More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 21 Tuesday, May 31, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Scientific American Answers Creationist Nonsense Evolution by natural selection is widely supported by evidence from many fields of natural science but that hasn't deterred creationists from trying to drive it out of the educational curricula of US schools. People who might defend evolution against this persistent assault are often unprepared for the battle. This is largely because creationism and intelligent design, which is just a different brand of the same kind of rubbish, aren't science at all, but a belief system and their proponents play fast and loose with logic and facts. Still, the success of creationists in intimidating textbook publishers, educational authorities, and government policymakers makes it vital that people speak up against efforts to weaken the teaching of evolution or supplant it with the flim flam of creationism. Scientific American has come to the rescue with clear rebuttals to 15 of the most widely used misleading arguments against evolution. The list doesn't necessarily cover every piece of slippery illogic and crafty nonsense you might encounter, but it does provide a solid foundation for resisting any further gutting of science education.http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF Voyager 1 Hits Solar System's Termination Shock The final frontier is no longer a space metaphor, but an actual location. The first Voyager spacecraft, which did exemplary work exploring the outer planets in the 1970s (and which as V'ger starred in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"), has entered the heliosheath, that part of space where the sun's solar wind begins to mix with the gases of interstellar space. As expected, Voyager 1 is detecting an increase in magnetic fields as the density of matter around it increases. Read the New Scientist piece for the clearest illustration of the different domains of space Voyager 1 will transit, then peruse NASA's Voyager site and press release for more details and animations. The two Voyager spacecraft, powered by decaying radioactive materials, should last until 2020, long enough to detect the bow shock as they leave the last vestiges of the solar system and enter the vast expanse of interstellar space.New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625015.000 Voyager: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ NASA press release: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager_agu.html The idea of therapy precisely matched to a patient's individual immune system is one of the dreams that has fueled stem-cell research. Scientists in South Korea have achieved an important milestone in that quest with the culturing of stem cells from the skin cells of patients with spinal cord injury, auto-immune disorders of various kinds, and genetic immunodeficiency diseases. The long-term goal is to develop appropriate stem-cell lines that can then be transplanted into patients to correct a disorder. This demonstration that stem-cell lines can be developed from the tissue of ill patients is an important first step but is hardly the end of the journey. Science magazine delivers the full article, once you finish with the free registration. http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/hwang2005/ The voice of Tony the Tiger, the long-time cartoon huckster for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, has been silenced. The man behind that voice, Thurl Ravenscroft, succumbed to prostate cancer this week at the age of 91. CNN notes that he was proud of being the only man in the world to have built a career on one word, but Ravenscroft spread his talents thickly across a spectrum of work. He's the guy who sang the bassy "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" in the animated Dr. Seuss Christmas classic and he also provided voices for some of Disney's most popular rides, such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Splash Mountain. Other characters given voice by the talented man appeared in such diverse films as "Alice in Wonderland", "Cinderella", and "The Jungle Book". He also sang backup for such stars as Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley. For much, much more, see the All Things Thurl homage site. A career built upon one word, indeed. Somewhere, and perhaps many times, he touched your life. CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/24/ravenscroft.ap/index.html All Things Thurl: http://members.aol.com/allthurl/thurl2.htm A new study of press coverage concludes that most of the news you get comes overwhelmingly from a male perspective. The study tracked 16,800 news stories across a broad range of American media on 20 randomly selected days over nine months. It found that journalists rely on men as sources more than twice as often as women, and that more than three quarters of all stories cite male sources while only a third cite a female source. These disparities hold true across the spectrum of news media - newspapers, magazines, TV, and online outlets. The only exception was lifestyle stories, in which women represented more than 50% of sources. The study did try to take into account the numbers of women in position to be used as sources, although we'd prefer a more rigorous statement than "42% of those working in management, business and financial operations are women," for example. The gap exists, but its actual size remains in question. The study, available online, has more, including breakdowns of where female representation in the news was particularly out of balance (think sports coverage). http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/gender/default.asp Google AdSense