Tips on Safe Use of Social Media
"Security isn’t just a concern in Middle East autocracies, or for would-be revolutionaries. Mobile phone surveillance, for example, is tough to escape for cellphone users anywhere, said Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a founder of Global Voices, a worldwide group of bloggers and interpreters that has produced similarly themed guides.
Mr. Zuckerman regularly advises Access, as do Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founders; the rock musician Peter Gabriel, and the MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser.
“In general, most users aren’t aware of the extent to which mobile phones can be monitored by telcos in cooperation with governments,” Mr. Zuckerman said, referring to telecommunications companies."
"Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. described a federal court trial for the self-professed mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” On Monday, Mr. Holder’s dream for demonstrating the power of the American court system crumbled when he announced that the trial would take place not in New York City or anywhere in the United States but before a military commission at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp...
...The wound inflicted on New York City from Mr. Mohammed’s plot nearly a decade ago will not heal for many lifetimes, yet the city, while still grieving, has thrived. How fitting it would have been to put the plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law...
...Given the circumstances, Mr. Holder is right to push for a military trial for Mr. Mohammed, rather than let him linger in indefinite limbo. His decision will test whether reforms to the military commission system will allow for both a fair prosecution and a vigorous defense. But Monday’s announcement represents a huge missed opportunity to prove the fairness of the federal court system and restore the nation’s reputation for providing justice for all."
"Over the past 540 million years, life on Earth has passed through five great mass extinctions. In each of those catastrophes, an estimated 75 percent or more of all species disappeared in a few million years or less.
For decades, scientists have warned that humans may be ushering in a sixth mass extinction, and recently a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, tested the hypothesis. They applied new statistical methods to a new generation of fossil databases. As they reported last month in the journal Nature, the current rate of extinctions is far above normal. If endangered species continue to disappear, we will indeed experience a sixth extinction, over just the next few centuries or millennia...
...Over the past decade, Dr. Pearson and other researchers have developed models to predict these future range shifts. They typically calculate the “climate envelope” in which species live today, and then use global warming projections to find where their climate envelopes will be in the future...
...“Biodiversity is under severe threat from climate change, but we need to be careful that we don’t give a false impression of what our confidence is,” said Dr. Pearson. “We have to give a nuanced sense of what we do know and what we can say with confidence.”
Seven years after the million-species headlines, Dr. Pearson says that extinction models still have a long way to go. “We’ve made some incremental improvements, but I don’t think they’re hugely better,” he said."
"The two largest studies of Alzheimer’s disease have led to the discovery of no fewer than five genes that provide intriguing new clues to why the disease strikes and how it progresses.
Researchers say the studies, which analyzed the genes of more than 50,000 people in the United States and Europe, leave little doubt that the five genes make the disease more likely in the elderly and have something important to reveal about the disease’s process. They may also lead to ways to delay its onset or slow its progress...
...An estimated 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, most of whom are elderly. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, one in eight people over age 65 have the disease. Its annual cost to the nation is $183 billion.
By themselves, the genes are not nearly as important a factor as APOE, a gene discovered in 1995 that greatly increases risk for the disease: by 400 percent if a person inherits a copy from one parent, by 1,000 percent if from both parents.
In contrast, each of the new genes increases risk by no more than 10 to 15 percent; for that reason, they will not be used to decide if a person is likely to develop Alzheimer’s. APOE, which is involved in metabolizing cholesterol, “is in a class of its own,” said Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of one of the papers...
...Now the European and American groups are pooling their data to do an enormous study, looking for genes in the combined samples."
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