Job type determines sex of babies

COUPLES desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a 'masculine' profession such as engineering or accountancy, a report says.

Equally, those keen for daughters are more likely to have success if they have 'caring' jobs such as teaching or nursing.

The conclusion comes from a survey of 3000 people from various professions by the London School of Economics and reported in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

The problem of how to ensure a baby is the desired gender is something Donna Groth, of Rose Park, knows all too well.

After three sons, Ms Groth was so keen to have a girl she made her husband, David Godfrey, wear two pairs of underwear, in the hope the heat would kill off the Y chromosomes. She also worked out a calendar of dates Mr Godfery, 44, could and absolutely could not have sex.

After 12 months of 'mucking around', as she calls it, they abandoned the regimen. Two months later, the couple's fourth child was conceived.

Baby Wyl - another boy - was born on Wednesday, at Burnside Hospital, confirming the couple's suspicions from the 18-week ultrasound.

According to the British theory, Mr Godfrey's occupation of mechanical engineer increased the likelihood of having sons.
Calculations by chief researcher Satoshi Kanazawa show that for engineers and other 'systemisers' there are roughly 140 boys born for every 100 girls.

Nurses and the like produce about 135 girls for every 100 boys, the study found.

Ms Groth, 36, was not working at the time of conception but her qualification is in the so-called 'feminine' field of high school language teaching.

'I would have liked a girl but I'm happy to have a very healthy baby,' she said. 'My mum's a bit of a fatalist and she says you get what you get.

'We used to joke that we'd have to change partners.'

Ms Groth said Cowan, 9, Callan, 6, and Rhys, 2, had assumed the new baby would be a boy: 'What other kind of baby is there?'

Mr Kanazawa, meanwhile, predicted a physicist and a mathematician would be the most likely pairing to produce a boy, while a therapist and a chat show host would be odds-on favourites for a daughter.

The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred, but Britain's Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of 'systemiser' parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male.

[ I just think its funny that they classify accounting as masculine ]

Enhance your Brain with a Dremil

It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.
Smart drugs

Does getting old have to mean worsening memory, slower reactions and fuzzy thinking?

AROUND the age of 40, honest folks may already admit to noticing changes in their mental abilities. This is the beginning of a gradual decline that in all too many of us will culminate in full-blown dementia. If it were possible somehow to reverse it, slow it or mask it, wouldn't you?

A few drugs that might do the job, known as "cognitive enhancement", are already on the market, and a few dozen others are on the way. Perhaps the best-known is modafinil. Licensed to treat narcolepsy, the condition that causes people to suddenly fall asleep, it has notable effects in healthy people too. Modafinil can keep a person awake and alert for 90 hours straight, with none of the jitteriness and bad concentration that amphetamines or even coffee seem to produce.

In fact, with the help of modafinil, sleep-deprived people can perform even better than their well-rested, unmedicated selves. The forfeited rest doesn't even need to be made good. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40 hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters with no ill effects. It's an open secret that many, perhaps most, prescriptions for modafinil are written not for people who suffer from narcolepsy, but for those who simply want to stay awake. Similarly, many people are using Ritalin not because they suffer from attention deficit or any other disorder, but because they want superior concentration during exams or heavy-duty negotiations.

The pharmaceutical pipeline is clogged with promising compounds - drugs that act on the nicotinic receptors that smokers have long exploited, drugs that work on the cannabinoid system to block pot-smoking-type effects. Some drugs have also been specially designed to augment memory. Many of these look genuinely plausible: they seem to work, and without any major side effects.

So why aren't we all on cognitive enhancers already? "We need to be careful what we wish for," says Daniele Piomelli at the University of California at Irvine. He is studying the body's cannabinoid system with a view to making memories less emotionally charged in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Tinkering with memory may have unwanted effects, he warns. "Ultimately we may end up remembering things we don't want to."

Gary Lynch, also at UC Irvine, voices a similar concern. He is the inventor of ampakines, a class of drugs that changes the rules about how a memory is encoded and how strong a memory trace is - the essence of learning (see New Scientist, 14 May, p 6). But maybe the rules have already been optimised by evolution, he suggests. What looks to be an improvement could have hidden downsides.

Still, the opportunity may be too tempting to pass up. The drug acts only in the brain, claims Lynch. It has a short half-life of hours. Ampakines have been shown to restore function to severely sleep-deprived monkeys that would otherwise perform poorly. Preliminary studies in humans are just as exciting. You could make an elderly person perform like a much younger person, he says. And who doesn't wish for that?
Food for thought

You are what you eat, and that includes your brain. So what is the ultimate mastermind diet?

YOUR brain is the greediest organ in your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer, however, and it isn't that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try.

First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work.

But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre diet and improved cognition. If you can't stomach beans before midday, wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.
“Junk food is implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders”

A smart choice for lunch is omelette and salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer's disease, and some studies suggest that boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.

A salad packed full of antioxidants, including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles - proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert, and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon. That's because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.

Don't forget to snaffle a snack mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground, but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.

It seems that some of the damage may be mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals' performance on the memory tasks improved.

Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.

Finally, you could do worse than finish off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory. And even if they don't work such wonders in people, they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?
The Mozart effect

Music may tune up your thinking, but you can't just crank up the volume and expect to become a genius

A DECADE ago Frances Rauscher, a psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart improved people's mathematical and spatial reasoning. Even rats ran mazes faster and more accurately after hearing Mozart than after white noise or music by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. Last year, Rauscher reported that, for rats at least, a Mozart piano sonata seems to stimulate activity in three genes involved in nerve-cell signalling in the brain.

This sounds like the most harmonious way to tune up your mental faculties. But before you grab the CDs, hear this note of caution. Not everyone who has looked for the Mozart effect has found it. What's more, even its proponents tend to think that music boosts brain power simply because it makes listeners feel better - relaxed and stimulated at the same time - and that a comparable stimulus might do just as well. In fact, one study found that listening to a story gave a similar performance boost.

There is, however, one way in which music really does make you smarter, though unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than just selecting something mellow on your iPod. Music lessons are the key. Six-year-old children who were given music lessons, as opposed to drama lessons or no extra instruction, got a 2 to 3-point boost in IQ scores compared with the others. Similarly, Rauscher found that after two years of music lessons, pre-school children scored better on spatial reasoning tests than those who took computer lessons.

Maybe music lessons exercise a range of mental skills, with their requirement for delicate and precise finger movements, and listening for pitch and rhythm, all combined with an emotional dimension. Nobody knows for sure. Neither do they know whether adults can get the same mental boost as young children. But, surely, it can't hurt to try.
Bionic brains

If training and tricks seem too much like hard work, some technological short cuts can boost brain function
(See graphic, above)
Gainful employment

Put your mind to work in the right way and it could repay you with an impressive bonus

UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.

Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.

A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).
“Working memory training could be the key to unlocking brain power”

Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that, there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved by training."
Memory marvels

Mind like a sieve? Don't worry. The difference between mere mortals and memory champs is more method than mental capacity

AN AUDITORIUM is filled with 600 people. As they file out, they each tell you their name. An hour later, you are asked to recall them all. Can you do it? Most of us would balk at the idea. But in truth we're probably all up to the task. It just needs a little technique and dedication.

First, learn a trick from the "mnemonists" who routinely memorise strings of thousands of digits, entire epic poems, or hundreds of unrelated words. When Eleanor Maguire from University College London and her colleagues studied eight front runners in the annual World Memory Championships they did not find any evidence that these people have particularly high IQs or differently configured brains. But, while memorising, these people did show activity in three brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks but are not normally active during simple memory tests.

This may be connected to the fact that seven of them used a strategy in which they place items to be remembered along a visualised route (Nature Neuroscience, vol 6, p 90). To remember the sequence of an entire pack of playing cards for example, the champions assign each card an identity, perhaps an object or person, and as they flick through the cards they can make up a story based on a sequence of interactions between these characters and objects at sites along a well-trodden route.

Actors use a related technique: they attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember highly emotional moments better than less emotionally loaded ones. Professional actors also seem to link words with movement, remembering action-accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered while static, even months after a show has closed.
“We always remember highly emotional moments better”

Helga Noice, a psychologist from Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Tony Noice, an actor, who together discovered this effect, found that non-thesps can benefit by adopting a similar technique. Students who paired their words with previously learned actions could reproduce 38 per cent of them after just 5 minutes, whereas rote learners only managed 14 per cent. The Noices believe that having two mental representations gives you a better shot at remembering what you are supposed to say.

