Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about passwords often, and he distills Thompsons findings into a few rules: Choose a password that doesnt contain a readable word. Mix upper and lower case. Use a number or symbol in the middle of the word, not on the end. Dont just use 1 or !, and dont use symbols as replacements for letters, such as @ for a lowercase A—password-guessing software can see through that trick. And of course, create unique passwords for your different sites.

via Slate Magazine.

PROSOPAGNOSIA, or face-blindness, affects 2.5% of the population. Those afflicted cannot recognise faces, even ones they have seen before and know well. They must learn to rely on other cues such as gait, spectacles and manner of dress. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and writer, is himself face-blind. He has also been living with ocular cancer. In his latest book, "The Mind's Eye", he considers six cases of people who have had to adjust to big changes in their vision, including himself. The stories, some previously published in the New Yorker, are heartbreaking: a writer who loses the ability to read, a pianist who can no longer read music, Dr Sacks's own face blindness and loss of stereo vision as a result of cancer. His stories humanise his subjects and give shape to conditions that seem otherwise impossible and unliveable. Yet these are hardly sob stories. Rather, Dr Sacks offers up many examples of the plasticity of the human brain, which can adapt to almost anything.

More Intelligent Life spoke to Dr Sacks over the phone about face-blindness, the line between biology and biography, and what it was like for him to become one of his own subjects.

When was the first time you realised you were face blind, and when did you start thinking of it as a real condition?

Probably the first time was in ‘85 when I visited my brother in Australia, whom I had had no personal contact with since the 1950s. He had difficulties recognising faces and places in the same way I have and we both had a sudden feeling that this was a family thing, though my other siblings don’t have it. This was the first time I consciously thought that way. And then after my "hat" book [" The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"] was published, I received letters [about conditions] that were confined to faces. Neurologists started to wonder whether there was a congenital form which had been under-reported. It turns out face recognition is a pre-attentive process, and should be instant.

via The Economist.

Undaunted by their current travails, WikiLeaks has released 140,000 emails written by Apple’s enigmatic leader. While Scoopertino is only beginning to dig into this treasure trove, a richer picture of Steve Jobs is already beginning to emerge. Overall, the emails reinforce the image of Steve as a man of few words. A cursory review of this massive email dump reveals that 88% of his messages contain three or fewer words, with 84% of those offering only one: “No.”

He did get a bit wordier in an exchange with North Korean bad boy Kim Jong Il. Kim, aching to get a pre-release iPod touch for his son back in August, wrote to Steve requesting “a favor from one dictator to another.” In this case, Steve doubled the syllable count with a quick “Hell no.”

via Scoopertino.

Susan Maus, an online-marketing consultant, arrived at the rendezvous at an Apple store in Minneapolis at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 13. Guests including Maus were escorted across the empty sales floor, down a hallway, up an unmarked elevator and into a conference room. For 90 minutes, Apple representatives talked with Maus and a dozen other consultants and shop owners about how the company's computing products could improve their businesses. The attendees played with iPads to check out various business applications, including one that runs presentations on a plasma screen.

"It was pretty slick," Maus said. "They're really reaching out to businesses now."

The hush-hush strategy reflects a recent shift for Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, who has said no company can focus on consumers and corporate customers at the same time. Jobs stumbled in efforts before to target businesses, including with the Lisa PC in the early 1980s and the NeXT computer he developed in the early 1990s during his time away from Apple.

But with more business people attracted to iPads and iPhones, Cupertino's Apple has been able to grab a share of corporate information-technology budgets

via SFGate.

Back in April, we looked at an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet's climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance. There are numerous challenges here. Nobody yet has the computing power necessary for such a task, neither are there models that will can accurately model even much smaller systems. But before any of that is possible, researchers must gather the economic, social and technological data needed to feed this machine.

Today, we get a grand tour of this challenge from Dirk Helbing and Stefano Balietti at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Helbing is the driving force behind this project and the man who will lead it if he gets the EUR 1 billion he needs from the European Commission.

It turns out that there are already numerous sources of data that could provide the necessary fuel to power Helbing's Earth Simulator. "In the past, collecting data of human activity has been largely obstructed by fifinancial, technological and ethical issues," say Helbing and Balietti. That is no longer the case.

While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games.

These and other pursuits are now producing massive amounts of data, many of which are freely available on the web.

Of course, one of the dangers from such an approach is that any ethical issues are likely to be swamped by this tidal wave of numbers. This needs to be urgently addressed. While Helbing and colleagues write persuasively about the potential benefits of an Earth Simulator, it's hard to believe they've given the same amount of thought to the potential risks.

So in the interests of stimulating this debate, I'm reproducing here Helbing's list of websites that are potential sources of data for an Earth Simulator. It makes for fascinating, if unnerving, reading:

via Technology Review.

In India, there is only 1 psychiatrist for every 400,000 people, according to the Indian government. The Lancet study involved about 2,600 people in the state of Goa with common mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression. About half were assigned case managers that had taken a two-month training course in mental health counseling. All of the patients in the study got whatever routine care was provided by private doctors or public clinics. And half of them had 6 to 12 meetings with the lay therapists. The therapists talked with them about their illnesses and problems, taught them coping mechanisms such as breathing exercises, and in some cases offered psychotherapy.

In the public health clinics, 66 percent of the people who talked to the lay therapists recovered after six months, compared to 43 percent of people who got the standard care. The researchers call this "modest evidence of a beneficial effect" of using lay counselors.

via NPR.

via Discovery News.

Chinese archaeologists believe they have discovered a 2,400-year-old pot of soup, sealed in a bronze cooking vessel and dug up near the ancient capital of Xian, state press said Monday.

"It's the first discovery of bone soup in Chinese archaeological history," the Global Times quoted Liu Daiyun of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology as saying.

"The discovery will play an important role in studying the eating habits and culture of the Warring States Period (475-221 BC)."

The soup and bones were discovered in a small, sealed bronze vessel in a tomb being excavated to make way for the extension of the airport in Xian, home to the country's famed ancient terracotta warriors, the report said.

The liquid and bones in the vessel had turned green...