Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/175706452?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Oil above $94 on signs of improving US economy (AP)
SINGAPORE ? Oil prices rose above $94 a barrel Friday in Asia amid signs the U.S. economy is slowly improving, which could boost demand for crude.
Benchmark crude for January delivery was up 40 cents to $94.27 a barrel at midday Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell by $1.08 to settle at $93.87 on Thursday.
In London, Brent crude was up 43 cents at $104.03 on the ICE futures exchange.
Crude has dropped from $100 this week because of expectations Europe's debt crisis will trigger a recession next year and undermine global oil consumption. However, the U.S. economy has shown evidence of growth the last few months.
The government said that applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level since May 2008. While manufacturing output fell last month after six straight months of steady gains, a regional report on Thursday showed manufacturing activity is rising this month in the Philadelphia area.
"We look for the oil market to move into a choppy, consolidation phase into the holiday period now that the euro appears to have stabilized for now amid a fresh flow of supportive U.S. economic guidance," energy consultant Ritterbusch and Associates said in a report.
In other energy trading on the Nymex, natural gas rose 1.1 cent to $3.14 per 1,000 cubic feet. Heating oil gained 1.5 cents to $2.85 a gallon and gasoline futures added 2.2 cents to $2.52 a gallon.
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Father of Kris Humphries Threatens to Pen Kim Kardashian Tell-All
Might the manipulative, large-breasted roof soon get blown off DivorceGate?
In the latest issue of Life & Style, William Humphries - the father of Kris Humphries and the very brief father-in-law of Kim Kardashian - says he'd "love to write a book" about the ordeal Kim and her family put his son through.
"It's important to him that Kris' side of the story is out there," a friend tells the tabloid.
Humphries may not be entitled to any of Kim's assets, due to a prenup, but no non-disclosure agreement was ever signed. He and/or his dad are free to dish and dish and dish and "Kris has told his father everything," a source notes.
William "has many stories to tell," the magazine reports.
Kris, of course, says he just wants to move forward and find a new NBA team. But we have a feeling this story is far from over.
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Friday, December 16, 2011
Green tech 'won't mean big bills'
15 December 2011
Last updated at 00:11 ET
Claims that the costs of wind farms and other low-carbon technology will lead to sharp rises in fuel bills are wrong, government advisers say.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says increases in bills over the past few years have been largely due to higher wholesale gas costs.
Members said their "best estimate" was that green policies would add ?110 to bills per household in 2020.
It emerged recently that an estimated 1.5m people are in fuel debt in the UK.
The combined gas and electricity bill for typical households could go up from ?1,060 in 2010 to ?1,250 in 2020, according to analysis by the committee.
But further energy efficiency measures - such as loft and wall cavity insulation - could see the projected 2020 bill fall to ?1,085 per household, it said.
CCC chief executive David Kennedy said the committee had analysed the impact of investing in technology including offshore and onshore wind, nuclear and carbon capture and storage.
Mr Kennedy said the cost of this investment was "significantly" outweighed by the benefits - including a reduced reliance on imported fossil fuels.
Looking back, the CCC said an analysis of the average dual fuel energy bills showed an increase of ?455 over the six years 2004 to 2010.
However, 80% of this rise was unrelated to low-carbon measures and the biggest contributor was rising gas prices, which added around ?290 to bills.
Mr Kennedy said that some people had claimed that energy bills were "through the roof at the moment" because of investment in green energy - but the committee's analysis showed this "clearly" was not the case.
A second claim that investment in low-carbon technology over the next decade would drive bills to "astronomical levels" was also untrue, he said.
CCC chairman Lord Adair Turner said: "Over the next decade, we anticipate a rise of around ?100 in the average bill as a result of investment in low-carbon power capacity, which will benefit the UK in the long run."
Fuel povertyThe committee's analysis comes against a background of increased concern about rising fuel costs.
In November it was revealed that the number of people with energy debts had risen by a quarter for electricity and a fifth for gas.
Campaign group Consumer Focus and charity Citizen's Advice say energy prices increased by seven per cent last winter and warn that further rises of 14% this winter could push more people into debt.
An independent report by Professor John Hills published in October found that 2,700 people died each year from problems linked to fuel poverty such as respiratory or cardiovascular disease.
And government figures released over the summer suggested that more than a fifth of all households in the UK in 2009 were affected by fuel poverty - meaning they spend more than 10% of their income keeping warm.
