Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year. So in the interest of time, here is the deal: You know that dream where you suddenly realize you’re stark naked? You’re living it whenever you open your browser.
There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you.
Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.
And while it’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free. Of course, the more effort and money you expend, the more concealed you are. The trick is to find the right balance between cost, convenience and privacy.
Read more HERE.
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Smithsonian Institution: Ocean Portal “Explore the sea on the Smithsonian Ocean Portal. Marine biology, videos, pictures, facts and more.”
Harvard receives the largest financial endowments of any institution in the world at $26 billion. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Jogging ‘increases life expectancy’
Jogging for as little as an hour a week can put years on your life, new research has shown.
Regular running increases the average life expectancy of men and women by around six years, a study found.
The greatest benefit came from jogging at a “slow or average” pace – enough to cause slight breathlessness – rather than pushing to physical limits. Danish heart expert Dr Peter Schnohr, who led the study of almost 2,000 male and female joggers, said: “The results of our research allow us to definitively answer the question of whether jogging is good for your health.”We can say with certainty that regular jogging increases longevity. The good news is that you don’t actually need to do that much to reap the benefits.”
Read more HERE.
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Harley-Davidson from Japan Washes up in Canada
Debris from last year’s devastating Japanese tsunami has been washing up on North American shores for some time, but few items have been returned to their owners because much of what has been found bears no identifying marks that would indicate where it came from or to whom it belonged. Recently, however, the owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that washed up on a Canadian beach was identified thanks to the bike’s license plate. The man lost his home and three relatives in the disaster and is looking forward to getting his Harley back. The bike is now rusty and corroded from its wet 4,000-mile (6,400-km) journey, but the shop that sold it plans to restore it. More …
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The family of Junior Seau, the NFL great who committed suicide Wednesday, will allow his brain to be studied for evidence of damage as a result of concussions.
“The family was considering this almost from the beginning, but they didn’t want to make any emotional decisions,” San Diego Chargers chaplain Shawn Mitchell said. The family wants “to help other individuals down the road.”
A link between traumatic brain injury and depression has been known for years, and there are similarities between Seau’s death and that of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide last year. Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine found that Duerson suffered from a neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions, and that played a role in triggering his depression.
From here: shortformblog
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The Kent State Shootings (This day in 1970)
In 1970, the US was in the midst of the Vietnam War, and antiwar demonstrations among students were common. When students at Ohio’s Kent State University decided to protest the incursion of US forces into Cambodia, no one imagined it would end in tragedy. But National Guard troops called in to disperse the crowd opened fire, killing four and wounding nine others. The shooting sparked nationwide outrage and became a rallying point for antiwar activists. Where else were student protesters killed? More…
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What would a good sci-fi romp be without a forbidden zone? The Cathedral is where the protagonists from “Logan’s Run” encounter a “Lord of the Flies”-like gang of preteen outlaws, proving that there is life outside the domed city’s strict regimen of recreational sex and ritualized murder. In “Escape from New York,” the entire island of Manhattan is off limits to United States authorities, a post-apocalyptic prison run by its inmates. Almost all the action in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” takes place in “the zone.” And “Star Trek”’s Federation vessels regularly skirt a Neutral Zone [1], their careful avoidance or bold invasion thereof being an oblique indication of whether their captain is a dovish liberal or a hawkish conservative [2].
Forbidden zones come in two categories. As in the first three examples, there are those lawless areas where governments are unable or unwilling to enforce their writ [3]. In general, these legal loopholes teem with outcasts – both the wanted (by the law) and the unwanted (by society). Raucousness is the rule. Yes, you’re free to express yourself outside the straight and narrow of accepted laws and norms, but you’re more likely to succeed if you’re an escaped convict with a few menacing scars and enough ammo to last until kingdom come.
MORE.
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Paradox: the Nine Greatest Enigmas in Science
For some, the paradoxes of science offer an excuse for a holiday from reason. The television physicist Jim Al-Khalili is tough-minded, though, and so he calls them a “fun sort of headache”. Remedy comes via small doses of science education, after which seemingly inevitable contradictions melt away.
