Ghiasi.org

Or rather the archetypal nerd. Today was apparently Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft:

Cool vid, must share. I really think it’s an extraordinary display of training and mimicking than a display of self-awareness and elephant artistic interpretation. I am saying this based on the incredibly ‘human’ way of emphasis on lines and curves and the flower at the end. But… ultimately who knows… it might be a combination of both. Elephants are incredibly smart and beside humans, apes, and dolphins, they are the only animals to pass the self-recognition mirror test (there is a good paper by Plotnik et al discussing this), in this case I’d be curious to know to what extent elephant actually identifies its drawing as a symbolic representation of something (rather than lines that it has learned to trace).

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/article/3171-wikileaks-web-site-gives-whistleblowers

Wikileaks web site gives whistleblowers a voice
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, April 7th, 2008

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

Unjust organizations around the world face a new threat: anonymity. A new web site called Wikileaks­ makes whistleblowers untraceable, so that they can leak documents without fear of being caught. The site follows the format of Wikipedia, allowing anyone to create a new document page, and providing space for public discussions and analyses of documents. The founders of the project are anonymous, and the locations of the web site’s servers are unknown, with speculations ranging from abandoned U.S. nuclear weapons bases to bunkers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Although peer-to-peer file sharing and anonymous personal web sites have given people a way to leak sensitive information in the past, whistleblowers have run high risks of being discovered, because information travel routes can often be easily traced. Wikileaks overcomes this problem by using advanced cryptographic techniques and an internet protocol called the Onion Router.

Frédéric Mégret, a Law professor at McGill and the Canada research chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, explains that punishment has been a major concern of potential whistleblowers.

“Some people give information only to the extent that [their identity] remains confidential because they would otherwise put themselves at strong risk.”

For whistleblowers, the risk of being discovered can be extreme. Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician, has spent 18 years prison in Israel, much of it in solitary confinement, due to what he revealed about the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1986. Dr. Mégret says that the ease and anonymity of Wikileaks could greatly increase the number of people willing to leak information.
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http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6929

Net neutrality threatened by market forces
By Marzieh Ghiasi
Monday, January 28th, 2008

Massive websites like Amazon may one day be able to pay for more information roadspace than smaller sites.

David Pullmer / The McGill Daily

As most people won’t wait more than four seconds for a page to load, the speed of delivery on the net has become more important than ever. In recent years, this need for speed has pitted companies that provide Internet services against web sites who want as much traffic as possible. What is at stake is net neutrality – the current state of affairs in which users can access Internet sites with equal speed, regardless of whether the site is eBay or mcgill.ca.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) act as the intermediary information carriers between users and web sites. In recent years, in what has become largely a battle of revenues, ISPs have sought to implant tiered network infrastructure and charge web sites – or content providers – for services.

Large content providers, such as Yahoo!, eBay, and Google, receive much of their revenues from new applications and advertising. Their wealth depends in large part on the masses of visitors to their site. Dr. Muthucumaru Maheswaran, a computer science professor at McGill, explains that the ISPs, who make it possible for sites like eBay to have so many visitors, want a piece of the revenue pie.

“The people who actually make the networks are anxious because they’re not sharing that wealth,” he said.
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Evolutionary mechanisms have made organisms dependent on feedback from their environment as a way of coping and adapting to their surroundings. Similarly, human beings depend on feedback, in the form of positive or negative reinforcement, as a way of coping in their social environments and maintaining psychological homeostasis.

Photo by Anissa Thompson

Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation established self-esteem, or the internal perception of self-worth, as fundamental to self-actualization ^[1]. Later, Nathaniel Brandon’s A Psychology of Self Esteem made a strong association between self-esteem and psychological well-being. He recognized positive reinforcement as necessary to promoting self-esteem in children ^[2].

Consequently, parents and educators began placing greater emphasis on praise as a way of boosting self-esteem and greater achievement. The advocates of positive behavioral reinforcement consider praise to be an effective means by which to strengthen a behavior, and provide external support and validation to children ^[3].

However, in the mid-80s critics began to suggest that praise was in fact harmful to children. One of the strong proponents of this movement, Alfie Kohn, has argued that praise can make “praise junkies” out of children and lead to reduced achievements ^[4].

While positive reinforcement is a necessary feedback mechanism for children, generic praise can undermine self-esteem and be detrimental to achievement. Such praise can disseminate the false notion that achievement is based on immutable internal parameters; reduce mastery and autonomy in achievements; and promote the internalization of failure and avoidance of challenges.
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Dangerous wheat-killing fungus detected in Iran – UN

A dangerous new fungus with the ability to destroy entire wheat fields has been detected in Iran, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today.

The wheat stem rust, whose spores are carried by wind across continents, was previously found in East Africa and Yemen and has moved to Iran, which said that laboratory tests have confirmed its presence in some localities in Broujerd and Hamedan in the country’s west.

Called Ug99, the disease first surfaced in Uganda and subsequently spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, with both countries experiencing serious crop yield losses due to a serious rust epidemic last year. Also in 2007, FAO confirmed that a more virulent strain was found in Yemen.

Good news for the gluten intolerant people, bad news for the rest of us.

*image source

This story is just precious. :cute:

How it Happened
Isaac Asimov

My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.

“In the beginning,” he said, “exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe–”

But I had stopped writing. “Fifteen billion years ago?” I said incredulously.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m inspired.”

“I don’t question your inspiration,” I said. (I had better not. He’s three years younger than I am, but I don’t try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there’s hell to pay.) “But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?”

“I have to,” said my brother. “That’s how long it took. I have it all in here,” he tapped his forehead, “and it’s on the very highest authority.”

By now I had put down my stylus. “Do you know the price of papyrus?” I said.

“What?” (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn’t include such sordid matters as the price of papyrus.)

I said, “Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you’ll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You’ll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I’ll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off. And even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who’s going to copy it? We’ve got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?”

My brother thought awhile. He said, “You think I ought to cut it down?”

“Way down,” I said, “if you expect to reach the public.”

“How about a hundred years?” he said.

“How about six days?” I said.

He said horrified, “You can’t squeeze Creation into six days.”

I said, “This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?”

“Oh, well,” he said, and began to dictate again, “In the beginning– Does it have to be six days, Aaron?”

I said, firmly, “Six days, Moses.”

-Source

Just so that everyone can join in while I bask in happiness, I finally found the full song to a 5 second clip, which I had been looking for for a while. He’s singing the Saadi poem “Bani Adam”… Habib has an amazing voice, he really does justice to the whole three lines of the poem.

I just wanted to say, for the love of all that is good and holy… people please update your browsers*. please.

This goes out to those people who are still using Internet Explorer 5.5/6.0. Theoretically every piece of code should be compatible with every browser. Fortunately, since Microsoft finally decided to comply with web standards, designers no longer have to tear their hair out while spending hours modifying something that already works in all major browsers… just because older IE browsers don’t render code properly. Unfortunately, the news hasn’t caught on and a sizable portion of people are still using these party killers.

It only takes a few minutes (or seconds in some cases) to update. But in turn you get better security, get to enjoy actual web-design… and possibly make a programmer’s life span a few days longer.

*or better yet convert to Firefox, but that would be indoctrination.