Friday, February 17, 2006

Non-computer game-recommendations adults can play .... Non-computer game-recommendations adults can play w/kids (dYeti w/links) [robot wisdom weblog] 5:57:22 PM    comment []

Grameen Covers the Monopoly Board. The Grameen Foundation, which gained visibility with the Village Phone project, is expanding into the provision of electricity and water using the same village entrepreneurial model. Created by inventor Dean Kamen, the village power and village water devices will be low-cost, low-maintenance, low-complexity methods of providing critical utilities to people in the developing world. The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts it, "If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime." [...] The Slingshot [water purifier] works by taking in contaminated water – even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat. Compared to building big power and water plants, Kamen's approach has the virtue of simplicity. He even created an instruction sheet to go with each Slingshot. It contains one step: Just add water, any water. We first noted the village power project last July, and Technology Review detailed both the generator and water purifier in October. Yesterday's CNN report doesn't break a lot of new ground on the story, but is getting a lot of attention -- and for a subject like this, attention can be the difference between success and failure. (Thanks to Tim Du Toit, Rektide, Ryan Sims, and Chris Albon for all -- independently -- sending in this story.) [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 5:57:17 PM    comment []

Proof: Employees don't care about security, by Will Sturgeon, silicon.com. An experiment carried out within London's square mile has revealed that employees in some of the City's best known financial services companies don't care about basic security policy. CDs were handed out to commuters as they entered the City by employees of IT skills specialist The Training Camp and recipients were told the disks contained a special Valentine's Day promotion. However, the CDs contained nothing more than code which informed The Training Camp how many of the recipients had tried to open the CD. Among those who were duped were employees of a major retail bank and two global insurers. The CD packaging even contained a clear warning about installing third-party software and acting in breach of company acceptable-use policies - but that didn't deter many individuals who showed little regard for the security of their PC and their company. . . . Just last year Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui in the City fell victim to a spyware infection which almost ended with the theft of £220m. That case should have highlighted the threat posed by applications entering the enterprise through unofficial channels and yet it appears few companies have taken note. 10:26:34 AM    comment []

Satellite view of the location of the Cheney-Whittington shooting incident. 10:26:26 AM    comment []

My students are so smart!. I haven't been posting as much here this week as I'd like because I've been grading papers. You academic types know how much fun that is. But, the batch of papers I just finished with was reasonably enjoyable -- clear, persuasive, and containing some impressive insights. The question on the table was whether, by dint of society's investment in the training of scientists, people so trained might have an obligation to do scientific research. This is an especially relevant question for my students: many of them are, as we speak, being educated as scientists with public monies, and all of them are paying taxes. So of course, knowing a bit about my life-story, the students were pretty attentive to the possibility that not everyone who goes through a scientific education will then embrace a career in science; if there's really a social contract where the scientifically trained need to pay society back -- in specialized scientific knowledge obtained through original research -- this complicates things significantly. Can society demand what it's owed, the happiness of the scientists be damned? It's not like this is the U.S.S.R. The papers did a nice job exploring the limits of the social contract, thinking through which approaches to such an implied contract are best for society (and each of its members), and suggesting other ways the scientifically trained could "give back". But there were some other insights in the papers that struck me as dead-on: People don't (or shouldn't) go into science because they feel it's their duty to do science. People go into science because they have a burning curiosity that can't be satisfied any other way (or because it's their "destiny" or "calling", or because they love it). Sure, we can have duties -- even duties we haven't figured out are binding on us -- but that's hardly ever what motivates us to do things like science that are worth doing. (These students, I think, are not so sympathetic to Kant's way of seeing the moral landscape ...) Those who are the keepers of scientific knowledge, and who have the ability to produce more scientific knowledge, have no greater obligations to society than those in other knowledge-keeping-and-making fields. That is to say, they all have responsibilities to society that flow primarily from the knowledge -- not whether or not the public helped pay for a significant portion of their training. Even if the public puts up a lots of the money for one's scientific training, that doesn't mean the trainee isn't paying for it, too -- not just in terms of tuition and fees, but more importantly in hard work devoted to learning. Speaking of the hard work involved in learning to be a scientist: you can't really argue that scientists have an unfair monopoly on scientific knowledge and the know-how to make more of it. Other members of society had all kinds of opportunities to crack a book and learn the same science. To some extent, choosing to do other things (whether because you enjoy those other things or you don't want seventh graders to think you're a dork) but then demanding that those who actually availed themselves of scientific training must, for the good of society, devote themselves to scientific research -- well, it's being a free-rider, isn't it? Very smart, these ones. It's going to be a good semester! [Adventures in Ethics and Science] 7:22:06 AM    comment []

