Social Scientists Might Gain Access to Facebook's Data on User Behavior

Social scientists hungry for Facebook’s data may be about to get a taste of it. Nature has learned that the social-networking website is considering giving researchers limited access to the petabytes of data that it has amassed on the preferences and behaviour of its almost one billion users.

Outsiders will not get a free run of the data, but the move could quell criticism from social scientists who have complained that the company’s own research on its users cannot be verified. Facebook's in-house scientists have been involved in publishing more than 30 papers since 2009, covering topics from what drives the spread of information and ideas to the relationship between social-networking activity and loneliness. However, because the company fears breaching its users’ privacy, it does not release the underlying raw data.

Facebook is now exploring a plan that could allow external researchers to check its work in future by inspecting the data sets and methods used to produce a particular study. A paper currently submitted to a journal could prove to be a test case, after the journal said that allowing third-party academics the opportunity to verify the findings was a condition of publication.

“We want to participate in the scientific process and we believe that there should be a way to have other researchers validate [our studies] without infringing on the policies that we have set with our users,” says Cameron Marlow, head of Facebook's data-science team.

Restricted access
If the scheme were to go ahead, it would apply to papers after publication. Scholars would have to travel to the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, because Facebook would not risk sending the data electronically, and they would have access to aggregated data only, and no personally identifiable information. The company would also allow access for only a limited period — and contingent upon researchers signing a non-disclosure agreement. Marlow says, however, that these conditions should not keep researchers from being openly critical about matters related to the published paper such as technique or data processing.

External scholars would not be allowed to conduct their own studies on the data sets.

The alternative — publicly releasing anonymized raw data sets — is not likely to be an option, says Facebook. Internet company AOL, based in New York, and film rental and streaming firm Netflix, based in Los Gatos, California, have both done this in the past, only for researchers to show that individuals could be identified in the anonymized data. “It is hard to really guarantee that it is anonymous,” says Marlow.

Facebook's proposals are a step in the right direction, say researchers. “Their intentions are very good,” agrees Bernardo Huberman, director of the social-computing group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. Huberman has voiced concerns in Nature about the lack of researcher access to 'big data' at private companies. Facebook “wants to get closer to something that is the scientific method”, he says.

But Huberman and others have practical concerns. The requirement for on-site visits will hinder many researchers, with few likely to receive  funding to travel to merely validate a completed study. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Facebook will allow researchers to validate research by running their own programs on the data. If scientists are restricted to repeating Facebook researchers’ own analyses, says Anatoliy Gruzd, director of the social-media lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, “they may be unknowingly repeating the same errors inherent in a technique”.

Source: Scientific American

Genetically Modified Apples Newest GMO Creation to be Pushed on Consumers

After setting sights on creating a heavily modified apple that ‘never browns’ and doing their very best to hide the fact that they are indeed genetically altered, a biotech corporation known as Okanagan Specialty Fruits is now pushing for their new genetically modified apples to hit the market. The company recently submitted an application to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to launch their initiative to get the apples into your local grocery market and reap ‘improved industry sales’, but they made sure that the data was not available to the public.

Now, after providing virtually no information to the citizens of Canada and submitting only two pages of information on the product actually written by the company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits is now set on a United States release. On July 9th, the USDA posted the corporation’s request for approval on their website for the genetically modified ‘non-browning’ apples, giving the public 60 days to comment before ultimately making a decision.

The move has outraged many watchdog organizations, who have continued to highlight the fact that the initial submission to the Canadian government was ‘embarrassing’ in its utter lack of real information. Speaking on behalf of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, activist and biotech researcher Lucy Sharratt stated:

“The CFIA should be deeply embarrassed for wasting Canadian’s time on a false invitation to comment on the GM apple… the CFIA public comment period was always a sham because it was based on no data but this farce is now completely exposed.”

Genetically Modified Apples Opposed by 69% of Canadians

Unsurprisingly, Sharatt’s sentiments have been echoed by many Canadian citizens and activists. The crusade to bring genetically modified apples has been met with extreme activism from concerned citizens as documented by a number of new polls and surveys. Giving a powerful statistical concept of how citizens see the proposition of the modified apples, a consumer poll commissioned by apple grower associations based in British Columbia and Quebec revealed that 69% of Canadians simply do not want the genetically modified apple.

