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- The Psychology of the Taboo Trade-Off: Scientific AmericanMar 19, 10Surprising insights into “sacred values,” and what they mean for negotiation
- Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » Evaluating statistical attacks on personal knowledge questionsMar 16, 10What is your mother’s maiden name? How about your pet’s name? Questions like these were a dark corner of security systems for quite some time. Most security researchers instinctively think they aren’t very secure. But they still have gained widespread deployment as a backup to password-based authentication when email-based identification isn’t available. Free webmail providers, for example, may have no other choice. Unfortunately, because most websites rely on email when passwords fail, and email providers rely on personal knowledge questions, most web authentication is no more secure than personal knowledge questions. This risk has gotten more attention recently, with high profile compromises of Paris Hilton’s phone, Sarah Palin’s email, and Twitter’s corporate Google Documents occurring due to guessed personal knowledge questions. There’s finally been a surge of academic research into the area in the last five years. It’s been shown, for example, that these questions are easy to look up online, often found in public records, and easy for friends and acquaintances to guess. In a joint work with Mike Just and Greg Matthews from the University of Edinburgh published this week in the proceedings of Financial Cryptography 2010, we’ve examined the more basic question of how secure the underlying answer distributions are to statistical guessing. Put another way, if an attacker wants to do no target-specific work, but just guess common answers for a large number of accounts using population-wide statistics, how well can she do? Answering this question first required developing the right mathematical model for resistance of a question to guessing. Entropy (specifically Shannon entropy H1) is commonly thrown around as the measure of resistance to guessing, but it was never intended for this purpose and is not appropriate for measuring guessing of non-uniform distributions. Guessing entropy G, the expected number of guesses if answers are guessed in decreasing order of likeliness, is better, but still highly skewed by low-probability events which wouldn’t be guessed in practice. We’re concerned with a trawling attacker, who will guess values like “Smith,” “Jones,” and “Johnson” for a target’s mother’s maiden name, and then move on to other accounts if these don’t work. The frequencies of uncommon names like “Zabielskis” are irrelevant because a trawling attacker will never try them, yet they inflate the values of both H1 and G. Entropy can be very misleading for real-world security, and we hope a contribution of our paper is to encourage the use of “marginal” guessing metrics instead. We even provide a few theorems that prove in a strong way that high entropy (H1 or G) can give you no security at all against a trawling attacker in the real world. Using these new metrics, we examined a range of statistics on answer distributions to common personal knowledge questions. It turns out the majority of personal knowledge questions ask for proper names of people, pets, and places, and the rest are trivially insecure (eg “What is my favourite day of the week?”). We collected government census data, pet registration records, and also completely crawled Facebook’s people directory. Incidentally, we believe this Facebook names corpus, consisting of 269 M full names, is the largest such dataset ever assembled and may have many uses outside of security research, which we are happy to provide it for. Analysing our data for security, though, shows that essentially all human-generated names provide poor resistance to guessing. For an attacker looking to make three guesses per personal knowledge question (for example, because this triggers an account lock-down), none of the name distributions we looked at gave more than 8 bits of effective security except for full names. That is, about at least 1 in 256 guesses would be successful, and 1 in 84 accounts compromised. For an attacker who can make more than 3 guesses and wants to break into 50% of available accounts, no distributions gave more than about 12 bits of effective security. The actual values vary in some interesting ways-South Korean names are much easier to guess than American ones, female first names are harder than male ones, pet names are slightly harder than human names, and names are getting harder to guess over time. Still, there is a strong result that anything named by humans is dangerous to use as a secret. Sociologists have known this for years. Most human names follow a power-law distribution fairly close to Zipfian, which we confirmed in our study. This means every name distribution has a few disproportionately common names—”Gonzalez” amongst Chilean surnames, “Guðrún” amongst Icelandic forenames, “Buddy” amongst pets—for attackers to latch on to. Combined with previous results on other attack methods, there should be no doubt that personal knowledge questions are no longer viable for email, which has come to play too critical a role in web security.
- Daylight saving time saves as much energy as daylight, maybe lessMar 13, 10You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was. The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject. What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light, according to most studies. In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy“:
Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.
Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next. Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings. “I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month. A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.
The Kotchen and Grant NBER paper is here. It concludes:We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States…. There are nevertheless several reasons we might infer that DST increases electricity demand across a much broader area. First, existing simulations suggest that DST increases electricity consumption on average over 224 different locations throughout the United States (Rock 1997). Our results also corroborate the results of such simulation exercises. Second, even when prior research finds little or no electricity savings from DST in the United States, the effect is smaller in more southern regions (DOE 2006). Finally, the fact that we identify the underlying tradeoff between artificial illumi- nation and primarily air-conditioning suggests that the DST effect that we estimate is likely to be even stronger in the more populated, southern regions of the Unites States. Further south, the days are shorter during the summer, meaning that decreases in electrical use from lighting are likely to be smaller, and air conditioning is more common and intensively used, meaning that increases in electricity for cooling are likely to be bigger.
In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.
An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.” Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02% of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study. DST’s general inanity is clear in this Rachel Maddow interview of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time: U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.” Enjoy! - Magazine Preview - Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.comMar 5, 10There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.
- Kashmir: "The World's Most Dangerous Place"Mar 4, 10Pankaj Mishra Kashmiri women looking over a wall at the funeral ceremony of Sajjad Ahmed, a suspected militant allegedly killed by Indian security forces, Rajpora, India, February 19, 2010 (Dar Yasin, AP Images) In New Delhi last week the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met for the first time since the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008; the official talks concluded with both sides arguing over what they should talk about. India demanded that Islamabad prosecute the Pakistani militants responsible for the Mumbai attacks more vigorously. Pakistan insisted that the core issue between the two countries remains the India-held Muslim majority valley of Kashmir, where, out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989. In one sense at least, the faltering dialogue between India and Pakistan resembles the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East: by the time any ways to proceed are agreed upon, usually with much acrimony, peace seems even further away. Last week’s talks in Delhi most likely came about because of pressure from the United States. The Obama administration seems to have decided that it cannot do without Pakistani assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistan has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has rewarded this overdue acknowledgment of its concerns by arresting senior Taliban leaders who have long been living in its territory. In return, the Obama administration has pressed India to be more conciliatory over Kashmir. Of course, protecting American security interests isn’t the only reason why India and Pakistan should work toward a solution in Kashmir. As Basharat Peer’s new book, Curfewed Night, recounts, India’s occupation of the valley, enforced by more than half a million soldiers, has given a powerful raison d’etre to militant organizations in Pakistan, which have grown exponentially since 1989. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, was in his teens when the insurgency began in Srinagar, the capital of India-held Kashmir. His own friends, enraged by police firing upon unarmed demonstrators, left the valley to train in militant camps set up across the border by Pakistani intelligence and army officers. Sent away to India by his parents, Peer witnessed the progressive alienation and isolation of Muslims as Hindu nationalists unleashed one violent campaign after another through the 1990s. He later returned to Kashmir as a journalist, and Curfewed Night reflects his diverse experience of the valley by combining memoir with reportage, history, and analysis. In clear, swift prose, Peer evokes the relentless ordeal of checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and disappearances that Kashmiri Muslims live with. He explores the valley’s syncretic Islam, and the attempts to undermine it by fundamentalists from Pakistan. He describes the plight of the poorest among more than a hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus, who fled the valley after radical Islamists killed many of them. He also investigates the widespread use of torture against Kashmiri young men by Indian security forces, particularly the practice of inserting live copper wires into penises, which led to hundreds of cases of impotence in the valley. Peer is not writing about a remote past; torture and extrajudicial execution remain commonplace in Kashmir today, even though Pakistan-trained or indigenous militants are fewer and less lethal. Nor have India and Pakistan gotten any closer to resolving their dispute over the