Cop's "Devious" MySpace status helps get ex-con acquitted

From Ars Technica:

What you post on MySpace or Facebook may not just embarrass you in front of your colleagues, it could also be used against you in court. If that's not a scary enough thought, just imagine if you were a police officer and your credibility came down to a few words snarkily posted on MySpace. This is what's happening to officer Vaughan Ettienne, whose MySpace and Facebook profiles—along with comments made on various videos—have been subpoenaed by the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn as part of a case accusing him of police brutality.

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China Condemns U.S. Warship Deployment as Tensions Mount

Mar. 8: Two Chinese trawlers stop directly in front of ocean surveillance ship USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea.

WASHINGTON — Chinese Navy officers reacted with annoyance today when it emerged that the United States had sent a destroyer to back up a surveillance vessel in the South China Sea after it was harassed by People’s Liberation Army sailors.

The decision by President Obama to send an armed escort for U.S. surveillance ships in the area follows the aggressive and co-ordinated manoeuvres of five Chinese boats on Sunday. The vessels harassed and nearly collided with the unarmed USNS Impecccable.

One unidentified officer quoted in the China Daily newspaper said that the decision was disproportionate. While China’s Foreign Ministry has so far kept tight-lipped on the latest development, the decision to run such a comment so swiftly in the state-run English-language newspaper was a signal of Beijing’s concerns.

More here...

British scientists work on mind reading

LONDON, March 13 (UPI) -- Scientists at University College London are working on developing a form of mind reading using virtual reality and magnetic resonance imaging.

Their experiment, outlined in the journal Current Biology, involves looking at neural activity to determine what someone is thinking, the Financial Times reported Friday.

The scientists had volunteers navigate around a room in a computerized virtual reality game while an MRI scanner was used to examine their hippocampus, the region of the brain that is used for navigation.

"Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality room," said Eleanor Maguire, project leader.

The experiment is significant because it shows for the first time that memories are laid down in specific structures or patterns in the hippocampus, the newspaper says.

The study's co-author Demis Hassabis, predicts it would be at least 10 years before the technique could be used in criminal investigations.

UPI.com

MTV

Via LP Cover Lover

Who Watches the Watchmen?

From Ars Technica:

Google's newest advertising strategy, behavioral targeting, has finally arrived. The strategy, referred to as "interest-based" advertising, will go beyond current targeted advertising practices and track your Internet usage habits in order to serve an ad that the search giant hopes is better suited for you. This means that, instead of visiting a music site and simply getting music-related ads, you might visit a music site and getting ads for the newest "Cats Meowing Christmas Carols" album—because Google knows you spend 95 percent of your Internet time at Catster.

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If you would like to avoid Google's Orwellian tendencies try Scroogle.org. Scroogle uses Google's search engine, but scrubs Google's cookies and ads. More on Scroogle at Wikipedia.

Sexting

Aaron Koblin's Haunting Flight Paths Project

Flight Paths over the northeast US from Aaron on Vimeo.

More at Jaunted

This Is for the Nieces and Nephews

"Where Do the Children Play" by Cat Stevens

Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off.

Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
'til there's no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Realtime/Realspace

Nicholas Carr writes:

I'm glad to see that "realtime" is officially one word now rather than two. It's an update long overdue. That space between "real" and "time" had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It's nonstop. It runs together.

Real time is realtime


And...

I was reminded of a haunting passage in a recent New Yorker article about the boom in Japanese cellphone novels:

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”

Realtime, you see, doesn't just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the "intimate portable world" that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.

Realtime kills real space


Rob Horning writes:

Accelerating the flow of information is tantamount to commodifying it, effacing the differences between things. It all becomes data to process; if it slows us down, it is an inconvenient datapoint that warrants a more careful calibration of the information stream—the appropriate response in the realtime world would be to put in place a better filter to remove such troubling material.

Speeding up information consumption for its own sake plays into the fantasy that technology permits a kind of ubiquity, lets us be present everywhere through online interconnections, so the maximum potential opportunities are available to us. We can see what all our friends are doing at all times and receive news from every corner of the world as it happens and so on. But it seems that this ubiquity of online presence is counterbalanced by surfeit of information, which flattens it all and renders no opportunity any more compelling than any other. As Carr explains in the second post, “Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.” He call the two-dimensional space “realspace,” the companion to realtime.

Realtime and realspace

Is Craigslist the world's biggest bordello?

..."At the same time, however, this is a story that underscores how one of the world's newest technologies has become a vital part of one of the world's oldest occupations. For the majority of Craigslist users--the millions who sell sofas, rent rooms, or find Spanish tutors every day--a steamy online brothel juxtaposed with Craigslist's plain-wrap classified pages may seem unlikely. But with the emergence of the Internet as a vital communications medium, it was only a matter of time before sex for hire infiltrated the listings on Craigslist as well."...

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