One reason that some citizens are concerned is the fact that biotechnology researchers have openly admitted that while only one gene is necessary to be altered to prevent browning in the apples, the change could likely affect a multitude of other genes in the process. And with unknown gene changes comes unknown consequences. In case you’re skeptical, even Monsanto’s top PhD researchers have openly stated to former Monsanto employee and whistleblower Kirk Azevedo that during the genetic modification process “other proteins that are being produced, not just the one we want, a byproduct of the genetic engineering process.”

Eventually leaving the company and coming out to expose their health-wrecking practices, Azevedo reports:

“I saw what was really the fraud associated with genetic engineering. My impression, and I think most people’s impression with genetically engineered foods and crops and other things, is that it’s just like putting one gene in there and that one gene is expressed….But in reality, the process of genetic engineering changes the cell in such a way that it’s unknown what the effects are going to be.”

There is still time to submit your comments to the USDA regarding the potential approval of genetically modified apples. The Alliance for Natural Health has established a simple form to do so.

Source: Infowars

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Archaeological "gold mine" illuminates connection between king and sun god.

The Maya sun god as shark-man—one of his several guises on a newfound monument in Guatemala.

Photograph courtesy Edwin Román, Brown University

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.

Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map)—was a loose aggregation of city-states. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

"This has been a growing awareness to us since the 1990s, when it became clear that a few kingdoms were more important than others," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who announced the discovery of the new temple Thursday.

El Zotz, in what's now Guatemala, was one of the smaller kingdoms, but one apparently bent on making a big impression.

By 2010 archaeologists working on a hilltop near the ancient city center had discovered 45-foot-tall (13-meter-tall) Diablo Pyramid. Atop it they found a royal palace and a tomb, believed to hold the city's first ruler, who lived around A.D. 350 to 400.

Around the same time, Houston and a colleague spotted the first hints of the Temple of the Night Sun, behind the royal tomb on Diablo Pyramid. Only recently, though, have excavations uncovered the unprecedented artworks under centuries of overgrowth.

Video: Archaeologist Stephen Houston on the Temple Find

 

Solar Power

The sides of the temple are decorated with 5-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall) stucco masks showing the face of the sun god changing as he traverses the sky over the course of a day.

(Related: "Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 'Doomsday' Myth.")

One mask is sharklike, likely a reference to the sun rising from the Caribbean in the east, Houston said.

The noonday sun is depicted as an ancient being with crossed eyes who drank blood, and a final series of masks resemble the local jaguars, which awake from their jungle slumbers at dusk.

In Maya culture the sun is closely associated with new beginnings and the sun god with kingship, Houston explained. So the presence of solar visages on a temple next to a royal tomb may signify that the person buried inside was the founder of a dynasty—El Zotz's first king.

It's an example of "how the sun itself would have been grafted onto the identity of kings and the dynasties that would follow them," he said in a press statement.

Maya archaeologist David Freidel added, "Houston's hypothesis is likely correct that the building was dedicated to the sun as a deity closely linked to rulership. The Diablo Pyramid will certainly advance our knowledge of Early Classic Maya religion and ritual practice."

Houston's team also found hints that the Maya, who added new layers to the temple over generations, regarded the building as a living being. For example, the noses and mouths of the masks in older, deeper layers of the temple were systematically disfigured.

"This is actually quite common in Maya culture," Houston told National Geographic News. "It's very hard to find any Mayan depiction of the king that doesn't have its eyes mutilated or its nose hacked ... but 'mutilation' is not the appropriate term to describe it. I see it as more of a deactivation.

"It's as if they're turning the masks off in preparation for replicating them in subsequent layers ... It's not an act of disrespect. It's quite the opposite."

(Also See "End of World in 2012? Maya 'Doomsday' Calendar Explained.")

"Gold Mine of Information"

Maya scholar Simon Martin said the masks on the newfound El Zotz temple are "completely unique" and valuable, because they could help verify theories about Maya portrayals of the sun god.

"We have images of the sun god at different stages ... but we've never found anything that puts it all together," said Martin, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, who was not involved in the project.

"We've had to assemble [the sequence] from bits and pieces of information and just trust that we got it right. This could be an opportunity to see the whole thing stage by stage."

The temple is also wonderfully well preserved, Martin added, making it a "real gold mine of information."

