordance with best known principles
rather than for anticipated good ends.


>  the answer seems to be
>  negative in most moral systems, but if the effects of induced compassion
>  linger many moral systems start to worry about causing inauthentic lives
>  that might actually be as problematic as killed people. But it seems you
>  have to place a pretty high value on authenticity to make it more valuable
>  than life itself, especially when the likely effects of such a drug would
>  be more of a bias in thinking than an absolute limitation to thinking or
>  acting.
>
>  > Don't know about Focus, but at least the surveillance technology is
>  > progressing
>  > very nicely towards capacities of the Emergents. It frankly gives me the
>  > willies.
>
>  The focused people were happy doing what they were doing, the victims of
>  the panopticon just have to do it.
>
>  It seems that there is a need for some radical new ideas about handling
>  surveillance. Can we go beyond Brin and the people's panopticon?

Yes, when our comprehension rises such that we see this not as an
issue of surveillance versus sousveillance, but as a rational
cooperative effort to improve awareness for improved positive-sum
social decision-making.

Not that I actually expect Humanity 1.x to be so rational.

- Jef

P.S.  Wishing everyone a nice day.  :-)

Re: psychedelics and creativity - in order to leverage the
creativity potential of a psychedelic experience, it seems to be
important as soon as possible after the experience to process the
experience by writing, drawing, and otherwise analytically
processing or expressing the experience. Similar to lucid
dreaming, the poetic, irrational phase must be followed by a
rational/analytic phase or the benefits are lost outside of a
prolonged period of well-being and heightened intuition/ideation.

Re: happiness optimization - there appears to be a loss of
rationality and critical thinking associated with very high levels
of happiness. Your most creative, well-adjusted people are happy
but not too happy, I believe. I have seen studies suggesting that
the best adaptive people have suffered some losses or difficulties
at various times in their life. People who do not suffer adversity
often crumble when the first major challenge presents itself. So
perhaps the emphasis should be on optimizing happiness not
maximizing it.

I know extremely happy people who seem incapable of thinking
critically, I also know very smart people who seem to have no joie
de vivre. There is probably a middle ground between these
extremes.

On Thu Mar 15 11:42:58 PDT 2007, Anders Sandberg <asa@...>
wrote:

>
> In general, what would make a good slavery drug? One possibility
> would be
> just to increase contentment. My own rather extreme positive mood
> makes me
> accept many things I suspect a normal person would react
> negatively to,
> and hence I do less to rectify them. No need to reduce
> aggression, just
> make everybody really happy and they will vote for the current
> government
> forever. This suggests that we should scrutinize our approaches
> to
> maximize happiness carefully. It could be that a dopaminergic
> overdrive
> flow state is less problematic than a serotonergic contentedness
> state in
> keeping us fixing bad conditions (as well as giving us energy and
> will for
> change).
>
> SSRIs might actually not work as contentedness drugs, since some
> studies
> have shown that they increase assertiveness. Put them in the
> drinking
> water and a lot of sad sheep may actually become balanced goats.
> Altruism
> enhancers like oxytocin might cause people to be more pro-social,
> but
> pro-social isn't the same thing as pro-government.
>
> Eugen Leitl wrote:
>>> That is another claim I wonder if there is any evidence for. Do
>>> people
>>> using psychedelics show greater creativity, or are they just
>>> creatives
>>
>> It can increase ideation to the degree where it becomes
>> overwhelming.
>> Unfortunately, it impairs judment, too, so it's hard to select
>> the
>> useful things out of the deluge of rainbow-colored chaff.
>
> Creativity requires both divergent thinking producing novelty,
> judgement
> in selecting the good ideas and convergent thinking implementing
> the best
> one. Since it is hard to shift between convergent and divergent
> thinking
> when it is biased by a drug I am slightly sceptical to easy
> creativity
> enhancement. The exception might be enhancing the incubation
> phase, for
> example by taking a drug before going to sleep.
>
>
>>> Modafinil makes you think before you act. Apparently this is
>>> why the US
>>> military does not use it on the battlefield.
>>
>> Long-term, lack of sleep will result in progressive paranoia and
>> frequently psychosis, so at least long-term it's not a good idea
>> on the battlefield. Now about MDMA/MDA, that might be a good drug
>> for that ;)
>
> E-sheep (http://www.e-sheep.com/) the Spiders part three
> describes the
> effect of a fictional battlefield MDMA/oxytocine weapon. It is
> actually an
> interesting form of chemical warfare. Instead of affecting the
> ability to
> fight it affects the willingness to fight directly. Unlike having
> the
> enemy incapacitated by hallucinations they might become overly
> empathic.
> That might be much better for nationbuilding afterwards, although
> the
> obvious ethical problems remain.
>
> Is it worse to dope your enemy than to shoot him? the answer
> seems to be
> negative in most moral systems, but if the effects of induced
> compassion
> linger many moral systems start to worry about causing
> inauthentic lives
> that might actually be as problematic as killed people. But it
> seems you
> have to place a pretty high value on authenticity to make it more
> valuable
> than life itself, especially when the likely effects of such a
> drug would
> be more of a bias in thinking than an absolute limitation to
> thinking or
> acting.
>
>
>> Don't know about Focus, but at least the surveillance technology
>> is
>> progressing
>> very nicely towards capacities of the Emergents. It frankly
>> gives me the
>> willies.
>
> The focused people were happy doing what they were doing, the
> victims of
> the panopticon just have to do it.
>
> It seems that there is a need for some radical new ideas about
> handling
> surveillance. Can we go beyond Brin and the people's panopticon?
>
> -- Anders Sandberg,
> Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
> --------------------~--> See what's inside the new Yahoo! Groups
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>  Yahoo! Groups Links
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>
>

In general, what would make a good slavery drug? One possibility would be
just to increase contentment. My own rather extreme positive mood makes me
accept many things I suspect a normal person would react negatively to,
and hence I do less to rectify them. No need to reduce aggression, just
make everybody really happy and they will vote for the current government
forever. This suggests that we should scrutinize our approaches to
maximize happiness carefully. It could be that a dopaminergic overdrive
flow state is less problematic than a serotonergic contentedness state in
keeping us fixing bad conditions (as well as giving us energy and will for
change).

SSRIs might actually not work as contentedness drugs, since some studies
have shown that they increase assertiveness. Put them in the drinking
water and a lot of sad sheep may actually become balanced goats. Altruism
enhancers like oxytocin might cause people to be more pro-social, but
pro-social isn't the same thing as pro-government.

Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> That is another claim I wonder if there is any evidence for. Do people
>> using psychedelics show greater creativity, or are they just creatives
>
> It can increase ideation to the degree where it becomes overwhelming.
> Unfortunately, it impairs judment, too, so it's hard to select the
> useful things out of the deluge of rainbow-colored chaff.

Creativity requires both divergent thinking producing novelty, judgement
in selecting the good ideas and convergent thinking implementing the best
one. Since it is hard to shift between convergent and divergent thinking
when it is biased by a drug I am slightly sceptical to easy creativity
enhancement. The exception might be enhancing the incubation phase, for
example by taking a drug before going to sleep.


>> Modafinil makes you think before you act. Apparently this is why the US
>> military does not use it on the battlefield.
>
> Long-term, lack of sleep will result in progressive paranoia and
> frequently psychosis, so at least long-term it's not a good idea
> on the battlefield. Now about MDMA/MDA, that might be a good drug
> for that ;)

E-sheep (http://www.e-sheep.com/) the Spiders part three describes the
effect of a fictional battlefield MDMA/oxytocine weapon. It is actually an
interesting form of chemical warfare. Instead of affecting the ability to
fight it affects the willingness to fight directly. Unlike having the
enemy incapacitated by hallucinations they might become overly empathic.
That might be much better for nationbuilding afterwards, although the
obvious ethical problems remain.

Is it worse to dope your enemy than to shoot him? the answer seems to be
negative in most moral systems, but if the effects of induced compassion
linger many moral systems start to worry about causing inauthentic lives
that might actually be as problematic as killed people. But it seems you
have to place a pretty high value on authenticity to make it more valuable
than life itself, especially when the likely effects of such a drug would
be more of a bias in thinking than an absolute limitation to thinking or
acting.


> Don't know about Focus, but at least the surveillance technology is
> progressing
> very nicely towards capacities of the Emergents. It frankly gives me the
> willies.

The focused people were happy doing what they were doing, the victims of
the panopticon just have to do it.

It seems that there is a need for some radical new ideas about handling
surveillance. Can we go beyond Brin and the people's panopticon?

--
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

(
pointed out by one of the authors on the extropian list
)

Nick and I have another paper out: Converging Cognitive Enhancements,
Ann.
N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1093: 201–227 (2006).
http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/converging.pdf
It is part of a NY annals volume titled Progress in Convergence:
Technologies for Human Wellbeing edited by William Sims Bainbridge and
Mihail C. Roco.
http://www.nyas.org/annals/detail.asp?annalID=875

I doubt the paper will be very surprising to any of you, but it is
always
nice to beat on one's own drum.

--
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

---

Converging Cognitive Enhancements
ANDERS SANDBERGa AND NICK BOSTROMb
a Oxford

Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, b Oxford
Future of Humanity Institute, Faculty of Philosophy & James Martin 21st
Century School, Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 1PT, United Kingdom
http://www.nickbostrom.com

ABSTRACT: Cognitive enhancement, the amplification or extension of core
capacities of the mind, has become a major topic in bioethics. But
cognitive enhancement is a prime example of a converging technology
where individual disciplines merge and issues transcend particular local
discourses. This article reviews currently available methods of
cognitive enhancement and their likely near-term prospects for
convergence. KEYWORDS: cognitive enhancement; cognition; intelligence;
biotechnology; collective enhancement; mental training; converging
technologies

CONVERGING COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENTS
There are few resources more useful than cognitive ability. While other
resources are necessary or desirable, cognition enables them to be used
for achieving personal goals. While there is little evidence that high
intelligence causes happiness there appears to be ample evidence that
low intelligence increases the risk for accidents, negative life events,
and low income (Gottfredson 1997, 2004) while higher intelligence
promotes health (Whalley and Deary 2001) and wealth. We also need better
cognition in order to balance an increasingly complex society where
information becomes more available and our actions have more
far-reaching consequences (Heylighen 2002a, 2002b). There may also be an
intrinsic existential value in being able to perceive, understand, and
interact well with the world. Cognitive enhancement may be defined as
the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind through
improvement or augmentation of internal or external information
processing systems. Cognition in turn can be defined as the processes an
organism uses to organize information. This includes both the
acquisition of information (perception), selecting (attention),
representing (understanding), and retaining (memory) information, and
using it to guide behavior (reasoning and coordination of motor
outputs). Interventions to improve cognitive function may be directed at
any one of these core faculties.
Address for correspondence: Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for
Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, Littlegate
House, 16/17 St. Ebbe’s St. Oxford, OX1 1PT. United Kingdom. Voice:
+44(0)1865-286877; fax: +44(0)1865-286886. e-mail:
anders.sandberg@... Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1093: 201–227
(2006). doi: 10.1196/annals.1382.015
C

2006 New York Academy of Sciences. 201

 202

ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

As cognitive neuroscience has advanced, the list of prospective
internal, biological enhancements has steadily expanded (Farah et al.
2004). Yet to date, it is progress in information technology and
cultural organization that has produced the most dramatic advances in
our ability to process information. External hardware and software
supports now routinely give human beings effective cognitive abilities
that in many respects far outstrip those of our native minds, and
institutions like peer review or markets. There exists a long tradition
in human–computer interaction dealing with cognitive enhancement,
beginning with William Ross Ashby defining intelligence as the “power
of appropriate selection,” which could be technologically amplified
similar to physical power (Ashby 1956). By offloading mental tasks to
computers or embedding humans within a software context their cognitive
functioning could be amplified (Licklider 1960). The aim was not
artificial intelligence but rather amplifying human intelligence. The
archetypal example of this approach is Douglas C. Engelbart’s famous
Augmenting Human Intellect, which defined the goal as:
By ‘augmenting human intellect’ we mean increasing the capability of
a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to
suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.
Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the
following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the
possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation
that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions,
and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed
insoluble. And by ‘complex situations’ we include the professional
problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists,
physical scientists, attorneys, designers—whether the problem
situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of
isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a
way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try,
intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist
with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation,
sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. Man’s
population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but
the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with
which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to
the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of
that activity. Augmenting man’s intellect, in the sense defined above,
would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be
shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits (Engelbart
1962).

An important insight was that it is not enough to improve just computer
hardware and software, but psychological and organizational aspects have
to be taken into account. The cybernetic approach has in itself been
technology independent by focusing on what is enhanced rather than the
means of doing it. This unfortunately also causes disconnection from the
richer social–ethical debate surrounding the other approaches, because
they mostly take place within bioethics and medical ethics.

 SANDBERG & BOSTROM: CONVERGING COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENTS

203

Studying cognitive enhancement solely in terms of bioethics, computer
supported intelligence amplification or nanomedicine, risks missing the
key commonalities. Converging technologies give a framework to approach
the commonalities between different forms of human enhancement, as well
as a way to contrast their differences and potential for divergence.
Criticisms of enhancements are often stated in a technology-independent
form yet when analyzed from a converging technologies perspective they
often show strong assumptions about a particular kind of technology.
Those that are truly technology independent, even if originating within
in a narrow area such as the genetics discourse, on the other hand raise
relevant challenges for broad areas.

PHARMACEUTICAL BIOTECHNOLOGY
Today there exist a broad range of drugs that can affect cognition.
Stimulant drugs like nicotine and caffeine are traditionally and widely
used to improve cognition. In the case of nicotine a complex interaction
with attention and memory occurs (Warburton 1992; Newhouse et al. 2004;
Rusted et al. 2005) while caffeine reduces tiredness (Lieberman 2001;
Smith et al. 2003; Tieges et al. 2004). Lashley observed in 1917 that
strychnine facilitates learning in rats (Lashley 1917). Since then
several families of memory-enhancing drugs affecting different aspects
of long-term memory have been discovered. They range from stimulants
(Soetens et al. 1993; Lee and Ma 1995; Soetens et al. 1995), nutrients
(Foster et al. 1998; Korol and Gold 1998; Winder and Borrill 1998;
Meikle et al. 2005), and hormones (Gulpinar and Yegen 2004) over
cholinergic agonists (Iversen 1998; Power et al. 2003; Freo et al. 2005)
and the piracetam family (Mondadori 1996) to ampakines (Ingvar et al.
1997; Lynch 1998) and consolidation enhancers (Lynch 2002). The earliest
drugs were mainly nonspecific stimulants and nutrients. For example,
during antiquity honey water, hydromel, was used for doping purposes.
Glucose is the major energy source for the brain, which relies on a
continuous supply to function. Increases in availability (either due to
ingestion or stress hormones) improve memory (Wenk 1989; Foster et al.
1998). Stimulants enhance either by increasing the amount of neuron
activity or by releasing neuromodulators, both factors which make the
synaptic change underlying learning more likely. The growing
understanding of memory allowed the development of more specific drugs.
Stimulating the cholinergic system, which appears to gate attention and
memory encoding, was a second step. Current interest is focused on
intervening into the process of permanent encoding in the synapses,
which has been elucidated to a great extent and hence has become a
promising target for drug development. The goal would be drugs that not
just allow the brain to learn quickly but also facilitate selective
retention of the information that has been learned. It is known that the
above families of drugs can improve

 204

ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

performance in particular memory tests. It is not yet known whether they
also promote useful learning in real-life situations. Pharmacological
agents might be useful not only for increasing memory retention, but
also for unlearning phobias and addictions (Pitman et al. 2002; Ressler
et al. 2004; Hofmann et al. 2006). Potentially, the combination of
different pharmacological agents administered at different times could
allow users a more fine-grained control of their learning processes, and
perhaps even the ability to deliberately select the contents of their
memory. Even common, traditional, and unregulated herbs and spices, such
as sage, can improve memory and mood through chemical effects (Kennedy
et al. 2006). While less powerful than those of dedicated cholinesterase
inhibitors, such effects illustrate that attempts to control access to
cognition-enhancing substances would be problematic. Even chewing gum
appears to affect memory, possibly by heightening arousal or blood sugar
(Wilkinson et al. 2002). Working memory can be modulated by a variety of
drugs. Drugs that stimulate the dopamine system have demonstrated
effects, as do cholinergic drugs (possibly through improved encoding)
(Barch 2004). Modafinil has been shown to enhance working memory in
healthy test subjects, especially at harder task difficulties and for
lower performing subjects (Muller et al. 2004). (Similar findings, of
greater improvements among low performers were also seen among the
dopaminergic drugs, and this might be a general pattern for many
cognitive enhancers.) On a larger battery of tasks, modafinil was found
to increase forward and backward digit span, visual pattern recognition
memory, spatial planning, and reaction time/latency on different working
memory tasks (Turner et al. 2003). The reason might be that modafinil
enhances adaptive response inhibition, making the subjects evaluate a
problem more thoroughly before responding to it, thereby improving
performance accuracy. The working memory effects might hence be part of
a more general enhancement of executive function. A few other drugs may
also improve executive function (Elliott et al. 1997; Kimberg et al.
1997; Mehta et al. 2000). Given that these functions are closely linked
to what is commonly seen as intelligence, they may be the first step
toward true intelligence-enhancing drugs. Modafinil was originally
developed as a treatment for narcolepsy, and can be used to reduce the
performance decrements due to sleep loss with apparently small side
effects and risk of dependency (Teitelman 2001; Myrick et al. 2004). The
drug improved attention and working memory in sleep-deprived physicians
(Gill et al. 2006) and aviators (Caldwell et al. 2000). Naps are more
effective in maintaining performance than modafinil and amphetamine
during long (48 h) periods of sleep deprivation than during short (24
h), but naps followed by a modafinil dose may be more efficient than
either individually (Batejat and Lagarde 1999). These results, together
with hormones like melatonin that can control sleep rhythms (Cardinali
et al. 2002), suggest that drugs can help shape sleep and alertness
patterns to improve task performance under demanding circumstances.

 SANDBERG & BOSTROM: CONVERGING COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENTS

205

Creativity can also be affected pharmacologically. A study using alcohol
demonstrated that a mild dose of alcohol could improve the results of a
creative scientific process (Norlander and Gustafson 1996). The
improvement only occurred when the subjects got the alcohol during the
“incubation phase” of the creative process, the period when they
were not actively working on the problem but presumably their
unconscious might have been active. Giving alcohol in a picture-drawing
task during the later verification phase did not promote creativity
(Norlander and Gustafson 1997). Creative thinking does not just include
divergent and disinhibited thinking, but also requires convergent
thinking to focus on the realization of the insight (Cropley 2006).
Excessive divergence or lack of inhibition may be similar to the
situation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Adult ADHD
individuals show a profile of divergent thinking and do badly on
convergent thinking and inhibition tasks (White and Shah 2006). Hence
medications affecting ADHD might promote convergent thinking.
Methylphenidate, the most common treatment and a potential executive
function enhancer, did not appear to impair flexible thinking in ADHD
individuals (Solanto and Wender 1989; Douglas et al. 1995). Giving
L-dopa, a dopamine precursor, to healthy volunteers did not affect
direct semantic priming (faster recognition of words directly
semantically related to a previous word, such as “black-white”) but
did inhibit indirect priming (faster recognition of more semantically
distant words, such as “summer-snow”) (Kischka et al. 1996). This
was interpreted by the authors of the study as dopamine inhibiting the
spread of activation within the semantic network, that is, a focusing on
the task. There also exist drugs that influence how the cerebral cortex
reorganizes in response to damage or training. Noradrenergic agonists,
such as amphetamine, have been shown to promote faster recovery of
function after a brain lesion when combined with training (Gladstone and
Black 2000) and to improve learning of an artificial language
(Breitenstein et al. 2004). A likely explanation is that higher
excitability increases cortical plasticity, in turn leading to synaptic
sprouting and remodeling (Stroemer et al. 1998; Goldstein 1999). An
alternative to pharmacological increase of neuromodulation is to
electrically stimulate the neuromodulatory centers that normally control
plasticity through attention or reward. In monkey experiments this
produced faster cortical reorganization (Kilgard and Merzenich 1998; Bao
et al. 2001). In general, pharmacological enhancement is possible here
and now, although the improvements in ability tend to be a modest
10–20% improvement of test scores. As for all pharmacology, there are
great interindividual variations. Using enhancer drugs optimally might
include tests of neuromodulator levels to see where the brain setpoints
are, pharmacogenomic tests to find how they are metabolized and
neuropsychological tests to check what levels produce maximum
performance. Such fine-tuning is expensive and cumbersome unless it can
be automated.

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OTHER BIOTECHNOLOGIES
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) stimulates neurons in the
cerebral cortex by a changing magnetic field induced from a coil held to
the head. It can increase or decrease the excitability of the cortex,
thereby changing its level of plasticity (Hummel and Cohen 2005). TMS of
the motor cortex that increased its excitability improved performance in
a procedural learning task (PascualLeone et al. 1999). TMS in suitable
areas has also been found beneficial in a motor task (Butefisch et al.
2004), motor learning (Nitsche et al. 2003), visuomotor coordination
tasks (Antal et al. 2004a, 2004b), working memory (Fregni et al. 2005),
finger sequence tapping (Kobayashi et al. 2004), classification (Kincses
et al. 2004), and even declarative memory consolidation during sleep
(Marshall et al. 2004). Snyder et al. demonstrated how TMS inhibiting
anterior brain areas could change the drawing style of normal subjects
into a more concrete style and improve spell-checking abilities,
presumably by reducing top-down semantic control (Snyder et al. 2003,
2004). While TMS appears to be highly versatile and noninvasive, there
are risks of triggering epileptic seizures and the effects of long-term
use are not known. Individual brain differences may necessitate much
adjustment before it can be applied to a specific use. Genetic memory
enhancement has been demonstrated in rats and mice. In normal animals,
during maturation expression of the NR2B subunit of the
Nmethyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor is gradually replaced with
expression of the NR2A subunit, something that may be linked to the
lower brain plasticity in adult animals. Tsien’s group (Tang et al.
1999) modified mice to overexpress the NR2B. The NR2B “Doogie” mice
demonstrated improved memory performance, both in terms of acquisition
and retention. This included unlearning of fear conditioning, which is
believed to be due to the learning of a secondary memory (Falls et al.
1992). The modification also made the mice more sensitive to certain
forms of pain, suggesting a nontrivial trade-off between two potential
enhancement goals (Wei et al. 2001). Increased amounts of brain growth
factors (Routtenberg et al. 2000) and the signal transduction protein
adenylyl cyclase (Wang et al. 2004) have also produced memory
improvements. These modifications have different enhancing effects:
unlearning took longer for these modified mice than for unmodified mice,
while the mice in the Tsien study had faster than normal unlearning.
Different memory tasks were also differently affected: the cyclase mice
had enhanced recognition memory but not improved context or cue
learning. A fourth study showed that mice with a deleted cbl-b gene had
normal learning but enhanced long-term retention, presumably indicating
that the gene is a negative regulator of memory (Tan et al. 2006). These
enhancements may be due to changes in neural plasticity during the
learning task itself, or that the developing modified brain develops in
a way that promotes subsequent learning or retention.

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The cellular machinery of memory appears to be highly conserved in
evolution, making interventions demonstrated to work in animal models
likely to have close counterparts in humans (Edelhoff et al. 1995;
Bailey et al. 1996). Genetic studies have also found genes in humans
whose variations account for up to 5% of memory performance (de Quervain
and Papassotiropoulos 2006). These include the genes for the NMDA
receptor and adenylyl cyclase that were mentioned above, as well as
other parts of the synaptic signal cascade. These are clear targets for
enhancement. Given these early results, it seems likely that there exist
many potential genetic interventions that directly or indirectly improve
aspects of memory. If it turns out that the beneficial effects of the
treatments are not due to changes in development, then presumably some
of the effects can be achieved by supplying the brain with the
substances produced by the memory genes without resorting to genetic
modification. But genetic modification would make the individual
independent of an external drug supply and would guarantee that the
substances end up in the right place. On the other hand, studies of the
genetics of intelligence suggests that there is a large number of
genetic variations affecting individual intelligence, but each
accounting for only a very small fraction (<1%) of the variance between
individuals (Craig and Plomin 2006). This would indicate that genetic
enhancement of intelligence through direct insertion of a few beneficial
alleles is unlikely to have a big enhancing effect. It is possible,
however, that some alleles that are rare in the human population could
have larger effects on intelligence, either negative or positive. A
possible example is the prediction that heterozygoticity for
Tay-Sachs’ disease should increase IQ by about 5 points (Cochran et
al. 2006). While human germline engineering is controversial, several
years away and likely to be expensive, the genetic discoveries discussed
here may be used for enhancement in other ways. Gene expression may be
affected pharmacologically or even through food intake. A notable form
of chemical enhancement is pre- and perinatal enhancement through
maternal nutrition. Administering choline supplementation to pregnant
rats improved the performance of their pups, apparently as a result of
changes in neural development in turn due to changes in gene expession
(Meck et al. 1988; Meck and Williams 2003; Mellott et al. 2004). Given
the ready availability of choline supplements, such prenatal
enhancement, may already (inadvertently) be taking place in human
populations. Supplementation of a mother’s diet during late pregnancy
and 3 months postpartum with long-chained fatty acids has also been
demonstrated to improve cognitive performance in human children (Helland
et al. 2003). Deliberate changes of maternal diet may hence be seen as
part of the cognitive enhancement spectrum. At present, recommendations
to mothers are mostly aimed at promoting a diet that avoids specific
harms and deficits, but the growing emphasis on boosting “good fats”
and the use of enriched infant formulas point toward enhancement.