Victim of 302 Redirect Hijack Google itself became the victim of a well known technique that hijacks Web site rankings in Google's search engine. Webmasters have been complaining for a long time about how Google handles Web page redirects embedded in HTML meta tags. It is possible to use what are known as 302 redirect tags to elevate a rogue Web site's rankings in Google search results (see NSD 11.12). This week, somebody aimed the exploit at Google's own AdSense site. Until the company fixed it, searching for AdSense in Google produced a link to a page at All-In-One-Business.com at the top of the search results. The JenSense blog has screen shots and a dissection of what was done. Google has been downplaying the 302 redirect problem for many months, and the general hope among webmasters is that this episode will finally lead the company to adjust their page-ranking algorithm to prevent such blatant exploits.NSD 11:12: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.12.html#BS10 JenSense: http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/05/google_adsense_4.html Yahoo Mindset: Machine Learning to Sort Your Search Results Yahoo Research Labs released this demo of a new search technology that uses machine learning to sort search results according to your preferences. This is only a demo, and the only sorting you can do right now is to arrange results along a shopping-researching continuum - one way, you get higher rankings for commercial pages trying to sell you something and the other way, you raise informational pages not trying to sell you something. Mindset automatically assigns each site in the search result a score based on the abstract category of how commercial/informational it is. The demo is an example of machine learning applied to text classification. The results are not perfect but are sufficient to show users how useful this technique can be. Read the FAQ ("Click here to learn more about this demo.") for more details.http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ BitTorrent Search Service Has Shaky Start Last week saw the debut of a BitTorrent search service created by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. The search service had a minimalist user interface a la Google, and ran searches across several major BitTorrent tracking sites. We use the past tense, because at press time the service was down, we suspect because of massive traffic that followed the voluminous publicity the site received. Of course, some speculate that the problem may be legal in nature. A BitTorrent search engine is an obvious legal target for the movie and music industries, which are concerned about the number of copyrighted files traded through the BitTorrent process. Whatever the cause, the BitTorrent search engine is only moderately more useful than existing alternatives. For example, doing a "filetype:torrent" search on Google frequently returns far more links than the BitTorrent search engine did in its short uptime. Slashdot hosts a related discussion, which as usual degenerates into a philosophical debate about the legitimacy of file sharing.BitTorrent: http://www.bittorrent.com/ Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/2033224 Non-Traditional Sources Cloud Google News In research for his master's thesis, Eric Ulken found that articles sought through Google News tend to be significantly more biased politically than those Yahoo News serves up. Ulken concentrated his research on searches of "George W. Bush" and "John Kerry" in the period leading up to the 2004 Presidential election. Google News and Yahoo News both provide balanced coverage, but on average, Google News tends to harvest more articles from the unbalanced political fringes. The slant is unintentional but is a direct result of the method Google uses to compile its popular index of news. Google's huge list of news sources includes many that only exist online, and these are typically more partisan and opinionated than conventional sources. As David Lewis points out in his comments at Online Journalism Review, Google uses citation frequency, the system developed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), but without the editorial review process that ISI uses. Eliminating sources that are too extreme might take some of the color out of the Google News results but would make them less incendiary. Google wants to achieve high diversity in its results - an admirable goal - but the company should take a serious look at Ulken's results.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050519ulken/ About a year ago, the Witty worm infected about 12,000 computers worldwide in under 75 minutes. The worm was unusual in that it exploited a flaw which had not been made public and was more destructive than the typical worms wiggling around the Net. A new analysis, "Outwitting the Witty Worm", reveals that Witty spread from a single vulnerable computer - "Patient Zero" - at a US military base in Europe, one that was probably on a hit list of machines targeted by the worm's author. The analysis hinges on the worm's flawed random-number generator. Researchers were able to trace the infection path by analyzing how the worm generated the list of IP addresses to infect. The researchers tracked the worm through analysis of both the worm program structure and data from monitoring systems called network telescopes which watch for activity on unallocated portions of the Internet address space. The hope is that such analysis might identify who released the worm, though this may be very difficult with an author as clever as the programmer who wrote Witty. SecurityFocus has an article and discussion. "Outwitting the Witty Worm": http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~akumar/witty.html SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11235 Strategy and Tactics of Phishermen Phishing is an attempt to capture passwords and other sensitive personal information by folks, normally nogoodniks, who pose as legitimate institutions. For example, you might receive an e-mail from a bank or eBay that requests that you visit a Web site and enter your account information - they say your account will be terminated, or they suspect fraud, or something equally luring. The Web site you visit looks authentic, but instead of getting access to your account, you have provided the phisher with the keys to your money. Phishing is serious business and it is getting worse, as a glance at any glop of spam will show you. This detailed report from the Honeynet Project makes clear that phishing is sophisticated and organized. What's more disturbing is that it is only going to get worse. Read this, and try not to fall for the phishers' bait.http://www.honeynet.org/papers/phishing/ Data on Trends and Global Sources of DDoS Attacks Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Many now target the very devices and strategies ISPs use to combat them. Attackers are also launching several different types of DDoS attacks at once and are making their attacks look more like legitimate traffic, thus making them even more difficult to deal with. Prolexic tracks such attacks and reports on these trends. It provides statistics about which networks and countries are major sources of DDoS zombie machines. The AOL and Deutsche Telekom networks supply the most DDoS zombies (although the company notes that Chinese ISPs are underrepresented for technical reasons), but among countries, the US and China are at the top of the list. The Web page also has a pretty graphic which depicts the sources of DDoS attacks directed at the company's domain.http://www.prolexic.com/zr/ Microsoft Offers Spam-Tracker to ISPs Microsoft's new Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) lets sysadmins view the spam that originates within their network as seen by Microsoft's Hotmail service. Once someone proves they own a given range of IP addresses, Hotmail offers them data about the volume and spam characteristics of the e-mail traffic those IP addresses have sent to Hotmail. Because so many people have Hotmail accounts, spam usually targets Hotmail accounts. An ISP can, for example, use SNDS to track spam sent from its customers' infected computers. To log in to SNDS, you need to be authorized as the legitimate owner of an IP-address range you want to check, but be aware that SNDS's automated authorization algorithm is new and unproven. Microsoft checks DNS and Whois records to automatically authorize you to receive abuse reports at designated e-mail addresses in your domain. Check the detailed FAQ before you use the service.http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/ What Has Microsoft Done for You Lately - Tell 'Em Microsoft, preparing to celebrate the start of the third decade of Windows, plans a massive ad campaign. If anything, the company knows marketing. Its Start Something Amazing campaign allows you, the reader and end-user, to tell your story. Microsoft wants you to share what you're passionate about, and how technology - Microsoft technology, we suppose - has helped you realize that passion. It seems obvious that the company would like you to describe the many things that Windows has done to - er, for you, and it offers five categories to guide you down memory lane. You can win prizes and stuff, and the grand-prize winner will be featured in a national ad campaign. The prize packages themselves are none too shabby; even if you don't win a trip to Tanzania and Zanzibar, you may still have a shot at some cool tech goodies.Start Something Amazing: http://www.startsomethingamazingawards.com/home.html CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3- 5674137.html 5674137.html Spielberg goes digital in his new movie, a new version of "War of the Worlds" shot in 72 days in mostly digital form. His final editing, however, is pure celluloid. The movie's set to open June 29, and the entire thing - from location scouting to final editing - will have been completed in ten months. "Ten months?" you say. "What kind of schlock will they be trying to palm off?" you wonder. Schlock that'll knock your socks off, we suspect. With a star director at the helm and star actor headlining the production, it's a safe assumption. With the technological boosts Spielberg and his crew are employing, any other outcome seems implausible. Wired reports. http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/war.html The Shared Future of Television, Part Two Mark Pesce has a simple message in the second half of his Mindjack "Piracy Is Good?" analysis of the future of television: the distribution of television on broadband is going to make someone a fortune. The only question is whom. Oddly, Pesce doesn't seem to realize that his new laws of television are already in action. Just go to South Korea where people watch soap operas on PCs and will soon watch them on their phones. Like William Gibson said, the future is already here, it's just not distributed equally. Still, Pesce's article is a good read on our forthcoming ubiquitous future.http://www.mindjack.com/feature/newlaws052105.html ONLINE CULTURE Your Own Budweiser.com E-Mail Account A beer company - the world's biggest beer company - is going into the business of providing e-mail addresses. Sign up and you, too, could have anyname@budweiser.com as your e-mail address. As if phishing in the guise of banks weren't bad enough, bad guys can now acquire a legit e-mail address with which to scam inebriated rednecks - that apparently did not cross the minds of the