"We've seen a few places where whole buildings have been preserved," he said. "But normally what happens is [the Maya] smashed up a building and then built on top of it, so when you dig into a building you don't find very much of their decoration."

By contrast, Maya workers at El Zotz went to great pains to preserve the original temple structure, going so far as padding it with earth and small rocks before building on top of it.

(Take a Maya quiz.)

Facing Out

Archaeologist Karl Taube points out the craftsmanship of the masks. "They're three-dimensional. The faces push out of the side of the facade. You don't really see that very often ... because if they project too much they fall off. But here they were able to pull it off.

"With the play of light on these things, the faces would have been extremely dramatic," said Taube, of the University of California, Riverside (UCR),who also was not involved in the project.

Project leader Houston added that the masks' color—crimson, according to paint traces—would have also helped them stand out. "With that bright red pigment, it would have had a particularly marked effect at dawn and at the setting of the sun," Houston said.

Blazing red and perched on high, the Temple of the Night Sun was meant "to see and to be seen," Houston said.

Importantly, it would have been noticeable from Tikal, a larger, older, and more powerful kingdom that El Zotz may or may not have been on friendly terms with.

"We tend to think of kings being completely autonomous, but for the Maya, a sacred king was often part of a hierarchy of kings," the Penn Museum's Martin said.

"So the people at El Zotz at times may have been heavily under the influence of Tikal, and when powers were weak at Tikal, they may have been completely independent or may have linked themselves with more powerful kings somewhere else."

"A Lot More Discoveries" to Come?

Despite the obvious care that was taken to construct and preserve the newfound temple, it wasn't used for long. Evidence at the site suggests the building was abandoned sometime in the fifth century, for reasons unknown.

"It's like they just dropped their tools and left" in the middle of once again expanding the temple, Houston said. "I think what you're looking at is the death of a dynasty."

The answer to this mystery and others could become evident as more of the Temple of the Night Sun is uncovered.

"Only 30 percent of this facade has been exposed," UCR's Taube said. "I think there're going to be a lot more discoveries and a broader understanding of what this building actually shows in the future."

The Truth About Sports Drinks

If you’ve ever looked at a fluorescent colored so-called “sports drink” (i.e. Gatorade, Powerade and all the wannabes in the category) and wondered if it could possibly quality as a natural, healthy beverage, we now know the answer: No, it’s not. Don’t take my word for it, here’s an exhaustive review of the relevant science by Deborah Cohen in the BMJ:

Prehydrate; drink ahead of thirst; train your gut to tolerate more fluid; your brain doesn’t know you’re thirsty—the public and athletes alike are bombarded with messages about what they should drink, and when, during exercise. But these drinking dogmas are relatively new. In the 1970s, marathon runners were discouraged from drinking fluids for fear that it would slow them down, says Professor Tim Noakes, Discovery health chair of exercise and sports science at Cape Town University. At the first New York marathon in 1970, there was little discussion about the role of hydration—it was thought to have little scientific value.

So how did the importance of hydration gain traction? An investigation by the BMJ has found that companies have sponsored scientists, who have gone on to develop a whole area of science dedicated to hydration. These same scientists advise influential sports medicine organisations, which have developed guidelines that have filtered down to everyday health advice. These guidelines have influenced the European Food Safety Authority, the EU agency that provides independent advice on the evidence underpinning health claims relating to food and drink. And they have spread fear about the dangers of dehydration.

Much of the focus on hydration can be traced back to the boom in road running, which began with the New York marathon. Manufacturers of sports shoes and the drink and nutritional supplement industries spotted a growing market.

One drink in particular was quick to capitalise on the burgeoning market. Robert Cade, a renal physician from the University of Florida, had produced a sports drink in the 1960s that contained water, sodium, sugar, and monopotassium phosphate with a dash of lemon flavouring.1 2

Gatorade—named after the American Football team, the Gators, that it was developed to help—could prevent and cure dehydration, heat stroke, and muscle cramps, and improve performance, it was claimed.2 …

[continues in the BMJ]

How Much is Your Gmail Account Worth?

While the really big bucks may be built into your big data, your trusty Gmail account just got a price tag slapped on it — and it may be worth more than you thought.