Ranging from the pre-Socratics to the Large Hadron Collider, Khalili has chosen nine examples – a triumphal march of scientific ingenuity. That, at any rate, is the book’s premise. But there is a difference between making a physical paradox vanish and being able to say confidently what is really going on.
Khalili eases in with some basic maths and logic puzzles, including the clearest explication one is ever likely to get of the infamous Monty Hall problem, a probability riddle derived from the American game show Let’s Make a Deal. Pretty soon we’re ready for actual science.
Read more HERE.
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Alcohol makes you dance!
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The Amish don’t use electricity. They live in Lancaster, Pa. They wear plain clothes. When they turn 16, they go on rumspringa for a year. If they leave the faith, they are shunned by their families. You can’t take their picture. Amish men have beards and women wear bonnets. They use horses and buggies, not cars. The community rallies together to build barns without any nails or tools. They use no modern conveniences. The Amish forgive.
All of these “facts” about the Amish are wrong.
MORE.
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Sometime on June 25, 2007, 25-year-old Sara Hulbert went to Nashville’s seedy Cowan Street with a pair of guys named Lee and Hollywood. The three scored some crack and smoked it. Then an argument broke out about divvying up what was left. Sara got annoyed and left. Lee figured she was headed for the nearby T.A.—a truck stop with a lively prostitution trade—to make some cash. He watched her disappear between a pair of empty truck trailers. He never saw her again. Somewhere in that row of warehouses, truck washes, and va- cant lots, as I-24 roared by overhead, Sara Hulbert climbed into the wrong truck. Around 12:50 in the morning, the T.A. security guard found Sara Hulbert face-up in the back lot, near the sagging fence hookers used for access, a half-inch hole in her head.
Looking at the crime scene, Nashville Metro Detective Pat Postiglione thought: serial killer. Postiglione, a small, wiry man with black hair, nearly black eyes, and the trace of a Queens accent, had encountered them before, and he saw several things that said “serial killer” to him here. Hulbert was naked and carefully posed, the soles of her feet pressed together so her legs made a diamond. There was no sign of a struggle. And there appeared to be little or no physical evidence. In fact, Nashville police really had only two things to go on: a sneaker-like footprint, and a grainy T.A. surveillance tape showing trucks streaming in and out of the lot all night. One truck—a yellow cab pulling a white trailer—had stayed only 16 minutes. As a lead, it wasn’t much.
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American Prisons | Special Reports |16 articles!
An epidemic of incarceration. A prison system that provides neither retributive justice nor rehabilitation. Is this America’s moral catastrophe?
Read MORE.
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One hundred years ago!
E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portrait, New Orleans, ca. 1912 (printed ca. 1967)
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Evolution’s It Girl: In 1993, Margie Profet received a MacArthur “Genius” grant tor her work in Evolutionary Biology. She was 34.
Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions. A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace.
Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body. Her theories were hotly debated among scientists but embraced by mainstream media. In quick succession, Profet landed a six-figure MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and published two books, including Protecting Your Baby-to-Be, on what to eat—and avoid—during pregnancy.
Magazines and newspapers played up her model looks and touted her beautiful mind. Her “radical new views,” the New York Times announced, gave “ordinary annoyances an active and salutary spin.”
Though controversial to this day, Profet’s work is “a paradigmatic example of how evolution can offer new solutions to old medical riddles,” says Michael Jones, a retired psychiatrist who discovered her papers while researching evolutionary biology at the University of Missouri.
MORE.
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You won’t see an ad like this today!
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Hot Korean actress Oh In Hye–compare to North Korea!
See her pictures HERE.
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10 Life-Enhancing Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes or Less
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Is Evolution a Lousy Story?
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. This happened, as nearly everyone has noted, in the same state where John Scopes was tried in 1925 for exposing impressionable high-school students to the evils of evolutionary theory. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill.