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COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY
Education has many benefits beyond higher job status and salary. Longer
education reduces the risks of substance abuse, crime, and many
illnesses while improving quality of life, social connectedness, and
political participation (Johnston 2004). There is also positive feedback
between performance on cognitive tests, such as IQ tests and scholastic
achievement, producing a 2.7 IQ point advantage per year of schooling
(Winship and Korenman 1997). While education may be more of a social
enhancement technology than a cognitive enhancement technology, it
clearly has some potential for the latter. Much of what we learn in
school is “mental software” for managing various cognitive domains:
mathematics, categories of concepts, language, and problem solving in
particular subjects. This kind of mental software reduces our mental
load through clever encoding, organization, or processing. Instead of
memorizing arbitrarily large multiplication tables we compress the
pattern of arithmetic relationships into simpler rules of
multiplication, which in turn (among very ambitious students) can be
organized into efficient mental calculation methods like the
Trachtenberg system (Trachtenberg 2000). Such specific methods have a
smaller range of applicability but can dramatically improve performance
within a particular domain. They represent a form of crystallized
intelligence, distinct from the fluid intelligence of general cognitive
abilities and problem solving capacity (Cattell 1987). The relative ease
and utility of improving crystallized intelligence and specific
abilities have made them popular targets of internal and external
software development. Cognitive enhancement attempts the more difficult
challenge of improving fluid intelligence. The challenge of improving
education is perennial, and much hope is currently placed on using the
results of neuroscience to improve education. However, so far pure
neuroscience has provided few directly applicable tools (Goswami 2006).
While this may change, the deep interdisciplinary divide that has to be
bridged may prove a far greater challenge than most forms of
technological convergence. Pharmacological cognitive enhancements
(nootropics) have physiological effects on the brain. So too do
education and other conventional interventions. In fact, conventional
interventions often produce more permanent neurological changes than do
drugs. Learning to read alters the way language is processed in the
brain (Petersson et al. 2000). Enriched rearing environments have been
found to increase dendritic arborization and to produce synaptic
changes, neurogenesis, and improved cognition in animals (Walsh et al.
1969; Greenough and Volkmar 1973; Diamond et al. 1975; Nilsson et al.
1999). While analogous controlled experiments cannot easily be done for
human children, it is very likely that similar effects would be
observed. Stimulation-seeking children, who might be seeking out and
creating enriched environments for themselves, score higher on IQ tests
and do better at school than less stimulation-seeking children (Raine et
al. 2002). This also suggests that interventions that make

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exploring and learning more appealing to children, whether environmental
or perhaps pharmaceutical, would have significant cognition-enhancing
effects. Enriched environments also make brains more resilient to stress
and neurotoxins (Schneider et al. 2001). Reducing neurotoxins and
preventing bad prenatal environments are simple and widely accepted
methods of increasing cognitive function. These latter kinds of
intervention might be classified as preventative or therapeutic rather
than enhancing, although the distinction is blurry. For instance, an
optimized intrauterine environment will not only help avoid specific
pathology and deficits but is also likely to promote the growth of the
developing nervous system in ways that ultimately enhance its core
capacities. In brains that have already been damaged, for example, by
lead exposure, nootropics may alleviate some of the cognitive deficits
(Zhou and Suszkiw 2004). It is not always clear whether they do this by
curing the damage or by amplifying (enhancing) capacities that can
compensate for the loss, or even whether the distinction is always
meaningful. Comparing chronic exposure to cognition-enhancing drugs with
an enriched rearing environment, one study found that both conditions
improved memory performance and produced similar changes in the neural
matter in rats. The improvements in the drug-treated group persisted
even after cessation of treatment. The combination of drugs and enriched
environment did not improve the rats’ abilities beyond the improvement
provided by one of the interventions alone. This suggests that both
interventions produced a more robust and plastic neural structure able
to learn more efficiently. Improving general health has
cognition-enhancing effects. Many health problems act as distractors or
directly impair cognition (Schillerstrom et al. 2005). Improving sleep,
immune function, and general conditioning promotes cognitive
functioning. Bouts of exercise have been shown to temporally improve
various cognitive capacities, the size of the effect depending on the
type and intensity of the exercise (Tomporowski 2003). Long-term
exercise also improves cognition, possibly by a combination of increased
blood supply to the brain and the release of nerve growth factors
(Vaynman and Gomez-Pinilla 2005). Understanding this system may lead to
new classes of nootropics, perhaps as a side effect of research into
regenerative medicine. Overall, improvements in the environment may be
effective and widely acceptable cognition enhancers, and conversely
enhancement may help deprived individuals.

MENTAL TRAINING
Mental training and visualization techniques are widely practiced in
elite sport (Feltz and Landers 1983) and rehabilitation (Jackson et al.
2004), with apparently good effects. Users vividly imagine themselves
performing a task

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(running a race, going to a store), imagining every movement and how
they feel again and again. A likely explanation for the efficacy of such
exercises is that they activate the neural networks involved in
executing a skill at the same time as the performance criteria for the
task is held in close attention, optimizing neural plasticity and
appropriate neural reorganization/ learning. Even general mental
activity, “working the brain muscle” can improve performance (Nyberg
et al. 2003) and long-term health (Barnes et al. 2004), as can
relaxation techniques to regulate the activation of the brain (Nava et
al. 2004). It has been suggested that the Flynn-effect (Flynn 1987), a
secular increase in raw intelligence test scores by 2.5 IQ points per
decade in most western countries, can be attributed to increased demands
of certain forms of abstract and visuospatial cognition in modern
society and schooling, although improved nutrition and health status may
also play a part (Neisser 1997; Blair et al. 2005). It appears that most
of the Flynn effect does not reflect an increase in general fluid
intelligence but rather a change in which specific forms of intelligence
are developed. The classic form of cognitive enhancement software is
learned strategies to memorize information. Such methods have been used
since antiquity with much success (Yates 1966; Patten 1990). One such
classic strategy is “the method of loci.” The user imagines a
building, either real or imaginary, and in her imagination she walks
from room to room, and places imaginary objects that evoke natural
associations to the subject matter that she is memorizing. During
retrieval, the user retraces her steps and the sequence of memorized
information is recalled when she “sees” the objects she has placed
along the route. This technique harnesses the brain’s spatial
navigation system to help remember objects or propositional contents.
Other memory techniques makes use of rhyming or the fact that we more
easily recall dramatic, colorful, or emotional scenes, which can serve
as placeholders for items that are more difficult to retain, such as
numbers or letters. The early memory arts were often used as a
substitute for written text or to memorize speeches. Today, memory
techniques tend to be used in service of everyday needs, such as
remembering door codes, passwords, shopping lists, and by students who
need to memorize names, dates, and terms when preparing for exams
(Lorrayne 1996; Minninger 1997). One study which compared exceptional
memorizers (participants in the World Memory Championships) with normal
subjects found no systematic differences in brain anatomy (Maguire et
al. 2003). However, activity during encoding was different, likely
reflecting the use of a deliberate encoding strategy. Especially areas
of the brain involved in spatial representation and navigation were
found to be consistently activated in the memorizers, regardless of
whether the subjects were learning numbers, faces, or snowflakes. When
asked about their memory strategies, nearly all memorizers reported
using the method of loci.

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In general it appears possible to attain very high memory performance on
specific types of material using memory techniques. They work best on
otherwise meaningless or unrelated information, such as sequences of
numbers, but do not appear to help skilled everyday activities (Ericsson
2003). There also exists a vast array of mental techniques alleged to
boost various skills, such as creativity training, speed reading methods
(Calef et al. 1999), and mind-maps (Buzan 1982; Farrand et al. 2002). It
is unclear how widespread such techniques are, and good data regarding
their efficacy is often lacking. Even if a technique improves
performance on some task under particular conditions that does not
necessarily mean that the technique is practically useful. In order for
a technique to significantly benefit a person, it would have to be
effectively integrated into her everyday work. Of the mental training
techniques, visualization may have the greatest potential for future
development. While new memory arts can be developed the need for them is
limited thanks to easily accessible external storage (the main exception
may be remembering passwords). Serious studies of the efficiency of
other mental techniques may be worthwhile. However, their specificity to
particular tasks limits them. Methods of taking advantage of brain
reorganization, possibly enhanced through nootropics and/or virtual
reality training, appear to have general utility.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
External hardware is of course already used for cognitive enhancement,
be it pen and paper or computer software like personal organizers. This
section can only scratch at the surface of the vast range of information
technologies that have a cognitive enhancement function. There is
practically no cognitive area where there does not exist external
hardware or software amplification. Many common pieces of software act
as cognition-enhancing environments where the software helps give an
overview, keep multiple items in memory, and perform routine tasks. Data
mining and information visualization tools help produce overview and
understanding where the perceptual system cannot handle the amount of
data, while specialized tools like expert systems, symbolic math
programs, decision support tools, and search agents expand specific
skills and capacities. What is new is the growing interest in creating
intimate links between the external systems and the human user through
better interaction. The software becomes less an external tool and more
of a mediating “exoself.” This can be achieved through mediation,
embedding the human within an augmenting “shell,” such as wearable
computers (Mann 2001; Mann and Niedzviecki 2001) or virtual reality, or
through smart environments, where capabilities of objects in the
environment are extended. An example is the ubiquitous computing vision,
in which objects would be equipped with unique identities and given

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ability to communicate with and to support the user (Weiser 1991). A
welldesigned environment can enhance proactive memory (Sellen et al.
1996) by deliberately bringing previous intentions to mind in the right
context. Another form of memory-enhancing exoself software is
remembrance agents (Rhodes and Starner 1996), agents that act as a
vastly extended associative memory. The agents have access to a database
of previous information, such as a user’s files, e-mail
correspondence, etc., and suggest relevant documents based on the
current context. Other exoself applications include additions to vision
(Mann 1997), team coordination (Fan et al. 2005a, 2005b), face
recognition (Singletary and Starner 2000), mechanical prediction (Jebara
et al. 1997), and recording emotionally significant events (Healey and
Picard 1998). Given the availability of external memory support, from
writing to wearable computers, it appears likely that the crucial form
of memory demand will be the ability to link together information into
usable concepts and associations rather than storage and retrieval of
raw data. Storage and retrieval functions can be offloaded to a great
extent from the brain, while the knowledge, strategies, and associations
linking the data to skilled cognition so far cannot generally be
offloaded. Wearable computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are
already intimate devices worn on the body, but there have been proposals
for even tighter interfaces. Control of external devices through brain
activity has been studied with some success for the last 40 years,
although it remains a slow form of signaling (Wolpaw et al. 2000). The
most dramatic potential internal hardware enhancements are brain–
computer interfaces. At present development is rapid both on the
hardware side, where multielectrode recordings from more than 300
electrodes permanently implanted in the brain are currently state of the
art, and on the software side, with computers learning to interpret the
signals and commands (Carmena et al. 2003; Nicolelis et al. 2003; Shenoy
et al. 2003). Early experiments on humans have shown that it is possible
for profoundly paralyzed patients to control a computer cursor using
just a single electrode (Kennedy and Bakay 1998) implanted in the brain
and a 96 electrode prototype has been demonstrated (Hochberg et al.
2006). Prefrontal recordings enable choice selection with a bandwidth of
6.5 bits/s (Santhanam et al. 2006). Experiments in localized chemical
release from implanted chips also suggest the possibility to use neural
growth factors to promote patterned local growth and interfacing
(Peterman et al. 2004). Cochlear implants are already widely used, and
there is ongoing research in artificial retinas (Alteheld et al. 2004)
and functional electric stimulation for paralysis treatment (von Wild et
al. 2002). These implants are mainly intended to ameliorate functional
deficits and will hardly be attractive for healthy people in the
foreseeable future. But the digital parts of the implant can in
principle be connected to nearly any kind of software and external

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hardware (Hochberg et al. 2006). This would enable enhancing uses, such
as access to software help, Internet, and virtual reality applications.
It has been demonstrated that a healthy volunteer could control a
robotic arm using tactile feedback, both in direct adjacency and
remotely, as well as a wheelchair and perform simple neural
communication with another implant (Warwick et al. 2003). Nondisabled
people, however, would most likely achieve the same benefits through
eyes, finger, and voice control. Neural implants are unlikely to become
common enhancements until a “killer application” that cannot be
achieved using external technology is found.

COLLECTIVE ENHANCEMENT
Much of human cognition is distributed across many minds and can be
enhanced by developing more efficient forms of collaboration.
Cooperative groups can detect deception better than individuals (Frank
et al. 2004) and solve many problems better than equal numbers of
individuals or even the best individuals (Laughlin et al. 2002; Kerr and
Tindale 2004; Laughlin et al. 2006). In general, the total ability of a
group to perform a task increases with the size of the group as long as
the members do not need to interact much. If they need to coordinate,
the efficiency starts to drop as time has to be spent on coordination
rather than work. In a densely connected group this eventually produces
a situation where adding people reduces total performance. Reducing the
density of the network by adding a hierarchy enables larger groups at
the price of information bottlenecks. Social cognitive enhancement would
act by either increasing the performance of individual group members
(improving overall performance), improve their ability to coordinate
(enabling larger groups), or improve the synergies generated by having
multiple competencies. This is an area ideally suited for embedding
technologies that mediate group interactions. Virtual workspaces can
enable improved pattern recognition (Hayne et al. 2003) and various
forms of groupware attempts to facilitate collaboration. However, the
greatest enhancements occur when very large groups can be facilitated:
the World Wide Web and e-mail are among the most powerful kinds of
cognitive enhancement software developed to date. Through the use of
such social software, the distributed intelligence of large groups can
be shared and harnessed for particular purposes (Surowiecki 2004).
Connected systems allow many people to collaborate in the construction
of shared knowledge and solutions: the more individuals that connect,
the more powerful the system becomes (Drexler 1991). The information is
not just stored in the documents themselves but in their interrelations.
When such interconnected information resources exist, automated systems,
such as search engines (Kleinberg 1999), can extract a wealth of useful
information from them.

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Lowered coordination costs enable larger groups to work on common
projects. Such groups of shared interests, such as amateur journalist
“bloggers” and open source programmers, have demonstrated that they
can successfully complete large projects, such as online political
campaigns (Drezner and Farrell 2004), the Wikipedia encyclopedia, and
the Linux operating system. Systems for online collaboration can
incorporate efficient error correction (Raymond 2001; Giles 2005),
enabling incremental improvement of product quality over time. An
interesting variant of knowledge aggregation is prediction markets (also
known as “information markets” or “idea futures markets”).
Here
participants trade in predictions of future events, and the prices of
these bets tend to reflect the best information available on the
probability of whether the events will occur (Hanson et al. 2003). Such
markets appear to be self-correcting and resilient, and have been shown
to outperform alternative methods of generating probabilistic forecasts,
such as opinion polls and expert panels (Hanson et al. 2006). Social
cognitive enhancement represents a convergence of not only information
and cognitive technology, but sociology, management, and epistemology.
In order to be successful a wide variety of factors must come together,
making deliberate design hard. It may not be a coincidence that the most
successful systems have been the most open, enabling many different
groups to experiment and discover whether they can get it to work for
their goals. We seldom notice the vast number of failed attempts because
they are overshadowed by the explosive growth of successful systems.

NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanotechnology has so far not been applied to cognitive enhancement,
which is unsurprising given its early state. However, in basic
neuroscience research many nanotechnology applications are in use or
close to use. Fluorescent nanodots are used in neuroscience research,
where they enable direct observation of biomolecule interaction
(Mitchell 2001; Weng and Ren 2006). Nanostructured scaffolds are
explored in tissue engineering (Silva et al. 2004) and nerve regrowth
(Ellis-Behnke et al. 2006). One near future application with great
promise is nanostructured neural interfaces (Cheung et al. 2002).
Providing the right surface would both help improve signal quality and
reliability. Nanoelectrodes may also be threaded through the capillary
system, enabling low-invasive neurointerfacing (Llinas et al. 2005). At
the very least nanotechnology is an enabler of neuroscience research
relevant for cognitive enhancement. Another near-term application
pursued with much commercial interest is drug delivery through
nanostructures (Panyam and Labhasetwar 2003; Sahoo and Labhasetwar 2003)
or controlled-release microchips (Santini et al. 1999;

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Grayson et al. 2003). This would enable precision pharmacology as well
as possibly gene therapy. It appears likely that as nanotechnology
matures it will become an integral part of nearly all cognitive
enhancement methods, be they light, powerful, and portable Internet
interfaces or “smart drugs” that release modulators just when they
are needed.

CONVERGING METHODS
As we have seen, many current applications already span disciplinary
borders. Cognitive enhancement is based on the unity between the
biological brain and the mind, and the unity between different kinds of
information processing. Changing biological processes enables changes to
the mind (and vice versa). Information processing is the same whether a
brain or a computer does it. It hence lends itself well to the vision of
converging technology. Convergence enables many extensions of the
current possibilities. As an example, take cortical plasticity.
Currently it can be increased by attention, TMS, and drugs, such as
amphetamines, in order to improve rehabilitation or learning. All three
methods achieve the same goal using different means. Sustaining
attention on a task requires motivation and can plausibly be improved
using various forms of mental training; it has the benefit of being
highly selective but requires significant effort. Current drugs are
nonspecific and would increase plasticity in other cortical areas than
the desired ones, besides effects on other parts of the brain. TMS is
specific to a particular cortical area but requires training close in
time and space to the stimulation equipment, and the task may be
distributed over a large number of cortical areas. Convergence easily
suggests multiple ways these techniques can be improved. Improving TMS
in terms of location specificity may be achieved by embedding micro- or
nanoparticles close to the area to be modified (this may be particularly
suitable for rehabilitation after neurosurgery) that augment the signal
or help target it. By placing drugs within the particles they might
promote nerve regrowth or dendritic sprouting, possibly triggered by
external signals (Sershen and West 2002). The use of magnetic particles
has already been explored to concentrate drugs to cancer tumors (Lubbe
et al. 1996; Lubbe et al. 2001; Kim et al. 2006): the same mechanism
could enable concentrating plasticity increasing drugs to the right
cortical region even without surgery. More advanced particles or
controlled-release microchips may able to sense local neuromodulator
concentrations and regulate their drug release to amplify the selective
effect of attention during training, making sure only the areas relevant
to the training get affected. On the macroscale, better sensor systems
would enable improved understanding of individual brain chemistry, a
prerequisite for finding the optimal

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combination of enhancer drugs. Wearable computing and other personal
sensory devices enable the monitoring not only of body state but also
behavior. This could enable personal data mining to find the individual
optimum of, for example, blood glucose for different cognitive tasks by
comparing it with monitored performance, and then based on measured
glucose response to different meals suggest food intake that fits future
scheduled demands. By pooling such individual data it would also be
possible to make inferences on the general utility of different enhancer
methods and the interactions between different factors. Rather than
being a top-down academic study it might emerge as voluntary data
sharing among users. This would represent an entirely new kind of
epidemiological study. The difference is similar to the difference
between the web-indices that seek to organize web sites into a
predetermined subject hierarchy/ontology, and the current Web 2.0
experiments with generating “folksonomies” from locally tagged data
(Shirky 2005). The challenges this form of “folk experimentation”
poses in terms of data mining, scientific rigor (even if useful patterns
are found the uncontrolled nature of the data may make strict
interpretation hard), integrity concerns, and ownership concerns (are
participants reimbursed for profitable discoveries?) are obviously great
and may provide a very fruitful areas of research. These scenarios are
of course merely extrapolations at present, but demonstrate the
synergistic potential of many current enhancement techniques.

DISCUSSION
Cognitive enhancement is already in widespread use, but not recognized
as such. The morning coffee, the crossword, the e-mail program, and the
cellphone are all part of our cognitive enhancement infrastructure. The
new kinds of enhancement discussed in this article may appear unusual,
futuristic, or problematic but will likely in time become as prosaic and
accepted as the others. It is easier to improve specialized abilities
than general cognition. But the rewards are far greater for general
cognition. It comes into play all the time, supporting many
tasks—including uses we may not have thought of enhancing. Better
memory may help education but it may also help remembering one’s
holiday memories and avoid forgetting keys. The overall societal impact
of even a small increase in general cognitive function would likely be
sizeable and desirable. Economic models of the loss caused by small
intelligence decrements due to lead in drinking water predict
significant effects of even a few points decrease (Salkever 1995; Muir
and Zegarac 2001). Because the models are roughly linear for small
changes, they can be inverted to estimate societal effects of improved
cognition. The Salkever model estimates the increase in income due to
one more IQ point to be 2.1% for men and 3.6% for women. (Herrnstein and
Murray 1994) estimate that a 3% increase in overall

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IQ would reduce the poverty rate by 25%, males in jail by 25%,
high-school dropouts by 28%, parentless children by 20%, welfare
recipients by 18%, and out-of-wedlock births by 25%. Cognitive
enhancement raises many ethical and social issues but also many
practical challenges. Enhancements do have a price. In some cases it is
a monetary price tag, but often it is a tradeoff between different
abilities. Keeping awake using stimulants prevents the memory
consolidation that would have taken place during sleep, and enhanced
concentration ability may impair the ability to notice things in
peripheral awareness. In some cases these tradeoffs can be predicted in
terms of known biology or the evolutionary past of humans (Bostrom and
Sandberg 2006), but often we will have to do an empirically based
evaluation of what we individually value in a particular situation. A
major concern for all forms of enhancement is risk, both from
enhancement itself and its effects (as well as its development in
clinical trials). Enhancement users must decide when the benefits
outweigh the potential risk, and how to estimate this on the basis of
available information, personal goals, and their ways of life. These
risks cannot always be accurately determined beforehand, nor may a user
be able to defer to experts to judge whether the benefits are, to her,
worth the risks. This poses a challenge to many current risk frameworks
that are based on reducing the risk for the population at large:
enhancement may be so individual and variable that it does not fit into
a paternalistic framework. This challenge is further complicated because
of the convergent nature of enhancement, which will bring different
fields with conflicting risk concepts (e.g., medicine, education, and
computing) into overlap. Developing a consistent, technology-independent
risk management framework for converging technologies is an important
task for the future, necessary for the eventual acceptance of general
enhancement. The reliability of research is also an issue. Many of the
cognition-enhancing interventions show small effect sizes, which may
necessitate very large epidemiological studies possibly exposing large
groups to unforeseen risks. One of the greatest challenges to developing
effective cognitive enhancement is the current research model. Enhancers
are tested within a laboratory setting for particular tasks. While this
enables exact measurement and elimination of confounders, it does not
test whether the enhancers aid real-life tasks and lifestyles.
Ecological testing in real-life situations would be more relevant, but
is far more expensive, time consuming, and hard to interpret. The
“folk experimentation” scenario mentioned above might solve the
first two problems but would likely worsen the third. An interesting
exception is military enhancement research, where studies in a more
realistic (if still somewhat limited) setting are sometimes pursued.
Civilian spin-offs from the current programs are likely, although the
research ethics issues of military biomedical research are clearly
nontrivial (cf. Pearn 2000; McManus et al. 2005 for a discussion of
issues of captive subjects and informed consent).

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A major challenge in developing human enhancement technologies is the
need for interdisciplinary understanding. The problems facing
“neuroeducation” and groupware have already been mentioned. While
narrowly focused technical work is necessary, it may be that some of the
most fruitful approaches will consist in creatively combining and
applying work from multiple disciplines. Seeing cognitive enhancement as
one field and as a general goal, rather than as multitude of unrelated
pursuits, may enable us to spot many promising research questions and
enhancement opportunities that would otherwise be overlooked.
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----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes@...>
-----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes@...>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:50:10 -0400
To: technoliberation@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [technoliberation] More on the "fixing" of gay Baptist embryos
Reply-To: technoliberation@yahoogroups.com


http://www.southernvoice.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=11962

Furor over Baptist seminary president's gay-fetus article

Rev. Mohler supports treatment to change sexual orientation of unborn

NEW YORK (AP) | Mar 15, 8:20 AM

The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has incurred
sharp attacks from both the left and right by suggesting that a
biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal
treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.

Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., one of the country's pre-eminent evangelical
leaders, acknowledged that he irked many fellow conservatives with an
article earlier this month saying scientific research ``points to some
level of biological causation' for homosexuality.

Proof of a biological basis would challenge the belief of many
conservative Christians that homosexuality - which they view as sinful -
is a matter of choice that can be overcome through prayer and
counseling.

However, Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
in Louisville, Ky., was assailed even more harshly by gay-rights
supporters. They were upset by his assertion that homosexuality would
remain a sin even if it were biologically based, and by his support for
possible medical treatment that could switch an unborn gay baby's sexual
orientation to heterosexual.

"He's willing to play God," said Harry Knox, a spokesman on religious
issues for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group. "He's
more than willing to let homophobia take over and be the determinant of
how he responds to this issue, in spite of everything else he believes
about not tinkering with the unborn."

Mohler said he was aware of the invective being directed at him on
gay-rights blogs, where some participants have likened him to Josef
Mengele, the Nazi doctor notorious for death-camp experimentation.

"I wonder if people actually read what I wrote," Mohler said in a
telephone interview. "But I wrote the article intending to start a
conversation, and I think I've been successful at that."

The article, published March 2 on Mohler's personal Web site, carried a
long but intriguing title: "Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know?
What If You Could Do Something About It?"

Mohler began by summarizing some recent research into sexual
orientation, and advising his Christian readership that they should
brace for the possibility that a biological basis for homosexuality may
be proven.

Mohler wrote that such proof would not alter the Bible's condemnation of
homosexuality, but said the discovery would be "of great pastoral
significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain
persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations."

He also referred to a recent article in the pop-culture magazine Radar,
which explored the possibility that sexual orientation could be detected
in unborn babies and raised the question of whether parents - even
liberals who support gay rights - might be open to trying future
prenatal techniques that would reverse homosexuality.

Mohler said he would strongly oppose any move to encourage abortion or
genetic manipulation of fetuses on grounds of sexual orientation, but he
would endorse prenatal hormonal treatment - if such a technology were
developed - to reverse homosexuality. He said this would no different,
in moral terms, to using technology that would restore vision to a blind
fetus.

"I realize this sounds very offensive to homosexuals, but it's the only
way a Christian can look at it," Mohler said. "We should have no more
problem with that than treating any medical problem."

Mohler's argument was endorsed by a prominent Roman Catholic thinker,
the Rev. Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla.,
and editor of Ignatius Press, Pope Benedict XVI's U.S. publisher.

``Same-sex activity is considered disordered,' Fessio said. ``If there
are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of children in the womb, and
a way of treating them that respected the dignity of the child and
mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of science.'

Such logic dismayed Jennifer Chrisler of Family Pride, a group that
supports gay and lesbian families.

"What bothers me is the hypocrisy," she said. "In one breath, they say
the sanctity of an unborn life is unconditional, and in the next breath,
it's OK to perform medical treatments on them because of their own moral
convictions, not because there's anything wrong with the child."

Paul Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris,
wrote a detailed critique of Mohler's column, contending that there
could be many genes contributing to sexual orientation and that medical
attempts to alter it could be risky.

"If there are such genes, they will also contribute to other aspects of
social and sexual interactions," Myers wrote. "Disentangling the nuances
of preference from the whole damn problem of loving people might well be
impossible."

Not all reaction to Mohler's article has been negative.

Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York City psychiatrist critical of those who
consider homosexuality a disorder, commended Mohler's openness to the
prospect that it is biologically based.

"This represents a major shift," Drescher said. "This is a man who
actually has an open mind, who is struggling to reconcile his religious
beliefs with facts that contradict it."




Yahoo! Groups Links




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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Greve  Frauke <fgreve@...>
Date: Mar 15, 2007 7:37 AM
Subject: Reminder: Invitation to Synthetic Biology 3.0, 24th-26th June
2007, Zurich, Switzerland
To: "Synthetic Biology 3.0" <syntheticbiology30@...>


Dear Madam/Sir (if you are a PhD student, please note the fellowship
opportunities at the end of the email):

It is our pleasure to invite you to The 3rd International Conference
on Synthetic Biology (Synthetic Biology 3.0).

The conference will take place at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, from 24th-26th June 2007. The
compulsory pre-registration is now open and you are invited to submit
abstracts for oral or poster presentations by 31st March 2007 via
www.syntheticbiology3.ethz.ch.

The Synthetic Biology Conference series has become the prime event for
a rapidly growing scientific community at the interface between
engineering and biology. After two hugely successful events at the MIT
(2004) and UC Berkeley (2006) we will continue the tradition of
exciting and inspiring meetings at the ETH. In the morning of the
24th, there will be several workshops on selected core topics of
synthetic biology. The conference will kick-off at 2 p.m. with a
keynote presentation from George Church (Harvard). Two other keynote
presentations will be delivered by Tom Knight (MIT) and Hamilton O.
Smith (Nobel Laureate currently at the Venter Institute) throughout
the conference, during which we will explore the following topics:

1. Design of biological parts, devices and systems (including
DNA-circuits and protein technology for synthetic biology).