region. Pakistani army and intelligence officers loudly invoke the alleged existential threat from India, helping them to preserve the ISI’s extra-constitutional authority (and business monopolies) in Pakistan and severely limiting the prospects for democracy and equitable economic growth. Kashmir also exacts a great price from India, which is still overwhelmingly poor despite its fast-growing GDP, while radicalizing many among the country’s 150 million Muslims. The Chennai daily, The Hindu, revealed last month that Pakistani militants demanding the Indian army’s withdrawal from Kashmir during the four-day terror attack on Mumbai in November 2008 were being prompted via their mobile phones by an Indian Muslim, who advised them to call the media to condemn India’s “two-faced” policy toward Muslims. The new round of talks could be derailed by another terrorist attack in India—such as the one last month that killed 15 Indians and foreigners in the Western Indian city of Pune—or against an Indian target in Afghanistan. In any case, the Obama administration doesn’t seem much interested in slowing or reversing the arms buildup in South Asia—the necessary prelude to peace in the region—as it promotes major arms deals with both India and Pakistan. As is well known, the Pakistani army under General Pervez Musharraf eagerly appropriated for their own purposes the $10 billion in aid showered on Pakistan by the Bush administration after September 11. Beholden for his survival to the army and the ISI, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari seems far from renouncing the venal ways that earned him long spells in prison. Nevertheless, American military sales to Pakistan, paid for with aid money, will increase almost two-fold next year. Meanwhile, American defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are currently vying for the world’s biggest weapons contracts from India, which is racing to modernize its military. Almost entirely exempt from parliamentary debate or public scrutiny, the unprecedented expansion of India’s defense budget, which rose 34 percent last year, is a bonanza for the country’s alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers. The consensus on defense spending is facilitated by an increasingly right-wing press that is constantly raising the alarm about various external and internal enemies. There are, as the political scientist Sunil Khilnani recently warned, grounds to fear the emergence in India of a “military-industrial complex”—especially while the Indian state, as Khilnani points out, is at war with its own people in Central India: the Mao-inspired guerillas who have organized India’s traditionally disadvantaged tribal communities and low-caste peasants into a militant movement spanning 20 of India’s 28 states. The apparent failure of an ambitious counterinsurgency campaign called “Operation Green Hunt” has recently forced the Indian government to propose ceasefire talks with the “Maoists.” As politicians and columnists frequently point out, “they are our own people.” But no such magnanimity may be extended to the 4 million Kashmiri Muslims who many Indians regard as blatantly treasonous after twenty years of anti-India, Pakistan-supported militancy. Of course most Kashmiris, weary of both radical Islamists from Pakistan and Indian security forces, long to be free of their overbearing neighbors. But even before its recent jingoistic phase, Indian press and television tended to obscure the clear Kashmiri demand for self-determination, preferring to highlight the depredations of Islamic fundamentalists. The complexity of the conflict as well as strictures on travel continue to inhibit foreign reporters from covering what Bill Clinton in 2002 described as the “world’s most dangerous place.” More disturbingly, a generation that has grown up in the shadow of the insurgency may soon be provoked into a new cycle of extreme violence. Scantily reported in the Indian and international press, Kashmir has been paralyzed for the last two weeks by strikes and clashes between police and young Kashmiri Muslims angered by the alleged killing of two unarmed teenagers by Indian soldiers. The possibility of participating in India’s growing economy will only partly defuse the fresh rage and frustration of these youths: they may prove to be no less compromising than their predecessors—Basharat Peer’s generation—who took up arms against the Indian state. No doubt Pakistani army and intelligence officials are watching them with interest, especially as talks between India and Pakistan go nowhere and the two countries embark upon their costliest arms race yet. Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland (Scribner, 2010)
- I For One Welcome Our Microbial OverlordsMar 4, 10Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true. The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one. It’s important to bear in mind that you can carry this galaxy of microbes around and enjoy perfect health. These microbes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, behave like well-mannered passengers. They do not barge into the kitchen, take a cleaver to the cooks, and then eat all the food. Aboard the SS Homo sapiens, the crew includes a huge staff of security guards armed with lethal chemical sprays and other deadly weapons, ready to kill any dangerous stowaway (also known as the immune system). For some reason, the immune system does not unleash its deadly fury on the microbes–even when the microbes are fairly close relatives to truly dangerous pathogens. In fact, our microbial