The cloud backup guys over at Backupify put together a calculator to help folks estimate the value of their cloud-based Google Gmail web mail accounts. So what’s the average account’s worth? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post.

That’s the value of the time invested in the average Gmail account, given how many emails the average Gmail user has written (5,768), how long it takes to write the average email (one minute, 43 seconds), and the most recent U.S. Depart of Labor statistics on average annual salary ($45,230). In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.

Some highlights, per Backupify:

• Your Gmail is worth $3,588.85, and increases by about $1,196 per year
• You “spend” as much in Gmail every year as you do on your car
• Your Gmail is worth five times as much as your laptop
• Your Gmail represents over four weeks of wages
• You store one old-school floppy disk (1.44 MB) of Gmail data every day

And the full-monty, in infographic form:

Image and data courtesy of Backupify

Of course, Backupify has a white paper and is championing its service here, but with Gmail and other mail services as “the cloud” for most consumers — and increasingly for business — it is good to think about how much me have in our existing personal clouds already, before — well, Apple released OS X Mountain Lion today — the mainstreaming of the cloud in the next generations of Windows and Mac operating systems.

Source: Wired

The New York Times Admits That Virtually Every Major News Outlet Allows Censorship By Government Officials

In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories.

For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published.

If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign. The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost.

But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns.

According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington". In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government, then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it.

This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke. What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves. People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.


The following quote comes from the recent article in the New York Times mentioned above and it is absolutely jaw dropping....

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. 

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. 

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. 

The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.

This is an article that everyone needs to read. If you have not read it yet, you can find it right here.

What all of this means is that both the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign essentially have "veto power" over any quotes from those campaigns that we see in the newspapers.

According to the New York Times, virtually every major news organization has agreed to submit their quotes for "quote approval"....

It was difficult to find a news outlet that had not agreed to quote approval, albeit reluctantly. Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms.

This is absolutely disgusting, and it goes against everything that our media is supposed to stand for.

The following is what Joseph Farah had to say when he learned about this story....

All I can say about these people I once considered “colleagues” is that I am so ashamed of them. I am mortified. They are humiliating themselves and a vital institution for any free society. 

It seems the biggest threat to the American tradition of a free and independent press is not government coercion. It’s the willing submission of the press to being handled and managed by government and politicians.

Keep in mind that Joseph Farah has been working in the world of journalism for decades. He is deeply saddened to see what is happening to a profession that he deeply loves.

But he is not the only one.

Just check out what Dan Rather had to say during a speech back in 2009....

'At my age and stage I've finally reached the point where I don't have to kiss up to anybody,' he said. 'What a wonderful feeling it is.'

Even so, his talk emphasized what he believes is the erosion of quality journalism, because of the corporatization, politicization, and “trivialization” of news. Those three factors, Rather argued, have fueled the “dumbing down and sleezing up of news” and the decline of “great American journalism.”

Likening media consolidation to that of the banking industry, Rather claimed that “roughly 80 percent” of the media is controlled by no more than six, and possibly as few as four, corporations.

And Dan Rather is right. The control over the media in the United States is more tightly concentrated than ever before.

Back in the early 1980s, approximately 50 corporations essentially had nearly total control of the media in the United States.

Today, just six monolithic media corporations dominate virtually everything you watch, hear and read.

These six gigantic corporations own television networks, publishing houses, movie studios, newspapers, radio stations, music labels and video game companies. Most Americans are absolutely addicted to information and entertainment, and those six massive corporations supply the vast majority of the information and entertainment that Americans take in.

The amount of control that those six corporate giants have is absolutely incredible. For example, the average American watches 153 hours of television a month. If you can beam 153 hours of "programming" into someone's head each month, that gives you an awesome amount of influence over that person.

The six monolithic corporations mentioned above are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.

There are some areas of the media that are not completely dominated by those corporations, but even control over those areas is becoming more highly concentrated than ever.

For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States. The power that Clear Channel has over the radio industry in America is absolutely staggering.

Even control over the Internet is becoming much more concentrated. Giant corporations such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly controlling what we see and hear online.

But it really is the "big six" that dominate most of what we see, hear and read on a daily basis.

In a previous article, I detailed a portion of the vast media holdings of these gigantic corporations....

Source: Activist Post

Govt follows you: Twitter feeds info to US police state