2. Concepts for fabrication (including minimal genome efforts,
large-scale DNA synthesis, fabrication beyond nucleic acids, expanding
the chemistry of life, and microsystems).

3. Concepts for design (including theoretical foundations of design,
complex network design).

4. Applications (including examples from chemistry, materials and energy).

5. Synthetic biology and the societal context (including public
perception, education, safety and security, synthetic biology and
ethics, and synthetic biology and IPR).

In order to guarantee a productive atmosphere, the conference will be
limited to 300 participants and priority will be given to those
submitting an abstract. Further information and details of the
registration process can be found at www.syntheticbiology3.ethz.ch.

Note: If you are a PhD student, then you are eligible to apply for a
fellowship of 650 € covering conference fees and contributing to
travel and accommodation costs. Students wishing to apply should send
a copy of their abstract, a CV, a half-page letter of motivation and a
letter of recommendation directly to the conference office by 31st
March 2007.

We look forward to seeing you in Zurich.

Synthetic Biology 3.0 Organizing Committee.

Sven Panke
Jörg Stelling
Matthias Heinemann
Martin Fussenegger




----- End forwarded message -----
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 11:02:16AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> Of course, the claims that MDMA or LSD are liberating are not that
> convincing. Ravers have never struck me as very likely to change their
> societies. They want freedom to enjoy, but not much more. And while

There's a considerable overlap between hippies and ravers.
At least the last time I looked, the culture is in flux so
things change all the time.

> > I can imagine a science fiction scenario where the entire
> > human species is wiped out by an out of control DMT/LSD/etc
> > -synthesis bacteria. If we cannot think rationally, the entire system
> > of support dies and us along with it.

At least this class of drugs is unsuitable for a sustainable trip.
They simply stop working, and/or need larger and larger doses,
which are eventually physiologically problematic.

> > Torture using extremely high doses of LSD (10,000+ micrograms).
>
> Do people suffer due to high dosage? According to my understanding "bad

Anecdotally, no. I presume the disruptive effect of an unfamiliar,
terrifying experience is at play here. Seasoned psychonauts are used
to such, and are basically immune. There might be a potentiator
effect of subjectively changed time flow, if coupled with a nasty
experience.

> trips" are caused by bad set and setting rather than concentration (there
> was a policeman who accidentally ingested an extreme dose but came down a
> few weeks later apparently no worse for wear). For torture a standard dose

LSD has a very wide therapeutic range. MDMA has about an order
of magnitude therapeutic range before you're in hyperthermia/neurotoxicity
country, much less.

> and a nasty environment would do the trick. But then again, torture and
> LSD are not useful for extracting reliable information, and if you just
> want to inflict suffering there is a million ways of doing it.

Unfortunately, you're quite correct.

> I wonder whether MDMA actually drops barriers, or just makes people desire
> social contact (and drops inhibitions against it). As one of Egan's

It's probably the latter. It's a good love mimic, at least some aspects
of it.

> characters remarked, neurotypical people *think* they understand what goes
> on in other people's minds, but that is maybe just a complete illusion.
> Still, if one were to try to form a group mind it would probably be rather
> like setting up a polyamourous marriage, so MDMA or something better would

I'm not sure polyamory is more than a fad. Unless until people can (and desire
to)
be reengineered.

> perhaps be useful.
>
> That is another claim I wonder if there is any evidence for. Do people
> using psychedelics show greater creativity, or are they just creatives

It can increase ideation to the degree where it becomes overwhelming.
Unfortunately, it impairs judment, too, so it's hard to select the
useful things out of the deluge of rainbow-colored chaff.

> willing to experiment to begin with? A lot of the results of people's
> psychedelic experimentation seem more like they got some new, complex and
> unexpected inputs and then used that in creative work in a fairly ordinary
> way rather than an improvement of the creative process itself. If anybody
> knows any studies on this, I would be interested.
>
> > Drugs like Modafinil or deprenyl seem faintly like Vinge's Focus

I'm familiar with both and anecdotally, they're nothing like
Focus at all. I would be very careful with selegiline, especially
long-term, and when it becomes an unselective MAO inhibitor
http://www.selegiline.com/

> Modafinil makes you think before you act. Apparently this is why the US
> military does not use it on the battlefield.

Long-term, lack of sleep will result in progressive paranoia and
frequently psychosis, so at least long-term it's not a good idea
on the battlefield. Now about MDMA/MDA, that might be a good drug
for that ;)

> There is an assumption that a better worker == a better drone, but that is
> flawed. Work can be extremely radical and subversive. Given that
> governments so far have been awfully bad at predicting the effects of new
> technology and policies even a society with Focus would find itself
> disrupted quite often.

Don't know about Focus, but at least the surveillance technology is progressing
very nicely towards capacities of the Emergents. It frankly gives me the
willies.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

Jeffrey Benner wrote:
> The empathogen MDMA is sometimes viewed by legalization advocates as
> evocative of greater individual freedom. But I can see a government
> role for MDMA-style drugs in helping people to accept the current
> regime, a class structure or a life situation that would otherwise
> make them miserable. I suspect that all psychotropics have military,
> social control, or economic productivity applications.

Sure. As Kathleen Taylor pointed out on a neuroethics seminar "the state
always want a mind control monopoly". And to some extent it is a natural
extension of the monopoly on coercion that most people view as legitimate.

Of course, the claims that MDMA or LSD are liberating are not that
convincing. Ravers have never struck me as very likely to change their
societies. They want freedom to enjoy, but not much more. And while
psychedelics might have been liberating once in the sense of producing
altered states or ideas far outside societal convention, today it is
pretty easy to get such ideas without drugs. A truly liberating drug that
would enable users to change themselves would probably be more akin to the
"Grey Knights" in Egan�s story _Chaff_ - but in reality such a drug would
be potentially risky and require an infrastructure of support in order to
be positively usable by people. Which does not imply the need for state
control, but at the very least the design of smart institutions
surrounding it.

> Create a bacteria that generates DMT and lives in the bloodstream of
> only certain genotypes typical of an enemy nation. Unleash it against
> your enemy and slowly mop up the country full of temporarily insane
> citizens.

Ah, instant quagmire! What a great idea! Just imagine nationbuilding
afterwards.

  I can imagine a science fiction scenario where the entire
> human species is wiped out by an out of control DMT/LSD/etc
> -synthesis bacteria. If we cannot think rationally, the entire system
> of support dies and us along with it.

I have toyed with something similar for some of my sf scenarios. Some drug
manufacturers homebrew E coli for making their favorite drug. They plan to
use it in a lab bioreactor, but it gets loose and infects people (and
perhaps animals) producing contagious drug effects.

> Torture using extremely high doses of LSD (10,000+ micrograms).

Do people suffer due to high dosage? According to my understanding "bad
trips" are caused by bad set and setting rather than concentration (there
was a policeman who accidentally ingested an extreme dose but came down a
few weeks later apparently no worse for wear). For torture a standard dose
and a nasty environment would do the trick. But then again, torture and
LSD are not useful for extracting reliable information, and if you just
want to inflict suffering there is a million ways of doing it.

> Use a psychedelic analogue to make it easier for future soldiers to
> engage mind-machine interfaces - I can easily see psychedelics as a
> "lubricant" to enable neural interfaces, possibly an early training
> tool or light doses used to make transition from physical to other
> neural spaces easier.

Hmm, I think this might be unnecessary these days. We are so used to
virtual and other mediated realities that unless the soldier was extremely
rigid in their thinking (and hence not suitable for being a soldier) this
would probably not be aided much by hallucinogens. I would expect
plasticity enhancer drugs to be useful instead: you want the soldier to
adapt to the interface and learn quickly, ideally reorganizing their
cortex to work with it.

> Use a MDMA analogue to drop barriers between minds, making supergroup
> synergistic minds easier; creating new ways to solve problems for
> corporations, military and intelligence organizations. Easing the end
> of privacy and privacy-related inhibitions. Borgification probably
> relies heavily on drugs.

Ah, "tune in, turn on, borg out" :-)

I wonder whether MDMA actually drops barriers, or just makes people desire
social contact (and drops inhibitions against it). As one of Egan's
characters remarked, neurotypical people *think* they understand what goes
on in other people's minds, but that is maybe just a complete illusion.
Still, if one were to try to form a group mind it would probably be rather
like setting up a polyamourous marriage, so MDMA or something better would
perhaps be useful.

> And psychedelics unleash creativity - and creativity can be used to
> create any kind of new thing, including those that lead to greater
> wealth and power.

That is another claim I wonder if there is any evidence for. Do people
using psychedelics show greater creativity, or are they just creatives
willing to experiment to begin with? A lot of the results of people's
psychedelic experimentation seem more like they got some new, complex and
unexpected inputs and then used that in creative work in a fairly ordinary
way rather than an improvement of the creative process itself. If anybody
knows any studies on this, I would be interested.

> Drugs like Modafinil or deprenyl seem faintly like Vinge's Focus
> (Deepness in the Sky). They make cognitive tasks much more
> interesting and thereby makes the user a better worker and more
> productive / a better drone.

Modafinil makes you think before you act. Apparently this is why the US
military does not use it on the battlefield.

There is an assumption that a better worker == a better drone, but that is
flawed. Work can be extremely radical and subversive. Given that
governments so far have been awfully bad at predicting the effects of new
technology and policies even a society with Focus would find itself
disrupted quite often.



--
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

----- Forwarded message from Bruce Schneier <schneier@...> -----

From: Bruce Schneier <schneier@...>
Date:         Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:56:45 -0500
To: CRYPTO-GRAM-LIST@...
Subject: CRYPTO-GRAM, March 15, 2007
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Windows/20070221)
Reply-To: Bruce Schneier <schneier@...>

                  CRYPTO-GRAM

                 March 15, 2007

               by Bruce Schneier
                Founder and CTO
                 BT Counterpane
              schneier@...
             http://www.schneier.com
            http://www.counterpane.com


A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and
commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.

For back issues, or to subscribe, visit
<http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>.

You can read this issue on the web at
<http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0703.html>.  These same essays
appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog:
<http://www.schneier.com/blog>.  An RSS feed is available.


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

In this issue:
      CYA Security
      Copycats
      U.S Terrorism Arrests/Convictions Significantly Overstated
      Movie Plot Threat in Vancouver
      News
      The Doghouse: Onboard Threat Detection System
      Private Police Forces
      BT Counterpane News
      The Doghouse: Sniffex
      Drive-By Pharming
      Cloning RFID Chips Made by HID
      Comments from Readers


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      CYA Security



Since 9/11, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending
ourselves from terrorist attacks.  Stories about the ineffectiveness of
many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions
of *why* they are so ineffective.  In short: much of our country's
counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from
the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from
criticism when another attack occurs.

Boston, January 31:  As part of a guerilla marketing campaign, a series
of amateur-looking blinking signs depicting characters from Aqua Teen
Hunger Force, a show on the Cartoon Network, were placed on bridges,
near a medical center, underneath an interstate highway, and in other
crowded public places.

Police mistook these signs for bombs and shut down parts of the city,
eventually spending over $1M sorting it out.  Authorities blasted the
stunt as a terrorist hoax, while others ridiculed the Boston authorities
for overreacting.  Almost no one looked beyond the finger pointing and
jeering to discuss exactly why the Boston authorities overreacted so
badly.  They overreacted because the signs were weird.

If someone left a backpack full of explosives in a crowded movie
theater, or detonated a truck bomb in the middle of a tunnel, no one
would demand to know why the police hadn't noticed it beforehand.  But
if a weird device with blinking lights and wires turned out to be a bomb
-- what every movie bomb looks like -- there would be inquiries and
demands for resignations.  It took the police two weeks to notice the
Mooninite blinkies, but once they did, they overreacted because their
jobs were at stake.

This is "Cover Your Ass" security, and unfortunately it's very common.

Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.  Pre-9/11, it
was bombs, guns, and knives.  Then it was small blades and box cutters.
  Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane, and suddenly we all have to
take off our shoes.  And after last summer's liquid plot, we're stuck
with a series of nonsensical bans on liquids and gels.

Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense.  The
TSA wants to be sure that if there's another airplane terrorist attack,
it's not held responsible for letting it slip through.  One year ago, no
one could blame the TSA for not detecting liquids.  But since everything
seems obvious in hindsight, it's basic job preservation to defend
against what the terrorists tried last time.

We saw this kind of CYA security when Boston and New York randomly
checked bags on the subways after the London bombing, or when buildings
started sprouting concrete barriers after the Oklahoma City bombing.  We
also see it in ineffective attempts to detect nuclear bombs; authorities
employ CYA security against the media-driven threat so they can say "we
tried."

At the same time, we're ignoring threat possibilities that don't make
the news as much -- against chemical plants, for example. But if there
were ever an attack, that would change quickly.

CYA also explains the TSA's inability to take anyone off the no-fly
list, no matter how innocent.  No one is willing to risk his career on
removing someone from the no-fly list who might -- no matter how remote
the possibility -- turn out to be the next terrorist mastermind.

Another form of CYA security is the overly specific countermeasures we
see during big events like the Olympics and the Oscars, or in protecting
small towns.  In all those cases, those in charge of the specific
security don't dare return the money with a message "use this for more
effective general countermeasures."  If they were wrong and something
happened, they'd lose their jobs.

And finally, we're seeing CYA security on the national level, from our
politicians.  We might be better off as a nation funding intelligence
gathering and Arabic translators, but it's a better re-election strategy
to fund something visible but ineffective, like a national ID card or a
wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

Securing our nation from threats that are weird, threats that either
happened before or captured the media's imagination, and overly specific
threats are all examples of CYA security.  It happens not because the
authorities involved -- the Boston police, the TSA, and so on -- are not
competent, or not doing their job.  It happens because there isn't
sufficient national oversight, planning, and coordination.

People and organizations respond to incentives.  We can't expect the
Boston police, the TSA, the guy who runs security for the Oscars, or
local public officials to balance their own security needs against the
security of the nation.  They're all going to respond to the particular
incentives imposed from above.  What we need is a coherent antiterrorism
policy at the national level: one based on real threat assessments,
instead of fear-mongering, re-election strategies, or pork-barrel politics.

Sadly, though, there might not be a solution. All the money is in
fear-mongering, re-election strategies, and pork-barrel politics.  And,
like so many things, security follows the money.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/nonterrorist_em.html

Airplane security:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secur.html

Searching bags in subways:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/searching_bags.html

No-fly list:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-052.html

More CYA security:
http://entertainment.iafrica.com/news/929710.htm
http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Oscars/0,,2-1225-1569_1665860,00.html
or http://tinyurl.com/24uuuo
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/major_security.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/80_cameras_for.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/realid_costs_an.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2143104/

Commentary:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/11746
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/22/214246.shtml

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72774-0.html


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Copycats



It's called "splash-and-grab," and it's a new way to rob convenience
stores.  (Okay; it's not really new.  It was used on the TV show "The
Shield" in 2005.  But it's back in the news.)  Two guys walk into a
store, and one comes up to the counter with a cup of hot coffee or
cocoa.  He pays for it, and when the clerk opens the cash drawer, he
throws the coffee in the clerk's face. The other one grabs the cash
drawer, and they both run.

Crimes never change, but tactics do. This tactic is new; someone just
invented it.  But now that it's in the news, copycats are repeating the
trick.  There have been at least 19 such robberies in Delaware,
Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Some arrests have been made since then.)

Here's another example: On Nov. 24, 1971, someone with the alias Dan
Cooper invented a new way to hijack an aircraft.  Claiming he had a
bomb, he forced a plane to land and then exchanged the passengers and
flight attendants for $200,000 and four parachutes. (I leave it as
exercise for the reader to explain why asking for more than one
parachute is critical to the plan's success.)  Taking off again, he told
the pilots to fly to 10,000 feet.  He then lowered the plane's back
stairs and parachuted away. He was never caught, and the FBI still
doesn't know who he is or whether he survived.

After this story hit the press, there was an epidemic of copycat
attacks.  In 31 hijackings the following year, half of the hijackers
demanded parachutes.  It got so bad that the FAA required Boeing to
install a special latch -- the Cooper Vane -- on the back staircases of
its 727s so they couldn't be lowered in the air.

The internet is filled with copycats.  Green-card lawyers invented spam;
now everyone does it.  Other people invented phishing, pharming, spear
phishing.  The virus, the worm, the Trojan: It's hard to believe that
these ubiquitous internet attack tactics were, until comparatively
recently, tactics that no one had thought of.

Most attackers are copycats. They aren't clever enough to invent a new
way to rob a convenience store, use the web to steal money, or hijack an
airplane.  They try the same attacks again and again, or read about a
new attack in the newspaper and decide they can try it, too.

In combating threats, it makes sense to focus on copycats when there is
a population of people already willing to commit the crime, who will
migrate to a new tactic once it has been demonstrated to be successful.
  In instances where there aren't many attacks or attackers, and they're
smarter -- al-Qaeda-style terrorism comes to mind -- focusing on
copycats is less effective because the bad guys will respond by
modifying their attacks accordingly.

Compare that to suicide bombings in Israel, which are mostly copycat
attacks. The authorities basically know what a suicide bombing looks
like, and do a pretty good job defending against the particular tactics
they tend to see again and again.  It's still an arms race, but there is
a lot of security gained by defending against copycats.

But even so, it's important to understand which aspect of the crime will
be adopted by copycats.  Splash-and-grab crimes have nothing to do with
convenience stores; copycats can target any store where hot coffee is
easily available and there is only one clerk on duty.  And the tactic
doesn't necessarily need coffee; one copycat used bleach.  The new idea
is to throw something painful and damaging in a clerk's face, grab the
valuables and run.

Similarly, when a suicide bomber blows up a restaurant in Israel, the
authorities don't automatically assume the copycats will attack other
restaurants. They focus on the particulars of the bomb, the triggering
mechanism and the way the bomber arrived at his target.  Those are the
tactics that copycats will repeat. The next target may be a theater or a
hotel or any other crowded location.

The lesson for counterterrorism in America: Stay flexible. We're not
threatened by a bunch of copycats, so we're best off expending effort on
security measures that will work regardless of the tactics or the
targets: intelligence, investigation and emergency response.  By
focusing too much on specifics -- what the terrorists did last time --
we're wasting valuable resources that could be used to keep us safer.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/16824777.htm
http://kyw1060.com/pages/254744.php?contentType=4&contentId=340063
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070222/NEWS/702220360\
/1006/NEWS
or http://tinyurl.com/2f3gyj
http://www.nbc10.com/news/11155984/detail.html?subid=10101521

Dan Cooper and the Cooper Vane:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/scams/DB_Cooper/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Vane

Green-card lawyers:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,19098,00.html

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72887-0.html

Blog entry URL:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/03/post.html


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      U.S Terrorism Arrests/Convictions Significantly Overstated



A new report (long, but at least read the Executive Summary) from the
U.S. Department of Justice's Inspector General says, basically, that all
the U.S. terrorism statistics since 9/11 -- arrests, convictions, and so
on -- have been grossly inflated.

The report gives a series of reasons why the statistics were so bad.
Here's one:  "The number of terrorism-related convictions was overstated
because the FBI initially coded the investigative cases as
terrorism-related when the cases were opened, but did not recode cases
when no link to terrorism was established."

And here's an example of a problem:  "For example, Operation Tarmac was
a worksite enforcement operation launched in November 2001 at the
nation's airports. During this operation, Department and other federal
agents went into regional airports and checked the immigration papers of
airport workers. The agents then arrested any individuals who used
falsified documents, such as social security numbers, drivers' licenses,
and other identification documents, to gain employment. EOUSA officials
told us they believe these defendants are properly coded under the
anti-terrorism program activity. We do not agree that law enforcement
efforts such as these should be counted as "anti-terrorism" unless the
subject or target is reasonably linked to terrorist activity."

("EOUSA" is the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, part of
the U.S. Department of Justice.)

There's an enormous amount of detail in the report, if you want to wade
through the 80 or so pages of report and another 80ish of appendices.

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0720/final.pdf


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Movie Plot Threat in Vancouver



The idiocy of this is impressive:  "A Vancouver Police computer crime
investigator has warned the city that plans for a citywide wireless
Internet system put the city at risk of terrorist attack during the 2010
Winter Olympic Games."

The problem?  Well, the problem seems to be that terrorists might attend
the Olympic games and use the Internet while they're there.

"'If you have an open wireless system across the city, as a bad guy I
could sit on a bus with a laptop and do global crime,' Fenton explained.
'It would be virtually impossible to find me.'"

There's also some scary stuff about SCADA systems, and the city putting
some of its own service on the Internet.  Clearly this guy has thought
about the risks a lot, just not with any sense.  He's overestimating
cyberterrorism. He's overestimating how important this one particular
method of wireless Internet access is.  He's overestimating how
important the 2010 Winter Olympics are.

But the newspaper was happy to play along and spread the fear.  The
photograph accompanying the article is captioned: "Anyone with a laptop
and wireless access could commit a terrorist act, police warn."

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=207f6d54-68fc-40da-8ae3\
-dc9f057c2f54&k=25065
or http://tinyurl.com/2nmy5j

Cyberterrorism:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0306.html#1


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      News



According to a new report, the FBI has lost 160 laptops, including at
least ten with classified information, in the past four years.  But it's
not all bad news.  A similar audit in 2002 found that 317 laptops were
lost or stolen at the FBI over about two years.   The FBI: Now losing
fewer laptops!
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/index.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/AR2007021200629.\
html
or http://tinyurl.com/38hsvh
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2094290,00.asp
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8821.html

There's a UAC security hole in Vista.  What's interesting is that
Microsoft is positioning this as a trade-off between security and
ease-of-use.  That's correct, of course, but it seems that someone made
a bad decision in this regard.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=29&tag=nl.e589
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2007/02/running-vista-every-day.html
or http://tinyurl.com/yo42z7

Slowly, AACS -- the security in both Blu-ray and HD DVD -- has been
cracked. Now, it has been cracked even further.  As I have said before,
what will be interesting to watch is how well HD DVD and Blu-ray
recover.  Both were built expecting these sorts of cracks, and both have
mechanisms to recover security for future movies.  It remains to be seen
how well these recovery systems will work.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/13/bluray_and_hddvd_bro.html
Previous cracks:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/aacs_cracked_1.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/bluray_cracked.html

Was the TSA website hacked, or was it just incredibly bad webpage design
and coding?
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/02/homeland_securi.html
http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2007/02/tsa-has-outsourced-tsa-traveler.html
or http://tinyurl.com/ywm7qx

Real-world back doors: a social engineering test where the attackers
entered the building through a back-door left open for smokers.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/15/smoke_ban_hack_risk/

OpenSSL is now FIPS 140-2 certified.  The process took five years.  This
is a major problem with long certification cycles; software development
cycles are faster.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/08/1935232

Is everything a bomb these days?  In New Mexico, a bomb squad blew up
two CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of church pews, that played
pornographic messages during Mass.  This is a pretty funny high school
prank and I hope the kids that did it get suitably punished.  But
they're not terrorists.  And I have a hard time believing that the
police actually thought CD players were bombs.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/22/church.foul.language.ap/index.html
Meanwhile, the British Police Force blew up a tape dispenser left
outside a police station in Northern Ireland.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6387857.stm

And not to be outdone, the Dutch police mistook one of their own
transmitters for a bomb.  At least they didn't blow anything up.
http://www.playfuls.com/news_10_14162-Dutch-Police-Seal-Off-Street-On-Taking-Own\
-Transmitter-For-Bomb.html
or http://tinyurl.com/2b6qn4
Okay, everyone.  We need some ideas, here.  If we're going to think
everything weird is a bomb, then the false alarms are going to kill any
hope of security.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/nonterrorist_em.html

If you're having trouble identifying bombs, this quiz should help.
http://www.bombornot.com
And here's a relevant cartoon.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/919.html

The Boston police blew up a traffic counter.  I'm beginning to think
that something is seriously wrong with the police chain of command in
Boston.  Boston PD: Putting the "error" in "terror."
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/28/boston_police_blow_u.html
http://wbztv.com/local/local_story_059122735.html
http://www3.whdh.com:80/news/articles/local/BO44642/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/03/boston_police_b.html

Lists of default router passwords:
http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/dpl.html
http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/
http://www.governmentsecurity.org/articles/DefaultLoginsandPasswordsforNetworked\
Devices.php
http://www.virus.org/default-password/

"Windows for Warships."  I'm not sure this is a good idea.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea/
A related article from 1998, involving Windows NT and the USS Yorktown.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,13987,00.html

There's a rumor about a software bug in the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter.
  It seems that the computer systems had problems flying west across the
International Date Line.  No word as to what operating system the
computers were running.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
http://www.f-16.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=91277
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/02/14/212102/pictures-navigational-sof\
tware-glitch-forces-lockheed-martin-f-22-raptors-back-to-hawaii.html
or http://tinyurl.com/26p5s6
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6225

With all the attention on foreign money laundering, we're ignoring the
problem in the U.S.
http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0212/096.html

Faking hardware memory access:
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=118291

There's good news regarding Canada's anti-terrorism laws.  First,
security certificates were declared unconstitutional.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/02/23/security-certificate.html
And second, the House of Commons voted against extending two provisions
of a 2001 anti-terrorism law.  They expired at the end of February.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/02/27/terror-vote.html
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/186476

Paranoia poster:
http://digitalfury.popmartian.com/images/20070202/paranoia.jpg

Powder-sized RFID tags:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6389581.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/19/rfid_powder/

Xbox 360 privilege escalation attack:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/461489/30/0/threaded

Very interesting article about Apple's DRM system, which they call
"FairPlay."
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/2A351C60-A4E5-4764-A083-FF8610E6\
6A46.html
or http://tinyurl.com/229pcm

The cost-effectiveness of sky marshals in Australia is being debated.  I
have not seen any similar cost analysis from the United States.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/skyhigh-cost-of-flying-cops/2007/02/24/11\
71734074064.html
or http://tinyurl.com/ywpt4t

Fascinating article about changing generational notions of privacy:
http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/

The FBI issued illegal National Security Letters under the USA PATRIOT Act
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/03/fbi_issued_ille_1.html

"Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders":
http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/pdfs/esecman.en.pdf

Cloning a UK RFID passport:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=4400\
69&in_page_id=1770
http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/06/daily_mail_passport_clone/
Nothing I haven't said before, only a demonstration of how insecure they
are.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/renew_your_pass.html

Some airport baggage handlers used their official credentials to bypass
security and smuggle guns and marijuana onto an airplane.  This kind of
thing is inevitable.  Whenever you have a system that requires trusted
people -- that is, every security system -- there is the possibility
that those trusted people will not behave in a trustworthy manner.  But
there are ways of minimizing this risk.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/08/national/main2549166.shtml

Find out if you're on the "no fly" list:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/are-you-on-the-no-fly-lis_b_42443.html
or http://tinyurl.com/29ve8o

Vista activation security cracked by brute force:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37941

I'm tired of headlines like this:  "New autopilot 'will make another
9/11 impossible.'"  Why are people so narrowly focused?  The goal isn't
to protect against another 9/11.  The goal is to protect against another
horrific terrorist incident.
http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/new-autopilot-will-make-another-911-impossib\
le
or http://tinyurl.com/2862gm
Stop focusing on the tactics, people.  Look at the broad threats.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secur.html
I've written about this particular countermeasure before.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/07/remotecontrol_a.html

Insurance and risk cartoon:
http://www.wondermark.com/d/279.html

Interesting article on the difficulty of profiling terrorists:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031101618.\
html


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      The Doghouse: Onboard Threat Detection System



It's almost too absurd to even write about seriously -- this plan to
spot terrorists in airplane seats:

"Cameras fitted to seat-backs will record every twitch, blink, facial
expression or suspicious movement before sending the data to onboard
software which will check it against individual passenger profiles."