Strategy is important in everyday life too, says Barry Gordon from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Simple things like always putting your car keys in the same place, writing things down to get them off your mind, or just deciding to pay attention, can make a big difference to how much information you retain. And if names are your downfall, try making some mental associations. Just remember to keep the derogatory ones to yourself.
Sleep on it

Never underestimate the power of a good night's rest

SKIMPING on sleep does awful things to your brain. Planning, problem-solving, learning, concentration,working memory and alertness all take a hit. IQ scores tumble. "If you have been awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone who is legally drunk," says Sean Drummond from the University of California, San Diego. And you don't need to pull an all-nighter to suffer the effects: two or three late nights and early mornings on the trot have the same effect.

Luckily, it's reversible - and more. If you let someone who isn't sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring sustained attention, such taking an exam. And being able to concentrate harder has knock-on benefits for overall mental performance. "Attention is the base of a mental pyramid," says Drummond. "If you boost that, you can't help boosting everything above it."

These are not the only benefits of a decent night's sleep. Sleep is when your brain processes new memories, practises and hones new skills - and even solves problems. Say you're trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim, memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help, says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

There is also some evidence that sleep can help produce moments of problem-solving insight. The famous story about the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev suddenly "getting" the periodic table in a dream after a day spent struggling with the problem is probably true. It seems that sleep somehow allows the brain to juggle new memories to produce flashes of creative insight. So if you want to have a eureka moment, stop racking your brains and get your head down.
Body and mind

Physical exercise can boost brain as well as brawn

IT'S a dream come true for those who hate studying. Simply walking sedately for half an hour three times a week can improve abilities such as learning, concentration and abstract reasoning by 15 per cent. The effects are particularly noticeable in older people. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on memory tests than their sedentary peers. What's more, over several years their scores on a variety of cognitive tests show far less decline than those of non-walkers. Every extra mile a week has measurable benefits.

It's not only oldies who benefit, however. Angela Balding from the University of Exeter, UK, has found that schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam grades at age 10 or 11. The effect is strongest in boys, and while Balding admits that the link may not be causal, she suggests that aerobic exercise may boost mental powers by getting extra oxygen to your energy-guzzling brain.

There's another reason why your brain loves physical exercise: it promotes the growth of new brain cells. Until recently, received wisdom had it that we are born with a full complement of neurons and produce no new ones during our lifetime. Fred Gage from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, busted that myth in 2000 when he showed that even adults can grow new brain cells. He also found that exercise is one of the best ways to achieve this.

In mice, at least, the brain-building effects of exercise are strongest in the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory. This also happens to be the brain region that is damaged by elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So if you are feeling frazzled, do your brain a favour and go for a run.

Even more gentle exercise, such as yoga, can do wonders for your brain. Last year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported results from a pilot study in which they considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses. Comparing back bends, forward bends and standing poses, they concluded that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.
“Get a mental lift by bending over backwards”

And the effect works both ways. Just as physical exercise can boost the brain, mental exercise can boost the body. In 2001, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio asked volunteers to spend just 15 minutes a day thinking about exercising their biceps. After 12 weeks, their arms were 13 per cent stronger.
Nuns on a run

If you don't want senility to interfere with your old age, perhaps you should seek some sisterly guidance

THE convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minnesota, might seem an unusual place for a pioneering brain-science experiment. But a study of its 75 to 107-year-old inhabitants is revealing more about keeping the brain alive and healthy than perhaps any other to date. The "Nun study" is a unique collaboration between 678 Catholic sisters recruited in 1991 and Alzheimer's expert David Snowdon of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

The sisters' miraculous longevity - the group boasts seven centenarians and many others well on their way - is surely in no small part attributable to their impeccable lifestyle. They do not drink or smoke, they live quietly and communally, they are spiritual and calm and they eat healthily and in moderation. Nevertheless, small differences between individual nuns could reveal the key to a healthy mind in later life.

Some of the nuns have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, but many have avoided any kind of dementia or senility. They include Sister Matthia, who was mentally fit and active from her birth in 1894 to the day she died peacefully in her sleep, aged 104. She was happy and productive, knitting mittens for the poor every day until the end of her life. A post-mortem of Sister Matthia's brain revealed no signs of excessive ageing. But in some other, remarkable cases, Snowdon has found sisters who showed no outwards signs of senility in life, yet had brains that looked as if they were ravaged by dementia.

How did Sister Matthia and the others cheat time? Snowdon's study, which includes an annual barrage of mental agility tests and detailed medical exams, has found several common denominators. The right amount of vitamin folate is one. Verbal ability early in life is another, as are positive emotions early in life, which were revealed by Snowdon's analysis of the personal autobiographical essays each woman wrote in her 20s as she took her vows. Activities, crosswords, knitting and exercising also helped to prevent senility, showing that the old adage "use it or lose it" is pertinent. And spirituality, or the positive attitude that comes from it, can't be overlooked. But individual differences also matter. To avoid dementia, your general health may be vital: metabolic problems, small strokes and head injuries seem to be common triggers of Alzheimer's dementia.

Obviously, you don't have to become a nun to stay mentally agile. We can all aspire to these kinds of improvements. As one of the sisters put it, "Think no evil, do no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel."
Attention seeking

You can be smart, well-read, creative and knowledgeable, but none of it is any use if your mind isn't on the job

PAYING attention is a complex mental process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.

The first is to raise your arousal levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.

One way to do this is with drugs such as amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. Caffeine also works. But if you prefer the drug-free approach, the best strategy is to sleep well, eat foods packed with slow-release sugars, and take lots of exercise. It also helps if you are trying to focus on something that you find interesting.

The second step is to cut down on distractions. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call. Just a few such interruptions and half the day is wasted.

Music can help as long as you listen to something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge.
“Avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge”

There are mental drills to deal with distractions. College counsellors routinely teach students to recognise when their thoughts are wandering, and catch themselves by saying "Stop! Be here now!" It sounds corny but can develop into a valuable habit. As any Zen meditator will tell you, concentration is as much a skill to be lovingly cultivated as it is a physiochemical state of the brain.
Positive feedback

Thought control is easier than you might imagine

IT SOUNDS a bit New Age, but there is a mysterious method of thought control you can learn that seems to boost brain power. No one quite knows how it works, and it is hard to describe exactly how to do it: it's not relaxation or concentration as such, more a state of mind. It's called neurofeedback. And it is slowly gaining scientific credibility.

Neurofeedback grew out of biofeedback therapy, popular in the 1960s. It works by showing people a real-time measure of some seemingly uncontrollable aspect of their physiology - heart rate, say - and encouraging them to try and change it. Astonishingly, many patients found that they could, though only rarely could they describe how they did it.

More recently, this technique has been applied to the brain - specifically to brain wave activity measured by an electroencephalogram, or EEG. The first attempts were aimed at boosting the size of the alpha wave, which crescendos when we are calm and focused. In one experiment, researchers linked the speed of a car in a computer game to the size of the alpha wave. They then asked subjects to make the car go faster using only their minds. Many managed to do so, and seemed to become more alert and focused as a result.

This early success encouraged others, and neurofeedback soon became a popular alternative therapy for ADHD. There is now good scientific evidence that it works, as well as some success in treating epilepsy, depression, tinnitus, anxiety, stroke and brain injuries.

And to keep up with the times, some experimenters have used brain scanners in place of EEGs. Scanners can allow people to see and control activity of specific parts of the brain. A team at Stanford University in California showed that people could learn to control pain by watching the activity of their pain centres (New Scientist, 1 May 2004, p 9).

But what about outside the clinic? Will neuro feedback ever allow ordinary people to boost their brain function? Possibly. John Gruzelier of Imperial College London has shown that it can improve medical students' memory and make them feel calmer before exams. He has also shown that it can improve musicians' and dancers' technique, and is testing it out on opera singers and surgeons.

Neils Birbaumer from the University of Tübingen in Germany wants to see whether neurofeedback can help psychopathic criminals control their impulsiveness. And there are hints that the method could boost creativity, enhance our orgasms, give shy people more confidence, lift low moods, alter the balance between left and right brain activity, and alter personality traits. All this by the power of thought.

From issue 2501 of New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 28

[ oxeygen to the brain also works ]

Gun Bound Championship starts

Gunbound is that free (will run on dialup), worms/scorched earth, turn based, strategy game.

They are holding the world championships now. And there is a new version to download (its quite large). but theres new maps and tanks etc...

Remeber its only a game....

[ Time to start collecting stuff for the championship ]

Surf the Web and The Waves on tetherless surfboard

When Weezer sang the words You take your car to work, I'll take my board in Surf Wax America they probably weren’t expecting Intel to design and create a surf board that had a built in wireless laptop in it. The surfboard allows surfers to check their emails, surf the web (literaterally) and even record the footage of themselves catching the best waves. The tablet laptop based on Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology allows a wireless Internet connection from the surfboard to a ‘hotspot’ on the beach.

The Intel Wireless Technology Surfboard has been developed to accompany the 2004 Intel GoldCoast Oceanfest, the North Devon free sports and music festival held June 18th - 20th, sponsored this year by Intel.

[ safety tether included ]

Creapy

Now without Code:[G]ayhem and his hibernating penis, I was actually able to get some REAL work done this time around at E3!

Most of the bitches push off most guys that try and take up skirts of them, grab their snatch, cup their melons and what not. But when you are a mother fuckin handicap in a wheel chair!!! THEY DON’T SAY SHIT! Fuck, even their body guards that where chasing me away the day before, where openly viewing and approving of my up skirt techniques

When I could cup their tits, ass and pussy they acted as if nothing was the matter. And a few chicks OMFG let me get away with a lot of shit. So for next year I know who the whores are that I have a chance with using my penis next time around! Oh, and even the shy chicks like the Geil chick let me rub her up, even though her expression says other wise

Oh well, GG at E3 day 3. Now its time for me to whack off to my pics for the 3rd time today!

[ Whats worse most of the comments on the forum are praising him ]

Whale hunt is on

[ Why not use the military to make them recognise... ] I'snt that the whole point of claiming something i.e. territory... just becuase they dont recognise their "laws" if that was the case why would anyone recognise anything....

Dr. Claws Face Revealed!

Remember Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget, the goofy carton with Don Adams as the voice of the cartoon rip off of his Get Smart character. Well if you ever saw this cartoon you would remember (besides every episode being the same where Penny and her Dog Brain save the day without Gadget knowing) that you never saw the villianous Dr. Claw's face. Never.

Besides the most asked question of why Penny was always with Uncle Gadget and not her parents, many people still to this day want to know what Dr. Claw looks like. When the movie adaption came out there was a big uproar that Dr. Claw's face was going to be revealed and obviously was going to be that of the actor playing him and many Inspector Gadget fans disowned the movie feeling the actor was not worthy to be the first seen face of Dr. Claw. Well that is not true.

We were sent pictures of an official Inspector Gadget action figure that was purchased at the now defunct Starlog Comic book store that was in Ridgewood, NJ. This Action figure is of Dr. Claw. NOW THAT IS A SHOPPING FIND! For years and years my childhood has never been complete. I actually watched every episode including the horrific Christmas special that was released years later. And never once did we see Dr. Claw's face. But now below lies his official Action Figure - Face and all

[ I'll get you next time gadget! ]

Mod: Old nokia LCD Screens

Use old tech and make it usefull again. Especialy good if you dont need your phone to make actual phone calls. (see: Skype cordlessphone mod)

[ back light is a cool addition ]

Awsome blog / photoblog

[ chicksnbreasts ]

Awsome blog / photoblog

[ flickrchicks ]

Expensive Fucking Toys

Solid titanium, gold plated, diamond embeded dildo...

[ Mi-Su ]

Touchscreen BoomboxPC

Hitachi TRK-8200HR + Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 Color Tablet PC
currently running win98 (linux or dual-boot when complete) with MediaCar as the default mp3 interface with custom skin for the 480x640 portrait display
20g harddrive
pcmcia LAN, and WiFi
internal webcam
4 USB

[ Very clean mod ]

Flying robot

Lighter than air is an autonomous flying robot. It utilizes blimp design principles, combining a helium filled envelope with 3-channel motor control allowing it to navigate in 3 dimensions.

[ remote control blimp ]

'Mutant' children are best

THE Chernobyl nuclear disaster has spawned a generation of ‘mutant’ super-brainy children.

Kids growing up in areas damaged by radiation from the plant have a higher IQ and faster reaction times, say Russian doctors.

They are also growing faster and have stronger immune systems.

Radiation from the Ukrainian Chernobyl plant swept the globe and affected more than seven million people.

Professor Vladimir Mikhalev from Bryansk State University, has tracked the health of youngsters growing up in areas hit by the fallout since the 1986 accident.

He compared their mental agility and health to those in unaffected areas and found they came out top in tests.

The kids had been exposed to radiation in the atmosphere and their food supply.

[ Its good for the economy ]

なるほどカバヤ カバヤの

Japanese TV ads for somekinda candy. Its animated, but its not anime, more the along the lines of "my first english to japanese dictionary: illustrated edition"

[ Sweet to Suck ]

Guinness Ice Lolly

[ The coldest brew in ye fridge ]

Batman in a Sticky Predickament

[ Biff! Whack! Zap! Boof! Poof! ]

The Spin Starts Here

There's a whole world of stuff out there begging to be snarked about, and we're here to deliver.

Join us as we slaughter all kinds of sacred cows and things people hold dear. Sometimes we're taking the piss. Sometimes we're deadly serious. Sometimes you'll have to guess which is which.

And if you don't like it, go on and tell us. Then stand back. We thrive on conflict.

Fasten your seatbelts. The spin starts here.


For some reason the spin feels like its rotating...

News Dump

This is some news I collected while at uni but was too embarased to be bloggin at uni. So I saved it and now I'm posting it at home.

http://www.qwantz.com/apologies/index.pl?comic=3

Subject: poopsock

A poopsock is a sock that a person with a mental disorder uses to store their feces in, presumably to prevent acquisition of the feces by another party, which will presumably use it to effect some negative result on the poopsocker.

[ drew ]

Subject: UnDecipherableScripts(text...)

Dear Straight Dope:

I just got a book on ancient civilizations. In the chapter dealing with written languages, they list Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian pictographs, and Indus script as the three oldest known written languages. The book goes on to say Indus script has never been deciphered even though over 2,500 examples of it exist. Maybe I've watched too many sci-fi movies where a master linguist deciphers alien languages, but I really thought we had terrestrial languages mastered. What's the deal with Indus script? Is the art of linguistics still held hostage by our inability to decipher ancient languages without a "key" à la the Rosetta Stone? --Troy Dayton, Fargo, ND

SDSTAFF bibliophage replies:

Too much science fiction? No such thing. Star Trek, for example, teaches us that a good communications officer can send a message that transcends mere language, especially if she has legs down to here and a hemline up to there. Mmmmm. Mm-HMMMmmmmm . . . er, sorry. Was I saying something?

Yes, I was. The Indus script, which was written in and around Pakistan over a period of several centuries centered around 2500 B.C., is the most famous undeciphered script, but there are many others. Other mystery writing systems include Linear A (Greece, 1800 B.C.), Zapotec (Mexico, 500 B.C.), Meroitic (Sudan, 300 B.C.), Isthmian (Central America, A.D. 200), Rongorongo (Easter Island, A.D. 1800) and Joycean (Ireland, A.D. 1900). Okay, maybe not that last one.

Why haven't they been deciphered? It's instructive to look at some deciphered scripts to see what makes the enigmatic writing of the Indus valley different. Script decipherment is not as easy as it's made out to be in science fiction--and sometimes not as easy as it's made out to be in history books. Chances are the impression you took away from school was that the Rosetta stone made it child's play to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not so. How many schools teach that some of the best minds in the world pored over the Rosetta stone for a quarter century before it finally revealed its secrets?

One of the biggest obstacles was that the ancient Egyptians used a writing system unlike anything known when the Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799. Scholars knew about logographic systems like Chinese, where there are thousands of symbols, each normally representing a whole word or idea. They knew about alphabetic systems like Hebrew and English, where there are typically 20 to 30 symbols, each normally representing one consonant or vowel. Some scholars may have known about syllabaries, with several dozen symbols each representing one syllable, as in Japanese hiragana and katakana. But Egyptian hieroglyphics had too many distinct symbols to be an alphabet or syllabary, and too few to be logographic.

The decipherment published by Champollion in 1823 (building on work by many others, including Thomas Young) showed that Egyptian hieroglyphics were (neglecting some complications) a logo-phonetic system. In such a writing system, any given symbol can represent either an entire idea or word, or the sound (or initial sound) of that word. Some simple ideas can be expressed efficiently with a drawing of the object or an object it's associated with. But to express an abstract idea that can't be readily drawn, you can use a string of sounds. Suppose you want to express the English word "charitable" without an alphabet. You could draw a picture of a chair and a table (since "chair table" sounds sort of like "charitable"). This is the rebus principle. Today we may consider rebus puzzles to be nothing but a silly game, but to the ancients, they were a natural way to write a language. Other early scripts, like Mayan hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform, are built on the same principle.

The rebus approach may seem an unwieldy way to write a language, but it's a step up from non-linguistic pictograms. A picture of a chair and a table can only convey "chair and table," or at best an idea associated with a chair and table, such as the act of sitting down at a table. An abstract concept such as "charitable" is difficult to get across using pictograms. Writing systems built on the rebus system are a way of filling the void, but have the drawback (for us latter-day translators) that, unlike pictograms, they'll only work in one language. For a speaker of Latin, for example, pictograms of a chair (in Latin, sella) and a picture of a table (mensa) would never suggest the word for charitable (benignus).

I go into such detail about logo-phonetic systems because the Indus script appears to have about the right number of distinct symbols (250 to 400, depending on who's counting) to use this system. Knowing that, shouldn't it be easier to decipher the Indus script? Not really--the decipherers of Egyptian hieroglyphics had the help of the Rosetta stone, a bilingual or bitext (parallel texts of the same message in the unknown script and a known script). No bitext for the Indus script has yet been found.

A bitext is no guarantee that decipherment will be easy. Take the case of Etruscan writing, found in Italy. At a superficial level the script is easily deciphered, since the letters are close in form to archaic Greek and Latin alphabets. But the language remains largely uninterpreted. What's the difference? Given a piece of Etruscan writing, we have no difficulty pronouncing the words, but no idea what most of the words mean (think of a trained politician reading off a TelePrompTer). The trouble is that Etruscan is apparently unrelated to any language understood today. Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphics, had the advantage of knowing Coptic, which he correctly suspected was the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. Etruscan has left no descendants.

The dozens of Etruscan bitexts (with Latin, Greek, or Phoenician) aren't very helpful. All they really tell you is that a given block of mysterious text means such-and-such. There's no sure way to tell which Etruscan word corresponds to which word in the parallel text, since the order of ideas and number of words vary widely among the different languages. All is not lost, however. If, for example, a Latin word occurs several times in a text and a mystery word occurs the same number of times in the corresponding Etruscan text, you may be justified in supposing that they mean the same thing. But beware--often the two messages in a bilingual text are just paraphrases of each other, not word-for-word translations. Still, using methods like this, together with glosses (explicit translations of individual words in the documents), scholars have been able to determine--or at least make a reasonable guess at--the meanings of a couple hundred Etruscan words.

If we understand the language or a close relative or descendant of the language, it ought to be pretty easy to decipher the script, right? Not so fast. The Rongorongo script used on Easter Island after European contact almost certainly represents Rapa Nui, the well known Polynesian language of the Easter Islanders. But no one now remembers how the script symbols are meant to be read. Steven Fischer recently claimed to have deciphered Rongorongo, but his critics say "Wrong-o, wrong-o." I don't know if Fischer is right or wrong, but undeciphered scripts do seem to invite harebrained analysis. Jacques Guy bluntly calls them "kook attractors," but even serious scholars aren't immune. Hrozný, who correctly deciphered Hittite, later went down many wrong paths with other scripts.

The real kooks are those like Goropius Becanus of the Netherlands, who in 1580 proved to his satisfaction that Egyptian hieroglyphics represented Dutch. A Jesuit priest named Heras is one of scores who have claimed to decipher Indus script. Here's one of his translations: "There is no feast in the place outside the country of the Minas of the three fishes of the despised country of the woodpeckers." Whatever you say, padre.

You mention the 2,500 examples of the Indus script. The number of available texts now exceeds 4,000, but quantity is no indication of ease of decipherment. Some scripts have been translated with far fewer texts. Take Palmyrene, the first ancient script ever deciphered. A handful of inscriptions were found on the walls of the ruins of the city of Palmyra in Syria. Scholars knew from ancient Greek writers that the language spoken there was closely related to Syriac, a well known Semitic language. The script was obviously derived from the known Aramaic alphabet but many letters weren't immediately identifiable. Among the ruins were several bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Palmyrene. If you know the Aramaic alphabet, it's a fairly simple matter to use the identifiable Aramaic letters and the similarity of proper names in Greek and Palmyrene to get a good start. Then you can use your knowledge of Greek and Syriac to fill in the blanks. Your Syriac is a little rusty, you say? Not to worry--a decent Syriac dictionary will serve just as well. Soon after the first decent reproductions of Palmyrene inscriptions were published in Europe in the 1750s, Barthélemy in France and Swinton in England independently deciphered them, each taking just a few hours to finish the job. It was perhaps a bit more challenging than the cryptogram puzzles you can find in your Sunday paper, but not by much. Most decipherments, needless to say, are a good deal tougher to crack than that.

Returning to the matter at hand, is the lack of a bitext for the Indus script an insurmountable obstacle? Not necessarily. Some scripts have been deciphered without them, although not without a good deal of cleverness. Ugaritic writings, like Palmyrene, were found in Syria (in 1929), suggesting that they too might be a Semitic language. About two dozen symbols were used, suggesting an alphabetic script. Several of the words were only a single letter long, suggesting Ugaritic used a consonantal alphabet written without vowels (as was the case with other early Semitic alphabets such as Hebrew). Applying letter frequency analysis to the problem, Hans Bauer tentatively assigned the values L and M to two Ugaritic letters. In Semitic languages, L is common as a single-letter word, but not so common in suffixes and prefixes; M is the only letter that is really common in Semitic suffixes, prefixes, and as single-letter words.

On the assumption that related languages use similar words for common concepts (much as European languages have father/vater/pater), Bauer then used the M and L assignments to search the texts for the expected Semitic word for "king" (M-L-K or similar) and "kings" (M-L-K-K or similar). Proceeding along these lines, he found the words for "son" and the name of the god Ba`al, and so eventually determined the values of several other letters. His real insight was to guess that the word for axe might occur in the text inscribed on several axes. He turned out to be right about that, but chose the wrong phonetic values (he guessed G-R-Z-N as in Hebrew; the actual Ugaritic form was the related but not identical H-R-S-N). Édouard Dhorme later corrected the reading and finished the decipherment. One of the axe inscriptions said, in a language related to biblical Hebrew, "Unto the high priest doth this axe belong, wherefore shouldst thou keep thy hands off it!" Or something like that. It strikes me that Bauer's guess was pretty lucky--I have two axes in my garage but have yet to inscribe either with the word "axe." But hey, when the high priest tells me, "Inscribe the word 'axe' on this axe, chop-chop," I'm not about to wait around for him to axe me politely.

Ugaritic isn't the only language to have been deciphered without a bilingual. Georg Friedrich Grotefend made considerable progress in deciphering Persian cuneiform by looking for and finding proper names of Persian emperors known from ancient Greek and Hebrew sources. (Henry Rawlinson finished the decipherment in the 1830s.) The point is that bilinguals aren't necessary to decipher an unknown script. Still, in the case of Ugaritic and Persian, scholars had a pretty good handle on the language the script represented before they started work. In the case of Etruscan, where the language is largely unknown, complete decipherment thus far has eluded us.

What do we know about the language the Indus script wrote? We can say little for certain, but the best guess is that it's a language of the Dravidian family, an idea that has been around since at least the 1920s. Today most Dravidian speakers live in Sri Lanka and southern India, 800 miles or more from the Indus valley where the bulk of the Indus inscriptions have been found. But about a hundred thousand speakers of one Dravidian language, Brahui, live in western Pakistan and neighboring parts of Iran and Afghanistan, not too far west of the Indus. Contrary to earlier speculation about recent migrations, linguistic and genetic analyses show that they have been separated from other Dravidian speakers for at least several thousand years. Further evidence that Dravidian or related languages were once spoken in the general area comes from Linear Elamite inscriptions, found in the ruins of the ancient city of Susa in southwestern Iran. The script has been deciphered from a phonetic standpoint because of its similarity to Mesopotamian cuneiform, but as with Etruscan, the language remains largely unknown. A significant percentage of words in Linear Elamite appear to be of Dravidian origin, which could mean it is descended from a hypothetical Elamo-Dravidian ancestor language, or just that it borrowed a lot of words from a Dravidian language spoken nearby. In either case, the Elamite connection makes it seem more likely that a Dravidian or related language was spoken in the Indus valley when the inscriptions were made.

Many Indian nationalists, and some serious scholars, believe the Indus script writes a language of the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch of the Indo-European family, which includes Farsi (modern Persian), Sanskrit and Hindi. All things considered, this seems unlikely. The inscriptions go back to about 3200 B.C., which according to mainstream archaeological thinking is before any Indo-Europeans had come that far southeast. Another problem is that Indo-European peoples kept domesticated horses and used chariots and had other cultural traits not shared with the ancient Indus civilization. Indeed, according to the mainstream thinking, the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in the Indus Valley around 1800 B.C. is more likely to have been the end of the Harappan culture than the beginning of it.

If the Indus script turns out to write a language that is neither Indo-European nor Dravidian (or Elamo-Dravidian), then the chances of deciphering it are slim. In the words of Alice Kober, who helped decipher Linear B, "an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered, bilingual or no bilingual." There are really no other decent candidates among known languages, so we would be left with an unknown language, and the prospects of complete decipherment would be as poor as with Etruscan.

But faint hope is better than none. Sumerian is a linguistic isolate, but the script has been phonetically deciphered, and the language partly deciphered. Most of the cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia are direct descendants of the Sumerian script, though they're used to write unrelated languages. Babylonian and Akkadian and some other languages written in these related scripts were amenable to decipherment in part because they were members of the well understood Semitic family. The similarity of the scripts, the many Sumerian loanwords in these Semitic languages, and the unusually large number of bilingual texts have allowed scholars to reconstruct the Sumerian language with considerable success despite its being unrelated to any known language. No such combination of circumstances exists for the Indus script, and no discoveries along these lines are seriously expected.

What will we get if the Indus script is finally deciphered--great historical works that reveal the local political situation 5,000 years ago? Classic works of literature like the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh? Insight into ancient religious practices of the sort revealed by Ugaritic? No to all the above. The sad truth is that the longest known Indus inscription is only 17 symbols long. The bulk of the 4,000 or so Indus inscriptions are believed to be simple identifying marks. Most of the inscriptions are on seals or seal impressions, similar to signet rings or rubber stamps. So even if we decipher the script and the language, chances are we'll discover they say nothing more fascinating than "government property" or "John Smith" or "tax paid." As with the revelation that Linear B wrote an archaic form of Greek, if the Indus script is deciphered, the most interesting fact learned will be what language the ancient script wrote--that is, if it writes a language at all.

If it writes a language? They wouldn't call it the "Indus script" if it weren't a script, would they? Don't be so sure. When the first inscriptions were discovered in the 1870s in and around the Indus valley of Pakistan, and when the early cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were excavated in the 1920s, archaeologists assumed that civilization and writing always went together--a complex urban culture couldn't possibly develop without writing. The Indus sites were urban; ergo, the inscriptions were writing.

Today we recognize that civilization and writing don't always go together. The Inca empire, for example, was urban but lacked true writing. Historian Steve Farmer now questions the assumption that the Indus script is true writing. In a recent paper, he and two linguists compare the Indus script with medieval European heraldry. Like heraldry, they say, the Indus script may consist of discrete conventional elements that serve as identification marks but don't encode a spoken language.

This controversial idea has some points in its favor. Considering the corpus of texts as a whole, there's a considerable amount of repetition among symbols, as would be expected if they wrote a spoken language. But there's less repetition than expected within the texts, even considering their brevity. Further, several systems of pictograms from around the world--for example, the Vinca signs of southeastern Europe, written about 4000 B.C.--resemble the Indus script in their use of conventional symbols, but nobody believes they code a written language.

Traditionalists have some points in their favor too. The Indus script was linear, that is, usually written with symbols following one another in a line, rather than being placed randomly or in some other geometric pattern. Linearity is found in most writing, though not exclusively so. More to the point, the characters often crowd at the end of a line, as if the writer wanted to avoid breaking up a word. This is a distinctive feature of true writing. The comparison with heraldry may not hold water either. Hittite hieroglyphics were initially considered heraldry by serious linguists but were eventually found to be true writing and deciphered. Much the same has been said about many other undeciphered scripts likewise shown to be true writing.

Still, Farmer feels so strongly that the Indus script is not a real script that he has offered a $10,000 reward for proof that it is true writing. He will accept as proof an authenticated inscription more than 50 symbols long. Farmer thinks the extant texts are all so short because they don't write a language. The pro-language side thinks the longer texts once produced in Harappa and other cities have been lost because they were written on perishable surfaces. Certainly a long text would be a great gift to modern science. I just wish they wouldn't use the lame excuse that they couldn't give it to us because they ran out of Harappan paper.

Further reading

Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson, 2002

The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script by Maurice Pope, revised edition, 1999

"The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization" by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Dec.13, 2004. This and related items can be accessed from Steve Farmer's download page at www.safarmer.com/downloads/.

--SDSTAFF bibliophage
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

[ ]

Steves consultation is 2 to 5pm tomorrow. Get a copy of the e-Tax CD and copy it to USB Drive. Then return.

Room:B 333

http://google.weblogsinc.com/entry/8276386740662606/

OneGig@yahoo.com.au

I now have one gig of space on my yahoo account. Not really sure I care anymore becuase its basicly getting ridiculous and I this it would be hard for anyone to rack up a gig of legitamate email (Shouldnt really count attatchments....) Google also gives me infinity plus one. Which means unlimited storage. I wonder where they get all of this space from. Maybe thats why harddrives are getting a bit pricey at the moment... Just when I was thinking of upgrading. Not that its gona stop me.... Muwahaha... Not sure why I used the evil laugh. Not very appropriate when you think about it. Maybe instead of giving gigs of email space away, why not give us gigs of webspace... Like in the old days. Of course in the old days, didnt get a gig of webspace. Mainly got 10 to 25 megs. And if you wanted "more" space you could just open a new account. Maybe they should allow you to store pictures. In the space. Becuase flickr is kinda crap in that there is a monthly upload limit. And yahoo photos is stupid because of the lack of useability. I guess hello is kinda unlimited. In that you can upload as many posts to blogger... But its not in an album and not as good as flickr basicly.

Flickr really is the best out of all of them. Maybe just need to be able to upload more. Other then that its awsome. I am going to assume the upload limit is in place to kerb abuseive type useage. For people who go over board. But then you can just do what you did in the old days, and open another account with another email address. Yahoo even gives you this option to have multiple email address for signing up for such things.... So its not very hard to subvert the system.

Das Keyboard - UberGeeks Only

Shouldn't your keyboard reflect your status as one of the elite? We think so!

Das Keyboard is an enhanced 104-key USB PC keyboard equiped with 100% blank keys mounted on precision and individually weighted key switches.

Most keyboards use a standard 55 grams of force required to register every key, Das Keyboard has 5 different levels of force. The keys are divided into groups and their feedback springs are weighted differently; from 35 grams to 80 grams, which correspond to the strength of the finger that touches the keys. The result is more comfort for your hands. (note: weighted keys are awsome)

[ Its modding time ]

Employees lose unfair dismissal rights

Larger businesses will soon be exempt from unfair dismissal claims under a new federal government plan which strips most sacked employees of their rights of redress.

Prime Minister John Howard has taken his election pledge a step further and expanded the exemption beyond small businesses with up to 20 staff.

The Australian newspaper reported that under the new rules, medium to large sized businesses with up to 100 employees - 90 per cent of employers - would no longer be subject to claims of unfair dismissal.

This removes most employees' rights to seek justice after being sacked, and relieves the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) of half its workload determining unfair dismissals.

However, workers will still be able to make breach-of-contract claims in court under common law or claim under anti-discrimination laws.

The probation period for new employees would also increase from three to six months, giving employers more time to sack people they believe are unsuitable for the job.

Mr Howard will promote the changes to unfair dismissal as a significant incentive to hire more workers, the newspaper said.

The changes will be formally approved by cabinet this week before Mr Howard announces the full workplace reforms package.

The package is said to change the way in which minimum wages are set, water down award employment conditions, impose more restraints on unions and limit some of the AIRC's powers.

[ dismisal of rights is unfair ]

Deleting spyware: a criminal act?

Analysis On my computer right now I have three anti-spyware programs, three anti-virus programs, and three anti-spam programs, together with a hardware and software firewall, an IPsec VPN, and data level encryption on certain files (and no, this is not intended to be an invitation for you to try to test my security.)

The anti-spyware, anti-virus, and anti-spam software all work in very much the same way - they have definitions of known malicious programs, and they may also have algorithms to raise flags about unknown programs which operate in an unusual way. Depending upon user preferences, the programs either automatically block or delete the suspicious mail or program, stop a running process, or quarantine a file for the user to delete.

In general, users delete all or virtually all of these identified programs and blocked mail. I mean, who really wants spyware or viruses, right? However, both the identification of programs as spyware or spam, and the deletion of these programs may, in fact, be a violation of the law.
What is "spyware" anyway?

At present there are several dozen laws or pending bills to both define and outlaw spyware. At the federal level, there are three bills pending, including the Internet Spyware (I-SPY) Prevention Act, HR 744, the SPY Act, HR 29, and SPY BLOCK Act, S. 687. At the state level, there are four existing anti-spyware laws, in Utah, Washington State H.B.1012, Virginia - Prohibited Software and Actions and California - Computer Spyware.

In addition, there are a number of states that are considering laws to outlaw spyware. While there are significant differences in each of these proposals (with some permitting criminal or private civil enforcement, and others only permitting the State Attorney General to enforce these rights), in general the law attempt to prohibit the "deceptive" practices of the unauthorized installation of programs that monitor a consumer's activities without their consent. As a result, these statutes tend to prohibit both the transmission or installation "through intentionally deceptive means" of software that either changes configurations of certain programs, or collects personally identifiable information, or prevents a user's efforts to block installation, or falsely claims that software will be disabled by the user's actions, or removes or disables security software, or takes control of the computer (by accruing dial-up charges, or by opening a series of advertisements that can only be stopped by turning off the computer).

Of course, if I want to install software that does all these things, the law would not prohibit these things. The problem of distinguishing between illegal spyware and ordinary programs is not that easy, however. America Online was sued when it distributed version 5.0 years ago, which members of the class that sued claimed altered software and registry settings without the consumer's knowledge or consent. Netscape was similarly sued for a version of its browser, but defended claiming that the Software Licence Agreement provided notice of the changes. Rumors have abounded that the next version of Microsoft's "Longhorn" OS will automatically send error messages to the mothership in Redmond which will now contain information about not only the system settings at the time of a crash, but also the contents of any document the user may have been working on when the system crashed.

Thus, the key difference between unwanted and unlawful spyware and "legitimate" software is simply user knowledge and consent. Both might actually collect and transmit personal information, muck up system and registry settings, be hard or impossible to alter or delete, and might disable itself or other programs upon removal. But did you know and consent to having it installed?
What is consent?

How does a purveyor of "spyware" get users to "consent" to its installation anyway? Online consent is usually achieved through some form of advisory on a webpage or a click-through agreement. Providing users with access to your Terms of Service or Terms of Use (by placing them on a link on your home page) or providing them the relatively easy ability to download or view a Software License Agreement is usually sufficient to bind the consumer to any non-egregious or unconscionable terms of a contract, including things like agreeing to arbitrate disputes, and agreeing to sue in the website operator's home jurisdiction (Guam? Northern Marianas Islands?), and so on.

Just how "prominent" must a Software License Agreement or website be in order to not constitute a "deceptive" practice? How detailed must a software distributor be in describing exactly what registry settings the software alters, what information it collects, and what programs it may interfere with in order to avoid liability? How does a software distributor get consent of, for example, a 13-year-old in Columbus, Ohio who just wants to download a pretty screensaver, yet is below the age to legally enter into a contract? Or what about a 92-year-old first time computer user in Sheffield who is installing a program he or she read about in a magazine?

Take, for example, one common source of "spyware" or "adware," Kazaa's peer-to-peer network software. By simply downloading and installing the P2P software you are agreeing to the terms of their 5,500 word license agreement, which attempts to distinguish between the evil "spyware" that they would never install on your computer, and the helpful and friendly "adware" which, according to Kazaa, delivers ads which "are selected for you based in part on how you surf the Web so they're often about things you are actively searching for. That makes them pretty useful." Consider a website which might contain language at the bottom (under the "privacy policy" or "legal") which might contain language to the effect that, by proceeding past the home page, or by installing certain programs, you are agreeing to the installation of a key logger, password grabber, browser redirector, program crasher, a pop-up installer, and a remote control program. Is it a crime if you state that you never read or understood what was clearly and plainly written on their website?

Whether a program is a crime or was invited must go beyond mere "notice and proceed" consent, or even mere "clickwrap" consent. When a program is as invasive and potentially destructive as what we commonly think of as "spyware" or "adware," the distributor should be required to demonstrate effective and informed consent - sort of an "are you sure you want to do this?" consent. Sure, this is a much higher standard than required of any other form of clickwrap contract - many of which may be as unconscionable as the installation of spwyare. But if I am going to install something that is as potentially disruptive as spyware, the purveyor should take strong steps to show that I knew what I was doing. This applies equally to Kazaa's Claria as it does to Redmond's Microsoft. Clear, concise and easily understood terms should be required.
Spyware removers as criminals?

Now let's say I install Kazaa and agree to the GAIN ads they give me as a condition precedent for obtaining this useful P2P software. Or, suppose I install a demo version of a program, and agree to a condition that it will self-destruct if I don't pay for it. Or, I install a screensaver which contains a notice that it will also redirect my browser and install spyware (but I am dumb enough not to read that part). I am therefore bound by the terms of the contract I have agreed to - whether or not I have read it - unless the terms are unconscionable and therefore unenforceable, or they are so buried and inaccessible or fraudulently worded as to not be capable of forming a contract.

Once I receive the benefit of the contract I have entered into (the P2P software, the screensaver, etc.) suppose I then download and install a spyware remover, which either automatically or at my request removes the portion of the program which is of benefit to the software distributor. Thus, I get the benefit of the program without adhering to the other part of the contract. An analogy can be made to those who get "free" broadcast television with the implied understanding that they will watch commercials, and then they use TIVO to get past them or create software programs that will automatically remove them from recorded broadcasts. More apt an analogy is those who subscribe to valuable services (such as email newsletters) on the condition that they provide some personal information, such as for a subscriptions to the online New York Times - and then deliberately provide false information. While these websites don't seem to mandate that you provide accurate information, what if they had an "attestation" clause - meaning, I agree that I am providing accurate information as consideration for my access to the free online content of the New York Times? Would that make viewing the Times under false pretenses the same as stealing a copy of the paper from the news box?

The problem is worse for anti-spyware programs, which essentially automate the process of breaching consumer contracts. This is assuming that the consumers actually agreed to the terms and conditions under which the spyware was installed - generally not a valid assumption. Essentially, the spyware distributors would argue that the anti-spyware purveyors are inducing their customers to breach their contractual obligations, and are tortuously interfering with their contractual relationships with those who knowingly downloaded the spyware.

This is precisely the legal theory relied on when New.net sued Lavasoft in Federal Court in California, asserting that by calling its software "spyware" and blocking it, Lavasoft was defaming its products and interfering with its ability to distribute it. The California court rejected these arguments, asserting that, "despite the fact that the success of [New.net's] business ultimately depends on its ability to distribute as many copies of its software as possible onto users' computers, these relationships with the public at large are based on free and usually surreptitious downloads, and thus hardly rise to the level of 'economic relationships' as there is no business dealing between the unsuspecting users and [the company]." While the result is laudable, it is not clear that the analysis withstands scrutiny. New.net's "customers," those who installed the software with a bargained for consideration, were induced into breaching the contract by Lavasoft's operator's designating the program as "spyware." Certainly there was an economic relationship between New.net and those who downloaded the software ? personal information in exchange for free software. The court could have attacked these contracts and found that the users never really agreed to them, and therefore were unenforceable, but it did not do so - it simply dismissed any argument that there was an economic relationship.

The lesson of all of this is, if you get a bargained-for benefit from downloading and installing a program in return for agreeing to provide something (such as your personal information), not only may the distributor be guilty of a deceptive trade practice if it doesn't fully explain what the program does, you may also be guilty of a deceptive practice if you don't live up to your end of the bargain. Another full employment program for lawyers!

[ hahha ]

No more family guy torrents

Family Guy, a show which has enriched the lives of countless generations of TV lovers, has struck a foul blow against its many fans. It seems that it has contacted TorrentSpy.com and asked them to disallow Family Guy torrents!

[ Ye Gad! ]

Bamboo Bike

It looks quite nice and its probably very strong and light weight, and would be very much allinghed to the tree hugging bike people. But I wonder what would happen if you came across a panda. It might eat the bike. Then you'll be stuck in the forest. And if no one was around to hear your bike bell, then does it make a sound?

Panda's

Solar Backpack

he Voltaic™ backpack is a mobile power source, designed to charge your gadgets without tying you to a power outlet.

Just plug a standard car charger into the bag and recharge most small electronic devices including: cell phones, cameras, two way radios, PDA's, even iPods. Note: it is not designed to charge laptops.

If you don't have a car charger, the bag comes with a set of standard adaptors for common cell phones and other devices. We also offer a full range of optional adaptors.

Embedded in the back of the bag are three lightweight, tough, waterproof solar panels which generate up to 4 watts of power. This means quicker charge times!

Inside the bag is a Li Ion battery pack which stores any surplus power generated, so it is available when you need it, not just when the sun is up. The battery pack can also be charged using an AC travel charger or car charger (both included). This makes the Voltaic™ backpack just as useful on the grid as off.

Voltaic™ Backpack
Price: $229

[ mmmm powerfull ]

Bike light

[ Hopefully we can buy these ]

Toilet Bowl Restaurant

A restaurant in Taiwan with a modern decor and a full-on toilet theme. The thorough implementation includes toilet chairs, urinal sconces, and even commode shaped serving pieces. Probably not the best place to bring a child in potty training...

[ Shit food ]

Note: real restaraunt

Toilet Bowl
Taipei Metro, Hsinpu Station, Exit 1
(02) 8253-7767 <-note: not in sydney ->

The Rurals

The Rurals are a collective of talented musicians who make lush, organic deep house music which is certainly inspired by the wild Devonshire countryside in which they reside. Founding members Andy Compton and Pete Morris have enlisted vocalist Marie 'Tweek', bassist Pete 'Gurner' Middleton, saxophonist Charlie Hearnshaw, and DJ-cum-remixer Onlymatt since their inception in the early '90s.

[ Free is good. But good is always good. ]

Jim Campbell

Campbell's brilliant LED animations render sensuous yet eerie scenes with amazing depth considering the low fidelity out-put. This show includes work from the last four of his 20 years in making technological art, and features works in a new direction that combine still photos with his animations. Bus Stop (above, left) and Library (video after the jump) present common city scenes in an ethereal and almost spiritual manner.

According to the artist, "My Ambiguous Icons projects essentially started with the question 'How and what kind of meaning can be expressed with very small amounts of information?'" and adds that "as in other forms of visual abstraction, associative thinking processes play a larger role than linear or narrative thinking in the interpretation of an image."

[ LED's just got cooler ]

Personalised Google Homepage

Google is just gona be like all the other portals and then crash and burn... the only reason to visit the site in the firstplace is the timelyness of the search and that its quick on dialiup... rant... rant...

[ Reminds me of excite ]

10,000 Frags

Accept the inevitable

Companies are increasingly judged not just on how well they perform as businesses, but how well they comply with an ever-growing array of regulatory and other non-financial requirements

By Roger Hogan
CFO. 01 June 2005

Like it or not, companies are increasingly judged these days not just on how well they perform as businesses, but how well they comply with a seemingly ever-growing array of regulatory and other non-financial requirements.

This issue of CFO highlights the trend. The cover story (Strange fruit), by Bernard Kellerman, charts the progress of sustainability reporting in Australia and elsewhere.

Sustainability reporting (SR) is one of those ideas that sound good - or, at least, worthy - in theory, but which are difficult to evaluate in terms of their practical benefits. At its simplest, it requires companies to report on the effect their activities have on society and the environment.

As Bernard discovers, Australia lags behind many of its global peers in the adoption of SR. This may not matter to an Australian chief financial officer who has yet to see a persuasive cost-benefit argument in support of the practice. It matters to those who promote the concept, however. In their view, the time is fast approaching when global capital markets will punish companies that fail to adopt SR best practice.

This is the peer pressure argument in favour of SR. There is also the moral blackmail argument: for example, the fear of "reputational risk" for companies employing, or linked to employers of, labour in developing countries. Finally, there is the more congenial and potentially more interesting argument that the level of scrutiny required by SR adds to a company's understanding of its cost structures and risk management.

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Whatever the merits of these arguments, they may ultimately prove irrelevant as governments and regulators climb aboard the SR bandwagon. The British Government has done it and, earlier this year, our own Federal Government sought opinion as to whether the Corporations Act should be used to "require certain types of companies to report on the social and environmental impacts of their activities ..."

In the face of these pressures, CFOs have little choice but to accept the inevitable. Once they implement SR, however, they should execute it well. As Simon Segal notes (Green investors grow), ethical investors are a minority but they are gaining influence. For them, the pages a company devotes in its annual report to SR will provide an important insight into its culture and the quality of its management.

Indeed, for many ethically-minded investors in our expanding shareholder democracy, the SR might even be more important than the columns of figures and pages of notes to the accounts. In this case, there will indeed be a direct link between a company's SR and its share price. The peer-pressure case for SR may have some merit after all.

Free choice guide

It may be some consolation (though not much) that SR is unlikely to turn into a regulatory and administrative impost on quite the same scale as superannuation. What could? Your company's super obligations will become even more complex and costly from next month, when choice of fund legislation comes into force from July 1.

You are, of course, obliged to inform your organisation's superannuation scheme members of how choice of fund legislation will affect them.

CFO is happy to help in this regard. On our home page, you will find a special issue of our quarterly CFO Super supplement, called A Beginner's Guide to Choice, which has been written by Zilla Efrat especially to help super fund members to prepare for choice. It will also help you to fulfil your responsibility to inform and educate your employees on the subject.

To distribute A Beginner's Guide to Choice to your employees, simply download the PDF from the homepage. There is no charge and you may make as many downloads or copies as you wish.

For your own guide as to what super choice means for financial executives and managers, see New laws raise sticky issues and It's in the system.

[ hooray! more work for me ]

BRW - Rich 200

Property prices cool, stocks fall and the economy slows, yet the BRW Rich 200 add $11.85 billion to their combined wealth and six new billionaires emerge to take the total to 17. Remarkable. Even though business conditions are softening, Australia's richest 200 individuals increased their wealth by 16.57%, to $83.37 billion, for a staggering average wealth of $417 million.

You now need $110 million just to make the list, up $10 million from last year. This performance makes a mockery of claims in this column last year that the wealth of Australia's richest people had most likely peaked in the short term because of weakening investment markets. Perhaps that call was a year too early, or misguided altogether.

You can never underestimate the rich, because they have a knack for sniffing out opportunity. Just look at their performance in Western Australia and Queensland. The Sunshine State has its first billionaire and can boast nine out of 21 new entrants on the list. Markets are slowing, but that is usually when the super rich buy cheaper assets and lay the foundations for the next big jump in their wealth.

Thematic connections
A feature of this year's Rich 200 is the work of the renowned artist Graham Fransella. Selected works from Fransella's eau forte series appear on the cover and throughout the issue, providing a striking visual theme that connects our stories. Fransella's wonderful art seems to fit the Rich 200 on some levels. His subjects have been described as "ruthlessly pared down to a mere outline, stripped of personality yet carrying indications of primitive humanity". And the style of his etching process was described as "allowing serendipitous 'mistakes' to occur in a free and spontaneous manner". Perhaps the true appeal of the Rich 200 is not their success or wealth, but, as Fransella's work suggests, their imperfections and rough edges.

Love them or hate them
Like most magazines, BRW conducts regular research on what readers like, and it seems nothing polarises them more than the Rich 200. When asked what is their favourite part of BRW, many say the Rich 200 and our newer issue, the BRW Young Rich, published in September. I know of one reader who leaves the Rich 200 on his bedside table every night because his goal in life is to make the list, and each day he picks it up for motivation. Others readers even send pictures of their children - some of them infants - holding the Young Rich because they want their children "to get started in business early". Certainly the Rich 200 is quoted throughout the year by other publications and it is by far our largest-selling issue. Yet other readers hate the Rich 200. Some say it glorifies the wealthy, is repulsive in its tone, and is little more than pornography for capitalists.

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There is no easy explanation for the love-hate relationship with the Rich 200, but what is clear is that if Australia is to prosper in the 21st century it must encourage a new breed of entrepreneurs, build a much stronger entrepreneurial culture, and celebrate the result of their endeavours: wealth. We need more of our best and brightest to consider starting a business when they are young, rather than automatically going to university, before going into business much later in life. And we need to recognise entrepreneurs and the wealth and the jobs they create. But how far do we go? How do we encourage entrepreneurs, but avoid creating a culture where the only thing that matters is money, or a repeat of the 1980s, when shonky entrepreneurs were idolised. What are your views?

Thanks aplenty
I could devote this entire page to thanking those involved in the Rich 200. All staff across editorial, advertising, marketing, circulation, finance, customer service and technology work on the Rich 200, and some deserve special mention. Thanks first to BRW's deputy editor, Robert Skeffington, who is the driving forcing behind the Rich 200. Robert spends many months leading a team of researchers, commissioning stories and editing them, and checking the entries and wealth estimates. Thanks also to our production team, who produce the Rich 200 in parallel with the regular issues for the best part of a month.

