You probably wouldn't expect to find advice on the current financial crisis in a science magazine. But Scientific American has posted a short article offering same. The piece has nothing specifically to say about Europe, now undergoing a meltdown of its own, albeit probably related to U.S. events.

"How to Fix the U.S. Financial Crisis" is by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who is best known for his high-profile, and sometimes controversial, analysis of economics in the developing world and sustainable development. Sachs argues that rescue legislation just passed by the U.S. Congress, while it may boost confidence, is not nearly enough to turn things around.

Among other measures, Sachs advises federal short-term loans to shore up lending between U.S. banks so as to keep capital markets operating. He also advocates easing repayment terms for mortgage holders and expanded spending abroad, especially in Asia.

His depressing forecast: several more months, minimum, of bad times in the U.S., and no serious additional action to fix things until after the new President Whoever takes office late in January.

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]]> Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:37:16 +0000 financial crisis current financial crisis economist jeffrey sachs meltdown short article tam category boost confidence fix columbia university Gloomy forecast: For financial meltdown remedies, wait 'til next year http://mobileratty.com/article/70e31fb17ea55ac034daa3c2e4a29da0 http://mobileratty.com/article/70e31fb17ea55ac034daa3c2e4a29da0


The German photographic society, numbering more than 1000 members since its founding in 1951, represents the cultural interests of photographs in Germany.

Sesson began to develop in 1975, and in 1978, has been patented technology, applications for building the first digital camera that uses a charge-coupled device (CCD, CCD).

Culture Prize awarded since 1959 in recognition of outstanding contribution to photography in the artistic, humanitarian, social, technical, educational and scientific spheres. Among the previously awarded this prize - known around the world, scientists, inventors, authors, publishers, educators, art directors and photographers.

This is the sixth award, presented by Sessonu for the development of the first digital camera. Last year he entered the Hall of Fame Consumer Electronics USA, received the prize for prescience Association photographic manufacturers and distributors. In 2006 he was awarded the prize for scientific achievements, Peking University School of Journalism Prize progress and photographic society of America, and in 2001, Kodak has said his achievements Prizom behalf of Eastman for innovation.

Sesson - fourth researcher of Kodak, was awarded the Prize of Culture. In previous years the award were Dr. Leopold Godovski (1973), Dr. Wesley T. Hanson (1977) and Dr. Paul B. Gilmen (1989).

The crew trekked down to Cambodia to use the military's equipment. At first, the Cambodian military didn't want to use a tank, so instead they taped a baseball to a rocket. This, obviously, didn't show how well the baseball would travel at such speeds, as it just blew everything up, as you can see above.

Then, after changing their minds, the Cambodians allowed a baseball to be loaded into one of their tanks using some super-secret method that was blurred out like the undergroomed nether regions of a Japanese porn star. This was much more successful, with the tank launching a baseball at about 203mph. The aiming, however, could have been better.

So simple, so ridiculous, so satisfying. Thanks, Japan! [Japan Probe]

Mayer builds his amazingly detailed sculptural creations entirely from parts found on old typewriters. His human and animal organic forms give new life to the cold metal of these mechanical relics.

The Tahoe City, California artist disassembles old typewriters and then reassembles them without glue, solder or welding.

His organic, metallic sculptures are a reflection of his fascination with how scientific progress continues to lead us towards the emulation of nature in technology.

Be sure to head on over to Jeremy Mayer’s online portfolio to see many more photos of his elaborate sculptures. Mayer is next expected to exhibit his works at La Jolla’s Device Gallery in the Summer of 2009.

[Thanks for the tip, Sara!]

Like an overinflated pilates ball, Apple's long-standing culture of secrecy has sprung a few leaks.

The tight-lipped corporate giant recently made a move toward transparency when it lifted its iPhone non-disclosure agreement. The unpopular policy prohibited iPhone application developers from discussing their coding techniques. Lifting the NDA may hurt Apple by exposing the inner workings of the iPhone to competitors like Google and Nokia. But increasingly open competitors and disgruntled developers may have forced Apple's hand.

