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Hugh Pickens writes:

Pamela Engel writes that Americans need only look to Nigeria to calm their fears about an Ebola outbreak in the US. Nigeria is much closer to the West Africa outbreak than the US is, yet even after Ebola entered the country in the most terrifying way possible — via a visibly sick passenger on a commercial flight — officials successfully shut down the disease and prevented widespread transmission. If there are still no new cases on October 20, the World Health Organization will officially declare the country "Ebola-free". Here's how Nigeria did it.

The first person to bring Ebola to Nigeria was Patrick Sawyer, who left a hospital in Liberia against the wishes of the medical staff and flew to Nigeria. Once Sawyer arrived, it became obvious that he was ill when he passed out in the Lagos airport, and he was taken to a hospital in the densely packed city of 20 million. Once the country's first Ebola case was confirmed, Port Health Services in Nigeria started a process called contact tracing to limit the spread of the disease and created an emergency operations center to coordinate and oversee the national response. Health officials used a variety of resources, including phone records and flight manifests, to track down nearly 900 people who might have been exposed to the virus via Sawyer or the people he infected. As soon as people developed symptoms suggestive of Ebola, they were isolated in Ebola treatment facilities. Without waiting to see whether a "suspected" case tested positive, Nigeria's contact tracing team tracked down everyone who had had contact with that patient since the onset of symptoms making a staggering 18,500 face-to-face visits.

The US has many of these same procedures in place for containing Ebola, making the risk of an outbreak here very low. Contact tracing is exactly what is happening in Dallas right now; if any one of Thomas Eric Duncan's contacts shows symptoms, that person will be immediately isolated and tested. “That experience shows us that even in the case in Nigeria, when we found out later in the timeline that this patient had Ebola, that Nigeria was able to identify contacts, institute strict infection control procedures and basically bring their outbreak to a close”, says Dr. Tom Inglesby. “They did a good job in and of themselves. They worked closely with the U.S. CDC. If we can succeed in Nigeria… I do believe we will stop it here.”

Hugh Pickens writes:

Michelle Cottle reports in The Atlantic that in an earlier era, a suspicious husband might have rifled through his wife's pockets or hired a private investigator but today spouses have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that records every keystroke; compiles detailed logs of calls, texts, and video chats; that tracks a phone’s location in real time; recovers deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); and that turns phones into wiretapping equipment. One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. But according to Cottle, aspiring cheaters, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market and researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. “Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,” says Katherine Hertlein. “The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.”

But virtual surveillance has its risks. Stumbling across an incriminating email your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court. A Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. In March 2010, Hormann's wife had a mechanic search her car and found the tracker. She called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. “I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right,” says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court—and potentially land you in trouble—if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer.

fliptop writes:

Over at ACM Mark Guzdial makes the case that Teaching > Genetics, the so-called "Geek Gene" doesn't exist, and gives some advice on how to teach students who believe they're just "not wired" for programming:

The most dangerous part of the "Geek Gene" hypothesis is that it gives us a reason to stop working at broadening participation in computing. If people are wired to program, then those who are programming have that wiring, and those who don’t program must not have that wiring. Belief in the "Geek Gene" makes it easy to ignore female students and those from under-represented minority groups as simply having the wrong genes. The problem is that those who seem like they have a "Geek Gene" or who are well-prepared are typically the students who have had privileges, who have had the opportunity to develop ability in computing before they enter our classroom. We need to teach as if anyone can learn to program in order to broaden participation in computing and develop a more diverse computing community and workforce.

...

The belief that students are born or have "different internal wiring" to be a programmer ignores the value of the teacher. A 2012 OECD report put the point in two words: "Teachers Matter." Hours of practice with a good teacher are far more likely to contribute to expertise than hours of practice alone. Rather than worry about our students’ genetics, we should be thinking about how to make ourselves more effective as teachers.

gewg_ writes:

Shaun Nichols at El Reg notes the latest Patch Tuesday

Microsoft has today patched two dozen CVE-classified security vulnerabilities in its software. People are urged to install them as soon as possible.

The US giant said the October edition of Patch Tuesday includes three critical fixes to address flaws in Internet Explorer, the .NET Framework and Windows kernel-mode driver.
[...]
MS14-061 - An 'important' rated vulnerability (CVE-2014-4117) in Office that allows an attacker to use malicious Word files to achieve remote code execution at the level of the logged-in user. The flaw can be mitigated by limiting the access rights of user accounts. The flaw is also present in Office for Mac. The discovery is credited to 35 Labs via the HP Zero Day Initiative.
[...]
And Adobe's software is still riddled with holes.

