Friday, 27 May 2011

Twitter vs Beeb in superinjunction nark shindy

Orwell 2.0?

Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope's Adviser

Johann Hari: A turning-point we miss at our peril

The Shadows of Srebrenica

On July 11, 1995, the Serbian army entered the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the days that followed killed 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. The Srebrenica genocide was the largest mass murder in Europe since the end of World War II, and the country is still recovering from the war that ended 15 years ago. Hatidza Mehmedovic, who lost her husband and two sons in the genocide, stands in a Srebrenica cemetery.
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Ghost Feet - Wires and Chords

(h/t: Audiozobe!)

Wisconsin Judge Voids Collective Bargaining Law

Frieder Butzmann & Thomas Kiesel 'Incendio Italiano' (1982)

Info

China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

Like a Headless Chicken

Another fake "grassroots" group exposed

Blind people echolocate with visual part of brain

When a blind echolocation expert (left) hears the clicks and echoes of his echolocation, his brain lights up in the fMRI scan. The brain of a seeing man who does not echolocate (right) does not light up. University of Western Ontario
Blind people who navigate using clicks and echoes, like bats and dolphins do, recruit the part of the brain used by sighted people to see, a new study has found.
While few blind people use echolocation — emitting a sound and then listening for the echo to get information about objects in the surroundings — some that do are so good at it that they can use the ability to hike, mountain bike and play basketball, said Melvyn Goodale, one of the co-authors of the study published Wednesday in PloS One.
Goodale, a psychology professor and the director of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., said he was amazed by the abilities of the two blind men in the study.
"They can tell a flat thing from convex. They can tell a bush from a wall, a car from a lamp post," he said. One of the two subjects, Daniel Kish, 43, could localize objects to within three degrees — "incredibly accurate," Goodale said.
Both Kish and a 27-year-old male subject trained by Kish could also tell which way objects were moving. Goodale and his research team wanted to find out what was happening in the brain while people like Kish were echolocating...

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Emily Chung @'CBC News'

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'?

A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors.
That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset.
"The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.

IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages...