The Report to Congressional Committees 09-747 authored by the United States Government Accountability Office reveals some glaring scientific mistakes on the part of the Department of Homeland Security with the potential for far-reaching effects (should the attendant stupidity of DHS pseudoscience dupe legislators). The problem: Until 2008, live FMD virus could by law be used [...]

Look no further, psychotic asylum-denizens and sane (if rightfully morose) discontents … whether you need a normative answer to buy your ticket off the hospital grounds or you would like to play madman for a while, the secrets of the Rorschach Test have finally come home to roost at Wikipedia. Is this a boon for [...]

Worth reading in full for its striking analysis of the polar difference between empathy and observation: Even though we might not realize it, we coordinate our mental and physical states with other people around us. In this research, social coordination can help or it can hurt, depending on how much we tend to get inside [...]

Long after the human race has invented an exothermic power source, fragmented, and destroyed itself with genotype-targeted bioweapons, Russian spambots will continue their unending mission to disseminate pharmaceutical advertisements and links to malicious software throughout the electronic mailboxes which populate the remaining nodes of the once-proud Intarweb. Long after the Russian spambots have been silenced [...]

via Good.is

via i09

… though not what you would expect.

… there’s a name for what happens when everyone joins the same site at the same time, perhaps rendering it uncool: “context collapse.” That’s the term used to describe a series of awkward events like when your boss or parents friend you, or someone posts a picture of you that you don’t want your colleagues [...]

If you’ve been following along over the past few months, you’ve read about institutionalized electronic surveillance (and how to protect yourself), a public relations cover-up, fabricated news stories, where spyware comes from, collectors using cute Facebook decoys, and social networking being used against its users – there’s a good chance that you won’t be surprised [...]

Normally I would hesitate to lean so heavily on quotation, however, as the blog no longer exists, the information is valuable, and WikiLeaks.org has a spotty record for uptime… Detective Jack Night, formerly-anonymous author of the now-defunct Nightjack blog, has this to say (sarcasm noted) on dealing with police: I thought it would be a [...]