Monthly Archives: June 2015

For Your Consideration: Brain/Body Exercise, Stop Trying To Be Happy, LEGO turnaround, A/B Illusion

1. High Intensity (Functional) Exercise and Neurogenesis
“The typical CrossFit box is a defoliated orangutang habitat.”

The modern gym has been deliberately designed to not require any coordination, accuracy, agility, or balance. The attributes of fitness that bind the body and brain together have become the exclusive province of athletes, dancers, and the few lucky children who still climb trees, pop bicycle wheelies, and hang upside down from monkey bars. The stripping-away of coordination, accuracy agility and balance from physical culture – from our modern notion of fitness – has made us weaker, because power, the ability to apply maximum force, requires neural circuitry that’s impossible to develop on a pulley cable.

But it’s worse than that. If all we lost in the transition from functional fitness to circuit-trained muscle development was power, we’d be losing something the modern world doesn’t demand. Most of us can live pretty well, in a physical sense, without building huge amounts of physical power.

The problem is, the area of our brain that’s responsible for full-body movement…that’s not all it does. The brain controls movement in three areas, depending on the complexity of the movement. The primary motor cortex, the lowest-level switch box, is responsible for simple movements like shifting the position of your head. Slightly in front of this area is a more sophisticated set of controls for integrated movements, like reaching for an object. In front of this is a third, even more intricate control center called the attention association area. The attention association area is the part of the brain that controls complex movements that involve the entire body. This is where coordination, accuracy, agility, and balance live. That’s what it evolved to do. That’s what it does in animals. When a predator leaps to latch onto a piece of prey and snap its neck, that complex coordinated pounce comes from the attention association area of the predator’s brain. The neural “go signal” to pounce comes from the same place in the animal’s brain that controls the physical execution of the movement.

In human beings, the attention association area, like many parts of the brain, has evolved in a way that transcends its original function. This area that controls complex movements, that generates the “go signal” to execute them, is also the source of human will, goal-setting behavior, and purposeful organization of thought. “To put it bluntly,” writes Andrew Newberg, a neuroscience professor who researches the neural mechanisms of consciousness, “a great part of what one sees with injury to the attention association area is a loss of will and an inability to form intention. If any part of the brain can be said to be the seat of the will or of intentionality, it is certainly the attention association area.”

2. Stop Trying To Be Happy
You have to do the work yourself. Nobody can do it for you.

Happiness is the process of becoming your ideal self

Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying a new computer.

And the funny thing is that all three of the activities above are exceedingly unpleasant and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of our lives. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair, yet once we’ve done them we look back and get misty-eyed about them.

Because it’s these sort of activities which allow us to become our ideal selves. It’s the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. This is why some people are happy in war and others are sad at weddings. It’s why some are excited to work and others hate parties. The traits they’re inhabiting don’t align with their ideal selves.

The end results don’t define our ideal selves. It’s not finishing the marathon that makes us happy, it’s achieving a difficult long-term goal that does. It’s not having an awesome kid to show off that makes us happy, but knowing that you gave yourself up to the growth of another human being that is special. It’s not the prestige and money from the new business that makes you happy, it’s the process of overcoming all odds with people you care about.

3. LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents
Also, buy the LEGOs, burn the instructions.

During a session with the photo diaries, for example, the researchers noted that the children’s bedrooms in New Jersey tended to be meticulously designed by the mothers. “They look like they’re from the pages of Elle Décor,” noted one participant. Another child’s bedroom in Los Angeles was suspiciously tidy with a stylish airplane mobile hanging down. “That looks staged,” an anthropologist observed, and the team discussed what that might mean. These were children who were driven everywhere in SUVs with carefully managed after-school activities. The researchers noted that the moms were also “staging” their children’s development. They were trying to shape children who were creative, fun, outgoing, humorous, intelligent, and quiet all at the same time. Throughout the conversation, critical theory from the human sciences provided a framework for the observations. The researchers discussed how these “staged” childhoods resembled Foucault’s “panopticon,” where activities were under surveillance and subject to disciplinary measures. One of the analysts drew a picture with a large circle and a very tiny circle. “This is the space we used to have for playing,” he said, pointing to the large circle, “and this ever-diminishing circle is the space these kids have right now.”