But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still don’t buy it. As the comedian Louis C.K. asked in a bit about people who insist that they can’t possibly be related to monkeys: “Why are you fighting this?”
Dan McAdams offers one possible, rarely discussed reason: Maybe evolution is a lousy story. Actually, McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, doesn’t think evolution is a story at all. There is no protagonist, no motivation, no purpose—all crucial elements in a narrative, whether it’s Frog and Toad Are Friends or Fifty Shades of Grey.
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Stonehenge Had Lecture Hall Acoustics: Scientific American
The stone slabs of England’s Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints.
“As they walk inside they would have perceived the sound environment around them had changed in some way,”said researcher Bruno Fazenda, a professor at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. “They would have been stricken by it, they would say, ‘This is different.’”
These Neolithic people might have felt as modern people do upon entering a cathedral, Fazenda told LiveScience.
MORE.
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Stonewall Jackson’s Arm Lies Here
What a memorial for an amputated limb can teach our society about wounded veterans…
Stonewall Jackson’s left arm is buried, with its own tombstone, in a family graveyard near the Virginia battlefield where he was mortally wounded. (U.S. Park Service)
On this week in 1863, the celebrated Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was returning from a nighttime reconnaissance ride near Chancellorsville, Virginia, when he was mistakenly shot by his own camp’s picket guards. On May 2, Jackson’s wounded arm was amputated; Jackson’s chaplain, Beverley Tucker Lacy, buried it the next day in a nearby family graveyard. Seemingly on the mend, Stonewall Jackson was removed far behind the battle lines to recuperate at Fairfield Plantation, but his condition soon worsened. Stonewall Jackson died eight days later, on May 10, 1863, of pneumonia.
General Robert E. Lee assessed the gravity of the situation for himself and the army when he first heard of Jackson’s amputation. “William,” Lee declared to his cook, “I have lost my right arm. I’m bleeding at the heart.”
Read more HERE.
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Iran is Rattled by U.S. Escalation in the Persian Gulf
While President Barack Obama was in Kabul overnight to meet with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to ink a strategic arrangement between the two countries over the U.S. military drawdown, the Pentagon is weighing contingency plans for war with Iran.
Based in Florida, the U.S. Central Command is capable of destroying or significantly degrading Iran’s armed forces in just three weeks by using the air and maritime assets at its disposal. Even now, the U.S. is stepping up its presence in the Persian Gulf, maintaining two aircraft carriers in the region as well as increasing the number of mine-detection vessels and helicopters. By strewing the Strait of Hormuz and to the Arabian Sea, a strategic chokepoint through which petroleum-laden ships must pass on their way through the Gulf to the open sea, Iran would thereby seal off approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil supply and cause significant worldwide economic disruption.
Read more HERE.
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The National Archives and Records Administration has lost track of dozens of boxes of confidential and secret government files at its records center just outside of Washington, the latest in a series of such incidents spanning more than a decade.
The missing classified materials include four boxes of top-secret restricted files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as records from several U.S. Navy offices, documents obtained by The Washington Times show.
MORE.
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Map’s Hidden Marks Illuminate and Deepen Mystery of Lost Colony
For centuries, the Tidewater coast of North Carolina has held one of early America’s oldest secrets: the fate of more than 100 English colonists who vanished from their island outpost in the late 1500s.
Theories abound about what happened to the so-called Lost Colony, ranging from sober scholarship to science fiction. Some historians believe that the colonists might have been absorbed into American Indian tribes. Other explanations point to darker fates, like disease, an attack by Spaniards or violence at the hands of Indians. The wild-eyed fringe hints at cannibalism and even alien abduction.
The shroud of mystery may finally be lifting. The British Museum’s re-examination of a 16th-century coastal map using 21st-century imaging techniques has revealed hidden markings that show an inland fort where the colonists could have resettled after abandoning the coast.
Read more HERE.
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The Kentucky Derby. Tomorrow people, so watch!
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