"We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work," Apple wrote in an open letter to iPhone developers. "It has happened before .... However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software."

Since Steve Jobs retook the helm in 1997, Apple has operated with a level of secrecy comparable to the CIA. The company is famously unresponsive to press inquiries and frequently leaves even its own retail employees in the dark about upcoming products.

Another example where Apple caved in to the transparency trend involved MobileMe, its $99 internet service that got off to an extremely rocky start. For two weeks after MobileMe's July launch, an estimated 20,000 users could not access e-mail due to a server error. And for most of that time, Apple left those affected by the error in the dark -- until journalists and customers clamored about the issue so much that the company started a blog devoted to updating users on MobileMe's progress.

Add to the list the recent Apple TV 2.2 and iPhone 2.1 software updates, for which Apple devoted entire web pages to detailing new features and bug fixes. Previously, when Apple released updates the descriptions were as vague as a single bulletpoint reading "Bug fixes." And again, people complained.

But in some ways, the corporation's modus operandi has benefited its sales: Keeping everyone guessing about what's to come from Apple has generated an ubiquitous, constant buzz, serving as free, psychologically alluring advertising for the corporation.

So what gives with the openness?

"One of the things that's happening to Apple is that it's less able to keep secrets than it used to be, because it has a broader supply chain and broader distribution," said Roger Kay, an Endpoint Technologies analyst. "And because it's dealing with parties that need plans -- partners as well as some customers -- they need to disclose their plans."

Kay explained that Apple isn't alone anymore; the company is now working more closely with partners, such as iPhone developers, mobile carriers and so on. That inevitably forces the company to open up. He added that the iPhone NDA was especially strange, because a scientific community relies on communication to ensure development and innovation -- "So people don't reinvent the wheel," he said.

But despite the corporation's recent demonstrations of being slightly more open, Valleywag managing editor Owen Thomas said Apple doesn't have what it takes to be open. Thomas, who has been reporting on Apple for years, explained that Apple's recent moves toward transparency were purely for public relations.

Thomas noted that Apple launched the MobileMe blog in reaction to complaints or criticism -- and that this move doesn't reflect any fundamental change.

"I would say they're trying more actively to make up for pitfalls of their closedness," Thomas said in a phone interview. "They're recognizing that they have a problem but they haven't really changed the fundamental culture of the company; they're just putting a bunch of Band-Aids on the problem."

"I don't think they're becoming more open," he added. "They're trying to seem more open and being very clumsy at it."

Clumsy or not, the question remains: Will Apple learn from its mistakes? The next time Apple stumbles like it did with MobileMe, will the company immediately launch a blog keeping customers informed on progress being made to fix a major problem? Will the company continue releasing detailed descriptions with each and every software update?

Neither Kay nor Thomas thinks so. But eerily enough, before this article's publication, Wired.com received an e-mail from Apple's PR department about Thursday night's Apple TV update. That never happens -- usually, we e-mail Apple to ask about something and we never hear back, so we're forced to write "Apple did not return phone calls or e-mails for comment." Could this be the sign of a new, press-friendly regime down in Cupertino?

Nah, we didn't think so either.

Photo: MacRonin47/Flickr  

The culprit is believed to be the result of a resin coating on some circuit boards and disappears after a period of time. Apparently once the product has burned in. The phenomenon seems to be only in systems built before this year. Liberation cited an anonymous researcher from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who had his Mac Pro desktop tested for toxins after he smelled some strong odors emanating from the machine.

[Uberreview]

Video after the jump.
Click here to view the embedded video.

The Anna Konda is the work of The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research (SINTEF) group of Norway. [SINTEF via Bot Junkie

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Anand Giridharadas's story in the September 15, 2008 New York Times featured the new new thing in 21st-century jurisrprudence: India is now convicting people of crimes on the basis of EEG readings alone.

You have the right to remain silent — but you're guilty based on what you think.

Here's the article.

India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated

The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars’ heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.

