"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Overcoming Bias : The Smart Are MORE Biased To Think They Are LESS Biased
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:31 am EDT, Jun 17, 2012
The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” … All four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.”
Lancope at the 2012 British Touring Car Championship
Topic: Miscellaneous
4:24 pm EDT, Jun 12, 2012
On Sunday 11th June, Lancope were joint sponsors of the Redstone Racing BTCC team. We're sponsoring the team for 6 of the 30 races in the 2012 season. The whole race meeting is covered live on the UK’s ITV4 TV station together with a highlights show on ITV1. The races are also streamed live via itv.com.
Israel steps up email border checks | The Australian
Topic: Miscellaneous
2:43 pm EDT, Jun 12, 2012
In a cyber-age twist on Israel's vaunted history of airport security, the country has begun to force incoming travelers deemed suspicious to open personal email accounts for inspection, visitors say.
Targeting mainly Muslims or Arabs, the practice appears to be aimed at rooting out visitors who have histories of pro-Palestinian activism, and in recent weeks, has led to the expulsion of at least three American women.
How Companies Can Beef Up Password Security — Krebs on Security
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:41 am EDT, Jun 12, 2012
What you do with a password hash is you design it in the opposite way you would design a standard cryptographic hash. A cryptographic hash wants to do the minimum amount of work possible in order to arrive at a secure result. But a password hash wants to deliberately be designed to do the maximum amount of work.
Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists | Ars Technica
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:13 pm EDT, Jun 11, 2012
In case you missed it:
The Flame espionage malware that infected computers in Iran achieved mathematic breakthroughs that could only have been accomplished by world-class cryptographers, two of the world's foremost cryptography experts said.
NASA | SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit - YouTube
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:40 pm EDT, Jun 11, 2012
On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.
The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.
Still, modern space-based views like this one show the event against an evocative backdrop of the turbulent solar surface with prominences lofted above the Sun's edge by twisting magnetic fields. Remarkably, the thin ring of light seen surrounding the planet's dark silhouette is sunlight refracted by Venus' thick atmosphere.
For Bernanke another round of QE is inevitable. As "Operation Twist" ends the economy, employment and the markets have begun to show cracks as they have each time stimulative efforts by the Federal Reserve have come to an end. The problem for Bernanke is that despite calls for assistance in policy efforts to promote economic growth from the current Administration - Congress and Senante have remained deadlocked in dispute blocking any potential actions. This has left Bernanke standing alone, facing the dragon, knowing that these programs have little long term effect. Each previous attempt to slay the beast has had a diminishing rate of return and a negative impact on the consumer. Lower rates have failed to spur demand for borrowing, expansion or increased employment.