passengers may actually help out the cruise liner’s crew. They can close up the ecological space in our bodies, so that invading pathogens can’t get a solid foothold. Some species in our guts can break down our food in ways that we can’t, and synthesize certain vitamins and other compounds beyond our biochemistry. The genes that the microbes carry–millions of them–expand our biochemical powers enormously. To understand the human microbiome better, scientists have been cataloging the microbes in and on people’s bodies, and they’ve been sequencing their DNA. (Listen to my recent podcast with biologist Rob Knight for more.) Yesterday, Nature published a head-spinningly huge study on the microbiome from a team of European and Chinese researchers. Lurking in the stool of 124 volunteers, the scientists found, were 3.3 million microbial genes. The scientists identified a core of bacteria species carried in most people’s guts, as well as other species that varied from person to person. As Ed Yong rightly points out, this study is most impressive as a titanic database. It is not the Theory of Everything for the human microbiome. That will take a lot longer to build, because the microbial ecosystem inside of us is so complex. Individual species don’t just sit in isolation, surviving in their own special way. Microbes cooperate with one another to get the food they need and produce the conditions in which they can thrive. In Microcosm, for example, I write about research suggesting that E. coli–a minor member of the gut ecosystem–may keep oxygen levels low enough for other species to invade and dominate. And it’s not as if there is some Platonic ideal of a microbiome that we all carry around with us from birth to death. The diversity of microbes I carry is different from the one you carry, and they both change over our lifetimes. Every time we take a dose of antibiotics, for example, the balance can change dramatically. And as the diversity of microbes changes, so do its ecological functions. Which brings me, at last, to the possibility that the human microbiome can become our puppetmaster. First some background. A lot of parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. (I get into more detail about this in my book Parasite Rex and in this segment of the show Radio Lab.) Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food. Parasitic wasps living inside caterpillars, for example, cause catepillars to convert the plants they eat into compounds that supply quick energy (good for wasp larvae growing quickly) instead of storing them as fat for their own metamorphosis. I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice. Scientists have found that if they transfer microbes from an obese mouse to a regular mouse that has had all its own germs stripped out, the recipient mouse will develop extra fat. In the case of these obese mice, it appears that the microbes become less efficient at helping the animals digest food, triggering a series of changes that leads the mice to be fat. Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat. They started out by engineering mice so that they didn’t produce a protein normally found on the surface of gut cells, called TLR5. TLR5 can recognize bacteria, and some studies suggest that the cells can then pass along signals to the immune system, possibly sending a stand-down command so that the immune system doesn’t start trying to kill the microbes (and end up killing gut cells too). Born without TLR5, mice got 20% fatter than normal. Not only that, but the mice had lots of other familiar symptoms that go along with being overweight, such as high levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Without TLR5 exerting its soothing influence, the mice suffered from chronic inflammation, probably thanks to the low-level war they were waging on their microbes. And things got worse for the mutant mice when they had to eat a high-fat diet. They gained more weight on a high-fat diet than regular mice, suffered even more inflammation, and even ended up diabetic. The obesity of these TLR5-deficient mice was not the result of inefficiency, as in previous studies. Instead, the mice wanted to eat more–about 10 percent more than regular mice. Knight and his colleagues restricted the diet of the mutant to what the regular mice ate. A lot of their symptoms went away. So the change in their behavior was critical to their weight change. The scientists also discovered that the make-up of the microbial diversity changed significantly in the mutant mice. Were the microbes giving the mice their symptoms? To find out, Knight and his colleagues knocked out the microbes with antibiotics. The mice ate less, put on less fat, and showed less diabetes-like symptoms. To isolate the effects of the microbes even more, the scientists transferred them from mutant mice into the bodies of ordinary mice that had first had all their own germs stripped out. Remember–these mice have a normal set of TLR5 receptors. The scientists found that the microbes made the recipient mice hungry–and also made them obese, insulin resistant, and so on. So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on. When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes. This discovery doesn’t just have the potential to change the way we think about why we eat what we eat. (Am I really hungry? Or are my microbes making me hungry?) It also provides a new target in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and related disorders. What may be called for is some ecological engineering. [Update: Links to papers fixed.]
- How Can I Ditch Cable and Watch My TV Shows and Movies Online? [Ask Lifehacker]Feb 24, 10Dear Lifehacker,
I'd love to get rid of cable and stream all my favorite TV shows right from the internet. What do I need to know before I take the plunge? Signed,
Ready to Cut the CoaxialPhoto by sociotard. Join the club! Some of us at Lifehacker HQ have already left or are ready to leave the cable company for 24/7 live TV streaming, too. We get this question all the time, and we've examined ditching the monthly bill in favor of watching programs online occasionally in the past, and we've also looked at ways to get your TV fix with apps like Boxee and Hulu, plus there are cool set-top devices like Roku and TiVo, but this is a good opportunity to get exhaustive. There are so many great options for catching a show here or there, but can you rely on them to replicate the cable TV experience? Well, yes and no. If you're going to unplug from the cable company, prepare to exercise some patience when it comes to watching your favorite shows as soon as they air—it can take anywhere from a day to a week for them to appear online. Also, be ready to do some digging around to find who's streaming special events, sports, and other programming outside of the drama/sitcom variety. Let's take a look at ways to find certain types of programming without relying on your cable company. Watch TV Online You can watch most of your favorite network shows by simply streaming them directly from the networks' web sites. They're often available a few hours after they air, and regularly have additional goodies like behind-the-scenes footage or teasers for upcoming episodes. In addition to official network sites, more and more useful tools are popping up every day to help you get your TV fix online. Clicker – Bookmark this site to help you figure out where your favorite shows are airing around the internet. It combs through what's available on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming video sites, and is searchable by show or topic. Hulu – This video streaming service offers the five most recent episodes of dozens of many of the most-watched shows on television. Episodes are available for 30 days after their air date, so this is a great way to catch up on any shows you've missed. It's also full of full seasons of older TV shows. CBS – Episodes from lots of current programming, as well as some oldies but goodies (MacGyver!). NBC – Check out new episodes of current primetime, daytime, and late night programming, and some original online-only series like Office parody show Ctrl. ABC – Episodes of current shows, including daytime programming and archives of specials like the American Music Awards. FOX – Full-length episodes of many popular shows, including Family Guy and Glee. Netflix – Best for catching episodes of your favorite shows from last season or from the last decade. While Netflix doesn't typically offer recently aired episodes of popular shows, it's perfect for streaming episodes from previous seasons, or for getting your "Murder She Wrote" groove on. There's a monthly fee to subscribe to Netflix but once you're signed up, you can stream an unlimited amount of shows. iTunes – You can pick up new episodes of shows on iTunes hours after they air on television, but be prepared to pay for the privilege. They'll usually set you back $1.99 per episode, or upwards of $30 per season. On the other hand, buying through iTunes means you can drop the shows on your iPod and watch them on the fly. Amazon Video On Demand – Like iTunes, you'll pay for most of the television shows you get from this site. The upside is, you can watch programs on your computer or convert them to a format that's playable on a mobile device. Gawker.TV - Okay, so our association aside (Gawker.TV is the all-video site of our blog network's namesake, Gawker), Gawker.TV was the go-to online destination we fired up every day during the recent Late Night debacle for comprehensive coverage of all the drama—and we didn't have to stay up all night to keep up with the latest. Gawker.TV isn't the only site out there that posts clips and synopses from shows and news events, but it's got a quick turnaround and can really fill a gap you miss when you don't have access to the regular cable lineup. If you're nuts for Psych, The Daily Show, or other cable TV shows, Hulu's got you covered. Some programs take a week to turn up on the web site, though, so you'll have to exercise some patience and avoid spoilers for a few days. On the other hand, Hulu has a bunch of nice features that let you organize, queue, and search shows. There's a desktop app that works with standard Apple or Windows Media Center Remotes. If you're sporting Windows 7 on your computer, don't forget to check out the Hulu Integration app for Windows Media Center. Watch Movies Online Hulu – Unlike television shows, current popular movies generally will take a while to turn up on Hulu. If you like to channel surf for movies until something catches your eye, then this is a great place to start. There are zillions of flicks to choose from and they're all searchable by name or genre. Netflix – Although much of the Watch Instantly movies at Netflix are titles that date back six months to a decade or more, there are a few newer movies if you hunt around a bit, and they've been improving their Watch Instantly service regularly. With unlimited streaming for subscribers and a handy queue feature to remind you of what movies you want to watch, this is a great substitution for paid movie channels from your cable company. iTunes – As with television shows, you'll pay per movie at iTunes. Buy a flick for about $15 or rent it for 24 hours for about $3 ($4 if you want it in HD). Most movies are available at iTunes the same day as the DVD becomes available in stores. Amazon Video On Demand - Like iTunes, Amazon offers lots of newly-released movies for purchase or rent. You'll find lots of independent and niche films here, as well as the option of pre-ordering flicks a few weeks before they become available. Watch Sports Online Watching professional sports without cable is a tougher nut to crack and, depending on the event, you may have no choice but to head to your local sports bar. Even with cable, however, there's no guarantee you'll be able to access your favorite team's game. Fortunately, professional sports associations are getting in on the online action and streaming some or all of their televised games via paid subscriber network. MLB.TV – Baseball fans can watch every regular season game live or on demand, and more than 150 spring training games with no blackouts. Viewers also get access to game day audio, game archives, and real-time stats. NFL Network – Though this is actually the National Football League's official cable channel, its website has a ton of post-game video footage for fans to check out. Due to licensing and TV restrictions, finding a legal way to live stream NFL football is next to impossible unless you live outside the US, but at least you can listen live to every game of the season with an NFL Field Pass. NHL Game Center Live – Watch up to 40 live hockey games, including some of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, with a subscription to this service. It streams live in HD (when available) and includes DVR functionality so you pause, rewind, and fast forward during games. NBA All Access – Basketball fans can choose from two types of season passes: unlimited for access to all teams, or a league pass to follow only seven teams. Watch three games at once, and control the live action with full DVR controls. Yes, subscriptions that let you watch professional sports still cost you some coin, but a one-time fee of $50 - $150 per season to catch your favorite games is better than paying $50 or more a month all year for cable. Of course, some events, like the Olympics, will have several viewing options to choose from. Set-Top Boxes and Gadgets Set-top devices like Roku and TiVo let you stream movies and some television shows directly from Netflix, Blockbuster, and similar subscription services. They're great options for scratching that movie itch, and perfect for times when you feel like browsing viewing options until something strikes your fancy. Boxee Box - Whether you build your own cheap but powerful Boxee box or buy the pre-built Boxee Box once it's available, Boxee integrates a lot of the online TV sources listed above into one TV- and remote-friendly interface. TiVo – The granddaddy of DVRs, a TiVo device is great for streaming programs from Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon Video On Demand. It connects to your home's TV antenna so you can watch free network programming, and the HD TiVo units will even pick up your local high-definition channels. The drawback is that on top of the price of the device ($200 and up), you'll need a monthly $12 subscription to access TiVo's best features. Roku – This nifty little device streams a batch of different free internet channels like Blip.tv, Twit.tv, and even your Flickr photostream. You can also use it to access your Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand Accounts, making it a great alternative to a TiVo or other DVR. A new Roku will set you back anywhere from $80 - $120, depending on the model you choose. AppleTV – This somewhat limited device lets you easily stream your iTunes media library right to your television. The $229 device will also stream content from YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe. If you're willing to hack your AppleTV, you can put Boxee Media Center on it for some added functionality like viewing torrents fresh off the net. PlayOn – If you've got an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, this software download lets you wirelessly stream internet video content from Hulu, Netflix, and more right to your game box. It'll also pick up content from ESPN.com and CBS.com, or grab a free plugin to stream programming from The Weather Channel, Adult Swim, The Food Network, and more. PlayOn has a 14-day free trial, then you'll have to pop for $40 to keep it. The Antenna Option Finally, though you probably already know this, you can watch your home teams, local news, and, yes, even LOST without cable. In fact, these are the easiest types of shows to get because they're free and just require a TV antenna to capture. If you have an HD-ready TV, you can even pick up high-def channels. Not sure what kind of antenna gives you the most bang for your geographical buck? AntennaWeb will help you figure out which antenna works best for your house based on where you live, and even tell you which way to point it. But you're here to watch TV online, so let's get to it. So, Coax, here's a few ways to get you started on the road to cable-free living. We'd love to hear more ideas from readers who've axed their cable, and we'll update this post as tips roll in. Love,
Lifehacker - Google Voice + Locale at That SmithFeb 24, 10I figure the only way Google Voice could be improved is if it magically knew where I am and make my phones ring accordingly – so that’s exactly what I made it do. You can too with an Android phone, the Locale app and a web server.