The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

Psychologists and neuroscientists in the United States, which has been at the forefront of brain-based lie detection, variously called India’s application of the technology to legal cases “fascinating,” “ridiculous,” “chilling” and “unconscionable.” (While attempts have been made in the United States to introduce findings of similar tests into court cases, these generally have been by defense lawyers trying to show the mental impairment of the accused, not by prosecutors trying to convict.)

“I find this both interesting and disturbing,” Henry T. Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford Law School, said of the Indian verdict. “We keep looking for a magic, technological solution to lie detection. Maybe we’ll have it someday, but we need to demand the highest standards of proof before we ruin people’s lives based on its application.”

Law enforcement officials from several countries, including Israel and Singapore, have shown interest in the brain-scanning technology and have visited government labs that use it in interrogations, Indian officials said.

Methods of eliciting truth have long proved problematic. Truth drugs tend to make suspects babble as much falsehood as truth. Polygraph tests measure anxiety more than deception, and good liars may not feel anxious. In 1998, the United States Supreme Court said there was “simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable.”

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

The Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, or BEOS, was developed by Champadi Raman Mukundan, a neuroscientist who formerly ran the clinical psychology department of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore. His system builds on methods developed at American universities by other scientists, including Emanuel Donchin, Lawrence A. Farwell and J. Peter Rosenfeld.

Despite the technology’s promise — some believe it could transform investigations as much as DNA evidence has — many experts in psychology and neuroscience were troubled that it was used to win a criminal conviction before being validated by any independent study and reported in a respected scientific journal. Publication of data from testing of the scans would allow other scientists to judge its merits — and the validity of the studies — during peer reviews.

“Technologies which are neither seriously peer-reviewed nor independently replicated are not, in my opinion, credible,” said Dr. Rosenfeld, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Northwestern University and one of the early developers of electroencephalogram-based lie detection. “The fact that an advanced and sophisticated democratic society such as India would actually convict persons based on an unproven technology is even more incredible.”

After passing an 18-page promotional dossier about the BEOS test to a few of his colleagues, Michael S. Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said: “Well, the experts all agree. This work is shaky at best.”

None of these experts have met the Indian inventors and the investigators using the test. One British forensic psychologist who has met them said he found the presentation highly convincing.

“According to the cases that have been presented to me, BEOS has clearly demonstrated its utility in providing admissible evidence that has been used to assist in the conviction of defendants in court,” Keith Ashcroft, a frequent expert witness in the British courts, said in an e-mail message.

Two states in India, Maharashtra and Gujarat, have been impressed enough to set up labs using BEOS for their prosecutors.

Sunny Joseph, a state forensic investigator in Maharashtra who used to work with Dr. Mukundan as a researcher on BEOS in Bangalore, said the test’s results were highly reliable. He said Dr. Mukundan had done extensive testing, as had the state.

Here in Maharashtra, about 75 crime suspects and witnesses have undergone the test since late 2006. But the technique received its strongest official endorsement, forensic investigators here say, on June 12, when a judge convicted a woman of murder based on evidence that included polygraph and BEOS tests.

The woman, Aditi Sharma, was accused of killing her former fiancé, Udit Bharati. They were living in Pune when Ms. Sharma met another man and eloped with him to Delhi. Later Ms. Sharma returned to Pune and, according to prosecutors, asked Mr. Bharati to meet her at a McDonald’s. She was accused of poisoning him with arsenic-laced food.

Ms. Sharma, 24, agreed to take a BEOS test in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra. (Suspects may be tested only with their consent, but forensic investigators say many agree because they assume it will spare them an aggressive police interrogation.)

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma’s head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald’s”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to Mr. Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph’s assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

In the only other significant judicial statement on BEOS, a judge in 2006 in Gujarat denied the test the status of “concluded proof” but wrote that it corroborated already solid evidence from other sources.

In writing his opinion on the Pune murder case, Judge S. S. Phansalkar-Joshi included a nine-page defense of BEOS.

Ms. Sharma insists that she is innocent.

