Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The purpose is making vital organs viable for transplantation into humans. Its an idea that could save lives, but I presume serious vegitarians wouldn't take such an organ. One wonders if this process has any impact on the sheep's brain. The comments in the thread here are entertaining... This is certainly a subject that bristles hairs in bioethics circles. The article states:

When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

Now, obviously the brain would not be available for transplant, so its not clear exactly what this sentence means. One also wonders, if they are using adult stem cells, if those cells are not already typed, allowing them to control which organs actually end up containing human content.

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human | the Mail on Sunday

Restaurant chains that want to reduce portion sizes also face considerable skepticism from Wall Street. Investors want to see steady growth in sales from what are called comparable stores, those restaurants that have been open for at least a year. To get that growth, a company has to increase the number of people coming through the door or what they spend.

“If you shrink portion sizes, you kind of have to reduce prices,” said John Glass, an analyst at CIBC World Markets. “A lower check drags down comp-store sales. What you hope is, you offset the check with higher traffic.”

Mr. Glass added: “It’s been a difficult sell on Wall Street. It does work but it takes time, and we all know that investors are focused on the short term.”

I thought I'd highlight this article from PNW's Sunday NYT roundup that offers a sober look at America's obesity problem. It interacts in interesting ways with liberatrian idealism about market economics. Ideally, you'd like restaurants to increase same store sales by increasing the variety and quality of the food they offer, but its much easier to simply increase the sizes. In fact, many retaurants define themselves as fitting a particular quality and genre niche, and can't easily tweak that variable. Consumers are, however, willing to buy more food than they need, mostly because an evolutionary deficiency in our nervous systems fails to rapidly communicate fullness to our brain. Essentially, consumers are irrational with regard to food qualities, and the market has met this irrationality, and the result is a national health problem. Now this article seems to indicate that consumers, after 20 years, are starting to become more rational in this regard, and the market is attempting to respond, but it is finding it difficult, as the maximally efficient solution is not in the interest of shareholders. Is this a market failure that requires government intervention? I'm not convinced that it rises to that level, but at the same time, I think its an interesting illustration for those who think that market failures do not exist.

Will Diners Still Swallow This? - New York Times

This Ross Anderson paper from 2001 is worth (re-)reading. I'd be interested in any pointers to further reading along these lines.

I particularly liked this quote, from the French economist Jules Dupuit in 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

According to one common view, information security comes down to technical measures. Given better access control policy models, formal proofs of cryptographic protocols, approved firewalls, better ways of detecting intrusions and malicious code, and better tools for system evaluation and assurance, the problems can be solved.

In this note, I put forward a contrary view: information insecurity is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of microeconomics: network externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, adverse selection, liability dumping and the tragedy of the commons.

Anderson has been working this theme over the past several years; his latest paper is The Economics of Information Security - A Survey and Open Questions.

Why Information Security is Hard

We scientists need to convey more about the status of our knowledge than can be learned from the muddy "most scientists believe" statement. We need our listeners to know what is tentative and what is not so that they understand better the ragged but cumulative progression of science and can use current knowledge effectively, with an understanding of its inherent uncertainties, in personal and political decision making.

An interesting discussion of scientific semantics, which has come up on MemeStreams in the context of evolution for years, as well as some observations about the difficulty that people who don't have any training in physics face in understanding why we know what we know.

Belief and knowledge—a plea about language - Physics Today January 2007

This was actually informative. I just started exercising again and I'm doing two of these in my routine. Doh!

Excercises you shouldn't do.

A security researcher at ShmooCon on Saturday demonstrated, but did not release, a tool that turns the PCs of unknowing Web surfers into hacker help.

As expected, SPI Dynamics researcher Billy Hoffman demonstrated a Web application vulnerability scanner written in JavaScript. The tool, called Jikto, can make an unsuspecting Web user's PC silently crawl and audit public Web sites, and send the results to a third party, Hoffman said.

"The whole point was to show how scary cross-site scripting has become."

"Once one person has talked about the ability to do it, it doesn't take that long for somebody else to come up with it," said one ShmooCon attendee who asked to remain anonymous. "It will come out."

There are already 50k hits for a Google search on "Jitko". A few comments from around the web: Jeremiah Grossman, of Whitehat Security, and "Pascal". Anurag Agarwal offered a Reflection on Billy Hoffman, along with a photo:

This week on Reflection we have a very young guy from the webappsec field.

Billy’s knowledge on Ajax is tremendous ... his ability to think differently has helped him achieve so much in such a short time.

I got a chance to meet with him in the WASC meetup at RSA. He is a very lively character. Let me put it this way, if billy is a part of a conversation, you won’t get bored even if you just stand there and listen.

Billy got an amazing amount of press out of this one. Google is up to 74,000!

Billy Hoffman: 'Would you like a destoyed Internet with your JavaScript?'

The ability to safely and covertly gain access to denied or hostile areas and perform useful tasks provides critical advantages to warfighters over a broad spectrum of military operations. An effective and logistically attractive means for gaining entry to denied areas is to deploy an unmanned platform, such as a robot. However, often the only available points of entry are small openings in buildings, walls, under doors, etc. In these cases, a robot must be soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload. Current robotic platforms are constructed primarily from hard materials and, while capable of locomotion with embedded payloads, cannot change their physical dimensions to rapidly traverse arbitrary size/shape openings whose dimensions are much smaller than the robot itself and are not known a-priori.

In response to this challenge, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking innovative proposals to develop Chemical Robots (ChemBots): soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversal; carry meaningful payloads; and perform tasks. ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots.

DOD wants shape shifting robots

Guy Kawasaki, Apple Computer legend, founder and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm:

Here's what not to do:

Create a venture capital fund, because capital isn't the issue; good ideas are (which is why we need engineering schools and foreigners).

The stuff you don't have always seems harder to come by than the stuff you have. Kawasaki must know that he doesn't fund ideas, he funds teams of people, and the cheaper those people are, the better, which is why he needs "engineering schools and foreigners."

USNews.com: Opinion: Capital Commerce: : What if America Had an Innovation Czar?

...where you can get a reasonably authentic baguette? There are simple things about Paris that I wish weren't on the other side of the world. There are so many things that I wish weren't so far away.

Nouvelle Vague, live in glastonbury

Speaking of Joy Division, I LOVE, LOVE Nouvelle Vauge, and none of my friends seems to understand that... This is one of their sweeter covers... And the lead singer is super cute! I really want to see them live sometime. Preferably in France.

YouTube - Nouvelle Vague - Love will tear us apart (LIVE)