“These kids were bubble-wrapped,” one team member recalled. “Every physical space in their life was curated, managed, or staged by an adult. Whereas children in the past used to find freedom and an appropriate level of danger on the streets, playing on sidewalks throughout the neighborhood or roaming free in the country, these children needed to find their freedom in virtual spaces through online gaming or in imaginary zones (like the box of magic mushrooms).”

An important insight came to the group through the discussion of all of these observations. One role of play for these children was to find pockets of oxygen, away from adult supervision. The group realized that kids were desperate to sneak some element of danger into their lives. If the researchers had used a more linear process—one focused on the properties of the children’s play—the team would never have thought to put poisonous mushrooms and booby traps in the same category. But the nonlinear act of connecting the dots revealed that the underlying phenomenon of both behaviors was the same.

These and other findings led the researchers to identify the key patterns: children play to get oxygen, to understand hierarchy, to achieve mastery at a skill, and to socialize. The patterns were simplified into four categories: under the radar, hierarchy, mastery, and social play.

4. The ethics and morality of the A/B illusion
For more, the authors respond to some questions.

CAN it ever be ethical for companies or governments to experiment on their employees, customers or citizens without their consent?

The conventional answer — of course not! — animated public outrage last year after Facebook published a study in which it manipulated how much emotional content more than half a million of its users saw. Similar indignation followed the revelation by the dating site OkCupid that, as an experiment, it briefly told some pairs of users that they were good matches when its algorithm had predicted otherwise.

But this outrage is misguided. Indeed, we believe that it is based on a kind of moral illusion.

Companies — and other powerful actors, including lawmakers, educators and doctors — “experiment” on us without our consent every time they implement a new policy, practice or product without knowing its consequences. When Facebook started, it created a radical new way for people to share emotionally laden information, with unknown effects on their moods. And when OkCupid started, it advised users to go on dates based on an algorithm without knowing whether it worked.

Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms?

In a forthcoming article in the Colorado Technology Law Journal, one of us (Professor Meyer) calls this the “A/B illusion” — the human tendency to focus on the risk, uncertainty and power asymmetries of running a test that compares A to B, while ignoring those factors when A is simply imposed by itself.

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” (Warren Buffet)

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

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For Your Consideration: Data Breach and Future Harm, Gov. 2.0, Digital Commons, Let Kids Play

1. Data Theft Today Poses Indefinite Threat of “Future Harm”
FYI. You can get a new Social Security Number for free from the SSA but the follow-on ramifications of doing so are unclear.

Benjamin Nuss was one of the nearly 80 million people whose social security number and personal information were compromised in this year’s Anthem data breach. He seems to have taken things in stride, continuing his daily routine of sharing computer time with his brother, eating healthy snacks and making crafts. Benjamin is four years old.

While it may seem trivial to think about the harm a preschooler will suffer from a data breach, the question is not what happens to him now, but what will happen years from now. Data theft poses an indefinite threat of future harm, as birthdate, full name and social security number remain a skeleton key of identity in many systems.

Benjamin’s mother, Jennifer Nuss, gave birth while the family had Blue Cross insurance, which was linked to Anthem’s databases. “They sent us a letter saying that Benjamin’s information may have been compromised. All they offered is, ‘We can watch Ben’s credit for you,’” she says. “But you can check that yourself for free.” A stay-at-home mother of two and an accounting student, Nuss is disciplined about family finances and checks her and her husband’s credit records and accounts regularly. “With Benjamin,” she adds, “well, we’re going to have to watch his information forever.”

While data breach victims like Nuss and his adult counterparts face open-ended questions about what lies ahead, the data wars are running hot, with each week seemingly bringing news of vast new breaches, victims and potential victims gripped with anxiety, and debate raging about the vulnerability of companies and government. All the uncertainty is raising thorny legal questions. The Supreme Court is readying to hear a case that could set new precedent on whether data breach lawsuits can be based on future harm.

[And] data breach victims aren’t only concerned with the financial bottom line. Many are more worried about doing the digital-era equivalent of constantly looking over their shoulder, waiting for someone to appropriate their identity, or dredge up some intimate, haunting secret they thought was long buried. It’s not likely that legislation or the courts can fix that.

2. Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup

Outsiders often make the mistake of perceiving Washington’s technical problems as the result of a dearth of engineering talent. This makes it tempting to frame the current wave of hires from Google and elsewhere as a wartime tactical team moving in to save us from the city’s existing coding barbarians. But this is not quite correct. For one thing, the people Park and Dickerson are luring here aren’t just software engineers; they’re data scientists, user-­experience gurus, product managers, and design savants. For another, these people are being matched with government insiders who can advise them on how to deploy private-sector tools like Amazon Web Services, for instance, that have long been considered forbidden within the Beltway, or how the procurement of contractors can be improved. Usually this involves cutting a jungle path through thousands of pages of overgrown government regulations. As Park says, “We need both kinds: people who can hack the technology, as well as people who can hack the bureaucracy.”

The complexity is formidable. If you put your engineer’s hat on, Dickerson says, you can look at government’s approach to tech and decide that it’s pretty much insane. But if you consider it as an anthropologist might (“If you’re studying this alien culture,” he says, “and you ask, Why do they behave so strangely?”), you see that D.C. has developed its dysfunctions for deep, structural reasons. For instance, Washington has plenty of smart people, Dickerson says. But they have been removed from the extraordinary growth—only occurring during the past decade, really—of the handful of West Coast companies that can now manage “planet-scale websites,” as Dickerson puts it.

Above all, there is the inertia of the past. One of the first lessons Dickerson learned about D.C. when he arrived was that the city traditionally conflates the importance of a task with its cost. Healthcare.gov ultimately became an $800 million project, with 55 contracting companies involved. “And of course it didn’t work,” he says. “They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as ­Healthcare.gov—8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million.” Dickerson believes that the Healthcare.gov project could have been done with a similar size budget. But there wasn’t anyone to insist that the now-well-established Silicon Valley practice of building “agile” ­software—rolling out a digital product in stages; testing it; improving it; and repeating the process for continuous ­improvement—would be vastly superior to (and much, much cheaper than) a patchwork of contractors building out a complete and monolithic website. In his Fast Company interview, President Obama remarks that he made a significant mistake in thinking that government could use traditional methods to build something—Healthcare.gov—that had never been built before. “When you’re dealing with IT and software and program design,” the president explains, “it’s a creative process that can’t be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils.”

Obama says. “And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth. But sometimes what’s missing is purpose. To what end are we doing this?” As the president explains, he asks potential recruits, “Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools you’re developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?”

3. The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

“How do you fix a broken system that isn’t yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lilly Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies. (On social networks like Twitter, for example, harassment is a problem for many users.) Irani and Silberman describe Turkopticon as a “mutual aid for accountability” technology, a system that coordinates peer support to hold others accountable when platforms choose not to step in.

Academics advancing the idea of digital commons have tended to focus on how to prevent or regulate these problems—after they’re identified. In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Larry Lessig describes software design as a kind of regulation separate from top-down policies or community norms. Sixteen years after Lessig’s book, belief in the power of code and social psychology to shape successful online communities is widespread among the design teams who govern our digital lives. Their growing toolbox of design options is detailed in a recent law review article by James Grimmelman, who covers everything from banning and shaming to reputation and rewards.

What might it mean for digital citizens to play a greater role in the long term operation of online platforms? In Europe, lawmakers and courts have a history of regulating the details of algorithms like Google search. Another idea is a Magna Carta for “consent of the networked,” according to the journalist and anti-censorship advocate Rebecca MacKinnon. This idea, backed by the web’s creator Tim Berners-Lee, might bind platforms to the consent of their users, even when companies span multiple countries and jurisdictions. One example of this might be the Wikimedia Foundation, which reserves half of its board positions for elected Wikipedians. Wikimedia also leaves many governance details to its community in each of its language groups, like a federal government comprised of many states.

Managing a commons is more complex than users versus platforms. In cases like Mechanical Turk, Amazon helps its users hold each other accountable by sharing data with systems like Turkopticon. Perhaps similar data sharing could help researchers and citizen groups audit algorithms from the outside. Nor does this work need to happen entirely outside platforms. Public research like Facebook’s recent study on political bias helps the public understand and debate the state of our shared digital lives.