More Sex With Girlfriend X. Can relationship-management software for men really get them laid more often? Commentary by Regina Lynn. This column is also available as a . Passwords Passé at RSA. Banks and brokerage houses are first in line for a slew of new security technologies that will change the way you log in -- whether you know it or not. Ryan Singel reports from the RSA Conference. [Wired News: Top Stories] 7:21:16 AM    comment []

Give it up for Mendel!. With all the hoopla over Darwin Day (justified in my opinion) I thought I'd point you to this article, Gregor Mendel: The father of genetics. The contemporaneous insights of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel illustrate the beauty of science, nature's gift to us in its underlying unity of form. Darwin looked at the big picture and saw the compelling connection between biological variation across space and time and natural selection. Mendel's experiments elucidated the most atomic and elementary reactions which buttressed the grand arcs of natural history and the flow of selection. Though the underlying unity eluded the first generation of evolutionary biologists after Darwin and Mendel the inevitable reconciliation between genetics and Darwinian evolution was forged by R.A. Fisher in 1918 (here is the paper that did it). Because of the majestic scope of Darwin's ideas he precedes Mendel in the scientific chain of being, but just as great strategicists need the aid of tacticians, evolutionary biology as a discipline would not exist without the insights of Gregor Mendel.1 1 - Mendelian genetics was an inevitable discovery, as the nearly simultaneous rediscovery of "Mendel's Laws" around 1900 show us. But so what? Newtonian Mechanics was probably inevitable (assuming a scientific culture as we know it), but Isaac Newton was first and foremost. The magnitude of Mendel's discovery was relatively modest compared to that of Newton's, but the vector is the same. [Gene Expression] 7:21:11 AM    comment []

Xerox PARC Takes on Clean, Green Technology. [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] 7:21:06 AM    comment []

LEAP.A Mac Trojan. There seems to be a trojan out for the Mac. See New MacOS X trojan/virus alert, developing.... There's some interesting tidbits: 6a) If your uid = 0 (you're root), it creates /Library/InputManagers/ , deletes any existing "apphook" bundle in that folder, and copies "apphook" from /tmp to that folder 6b) If your uid != 0 (you're not root), it creates ~/Library/InputManagers/ , deletes any existing "apphook" bundle in that folder, and copies "apphook" from /tmp to that folder 7) When any application is launched, MacOS X loads the newly installed "apphook" Input Manager automatically into its address space Name is from F.Secure. See my "The Approaching Apple OSX86 Security Nightmare" for my prior thoughts. If any reader has an archived copy, I'd like one so I can do some analysis. First thought: It's not attacking that nice, secure, BSD Unix base, but the Apple-designed parallel bits that help make the Mac so beautiful, usable, and extensible. [Update: Second thought: there's a lot of Mac-specific code here. Its not simply a port of a UNIX trojan.] [Emergent Chaos] Let's correct yesterday's record: this is a trojan, not a worm, strictly speaking. 7:20:52 AM    comment []

Remix George Clinton and Chuck D!. Wendy sez, "Great news for all you producers, DJs, and remixers: the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest over at ccMixter has been extended by two weeks, ending on March 14. Additionally, new vocal samples from influential rapper Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and pioneering funk musician George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic) have been made available for use in the competition." Link (Thanks, Wendy!) [Boing Boing] 7:20:40 AM    comment []