- A Whole Lotta Nothing: My recommended kid gamesFeb 22, 10It started out innocuously. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant, my daughter was about two years old and fidgeting. I checked the App Store on my iPhone for a kid genre, found a fake phone game, and...
- Booking a Flight the Frugal Way - Frugal Traveler Blog - NYTimes.comFeb 18, 10The Frugal Traveler sifts through the many booking sites out there, and outlines the steps he takes when booking a flight for himself.
- Google Voice, ExplainedFeb 18, 10Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.
While we've heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we're conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.
So we've created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do:
In addition, we've created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:
Voicemail transcriptionOne numberPersonalized greetingsInternational callingSMS to emailShare voicemailsBlock callersScreen callersMobile appConference callsThe videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.
Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.
We hope these videos help you get the most out of Google Voice.
Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager - Can chocolate lower your risk of stroke?Feb 18, 10Eating chocolate may lower your risk of having a stroke, according to an analysis of available research. Another study found that eating chocolate may lower the risk of death after suffering a stroke.
- Valentine's Day statistical love poemsFeb 14, 10Elissa Brown sends these in. They're actually pretty good, with a quite reasonable Ogden-Nash-style rhythm and a certain amount of statistical content. It's good to know that the kids today are learning useful skills in their graduate programs.
You are perfect; I'd make no substitutions You remind me of my favorite distributions With a shape and a scale that I find reliable You're as comforting as a two parameter Weibull When I ask you a question and hope you answer truly You speak as clearly as a draw from a Bernoulli Your love of adventure is most influential Just like the constant hazard of an exponential. With so many moments, all full of fun, You always integrate perfectly to one.
And here are a bunch more:A frequentist would say the chances of love are small, using 1 in a million as an close approximation. But I'd rather let a Bayseian make the call, who would conclude it's certain based on observed information -+- I'm aiming for a p-value less than .01
I don't know what "WSR, WRS, MWU" are, but the other poems pretty much make sense to me.
That you and me together could have lots of fun
The R2 of those before you were really quite poor
But the multiple comparisons problem we'll just ignore -+- I used to think you were a little proc mean
But now I see that I was wrong
Your data is much more classy than I'd seen
So how 'bout we get our proc freq on? -+- Some hypothesize all love turns sour
And that even the hottest flame will grow dull
That's why you and I should combine our power
And once and for all reject the null -+- You're the apple of my pi
You're the square to my chi
You're the source of my love, shining and nu
And that is why I love mu -+- They say that Y equals m-x plus b
(well, when you remove the uncertainty).
So let me reveal a secret confession:
You're the solution to my least squares obsession. -+- In this world, I seek a fellow actuary;
but I am careful to avoid those who are ancillary.
When I need some help estimating my coefficient,
you, my dear, are minimal and sufficient. -+- I may know all things statistical
But how to win your love is far more mystical
I could derive and integrate with great flair
And we could make a perfectly correlated pair -+- #2 in the homework? I'll show you what I got:
My heart's the confounder in Y-dot-dot
Just check out the box and spaghetti plots
Now let's get to rejecting H sub naught! -+- H0: All is lost, our love is not mean to be
Ha: Oh happy day, you really like me
Our favorite test statistic says p=0.053
That's a little high but it's good enough for me -+- WSR, WRS, MWU
The highest rank of love is in group You
Distributions lead to models that aren't very true
Because parameters our love most readily eschews -+- Help! My heart's survival is approaching zero
There's been no recurrence of love to observe
So do me a favor and be my hero
And flatten the shape of my survival curve -+- You could say my love life was missing
And my crushes so dismissing
But then I had an idea most astute:
A new lover I could impute!
