Wednesday Morning Links

1. Gay marriage activists hope the Vermont legislature's decision to legalize gay marriage will provide impetus to other states to do the same. This is true at least in D.C., which voted to recognize gay marriages in other states. On the other side of the world though in Iraq, gays and lesbians find that their lives are endangered because of their sexuality.

2. Small towns, suckered by investment bankers who sold them risky municipal bond derivatives.

3. Peru's Ex-President Alberto Fujimora is convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for human rights abuses that occurred during the war against Maoist rebels Shining Path.

4. More details on the prosecutorial misconduct that undid the Ted Stevens prosecution. And McClatchy has another article on Judge Emmett Sullivan, who has "declared war" on what he sees to be a rising tide of government prosecutorial secrecy, incompetence and malfeasance.

5. Texas Republican lawmakers find themselves at odds with Gov. Rick Perry over a number of issues beyond stimulus funding. Texas Republicans are apparently not as receptive to marching orders as Congressional Republicans were during the Bush administration.

6. Former Australian government officials and academics applaud Obama's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Anne Applebaum says there are other more important priorities that Obama should focus on, but it seems to me that getting rid of nuclear weapons never seems to be worthwhile until somebody's threatening to use one. Why wait until we reach that point?

7. Michael Gerson, being a moron again, characterizes Obama as "the most polarizing President" in history. In fact, Obama is a broadly popular President among Americans, and is most vociferously opposed by a loud minority contingent of right-wing lunatics and Republicans who think the key to electoral victory is saying no to everything Obama proposes.

8. Al Franken emerges victorious in the re-count, but Coleman signals further appeals are on the way.

9. Student loan defaults are surging, which may increase calls for a student loan "bailout."

10. American intelligence officials warn that the United States' electrical grid has been infiltrated by hackers from China and Russia who may be looking to launch cyber attacks against the United States infrastructure in the event of military conflict. I remember a 2003 Frontline special warning of this very thing, a warning that appears to be coming true.

Friday Links

For your edification:

1. Via Volokh, Congress takes on the issue of cyber security.

2. A federal judge rules that some detainees being held at Bagram in Afghanistan can challenge their detention in court.

3. Social Security is clogged with a backlog of disability cases. In my law school's legal clinic, I was very bluntly informed by the senior attorneys working there that the Social Security Administration always denies an initial application for disability, regardless of the merits. And that they will fight tooth and nail to deny benefits to all but those who are most clearly disabled (such as with blindness, paralysis, loss of limb, etc.) The SSA's role should be to to fairly dispense entitlement benefits, but they seem to regard themselves as the government's moneysavers.

4. Speaking of government malfeasance, immigrants die in custody and not only does nobody care, but nobody even bothers to report it. I understand the need to enforce immigration laws in our country, but we treat detained immigrants worse than we treat terrorist being held at Guantanamo Bay.

5. The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously strikes down the state's ban on gay marriage finding that it violates the Iowa State Constitution forbidding . According to Maggie Gallagher, teenagers will now begin fornicating left and right (more than they already do, I presume.)

6. Photographs from the day Martin Luther King Jr. died.

7. The U.S. Men's soccer team beat Trinidad and Tobago the other night, 3-0. The score probably should've been worse for T&T, who looked out of sync and discombobulated all night. All three goals came from the feet of Jozy Altidore, who's put in two phenomenal performances for the national team. But nobody should declare him the great American hope yet, as we've seen this sort of thing before (Eddie Johnson, anyone?)

8. The Mavericks cling to the hope that they can grab the 7th seed and avoid a first round match-up against L.A. They're getting a little help from Utah, but they need to win out to have a chance.

"Ghost Network"

Suspected Chinese hackers have upped the ante in cyberspace, hacking into almost 1,300 foreign machines around the world for unknown reasons, stealing sensitive documents and logging the activities of the users. So far this is the most sophisticated cyber spying operation uncovered. Actual cyberwar remains crude in comparison, though you can be assured that the Chinese government and other governments around the world are working on that too.

Indeed, Nerds are Ascendant

When Ta-Nahisi Coates, an otherwise highly regarded blogger for the Atlantic, can write this:

It's funny because I've actually seen relationships come out of online gaming. When I used to play Everquest back in the day, I ran with two Wood Elves (I was a Euridite wizard. Even when I'm fantasizing, I'm a black nerd) who were hooked up in real life. I only figured this out as I hung out with them more. Whenever we'd go to Karnor's or the City Of Mist, this dude would follow us. Later the couple told me the dude was the girl's ex--in real life. They used to game together, but she met this other dude (the other Wood Elf) and left her man to move in with him. That just blew me away--but it really shouldn't. Virtual communication is a lot like real communication.

