Incite

A Parrot with a Sense of Humor

A little humor to brighten your day - from a parrot!

Corin says:"An African Grey Parrot called N'kisi has a vocabulary of 950 words and can 'communicate' (as opposed to repeat). He has a sense of humour as well. Amazed by this [article on the BBC web site] I searched a little and found a recording of the bird with his owner. Initially I thought 'why they hell did you put the microphone next to the person and not the bird?' before I realised it wasn't the person I was listening to but the bird."

Boing Boing: Parrot uses 950 words to converse with people

technorati tags:parrot, talking, humor, smart, intelligent

RFID Chips To Travel in U.S. Passports

The State Department has officially implemented the new RFID passport regulations, effective October 2006.  The new passports will contain Radio Frequency ID chips (RFID) that will broadcast your information like little radio stations.  Since it has been determined that this information can be read from as far as 160 feet away, they've added some material to dampen the signal when the passport is closed, but it won't completely prevent the broadcasting.  When the passport is open - at airports, hotels, etc. - all bets are off.

This means that identity thieves, or thieves in general, do not have to gain possession of your passport to take your information, they only have to be in your vicinity.

Technorati Tags: identity theft, privacy, RFID, security

Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity.

In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system.

"It looks like a marvelous discovery," said Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, described the finding as "a really strange and unexpected result," which would be important if the observation holds up and applies widely in nature.

Read more:  Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene

Technorati Tags: DNA, backup

The Year of Living Indecently

Frank Rich has a good column about the amount of censorship and self-censorship that's happened in the year since last year's Super Bowl. There's been more than I was aware of. In addition to cuts in "Saving Private Ryan" on network television, PBS has trimmed the BBC's "Prime Suspect", and is making cuts in HBO-BBC's "Dirty War" - about terrorist attacks. This year's Super Bowl half-time show will air minus an Airborne commercial containing Mickey Rooney's 84 year old behind which was deemed too salacious for us to see. I don't see the need to be protected from these images. "Private Ryan" was fine the first time it aired and "Prime Suspect" has always been high quality drama that is appropriate to it's setting.

One new target is a kids show "Postcards from Buster" which is animated (Buster, a rabbit) and live which showed lesbian moms in one episode about how Maple Syrup is made. It was pulled before it was aired. Buster has also visited Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Pentecostal Christians with no problems. Prior to being sworn in, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings threatened PBS with loss of funding because of this episode. That's a little scary.

I was also amazed to see changes and complaints about animated shows like "Family Guy" (a naked baby) and "SpongeBob SquarePants". This seems to be quite silly to me, but Rich says:

there's a method to their seeming idiocy: the cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.

This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" as superheroes. A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome "Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason.

With so many networks running scared, it will be interesting to see what this evolves to.

Read more: The New York Times > Frank Rich: The Year of Living Indecently

Passport Privacy Protection? Nope

The Bush Administration fights the concept of foreign countries telling us how to behave in any way, but they let them dictate how our passports should work. Why?

By the end of this year, our new passports will have an embedded microchip that can broadcast our information - name, birth date, picture - to anyone within 30 feet - unencrypted. Why does this information need to be broadcast? The only reason I can think of is so the government can scan people whenever they want to - to discover who's going into any kind of meeting, for example. This would give governments much greater surveillance power without the need for a warrant.

The reason they are unencrypted, we're told, is to make them more easily usable by foreign countries. It makes it easier for terrorists and identity thieves to get information as well. Since the information is unencrypted, they are LESS secure than our current passports, and will not stop counterfeiters.

Credit cards work just fine by swiping the card. Current passports require physical contact to be scanned, so someone would have to have possession of them to steal your information. You wouldn't be able to be tracked by having it in your bag - a downside for surveillance - a plus for your privacy and the safety of your identity.

I suppose we could just put them inside aluminum foil to stop the broadcasts ;-)

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration opposed security measures for new microchip-equipped passports that privacy advocates contended were needed to prevent identity theft, government snooping or a terror attack, according to State Department documents released Friday.

The passports, scheduled to be issued by the end of 2005, could be read electronically from as far away as 30 feet, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Though the passports wouldn't include transmitters of their own, they would have antennas to allow a reader to capture the data.

The ability to read remotely, or "skim," personal data raises the possibility that passport holders would be vulnerable to identity theft, the ACLU said. It also would allow government agents to find out covertly who was attending a political meeting or make it easier for terrorists to target Americans traveling abroad, the ACLU said.

Read more: Wired News: Passport Privacy Protection? Nope

Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers' friends?

This post from Boing Boing makes you wonder what exactly is going on with security these days. It seems to be getting pretty intrusive without any legal justification.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they'd gathered it. I raised a stink, and was eventually told that I wouldn't have to give them the requested dossier because I was a Platinum AAdvantage Card holder (e.g., because I fly frequently with AA). I have written an open letter to AA asking for details on this -- see the link below for the whole text.

Read more: Boing Boing: Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers' friends?

Separate Schools for "white and colored children" Stays in the Constitution

Alabama refuses to come into the 21st century and is still hanging onto this remnant of it's segregationist past. In the 60's George Wallace said the state's constitution forbade the admission of black students to the University of Alabama.

If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for "white and colored children" and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

Read more: Yahoo! News - Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds

Dolphins Rule!

This is my favorite kind of story - especially at Thanksgiving. A pod of dolphins in New Zealand herded up some swimmers and protected them from an attack by a great white shark.

Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark.

"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).

Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a nine-foot great white shark swimming toward the group.

"I just recoiled. It was only about 2 meters away from me, the water was crystal clear and it was as clear as the nose on my face," Howes said, referring to a distance of six feet.

"They had corralled us up to protect us," he said.

The lifesavers spent the next 40 minutes surrounded by the dolphins before they could safely swim back to shore. The incident happened on October 30, but the lifesavers kept the story to themselves until now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Read more: Yahoo! News - Great Animal Story...

Congressional Staffers to Look at Your Tax Return?

Apparently a provision was slipped into the current 1,000 page Omnibus Spending Bill, at the last minute, that would allow a chairman's "agent" to look at your tax return with no restrictions at all - and no privacy protections. "No one" knew it was in there, we're told.

The Democrats caught it at the last minute. The Republicans repudiated it as a mistake and said accountability would be carried out against the author, if and when found.

"I have no earthly idea how it got in there," Frist said on CBS's "Face The Nation." "Nobody is going to defend this."

The Democrats were equally upset:

"Does anyone believe that some staffer without permission thought up a scheme by which a chairman's 'agent' could have access to every IRS facility everywhere in this nation and every single IRS filing of every citizen of this nation?" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat.

"I mean, you know, we weren't born yesterday."

The culprit has not yet been found. The provision was removed from the bill.

Read more: CNN.com - Frist: Tax-returns measure indefensible

The CIA's 9/11 Report Held Till After The Election?

The CIA completed it's 9/11 Report in June and has not yet shown it to the congressional intelligence committees who commissioned it two years ago. Unlike the other 9/11 Report, this one reveals names of the people who are at fault. The House Intelligence Committee asked for the report two weeks ago and has received nothing. The CIA has no reason to hold it back - except to protect Bush in the election - and Bush didn't want this report done in the first place.

""It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.""

Link: Los Angeles Times - The 9/11 Secret in the CIA's Back Pocket