marketing team. Of course, if you drink enough beer, you won't question your need to have a budweiser.com e-mail address in the first place.http://web.synacor.com/login/budweiser ONLINE TRAVEL Smallest Coolest Apartment Contest Results A New York City interior designer recently sponsored a contest to find the smallest, coolest apartment in the city. The results are in, and netsurfers get to view many photos of - what else? - small, cool apartments. You can browse the interior decor of each of the 30 official entries and read comments by judges and interested readers. People used to living in houses will have a hard time adjusting to the tiny boxes into which people cram themselves in the big city, and possibly to the ingenuity and good taste in the decorating. On the other hand, perhaps this is a testament to the idea that we really don't need huge expanses to have a nice place. Each entry can supply you with ideas on organizing a small living space. Don't forget to read all the comments; visitors minutely dissect every apartment owner's decorating and arranging choices. It's very entertaining.http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/scc/index.html The "does size matter?" debate rages on, and probably always will, because size really does matter to some people. A few of the myriad size-maniacs out there, in fact, are responsible for Larger Than Life, an online image collection of giant items around the world. You can enjoy the 120-foot baseball bat that leans nonchalantly against the Louisville Slugger Museum. Who wouldn't? Other road trip destinations include the huge viking at Lake Placid, N.Y., numerous Paul Bunyans, and a huge teapot in Shanghai. What we'd like to know is what happens if massive ballplayers take that bat and a correspondingly huge mitt in Seattle - do we have a stadium somewhere that could host the game? You'd have to have some pretty big balls to try something like that. http://www.ohiobarns.com/othersites/largerthanlife/ltl.html If you're into urban decay, the moronically capitalized dETROITfUNK is right up your graffiti-covered alley. The site captures the former grandeur of buildings around Detroit now abandoned. In examples from simple houses to historic hotels, the site worships both the beauty and the monstrosity of entropy. One section is dedicated to graffiti, and the artistry sprayed over the decay makes it that much more poignant. http://www.detroitfunk.com/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Just about everybody recognizes a Mondrian, even if they have no idea who he was. Piet Mondrian, in artsy terms a Dutch neo-plasticist artist, created those stark abstract paintings of black grids with some rectangles colored in bright shades. His work is in galleries worldwide, and you probably couldn't afford to have him paint you even if he were still alive. Fortunately, you can use the "myData = myMondrian" online project to convert your personal data (sex, height, education, etc.) into a Mondrianesque image. The engine takes your data, converts it into dimensions, then uses them to create a unique piece of art that represents who you are. It is surprisingly good fun, and might look nice on your wall, unless you're a big brown blotch like our editor. Go on, create your abstract self-portrait today. You may be intrigued to find that there is a Net scripting language called Mondrian, so this project is a neat way to put some art back into Mondrian on the Web.myData = myMondrian: http://rhizome.org/artbase/24114/myData/ Mondrian: http://www.mondrian-script.org/mondrian/index.html Behind the Curtain of British Stagecraft Stagework is a terrific educational resource for teenagers and almost anyone interested in furthering a knowledge of the arts who look to learn about the behind-the-scenes aspects of theatrical production. England's National Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre each guide visitors into a current or recent production and teach about the decisions made in the process of putting on a show, from dramaturgical analysis to the marketing of the final product. One of the more compelling pieces is the interactive performance doodad of "His Dark Materials" in which visitors can "direct" their own scene and compare their version to the live performance.http://www.stagework.org.uk/ If we could only get the domain-name industry to agree on anything, our first choice might be to ask that all URLs accurately reflect the content they lead to. Were that to happen, Pictures of Walls wouldn't have to change a thing. Subheaded the Gallery of Grime, this collection features photos of graffiti and tags - yes - on walls. After spending time clicking through the pictures of walls and browsing the graffiti and pictures painted upon them, you may be struck by the fact that you've seen most of these pithy sayings before - say, on the wall of the toilet at your local pub. Nevertheless, some of them are funny or thought-provoking and others are just weird. A link leads to the similarly domained Pictures on Walls, which is a more traditional art site with galleries of work for sale and interviews with artists and animators like Jamie Hewitt, creator of Tank Girl and Gorillaz. http://www.picturesofwalls.com/ Really love language? Prove it to your favorite word by having it permanently emblazoned on your person in the form of a tattoo. Darren Barefoot has a blog entry that discusses the phenomenon of textual tattoos. He points out that images can be non-committal (in meaning - getting ink injected into your skin is generally pretty committal), but as he aptly puts it, "'Yo Mamma' on your inner thigh is far less ambiguous." Barefoot provides a long list of links to images of this sort of tattoo. If you love language but don't want to play