4. Let the kids learn through play

TWENTY years ago, kids in preschool, kindergarten and even first and second grade spent much of their time playing: building with blocks, drawing or creating imaginary worlds, in their own heads or with classmates. But increasingly, these activities are being abandoned for the teacher-led, didactic instruction typically used in higher grades. In many schools, formal education now starts at age 4 or 5. Without this early start, the thinking goes, kids risk falling behind in crucial subjects such as reading and math, and may never catch up.

The idea seems obvious: Starting sooner means learning more; the early bird catches the worm.

But a growing group of scientists, education researchers and educators say there is little evidence that this approach improves long-term achievement; in fact, it may have the opposite effect, potentially slowing emotional and cognitive development, causing unnecessary stress and perhaps even souring kids’ desire to learn.

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

“Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.”  - Jean de La Fontaine

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

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For Your Consideration: Education Tech, Russian Troll Farms, Robotic Sewing, Athletic Tourettes

1. Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools

Amplification seems like an obvious idea—all it says is that technology is a tool that augments human power. But, if it’s obvious, it nevertheless has profound consequences that are routinely overlooked. For example, amplification explains why large-scale roll-outs of educational technology rarely result in positive outcomes. In any representative set of schools, some are doing well and others poorly. Introducing computers may result in benefit for some (the ones highlighted in pilot studies), but it distracts the weaker schools from their core mission. On average, the outcome is a wash.

An even bigger problem is that administrators rarely allocate enough resources to adapt curricula or train teachers. Where teachers don’t know how to incorporate digital tools appropriately, there is little capacity for the technology to amplify.

If a private company is failing to make a profit, no one expects that state-of-the-art data centers, better productivity software, and new laptops for all of the employees will turn things around. Yet, that is exactly the logic of so many attempts to fix education with technology.

To wonder what ails American education is to open a Pandora’s box of wicked problems. It could be poverty in early childhood or school districts funded by inadequate property taxes. Maybe it’s poorly designed incentives for teachers or elite flight into the private school system. The truth likely lies in some combination of these factors and more, but the problem is definitely not a lack of computers. Even tech proponents don’t argue that U.S. educational decline was caused by a decline of technology.

2. Troll Farming in Russia – The Agency
When nation states start playing psyops with social media. It gives a whole new flavor to “Manufacturing Consent”.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. A YouTube video showed a team of hazmat-suited medical workers transporting a victim from the airport. Beyoncé’s recent single “7/11” played in the background, an apparent attempt to establish the video’s contemporaneity. A truck in the parking lot sported the logo of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety; that summer and fall were marked by protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In this case, a blurry video purports to show the shooting, as an onlooker narrates. Watching it, I thought I recognized the voice — it sounded the same as the man watching TV in the Columbian Chemicals video, the one in which ISIS supposedly claims responsibility. The accent was unmistakable, if unplaceable, and in both videos he was making a very strained attempt to sound American. Somehow the result was vaguely Australian.

Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

In fact, she was a troll. The word “troll” was popularized in the early 1990s to denounce the people who derailed conversation on Usenet discussion lists with interminable flame wars, or spammed chat rooms with streams of disgusting photos, choking users with a cloud of filth. As the Internet has grown, the problem posed by trolls has grown more salient even as their tactics have remained remarkably constant. Today an ISIS supporter might adopt a pseudonym to harass a critical journalist on Twitter, or a right-wing agitator in the United States might smear demonstrations against police brutality by posing as a thieving, violent protester. Any major conflict is accompanied by a raging online battle between trolls on both sides.

3. Made to Measure

HUMAN hands are extremely good at making clothes. While many manufacturing processes have been automated, stitching together garments remains a job for millions of people around the world. As with most labour-intensive tasks, much of the work has migrated to low-wage countries, especially in Asia. Factory conditions can be gruelling. As nations develop and wages rise, the trade moves on to the next cheapest location: from China, to Bangladesh and, now that it is opening up, Myanmar. Could that migration be about to end with the development of a robotic sewing machine?