Granted, I still don't see regular discussion of non-digital role playing games outside of the nerd-blogger community. This is probably due to the fact that the RPG community is also populated by dorks, who do not enjoy the reputation for intellectual achievement that their nerd/geek peers do. We can only ask society to accept so much from us outcasts.   

The Ocean Matrix

Is Google planning on moving their data centers offshore? Maybe:

In the patent application seen by The Times, Google writes: “Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away.”

The increasing number of data centres necessary to cope with the massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.

It's only a patent application and companies file such things all the time for wacky ideas they will probably never use. But still, the notion of giant floating data centers off the coast of major countries is truly fascinating. And it surely is one of the more innovative ways of dealing with the size, expense and power requirements of data centers, which you can read more about in this fascinating article here. 

This machine does read your mind...so you can play games!

I feel it's my job to keep this blog from getting too narrowly focused on politics and especially the Presidential election, thus I'm returning to one of my favorite themes: wild and cutting-edge technology.

Apropos of my recent post about a mind-reading machine, this is a mind-reading headset for computer games!

Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that.

While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas.

The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications.

The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain.

This is still very crude, and is not so much mind-reading as turning the non-random signals of the brain into some kind of signal in a computer, thereby manipulating a program. It's a totally different thing from the machine that recognizes what picture you're seeing, as one "understands" the information coming from your brain and the other doesn't. But it's amazing nonetheless. You can see immediate applications of this; for example using it to control wheelchairs and robots (which could be used by disabled people to do their work for them), vehicles, etc. It would open up worlds of mobility for the disabled. Of course being able to manipulate regular pc programs by thought alone is also just too cool. You'd need the other kind of mind-reader to manipulate words any more quickly than machines can do now, but at least with this you could do away with a mouse for the most part. Think of how fast you could respond in first-person shooters!

Anyway, that's your crazy technology for the day. Enjoy.

Mind-reading machines?

Not just yet, but still, this getting scarily close:

Using this model, the program then scanned a new set of 120 brand new pictures to predict what kind of fMRI patterns these would make in the visual cortex.

After that, the volunteers themselves looked at the 120 new pictures while being scanned. The computer then matched the measured brain activity against the predicted brain activity, and picked an image that it believed was the closest match.

They notched up a 92 percent success rate with one volunteer, and accuracy was 72 percent in the other. The probability of this happening on the basis of chance -- i.e. the computer picking the right image out of the 120 -- is only 0.8 percent.

In short, if the computer knows what the viewer could be seeing, it can guess what it is almost all the time. The numbers decrease over a longer sequence, but not to an insignificant number:

The ambitious experiment was taken a stage further, expanding the set of novel images from 120 to up to 1,000. The first volunteer took this test, and accuracy declined, but only slightly, from 92 percent to 82 percent.

"Our estimates suggest that even with a set of one billion images -- roughly the number of images indexed by Google on the Internet -- the decoder would correctly identify the image about 20 percent of the time," said Gallant.

That's very, very meaningful. If we extrapolate further, assuming a computer could catalog all the sensations a human could experience, it would be possible to train a computer to recognize the brainwaves associated with them. The better computers get and the better the programming get, the closer this becomes to an actual mind-reading computer. It'll be a while (at least a decade) before this becomes really practical, but in that time I can see this developing into a number of ways of controlling and manipulating computers. Very interesting.

More e-waste; this time, it's Africa!

If you recall my previous posts (here and here) on the subject, you know that "recycling" computers by such primitive methods as ripping them apart and prying the precious metals out is extremely hazardous to one's health. And yet, this is the method employed by poor people overseas. The first article I posted specifically talked about China. This new article talks about the same phenomena happening in Africa. It's really a horrible situation.

Nigerian importers are able to make a quick buck because of high local demand for electronic goods—Pentium III computers sell for about $130 and a 27-inch television will set you back around $50. The remainder, equivalent to approximately 100,000 computers per month, ends up in dumps and landfills. That electronic waste (e-waste) is chock-full of pollutants like lead, cadmium and mercury that then seep into the ground and water supply. When the mounds of waste get too high, they are burned, releasing toxins from the plastic casings into the air. (For more about how we're destroying Africa with waste, check out Travis's post, The Global Village's Septic Tank.)

Not only should African countries not allow this to happen, we shouldn't either. US manufacturers certainly have the resources to handle recycling domestically, where it would be much safer and healthier (provided they're not using prisoners!).