In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in-transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.”

In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties.

{ Crime and Delinquency | PDF | via MindHacks }

artwork { Jean-Micel Basquiat, Not Detected, 1982 }

{ Jay-Z, Ed Ruscha and Marilyn Minter to Design Water Tanks in New York }

previously in let’s deface new york { Jeff Koons is in talks with Friends of the High Line }

Six studies demonstrate the “pot calling the kettle black” phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral misconduct. Our findings indicate that to reduce ethical dissonance, individuals use a double-distancing mechanism. Using an overcompensating ethical code, they judge others more harshly and present themselves as more virtuous and ethical.

{ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }

related { Psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. | Wikipedia }

One quick story: I was a venture capitalist in 2001. A company, Oingo, which later became Applied Semantics, had a technique for how search engines could make money by having people bid for ads. My partner at the firm said, “we can probably pick up half this company for cheap. They are running out of money.” It was during the Internet bust.

“Are you kidding me, “ I said. “they are in the search engine business. That’s totally dead.” And I went back to playing the Defender machine that was in my office. That I would play all day long even while companies waited in the conference room.

A year later they were bought by Google for 1% of Google. Our half would’ve now been worth hundreds of millions if we had invested. I was the worst venture capitalist ever. They had changed their name from Oingo to Applied Semantics to what became within Google…AdWords and AdSense, which has been 97% of Google’s revenues since 2001. 97%. $67 billion dollars. (…)

Ken Lang buys his patents back from Lycos for almost nothing. He starts a company: I/P Engine. Two weeks ago he announced he was merging his company with a public company, Vringo (Nasdaq: VRNG). Because it’s Ken, I buy the stock although will buy more after this article is out and readers read this.

The company sues Google for a big percentage of those $67 billion in revenues plus future revenues. The claim: Google has willfully infringed on Vringo – I/P’s patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs.

{ James Altucher/TechCrunch | Continue reading }

Computers dominate how we live, work and think. For some, the technology is a boon and promises even better things to come. But others warn that there could be bizarre consequences and that humans may be on the losing end of progress.  (…)

“Economic progress ultimately signifies the ability to produce things at a lower financial cost and with less labor than in the past,” says Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. As a result, he says, increasing effectiveness goes hand in hand with rising unemployment, and the unemployed merely become “human waste.”

Likewise, (…) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both scholars at the MIT, argue that, for the first time in its history, technological progress is creating more jobs for computers than for people.

{ Spiegel | Continue reading }

unrelated { Competition among memes in a world with limited attention }

{ Harry the baby pygmy hippo. | More: Male pygmy hippos control sex ratio with their sperm. | The Pygmy Hippo is rarely seen because of its secretive, nocturnal habits and consequently not much is known of its ecology. }

previously { Are hippos the most dangerous animal? }

Sometime last year computers at the U.S. Social Security Administration were hacked and the identities of millions of Americans were compromised. What, you didn’t hear about that? Nobody did.

The extent of damage is only just now coming to light in the form of millions of false 2011 income tax returns filed in the names of people currently receiving Social Security benefits.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

Sixty-five million years ago, a Manhattan-size meteorite traveling through space at about 11 kilometers per second punched through the sky before hitting the ground near what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The energy released by the impact poured into the atmosphere, heating Earth’s surface. Then the dust lofted by this impact blocked out the sun, bringing years of wintry conditions everywhere, wiping out many terrestrial species, including the nonfeathered dinosaurs. Birds and mammals thus owe their ascendancy to the intersection of two orbits: that of Earth and that of a devastating visitor from deep space. (…)

In December 2004, scientists at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, Calif., estimated there was a nearly 3 percent chance that a 30-billion-kilogram rock called 99942 Apophis would slam into Earth in 2029, releasing the energy equivalent of 500 million tons of TNT. That’s enough to level small countries or raise tsunamis that could wash away coastal cities on several continents. More recent calculations have lowered the odds of a 2029 impact to about 1 in 250 000. This time around, Apophis will probably miss us—but only by 30 000 km, less than one-tenth of the distance to the moon. (…)

We considered several strategies. The most dramatic—and the favorite of Hollywood special-effects experts—is the nuclear option. Just load up the rocket with a bunch of thermonuclear bombs, aim carefully, and light the fuse when the spacecraft approaches the target. What could be simpler? The blast would blow off enough material to alter the trajectory of the body, nudging it into an orbit that wouldn’t intersect Earth.

But what if the target is brittle? The object might then fragment, and instead of one large body targeting Earth, there could be several rocks—now highly radioactive—headed our way.

{ IEEE Spectrum | Continue reading }

painting { Nicola Verlato }

How to survive an atomic bomb

The first thing to understand is that if you are still alive five minutes after a small nuclear weapon detonates, you are already very likely to survive.