Professor Hills called for a new definition of fuel poverty, which focuses on people with low incomes driven into poverty by high fuel bills.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-16191900
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Computing: Improving security in the cloud
ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2011) ? Less and less of today's computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in "the cloud" without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered.
Attempting computation on sensitive data stored on shared servers leaves that data exposed in ways that traditional encryption techniques can't protect against. The main problem is that to manipulate the data, it has to be first decoded. "Until a few years ago, no one knew if the encryption needed for this sort of online security was even possible," says Dr. Zvika Brakerski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department. In 2009, however, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Craig Gentry provided the first demonstration of so-called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). But the original method was extraordinarily time consuming and unwieldy, making it highly impractical. Gentry constructed his FHE system by using fairly sophisticated math, based on so-called ideal lattices, and this required him to make new and unfamiliar complexity assumptions to prove security. Gentry's use of ideal lattices seemed inherent to fully homomorphic encryption; researchers assumed that they were necessary for the server to perform such basic operations as addition and multiplication on encrypted data.
Brakerski, together with Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan (who was a student of Goldwasser's at MIT), surprised the computer security world earlier this year with two recent papers in which they described several new ways of making fully homomorphic encryption more efficient. For one thing, they managed to make FHE work with much simpler arithmetic, which speeds up processing time. And a surprise discovery showed that a mathematical construct used to generate the encryption keys could be simplified without compromising security. Gentry's original ideal lattices are theoretical collections of points that can be added together -- as in an ordinary lattice structure -- but also multiplied. But the new research shows that the lattice does not have to be ideal, which simplifies the construction immensely. "The fact that it worked was something like magic, and it has challenged our assumptions about the function of the ideal lattices in homomorphic encryption," says Brakerski.
Their result promises to pave a path to applying FHE in practice. Optimized versions of the new system could be hundreds -- or even thousands -- of times faster than Gentry's original construction. Indeed, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan have managed to advance the theory behind fully homomorphic encryption to the point that computer engineers can begin to work on applications. These might include, for instance, securing medical information for research: A third party could perform large medical studies on encrypted medical records without having access to the individuals' information.
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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111215095454.htm
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Francis Galton's novel about eugenics
Michael Marshall, environment reporter
How do you publish a novel arguing that the unfit, weak or mentally infirm should not be allowed to breed, and only those deemed ?high quality? be given the privilege of having children?
Well, you don?t. Francis Galton tried to in the first decade of the 20th century, but he died in 1911 before his eugenic novel Kantsaywhere could be published. His family promptly got hold of it and, horrified, destroyed almost all of it.
Now though, to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, University College London has published all that remains online. You can download the book from their website, but good luck with reading it: it is published in the form of scans of Galton?s typewritten manuscript, complete with scribbled corrections.
Galton was a polymath who variously invented a system for fingerprinting, pioneered weather maps and made major contributions to social science. But his memory has been tainted by his longstanding obsession with eugenics.
Kantsaywhere is his attempt to sell the idea of eugenics to British society. It?s the story of Professor Donoghue, who arrives in the eugenic state of Kantsaywhere and must pass a series of tests in order to be accepted into the society and marry his love, Augusta Allfancy. The book recounts how Donoghue is tested for his strength, intelligence and aesthetic sense, and attempts to demonstrate that his ancestors had ?good genes?.
Too much has been removed to judge the book on its literary merits. As it stands Donoghue is a bland narrator, with no discernible personality, and there are no other characters or plot developments. But this may be the result of the heavy editing. Meanwhile Donoghue?s love Augusta has been almost entirely removed, apparently along with a number of explicit sex scenes.
The book could have done with the sex, for in its current form it is irremediably dry. Galton describes the tests, and the principles of the society, in detail. That might have worked perfectly well if it had been integrated into a story with characters and setting, but in this form it?s like reading a textbook.
However, even in this form, it is hard to escape a ghastly fascination with Galton?s vision of a eugenic society. What is most striking is that, in all the tests he envisions people going through before they can breed, nobody is ever tested on their sense of morality. The tests aren?t concerned with whether people are kind, sharing, empathic or cooperative. Apparently, these qualities weren?t as important to Galton?s perfect society as being able to sing in tune or write an insightful essay, both of which are systematically measured.
In that chilling disdain for emotion and feeling, Galton?s novel presaged the many inhuman horrors of the two world wars to come.
The remaining portions of Kantsaywhere were made available online by University College London to mark the 100th anniversary of Francis Galton's death.
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