And:

"They say that rapid eye movements, blinking excessively, licking lips
or ways of stroking hair or ears are classic symptoms of somebody trying
to conceal something."

"A separate microphone will hear and record even whispered remarks.
Islamic suicide bombers are known to whisper texts from the Koran in the
moments before they explode bombs."

"The software being developed by the scientists will be so sophisticated
that it will be able to take account of nervous flyers or people with a
natural twitch, helping to ensure there are no false alarms."

The only thing I can think of is that some company press release got
turned into real news without a whole lot of thinking.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=4353\
42&in_page_id=1770
or http://tinyurl.com/2oqsyn


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Private Police Forces



In Raleigh, N.C., employees of Capitol Special Police patrol apartment
buildings, a bowling alley and nightclubs, stopping suspicious people,
searching their cars and making arrests.

Sounds like a good thing, but Capitol Special Police isn't a police
force at all -- it's a for-profit security company hired by private
property owners.

This isn't unique. Private security guards outnumber real police more
than 5 to 1, and increasingly act like them.

They wear uniforms, carry weapons and drive lighted patrol cars on
private properties like banks and apartment complexes and in public
areas like bus stations and national monuments. Sometimes they operate
as ordinary citizens and can only make citizen's arrests, but in more
and more states they're being granted official police powers.

This trend should greatly concern citizens. Law enforcement should be a
government function, and privatizing it puts us all at risk.

Most obviously, there's the problem of agenda. Public police forces are
charged with protecting the citizens of the cities and towns over which
they have jurisdiction. Of course, there are instances of policemen
overstepping their bounds, but these are exceptions, and the police
officers and departments are ultimately responsible to the public.

Private police officers are different. They don't work for us; they work
for corporations. They're focused on the priorities of their employers
or the companies that hire them. They're less concerned with due
process, public safety and civil rights.

Also, many of the laws that protect us from police abuse do not apply to
the private sector. Constitutional safeguards that regulate police
conduct, interrogation and evidence collection do not apply to private
individuals. Information that is illegal for the government to collect
about you can be collected by commercial data brokers, then purchased by
the police.

We've all seen policemen "reading people their rights" on television cop
shows. If you're detained by a private security guard, you don't have
nearly as many rights.

For example, a federal law known as Section 1983 allows you to sue for
civil rights violations by the police but not by private citizens. The
Freedom of Information Act allows us to learn what government law
enforcement is doing, but the law doesn't apply to private individuals
and companies. In fact, most of your civil rights protections apply only
to real police.

Training and regulation is another problem. Private security guards
often receive minimal training, if any. They don't graduate from police
academies. And while some states regulate these guard companies, others
have no regulations at all: anyone can put on a uniform and play
policeman. Abuses of power, brutality, and illegal behavior are much
more common among private security guards than real police.

A horrific example of this happened in South Carolina in 1995. Ricky
Coleman, an unlicensed and untrained Best Buy security guard with a
violent criminal record, choked a fraud suspect to death while another
security guard held him down.

This trend is larger than police. More and more of our nation's prisons
are being run by for-profit corporations. The IRS has started
outsourcing some back-tax collection to debt-collection companies that
will take a percentage of the money recovered as their fee. And there
are about 20,000 private police and military personnel in Iraq, working
for the Defense Department.

Throughout most of history, specific people were charged by those in
power to keep the peace, collect taxes and wage wars. Corruption and
incompetence were the norm, and justice was scarce. It is for this very
reason that, since the 1600s, European governments have been built
around a professional civil service to both enforce the laws and protect
rights.

Private security guards turn this bedrock principle of modern government
on its head. Whether it's FedEx policemen in Tennessee who can request
search warrants and make arrests; a privately funded surveillance
helicopter in Jackson, Miss., that can bypass constitutional
restrictions on aerial spying; or employees of Capitol Special Police in
North Carolina who are lobbying to expand their jurisdiction beyond the
specific properties they protect -- privately funded policemen are not
protecting us or working in our best interests.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100665.\
html
or http://tinyurl.com/y26xgr
http://www.nlg-npap.org/html/research/LWprivatepolice.pdf

This op-ed originally appeared in the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune":
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1027072.html

When I posted this on my blog, I got a lot of negative comments from
Libertarians who believe that somehow, the market makes private
policemen more responsible to the public than government policemen.  I'm
sorry, but this is nonsense.  Best Buy is going to be responsive to its
customers; an apartment complex is going to be responsive to its
renters.  Petty criminals who prey on those businesses are an economic
externality; they're not going to enter into the economic arguments.
After all, people might be more likely to shop at Best Buy if their
security guards save them money by keeping crime down -- who cares if
they crack a few non-customer heads while doing it.

None of this is meant to imply that public police forces are magically
honorable and ethical; just that the economic forces are different.  So
people can consider carefully which is the lesser of two evils, here's
Radley Balko's paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in
America":
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476
And an interactive map of public police raids gone bad:
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      BT Counterpane News


Schneier is a recipient of the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, together with
Yochai Benkler and Cory Doctorow.
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_03.php#005149

PC World named Schneier the 31st most influential person on the Web:
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,129301/printable.html

Article on Schneier from the Hindustan Times:
http://www.schneier.com/news-031.html

As part of BT's Big Thinkers series, Esther Dyson interviewed Schneier
and two other people (Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman of F-Secure Corporation;
and Michael Barrett, PayPal's CISO) on network security issues.
http://www.networked.bt.com/bigthinkers_security.php
The other interviews in the series are here.
http://www.networked.bt.com/bigthinkers.php

Schneier is giving a public lecture in London on March 21:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/newsAndEvents/2007events/SSI\
T7.htm
or http://tinyurl.com/25c2ap

Schneier is speaking at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, NJ
on March 25th.

Schneier is speaking at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD, on April 10th:

Schneier is speaking at the Security and Liberty Forum at UNC Chapel
Hill on April 14:
http://www.seclibforum.org/


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      The Doghouse: Sniffex



It's nothing more than a homeland security scam: a dowsing rod for
explosives.  That, and a pump-and-dump stock scam.  The Sniffex site is
down, but Google has a cache, and they seem to be back as Homeland
Safety International.  They also have a patent.

http://www.sniffex.com/
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:T397Ap3BNTIJ:www.sniffex.com/+SNIFFEX&hl=en&\
ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=opera
or http://tinyurl.com/ysl3le
http://www.homelandsafetyintl.com/
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%\
2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,344,818.PN.&OS=PN/6,344,818&RS=\
PN/6,344,818
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/02/sniffing_bomb_d.html or
http://tinyurl.com/28mg44


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Drive-By Pharming



Sid Stamm, Zulfikar Ramzan, and Markus Jakobsson have developed a
clever, and potentially devastating, attack against home routers,
something they call "drive-by pharming."

First, the attacker creates a web page containing a simple piece of
malicious JavaScript code.  When the page is viewed, the code makes a
login attempt into the user's home broadband router, and then attempts
to change its DNS server settings to point to an attacker-controlled DNS
server.  Once the user's machine receives the updated DNS settings from
the router (after the machine is rebooted) future DNS requests are made
to and resolved by the attacker's DNS server.

And then the attacker basically owns the victim's web connection.

The main condition for the attack to be successful is that the attacker
can guess the router password.  This is surprisingly easy, since home
routers come with a default password that is uniform and often never
changed.

They've written proof of concept code that can successfully carry out
the steps of the attack on Linksys, D-Link, and NETGEAR home routers.
If users change their home broadband router passwords to something
difficult to guess, they are safe from this attack.

Cisco says that 77 of its routers are vulnerable.

Note that the attack does not require the user to download any malicious
software; simply viewing a web page with the malicious JavaScript code
is enough.

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2007/02/driveby_phar\
ming_how_clicking_1.html
or http://tinyurl.com/2uqwug
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/Driveby_Pharming.pdf
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/1421238
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleI\
d=9011588&intsrc=hm_list
or http://tinyurl.com/2vy7xv

Blog comment:  "The attack is called 'CSRF' Cross-Site
Request-Forgeries. It's been documented for several years, I remember
stumbling on it myself 2-3 years ago, and being very surprised that it
doesn't get wider publicity -- that has luckily changed in the past
year. It's not only routers, but all sorts of intranet-web applications
are open to this line of attack (especially when it's standard-software,
or someone has insider-knowledge; and users stay logged in for most for
most of the time)."


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Cloning RFID Chips Made by HID



Remember the Cisco fiasco from BlackHat 2005?  Next in the stupid box is
RFID-card manufacturer HID, who has prevented Chris Paget from
presenting research on how to clone those cards.  The ACLU presented in
his place.

Won't these companies ever learn?  HID won't prevent the public from
learning about the vulnerability, and it will end up looking like heavy
handed goons.  And it's not even secret; Paget demonstrated the attack
to me and others at the RSA Conference last month.

There's a difference between a security flaw and information about a
security flaw; HID needs to fix the first and not worry about the
second.  Full disclosure benefits us all.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=1182851
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/022707-battle-brewing-over-rfid-chip-hacki\
ng.html
or http://tinyurl.com/2dvqww
http://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/bytes_and_pieces/blackhat_presenters_thr\
eatened_with_patent_suit_for_exposing_rfid_vulnerabilities.shtml
or http://tinyurl.com/2q8tkj

Attack demonstration:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/010227.html

Cisco story:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/cisco_harasses.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/08/more_lynncisco.html

Full disclosure:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0111.html#1


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

      Comments from Readers



There are hundreds of comments -- many of them interesting -- on these
topics on my blog. Search for the story you want to comment on, and join
in.

http://www.schneier.com/blog


** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

CRYPTO-GRAM is a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses,
insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.  You can
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<http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>.  Back issues are also
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Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to
colleagues and friends who will find it valuable.  Permission is also
granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety.

CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier.  Schneier is the author of the
best sellers "Beyond Fear," "Secrets and Lies," and "Applied
Cryptography," and an inventor of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms.
He is founder and CTO of BT Counterpane, and is a member of the Board of
Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).  He is a
frequent writer and lecturer on security topics.  See
<http://www.schneier.com>.

BT Counterpane is the world's leading protector of networked information
- the inventor of outsourced security monitoring and the foremost
authority on effective mitigation of emerging IT threats.  BT
Counterpane protects networks for Fortune 1000 companies and governments
world-wide.  See <http://www.counterpane.com>.

Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter.  Opinions expressed are not
necessarily those of BT or BT Counterpane.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Bruce Schneier.

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

(
http://www.venterinstitute.org/press/news/news_2007_03_13.php
)

More than Six Million New Genes, Thousands of New Protein Families, and
Incredible Degree of Microbial Diversity Discovered from First Phase of
Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition

Unprecedented amount of data deposited in CAMERA database; features
enhanced tools to visualize and analyze metagenomic data

ROCKVILLE, MD�March 13, 2007� Researchers from the J. Craig Venter
Institute (JCVI) today announced the publication of several studies from
the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS) in PLoS Biology
(www.plosbiology.org) detailing the discovery of millions of new genes,
thousands of new protein families and specifically the characterization
of thousands of new protein kinases from ocean microbes using whole
environment shotgun sequencing and new computational tools. Researchers
believe these data will lead to better understanding of key biological
processes which could eventually offer new ideas for alternative energy
production and could offer solutions to deal with climate change and
other environmental issues.

The GOS dataset is 90-fold larger than other marine metagenomic
datasets, thus making it the largest ever released in the public domain.
The GOS analysis also nearly doubles the number of previously known
proteins. This enormous amount of data allowed the researchers to better
understand the genomic structure and evolution of microorganisms, as
well as the function of important protein families such as protein
kinases, which are key regulators of cellular function in all organisms.
Although invisible to the naked eye, microbes make up the vast majority
of life on the planet and are responsible for creation and maintenance
of Earth�s atmosphere, it is important to understand the role and
function of these organisms to ensure the survival of the planet and
human life on it.

�This publication is not only providing an unprecedented level of new
genes and protein family discoveries, but is also pivotal in that we
have provided compelling analysis of evolution and function of these
genes and proteins within the larger context of organisms interacting
with their environment,� said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., founder and
chairman, the J. Craig Venter Institute. �Given the findings, it�s clear
that we�ve only begun to scratch the surface of understanding the
microbial world around us.�

The Sorcerer II Expedition began with a pilot project in 2003 in the
Sargasso Sea near Bermuda in which more than one million new genes and
hundreds of new photoreceptors were discovered in what was thought to be
an area of low diversity. The GOS publication today is a result of ocean
water sampling conducted from Halifax, Nova Scotia to the Eastern
Tropical Pacific during the two year circumnavigation by the Sorcerer II
Expedition. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the United States
Department of Energy, Office of Science, funded the sequencing and
analysis of the Expedition. The JCVI funded the operation of the vessel.

The group also announced today the launch of a new online database and
high-speed computational resource, Community Cyberinfrastructure for
Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA). Funded
by a grant from the Moore Foundation of $24.5 million over seven years,
CAMERA was developed by the UC San Diego Division of the California
Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) in
partnership with JCVI and UCSD�s Center for Earth Observations and
Applications (CEOA) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

"The scale and complexity of the GOS data required Calit2 to architect a
powerful new cyberinfrastructure to enable both interactive access as
well as high performance computation on the data by the global
metagenomic community, " said Larry Smarr, Calit2 director and principal
investigator on CAMERA.

CAMERA houses metagenomic data and provides the advanced software tools
and computer hardware to analyze these data. Using dedicated optical
circuits, CAMERA permits scientists to connect their local laboratory
computers directly to the CAMERA database and tools using the National
LambdaRail or international optical circuits, resulting in up to a
hundred-fold increase in bandwidth over current standards. CAMERA has
been in beta testing since January 2007 and today is available to
researchers worldwide. In addition to the CAMERA database, the GOS data
is also being deposited in the U.S. National Institutes of Health�s
public database, GenBank.

The GOS publication was a result of intensive analysis of these data by
scientists from the JCVI along with collaborators at four University of
California campuses (San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Davis),
University of Southern California, Salk Institute for Biological
Studies, Burnham Institute, University of Hawaii, Brown University,
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Universidad de Costa Rica,
Universidad de Concepcion, Bedford Institute of Oceanography,
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and Rutgers University.
PLoS Biology Publications: The Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition

The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Northwest Atlantic
through Eastern Pacific

Rusch et al. describe the results of metagenomic analysis of 37 samples
taken aboard Sorcerer II during its voyage between Halifax, Nova Scotia
and French Polynesia in 2003 to 2004, combined with seven samples
collected during the pilot study in the Sargasso Sea. To capture the
DNA, scientists onboard the Sorcerer II collected water every 200
nautical miles and then filtered it through progressively smaller
filters to collect bacteria and then viruses. The DNA extracted for
these publications were from the filter that collects mostly bacteria.

The group analyzed a massive dataset consisting of 7.7 million DNA
sequences totaling 6.3 billion base pairs. Following from the Sargasso
Sea pilot study, they continued to find a great degree of diversity both
within and across the sampling sites. Researchers identified 60 highly
abundant ribotypes (roughly equivalent to species) however, the
inter-species variation and the variation of organisms within the same
environment suggests that while the microbes might be similar at an rRNA
level they can differ greatly at a biochemical and genomic level.

While variation is known to be closely linked to environment, this all
encompassing genetic survey has identified new and unexpected links
between variation and the environment. For example, the class of
proteins known as proteorhodopsins absorbs either blue or green light.
This study revealed that the blue and green variants are found in
different environments with blue light preferred in the open ocean and
green light preferred in coastal environments. Identifying these
associations should greatly enhance our understanding of marine systems
and the environmental factors upon which they depend.

To handle the enormous volume of data generated from this phase of the
Expedition, the team developed new computational methods to assemble and
analyze these data. One comparative genomic method termed �fragment
recruitment,� allowed researchers to look at genome structure, microbial
evolution, and diversity on many levels. Another, �extreme assembly�, as
the name implies, enabled researchers to assemble very large segments of
DNA from the abundant but previously hard to analyze genomes of
organisms. Finally, they developed a tool to assess the similarity
between whole metagenome databases.

According to lead author Doug Rusch, Ph.D., computational scientist at
the JCVI, �We know so little about the organisms in our environment
mostly because we have lacked the genomic and computational tools for
understanding and examining these organisms. We believe that this
publication and the new tools we developed will help to unleash a new
era of enhanced knowledge of the biological processes of microbial
communities and this new understanding will begin to unlock the
mysteries of unseen life.�

The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Expanding the Universe
of Protein Families

Characterization of microbial communities has been limited in the past
by the difficulty in culturing organisms in the laboratory. With whole
environment shotgun sequencing techniques, environments such as ocean
microbial communities can now be better understood at the DNA and
protein level.

Yooseph et al. report on the 6.12 million new proteins uncovered from
7.7 million GOS sequences by using a novel sequence clustering approach.
This nearly doubles the number of known proteins. The researchers found
that the GOS dataset covered almost all of the known prokaryote
(bacterial and archaeal) protein families and that there were 1,700
totally unique large protein families in the GOS dataset, not matching
any known families. A surprising number of the new protein families
discovered are in viruses. Researchers were also able to match 6,000
previously unmatched sequences in current protein databases to proteins
found in the GOS dataset.

Given the extraordinary rate of discovery of new proteins and protein
families, the researchers conclude that there are likely many more
protein families to be discovered both in microbes and viruses given the
rate of discovery in this first phase of the GOS Expedition. The data
also suggest that this is much more yet to be discovered about
biological diversity of microbes.

The team also found that several protein domains (the conserved
structural units in proteins) that were previously thought to exist only
in one of the four kingdoms of life (bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes,
viruses) have GOS examples in another kingdom. These kingdom-crossing
families may be proteins whose lineages are more ancient than previously
assumed or they may have arisen due to lateral gene transfers.

To assess the impact of the GOS data on known protein families, the team
also investigated several protein families in detail. In addition to
increasing substantially the size and diversity of these families, the
GOS sequences increased the understanding of the evolution and function
of these proteins.

One example is those that repair DNA damage due to UV light
(photolyases). While sunlight has benefits to the microbes, like with
humans, sunlight also has the potential to be harmful to cells exposed
to it. The team discovered many new proteins that protect these
organisms from UV ray damage and some that are involved in repairing UV
damage. These proteins were found in all organisms in the dataset, even
in viruses.

Another example is glutamine synthetase (GS), the protein that plays a
key role in nitrogen metabolism. More than 9,000 GS or GS-like sequences
were uncovered, with a large number of sequences of type II GS (one of
the three GS types). This was unexpected because type II GS is
associated more with eukaryotes, not bacteria and viruses, and not many
eukaryotes are expected in the filters that were analyzed. The
researchers theorize that this could be due to lateral gene transfer
from eukaryotes, or more likely due to gene duplication before
prokaryotes and eukaryotes diverged into two branches of life.

Shibu Yooseph, Ph.D., lead author and computational scientist at JCVI
said, �The analysis we have done so far with this publication shows a
tremendous diversity of organisms at the protein level and going
forward, I think we will continue to see this tremendous amount of
diversity. These data open up a whole new set of research efforts from a
computational perspective in designing better tools to be able to deal
with this sort of data, as well as making observations on evolution and
how functions evolved for these protein families�

Structural and Functional Diversity of the Microbial Kinome

The availability of the GOS metagenomic data along with other large
microbial genome data sets is enabling more research into specific kinds
of protein families. Of particular interest to a wide variety of
researchers are kinase families. Protein kinases are protein enzymes
that regulate many of the most basic cellular functions in humans and
other eukaryotes. They are key targets for cancer and other disease drug
development.

Previously, it was thought that different families of kinases were
responsible for these types of cell regulation in prokaryotes (bacteria)
versus eukaryotes (animals and other non-bacteria). Eukaryote protein
kinases (ePK) were most common in eukaryotes, histidine kinases in
bacteria. However, in their PloS Biology publication Kennan et al. show
that with the scope and diversity of the GOS data that ePK-like kinases
(ELKs) are indeed very prevalent in bacteria, in fact, more so than
histidine kinases. This finding is even shedding some light on human
kinases.

The research team has shown that the ePK is just one family in a diverse
superfamily of enzymes that all share a common protein kinase-like (PKL)
fold (shape). Using sensitive profile methods, the researchers
discovered more than 45,000 kinase sequences from the GOS and other
public data sources and grouped these into 20 diverse families, of which
ePKs were just one. The GOS data doubles the size of most PKL families
and triples the number of known ePK-like kinases (ELK). Many of these
families exhibited eukaryote-like structure and function of their
proteins and thus the researchers conclude that several of these protein
families existed before the divergence of the three domains of life.

The authors concluded this work shows the power of metagenomic data in
allowing better understanding of any gene family and has opened the door
to further research into the mechanisms of protein families and their
function, structure and evolution.
About

JCVI
The J. Craig Venter Institute is a not-for-profit research institute
which through its two operating divisions, The Institute for Genomic
Research (TIGR) and The Center for the Advancement of Genomics (TCAG)
advances the science of genomics; the understanding of its implications
for society; and communication of those results to the scientific
community, the public, and policymakers. Founded by J. Craig Venter,
Ph.D., the JCVI is home to approximately 500 scientists and staff with
expertise in human and evolutionary biology, genetics,
bioinformatics/informatics, information technology, high-throughput DNA
sequencing, genomic and environmental policy research, and public
education in science and science policy. The JCVI is a 501 (c)(3)
organization. For additional information, please visit www.jcvi.org

Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in September 2000,
works in collaboration with grantees and other partners to achieve
significant and measurable outcomes in three areas: environmental
conservation, science and the San Francisco Bay Area. In April 2004, the
Foundation launched its 10-year Marine Microbiology Initiative, with the
goal of attaining new knowledge regarding the composition, function and
ecological role of microbial communities in the world�s oceans.
www.moore.org

Calit2
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information
Technology, a partnership between UC San Diego and UC Irvine, houses
over 1,000 researchers organized around more than 50 projects on the
future of telecommunications and information technology and how these
technologies will transform a range of applications important to the
economy and citizens' quality of life. www.calit2.net

US Department of Energy Office of Science
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic
research in the physical sciences in the nation, manages 10 world-class
national laboratories, and builds and operates some of the nation's most
advanced R&D user facilities. Its website address is
www.science.doe.gov. DOE's Genomics: GTL program aims to use the
department's unique computational capabilities and research facilities
to understand the activities of single-cell organisms on three levels:
the proteins and multi-molecular machines that perform most of the
cell's work; the gene regulatory networks that control these processes;
and microbial associations or communities in which groups of different
microbes carry out fundamental functions in nature. Once researchers
understand how life functions at the microbial level, they hope to use
the capabilities of these organisms to help meet many of our national
challenges in energy and the environment. The program will combine
research in biology, engineering and computation with the development of
novel facilities for high-throughput biology projects. More information
on the department's genomics programs is on the Web at
www.doegenomes.org.

PLoS Biology
PLoS Biology is a peer-reviewed , open-access journal that features
research articles of exceptional significance in all areas of biology.
It is ranked in the top tier of life science journals by the Institute
for Scientific Information (ISI) , with an impact factor of 14.7.
Media Contacts

JCVI: Heather E. Kowalski, 202-294-9206,
hkowalski@...

Calit2: Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@...

PLoS Biology: Natalie Bouaravong, 415-568-3445, nbouaravong@...

I can just imagine U0126 available as a nasal spray, you could live
your entire life in cut and edit mode. The possibilities for crime
are mind-staggering. And yes of course the "Brave New World"
scenarios are very easy to imagine. I had a discussion with someone
off this list where the implication was that U0126 had totalitarian
possibilities (in the ability to censor memories) but materials such
as LSD tend to awaken more free and libertarian possibilities in users.

I think that all psychotropics probably have abilities to either
enable the state or enable the individual, and I strongly suspect
that a variety of psychotropics, psychedelics, and cognitive
enhancers will play a role in the Singularity.

The empathogen MDMA is sometimes viewed by legalization advocates as
evocative of greater individual freedom. But I can see a government
role for MDMA-style drugs in helping people to accept the current
regime, a class structure or a life situation that would otherwise
make them miserable. I suspect that all psychotropics have military,
social control, or economic productivity applications.

Create a bacteria that generates DMT and lives in the bloodstream of
only certain genotypes typical of an enemy nation. Unleash it against
your enemy and slowly mop up the country full of temporarily insane
citizens. I can imagine a science fiction scenario where the entire
human species is wiped out by an out of control DMT/LSD/etc
-synthesis bacteria. If we cannot think rationally, the entire system
of support dies and us along with it.

Torture using extremely high doses of LSD (10,000+ micrograms).

Use a psychedelic analogue to make it easier for future soldiers to
engage mind-machine interfaces - I can easily see psychedelics as a
"lubricant" to enable neural interfaces, possibly an early training
tool or light doses used to make transition from physical to other
neural spaces easier.

Use a MDMA analogue to drop barriers between minds, making supergroup
synergistic minds easier; creating new ways to solve problems for
corporations, military and intelligence organizations. Easing the end
of privacy and privacy-related inhibitions. Borgification probably
relies heavily on drugs.

And psychedelics unleash creativity - and creativity can be used to
create any kind of new thing, including those that lead to greater
wealth and power.

Drugs like Modafinil or deprenyl seem faintly like Vinge's Focus
(Deepness in the Sky). They make cognitive tasks much more
interesting and thereby makes the user a better worker and more
productive / a better drone.

Psychedelics aren't just for hippies any more!



At 08:54 AM 3/12/2007, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070305/pf/070305-17_pf.html
>
>Published online: 11 March 2007
>
>Wipe out a single memory
>Drug can clear away one fearful memory while leaving another intact.
>
>Kerri Smith
>
>A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats,
>leaving other recollections intact.

Your word for today: Herbertsmithite

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325954.200&feedId=fundamentals_rss\
20

IN 1998, just after he won a share of the Nobel prize for physics, Robert
Laughlin of Stanford University in California was asked how his discovery of
"particles" with fractional charge, now called quasi-particles, would affect the
lives of ordinary people. "It probably won't," he said, "unless people are
concerned about how the universe works."

Well, people were. Xiao-Gang Wen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and Michael Levin at Harvard University ran with Laughlin's ideas and have come
up with a prediction for a new state of matter, and even a tantalising picture
of the nature of space-time itself. Levin presented their work at the
Topological Quantum Computing conference at the University of California, Los
Angeles, early this month.

