Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314403347?client_source=feed&format=rss
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রবিবার, ২৩ জুন, ২০১৩
Social media spreads and splinters Brazil protests
Social media 
10 hours ago
UESLEI MARCELINO / REUTERS
A demonstrator holds a sign next to street structures set on fire during a protest against the Confederations Cup and President Dilma Rousseff's government, in front of the National Congress in Brasilia June 20, 2013.
SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil's biggest protests in decades are a confusing, conflicting mix of people and messages. Blame Facebook.
Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter enabled mass protests of the sort that have not happened in Latin America's biggest country in more than two decades.
As a result of the speed, efficiency and anonymity of online activism, though, an amorphous, unwieldy movement has emerged that is beyond the control of any of those who first began pushing for change.
"Social media has helped us organize without having leaders," said Victor Damaso, 22, demonstrating on Sao Paulo's main Paulista Avenue on Thursday night. "Our ideas, our demands are discussed on Facebook. There are no meetings, no rules."
The demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, but as more than a million Brazilians took to the streets on Thursday, vandals and looters cast a violent pall over some of the protests. Police and security forces have responded with teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray.
Facebook pages set up for logistical coordination and Twitter hash tags have cropped up for protests in hundreds of cities across Brazil. Rival groups appear to be vying for control of one of the most-viewed organizing pages on Facebook and an associated Twitter feed.
"Any movement risks attracting unaffiliated groups and individuals," said Angela Alonso, a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo. "It's a price of growth. In this case there is no centralized leadership, administration is more difficult and it is even becoming uncontrollable."
The Free Fare movement, a group of 40 activists who marched for - and got - lower transportation rates, said on Friday it was suspending any further marches for now because of mounting tension and violence.
Sparked by Free Fare's protests, the nationwide call for reform quickly evolved into what is now known online as Anonymous Brazil.
The group appears to use encrypted Web browsers that make it difficult to identify page administrators and has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol for the global cyber group of hackers known as Anonymous, as its mascot, although it is not clear if the two have a formal link.
While that opens the door to all sorts of fringe groups, the people at the core of the protests generally share a commitment to better public services. Their rallying cries, found on Twitter and Facebook and on traditional signs at the protests, range from ending political corruption to lambasting more than $12 billion being poured into soccer stadiums and other preparations for the 2014 World Cup.
The demonstrators, mostly educated, middle class and under age 30, want nothing to do with established groups that were behind the causes of their parents' generation.
Online organizing
Unlike Brazil's movement for redemocratization in the 1970s and 1980s and protests for the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello in the early 1990s, today's demonstrations have no clear leadership or political affinity.
"The recent protests are not partisan, and they do not have centralized leadership," said Alonso, the sociologist. "This has to do with new technologies that allow for organization without centralization, and also with the fact that the activists are from a new generation that is no longer guided by ideals like socialism, and doesn't want state power."
Indeed, Brazil's protests do not target any specific leader or political party. That makes them different from the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings against autocratic leaders in the past few years, or even this year's demonstrations in Turkey against the government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
While some of the Arab governments blocked access to the Internet to disrupt the planning of protests, Brazil's intelligence agency, Abin, has beefed up efforts to monitor calls for demonstrations online and on popular smart phone chat tool WhatsApp.
President Dilma Rousseff, a leftist guerrilla in the 1970s, has praised the protests as democratic.
Anonymous Brazil's Facebook page, which has nearly 1 million followers, briefly disappeared from the Web on Friday. The group later said via Facebook that its Twitter account had been "robbed" by one of its own members, generating conflicts on its linked Facebook platform.
The group says competing Twitter accounts like @AnonymousBr4sil and #AnonymousFuel are run by "usurpers."
Of the 53.5 million Brazilians online, almost a third of the population, 86 percent use some kind of micro blog or social media tool, according to polling firm Ibope.
(Additional reporting by Silvio Cascione; Editing by Paulo Prada and Mohammad Zargham)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.