And now how I'm enjoying lots of kissing. -+- I've suffered through dates that were very extreme
When all I was hoping for was closer to the mean
Their knowledge of boring facts was encyclopedian
When it would have been better to be on the other side of the median
And eventually even their manners did erode
With scores for politeness nowhere near the mode
So I apologize for being so informal
But I'm so glad I finally found someone normal - A recent improvement for Arabic searchesFeb 2, 10This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [amazingly beautiifullpoem].
These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are cursive. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.
For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.
To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [قصيدة راائعةالجماال] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.
As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.
For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it’s a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.
Posted by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, Software Engineers, Search Quality Team - How important is physical attractiveness to a happy marriage?: - Barking up the wrong treeJan 28, 10Hmmm
Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. These results highlight the importance of dyadic examinations of the effects of spouses' qualities on their marriages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Beyond initial attraction: Physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. By McNulty, James K.; Neff, Lisa A.; Karney, Benjamin R. Journal of Family Psychology. Vol 22(1), Feb 2008, 135-143. -- - Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking | Electronic Frontier FoundationJan 28, 10What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. When you visit...
- Behind The Bail Bond System : NPRJan 26, 10It's a shame.Behind The Bail Bond SystemBail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates(186) (169)January 21, 2010 Two-thirds of the inmates in U.S. jails are petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason: They can't afford their bail. Sometimes, it's as little as $50. Some will wait behind bars for as long as a year before their cases make it to court. And it will cost taxpayers $9 billion this year to house them.TranscriptOn All Things ConsideredPlaylistCHART: Jails Stuffed To Capacity In Many U.S. CountiesInmates Who Can't Make Bail Face Stark Options(159) (100)January 22, 2010 Shadu Green was like hundreds of thousands of inmates nationwide who can't afford bail or a bondsman's fee. So Green, who insists he is not guilty of a series of misdemeanors after getting pulled over for speeding, had to decide whether to fight his case from jail or plead guilty and get out faster. Studies show that internal debate usually works in prosecutors' favor.TranscriptOn Morning EditionPlaylistPART 1: Bail Rules Keep U.S. Jails Stuffed With InmatesBondsman Lobby Targets Pretrial Release Programs(62) (49)January 22, 2010 The pretrial release program in Broward County, Fla., was working, but commissioners voted to gut the program nonetheless. Industry experts say powerful bail lobbying groups have begun using Broward as a road map of how to squash similar programs elsewhere.TranscriptOn All Things Considered
- Google Voice for iPhone and Palm WebOSJan 26, 10Today we are launching a new Google Voice mobile web app for iPhone OS 3.0 and higher and Palm Web OS devices, harnessing the power of HTML5, a new web technology that makes it possible to run faster, richer web-based applications right in the browser.
In addition to letting you access a streamlined version of your Google Voice inbox, the new web app also lets you display your Google Voice number as the outbound caller ID (so return calls come back to your Google Voice number), send and receive text messages for free, and place international calls at Google Voice's low rates.
To get started, visit m.google.com/voice in your mobile browser. For quick access, don't forget to create a shortcut to this URL on your home screen or Palm Launcher.
Just a reminder: you'll need a Google Voice account and a voice plan on your cell phone to place calls using this web app. Don't have a Google Voice account? Request an invite.
Posted by Michael van Ouwerkerk, Software Engineer - electoral college reformJan 24, 10The electoral college is a time-honored system that, has only broken down three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. the organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size. The 2000 Census records a population of 81,421,906 for the United States. The states ranged in population from 493,782 to 33,871,648.1 In this map, new states have formed, all with equal populations of roughly 5,617,000.2 enlarge this map Advantages of this proposal Ends overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now. Disadvantages Some county names are duplicated in new states. Local governments would have to deal with shift in state laws and procedures. Alaska and Hawaii are part of the states of Olympia and Coronado, respectively. 1. Wyoming and California, respectively 2. Every effort was made to place major cities and their close-in suburbs in a single state, leading to slight variences in state sizes. Each state shown has a population between 5.4 and 5.635 million, according to Census 2000 figures. Most are 5.616 million. The District of Columbia is preserved as it is.
- FBI broke law for years in phone record searches - washingtonpost.comJan 19, 10The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact...
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