The first hint that a new type of matter may exist came in 1983. "Twenty five
years ago we thought we understood everything about how matter changes phase,"
says Wen. "Then along came an experiment that opened up a whole new world."

In the experiment, electrons moving in the interface between two semiconductors
behaved as though they were made up of particles with only a fraction of the
electron's charge. This so-called fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE)
suggested that electrons may not be elementary particles after all. However, it
soon became clear that electrons under certain conditions can congregate in a
way that gives them the illusion of having fractional charge - an explanation
that earned Laughlin, Horst St�rmer and Daniel Tsui the Nobel prize (New
Scientist, 31 January 1998, p 36).

Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter.
Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are
organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas
atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are
different. "If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE
system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step
back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each
other in well-defined steps.

It is as if the electrons are entangled. Today, physicists use the term to
describe a property in quantum mechanics in which particles can be linked
despite being separated by great distances. Wen speculated that FQHE systems
represented a state of matter in which entanglement was an intrinsic property,
with particles tied to each other in a complicated manner across the entire
material.

This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking
about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at
the ends of long "strings" of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a
model in which such strings are free to move "like noodles in a soup" and weave
together into huge "string-nets".

Light and matter unified

The pair ran simulations to see if their string-nets could give rise to
conventional particles and fractionally charged quasi-particles. They did. They
also found something even more surprising. As the net of strings vibrated, it
produced a wave that behaved according to a very familiar set of laws -
Maxwell's equations, which describe the behaviour of light. "A hundred and fifty
years after Maxwell wrote them down, here they emerged by accident," says Wen.

That wasn't all. They found that their model naturally gave rise to other
elementary particles, such as quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, and
the particles responsible for some of the fundamental forces, such as gluons and
the W and Z bosons.

  From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be
modelled in a similar way? "Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole
universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified
explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary
particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they
emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.

"Wen and Levin's theory is really beautiful stuff," says Michael Freedman, 1986
winner of the Fields medal, the highest prize in mathematics, and a quantum
computing specialist at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. "I admire their approach, which is to be suspicious of anything -
electrons, photons, Maxwell's equations - that everyone else accepts as
fundamental."

Other theories that try to explain the same phenomena abound, of course; Wen and
Levin realise that the burden of proof is on them. It may not be far off. Their
model predicts specific arrangements of atoms in the new state of matter, which
they dub the "string-net liquid", and Joel Helton's group at MIT might have
found it.

Helton was aware of Wen's work and decided to look for such materials. Trawling
through geology journals, his team spotted a candidate - a dark green crystal
that geologists stumbled across in the mountains of Chile in 1972. "The
geologists named it after a mineralogist they really admired, Herbert Smith,
labelled it and put it to one side," says team member Young Lee. "They didn't
realise the potential herbertsmithite would have for physicists years later."

Herbertsmithite (pictured) is unusual because its electrons are arranged in a
triangular lattice. Normally, electrons prefer to line up so that their spins
are in the opposite direction to that of their immediate neighbours, but in a
triangle this is impossible - there will always be neighbouring electrons
spinning in the same direction. Wen and Levin's model shows that such a system
would be a string-net liquid.

Although herbertsmithite exists in nature, the mineral contains impurities that
disrupt any string-net signatures, says Lee. So Helton's team made a pure sample
in the lab. "It was painstaking," says Lee. "It took us a full year to prepare
it and another year to analyse it."

The team measured the degree of magnetisation in the material, in response to an
applied magnetic field. If herbertsmithite behaves like ordinary matter, they
argue, then below about 26 �C the spins of its electrons should stop fluctuating
- a condition called magnetic order. But the team found no such transition, even
down to just a fraction above absolute zero.

They measured other properties, too, such as heat conduction. In conventional
solids, the relationship between their temperature and their ability to conduct
heat changes below a certain temperature, because the structure of the material
changes. The team found no sign of such a transition in herbertsmithite,
suggesting that, unlike other types of matter, its lowest energy state has no
discernible order. "We could have created something in the lab that nobody has
seen before," says Lee.

The team plans further tests to visualise the position of individual electrons,
looking for long-range entanglement by firing neutrons at the crystal and
observing how they scatter. "We want to see the dynamics of the spin," says Lee.
"If we tweak one [electron], we can see how the others are affected."

This intrigues Paul Fendley, a quantum computing specialist at the University of
Virginia, Charlottesville (see "Silicon for a quantum age"). "It's reasonable to
hope that we are seeing something exotic here," he says. "People are getting
very excited about this."

Even if herbertsmithite is not a new state of matter, we shouldn't be surprised
if one is found soon, as many teams are hunting for them, says Freedman. He says
people wrongly assume that particle accelerators are the only places where big
discoveries about matter can be made. "Accelerators are just recreating
conditions after the big bang and repeating experiments that are old hat for the
universe," he says. "But in labs people are creating [conditions] that are
colder than anywhere that has ever existed in the universe. We are bound to
stumble on something the universe has never seen before."

Silicon for a quantum age

Herbertsmithite could be the new silicon - the building block for quantum
computers.

In theory, quantum computers are far superior to classical computers. In
practice, they are difficult to construct because quantum bits, or qubits, are
extremely fragile. Even a slight knock can destroy stored information.

In the late 1980s, mathematician Michael Freedman, then at Harvard University,
and Alexei Kitaev, then at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Russia, independently came up with a radical solution to this problem. Instead
of storing qubits in properties of particles, such as an electron's spin, they
suggested that qubits could be encoded into properties shared by the whole
material, and so would be harder to disrupt (New Scientist, 24 January 2004, p
30). "The trouble is the physical materials we know about, like the chair you're
sitting on, don't actually have these exotic properties," says Freedman.

Physicists told Freedman that the material he needed simply didn't exist, but
Joel Helton's group at MIT might just prove them wrong. The material would be a
string-net liquid with elementary and quasi-particles at the end of each string.
Physicists could manipulate quasi-particles with electric fields, braiding them
around each other, encoding information in the number of times the strings twist
and knot, says Freedman. A disturbance might knock the whole braid, but it won't
change the number of twists - protecting the information.

"The hardware itself would correct any errors," says Miguel Angel Martin-Delgado
of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.

  From issue 2595 of New Scientist magazine, 17 March 2007, page 8-9

The New York Times
http://nytimes.com/2007/03/18/books/1154668583393.html

March 18, 2007
Girls Will Be Boys
By MARY ROACH

THE FIRST MAN-MADE MAN
The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical
Revolution.

By Pagan Kennedy.

Illustrated. 214 pp. Bloomsbury. $23.95.

Michael Dillon wanted nothing more than to be invisible, to be one of the guys.
Problem: he was born with a woman's body. Everything he did toward realizing his
humble dream - the cross-dressing, the hormones and surgeries and the chimera
that resulted - pushed it further from his grasp. He went through life as the
most visible sort of human being: a physical anomaly. He was the first person on
record to undergo surgery (13 operations between 1946 and 1949) to change his
gender.

Pagan Kennedy, the author of "Black Livingstone" and other books, does for
Dillon what he never succeeded in doing for himself. She makes us see him as an
ordinary, sane Englishman, worthy of respect and acceptance. Her compassion and
restraint are laudable. She had access to before-and-after close-up medical
photographs of Dillon but omits them. Her description of the surgeries is brief
and devoid of graphic detail. She resists the temptation to highlight the
comically surreal nature of her material. If you read this book, you will not
gawk or laugh at Michael Dillon.

Dillon's story, as Kennedy tells it, is itself a chimera: part biography, part
medical history. Here the surgery is seamless, the hybrid better than the sum of
its parts. "The First Man-Made Man" is oddly mesmerizing, as close to
Shakespearean tragedy as you can come with the words "tube pedicle" and "mast of
cartilage" in your book. It's Romiette and Julio.

Dillon fell in love but once in his life. In 1950, he met Roberta Cowell, the
only woman who might understand and even love him. Cowell, born (and equipped)
Robert Cowell, came to him for advice. Dillon, who became a doctor, had written
an obscure book about hormones and transsexuality, which Cowell read. With
Dillon's help, Roberta Cowell could become Dillon's modest fantasy: a woman to
whom he could reveal his secret ("a semierect, mostly numb sexual organ that
resembled a small party balloon"), and who might have him anyway.

Alas, Roberta didn't love Michael Dillon. She led him on, because, well, she
needed him to remove her testicles. Owing to an obscure bit of British law, the
physical mutilation of a man who would otherwise be fit for military service was
then illegal. Later in the 1950s and through the 1960s, British men seeking
sex-change surgery could travel to Continental Europe for the prerequisite
amputation of their gonads - "castrated abroad," the medical records would say,
lending an aura of worldliness and class to the proceeding - but for Roberta
this was not yet an option.

The besotted Dillon risked not getting his medical license for Cowell: he
performed the castration himself. For the actual construction of a vagina, he
introduced Cowell to Harold Gillies, the maverick British surgeon who had
recently engineered Dillon's own transformation. Cowell's genital makeover was
another surgical first, predating by almost a year the hyper-publicized
metamorphosis of Christine (n�e George) Jorgensen, in Copenhagen. Shortly after
the operation, Dillon proposed marriage and Cowell promptly jilted him. You
could see it coming. As a man, Cowell flew fighter planes and raced sports cars.
As a woman, she wore "va-va-voom" peroxide wigs and high heels. It wasn't so
much Dillon's anatomy that put her off, it was the prospect of a quiet life as a
doctor's wife.

I'm afraid I jilted Dillon too. I wanted to stand by him through all 200 pages,
but I fell hard for Dr. Gillies. It is no small feat to make a romance between
the world's first two transsexuals seem ho-hum, but Gillies almost manages.
During World War I, he persuaded the British government to devote one wing of a
military hospital to the cosmetic repair of burned and maimed soldiers - a
subspecialty all but unknown at the time. "Gillies made up plastic surgery as he
went along, smoking furiously, operating for a dozen hours a day, sketching
noses on the backs of envelopes," Kennedy writes. She describes him preparing
for the world's first male-to-female transsexual surgery: cigarette in hand,
doing a dry run on a cadaver while Cowell sits nervously in the waiting room in
a skirt and blond wig. It's heady stuff.

Gillies was altering not merely faces and bodies, but the very nature of
surgery. For the first time, operations were being done not out of medical
necessity, but for the patient's emotional well-being. "If it gives real
happiness," Gillies reasoned, "that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can
give."

Happiness eluded Michael Dillon. Isolated, depressed, hounded by the press, he
traveled to India and, bizarrely, to a series of ever more remote Tibetan
monasteries. He could not speak the language of his fellow novices, but with his
shaved head and robes, he felt he fit in someplace. Sadly, he faced prejudice in
the monasteries too, and his visa ran out before he was allowed to become a
full-fledged monk. In 1962, he died impoverished near the border of Ladakh. He
was 47, and had been trying to get back to the monastery where he'd felt at
home. Dillon's is the tragedy of a man born too soon.

Mary Roach, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of "Spook:
Science Tackles the Afterlife" and "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/blade_pr.html

Blade Runner
His legs were amputated when he was a year old. Now Oscar Pistorius is on track
to make the South African Olympic team. Is he an engineering marvel — or just
one hell of a sprinter?
By Josh McHugh

Footage by Baerbel Schmidt. Music by Michael Calore.

I first hear it as I’m coming out of a turn on the track at the University of
Pretoria’s High Performance Centre. It’s 100 meters to the finish line.
I’m pumping my legs as fast as I can when a sort of snick snick snick snick
starts getting louder, like I’m being chased by a giant pair of scissors. At
50 meters to go, the sound is at my left shoulder, and then Oscar Pistorius
blows past me; the snick snick fades away ahead. By the time I cross the finish
line, the South African sprinter has already turned around and is catching his
breath, leaning forward, hands on his knees.

He ran 200 meters. I ran only 150; he spotted me the difference. Still, his win
comes as no surprise. Two years ago Pistorius ran the 200 in 21.34 seconds,
matching the women’s world record time set by Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988
and missing the qualifying time for the 2008 Olympics by just three-quarters of
a second.

“Nice running, bru,” Pistorius says in his Afrikaans-tinged lilt. Then he
turns his attention to a pair of sprinters from the women’s track team,
stretching before their workout. He suggests they upgrade to more streamlined
running gear: bikinis. “Naughty!” one of them squeals, tousling his frosted
curly hair.

Pistorius and I grab bottles of water, and then he trots to the infield. He
sits, undoes a couple of straps, and tosses his legs onto the grass. The
Cheetahs, elegant, swooping lengths of carbon-fiber composite, are

better at running than walking.

I’m not the only runner who has learned to dread the scissoring sound of Oscar
Pistorius. Marlon Shirley and Brian Frasure, both of whom are below-the-knee
single amputees, were the world’s top two runners going into the Athens
Paralympics in 2004. Shirley finished in 22.67 seconds, breaking Frasure’s
world record for a one-legged amputee. But they were racing for silver. Three
strides ahead, Pistorius had demolished them both, clocking a time of 21.97.

Since Athens, Pistorius has been running in Paralympic events, but also against
able-bodied runners. After overhauling his training regimen and working with
redesigned, customized prototype prosthetics, Pistorius is on pace to run the
200- and 400-meter sprints fast enough to earn a spot on South Africa’s
Olympic team. He’d be the first amputee runner to cross over.

Pistorius is forcing the sports world to rethink what it means to be a disabled
athlete. Is he so close to world-class that his limitations, his prosthetic
legs, represent a disadvantage? Or are the Cheetahs an advantage, an artificial
enhancement that makes him faster than he would be if he had natural legs? After
all, improvements in human performance are normally limited by biology and
evolution. Not in Pistorius’ case. His legs are constantly upgraded by a pit
crew of Icelandic gearheads at one of the world’s most sophisticated
prosthetic manufacturing facilities.

No one expects able-bodied runners to compete head-to-head with wheelchair-bound
marathoners. The wheels confer an obvious speed advantage, and maybe Oscar
Pistorius’ Cheetahs do, too. So the real question is this: Do able-bodied
athletes need protection from him?

Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, with five digits on
each hand and two toes on each tiny foot. Each leg was missing its fibula, the
long, thin bone that anchors the calf muscle and forms the outside of the ankle.
His parents had a choice: consign their child to a wheelchair or amputate his
lower legs and let him learn to walk with prosthetics.

His father, Henke, head of the family’s zinc-mining company, asked a dozen
orthopedic surgeons which three doctors in the world they would choose to
perform a lower-leg amputation on their own child. Of the top three they named,
two were in the US and one was in South Africa. A month before Oscar’s first
birthday, Gerry Versveld removed the baby boy’s legs halfway between his knees
and ankles. Six months later, Oscar took his first steps, on a pair of
fiberglass pegs.

Spending a week with Pistorius makes you feel slow in all sorts of ways. When I
hear he is going to pick me up at the airport, I figure someone will drive him
there to meet me, or maybe he’ll be driving a car modified with hand controls
for accelerating and braking. I am mistaken.

As I emerge from customs, he picks me out of the blinking crowd with a shout,
grabs my suitcase, and bounds up a set of stairs ahead of me on a pair of
“street” prosthetics. I look surreptitiously at his baggy jeans for some
sign that he doesn’t have biological legs. Maybe he looks a little bowlegged.

His car is modified, but not in the way I’d imagined. It’s a little black
sled straight out of The Fast and the Furious — a low-slung, five-speed manual
SEAT Ibiza hatchback with about 4 inches of ground clearance. oscar pistorius is
emblazoned across the doors in 6-inch-high white letters above the name of his
sponsor, Hatfield Motors.

Slaloming along the N1 freeway between Pretoria and Johannesburg at about 125
percent of the speed limit, Pistorius hands me his cell phone to show me a text
message he just received. “I go back to Denmark in 2 weeks. I want to have as
much fun as possible before I go. What are u doing 2nite?” He tells me he’s
going to decline this invitation — he’s quite sweet on his current
girlfriend — but he can’t resist texting back, one hand (thankfully) still
on the wheel, to inquire what she has in mind. He passes her reply over for my
perusal: “I cd tell u but it would be much easier to show u!”

Later, while Pistorius is parking his little rocket at a coffee shop, I ask
whether sometimes, maybe if he’s in a huge hurry, he ever parks in handicap
spaces.

“Yoh! Never,” he almost spits. “There’s nothing that cheeses me off
worse than seeing somebody pull into a disabled spot, then get out of their car
and walk off.

“People ask me all the time if I wish I had the rest of my legs,” Pistorius
continues. “No. I guess it’s a kind of an inconvenience, having to put on
different legs to do different things, but there’s nothing that anyone else
can do that I can’t do.”

Sometimes his managers and coaches wish Pistorius would do a little less. Last
spring his then–business manager Lizl Schutte chewed him out when she learned
he’d spent the weekend on an ATV bike, competing with friends to see who could
launch themselves the farthest off a ramp into a lake. Steven Ball, his strength
trainer, reports that although Pistorius has been destroying Paralympics records
for two years, he began a hardcore weight training program only a year ago.
Ampie Louw, Pistorius’ running coach since 2003, says the biggest thing
standing between the sprinter and the two seconds he needs to cut from his time
in the 400 meters to make the Olympics may be his robust social life.

“Getting him to come here and train every day — that’s the challenge,”
Louw says with a rueful laugh. “Look at the best sprinters’ upper bodies,
and look at Oscar’s. We’re not matching the Asafa Powells yet.” Two
seconds is about 5 percent of a world-class time in the 400, no small
improvement for Pistorius. But Louw is convinced he can do it. Since 2004
Pistorius has trimmed more than three seconds off his time in the 400, and Louw
is still working to correct a persistent problem in his running mechanics. “He
always wants to make his stride too long,” Louw says. “It puts enormous
pressure on his hamstrings, and he spends too much time in the air.” A new
pair of Cheetahs, specially designed for use by double amputees, might also
help.

At the track for a workout, Pistorius opens the hatch of his car and takes out
the new legs. The South African flag is emblazoned on the sockets that grip
Pistorius’ stumps; there’s a line of 2-inch-high foam-rubber pyramids down
the rear face of the blades with a plastic wire connecting the points. Pistorius
says he and Trevor Brauckmann, the man who builds and fits those sockets, are
going to stretch fabric across the framework in an attempt to cut down wind
resistance — in other words, he’s going to add aerodynamic cowling. Just
another enhancement.

A company called Flex-Foot debuted the Cheetah in 1996, but the prosthetic
blades remained a bit crude until Flex-Foot was acquired by the Icelandic firm
Ossur in 2000. If you are missing a leg, owning an Ossur is like driving a BMW
M-series.

The current Cheetahs look a little like the rear leg of a horse or cat,
extending straight down from the socket, cantilevering backward, and then
angling forward sharply. But last September, Pistorius and Brauckmann went to
Reykjavik to test prototypes designed for double amputees. The new ones, which
Pistorius hasn’t debuted at a major race yet, make just one smooth curve, an
arc of pure engineering.

Ossur’s R&D team met them at the company’s workshop and unveiled the
prototypes. Brauckmann attached the blades to the sockets, and Pistorius walked
around on them, testing the design.

They were too soft, Brauckmann told Ari Clausen, an engineer at Ossur. Oscar
would to break them.

Clausen didn’t believe it. His team had factored in every force Pistorius
could possibly apply to the carbon fiber. So the next day, Pistorius put them
on, jogged a bit, and cracked them. Clausen built a new set; that afternoon he
took the South Africans to a track to try out the replacements — Brauckmann
had doubts about the new pair as well, but Pistorius wanted to give them a try.
He strapped in, stretched a bit, and started to jog.

When Pistorius falls while running, it’s less like a stumble and more like a
skiing wipeout. A few months before the Reykjavik trip, at a training day in
South Africa, one of his blades split with a sound like a snapping two-by-four.
He hit the rubber track going about 25 miles an hour, and bounced and slid 10
yards before stopping. He didn’t break any bones, but the road burn took weeks
to heal.

This time, as Pistorius started running he heard some creaking noises from his
right leg — something felt wrong. Sure enough, the blade splintered. But this
time Pistorius was able to pull up and slow down. He avoided the fall and hopped
back to a chagrined Clausen, who tossed the prototypes into his huge
tundra-and-magma- field-crawling Dodge Ram pickup and headed back to the
workshop.

The testing room at Ossur is a bustling space where titanium-jointed prosthetic
legs are stacked under racks of silicone feet and hands in various skin tones.
It looks like Geppetto’s workshop, if Geppetto were building an army of
life-size super puppets. On my first look around, I see a guy sitting at a
workbench, tightening screws that attach a prosthetic foot to a
computer-controlled bionic knee called the Rheo. It’s a joint project between
Ossur and the MIT Media Lab. The man swivels in his chair, fastens the bionic
leg to the stump of his left leg, stands up, and walks out of the room. I catch
up to him on his way back after he’s tried out his tweaked Rheo on a set of
stairs. His name is Gísli Jónsson; he’s a technician at Ossur.

What’s the best thing about the Rheo? I ask.

“I don’t fall down anymore,” Jónsson says. “Even after I’ve been
drinking.”

Pistorius’ Cheetah blades aren’t particularly well-suited for a night of
debauchery, and they don’t have any of the sophisticated electronics software
or servos of a Rheo. They are purpose-built, starting their life at Ossur as
rolls of resin-impregnated (or “pre-preg”) carbon fiber, stored in a
van-sized industrial freezer. The rolls are cut into square sheets and pressed
onto the outside of a steel mold milled in the shape of the legs’ final
profile.

Depending on the size of the athlete the blades are being made for, anywhere
from 30 to 90 carbon-fiber sheets are layered one on top of another. Then the
whole thing is swung into an autoclave that melts and fuses the resin and sheets
into a solid, contoured carbon-fiber plate. Using pre-preg sheets instead of
adding resin cuts down on air bubbles that can cause breaks. Once the compound
cools, a robotic arm with a high-pressure water jet on the end carves the
now-curved sheet into several Cheetah legs. Each one costs between $15,000 and
$18,000.

To give me a sense of how they feel, Ossur’s engineers bolt a pair of Cheetahs
to the back of two rigid plastic-and-leather motorcycle boots. I clamp in and
trot across the room a few times. The Cheetahs seem to bounce of their own
accord. It’s impossible to stand still on them, and difficult to move slowly.
Once they get going, Cheetahs are extremely hard to control.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the most highly functional prosthetic
limbs come from Iceland. It’s not a culture that embraces self-pity or, as far
as I could tell from my week in Reykjavik, any pity at all. Iceland has just
begun killing whales again after a 20-year hiatus, and nearly every Icelander I
talk to is mystified by the international condemnation aimed at their tiny
country. Mothers sit in Reykjavik’s restaurants devouring smoked puffin,
casting occasional glances through the window at their heavily swaddled babies
in carriages parked on the sidewalk in the cold wind.

There’s a word in Icelandic: upphafning. Literally it means “elevation,”
but when the folks at Ossur use it, it’s more like “self- elevation.”
Cutting slack to someone who’s disabled is frowned upon here — pity is just
condescension by another name.

Pistorius says he wouldn’t change a thing about his life — he’s a
world-class athlete and bona fide celebrity in South Africa who gets pestered
for autographs and ogled by girls. Just one problem: Pistorius wishes that his
carbon-fiber prostheses were beside the point. That’s not likely. They’ll be
precisely the point when the world’s best able-bodied sprinters start losing
heats to a bilateral lower-leg amputee.

If only because of their shape, the Cheetahs, especially when they are lined up
at the starting blocks next to seven pairs of biological legs, elicit amazement
and fear. They look dangerous. Bionic legs! Part man, part machine! The twin
ghosts of Steve Austin and John Henry (well, not twins exactly, but you see what
I mean) will always dog Pistorius.

Eventually, sports fans might be made to comprehend the distinction between
bionics — mechanical joints with moving parts, microprocessors, and power
sources — and what Pistorius runs on: pegs. Hyper-engineered,
autoclave-forged, epoxy-impregnated, elastic pegs, but still really just pegs.

But even that recognition might not be enough to quell concerns that Cheetahs
confer an advantage. After he blew past them in Athens, Americans Shirley and
Frasure accused Pistorius of “running tall”: adding length to his stride by
using longer prosthetics. “He’s able to manipulate something that’s out of
other athletes’ control,” Shirley told Sports Illustrated. “Just because
he has a double amputation, why should he have a different set of rules?” It
was a spurious accusation; both men are, like Pistorius, sponsored by Ossur.
They know, or ought to know, that Cheetahs have to be longer than biological
legs. Nature built the ankle as a hinge that compresses and extends with every
step, but Cheetahs supplant that localized up-and-down movement with elastic
compression along their entire curve ... which means Cheetah users are
permanently on tiptoe.

Perhaps more important, the limits of the human body — any human body — are
a matter of math. It takes 3,556 joules to move 80.5 kilograms, Pistorius’
weight, at 9.4 meters per second. That’s his average speed on his fastest
200-meter run. Those joules have to come from somewhere. Running is basically a
matter of forcing that power into the legs and using them, springlike, to bounce
the body forward.

The lower legs of able-bodied sprinters return all the energy pumped into them
by the muscles at the hips and knees — and they give back more, thanks to
power from the calves and ankles. Pistorius doesn’t have feet, ankles, or
calves, of course, so he compensates: His strength trainer estimates that 85
percent of his power comes from his hips and the rest comes from the knees. That
hip- generated stride, combined with the odd shape of the Cheetah itself, means
that Pistorius has to waddle slightly, his feet flailing out to the side a bit
on each rearward kick. The blades make that scissoring noise as they grip the
track, compress, and return to their original shape.

Pistorius’ street legs are modeled and painted to look as much like natural
legs as possible, color-matched to his thighs. But covered by the flesh-tone
paint is a doodled-on depiction of calf muscle a friend inked in red and black
permanent marker before the Athens Paralympics. It’s an interesting tattoo, a
reminder that no matter how good Cheetahs are, Pistorius is still missing a
natural calf.

So, sure, artificial legs are lighter than natural ones. Pistorius will never
blow out his ankles or break a toe, though presumably his knees are as
vulnerable as anyone’s to old age and trauma. But does any of that constitute
an unfair advantage? Does being able to modify and tune a prosthetic limb belong
to the same category as blood doping (banned) or altitude training (A-OK)? If
there’s an issue of fairness here at all, it’s not that Pistorius is using
technology superior to what evolution has built for human beings. As Robert
Gailey, who studies the biomechanics of prosthetics at the University of Miami,
puts it, running on stilts isn’t exactly a plus. The real asymmetry is that
Frasure and Shirley each still have one natural leg, and it’s holding them
back.

You can see it when they run. Mixed-leg sprinters piston up and down, energy
lost to vertical movement when they’re trying to go horizontal. When Pistorius
runs, his gait has a circular smoothness. He looks like he’s on wheels. (Watch
Pistorius run at wired.com /extras.) And while runners lose speed coming out of
a turn as they straighten up, Louw thinks that Pistorius may actually be able to
use that inward lean to push more energy into the Cheetahs. He’d come out of a
turn going faster.

Sitting in the stands overlooking the track in Pretoria, Pistorius admits to
some of his shortcomings as a runner. The 100-meter will never be his event: It
takes him too long to get the right rhythm going, and the top single-amputee
sprinters (not to mention the able-bodied ones) will probably continue to beat
him. No, for Pistorius it’ll be the 200 and the 400.