There have been many attempts to automate sewing. Some processes can now be carried out autonomously: the cutting of fabric, for instance, and sometimes sewing buttons or pockets. But it is devilishly difficult to make a machine in which fabric goes in one end and finished garments, such as jeans and T-shirts, come out the other. The particularly tricky bit is stitching two pieces of material together. This involves aligning the material correctly to the sewing head, feeding it through and constantly adjusting the fabric to prevent it slipping and buckling, while all the time keeping the stitches neat and the thread at the right tension. Nimble fingers invariably prove better at this than cogs, wheels and servo motors.

“The distortion of the fabric is no longer an issue. That’s what prevented automatic sewing in the past,” says Steve Dickerson, the founder of SoftWear Automation, a textile-equipment manufacturer based in Atlanta, where Dr Dickerson was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The real test of how successful robots will be at making clothing and shoes will depend on how efficient and reliable they will be, and how fully they can automate the process. If time-to-market and customisation are priorities, then the robots might win—even if some manual intervention in production is required. But for mass-produced lines, where every cent matters, any human involvement could keep manufacturing offshore. The lesson from industrial automation in other sorts of factories, though, shows that robots keep getting better and cheaper. It may be a while coming, but the writing seems to be on the wall for sweatshops.

4. Amaris Tyynismaa: The Human Body Is A Miracle, The Human Body Is A Curse

Some athletes with TS attribute near-magical powers to their condition. Tim Howard, the goalkeeper of last year’s U.S. World Cup soccer team, says that TS has given him vision and reflexes that other players simply don’t have. Famed physician Oliver Sacks once wrote about a ping-pong player whose abnormal quickness and ability to knock back unreturnable shots, he believed, had to be connected to TS. One reason is that people with Tourette’s also tend to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Amaris included). They need to repeat behaviors—whether it’s preventing balls from going into the net or running improbably long distances—until they do it just right. “I’m not saying it’s a good thing to have,” Sacks told a reporter last year, “but if one has Tourette’s, there are advantages.” New research out of the University of Nottingham shows that the brains of TS patients are physically different from everyone else’s, transformed by years of operating under much greater than normal resistance and better at controlling the body.

Neurologists at the Tourette Syndrome Association aren’t quite ready to embrace a connection between TS and superior athleticism. They are more comfortable saying that people with TS often see their symptoms subside when they’re playing sports or otherwise engaged in something that focuses their attention away from the urge to tic.

Soccer quieted the noise in Amaris’ head. After taking up the game, she began to tic less off the field. She did better in school. She talked more. Actually, she talked a lot, like she does now. In her last game in England, she scored three goals and the other kids lifted her up on their shoulders and carried her around. She would have had a major problem with that just months before—too many germs—but she loved it. And then her family moed to Alabama.

Her tics intensified with the stress and anxiety of being relocated to a new base, a new house, a school with no friends. More than at any other time in her life, her tics wore her out. But England had taught her something. She decided to join two different soccer teams and a swim team.

Soon enough, Mike and Kristen began to hear tales of athletic feats that seemed impossible. Specifically, they were told that their sixth-grader had run a mile at school in well under six minutes.

“Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them.” -Chaim Weizmann

 

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

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For Your Consideration: Coupon Racket, Focused EMP, New Body Parts, Age of Infrastructure

1. Inside a Giant Dark Web Counterfeit Coupon Scheme

“We have the best, most consistent, most precise, most scannable, most accepted, most diverse collection of coupons anywhere. They are not on anyone’s ban list. They are not blacklisted anywhere,” reads PurpleLotus’s vendor profile on Agora, the largest currently active black market on the Dark Web. “They will save you a ton of money…If you use the coupons for the everyday things that you normally buy, the golden goose will continue to lay golden eggs.”

In addition to those packages of pre-made coupons, ThePurpleLotus also offered a $200 package of “coupon-making lessons.” That counterfeit digital guide included a powerpoint presentation showing the step-by-step process of coupon fraud, from generating bar codes to copying legitimate-looking logos and watermarks. In an accompanying video, set to a tasteful soundtrack of Bach piano compositions, he demonstrates the technique on screen.

In his tutorials, ThePurpleLotus explained the simple breakdown of barcode creation using the increasingly universal GS1 standard: GS1 codes begin with a “company prefix” that can be copied from any of the company’s products. The next six digits are the “offer code,” which can be any random number for a counterfeit coupon, followed by the savings amount listed in cents and the required number of item purchases necessary to receive the discount. “You can be up and running and making coupons in an hour,” PurpleLotus’s guide reads. “The more you make the faster you get…You are a coupon ninja if you can make one in under two minutes.”