favorites, you may want to be part of Shelley Jackson's Skin Project. Each volunteer in this project agrees to host a tattoo of one of 2,095 specified words from one of Jackson's stories. We hope the volunteers double-check the spelling. Barefoot: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/002438.html Skin Project: http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skinnews.html Biography and O. Winston Link's Photography You may not have visited the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Va., but you have probably seen the photographs Link created in his heyday. And if you haven't, you've undoubtedly seen photographs influenced by Link's industrial style. (Apologies to our visually limited readers, of course.) Link's work includes photos of steam locomotives racing through placid settings and his techniques included a way of using flashbulbs to light an outdoor scene to make it look oddly natural, even in the dark of night. The Link Museum site has a good amount of biographical information but surprisingly few photos. Normally, this tease would tempt you to buy books or posters from the online store, but there's surprisingly little there, too. This is just a site with a lot of information on the tangible Link Museum. For more Link info, try the Works of O. Winston Link page.Link Museum: http://www.linkmuseum.org/ Works of O. Winston Link: http://www.spikesys.com/Trains/owlink.html A British temps agency, no doubt through the goodness of its heart, presents the Internet community with the adventures of Barking Bob, a series of mercifully short cartoons of a dog who saves the world from the evil Emporer Xang. It has been said that George Lucas understands everything about making movies except writing and acting; the creators of the Barking Bob shorts can add drawing and animation to that list. "The Amazing Adventures of Barking Bob" is so wretched that we feel it is bound to become a beloved classic in the genre of poorly designed and pointless cartoon shorts - it remains underappreciated in its time. Let's face it, if you're going to make something bad, it's best to make it really bad. You can also play the Xang's Disc of Doom online game, an activity which could perhaps keep a seven-year-old engaged for the amount of time it takes a babysitter to get a stiff drink. Finally, there's a CV wizard, in case you're unemployed. Mind you, we're not saying that we dislike this site; we quite enjoyed it. Maybe you will as well. Just keep your expectations as low as possible. http://www.barkingbob.co.uk/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.toonopedia.com/ Is Mad Ape Den fit for NSD? Yes! Its mix of IQ and wry wit may woo you to set pen to pad and try it, too. The "Ape" of the odd URL is not one in "The Orb of the Ape (et al)" w/ the guy from the NRA, by the way. ("Get thy Eau de Loo paw off me, you fit for Dis mud ape!") Vow to use one or two (or add two and one), and you are on the way! The Web log is not new, but you can wax a bit on the art of the old ode set 'til the ebb of the lag. http://www.madapeden.com/ SURFING SCIENCE Fabulous Online Egyptian Museum We tend not to realize how truly ancient ancient Egypt is. Egyptian civilization was already almost 4,000 years old when Julius Caesar landed there and dallied with the ancestrally Greek Cleopatra. The pyramids of Giza were no less a tourist site for the Athenians of Pericles's day than they are today. The artifacts of the ancient Egyptians still have the power to amaze and delight us today. The California Institute of Old World Archeology has prepared hundreds of images of archeological treasures originally to be found in the famous Senusret Collection and presents them in this wonderful online exhibit. You can study objects in multiple views and enlargeable images, and each is accompanied by an extensive explanatory text - including dating information and a bibliography. You can browse objects by period, by god and even by material, and helpful thumbnails in the side window make searching a pleasure. There are plenty of virtual museums out there on the Web, but few are so extensive, well organized, and satisfying to view. If antiquity is your passion, this site is a must-see.http://www.virtual-egyptian-museum.org/ Is it a sign of obsessive compulsive disorder when you find yourself trying to locate number patterns in the license plates and road signs on the road around you? If it is, the Road Sign Math site is an obsessive-compulsive dream! This site challenges visitors to make valid mathematical equations out of the numbers they find on road signs. This makes more sense when you read the rules on the site. Of course, there's one more important rule - you have to submit a photo of the sign along with your formula. Some of this math gets complicated, and we think the potential for discovering these formulae must be directly proportional to the ratio of cars to available road. http://www.roadsignmath.com/ On May 14, we sat down to watch "Alien Planet" on the Discovery Channel. The show was a fictional take on a future robotic exploration of a planet teeming with alien life. The show was equal parts cool and "yeah, sure", but if you rue missing it, check out the online companion site. Discovery Channel's Flash intro trailer is very cool and explains the 42-year-long trip to a fictional planet orbiting a binary star system. The departure sequence from Earth to Darwin IV is lame but brief. The detailed recon and contact parts make the trip worthwhile. If you choose to explore the alien world, plan to spend a lot of time. Do avoid the arrowtongue - nasty one, that. http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/alienplanet/alienplanet.html |
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