Production manager Anna Wolf kept the hundreds of stories and entries in good shape, while production editor Tom Brentnall and chief copy editor Paul Watson led a team of sub-editors who tirelessly checked, rechecked and polished the stories in this issue. Art director Justin Garnsworthy created the look of this issue, supported by deputy art director Mike Innes and senior designer Ken Uchida, who laid out the entries at the back of the magazine. Pictorial editor Jessica Shapiro organised the pictures, helped persuade many reluctant "richies" to have their pictures taken, and took many herself - her portfolio of photos of Griffith in New South Wales is a feature of this issue. Thanks also to our Rich 200 researchers: Shayne Barnett, Timothy Delbridge, Melanie Dunn, Evan Theodorou, Dharmini Sivananthan, Michael Watts and Yvonne Zhang.

[ 200 rich dudes ]

Real R2D2

A prototype of R2D2 has been built by researchers at the university of Pisa. It will be presented in Livorno today (May 19th) during the presentation of Episode III. It's somehow taller (1.5 mt) but walks (with 2 or 3 legs) and beeps like the original, and flees from people holding light sabres! Oh, and comes with bluetooth and usb.

The robot actually is the resulting prototype of a research project in creating a kind of slave or companion robot with a friendly interface. What's best than a worldwide icon that in 28 years of honored service ingnited the imagination of at least two generations?

In the mind of the researchers, this kind of robots could be used in to be used in museums, hospitals, or maybe even at home. The budget for the whole thing was about 50k euros

[ I wonder if it makes good coffee ]

Full size flying millenium falcon

A relatively long time ago, in a west Wales town not too far away... arguably the most famous spaceship in the universe was created.

In the winter of 1979 word started to spread in Pembroke Dock that a flying saucer was being built in an old giant aircraft hangar in the town.

Those involved were sworn to secrecy.

For three months they worked on the only full-scale Millennium Falcon, the spaceship from the original Star Wars trilogy, to be built for the films.

Production was gearing up for The Empire Strikes Back - the second instalment in George Lucas's epic space saga.

And much like the feverish build-up to this week's release of Revenge Of The Sith, the sixth and final movie in the series, fans were desperate for the smallest piece of news of what was to come.

Marcon Fabrications, a company more usually associated with steel fabrications for the nearby petrochemical and oil industries, had won the contract to build the prop for the film.

One of company's main selling points was it was based in the eastern hangar of the Royal Dockyard - a Grade II listed structure that once housed the famous Sunderland flying boats based there during World War II.

Govan Davies, who owned the dockyard at the time, recalls the secrecy surrounding the project.

"No-body was allowed in and they kept it locked at all times," he said.

"It was made out of timber on the outside of a steel frame. There were 30 or 40 men working on it - it was a hell of a big thing."

Bizarrely, those working on the spaceship were told they could only refer to it by the code name "Magic Roundabout".

But Mr Davies said word soon spread.

"Friends talk to friends. But they still did not allow anyone in although I saw it, of course, because I owned the hangar at the time."

Security was finally breached in March 1979 when the Pembrokeshire newspaper The Western Telegraph ran a picture and story under the headline "Security Blown On Flying Saucer Secret".

Tongue-in-cheek, it linked the spaceship to an apparent spate of UFO sightings in the sky above the county at the time.

According to Brian Johnson, special effects supervisor on the film, the spaceship could fly - but only a few millimetres off the ground.

"It weighed approaching 23 tonnes and was 70ft in diameter," he told the Official Making of the Empire Strikes Back book.

"We fitted compressed air hover pads on the feet to lift the thing up so it could be pushed around without any wheels.

"The whole thing was actually floating on a cushion of air, with about a sixteenth of an inch between the feet and the floor.

"To get the Falcon from Pembroke it was dismantled and brought on lorries in sections, then put together on the sound stage at Elstree."

[ I thought my model was good... ]

Rubbish

Portraits of American Mass Consumption Pile after pile, mile after mile of old mobile phones, cars, cans, timber, circuit boards and lots of other stuff. Whole landscapes of discontinued technology.

[ photography ]

Art Terroist Strikes again!

The British Museum has been exhibiting a cave painting of a primitive man ... pushing a supermarket trolley. The "rock painting", entitled Early Man Goes to Market, depicts the outline of a spear-wielding caveman pushing a trolley, next to the outline of a pig.

The work was planted by anonymous "art terrorist" Banksy, whose creation failed to raise eyebrows at one of London's most famous museums. This is not the first time Banksy has stuck fake objects to gallery walls and waited to see how long it takes before curators notice.

[ dulux ]

Lego Harpsichord

How to stop masturbating

[ Full size and it works ]

We do stuff.

Welcome to the world's most dynamic e-business marketing, design and consulting agency. We provide distinct clients with groundbreaking business strategies and cutting-edge designs to aggressively and creatively compete in a changing economy.

Our consulting ideas will entice and excite you. Our professional design solutions will give you the confidence to succeed. And our web site will make you think we know what we're doing.

Our name will confuse you, but, you have to admit, the logo design is pretty cool. And we're good at turning regular words into "e-words," such as "e-consulting," "e-business" or "e-sexual harassment."

Our office is really modern and we've got nice computers and stuff. If you ever saw it, you'd say "Wow, cool office. These guys are legit."

[ huh? ]

This has to be one of the more awsome sites atm (atm=this week...)

This pill will make you smarter

HAVING problems performing in the sack? Take Viagra. Got the jitters before that important presentation? Try beta blockers. Need to stay awake to finish that assignment? Pop a Provigil pill.

For those prepared to pay, the growing list of "lifestyle drugs" is shifting the boundaries of what bodies and minds are capable of. Now a small clinical trial of the class of experimental drugs known as ampakines suggests these brain-boosters are destined to blur that line still further by offering improved memory.

The success of the unrelated drug Provigil (also called modafinil) has proved there is a huge market for drugs that can improve mental performance. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved it for treating narcolepsy, sleep apnoea - disrupted breathing during sleep - and the sleepiness caused by shift work. But it is widely taken "off-label" by healthy people to stay awake and alert. Sales of the drug, produced by Cephalon of West Chester, Philadelphia, have more than doubled since 2002, and continue to skyrocket (see Graphic).

Some may feel uncomfortable with the increasing availability of such pharmaceutical pick-me-ups, but others see them as no different from performance aids such as palmtop organisers. "Stimulating your brain with a reminder on a Blackberry doesn't seem that different to me from stimulating your brain with a drug," says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Ampakines work by boosting the activity of glutamate, a key neurotransmitter that makes it easier to learn and encode memory. They change the rules about what it takes to create a memory, and how strong those memories can be, says Gary Lynch of the University of California at Irvine, who invented the drugs. "We all have the same computer," he says, "but we're running with different voltage levels." Ampakines up that "voltage".

The effects can be dramatic, as Julia Boyle at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues have now shown. They tested an ampakine called CX717 on 16 healthy males aged between 18 and 45. The men were given either 100 milligrams, 300 mg or 1000 mg of the drug, or else a placebo. In repeated trials the volunteers cycled through the treatments so that their performance with different amounts of CX717 could be compared directly.

In each test session, the volunteers started with a full night's sleep and the following morning and evening were given a battery of tests. These assessed memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving. Then, at 11 pm, the volunteers swallowed their pills and stayed up through the night. At midnight, 1 am, 3 am, 5 am and 9 am, they were re-tested on some of the tasks. And at 4 am, cruelly, they were tucked into bed in a darkened room and told to stay awake. The researchers measured heart rate and brainwave activity to monitor how alert the subjects were and whether they fell asleep.
“Even the lowest dose of CX717 improved the wakefulness and cognitive performance of sleep-deprived people”

Even the lowest dose of CX717 significantly improved the sleep-deprived volunteers' wakefulness and cognitive performance. And the more ampakine they took, the more they improved and the longer the effect lasted. Roger Stoll, CEO of Cortex, the Irvine-based company in California that owns the drug, announced the trial results at an investors' conference on 4 May. While specifics were scant, he mentioned that in the dark room, for instance, most volunteers taking placebo dozed off within about 3 minutes, while some ampakine users stayed awake for the entire 15-minute test. And on a test of sustained attention, effects kicked in within an hour of consuming the drug, he revealed. Crucially, the subjects suffered none of the jitteriness that comes with caffeine or amphetamines. "It generates a state of cortical wakefulness without stimulation," says Lynch.

CX717 will have to undergo further clinical trials before gaining approval as a drug. Cortex is considering it as a possible treatment for narcolepsy, jet lag, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Alzheimer's disease.

Meanwhile animal studies hint at even more impressive effects. Research on rhesus macaques, carried out for the US military by Sam Deadwyler at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, found that sleep-deprived monkeys on CX717 actually performed better on reaction time and accuracy tests than when they were well rested. And non-sleep-deprived monkeys given the drug did better still.

[ And no its not caffine ]