In fact, ThePurpleLotus’s schemes demonstrate how absurdly easy coupon fraud remains, Beauchamp argues. She points to the insecure method of coupon verification that major retailers like Target, Walmart, and many others use—which essentially amounts to no authentication, only a blacklists of known fraudulent coupons like one maintained by an industry group known as the Coupon Information Center. A coupon fraudster can merely use the publicly available GS1 barcode algorithm to encode whatever discount they want into a new fake coupon. If it’s not yet on that blacklist and looks realistic to the cashier, it’s accepted, says Beauchamp. “Usually the cashiers don’t even take the time to question it. If it ‘beeps,’ it’s good,” she says.

Beauchamp notes that when a counterfeit coupon is spotted at the register, consumers often say they were given the coupon by a friend or “found it on the internet” and face no consequences. Other coupon fraudsters are careful to use self checkout at large stores, as Wattigney advised one customer in a message included in the indictment.

“Every day new codes get added to the blacklist,” says Beauchamp. But new fraudulent coupons are being created at a faster rate than ever, she says. “The problem is that it’s a blacklist, not a whitelist. And that affects the whole industry.”

2. Boeing Unveils Amazing, Slightly Terrifying New Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon

The weapon in question: Boeing’s “CHAMP,” short for Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project. It’s essentially the old nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon that we used to worry so much about — but without the nuclear part. CHAMP carries a small generator that emits microwaves to fry electronics with pinpoint accuracy. It targets not nations or cities but individual buildings, blacking out their electronics rather than blowing up physical targets (or people).

What makes CHAMP even more interesting is that, unlike a nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon, which fires once, blacking out entire nation-states, CHAMP can fire multiple times, pinpointing and blacking out only essential targets. This would permit, for example, taking down radar defenses in a hostile state, while saving the electrical grid that supports the civilian population. In a 2012 test flight in Utah, a single CHAMP was reported to have blacked out seven separate targets in succession, in one single mission.

Even back then, a Boeing representative was able to boast: “We hit every target we wanted to,” predicting further that “in the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive.” Three years later, that future has arrived. Air Force Research Laboratory commander Maj. Gen. Tom Masiello says CHAMP is “an operational system already in our tactical air force.”

3. Missing link found between brain, immune system; major disease implications
This is HUGE.

In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically. Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, professor in the UVA Department of Neuroscience and director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”

“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said. “Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”

The unexpected presence of the lymphatic vessels raises a tremendous number of questions that now need answers, both about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it. For example, take Alzheimer’s disease. “In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain,” Kipnis said. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.” He noted that the vessels look different with age, so the role they play in aging is another avenue to explore. And there’s an enormous array of other neurological diseases, from autism to multiple sclerosis, that must be reconsidered in light of the presence of something science insisted did not exist.

4. Welcome to the Infrastructure Age

But now we’re we’re entering the age of infrastructure gadgets. Thanks to devices like Tesla’s household battery, Powerwall, electrical grid technology that was once hidden behind massive barbed wire fences, owned by municipalities and counties, is now seeping slowly into our homes. And this isn’t just about alternative energy like solar. It’s about how we conceive of what technology is. It’s about what kinds of gadgets we’ll be buying for ourselves in 20 years.

It’s about how the kids of tomorrow won’t freak out over terabytes of storage. They’ll freak out over kilowatt-hours.

Beyond transforming our relationship to energy, though, the infrastructure age is about where we expect computers to live. The so-called internet of things is a big part of this. Our computers aren’t living in isolated boxes on our desktops, and they aren’t going to be inside our phones either. The apps in your phone won’t always suck you into virtual worlds, where you can escape to build treehouses and tunnels in Minecraft. Instead, they will control your home, your transit, and even your body.

Once you accept that the thing our ancestors called the information superhighway will actually be controlling cars on real-life highways, you start to appreciate the sea change we’re witnessing. The internet isn’t that thing in there, inside your little glowing box. It’s in your washing machine, kitchen appliances, pet feeder, your internal organs, your car, your streets, the very walls of your house. You use your wearable to interface with the world out there.

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” (Susan Ertz)

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