Even as the debate continues over using scans to trip up obfuscators, researchers are developing new uses for the technology. No Lie MRI, a company in California, promises on its Web site to use the scans to help with developing interpersonal trust and military intelligence, among other tasks. In August, a committee of the National Research Council in Washington predicted that, with greater research, brain scans could eventually aid “the acquisition of intelligence from captured unlawful combatants” and “the screening of terrorism suspects at checkpoints.”

“As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine.

If brain scans are widely adopted, they said, “the legal issues alone are enormous, implicating at least the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

“At the same time,” they continued, “the potential benefits to society of such a technology, if used well, could be at least equally large.”

Speaking of which, Thomas Frank's September 19, 2008 USA Today article featured the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's newest toy (above): Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), which scans people as they walk by a set of cameras and measures heart and breathing rates and skin temperature.

Sharp jumps in the computerized bands displaying these parameters will cause individuals to be flagged and taken aside to be interviewed in front of even more specialized cameras programmed to detect minute facial movements for signs of lying.

Here's the USA Today story.

Anxiety-detecting machines could spot terrorists

A scene from the airport of the future: A man's pulse races as he walks through a checkpoint. His quickened heart rate and heavier breathing set off an alarm. A machine senses his skin temperature jumping. Screeners move in to question him.

Signs of a terrorist? Or simply a passenger nervous about a cross-country flight?

It may seem Orwellian, but on Thursday, the Homeland Security Department showed off an early version of physiological screeners that could spot terrorists. The department's research division is years from using the machines in an airport or an office building — if they even work at all. But officials believe the idea could transform security by doing a bio scan to spot dangerous people.

Critics doubt such a system can work. The idea, they say, subjects innocent travelers to the intrusion of a medical exam.

The futuristic machinery works on the same theory as a polygraph, looking for sharp swings in body temperature, pulse and breathing that signal the kind of anxiety exuded by a would-be terrorist or criminal. Unlike a lie-detector test that wires subjects to sensors as they answer questions, the "Future Attribute Screening Technology" (FAST) scans people as they walk by a set of cameras.

"We're picking up things with sensors that can't necessarily be detected by the human eye," said Jennifer Martin, a consultant to Homeland Security's Science and Technology division.

The five-year project, in its second year, is the department's latest effort to thwart terrorism by spotting suspicious people. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has trained more than 2,000 screeners to observe passengers as they walk through airports, questioning those who seem oddly agitated or nervous.

The system would be portable and fast, said project manager Robert Burns, who envisions machines that scan people as they walk into airports, train stations or arenas. Those flagged by the machines would be interviewed in front of cameras that measure minute facial movements for signs they are lying.

Like the TSA's program, FAST raises reliability questions. Even if machines accurately spot someone whose heart rate jumps suddenly, that may signal the agitation of learning a flight is delayed, said Timothy Levine, a Michigan State University expert on deceptive behavior.

"What determines your heart rate is a whole bunch of reasons besides hostile intent," Levine said. "This is the whole reason behavioral profiles don't work."

John Verdi, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, calls physiological screening a "medical exam" that the government has no business conducting. "This is substantially more invasive than screening in airports," Verdi said.

Burns said the measurements would not be stored and would give a quick read on someone. Previous research, Burns added, has found that people planning to cause harm act differently from the anxious or annoyed.

To pinpoint the physiological reactions that indicate hostile intent, researchers have set up two lab-like trailers on an equestrian center outside Washington, D.C. Science and Technology recruited 140 local people with newspaper and Internet ads seeking testers in a "security study." Each person receives $150.

On Thursday, subjects walked one by one into a trailer with a makeshift checkpoint. A heat camera measured skin temperature. A motion camera watched for tiny skin movements to measure heart and breathing rates.

As a screener questioned each tester, five observers in another trailer looked for sharp jumps on the computerized bands that display the person's physiological characteristics.

Some subjects were instructed in advance to try to cause a disruption when they got past the checkpoint, and to lie about their intentions when being questioned. Those people's physiological responses are being used to create a database of reactions that signal someone may be planning an attack. More testing is planned for the next year.