science/news
A single smartphone can DoS federal wiretaps
As the telecommunications world went wireless and digital, the tried-and-true method law enforcement agencies used for wiretaps—splicing into the local loop—was in danger of becoming an anachronism. In 1994, Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , which required telecommunications switches to incorporate a capacity for government monitoring of phone calls and other communications. That requirement ultimately produced an ANSI standard, J-STD-025, that dictated the capabilities of the hardware interface used by law enforcement agencies.
Continue reading »Rwandans find few physical scars from past war
War and civil strife have a lasting effect on the societies that they strike. Although many attempts have been made to quantify the impacts, a recent PLoS One study shows just how difficult this can be. In 1994, some 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda as ethnic tensions exploded into an attempted genocide.
Continue reading »Talk of "global cooling" based on bogus statistics
There’s an inevitable problem with trying to find trends in data that is subject to a great deal of random variability: unless the most recent point was a record high, it will always look like there’s a downward trend. We’re currently seeing that happen with the global temperature record, where the warmest year ever recorded, 1998, is receding into the past. As a result, reports of “global cooling” are appearing in the popular press, and smaller percentages of the US public are confident that the globe is warming.
Continue reading »Mars can wait; NASA should try landing on asteroids first
Forget all this talk about manned missions to Mars; is it time to scale back US space plans and land on an asteroid instead, Armageddon style? Earlier this year, in response to a request from John Holdren, the White House’s Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, NASA empaneled a committee and charged them with evaluating the future of US manned space flight. After a series of public meetings and the earlier release of an executive summary, its final report has been released.
Continue reading »Anonymized genetic research data still carries privacy risks
Up until recently, looking for the changes in DNA that contribute to human genetic diseases was a laborious process that involved tracking the changes through the generations of individual families. The completion of the human genome has changed all of that, allowing researchers to check for hundreds of thousands of individual DNA changes in large populations, and to identify those changes that are associated with specific genetic diseases—as the number of people genotyped grows, data sharing might be able to increase the statistical power of these experiments. But researchers are now cautioning that sharing the data might allow someone to learn about the people who contribute DNA samples to these studies.
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