The first 30 meters, he says, are all about keeping his head down and taking
short, quick strides. Then he upshifts, breaking each curve into three straight
lines and hitting the afterburners in the stretch. He points to the stride
patterns of Michael Johnson, the drug-enhanced sprinter’s physique of Tim
Montgomery, and the all-around greatness of current champ Asafa Powell. All the
people he wants to emulate are able-bodied.

“I have full respect for the Paralympics,” Pistorius says. “But I tell
people this all the time: You’ll never progress if your mind is on your
disability.”

But he’s a Paralympic champion, I say.

“I’d really like to dominate the Paralympics until the end of my career,”
he answers. “But in able-bodied racing, I’d like to be a known name for a
long time.”

In November, John Einmahl and Jan Magnus, econometrics professors at the
Netherlands’ Tilburg University, released an article called “Records in
Athletics Through Extreme-Value Theory.” In the paper — which hasn’t been
accepted for publication yet — they apply probability theory to the peak
performances of thousands of athletes over time in 14 track and field events to
determine the extreme values, or the limits, of athletic capability. In some
events, their models showed that current world records are fairly close to the
limits. They model the fastest-possible men’s marathon time as 2:04:06, only
49 seconds, or 0.7 percent, faster than the current world record. In other
events, the models predict a major improvement — the limit to the men’s 100
meters is 9.29 seconds, they say, and the current world record is a dawdling
9.77, a difference of 5 percent.

True, sports statisticians are always drawing graphs like this. Charts of
world-record performances do indeed tend to look asymptotic, forever approaching
but never reaching some theoretical limit. But the curve of records laid down by
Paralympic athletes, Pistorius in particular, is approaching the limit line much
more rapidly and at a much steeper angle. The average track and field world
record for able-bodied athletes is nine years old for men and 10 for women; in
Paralympics track and field events, that number is just two years. Every time
amputee jocks get together for a major meet, they break half of the world
records on their books.

It’s also true that the Cheetahs Pistorius hopes to run on in Beijing, with
their pure-engineering swoop, are in quantifiable ways better — faster —
than the ones he ran on in Athens. Does that bother you? Pistorius’ handlers
have a saying: If you think having carbon-fiber legs will make you a faster
sprinter, have the operation and we’ll see you at the track. In their eyes,
Cheetahs — for all their sophistication — are a disadvantage that Pistorius
has transcended.

The International Association of Athletics Federations is supposed to decide if
Pistorius is eligible for the Olympics this spring. The possibilities: If
Pistorius is a black swan, a statistical freak who would have been a world-class
sprinter on natural legs, too, then no problem — let him run. And, if being an
amputee is what gave Pistorius something to prove and turned him into a
world-class sprinter, then no problem — let him run. But if he is the vanguard
of a legion of plastic track-and-field terminators whose upper speed is a
function of materials science and software instead of determination and
training? The International Olympics Commission better start hiring some
engineers.

Back at the track, Pistorius scissors around a turn, halfway through half a
dozen 300-meter reps. Louw whistles through two fingers and barks at the runner
to shorten his strides. Pistorius doesn’t seem to hear. He accelerates,
muscles and carbon fiber reaching in unison toward a point just beyond the
finish line.
Contributing editor Josh McHugh (www.joshmchugh.net) wrote about running a
faster mile in issue 15.01.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

(probably a dupe)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL

Science hopes to change events that have already occurred

Patrick Barry

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Ever wish you could reach back in time and change the past? Maybe you'd like to
take back an unfortunate voice mail message, or rephrase what you just said to
your boss. Or perhaps you've even dreamed of tweaking the outcome of yesterday's
lottery to make yourself the winner.

Common sense tells us that influencing the past is impossible -- what's done is
done, right? Even if it were possible, think of the mind-bending paradoxes it
would create. While tinkering with the past, you might change the circumstances
by which your parents met, derailing the key event that led to your birth.

Such are the perils of retrocausality, the idea that the present can affect the
past, and the future can affect the present. Strange as it sounds,
retrocausality is perfectly permissible within the known laws of nature. It has
been debated for decades, mostly in the realm of philosophy and quantum physics.
Trouble is, nobody has done the experiment to show it happens in the real world,
so the door remains wide open for a demonstration.

It might even happen soon. Researchers are on the verge of experiments that will
finally hold retrocausality's feet to the fire by attempting to send a signal to
the past. What's more, they need not invoke black holes, wormholes, extra
dimensions or other exotic implements of time travel. It should all be doable
with the help of a state-of-the-art optics workbench and the bizarre yet
familiar tricks of quantum particles. If retrocausality is confirmed -- and that
is a huge if -- it would overturn our most cherished notions about the nature of
cause and effect and how the universe works.

Dating back to Newton's laws of motion, the equations of physics are generally
"time symmetric" -- they work as well for processes running backward through
time as forward. The situation got really strange in the early 20th century when
Einstein devised his theory of relativity, with its four-dimensional fabric of
space-time. In this model, our sense that history is unfolding is an illusion:
The past, present and future all exist seamlessly in an unchanging "block"
universe.

"If you have the block universe view, the future and the past are not any
different, so there's no reason why you can't have causes from the future just
as you have causes from the past," says David Miller of the Centre for Time at
the University of Sydney in Australia.

With the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, the relative timing of
particles and events became even less relevant. "Real temporal order in general,
for quantum mechanics, is not important," says Caslav Brukner, a physicist at
the University of Vienna, Austria. By the 1940s, researchers were exploring the
possibility of time-reversed phenomena. Richard Feynman lent credibility to the
idea by proposing that particles such as positrons, the antimatter equivalent of
electrons, are simply normal particles traveling backward in time. Feynman later
expanded this idea with his mentor, John Wheeler of Princeton University.
Together they worked out a theory of electrodynamics based on waves traveling
forward and backward in time. Any proof of reverse causality, however, remained
elusive.

Fast forward to 1978, when Wheeler proposed a variation on the classic
double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics. Send photons through a barrier with
two slits in it, and choose whether to detect the photons as waves or particles.
If you put up a screen behind the slits, you will get a pattern of light and
dark bands, as if each photon travels through both slits and interferes with
itself, like a wave. If, on the other hand, you take a snapshot of the slits
themselves, you will find each photon passes through one slit or the other: it
is forced to pick a path, like a particle. But, Wheeler asked, what if you wait
until just after the photon has passed the slits to make your choice? In theory,
you could suddenly raise the screen to expose two cameras behind it, one trained
on each slit. It would seem that you can affect where the photon went, and
whether it behaved like a wave or particle, after the fact.

In 1986, Carroll Alley at the University of Maryland at College Park, found a
way to test this idea using a more practical set-up: an interferometer which
lets a photon take either one path or two after passing through a beam splitter.
Sure enough, the photon's path depended on a choice made after the photon had to
"make up its mind." Other groups have confirmed similar results, and at first
blush this appears to show the present affecting the past. Most physicists,
however, take the view that you can't say which path the photon took before the
measurement is made. In other words, still no unambiguous evidence for
retrocausality.

That's where John Cramer comes in. In the mid-1980s, working at the University
of Washington in Seattle, he proposed the "transactional interpretation" of
quantum mechanics, one of many attempts to relate the mathematics of quantum
theory to the real world. It says particles interact by sending and receiving
physical waves that travel forward and backward through time. In June, at a
conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Cramer
proposed an experiment that can at last test for this sort of retrocausal
influence. It combines the wave-particle effects of double slits with other
mysterious quantum properties in an all-out effort to send signals to the past.

The experiment builds on work done in the late 1990s in Anton Zeilinger's lab,
when he was at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Researcher Birgit Dopfer
found that photons that were "entangled", or linked by their properties such as
momentum, showed the same wave-or-particle behavior as one another. Using a
crystal, Dopfer converted one laser beam into two so that photons in one beam
were entangled with those in the other, and each pair was matched up by a
circuit known as a coincidence detector. One beam passed through a double slit
to a photon detector, while the other passed through a lens to a movable
detector, which could sense a photon in two different positions.

The movable detector is key, because in one position it effectively images the
slits and measures each photon as a particle, while in the other it captures
only a wave-like interference pattern. Dopfer showed that measuring a photon as
a wave or a particle forced its twin in the other beam to be measured in the
same way.

To use this setup to send a signal, it needs to work without a coincidence
circuit. Inspired by Raymond Jensen at Notre Dame University, Cramer then
proposed passing each beam through a double slit, not only to give the
experimenter the choice of measuring photons as waves or particles, but also to
help track photon pairs. The double slits should filter out most unentangled
photons and either block or let pass both members of an entangled pair, at least
in theory. So a photon arriving at one detector should have its twin appear at
the other. As before, the way you measure one should affect the other. Jensen
suggested that such a setup might let you send a signal from one detector to
another instantaneously -- a highly controversial claim, since it would seem to
demonstrate faster-than-light travel.

If you can do that, Cramer says, why not push it to be
better-than-instantaneous, and try to make the signal arrive before it was sent?
His extra twist is to run the photons you choose how to measure through several
kilometers of coiled-up fiber-optic cable, thereby delaying them by
microseconds. This delay means that the other beam will arrive at its detector
before you make your choice. However, since the rules of quantum mechanics are
indifferent to the timing of measurements, the state of the other beam should
correspond to how you choose to measure the delayed beam. The effect of your
choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it.

That's the idea anyway. What will the experimenters actually see? Cramer says
they could control the movable detector so that it alternates between measuring
wave-like and particle-like behavior over time. They could compare that to the
pattern from the beam that wasn't delayed and was recorded on a sensor from a
digital camera. If this consistently shifts between an interference pattern and
a smooth singleparticle pattern a few microseconds before the respective choice
is made on the delayed photons, that would support the concept of
retrocausality. If not, it would be back to the drawing board.

If the experiment does show evidence for retrocausation, it would open the door
to some troubling paradoxes. If you could see the effects of your choice before
you make it, could you then make the opposite choice and subvert the laws of
nature? Some researchers have suggested retrocausality can occur only in limited
circumstances in which not enough information is available for you to contradict
the results of an experiment.

Another way to resolve this is to say that even if the present can influence the
past, it cannot change it. The fact that your hair is shorter today has as much
influence on your going to the barber yesterday as the other way around, yet you
can't change that decision. "You wouldn't be able to talk about altering, but
you could talk about causing or affecting," says Phil Dowe, an expert on
causation at the University of Queensland in Australia. While it would mean we
cannot change the past, it also implies that we cannot change the future.

If all that gives you a headache, then consider this: if retrocausality does
exist, it says something profound about how the universe works. "It has the
potential to solve what is one of the biggest problems in modern physics," says
Huw Price, head of Sydney's Centre for Time. It goes back to quantum
entanglement and "nonlocality" -- one particle instantaneously affecting
another, even from the other side of the galaxy. That doesn't sit well with
relativity, which states that nothing can travel faster than light. Still, the
latest experiments confirm that one particle can indeed instantaneously affect
the other. Physicists argue that no information is transmitted this way: Whether
the spin of a particle is up or down, for instance, is random and can't be
controlled, and thus relativity is not violated.

Retrocausality offers an alternative explanation. Measuring one entangled
particle could send a wave backward through time to the moment at which the pair
was created. The signal would not need to move faster than light; it could
simply retrace the first particle's path through space-time, arriving back at
the spot where the two particles were emitted. There, the wave can interact with
the second particle without violating relativity. "Retrocausation is a nice,
simple, classical explanation for all this," Dowe says.

While Cramer last week prepared to start a series of experiments leading up to
the big test of retrocausality, some researchers expect reverse causality will
play an increasingly important role in our understanding of the universe. "I'm
going with my gut here," says Avshalom Elitzur, a physicist and philosopher at
Bar-Ilan University in Israel, "but I believe that when we finally find the
theory we're all looking for, a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and
relativity, it will involve retrocausality."

But if it also involves winning yesterday's lottery, Cramer won't be telling.
Did we reach back to shape the Big Bang?

If retrocausality is real, it might even explain why life exists in the universe
-- exactly why the universe is so "finely tuned" for human habitation. Some
physicists search for deeper laws to explain this fine-tuning, while others say
there are millions of universes, each with different laws, so one universe could
quite easily have the right laws by chance and, of course, that's the one we're
in.

Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology
at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: The universe
might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do
not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can
only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of
the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just
after the Big Bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there
may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.

And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers
later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the
laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: Life exists to
make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forward and
backward, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that
matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to
prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Davies says. "If the
conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the Big
Bang, there must be some sort of two-way link."

-- Patrick Barry
Retrocausality: Can the present affect the past?

Researchers have devised an experiment using laser light to demonstrate a
property of quantum mechanics: That pairs of entangled photons show identical
properties as either a wave or a particle. By using this knowledge, they hope to
demonstrate how to influence an event that has already occurred.

1. A laser beam is directed into a crystal that makes two streams of photons.

2a. One stream of photons travels through a screen with two slits.

2b. The other stream of photons travels through an identical screen with two
slits BUT is routed through six miles of fiber-optic cable that delays the light
by microseconds.

3a. A detector captures the light and records it as a wave-like or particle-like
photon (you don't know which yet).

3b. The delayed light is sensed by a movable detector. If the detector is closer
to the lens it's recorded as a wave-like interference pattern. If its farther
from the lens it is recorded as a particle.

What is happening here: By choosing to measure the delayed photon as either a
wave or particle photon, the experimenter forces the other photon to appear in
the same way - because they are entangled - even though it reaches the detector
earlier.

Sources: John Cramer, University of Washington; NewScientist, Sept. 2006

Patrick Barry wrote this piece for the New Scientist, where it first appeared.
Contact us at insight@....

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

----- Forwarded message from Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki@...> -----

From: Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki@...>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:31:05 -0400
To: Anders Sandberg <asa@...>
Cc: ExI chat list <extropy-chat@...>
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] limits of computer feeling
Reply-To: rafal@...,
	 ExI chat list <extropy-chat@...>

On 3/13/07, Anders Sandberg <asa@...> wrote:

> Still, I could be wrong. It would be interesting to see if one could use
> Adami-type evolutionary statistical mechanics arguments on the evolution
> of posthuman motivational clades and how likely it would be that slight
> differences in economic fitness would produce radically dominant
> evolutionary clades. Sounds like a great research project for someday when
> somebody has time. Now I must work - how delightful! Yay!
>
### We need to keep in mind that our present society is not anywhere
close to evolutionary equilibrium. Many of our mental characteristics
are adaptations to the life in the African savannah, 200 000 years
ago. At that time and place, our ancestors spent essentially all of
their time obtaining the resources needed for maintenance and
replication of their genes. Status seeking, signaling, envy,
dominance, and yes, even a bit of leisure - all of these helped to get
more food, destroy enemies, gain sexual access, or protect offspring.
Our ancestors may have had occasionally fun, but essentially all they
ever did was to work on the survival of their genes. Under conditions
of evolutionary equilibrium working on your survival is almost all
that living creatures do, from the amoeba, and the cockroach, to the
lion and the whale.

Now, we have inherited a lot of proclivities that no longer contribute
to survival but since almost all of us inherited them to almost the
same degree, the competition among us does not result in radical
differences in survival. What we see as "fun" or "leisure" (sports,
sex, eating) are in fact activities that used to be "work" - the stuff
your genes "think" they need to survive. Our genes just didn't have
the time to catch up with the present situation, since the it is only
about a few hundred years ago that our current way of life started
emerging. (BTW - this is why the trends you mention above, more
leisure and more pleasure with more technology, are misleading - our
current amount of leisure is a 300 year blip on a graph spanning 3
billion years of evolution)

But, with self-modification there will be much more profound
differences in productivity. The mind that builds itself to do nothing
but to maximize access to resources, and to multiply as quickly as
possible, ideally adapted to the year year 2030, will not have a
"slight" edge in economic fitness over those still adapted to the year
200 000 BC - it will be a gaping chasm.

The speed with which you will be able to adapt yourself to the
prevailing conditions will no longer be limited by the snail's pace of
evolution - you will be able to adapt as soon as you understand what
is needed, work out the mods to your mind, and reboot. In other words,
the posthuman minds could be in evolutionary equilibrium all the time.

Of course, it is possible that the most efficient minds will use
happiness or pleasure (i.e. the computational paradigms that have the
subjective correlate of happiness) as an indispensable component of
their motivational structure. Maybe computing happiness really is
needed to orchestrate the diverse agents that make up a complex mind,
so as to act in harmony for long-term goals. Perhaps. Obviously, I
know next to nothing about the design space of minds in general - my
naive guess is that there are many ways to skin the cat, and minds
without this motivational trick are possible, and frequently will
survive better than the ones dependent on it.

However, I am moderately confident that sinking large fractions of
your computing (and other) resources on pleasure for pleasure's sake
will severely limit survival, and will be quickly weeded out of the
ecosystem, once evolution starts running on Internet time.

Rafal
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat@...
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

----- Forwarded message from Edge <editor@...> -----

From: Edge <editor@...>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:03:18 -0800
To: Eugen Leitl <eugen@...>
Subject: W. Daniel Hillis: Addendum to "Aristotle: The Knowledge Web"
Reply-To: Edge <editor@...>

March 14, 2006

Edge 205
http://www.edge.org

[5,715 words]

[This EDGE edition is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html]

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
ED. NOTE: In May, 2004, Edge published Danny Hillis's essay in which he proposed
Aristotle: The Knowledge Web. "With the knowledge web," he wrote, "humanity's
accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable,
and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the
most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to
teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move
beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides,
mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter.
The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come."

Last week, Hillis announced a new company call Metaweb, and the free database,
Freebase.com. The launch was covered by John Markoff in his New York Times
article "Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching" [3.9.07].

Below is an addendum to his essay  he has written for Edge, a link to Markoff's
article, as well as links to the original essay, the subsequent Edge Reality
Club discussion.

                 --------------------------------

ADDENDUM TO "ARISTOTLE: THE KNOWLEDGE WEB"
By W. Daniel Hillis

...In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could
contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then
the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and
format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea
work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a
form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the
World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed
to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the
presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference
of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database,
while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's
storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the
specific needs of the viewer. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html

                  --------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 9, 2007

Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching
By John Markoff

SAN FRANCISCO, March 8 - A new company founded by a longtime technologist is
setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers
rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which
machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background
includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the
idea of intelligent machines. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#markoff
----------------------------------------------------
THIRD CULTURE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SCIENCE TIMES
FINDINGS

What's So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing
By John Tierney

When Robert R. Provine tried applying his training in neuroscience to laughter
20 years ago, he na�vely began by dragging people into his laboratory at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to watch episodes of "Saturday Night
Live" and a George Carlin routine. They didn't laugh much. It was what a
stand-up comic would call a bad room. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Tierney3.13
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 11, 2007
[COVER STORY]

The Brain on the Stand
By Jeffrey Rosen

How neuroscience is transforming the legal system.

...Two of the most ardent supporters of the claim that neuroscience requires the
redefinition of guilt and punishment are Joshua D. Greene, an assistant
professor of psychology at Harvard, and Jonathan D. Cohen, a professor of
psychology who directs the neuroscience program at Princeton. ...

...Michael Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and author of "The Ethical Brain," notes that within 10 years,
neuroscientists may be able to show that there are neurological differences when
people testify about their own previous acts and when they testify to something
they saw.  ...

...Libet argued that this leaves 100 milliseconds for the conscious self to veto
the brain's unconscious decision, or to give way to it - suggesting, in the
words of the neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, that we have not free
will but "free won't.". ...

...The legal implications of the new experiments involving bias and neuroscience
are hotly disputed. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard who
helped to pioneer the I.A.T., has argued that there may be a big gap between the
concept of intentional bias embedded in law and the reality of unconscious
racism revealed by science. . ...

... "You can have a horrendously damaged brain where someone knows the
difference between right and wrong but nonetheless can't control their
behavior," says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. "At that point,
you're dealing with a broken machine, and concepts like punishment and evil and
sin become utterly irrelevant. Does that mean the person should be dumped back
on the street? Absolutely not. You have a car with the brakes not working, and
it shouldn't be allowed to be near anyone it can hurt.". ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Rosen
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW WORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 11, 2007

Out There
By Richard Panek

Only 4 percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter that makes up you
and me and all the planets and stars and galaxies. The rest - 96 percent - is
... who knows?

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George
Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at
the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow
cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming,
eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his
chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent,
leaned forward in his. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Panek
----------------------------------------------------
PROSPECT
March 2007

LEFT VERSUS RIGHT
defined the 20th century
WHAT'S NEXT?

100 Prospect contributors answered our invitation to respond to the question on
the left in no more than 250 words. An edited selection of their responses is
printed here - the rest are on our website. (Thanks to John Brockman for
allowing us to borrow his Edge website idea). The pessimsm of the responses is
striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades,
and many predict it will get much worse.

Ed. Note: Among the 100 responses to the question posed by Prospect Editor David
Goodhart, are a number of Edge contributors:


Brian Eno, musician
Interventionists vs laissez-faireists
One of the big divisions of the future will be between those who believe in
intervention as a moral duty and those who don't. ...

Anthony Giddens, sociologist

"The future isn't what it used to be," George Burns once said. And he was
right....

Nicholas Humphrey, scientist

How can anyone doubt that the faultline is going to be religion? On one side
there will be those who continue to appeal for their political and moral values
to what they understand to be God's will. ...

Marek Kohn, science writer

The right, of course, is still with us; robust structures remain to uphold
individualism and the pursuit of wealth. There is also plenty of room in the
current orthodoxy for liberalism and conservatism of all kind of stripes. ...

Mark Pagel, scientist

Modern humans evolved to live in small co-operative groups with extensive
divisions of labour among unrelated people linked only by their common culture.
Co-operation is fragile, being the contented face of trust, reciprocity and the
perception of a shared fate-when they go, the mask can quickly fall. ...

Lisa Randall, scientist

Debates today have descended into those between the lazy and the slightly less
lazy....

Steven Rose, biologist

Last century's alternatives were socialism or barbarism. This century's
prospects are starker: social justice or the end of human civilisation-if not
our species....

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Prospect
----------------------------------------------------

PROSPECT
March 2007

Speculations

Why have we not encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life? We used to assume
that the aliens had blown themselves up. But perhaps they just got addicted to
computer games

By Geoffrey Miller

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Miller
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 11, 2007

Reflections on Life as a Shaker-Upper
By Erik Piepenburg

SINCE the 1960s the playwright, director and designer Richard Foreman has been
the emperor of New York experimental theater, with some constants in those
experiments: nonlinear tableaus about the unconscious mind, deliriously
decorated sets, actors dressed like commandos from Dr. Seuss's special forces.
Voices (often Mr. Foreman's own) and, lately, projected films add to the sensory
overload.

In his current production, "Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is
Dead!," running through April 1 at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church,
he imagines a topsy-turvy world where doll heads and catatonic humans question
the concept of sentience. Ben Brantley of The Times called it a "dazzling
exercise in reality-shifting." ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Piepenburg
----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 11, 2007
ICONS

Tie Space Contimuum
By Herbert Muschamp

Shoppers for men's wear should not be discouraged, either. Even if we cannot
solve the problem, we can at least live the problem, and live it well, provided
we know where to shop. "The Elegant Universe" is the title Brian Greene gave his
popular book about string theory.

Let us ponder a possible sequel on the subject of thread theory. We will call it
Universal Elegance. Battistoni will be the laboratory for our cosmic research.

[...more]
Muschamp
----------------------------------------------------
TIME
March 7, 2007

Early Christianity's Martyrdom Debate
By David Van Biema

Princeton University's Elaine Pagels is about the nearest thing there is to a
superstar in the realm of Christian history scholarship. It is largely through
her work that many understand the early non-Orthodox Christianity that she at
one point dubbed (and later un-dubbed, finding the term imprecise) the Gnostic
Gospels. She breaks new ground with the debut of Reading Judas: The Gospel of
Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, her collaboration with Harvard Divinity
scholar Karen King about the second-century "Gospel of Judas" that was made
public last year.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Pagels
----------------------------------------------------
HUFFINGTON POST
March 7, 2007

Damascus, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, March 4, 2007

Give Palestine's Unity Government a Chance
Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod and Richard Davis

Most Israeli leaders we talked to agree that Abbas is sincere in wanting to
steer the unity government and all Palestinian factions to recognize Israel.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Atran

[ED NOTE: See New York Times Magazine cover story "Darwin's God" (3.4.07) on
Scott Atran's theories on the evolution of religion.]

----------------------------------------------------
SEED
March 6, 2007
THE SEED SALON

Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin
The novelist and the cosmologist meet up to talk about reality.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html#Levin

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
This EDGE edition is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private
operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of
the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
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To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2553875-5352293N@...

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----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes@...>
-----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes@...>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:11:36 -0400
To: technoliberation@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [technoliberation] Computers boost productivity
Reply-To: technoliberation@yahoogroups.com


The job-less economy: ""it is unlikely that the I.T. industry will be
producing jobs gains out of line with its size. In part this is because
productivity in the I.T. industry itself has been strong, allowing it to
produce more output with fewer workers."

The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/technology/13tech.html

March 13, 2007
Study Says Computers Give Big Boosts to Productivity
By STEVE LOHR

Money spent on computing technology delivers gains in worker
productivity that are three to five times those of other investments,
according to a study being published today. But the study also concluded
that the information technology industry itself was unlikely to be a big
source of new jobs.

The 69-page report is a wide-ranging look at the role that information
technology plays in the economy, based on an assessment of existing
research and the authors' analysis. The study was done by a year-old
research organization, the Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation, whose work is supported by companies like I.B.M., Cisco
Systems and eBay, as well as by the Communications Workers of America
and foundation grants. It will be available at www.itif.org.

The study concludes that the economic significance of information
technology is less in the technology itself than in the capacity of
computer hardware, software and services to transform other sectors of
the economy.

Policy, according to the study, should focus less on incentives to use
certain technology products or help particular companies than on
encouraging market forces to hasten the pace of technology-aided change
in industries.

In an interview, Robert D. Atkinson, the foundation president, cited
health care, electric utilities and transportation as sectors that
computing technology could benefit.

In health care, for example, the federal government has prodded industry
to set standards for sharing patient and treatment information, as a
step toward building a national health information network. Medicare and
industry groups are moving to require hospitals and clinics to measure
and report their performance in meeting safety standards and in patient
health goals. To meet those standards, health care providers must
increasingly adopt modern computing tools.

"The policy issue is how do you get digital transformation in these
other sectors," Mr. Atkinson said. "This is not about tax breaks for
I.B.M. or Cisco or other technology companies."

Mr. Atkinson, a former project director at the Congressional Office of
Technology Assessment, most recently headed the technology policy
program at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic
research organization.

The report notes that employment in computing has recovered somewhat,
after falling sharply after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, to account
for 3.76 million jobs. Still, it says, the growth potential is limited.

"Going forward," the report states, "it is unlikely that the I.T.
industry will be producing jobs gains out of line with its size. In part
this is because productivity in the I.T. industry itself has been
strong, allowing it to produce more output with fewer workers."

Instead, the report contends, job gains will more and more come from
industries that use information technology intelligently, just as in the
19th century employment in the railroad industry leveled off but
development of a transportation network led to the rise of national
retailers and other new industries.

The services sector, which employs 80 percent of the American work
force, is expected to generate most of the new jobs in the future.

The most provocative and controversial parts of the report, "Digital
Prosperity: Understanding the Economic Benefits of the Information
Technology Revolution," are its claim of extraordinary productivity
gains from investments in computing technology and its policy focus on
industry sectors.

The report cites studies to back its assertion of outsize productivity
benefits, but many economists are not convinced. "It could be that
investments here pay off more than other investments, but the evidence
is still not in, in my view," said Robert E. Litan, an economist and
director of research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Economists also tend to be skeptical of industry-sector policies because
they are reminiscent of industrial policy initiatives in Europe and
elsewhere in the postwar years that are widely seen as costly failures.
"I am far more sympathetic with promoting investment in general," Mr.
Litan said, "and letting the chips - pun intended - fall where they
may."




Yahoo! Groups Links




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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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----- Forwarded message from Erik De Schutter <erik@...> -----

From: Erik De Schutter <erik@...>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:56:16 +0100
To: connectionists@..., comp-neuro@...,
	 general@..., CNS <cns@...>, SMBnet@...
Cc:
Subject: [Comp-neuro] Research Professorship in Computational Neuroscience
	 at the University of Antwerp
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)

The following tenured faculty position is available within the
Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences of the
University of Antwerp, Belgium:

            Research Lecturer/Professor (ZAP-BOF) in Computational
Neuroscience

The successful candidate will develop a computational neuroscience
research line that fits within the overall research program of the
Laboratory of Theoretical Neurobiology (http://www.tnb.ua.ac.be). In
addition the candidate will participate in managing the National
Neuroinformatics Node and contribute to teaching in the Master in
Biomedical Sciences/Neuroscience.

Candidates are expected to have a PhD in a topic related to
computational neuroscience but also to be able to interface well with
experimental work. Preference is given to candidates with at least 6
years of postdoctoral training and with a strong, international
publication record.

Appointment is for an evaluation period of 3 years after which it
becomes tenured.  Starting grade depends on experience and academic
qualifications. The special research lecturer/professor mandate can
last a maximum of 10 years after which one becomes a lecturer/professor.

Application using the specific form of the University of Antwerp
together with a 5-10 page research plan for the first 5 years.
Application deadline April 28, 2007.

Text of the vacancy: http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?
c=*VACATURES&n=42384&ct=42852&e=120939
Application form: http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=*VACATURES&n=20319



_______________________________________________
Comp-neuro mailing list
Comp-neuro@...
http://www.neuroinf.org/mailman/listinfo/comp-neuro

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______________________________________________________________
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----- Forwarded message from gajinder singh <gajinder_pal_singh@...>
-----

From: gajinder singh <gajinder_pal_singh@...>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:33:47 +0000 (GMT)
To: discuss@...
Subject: [Synthetic Biology] Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property
	 Rights


Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the
Public Domain, and the Commons

Arti Rai*, James Boyle

PLoS Biol 5(3): e58 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050058


http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjou\
rnal.pbio.0050058





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discuss@...
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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore_pr.html

Be More Than You Can Be
Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like
today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.
By Noah Shachtman

The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66 percent humidity.
Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few minutes, is an unpleasantly
moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9
percent grade. My face is chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is
coming in short, unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are
in full revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer”
are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former minor-league
hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my direction and smiles at a
technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking contraption he
calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool to the touch. He tightens
a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins pulling blood to the surface of my hand,
and the cold metal chills my blood before it travels through my veins back to my
core. After five minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never
mind Bon Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the American
armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military —
specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency. For nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered
technological breakthroughs from the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early
1990s, as military strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ
weapons, the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a
scary place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head of
Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the capabilities of
nature before others taught them to us.”

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with
emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers,
not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with
medics — they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on
in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to
radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American
troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome
deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 (the D was added in
1972) as a place to noodle around on ideas too big, or too far out, for the Cold
War military-industrial complex. The results can sometimes be spectacular
failures (nuclear hand grenade, anyone?). But Darpa has also pushed the
development of some things that have become part of the fabric of military and
civilian life: wearable computers, long-range drone aircraft, night vision, even
the M16 rifle and the computer mouse.

But the agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in
1980s and 1990s weren’t interested — and were happy to avoid the tangled
ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, in June
2001, Tony Tether, an electrical engineer and Darpa veteran, left his job at the
Sequoia Group, a venture capital firm, and returned to head the agency. Under
his guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand.
Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more
general research on the human body. “There was a sense before that Darpa
wouldn’t get into human R&D. That was somewhere Frank Fernandez didn’t want
to go,” one former program manager says, referring to Darpa’s director from
1998 to 2001. But Tether “had a more open attitude. He was more permissive
about dealing with humans.”

The agency had already enlisted an unusual team of bioscience experts. One
program manager had been a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory working on
biomimetics; soon he was funding research on artificial limbs. Another early
member of the team, Joe Bielitzki, studied the effects of space travel on
animals while he was NASA’s chief veterinary officer. To head the push, Darpa
had turned to Michael Goldblatt, VP of science and technology at McDonald’s.
He’d helped develop a self-sterilizing package and pitched Darpa on the
material’s potential as a bandage, figuring that what was good for a Big Mac
might be good for bullet wounds. The agency offered him a job... which he turned
down. But two years later Darpa supersized the offer — Goldblatt was hired to
head the Defense Sciences Office, a division with a major focus on human
enhancement.

Grahn and his research partner, biologist Craig Heller, started working on the
Glove at Stanford in the late 1990s as part of their research on improving
physical performance. Even they were astounded at how well it seemed to work.
Vinh Cao, their squat, barrel-chested lab technician, used to do almost 100
pull-ups every time he worked out. Then one day he cooled himself off between
sets with an early prototype. The next round of pull-ups — his 11th — was as
strong as his first. Within six weeks, Cao was doing 180 pull-ups a session. Six
weeks after that, he went from 180 to more than 600. Soon, Stanford’s football
trainers asked to borrow a few Gloves to cool down players in the weight room
and to fight muscle cramps.

In 2001, Heller went to Darpa. The agency saw the potential of the Glove for
training recruits; the Stanford researchers received their first funding in 2003
and got $3 million.

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up
challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out
because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire
because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the
lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words,
overclocks the heat exchange system. “It’s like giving a Honda the radiator
of a Mack truck,” Heller says. After four months of using it himself, Heller
did 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday in April 2003. Soon after, troops from
Special Operations Command were trying out the Glove, too.

Darpa’s human-enhancement programs were looking promising. In February 2002,
Darpa asked Congress for a new, $78 million-per-year push for research including
“the development of biochemical materials for enhancement of performance.”
That was on top of $90 million to explore how “biological systems … adapt to
wide extremes.” The human being, a Darpa fact file proclaimed in April 2002,
“is becoming the weakest link in Defense systems.” Strengthening that chain
meant “sustaining and augmenting human performance,” as well as “enabling
new human capabilities.” Darpa was going to figure out how to build a better
soldier.

Mark Roth never expected his research to have military applications. He was a
biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, studying
how chromosomes move during cell replication. Then, about a decade ago, his
second daughter, Hannah Grace, died of heart failure at the age of 1. Her death
sent him down a much stranger path. “I became interested in immortality,” he
says.

Roth knew that some animals hibernate — slowing their metabolisms until
environmental conditions improve. He also knew that some cells can enter a kind
of dormancy and then spring back to life — essentially, they go into suspended
animation. Roth wanted to better understand this “metabolic flexibility.” He
started testing various chemicals that slowed metabolism, like heavy water and
tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison, used in Haiti to turn people into zombies).
Nothing worked. But then Roth found a loophole in one of nature’s seemingly
absolute rules: Animals need oxygen. But some creatures, like nematodes, fruit
flies, and zebra fish, don’t die if oxygen levels drop. Instead the critters
suspend. Their hearts stop beating for up to 24 hours. They don’t breathe. And
they don’t die. Wounds stop bleeding; nearly any injury becomes survivable,
and the brain shuts down without damage. “If you were shot, this is exactly
what you would want,” Roth says.

It’s a timing issue: At oxygen concentrations below some critical level,
animals kick off. But take the oxygen level even lower than that, fast, and they
don’t. The problem was, Roth couldn’t figure out how to pull off his oxygen
reduction trick in mammals, let alone humans. What would a battlefield medic do?
Tie a plastic bag over a wounded soldier’s head?

A television show gave Roth the clue he needed. In October 2002, he was watching
a PBS show about caving in Mexico. The host had to don a breathing mask because
the cavern’s air was full of hydrogen sulfide, which binds to mitochondria and
impedes the body’s ability to use oxygen. “Oh my gosh,” Roth thought.
“We can de-animate people.”

Three weeks later, Roth was at a meeting at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in
Colorado, organized by DSO’s Bielitzki, the ex-NASA veterinarian. The agency
was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within
which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth
had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

But before the program could start, DSO’s performance-enhancement push ran
into trouble in Washington. The President’s Council on Bioethics was
publishing reports decrying body hacks. Some in Congress worried about being
accused of funding a Frankenstein army.

In response to those critics, the agency already predisposed to clandestine
research — decided to go underground. Program names were changed to dull their
mad-scientist edge. Metabolic Dominance became Peak Soldier Performance.
Augmented Cognition became Improving Warfighter Information Intake Under Stress.
Researchers were told to keep their mouths shut; many current and former program
managers still won’t talk on the record, requesting anonymity for this story.
The Surviving Blood Loss program, meant to fund Roth’s work, was itself put
into suspended animation.

At Darpa headquarters — a blandly menacing office tower of brown stone and
curved black glass in suburban Virginia — the pall of that near-death
experience still hangs over the program. Or maybe it’s just the pictures of
Dick Cheney that stare down from the walls of director Tony Tether’s
fluorescent-lit office.

DSO isn’t trying to create posthuman troops, Tether says. “You know the old
Army saying, ‘Be all that you can be’? Well, that’s really what we’re
doing.” In training, soldiers “become extraordinary in strength and
endurance. But it’s not any better than their body can be. And what we try to
do is come up with techniques that allow them to maintain that level.” Tether
is also careful not to take too much credit for Darpa’s forays into biology.
“Darpa started these kinds of programs in the ’90s,” he says. “The fact
that we had small units meant that the medical ability wasn’t going to be
there. So we went in and started developing things that would allow soldiers to
take care of themselves. As time went on we found more things we could do.”
Most of Darpa’s performance-enhancement projects will take years, even
decades, to show up on battlefields, Tether notes. Many are still in petri
dishes or lab rats.

That pace is just fine with Tether. Darpa, he says, needs to be extra cautious.
During the mid–20th century, the US government did some pretty ugly things to
people in the name of science: exposing soldiers to A-bomb blasts,
psychologically abusing Harvard students (including a young Ted “Unabomber”
Kaczynski), letting hundreds of black men die of syphilis in Alabama.

Today, things are different. Organizations that conduct research on people use
Institutional Review Boards to evaluate every proposal. Anyone who wants to
study human beings with Darpa money has to further apply to a second, federal
IRB. “When you’re dealing with things that eventually have to be tested on
living things — animals and eventually humans — yeah, you’re much more
cautious,” Tether says. “We spend a lot of money on creating IRBs.” Guys
like Grahn and Heller hate the extra paperwork. “It’s an incredible pain in
the ass,” Grahn moans. “It’s like, ‘Heart monitors may cause chafing. In
such event, will discontinue use.’” Tether’s reply: “You can’t just
take the gun out in the back and shoot it, you know? It does slow things up, but
it’s a good check.”

Even as the research environment grew more restrictive, Mark Roth kept working.
In his first tests, he lowered the oxygen content in his mouse enclosures to
just 5 percent — and watched his lab mice drop dead in 15 minutes. He gave the
second group a whiff of hydrogen sulfide first. They survived in the 5 percent
oxygen environment for six hours — unconscious but alive. Roth was ecstatic.
He even brought his kids to see the mice in stasis and took pictures of the
rodents while they were out. “I’d never done that in 30 years of
research,” he says. “But this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to
change the playing field.”

In March 2005, the money from Darpa finally came through. The agency was looking
for techniques that would keep animals alive for three hours with 60 percent of
their blood gone — a lethal wound. Roth tried his hydrogen sulfide approach:
He knocked rats out with a blast of the gas and drained 60 percent of their
blood. They lived for 10 hours or more. Now Roth is considering going to the
IRBs for permission to suspend human beings.

Bioethical safeguards haven’t stopped dozens of other DSO-funded projects
around the world: energy cocktails that shave seconds off the race times of
world-class cyclists, magnetic waves beamed at people’s heads to detect
alertness, EEGs to detect when satellite imagery analysts spot a target — even
before the analysts realize it themselves, meaning they can work much faster.

In peacetime, this work might not have much urgency. But the US military is
chest-deep in a pair of nasty counterinsurgencies. Fighting this kind of war
requires huge numbers of troops, none more important than the so-called
“strategic corporal” — the average infantryman on patrol. The Bush
administration wants to increase the overall size of combat forces by 92,000
people over the next five years.

The problem is, the military is already struggling to meet current recruiting
goals. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Congress authorized a
temporary, 30,000-troop increase in the Army; the service still has 7,000 slots
left to fill. Up to 12 percent of the military’s recruits can now come from
the lowest admissible pool of applicants, “Category IV.” (In the 1980s and
1990s, it was 2 percent.) The maximum age for new privates has been raised from
35 to 42. Last year, 8,000 recruits got waivers for past drug use and criminal
histories. Drill sergeants have been told to back off the trainees — and even
allow them to do push-ups on their knees.

Those same grunts will need to pull 24-hour patrols in Iraq’s Venutian heat.
Intel officers must cope with a cascade of data from sensors, drones, and
informants. Rangers go on weeklong chases in the bitterly cold Hindu Kush.
Everyone, in other words, has to perform at their peak.

Which brings me back to Stanford. Heller and Grahn are developing a new version
of the Glove: one that fits less like a coffeepot and more like, well, a glove.
And it’ll have some added functionality. Those assemblies of radiator veins in
our extremities don’t just release heat — they can collect it, too, and use
it to warm the rest of the body. In a green and orange tent on a balcony outside
their lab, I strip down to a bathing suit to test their theory.

Next to me is a gray tub filled with 150 gallons of water, into which Vinh Cao,
the pull-up–happy lab technician, dumps 30 pounds of shaved ice. It’ll take
just 10 minutes or so, he says, to get the water down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
I wait, shivering slightly in the wind.

Then, eyelids squeezed tight, I step into the water. It stings, horribly. I yip
in pain. My shoulder and neck muscles clench like fists and brace to fight the
elements. I exhale once, twice. I lean on my forearms and lower myself in. Deep,
low-toned breaths rush out from the deepest part of my lungs. Water splashes as
my biceps and legs start to twitch. “Y’know, we can cut this short,” Grahn
says. After seven minutes, my fingers have turned white, and the nails have
settled into a dull purple. I touch my hands to my face. It’s like being
caressed by a corpse. “You’ve shut off the blood flow to these vascular
structures,” Grahn explains. “Standard suite of responses.”

That’s moderately comforting. So is the fact that I’m now totally numb. For
the first time, I notice three little yellow duckies bobbing in my Arctic tub.
Over the next 45 minutes, Grahn talks — about the scars on his nose and cheek
that he got playing center in the old Western Hockey League, about his days
driving Sno-Cats at Mount Hood Meadows Ski Resort in Oregon, about the Glove’s
trials at the marines’ mountain warfare training center.

But his stories get harder and harder to follow. I’ve started shivering again
— all across my legs and chest, muscles pulse to a manic rhythm. And then I
start having tremors. My thighs jackknife to my chest, unbidden. I moan, and
darkness closes in from the edges of my vision.

Then, just like on the treadmill, Grahn takes my wrist. He slips each of my
hands into a modified Glove prototype. This time, the metal hemispheres inside
are hot to the touch — 113 degrees. After two minutes, I can think again. The
tent comes back into focus. “You can stay this way indefinitely now. You’re
at a thermal equilibrium; the heat going into these two hands is equivalent to
what’s going out of the rest of you,” Grahn says. “Now you’re
uncomfortable again — merely uncomfortable. That’s a huge difference when
you’re talking about survival.” The water is still bitter, of course. But
now I can take it.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman wrote about MySpace in issue 14.12. His new
national security blog, Danger Room, is at blog.wired.com/defense.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

----- Forwarded message from Laurens van der Maaten
<l.vandermaaten@...> -----

From: Laurens van der Maaten <l.vandermaaten@...>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:18:37 +0100
To: connectionists@...
Subject: Connectionists: Matlab Toolbox for Dimensionality Reduction
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)

Dear Connectionists,

It is my pleasure to inform you that I recently released a Matlab
Toolbox for Dimensionality Reduction. The toolbox contains Matlab
implementations of twenty techniques for dimensionality reduction. A
number of these implementations were developed from scratch, whereas
other implementations are based on software that is already available
on the Web. I modified most of these implementations in order to make
them faster and/or more conservative in their use of memory. I
developed the toolbox while I was working on the following paper:

	 L.J.P. van der Maaten, E.O. Postma, and H.J. van den Herik.
Dimensionality Reduction: A Comparative Review.

A draft version of this paper is now available online. Any remarks,
suggestions, or comments regarding either the paper or the software
are very welcome!
Both the software and the paper are available from: http://
www.cs.unimaas.nl/l.vandermaaten/dr

With best regards,
Laurens van der Maaten

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

----- Forwarded message from RISKS List Owner <risko@...> -----

From: RISKS List Owner <risko@...>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:41:27 PDT
To: risks-resend@...
Cc:
Subject: [RISKS] Risks Digest 24.59

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest  Tuesday 13 March 2007  Volume 24 : Issue 59

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
   <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.59.html>
The current issue can be found at
   <http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

   Contents:
Errors down Canada's electronic income tax filing system (Paul Robinson)
Mega Millions Mess (Benjamin Jun)
PG&E sidesteps $38 million bill for daylight-saving patch (Paul Eggert)
FDA - DST and Medical Device Safety (Richard I. Cook)
Countdown to Confusion (Babington/Tse via Monty Solomon)
Insured car wrongly crushed? (Chris Drewe)
Two traffic engineers deny hacking into L.A.'s traffic system (PGN)
Hackers break into Harrisburgh water system network (PGN)
Trailing blank causes e-mail failure (Richard Karpinski)
Date arithmetic before 1900 (John Gilliver)
W2SP: Workshop on Web Security, call for papers (Dan Wallach)
Re: REVIEW: "Code Quality: ..." (Peter Mellor)
REVIEW: "FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook", Laura Taylor
   (Rob Slade)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:39:41 -0500
From: Paul Robinson <Paul@...>
Subject: Errors down Canada's electronic income tax filing system

An article in the 7 Mar 2007 *Toronto Star* (1) states that due to errors in
the electronic filing system, Canada Revenue Agency will be unable to accept
any tax filings electronically or corrections to prior filings.

The Agency's electronic systems apparently transposed the birth date and the
user's Social Insurance Number (the Canadian equivalent to the U.S. Social
Security Number) and thus corrupted all electronic databases.

A reference to the incident in Slashdot (2) states that no returns - not
even paper ones - can be accepted, "based returns will be stacking up in the
mail room, as returns cannot be filed at all until the problem is fixed."
This could be inferred from the first paragraph of the article in the
*Star*, which reads "a problem with electronic filing is making it
impossible even to submit tax returns to the Canada Revenue Agency."

The remainder of the article in the *Star* says nothing about their system
for accepting paper returns, only about the on-line and telephone systems.
A check of the taxing authority's website(3) regarding the issue states "We
have temporarily shut down public access to electronic services to ensure
the integrity of taxpayer information." and that "We have now traced the
source of the problem to software maintenance conducted on 4 Mar 2007. We
are currently working to bring all systems back online gradually."

A CRA press release dated March 6 (4) states "Commissioner of the Canada
Revenue Agency (CRA) Michel Dorais today instructed some computer
applications related to personal income tax filing to be temporarily
halted."

Mr. Dorais also stated "there is no indication that this situation was
caused by intrusion, hacking, or computer virus", i.e. the agency messed
things up all by their lonesome, they didn't need any help from anyone else.

The press release also says, "These applications include online services
like Efile, Netfile, and My Account. Mr. Dorais said that he instructed that
this preventative measure be taken following indications that CRA computer
systems have run into infrastructure problems. In order to safeguard
existing systems and to maintain the integrity of CRA's taxpayer information
holdings, Mr Dorais ordered tax filing processes halted."

Again, while this may imply that the agency is unable to process all returns
- even ones filed on paper - that is not explicitly stated, e.g.  don't get
your hopes up that you'll get away with a long delay in filing, considering
that Canada's tax deadline is April 30, Canadians have even more time than
people here in the U.S.

However, an article in *The Globe and Mail* (5) states that taxpayers "can
wait for Netfile to return to service, or they can print their returns and
mail them to the CRA" which indicates that the paper-based systems are
unaffected.

(1) http://www.thestar.com/News/article/189175
(2) http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/0417247
(3) http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/agency/updates/eservices-e.html
(4) http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/newsroom/releases/2007/march/nr070306-e.html
(5)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070307.wtaxes0307/BNStory/T\
echnology/home

   [Also noted by Henry Troup, who noted that 17 of 75 databases were
   reportedly impacted.  PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 10:02:03 -0800
From: Benjamin Jun <ben@...>
Subject: Mega Millions Mess

A US networked lottery system was overtaxed by demand and had at least two
operational problems:

A record $370M jackpot in the US "Mega Millions" lottery overwhelmed systems
used for tracking lottery purchases and ticket numbers.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/03/07/megamillions.ap/index.html

In one state (Ohio), the purchasing system went down 25 minutes before the
deadline.  In another state (California), they could not confirm by the
morning after the draw if there were any winners.  Loss of sales revenue is
one problem, but the delays in authentication open opportunities for more
serious fraud.

Benjamin Jun, Vice President of Technology, Cryptography Research, Inc.

   [After California results were finally generated, no new winners were
   discovered -- leaving the two East-coast winners to split the pot.  PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:38:45 -0800
From: Paul Eggert <eggert@...>
Subject: PG&E sidesteps $38 million bill for daylight-saving patch

In the 1 Mar 2007 *InformationWeek* Paul McDougall reports that utility
giant Pacific Gas & Electric says its meters won't work properly on 11 Mar
2007 because of this year's new daylight-saving rules and that reprogramming
them would cost $38 million.  The problem is time-of-use billing, where the
end-user rates change depending on time of day.

PG&E has worked around the problem by getting permission from the California
Public Utilities Commission to change the cutover times instead of upgrading
its meters.  For example, from 11 Mar through 31 Mar a peak usage period
that would ordinarily end at 6pm will instead end at 5pm to compensate for
the meters being off by an hour.

PG&E announced this workaround in April 2006.  Presumably the workaround
will continue through the life of the existing meters.

The workaround encourages power usage in the 5pm-6pm hour.  This undermines
a primary justification for the 2007 change to U.S. daylight-saving rules,
which is to conserve electricity by shifting consumption from late afternoon
to early morning.

Here's a reference:

Paul McDougall, "PG&E Says Patching Meters For An Early Daylight-Saving Time
Will Cost $38 Million", InformationWeek 1 Mar 2007
<http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700487>

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:17:42 -0600
From: "Richard I. Cook" <ri-cook@...>
Subject: FDA - DST and Medical Device Safety

FYI: There are lots of dates in modern medical equipment including DST
changes, leap years, and device dependent dates, e.g.  the next required
preventive maintenance.  The alert was not issued because of a theoretical
possibility but because of actual user experience. Just when you thought
that Y2K was safely behind you...

Date:    Fri, 2 Mar 2007 15:57:45 -0500
From:    CDER MEDWATCH LISTSERV
Subject: FDA - MedWatch - Medical Device Safety - Change in Daylight
Savings Time May Affect Medical Equipment in Unpredictable Ways

FDA notified healthcare professionals and consumers of the possibility that
some medical devices/equipment, hospital networks and associated information
technology systems may generate adverse events because of the upcoming
change in the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time (DST), and
suggested actions to prevent such occurrences.  Medical equipment that uses,
creates or records time information about a patient's diagnosis or treatment
and has not been updated by the manufacturer, may not work properly when the
new DST starts three weeks earlier and ends one week later this
year. Medical equipment currently in use was likely made before the DST
rules were changed and may cause patient's equipment to register the wrong
dates for the start and end of daylight savings time this year.
Additionally, if a medical device or medical device network are adversely
affected by the new DST date changes, a patient's treatment or diagnostic
result could be:

  * incorrectly prescribed
  * provided at the wrong time
  * missed
  * given more than once
  * given for longer or shorter durations than intended
  * incorrectly recorded

Related CDRH release: Unpredictable Events in Medical Equipment due to New
Daylight Savings Time Change: http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/safety/030107-dst.html

   [Also noted by Paul Eggert:]
http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/medicaldevicesafety/atp/030107-dst.html

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2007 20:53:13 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@...>
Subject: DST: Countdown to Confusion (Babington/Tse)

Perhaps the worst that will happen in millions of offices on the second
Monday in March is that caffeine-deprived workers will wonder why their
automatic coffeemakers failed to perk on schedule. In less lucky workplaces,
however, employees might miss meetings, overbook conference rooms or
inaccurately record the time or date of important financial transactions.

For the first time in 20 years, daylight saving time will not start on the
first Sunday in April. Instead, it will begin three weeks earlier, at 2
a.m. on the second Sunday in March, the 11th.

Devices from the tiniest BlackBerry to the largest mainframe computer must
be updated to ensure their internal clocks "spring forward" by one hour at
the right moment rather than on the old date, which has been written into
countless programs. Similarly, they must be reprogrammed to revert to
standard time a week later than usual, on Nov. 4. Congress decided in 2005
to expand daylight saving time by four weeks, starting this year, in hopes
of conserving energy by pushing more human activity into sunlit hours. ...
[Source: Charles Babington and Tomoeh Murakami Tse Countdown to Confusion:
Daylight Saving Time Comes Early This Year, But Will Your Computer Know When
to Switch?, *The Washington Post*, 3 Mar 2007]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/02/AR2007030201346.\
html

   [Marc Sachs mentioned to me that Kerberos-based systems were subject to
   failure on 11 March because of a maximum-permitted 10-minute clock
   divergence.  PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:25:30 +0000
From: Chris Drewe <e767pmk@...>
Subject: Insured car wrongly crushed?

Background: In the UK, motor vehicle details have been stored on the Driver
& Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) computer for decades.  This includes a
record that the annual Vehicle Excise Duty ("tax disc") is current.  For the
last year or two, the annual vehicle inspection ("MoT test") is captured
on-line as it's done, and insurance companies provide details for a database
of insured vehicles.  These allow the police to do real-time road-side
checks on passing traffic.  Drivers are not required to carry documents with
them, but the police can require them to be produced ("a producer") at a
police station nominated by the driver within 7 days.