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শনিবার, ২২ জুন, ২০১৩
Snowden in a 'safe place' as U.S. prepares to seek extradition
By Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Edward Snowden was in a "safe place" in Hong Kong, a newspaper reported on Saturday, as the United States prepared to seek the extradition of the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor after filing espionage charges against him.
The South China Morning Post said Snowden, who has exposed secret U.S. surveillance programs including new details published on Saturday about alleged hacking of Chinese phone companies, was not in police protection in Hong Kong, as had been reported elsewhere.
"Contrary to some reports, the former CIA analyst has not been detained, is not under police protection but is in a 'safe place' in Hong Kong," the newspaper said.
Hong Kong Police Commissioner Andy Tsang declined to comment other than to say Hong Kong would deal with the case in accordance with the law.
Two U.S. sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States was preparing to seek Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong, which is part of China but has wide-ranging autonomy, including an independent judiciary.
The United States charged Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person, according to the criminal complaint made public on Friday.
The latter two offenses fall under the U.S. Espionage Act and carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.
America's use of the Espionage Act against Snowden has fueled debate among legal experts about whether that could complicate his extradition, since Hong Kong courts may choose to shield him.
Snowden says he leaked the details of the classified U.S. surveillance to expose abusive programs that trampled on citizens' rights.
Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies such as Facebook and Google, under a government program known as Prism.
They also showed that the government had worked through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gather so-called metadata - such as the time, duration and telephone numbers called - on all calls carried by service providers such as Verizon.
On Friday, the Guardian newspaper, citing documents shared by Snowden, said Britain's spy agency GCHQ had tapped fiber-optic cables that carry international phone and internet traffic and is sharing vast quantities of personal information with the NSA.
STEALING DATA
The South China Morning Post said on Saturday that Snowden offered new details on U.S. surveillance activities in China.
The paper said documents and statements by Snowden show the NSA program had hacked major Chinese telecoms companies to access text messages and targeted China's top Tsinghua University.
The NSA program also hacked the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which has an extensive fiber-optic network, it said.
"The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data," Snowden was quoted by the Post as saying during a June 12 interview.
President Barack Obama and his intelligence chiefs have vigorously defended the programs, saying they are regulated by law and that Congress was notified. They say the programs have been used to thwart militant plots and do not target Americans' personal lives.
Since making his revelations about massive U.S. surveillance programs, Edward Snowden, 30, has sought legal representation from human rights lawyers as he prepares to fight U.S. attempts to force him home for trial, sources in Hong Kong say.
The United States and Hong Kong signed an extradition treaty in 1998, under which scores of Americans have been sent back home to face trial.
The United States and Hong Kong have "excellent cooperation" and as a result of agreements, "there is an active extradition relationship between Hong Kong and the United States," a U.S. law enforcement official told Reuters.
However, the process can take years, lawyers say, and Snowden's case could be particularly complex.
An Icelandic businessman linked to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Thursday he had readied a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland if Iceland's government would grant asylum.
Iceland refused on Friday to say whether it would grant asylum to Snowden.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by James Pomfret, Venus Wu and Grace Li in HONG KONG, Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball in WASHINGTON; Editing by Eric Beech)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-files-espionage-charges-against-snowden-over-leaks-015108216.html
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Greyhound happy with pace on couch | Otago Daily Times Online ...
| Sarah Tweedale with greyhound Gabbie and Oscar the cat at home in Dunedin this week. Photo by Stephen Jaquiery. |
She might have been a dog on the racetrack, but now everyone thinks Gabbie is a winner.
The 2-year-old greyhound did not win any races on the track, but off it has certainly won hearts.
Dunedin couple Sarah and Mark Tweedale got the greyhound in December through the Greyhounds As Pets (GAP) programme for retired racing greyhounds.
''I really wanted to rehome an animal and thought greyhounds fitted the bill for what we wanted,'' Mrs Tweedale said this week.
''We both work, so we didn't want a puppy and we wanted a dog that didn't need a lot of exercise. She's really a couch potato. They're one of the best family dogs. They're fantastic with children and with older people, but she's a bit anxious of other dogs. She's very shy.