Adobe, meanwhile, has released its own monthly patch update. That patch will include a fix for three remote-code execution flaws in Flash Player for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Adobe is also patching a trio of flaws in ColdFusion allowing elevation of privilege and security control bypass.

[Update 1]: Corrected title as these vulnerabilities are not restricted to Windows.

[Update 2]: There are also reports of remote code execution and privilege elevation vulnerabilities across Solaris, Linux and Windows, via Java and Oracle: http://threatpost.com/java-reflection-api-woes-resurface-in-latest-oracle-patches/108847.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A-a-and they're off. A week after the .nyc top-level domain was opened to the general public for instant registration (a pre-registration period with delayed notification ended October 3), some 27,000 domains have been snapped up. Domains are available on a first-come, first-serve basis from any domain name registrar, but registrants are required to have a physical residence (not just a Post Office box) in one of New York City's five boroughs.

London, Paris, and Berlin also have TLDs; New York City is the first city in the USA to get one. The WSJ reports that some New Yorkers are fans.

As could be expected, some domains seem to have been taken by cybersquatters:

source:whois.nic.nyc

However, last year ICANN put in place a Uniform Rapid Suspension system to allow trademark owners to take quick action against the squatters. It's not clear whether this would be useful for individuals such as Jeter (a professional athlete), though.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/lockheed-says-makes-breakthrough-fusion-energy-project-123840986--finance.html

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade."

Who knew? But then again every other article I ever read said "Fusion is on 50 years away", maybe this time we get lucky!

lhsi writes:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/10/14/earths-magnetic-field-could-flip-within-a-human-lifetime/
Abstract: http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/content/199/2/1110

From Berkeley:

francois.barbier writes:

I received an e-mail from THAWTE tonight about the new "nasty" SSL vulnerability we learned about. From the e-mail:

Thawte is aware of and currently investigating CVE 2014-3566 SSL v3.0 POODLE vulnerability. This vulnerability affects servers still running SSL 3.0. It centers on cipher block chaining (CBC) encryption implementation and allow attackers with a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) position to derive the contents of a secure payload based on responses received from requests sent from a compromised browser to a legitimate server.

tonyPick writes:

The journal Science has an article on the increasing diversification of scientific publishing, with a growing number highly cited papers appearing outside the "elite" journals (such as Science and Nature).

The paper is available on arXiv (pdf).

SlimmPickens writes:

Technology Review reports that since 2004 Microsoft has had a quantum computing project lead by Michael Freedman who proved the Poincaré conjecture in dimension four.

Unsurprisingly, this effort centers around a "topological qubit" which is theorized to be more stable and scalable than other qubits. The topological qubit has been proven and at least one team has announced that they have found evidence of the Majorana fermion it depends upon. That appears, however, to be controversial.

A number of other teams, including one at Bell Labs, are working on the same or similar things.

frojack writes:

PSMag reports an interesting story about the often told tales of strange animal behavior being able to predict earthquakes.

In a survey conducted 8 months after the devastating March 11th, 2011 earthquake in Japan, when the situation had stabilized enough for such frivolous studies, researchers asked pet owners all over the country to report via the internet any strange behavior of their pets in the time period leading up to the quake.

As you might expect, there were numerous reports, seeming to vary with distance from the epicenter. The most common reports were of dogs and cats being restless and wanting to be near the owner. Most of these incidents were remembered by the pet owners as having occurred just minutes or seconds before the quake.

However, human recollection being what it is, and the sequence of precursor quakes that occurred leading up to the Big One tended to make the data less than totally believable. In any event, the warnings were too random, and too late to be of any practical value.

It has historically been claimed that cows give less milk in the days leading up to a big quake. One can only suppose that an animal that spends most of its waking life with its head close to the ground might notice things that man, or other animals miss. If cows are able to hear grinding and rumbles, or smell changes in the ground they might be stressed and make less milk. So the researchers decide to check dairy farms as well as pet owners.

It turns out that automated computerized Milking Machines on dairy farms keep very good records, aren't sentimental, and they can produce those records long after the fact. In a modern dairy farm, these records are specific to each cow (ear tags) and every cow has a complete medical history on file.

The analysis took account of the length of time since calving and the temperature and humidity, as these factors are known to affect milk yield.

So if your herd all dries up at the same time, maybe its time to sleep in the tent for a few days.

Hugh Pickens writes:

German was the dominant scientific language in 1900. Today if a scientist is going to coin a new term, it's most likely in English. And if they are going to publish a new discovery, it is most definitely in English. Look no further than the Nobel Prize awarded for physiology and medicine to Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Their research was written and published in English. How did English come to dominate German in the realm of science? BBC reports that the major shock to the system was World War One, which had two major impacts. According to Princeton University's Rosengarten professor of modern and contemporary history Michael Gordin, it started after World War One when Belgian, French, and British scientists organized a boycott of scientists from Germany and Austria. They were blocked from conferences and weren't able to publish in Western European journals. "Increasingly, you have two scientific communities, one German, which functions in the defeated [Central Powers] of Germany and Austria, and another that functions in Western Europe, which is mostly English and French," says Gordin.

The second effect of World War One took place in the US. Starting in 1917 when the US entered the war, there was a wave of anti-German hysteria that swept the country. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota there were many, many German speakers. World War One changed all that. "German is criminalized in 23 states. You're not allowed to speak it in public, you're not allowed to use it in the radio, you're not allowed to teach it to a child under the age of 10," says Gordin. The Supreme Court overturned those anti-German laws in 1923, but for years they were the law of the land. What that effectively did, according to Gordin, was decimate foreign language learning in the US resulting in a generation of future scientists who come of age with limited exposure to foreign languages. That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world. "The story of the 20th Century is not so much the rise of English as the serial collapse of German as the up-and-coming language of scientific communication," concludes Gordin.

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Prospective students in the United States who can't afford to pay for college or don't want to rack up tens of thousands in student debt should try their luck in Germany. Higher education is now free throughout the country, even for international students. Yesterday, Lower Saxony became the last of seven German states to abolish tuition fees, which were already extremely low compared to those paid in the United States.

German universities only began charging for tuition in 2006, when the German Constitutional Court ruled that limited fees, combined with loans, were not in conflict the country's commitment to universal education. The measure proved unpopular, however, and German states that had instituted fees began dropping them one by one.

"We got rid of tuition fees because we do not want higher education which depends on the wealth of the parents," Gabrielle Heinen-Kjajic, the minister for science and culture in Lower Saxony, said in a statement. Her words were echoed by many in the German government. "Tuition fees are unjust," said Hamburg's senator for science Dorothee Stapelfeldt. "They discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany."

[...]Free education is a concept that is embraced in most of Europe with notable exceptions like the U.K., where the government voted to lift the cap on university fees in 2010. The measure has reportedly cost more money than it brought in. The Guardian reported in March that students are failing to pay back student loans at such a rate that "the government will lose more money than it would have saved from keeping the old £3,000 ($4,865) tuition fee system."

[...]learning German might be the best financial choice an American high school student can make.

tonyPick writes:

gigwise has a transcript of the 2014 John Peel Lecture, delivered this time by Iggy Pop.

The Lecture is named after legendary UK Music presenter John Peel, who died in 2004, and the BBC has the talk available for download.

And (for those of you under 20) Iggy Pop is the former frontman of Influential band the Stooges, and a massively successful solo artist.

It's a great talk, and worth the time to read it all.

There's also a much shorter Guardian Summary available.

cafebabe writes:

A while back, the BBC News reported that:

Often it's so innocent. It might even be relevant initially. A quick Wikipedia fact-check, perhaps. But before long you've been sucked into the wormhole. Link after link, page after page. When you finally snap out of it you've lost a precious hour and you're reading about the intricacies of 16th Century Prussian politics. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.

"We're really entering the golden age of procrastination," says Dr Piers Steel, who has conducted surveys and written The Procrastination Equation. "One in four [people] would describe themselves as a chronic procrastinator, [while] over half the population would describe themselves as frequent," he says. "In the last 40 years there's been about a 300-400% growth in chronic procrastination," which is when it becomes particularly self-defeating, Steel explains. UK smartphone users check their phone 221 times a day on average, a recent survey found. Checking emails and social media cost 36% of respondents more than an hour each day in productivity, another survey found.

The article gives some extreme measures to stop procrastination including Victor Hugo's valet hiding clothes or Greek orator Demosthenes shaving one side of his face to discourage any outdoors procrastination. Software to discourage procrastination is also mentioned.