{ Jason Lefkowitz | Continue reading }

What would we do if we encountered an alien race? As it turns out, the question has garnered considerable academic thought since the first reported flying saucer sighting in 1947, not just as an inquiry in human psychology, but also as a way of contemplating what aliens might do if they ever found us. From astronomers to ufologists to anthropologists, scholars who have contemplated the various “contact scenarios” believe our course of action would strongly depend on the relative intelligence level of the newfound beings. Here, we outline what would happen if we encountered primitive, humanlike, and godlike aliens. (…)

In 1950 the U.S. military developed a procedure called “Seven Steps to Contact,” laying out the logical steps we would take upon discovering creatures with roughly human-level sentience. According to the steps, we would begin with remote surveillance and data gathering, and would eventually move on to covert visitations with the goal of gauging the performance characteristics of the aliens’ vehicles and weaponry.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

related { Alien Abductions May Be Vivid Dreams, Study Shows }

photo { Laerke Posselt }

I’ve heard a few stories, over the years, of what happens when collectors who own art try to sell that art through a gallery. In the first instance, the gallery is always very bullish, and promises to sell it for a high price at a modest commission. But then it somehow never sells, and the consignor becomes increasingly desperate, and eventually accepts a sum of money from the gallery which is a mere fraction of the amount originally mooted. It’s a standard m.o. in the gallery world: never sell anything too quickly, and wait instead for the seller’s need for cash to be as urgent as possible. That minimizes the amount the gallery needs to pay the seller, and therefore maximizes the amount the gallery can keep for itself. (…)

In a nutshell, Jan’s no-good son Charles got desperate for cash, and so sold her Lichtenstein through Gagosian without her knowledge or consent. What’s more, his desperation was so obvious to Gagosian that he wound up getting spectacularly ripped off: while Gagosian had initially promised him $2.5 million for the piece, the final payment to Cowles was just $1 million. (…)

No matter who wins the legal case, is that the opacity, skullduggery, and information asymmetry in the art world should put off anybody who ever thinks they’re dealing fair and square with a prominent dealer.

{ Felix Salmon/Reuters | Continue reading | via Ritholtz }

{ The New York Times’ City Room blog reports that Koons is in talks with Friends of the High Line, the conservancy group charged with managing the park, to bring one of his sculptures to the converted greenway. What sculpture would that be? A full-sized replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive. | Gawker | Thanks Tim }

Who made and launched Stuxnet in the first place? Richard Clarke tells me he knows the answer.

Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, now operates a cybersecurity consultancy called Good Harbor. (…) We have virtually no defense against the cyberattacks that he says are targeting us now, and will be in the future. (…)

“I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,” he said calmly.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

previously, Stuxnet { The out-of-controller | I don’t sleep. I wait. }

illustration { Jonathan Koshi }

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media skeptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most “toxic” elements of narcissistic personality disorder.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Leo Berne }

quote { Hamilton Nolan/Gawker }

A Star Trek-style cloaking technique allows people to spy on your Facebook account in a way that is difficult to spot and even harder to stop, say computer scientists.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

illustration { Grant Orchard }

This new research provides a terrific reference list of prior work done on women stalkers and reports a high rate of psychosis among women stalkers. Delusions are the most common symptom in two of the three major studies completed so far. Half of the women stalkers described in prior research had character disorders and women were more likely than men to target a former professional contact (like mental health professionals, teachers or lawyers). It appears that male stalkers are less particular, and more likely to target strangers. Women stalkers seek intimacy.

{ Keen Trial | Continue reading }

photo { Taylor Radelia }

As bacteria evolve to evade antibiotics, common infections could become deadly, according to Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization.

Speaking at a conference in Copenhagen, Chan said antibiotic resistance could bring about “the end of modern medicine as we know it.”

“We are losing our first-line antimicrobials,” she said Wednesday in her keynote address at the conference on combating antimicrobial resistance. “Replacement treatments are more costly, more toxic, need much longer durations of treatment, and may require treatment in intensive care units.”

Chan said hospitals have become “hotbeds for highly-resistant pathogens” like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, “increasing the risk that hospitalization kills instead of cures.”

Indeed, diseases that were once curable, such as tuberculosis, are becoming harder and more expensive to treat.

{ ABC | Continue reading }

artwork { Mœbius }

Consider what the modest justices were debating on Monday: what Americans are allowed to do AFTER they die.

Specifically, the question before the court was whether a dead man can help conceive children.

This odd point of law came before the court after a woman, Karen Capato, gave birth to twins 18 months after her husband died of cancer. She had used sperm he deposited when he was alive, and she was seeking his Social Security survivor benefits for the kids. (…)

“Let’s assume Ms. Capato remarried but used her deceased husband’s sperm to birth two children . . . ” Sotomayor posited. “Would they qualify for survivor benefits even though she is now remarried?” (…) “What if you are a sperm donor?”

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

This has led researchers to ask the questions: How can we get mobile users to break out of their patterns, visit less frequented areas, and collect the data we need?

Researchers can’t force mobile users to behave in a certain way, but researchers at Northwestern University have found that they may be able to nudge them in the right direction by using incentives that are already part of their regular mobile routine.


“We can rely on good luck to get the data that we need,” Bustamante said, “or we can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them.”


{ McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science | Continue reading }

related { What Privacy Advocates Don’t Get About Data Tracking on the Web }

related { Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services and hand over user data | Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For? | Thanks Samantha! }

We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

{ This American Life | Continue reading | More: Mike Daisey’s Lies About China }