''I can't imagine life without her. I'm besotted with her. A lot of people start with one and then get a second one.''
However, the Tweedales' six cats, Oscar, Lucy, Isaac, Bella, Maggie and Tonks, were originally less than impressed with their new housemate.
''The cats were OK. They were a bit nervous at first, but Gabbie was more anxious about them. That's probably why she failed her racing career,'' Mrs Tweedale said.
''A lot of people think greyhound racing is cruel, but most trainers want to see their dogs retire in a family.''
GAP sells the dogs for $380, after giving them a complete health check, including desexing, microchipping, registration and training for a new life as a pet. There were 19 former race greyhounds living as pets in the Otago region, GAP southern regional co-ordinator Susan Sinclair, of Kaiapoi, said.
''That will go up to 20 this week, as we're about to send another one down there. They're very addictive. They always seem to have a worried look on their faces but, behind that, they're quite cheeky. They're a sweet-natured dog, but very cheeky and very funny,'' she said.
- nigel.benson@odt.co.nz
Source: http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/261944/greyhound-happy-pace-couch
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Scientists discover previously unknown requirement for brain development: Brain requires thalamic input as well as genetics
June 21, 2013 ? Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have demonstrated that sensory regions in the brain develop in a fundamentally different way than previously thought, a finding that may yield new insights into visual and neural disorders.
In a paper published June 7, in Science, Salk researcher Dennis O'Leary and his colleagues have shown that genes alone do not determine how the cerebral cortex grows into separate functional areas. Instead, they show that input from the thalamus, the main switching station in the brain for sensory information, is crucially required.
O'Leary has done pioneering studies in "arealization," the way in which the neo-cortex, the major region of cerebral cortex, develops specific areas dedicated to particular functions. In a landmark paper published in Science in 2000, he showed that two regulatory genes were critically responsible for the general pattern of the neo-cortex, and has since shown distinct roles for other genes in this process. In this new set of mouse experiments, his laboratory focused on the visual system, and discovered a new, unexpected twist to the story.
"In order to function properly, it is essential that cortical areas are mapped out correctly, and it is this architecture that was thought to be genetically pre-programmed," says O'Leary, holder of the Vincent J. Coates Chair in Molecular Neurobiology at Salk. "To our surprise, we discovered thalamic input plays an essential role far earlier in brain development."
Vision is relayed from the outside world into processing areas within the brain. The relay starts when light hits the retina, a thin strip of cells at the back of the eye that detects color and light levels and encodes the information as electrical and chemical signals. Through retinal ganglion cells, those signals are then sent into the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN), a structure in thalamus.
In the next important step in the relay, the LGN routes the signals into the primary visual area (V1) in the neo-cortex, a multi-layered structure that is divided into functionally and anatomically distinct areas. V1 begins the process of extracting visual information, which is further carried out by "higher order" visual areas in the neo-cortex that are vitally important to visual perception. Like parts in a machine, the functions of these areas are both individual and integrated. Damage in one tiny area can lead to strange visual disorders in which a person may be able to see a moving ball, and yet not perceive it is in motion.
Current dogma holds that this basic architecture is entirely genetically determined, with environmental input only playing a role later in development. One of the most famous examples of this idea is the Nobel Prize-winning work of visual neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, which showed that there is a "critical period" of sensitivity in vision. Their finding was commonly interpreted as a warning that without exposure to basic visual stimuli early in life, even an individual with a healthy brain will be unable to see correctly.
Later discoveries in neural plasticity more optimistically suggested that early deprivation can be overcome, and the brain can even sprout new neurons in specific areas. Nevertheless, this still reinforced the idea that environmental influences might modify neural architecture, but only genetics could establish how cortical areas would be laid out.
In their new study, however, O'Leary and the paper's co-first authors, Shen-Ju Chou and Zoila Babot, post-doctoral researchers in O'Leary's laboratory, show that genetics only provides a broad field in the neo-cortex for visual areas.
When they created mouse mutants that disconnected the link between thalamus and cortex but only after early cortical development was complete, they found that the primary and higher order visual areas failed to differentiate from one another as they should.
"Our new understanding is that genes only create a rough lay-out of cortical areas," explains O'Leary. "There must be thalamic input to develop the fine differentiation necessary for proper sensory processing."
Essentially, if the brain were a house, genes would determine which areas were bedrooms. Thalamic input provides the details, distinguishing what will be the master bedroom, a child's bedroom, a guest bedroom and so on. "The size and location of areas within the overall cortex does not change, but without thalamic input from the LGN, the critical differentiation process that creates primary and higher order visual areas does not happen," says O'Leary.
Given that most sensory modalities -- -- sight, hearing, touch -- -- route through thalamus to cortex, this experiment may suggest why, when someone lacks a sensory modality from birth, that individual has a harder time processing restored sensory input than someone who lost the sense later in life. But in addition, as O'Leary says, "More subtle changes in thalamic input in humans would also likely result in changes to the neo-cortex that could well have a substantial impact on the ability to process vision, or other senses, and lead to abnormal behavior."
O'Leary says his lab plans to continue to explore the links between how cortical areas in the brain are established and various developmental disorders, such as autism.
Other researchers on the study were Axel Leing?rtner and Yasushi Nakagawa of the Salk Institute, and Michele Studer, of the Institute of Biology Valrose, INSERM in France.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Agence National de la Recherche 2009 Chaires d? Excellence Program, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/R5EH5b1wWdA/130621095328.htm
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Olympus Electronic Viewfinder VF-4
The Olympus Electronic Viewfinder VF-4 ($279.99 direct) is, without question, the best EVF that we've seen for digital cameras at this point. It's bundled with the Olympus PEN E-P5 as part of the standard kit, but can also be purchased separately and used on older Olympus PEN cameras with the AP2 accessory port.
The finder delivers 1.48x magnification?basically, this means that if you're shooting with a standard-angle lens (25mm in the Micro Four Thirds format), what you're seeing in the finder is going to be noticeably larger than it is in reality. And what you see is extremely crisp thanks to a 2.36-million-dot resolution. This gives you a clear view of what you're shooting, and overlay information is displayed so you also know what settings your camera is using.
It's an LCD finder, so it doesn't pack quite as much contrast as the OLED Sony Electronic Viewfinder that is compatible with the Cyber-shot DSC-RX1 and some other Sony cameras. Of course, because there's no cross-system standard for accessory ports, you can only use the Sony finder on Sony cameras, and you can only use this Olympus finder on Olympus cameras.
In addition to the sharp resolution, the finder delivers a very fast refresh rate when used on the E-P5. Older Olympus cameras require a firmware update to use this new finder. We also looked at it on the PEN Lite E-PL5. The finder seemed a little slower to refresh on that camera, even with an f/1.8 lens attached. Even on the E-P5, the refresh can get a little laggy if you are using a lens with a narrow maximum aperture in dimmer light.
The EVF itself is fairly large, which is necessary because of its magnification factor. It is hinged and can tilt up to 90?; there is a locking notch, so you won't accidentally tilt it. If you use it on an E-P5 the eye-sensor automatically switches between the rear LCD and the EVF, and for older PEN cameras there is a button to do so.
It's heads and shoulders better than the older VF-2, which was previously the top-end accessory viewfinder for Olympus cameras. The VF-2 features a 1.15x magnification factor and a 1.44-million-dot resolution, so the image it projects is not only smaller, it's not as sharp.
The Olympus Electronic Viewfinder VF-4 is more expensive than the older VF-2, but delivers a much better experience, even for occasional EVF use. We were blown away by the image quality that the EVF delivered, and are also quite happy with the asking price?it's $170 less expensive than the OLED EVF that Sony sells for some of its cameras. The VF-4 earns our Editors' Choice award, and is without a doubt the EVF to get if you're a PEN shooter.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/zVsaF9GxAik/0,2817,2420716,00.asp
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