In one case, a car was allegedly towed by police and crushed for having no
insurance, despite having a valid policy.  There are questions about this
case, but here are some general comments on the matter from people at the
company where I work:

>> A police statement said: "It is the responsibility of insurance
>> companies, not police forces, to ensure that insurance policy details
>> are updated on the national motor insurance database. When deciding if a
>> car should be towed for insurance or licence violations, officers must
>> show `reasonable belief' that an offence has taken place.  "Due to
>> inaccuracies on the motor insurance database officers should not only
>> rely on details held there to constitute `reasonable belief'".
>
> Having been involved in our attempts to keep the motor insurers database
> up to date with details of the company fleet, I can't say I'm surprised
> that it's sometimes out of date.  It seems totally ridiculous that the
> police use this as the sole evidence that a vehicle should be towed away.
>
>> Gives you great confidence in the ability of the `authorities' to use
>> databases in he pursuit of their version of justice. Imagine them using a
>> database covering ID cards, they'd be hauling us off instead of cars
>> then....
>
> Can't help wondering why the police impounded the car instead of simply
> issuing a producer.  Was there something else dodgy about the car or the
> driver that we weren't told about?

The idea is the computer says no, the journey ends there. The police will
not allow you to continue in an uninsured car.

There was something on one of those `fly on the wall' police programs that
made me wonder.  They stopped someone because the computer said the car was
untaxed and uninsured and the driver tried to show them an insurance
certificate. The officers were singularly unimpressed saying anyone with a
computer can knock up a `valid' certificate of insurance preferring to
believe what the database told them.  At the end of the program we were
updated and the driver was insured but his tax was 6 weeks out of date.

Looks like the (rather familiar) RISKs here are (a) ambiguity as to what is
regarded as the definitive record -- in this case, computer database or
paper insurance certificate? -- and (b) how individuals can find themselves
in trouble for others' errors and omissions, e.g. if your insurance company
makes a mistake in updating the database.  Presumably you could prove in
court that you have a valid policy, but that's not much good if you're
detained by police at the side of the road a long way from home.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 13:01:52 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@...>
Subject: Two traffic engineers deny hacking into L.A.'s traffic system

Back in Aug 2006 there was a threat of a strike, which caused Los Angeles
officials to restrict access to traffic-control computers.  However,
beginning on 21 Aug 2006, two traffic engineers were able to access those
computers anyway, lengthening the red light cycles on major routes, and
allegedly causing massive traffic tie-ups for several days at different
intersections (LAX Airport, Studio City, the Glendale Freeway, Little Tokyo,
and the L.A. Civic Center).  Both men pleaded not guilty to felony charges
on 8 Jan 2007.  [Source: Sharon Bernstein and Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles
Times, 9 Jan 2007; PGN-ed]
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-trafficlights9jan09,1,899433.story\
?coll=la-news-state

   [Clifford Neuman is quoted at the end of the article, saying that there
   are two primary ways to design computers to guard against malicious
   activity by insiders, but each can interfere with employees' ability to do
   their tasks and would probably be prohibitively expensive for the city.]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:11:17 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@...>
Subject: Hackers break into Harrisburgh water system network

   [Marcus H. Sachs sent this to me at the end of October, but it slipped
   through the crack.  It is never too late for such items to appear in
   RISKS, even though some of them may have been overtaken by other events.]

An infected laptop gave hackers access to computer systems at a Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, water treatment plant.  The plant's systems were accessed in
early October 2006 after an employee's laptop computer was compromised via
the Internet (apparently from abroad), and then used as an entry point to
install a computer virus and spyware on the plant's computer system.  The
FBI was investigating.  The motive appears to have been the use of the
laptop as a zombie, rather than an attempt to subvert the water system.
However, more serious risks are obvious.  [Source: Robert McMillan, Hackers
break into water system network, IDG News Service, 31 Oct 2006; PGN-ed]
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/110106-hackers-break-into-water-system.htm\
l

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 22:27:53 -0800
From: Richard Karpinski <dick@...>
Subject: Trailing blank causes e-mail failure

When a system of components is under disparate control like the Internet, it
only works reliably when everybody plays by the rules.  E-Mail behavior is
specified in rfc2822 and related documents maintained by the IETF. While I
can't find it clearly in that document, the general rule is that you should
be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you generate.

Here I report on an e-mail address which fails because of a trailing
blank. Notice that it can be difficult to see a blank by the naked eye when
it is followed by white space. It should not be there. There should be no
space after .COM or .NET in an e-mail address. Still, many e-mail programs
make it easy to put one there by mistake. In this case, the Apple Macintosh
OS X application Mail happily uses such an address and passes the blank
along.

No matter; the next recipient will trim it off and there will be no
problem. In my case, the e-mail went to the ISP supported by what used to be
Pacific Bell, which became SBC and then became AT&T by further corporate
manipulations. They use Yahoo to provide outgoing e-mail service for their
DSL customers. Yahoo, too, apparently passes the trailing blank along,
presumably to a Domain Name Server. No matter.  The DNS will trim off the
blank and all will be well.

But no. MAILER-DAEMON@... says:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named bzwebtech.com?. (#5.1.2)
And the mail is returned to the sender.

Perhaps the DNS is actually OK; I can't tell from the messages I get.
Still, I believe that at least Mail and Yahoo are not really playing by the
rules.

Now a nitpicker is fully equipped to track such a problem down, at least to
the point of discovering the unwanted blank, but other e-mail users may not
have the resources and may simply assume that the part to the left of the
.COM is in error and give up entirely on reaching that company or
person. Too bad, since that introduces unnecessary friction and loss in a
vital facility.

Surely Apple and Yahoo are wrong in their treatment of a problem originally
caused by my own mistake. If the DNS is also wrong, then we may have more to
worry about than I knew. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of any
convenient way to report problems to any of those entities.

Richard Karpinski, World Class Nitpicker, 148 Sequoia Circle, Santa Rosa,
CA 95401  dick@...  Home +1 707-546-6760   Cell +1 707-228-9716

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 19:31:40 -0000
From: "Gilliver, John \(UK\)" <John.Gilliver@...>
Subject: Date arithmetic before 1900 (Re: Excel, Levine, RISKS-24.57)

> less common to do date arithmetic, and I've never seen anyone doing date
> arithmetic as far back as 1900.

Genealogists -- or the software they use -- does it a lot; the one I use
(Brother's Keeper -- somewhat clunky by today's standards, but I have a *lot*
of records in it and am not translating it all now! It also is excellent at
encouraging you to record *source* and *quality* data for all your data),
for example, shows the age of anyone it can (by subtracting birth from death
if both are recorded, otherwise birth from today -- and no I don't know what
cutoff it imposes). It may do other date calculations too. OK, for giving
ages in years, this only has a 1 in (about) 365 chance of giving the wrong
answer if there's a day funny around 1900, but I just thought I'd mention it
as something which regularly does date calculations "as far back as" 1900.

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 11:08:26 -0800
From: "Dan Wallach" <dwallach@...>
Subject: W2SP: Workshop on Web Security, call for papers

Larry Koved and I are co-chairing a workshop on 24 May 2007 on web security
(W2SP) that will be co-located with and following the IEEE Symposium on
Security & Privacy in Oakland, CA.  We're asking for one-page position
papers, and our hope is to attract more industrial participation than you'd
otherwise get at an academic conference.

   The goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia
   and industry to focus on understanding Web 2.0 security and privacy
   issues, and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Position papers are due March 23.
Here's the full CFP:
http://www.ieee-security.org/Calendar/cfps/cfp-W2SP.html

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 14:12:40 EST
From: MellorPeter@...
Subject: Re: REVIEW: "Code Quality: ..." (Slade, RISKS-24.57)

Review by Rob Slade <rMslade@...> of "Code Quality:
The Open Source Perspective", Spinellis.

> Nonfunctional requirements (including such
> characteristics as reliability, portability, usability, interoperability,
> adaptability, dependability, and maintainability) are much harder
> to assess, and yet may be more important.   [...]
> Chapter one introduces the structure of the text by mapping
> characteristics from the ISO 9126 quality standard to the chapters and
> sections of the book.

ISO/IEC 9126 has now been superseded by a set of standards referred to as
SQuaRE, but the new standards are still flawed, in the same way that 9126
was (and are direct derivatives of it).

The problem arose back in 1992 when the joint technical committee (JTC1) set
up to ensure compatibility between ISO (International Standards
Organisation) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) took on a
life of its own and began to write standards without reference to either of
its parent bodies.

In particular, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG6 began to draft standards (the ISO/IEC
9126 series) on "software quality" in which it misused terms defined by
IEC/TC56 (Technical Committee 56: Dependability).  In particular, terms such
as "reliability", "availability" and "maintaintability" were defined as
"subcharacteristics" of "software quality" without any regard to the
standard definitions of these terms in the field of system dependability.
(At the time, the working group responsible had not even heard of the
standard definitions as stated in IEC 60050 (191): International
Electrotechnical Vocabulary Section 191: Dependability and Quality of
Service.)

I would advise anyone who is interested in the dependability of systems
(i.e., their reliability, availability and maintainability as correctly
defined) to take anything emanating from ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 (Joint Technical
Committee 1, committee on "Software Quality") with a very large pinch of
salt.

Peter Mellor (UK Principal Expert on Dependability Terminology,
IEC/TC56/WG1: Working Group 1, Definitions of Terms.)  +44 (0)20 8459 7669

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:56:32 -0800
From: Rob Slade <rMslade@...>
Subject: REVIEW: "FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook", Laura Taylor

BKFISMAC.RVW   20070113

"FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook", Laura Taylor, 2007,
1-59749-116-0, U$69.95/C$90.95
%A   Laura Taylor
%C   800 Hingham Street, Rockland, MA   02370
%D   2007
%G   1-59749-116-0 978-1-59749-116-7
%I   Syngress Media, Inc.
%O   U$69.95/C$90.95 781-681-5151 fax: 781-681-3585 www.syngress.com
%O  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597491160/robsladesinterne
   http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597491160/robsladesinte-21
%O   http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597491160/robsladesin03-20
%O   Audience a- Tech 1 Writing 1 (see revfaq.htm for explanation)
%P   498 p.
%T   "FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook"

The United States' Federal Information Systems Management Act mandates
certain standards of information security and controls for US federal
agencies.  It extends to contractors and other sources that support the
assets of federal government departments.  However, it may have wider
application yet, since it provides a solid basis for security management,
assessment, and assurance for large corporations as well.

Chapter one looks at definitions of various terms surrounding security and
controls.  It is interesting to note that to the usual certification
(assessment) and accreditation (acceptance) phases the feds add an
audit/evaluation phase between the two.  The National Information Assurance
Certification and Accreditation Process (NIACAP), National Institute of
Standards and Technology outline, Defense Information Technology Systems
Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP), and Director of Central
Intelligence Directive 6/3 (DCID 6/3), all directions on how to follow
FISMA, are briefly compared in chapter two.  A list of job descriptions, and
a brief outline of general project management steps makes up chapter three.
Chapter four examines components of a certification and accreditation
program, mostly in terms of documentation.  Chapter five returns to project
management, with a quick look at the initiation phase.  An even shorter
mention of creating a hardware and software inventory is in chapter six.
Chapter seven is nominally about determining the proper level for
certification (which is, again, primarily related to the number of documents
produced), but turns into an interesting and valuable outline of information
classification.  Much of chapter eight, on self-assessment, is a reprinting
of the NIST 800-26 guideline on that topic.  Security awareness and training
is touched on briefly in chapter nine.  Chapter ten, on rules of behaviour,
is a terse mix of acceptable use and incident response, but it leads rather
nicely into the longer examination of incident response in chapter eleven.
Chapter twelve lists various types of assessment tools, such as
vulnerability scanners and code analyzers.  I found the privacy impact
assessment, in chapter thirteen, to be an interesting perspective.  Chapter
fourteen's material on business risk assessment is concise but reasonable.
Business impact assessment, in fifteen, is not quite as good, since it
neglects the analysis of criticality of operations.  Contingency planning is
outlined well in chapter sixteen.  Chapter seventeen takes a brief look at
risk assessment, but manages to hit all the high points.  Change management
is reviewed in chapter eighteen.  An overview system security plan document
is described in chapter nineteen.  The certification package is detailed
from the perspective of those submitting it (in chapter twenty) and those
evaluating or auditing it (chapter twenty-one).  Preparation of a plan to
correct residual weaknesses is addressed in chapter twenty-two.  Chapter
twenty-three looks at improving the standings and grading on a Federal
Computer Security Report Card.

There is much that is useful and helpful in this book, both in terms of
general information security management structure and process, and in terms
of references for those involved with FISMA related programs.  However, for
those who are new to the operation of US government certification and
accreditation, the basic requirements, and the relation of the ancillary
programs to FISMA itself, could have been more fully explained.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 2007   BKFISMAC.RVW   20070113
rslade@...     slade@...     rslade@...
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm

------------------------------

Date: 2 Oct 2005 (LAST-MODIFIED)
From: RISKS-request@...
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

  The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest, with Usenet equivalent comp.risks.
=> SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent)
  if possible and convenient for you.   The mailman web interface can
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  Alternatively, to subscribe or unsubscribe via e-mail to mailman your
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=> The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites,
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  The full info file may appear now and then in RISKS issues.
  *** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines.

=> .UK users should contact <Lindsay.Marshall@...>.
=> SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored.  Instead, use an alternative
  address from which you NEVER send mail!
=> SUBMISSIONS: to risks@... with meaningful SUBJECT: line.
  *** NOTE: Including the string "notsp" at the beginning or end of the subject
  *** line will be very helpful in separating real contributions from spam.
  *** This attention-string may change, so watch this space now and then.
=> ARCHIVES: ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks for current volume
      or ftp://ftp.sri.com/VL/risks for previous VoLume
  <http://www.risks.org> redirects you to Lindsay Marshall's Newcastle archive
  http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html gets you VoLume, ISsue.
    Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version
    of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but
    not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r
  <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> .
==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners:
     <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing,
     <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing

------------------------------

End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 24.59
************************

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

Quite unexpectedly, I've been able to make lighttd+postfix+mailman
to work almost out of the box. The new list home is on
http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt
(NO NEED TO SUBSCRIBE YET, I will relocate everyone manually)
new archives are on http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/
and list is tt@... with the Subject: [tt]

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

Please consider speaking at our upcoming conference.
Send proposals to me at director@....

Also, distribute to anyone you think might be interested.

-------------------------------------------------------

IHEU- Appignani Humanist Center for Bioethics and
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

present

Human Rights for the 21st Century
Rights of the Person to Technological Self-Determination

May 11-13, 2007
New York City

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/rights2007

Cocktail Reception: Friday May 11, 6-9pm, Romanian Consulate, 200 East
38th Street

Conference: Saturday May 12 and Sunday May 13, 9:00 am - 3:45 pm
Location: 777 UN Plaza, 2nd Floor, New York City, NY 10017

Download the Conference Poster
http://ieet.org/archive/ieetiheu2007.pdf

Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Moreno Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Center for
American Progress

The 2007 conference "Human Rights for the 21st Century: Rights of the
Person to Technological Self-Determination" will focus on (a) human
rights in the context of bodily autonomy as well as reproductive and
cognitive liberties, (b) emerging biotechnologies which may contribute
to the exercise of such rights, and (c) challenges to the ideas of human
identity underlying some rights discourse.

The conference will address the various roles of emerging technologies
and other products of scientific progress in today's society, as well as
their implications for the pursuit of bioethics. Potential topics to be
considered include nanotechnology in medical treatment, novel vaccines
against addictive behaviors, Internet-enabled social networking and
engineering, designer genetic engineering, novel transplantable tissue
and organ generation, neuroscience and its application to medical
advances, as well as reproductive science and women's rights. The
conference intends to provide an open forum for interaction between
various stakeholders in this debate, including those representing
public, private, and international sectors.

These topics will be addressed through paper presentations and panel
discussions. The deadline for the proposals for talks is April 25, 2007.
Papers are not required, but any conference papers that are submitted
will be peer-reviewed and considered for publication in the Journal of
Evolution and Technology (http://jetpress.org).

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Registration for presenters and early registrants is $50, payable by May
1, 2007. Registration fee includes attendance at the two-day conference.
Cocktail reception: $15 extra. The conference fee for students who
attend is $25, for the general public (after May 1) $75.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/rights2007#reg

The physical address for the submission of proposals for talks
(deadline: April 25, 2007), registration fees by check (payable to
"IHEU") or inquiries:

IHEU, P.O. Box 4104 Grand Central Station New York, NY 10162
Phone: (212) 687 3324 analita@...

----------------------------------------------------------

Accommodation packages are available, on a first-come-first-serve basis,
from the Pickwick Hotel, E 51st Street and Second Avenue. Tel: 212 355
0300, e-mail: info@...

Fifteen hotel rooms have been booked at Millenium UN Plaza Hotel New
York, United Nations Plaza, 44th Street between First and Second
Avenues, New York,NY, USA 10017-3575 Tel: 212 758 1234 fax: 212 702 5051
reservation: 866 866 8086 email: unplaza@.... Please quote
Conference name when booking.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics focuses on raising awareness of
bioethical issues confronting the international community and developing
and implementing an international program for lobbying. The Center is a
new initiative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. IHEU
holds a special consultative status with ECOSOC at the United Nations, a
general consultative status with UNICEF and the Council of Europe as
well as operational relations with UNESCO in Paris.

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies examines the social
implications of technological progress, promoting public policies that
distribute the benefits and reduce the risks of accelerating innovation.
The IEET is chaired by Dr. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, and served
by Dr. James Hughes of Trinity College (Hartford CT) as its Executive
Director. The thirteen Fellows of the IEET span expertise from
nanotechnology, neurotechnology, biotechnology and information science
to bioethics, philosophy and health policy. The IEET publishes the
Journal of Evolution and Technology and produces the Changesurfer radio
show and podcast.

------------------------
James Hughes Ph.D.
Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
http://ieet.org
Editor, Journal of Evolution and Technology
http://jetpress.org
Public Policy Studies, Trinity College
http://internet2.trincoll.edu/facProfiles/Default.aspx?fid=1004332
Williams 229B, Trinity College
300 Summit St., Hartford CT 06106
(office) 860-297-2376
director@...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11358-can-computers-make-lifeordea
th-medical-decision.html

Click to Print
Can computers make life-or-death medical decision?

     * 00:01 13 March 2007
     * NewScientist.com news service
     * Roxanne Khamsi

A simple formula can predict how people would want to be treated in dire
medical situations as accurately as their loved ones can, say
researchers.

The finding suggests that computers may one day help doctors and those
acting as surrogate decision-makers to better estimate the wishes of
people in a coma.

By signing what is known as an "advance directive", people can specify
what types of medical care they would want if they lost the ability to
make decisions. Many people, however, do not complete such a directive
in advance of these critical situations and their relatives or others
must then decide on their behalf.

But how well can surrogates accurately predict the wishes of patients?
Researchers have previously addressed this question by asking people how
they would want to be treated in various hypothetical medical scenarios
and, in a separate room, asking surrogates to guess what those responses
had been. A review of 16 studies found that surrogates got it right only
68% of the time.
Reason and remember

Bioethicist David Wendler of the National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, US and colleagues wondered whether a formula could
be used to better predict a patient's wishes. They examined information
collected by pollsters and scientists about the attitudes towards
medical care held by the general US population.

The data suggested that most people want life-saving treatment if there
is at least a 1% chance that following the intervention they would have
the ability to reason, remember and communicate. If there is less than a
1% chance, people generally say they would choose not to have the
treatment.

"The difference between zero and 1% is all the difference in the world
for someone," says Wendler.
Surprising accuracy

His team then looked at subset of the 16 studies in which the medical
scenarios were judged to be easier for a member of the public to
understand. In these casea, they found that surrogates predicted the
patient's wishes more accurately, 78% of the time. But surprisingly,
using the formula that people only want interventions if there is a 1%
chance of a good outcome had the same accuracy.

Wendler says he was surprised at the formula's accuracy. "I think it's
fascinating. At first when you hear it you think 'That just can't be
right,'" he says.

He imagines a situation in which a surrogate is told there is only a 5%
chance that an incapacitated loved one will survive a life-saving
surgery following an auto accident. He says that the relative might
predict that the patient would not want the intervention while the
formula would predict that they did.

Wendler now wants to collect medical care preferences from people of
various ethnic, religious and gender groups, which will help his team
refine the formula. He believes that a computer program might one day
predict patient's wishes to an accuracy of 90%.

And the tool could take some of the pressure off of relatives who
sometimes have to decide whether or not to switch off a patient's life
support machine.
Question of ethics

However, critics caution that computer algorithms should never supplant
human surrogates. "I believe it would be extremely irresponsible to
allow machines to make decisions involving life and death," says Bobby
Schindler, brother of Terri Schiavo. Schiavo was in a persistent
vegetative state for 15 years until she died in 2005 after doctors
removed her feeding tube. Her case sparked huge debate in the US.

"If a person becomes incapacitated, is not dying, and can assimilate
food and water via a feeding tube, then I believe that we are morally
obligated to care for the person and provide them this basic care -
regardless of a computer attempting to 'predict' what that person's
wishes might be," Schindler adds.

"Essentially, you would be allowing a machine to determine what is
ethical, what is right and wrong, which no machine is able to do."

Journal reference: PLoS Medicine (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040035)
Related Articles

     * Regaining consciousness: A life or death dilemma
     * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125593.900
     * 08 July 2006
     * Last rights: The battle for a dignified death
     * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624967.000
     * 23 April 2005
     * Terri Schiavo dies as politics and medicine collide
     * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7222
     * 01 April 2005

Weblinks

     * David Wendler, NIH
     * http://www.bioethics.nih.gov/people/wendler-bio.html
     * PLoS Medicine
     *
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1549-
1676
     * End of life issues, MedlinePlus
     * http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/endoflifeissues.html
     * Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation
     * http://www.terrisfight.org/

----- Forwarded message from Yahoo!Groups <notify@yahoogroups.com> -----

From: Yahoo!Groups <notify@yahoogroups.com>
Date: 13 Mar 2007 08:06:56 -0000
To: eugen@...
Subject: Unable to deliver your message


We are unable to deliver the message from <eugen@...>
to <transhumantech@yahoogroups.com>.

Your email account has been bouncing mails.  This means that emails
sent to your account over several days have been returned to us.
This is sometimes because mail boxes are filled up, or because of
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For further assistance, please visit http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/

From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@...>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:05:03 +0100
To: transhumantech@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [d.mareschal@...: Connectionists: Neuroconstructivism]
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

----- Forwarded message from Denis Mareschal <d.mareschal@...> -----

From: Denis Mareschal <d.mareschal@...>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:57:07 +0000
To: connectionists@...
Subject: Connectionists: Neuroconstructivism

Dear all,

Several readers of this list may be interested in the new two volume
book described below.

Best regards,

Denis Mareschal

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a
single cell to grow into a sentient adult? The processes that occur
along the way are so complex that any attempt to understand
development necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating
data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging -
an approach till now seldom taken in the study of child development.
Neuroconstructivism is a major new 2 volume publication that seeks to
redress this balance, presenting an integrative new framework for
considering development.

Further details can be obtained at
http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/neuroconstructivism/


Neuroconstructivism: Vol. 1: How the Brain Constructs Cognition (2007)
Denis Mareschal, Mark H. Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, Michael Spratling,
Michael S. C. Thomas, and Gert Westermann. Oxford University Press

In the first volume, the authors review up-to-to date findings from
neurobiology, brain imaging, child development, computer and robotic
modelling to consider why children's thinking develops the way it
does. They propose a new synthesis of development that is based on 5
key principles found to operate at many levels of descriptions. They
use these principles to explain what causes a number of key
developmental phenomena, including infants' interacting with objects,
early social cognitive interactions, and the causes of dyslexia. The
"neuroconstructivist" framework also shows how developmental
disorders do not arise from selective damage to normal cognitive
systems, but instead arise from developmental processes that operate
under atypical constraints. How these principles work is illustrated
in several case studies ranging from perceptual to social and reading
development. Finally, the authors use neuroimaging, behavioural
analyses, computational simulations and robotic models to provide a
way of understanding the mechanisms and processes that cause
development to occur.

Neuroconstructivism: Vol. 2: Perspectives and Prospects (2007)
Denis Mareschal, Sylvain Sirois, Gert Westermann and Mark H. Johnson.
Oxford University Press

Computer and robotic models provide concrete tools for investigating
the processes and mechanisms involved in learning and development.
Volume 2 illustrates the principles of 'Neuroconstructivist'
development, with contributions from 9 different labs across the
world. Each of the contributions illustrates how models play a
central role in understanding development. The models presented
include standard connectionist neural network models as well as
multi-agent models. Also included are robotic models emphasizing the
need to take embodiment and brain-system interactions seriously. A
model of Autism and one of Specific Language Impairment also
illustrate how atypical development can be understood in terms of the
typical processes of development but operating under restricted
conditions. This volume complements Volume 1 by providing concrete
examples of how the 'Neuroconstructivist' principles can be grounded
within a diverse range of domains, thereby shaping the research
agenda in those domains.

Contributors to Volume 2:
James A Bednar, Institute for Adaptive & Neural Computation,
University of Edinburgh;
Ira L Cohen, Chairman, Dept of Psychology, NYS Institute for Basic
Research in Developmental Disabilities; Yiannis Demiris, Dept of
Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London;
Melissa Dominguez, DBK Acoustics
Robert A Jacobs, Dept of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of
Rochester, Rochester;
Marc Joanisse, Dept of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience, The
University of Western Ontario;
Mark H Johnson, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck
College, University of London; Denis Mareschal, Centre for Brain and
Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, University of London; Risto
Miikkulainen, Dept of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at
Austin;
Shreesh P Mysore, Control & Dynamic Systems Program, California
Insitute of Technology;
Domenico Parisi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies,
Italian National Research Council;
Steven R Quartz, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and
Computation and Neural System Program, California Institute of
Technology;
Maartje E J Raijmakers, Dept of Psychology, University of Amsterdam;
Matthew Schlesinger, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Program, Dept of
Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale;
Thomas R Shultz, Dept of Psychology and School of Computer Science,
McGill University;
Sylvain Sirois, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester;
Olaf Sporns, Dept of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana
University, Bloomington;
Gert Westermann, Dept of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University
--
=================================================


	 Professor Denis Mareschal
	 Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
	 School of Psychology
	 Birkbeck College
	 University of London
	 Malet St., London
	 WC1E 7HX, UK
	 tel +44 (0)20 7079-0751/7631-6582 reception: 7631-6207
	 fax +44 (0)20 7631-6312
	 http://www.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/people/academic/mareschal_d/


=================================================

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE




----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

I hope to move the list to postbiota.org soonish.
It will be run on Mailman (hopefully, with an RSS feed),
and have searchable archives, monetized with AdSense.
There will be a blog (Wordpress), too.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

----- Forwarded message from Sunny Bains <sunny@...> -----

From: Sunny Bains <sunny@...>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:41:19 +0000
To: connectionists@...
Subject: Connectionists: Latest version of The Neuromorphic Engineer now
	 online
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)

You can download it from

http://www.sunnybains.com/NME3-2.pdf

currently, or in a few days at:

http://www.ine-web.org/

Note: If you have suggestions for contributors for future issues, or
would like to write yourself, please don't hesitate to get in touch
with me.

Best,

Sunny Bains
Editor, The Neuromorphic Engineer

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE