ON JANUARY 29, 2008, an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for public comment.

Entropy and the New Monument

Skip graphs are a novel distributed data structure, based on skip lists, that provide the full functionality of a balanced tree in a distributed system where resources are stored in separate nodes that may fail at any time. They are designed for use in searching peer-to-peer systems, and by providing the ability to perform queries based on key ordering, they improve on existing search tools that provide only hash table functionality. Unlike skip lists or other tree data structures, skip graphs are highly resilient, tolerating a large fraction of failed nodes without losing connectivity. In addition, constructing, inserting new nodes into, searching a skip graph, and detecting and repairing errors in the data structure introduced by node failures can be done using simple and straightforward algorithms.

Skip graphs

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Freeman Dyson, the distinguished scientist, writer and futurist will present a series of three lectures for the public on April 14, 16 and 17 in room 59 of the Sloane Physics Laboratory, 217 Prospect Street. Each lecture will begin at 4 p.m. and all interested persons are invited to attend.

Three Myths in the Public Perception of Science

As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product. You don't see all the false starts. This gives students a misleading view of how things get made.

A Version 1.0

What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia’s nine design studios around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a woman’s handbag is more than that; it’s a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

It comes as no surprise to learn from a study published this week that, although Britons are twice as rich as they were in 1987, they are no happier.

The lack of relationship between wealth and happiness has long been common knowledge, and the knowledge itself has long been a source of happiness to moralisers who like the fact that money is not life's answer.

There are, though, two confusions involved in the idea that anything significant can be discovered by looking for a correlation between wealth and happiness. One concerns the nature of happiness, the other the nature of wealth.

Happiness is the measure of true wealth

In Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, Ronald de Sousa—a long-time member of the University of Toronto Philosophy Department, now cast out into the knackers’ yard of retirement—discusses two cases of people instructed by God to kill their children. First there was the wretched Texas housewife Andrea Yates, killer of her five kids, who was found guilty of deliberate murder on the grounds that, having got her divine instructions, she planned carefully how she could drown her babies. Second, there was Abraham, no less of a planner and whose son Isaac was saved only at the last moment thanks to another message from above, not to mention a handy ram ensnared in a thicket. The one was condemned for a vile crime; the other is venerated as a founder of no fewer than three different religions. De Sousa remarks: “When enough people share a delusion, it loses its status as a psychosis and gets a religious tax exemption instead.”

At that point, I knew I was going to love this book—and it is indeed a lot of fun. Why Think? is also good and clever. I have always said that the reason why philosophers are so disliked on university campuses is that we are brighter than anyone else and have trouble concealing the fact. Ronnie de Sousa does nothing to change this perception.

Darwin on My Mind

Think of us as Google News with human editors and higher ideals.

Our motto is: Clarity not cacophony. The Internet is overloaded with poor quality information run rampant. Almost nobody has the time to filter out the junk and find the diamonds in the rough.

DailySource.org

This report on the attitudes and lives of the American middle class combines results of a new Pew Research Center national public opinion survey with the center's analysis of relevant economic and demographic trend data from the Census Bureau. Among its key findings:

Fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they're moving forward in life.

For decades, middle-income Americans had been making absolute progress while enduring relative decline. But since 1999, they have not made economic gains.

About half of all Americans think of themselves as middle class. They are a varied lot.

For the past two decades middle-income Americans have been spending more and borrowing more. Housing has been the key driver of both trends.

At a time when these borrow-and-spend habits have spread, Americans say it has become harder to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

Economic, demographic, technological and sociological changes since 1970 have moved some groups up the income ladder and pushed others down.

Most middle class adults agree with the old saw that the Republican Party favors the rich while the Democratic Party favors the middle class and the poor.

Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life

GAO found numerous defense-related items for sale to the highest bidder on eBay and Craigslist. A review of policies and procedures for these Web sites determined that there are few safeguards to prevent the sale of sensitive and stolen defense-related items using the sites. During the period of investigation, GAO undercover investigators purchased a dozen sensitive items on eBay and Craigslist to demonstrate how easy it was to obtain them. Many of these items were stolen from the U.S. military. According to the Department of Defense (DOD), it considers the sensitive items GAO purchased to be on the U.S. Munitions List, meaning that there are restrictions on their overseas sales. However, if investigators had been members of the general public, there is a risk that they could have illegally resold these items to an international broker or transferred them overseas.

Undercover Purchases on eBay and Craigslist Reveal a Market for Sensitive and Stolen U.S. Military Items