June 2011 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable
by Eugen Leitl 02 Jun '11

02 Jun '11

http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-dru… The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable Adrian Chen b Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road. About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. "If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't have even noticed," Mark told us in a phone interview. Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out." He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoinsbuntraceable digital currencybworth around $150. Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house. "It kind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said. View the gallery Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users' purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronicsband seemingly as safe. It's Amazonbif Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals. Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of "sour 13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada. But even Silk Road has limits: You won't find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction." Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don't point your browser there yet. It's only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure. Once you're there, it's hard to believe that Silk Road isn't simply a scam. Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake "online pharmacies" that dupe the dumb and flaccid. There's no sly, Craigslist-style code names here. But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit. Mark's acid worked as advertised. "It was quite enjoyable, to be honest," he said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some "silver haze" pot purchased off Silk Road. "It was legit," he said. "It was better than anything I've seen." Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer wrote on his profile: "Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived exactly as described." They gave the transaction five points out of five. "Our community is amazing," Silk Road's anonymous administrator, known on forums as "Silk Road," told us in an email. "They are generally bright, honest and fair people, very understanding, and willing to cooperate with each other." Sellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road's users with computer forensics, they'd have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user's tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to "creatively disguise" their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn't accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins. Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders' computers. (The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits. To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That's probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience. Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision. Many of its users come from Bitcoin's utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy drugs. Silk Road's administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of Agorism. "The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and all forms of coercion," Silk Road wrote to us. "Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market." Mark, the LSD buyer, had similar views. "I'm a libertarian anarchist and I believe that anything that's not violent should not be criminalized," he said. But not all Bitcoin enthusiasts embrace Silk Road. Some think the association with drugs will tarnish the young technology, or might draw the attention of federal authorities. "The real story with Silk Road is the quantity of people anxious to escape a centralized currency and trade," a longtime bitcoin user named Maiya told us in a chat. "Some of us view Bitcoin as a real currency, not drug barter tokens." Silk Road and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution. But anonymity cuts both ways. How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she gets? As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can blur. Update: Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log, though the identities of all the parties are anonymous, law enforcement could use sophisticated network analysis techniques to parse the transaction flow and track down individual Bitcoin users. "Attempting major illicit transactions with bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb," he says.

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EDRi-gram newsletter - Number 9.11, 1 June 2011
by Eugen Leitl 02 Jun '11

02 Jun '11

----- Forwarded message from EDRI-gram newsletter <edrigram(a)edri.org> -----

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Звонки по России √ 1 рубль.
by Tyler Goodrich 02 Jun '11

02 Jun '11

Услуги связи для организаций! Офисная АТС - бесплатно Звонки по России – 1 рубль. Звонки на мобильные – 1 рубль. Звонки в Москву – 50 копеек. Безлимитные звонки по России 1990 рублей в месяц ПОДКЛЮЧИМ В ЛЮБОМ ГОРОДЕ РОССИИ. БЕЗ ПРОТЯЖКИ ПРОВОДОВ, БЕЗ СОГЛАСОВАНИЙ С АРЕНДОДАТЕЛЕМ Наш телефон: 8-(495)-668-O856 www.lekstel.net СОХРАНЕНИЕ НОМЕРА ПРИ ПЕРЕЕЗДЕ Возможно подключение вашей атс по SIP

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HCG Diet Drops - Rapid Weight Loss - Best Quality!
by Aide Antonetta 02 Jun '11

02 Jun '11

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Налоговая оптимизация. Виртуальная группа компаний
by Аффилированность в холдингах 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

О6 июня 2011 г. Создание виртуального холдинга для оптимизации налогообложения. +7 (код Москвы) Ч/45*Ч*0-95 \\\/// ЧЧ5*32-66 Цель: На занятиях будут рассмотрены организационно-правовые, экономико-правовые аспекты создания и деятельности холдингов; вопросы управления холдингом, взаимодействие с дочерними и зависимыми компаниями Программа: 1. Понятие и принципы налогового планирования: платить налоги, но не переплачивать. Как можно и как нельзя оптимизировать налоги с учетом изменений законодательства, судебной практики и тенденций развития правоприменения. "Черные", "серые" и "белые" схемы. "Метод холдинга" в налоговом планировании. Понятие виртуального холдинга как средства налогового планирования. Рациональное построение финансовых потоков и договорных отношений в холдинге через разделение оборотов, капитала (прибыли), активов, персонала, отношений с контрагентами и рисков. Элементы холдинга √ Операционные компании, Управляющая или финансирующая компания (Казначейство), Хранитель активов, Торговый дом (Снабжающая или закупочная организация), Центры обслуживания (Кадровые центры), риск-структуры и их роли в налоговом планировании. 2. Методы планирования налога на прибыль и НДС в холдингах Низконалоговые субъекты (ННС): * субъекты специальных налоговых режимов √ ЕНВД и УСН, в т.ч. патентная система, а также субъекты УСН из "низконалоговых" регионов, где введена минимальная ставка единого налога при объекте "доходы минус расходы" (5-7%) на все или почти на все виды деятельности, а также простое товарищество с их участием, * зарубежные офшоры или связанные с ними компании-нерезиденты из респектабельных юрисдикций, * экзотические варианты: ИП на общей системе, физлица (при условии несистематичности извлечения дохода), "инвалидные" структуры, убыточные предприятия и фирмы, имеющие переплату НДС, 3. "Недобросовестные налогоплательщики" и контактирующие с ними риск-структуры: как нельзя "оптимизировать". Принципиальная невозможность экономии НДС "белыми" схемами и случаи, когда это все же возможно. 4. Способы переноса налогооблагаемой базы по налогу на прибыль на низконалоговых субъектов: * нефиктивные услуги, работы, * выплата процентов по долговым обязательствам. Включение процентов в расходы в любом размере, * платежи за использование и обслуживание объектов основных средств и нематериальных активов, в т.ч. франчайзинговые, * штрафные санкции, возмещение убытков, включая демередж и прочий простой, * платежи за увеличенный срок и/или объем гарантийных обязательств, * плата за залог или поручительство, делькредере. * механизм трансфертных цен, 5. Условия их применения: Непритворный характер заключаемых сделок. Экономическая целесообразность расходов ("деловая цель", "легенда", отсутствие дублирующихся функций). Грамотное обоснование трансфертных цен. Неаффилированность, прямые и косвенные признаки аффилированности, ее негативные последствия и когда она допустима; "искусственное дробление бизнеса с целью уклонения от уплаты налогов" (подход "как к ЮКОСу"); "деловые цели", обосновывающие деление бизнеса. Самостоятельность низконалоговых субъектов. 6. Безналоговые способы передачи денежных средств в холдинге. Займы и аналогичные им договоры как способ возвратного рефинансирования √ преимущества и недостатки, риск ведения незаконной банковской деятельности. Рефинансирование и капитализация прибыли предприятия (холдинга) через уставной капитал, безвозмездную передачу имущества или добавочный капитал. Ст. 27 Закона "Об ООО". Другие способы безвозвратного рефинансирования. 7. Простое товарищество субъектов упрощенной системы налогообложения, в т.ч. из "низконалоговых" регионов. Нужно или нет платить НДС? Перенос прибыли товарищества на низконалоговых субъектов (УСН 6%, ЕНВД, офшор и др.). Отсрочка уплаты налога при непередаче прибыли на счета товарищей. Возможен ли обход с помощью простого товарищества правил налогового учета (гл. 25 НК) и ограничений гл. 26.2 НК РФ в части перечня затрат? 8. Экономия НДС в производстве, выполнении работ, оказании услуг через разделение финансовых потоков "с НДС" и "без НДС". Ограничение использования: покупатели/заказчики, не нуждающиеся в вычете НДС, как их выявить или создать искусственно. 9. Создание рациональной финансовой и организационной холдинговой структуры, схемы товарно-финансовых потоков и договорных отношений холдинга. Оперативное распределение налоговой нагрузки между участниками холдинга. Реальный пример комплексного налогового планирования в холдингах. 10. Принципы налогового планирования использования основных средств. Формирование холдинговой структуры для целей минимизации налогообложения имущества. "Хранитель активов" (лицо √ собственник имущественного комплекса). Низконалоговые и безналоговые способы передачи имущества "Хранителю активов". 11. Принципы налогового планирования (оптимизации) выплаты заработной платы в холдинге. Дивидендные схемы √ замена выплаты зарплате на "упрощенке"? Договоры с предпринимателем: возмездного оказания услуг, выполнения работ, агентский, транспортные услуги, механизм трансфертных цен, штрафные санкции, аренда и пр. Расчеты эффективности. Краткий обзор других (компенсационных, процентных и прочих) схем выплаты низконалогового дохода. 12. Встраивание иностранных (в т.ч. низконалоговых) компаний в структуру российских холдингов. Защита владения и скрытие собственника, уход от аффилированности, использование для оптимизации налога на прибыль: традиционные (торговля, проценты, дивиденды, роялти, услуги, и т.п.) и нетрадиционные схемы (простое товарищество, агентские). Выбор юрисдикций. 13. Обзор изменений налогового законодательства в 2011 г., как они повлияли на налоговые схемы. Ответы на вопросы. Стоимость участия:═7═900 рублей По вопpоcам подробной информации и pегucтаpацuu обpащайтеcь по тел: код: (четыре девять пять) 792_21_22 или 4Ч_53\96_8

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Re: Never underestimate the value of looking rich
by Emmanuel Weeks 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

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hi Cypherpunks, Patek philippe never goes out of style
by Evelyn Daniel 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

The person is rich also successful, faultless appearance if experts do not distinguish a difference - what for to pay more? GMT anniversary model - discounted price today http://widg.me/DSlew

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Секретарь, офис-менеджер, помощник руководителя
by Помощник руководителя 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

ДЕЛОПРОИЗВОДСТВО - ОРГАНИЗАЦИЯ ДОКУМЕНТООБОРОТА ПРЕДПРИЯТИЯ Информацию можно получить по телефонам: (код Москвы)/7Ч-29I/98 **** 792\2122 О7 июня 2011 года Программа мероприятия 1-й день: Нормативно-правовые акты по делопроизводству. Основные категории документов. Создание Табеля унифицированных форм документов предприятия. Правила оформления документов. Виды бланков. Наиболее распространенные погрешности при разработке фирменных бланков организации. Распорядительные документы Признаки юридической силы документа. Особенности оформления и хранения документов по личному составу. Справочно-информационные документы. Деловое письмо. Рекомендации, которыми не следует пренебрегать. Правила заверения копий документов в организации. Совершенствование делопроизводственных процессов. Контроль исполнения. Составление номенклатуры дел. Формирование и оформление дел. Что должен знать и уметь секретарь при подготовке и передаче дел на архивное хранение Практическая работа с документами. СОВРЕМЕННЫЙ СЕКРЕТАРЬ, ОФИС-МЕНЕДЖЕР: ФУНКЦИОНАЛЬНЫЕ ОБЯЗАННОСТИ И ЭТИКЕТ СЛУЖЕБНЫХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ 08 Июня 2011 гoда Программа мероприятия 2-й день: Корпоративная культура: фирменный стиль организации. Имидж секретаря. Международный стандарт. Функциональные обязанности секретаря. Личные и профессиональные качества. Деловое общение: правила этикета при приветствии и представлении. Виды визитных карточек и правила использования. Характерные ошибки в оформлении и использовании. Функции секретаря по организации приема посетителей. "Традиционные" ошибки при приеме деловых партнеров и посетителей. Международные правила дарения и принятия подарков и сувениров. Взаимоотношения с сотрудниками и руководством. Использование психологических дистанций и жестов в деловой обстановке. Культура деловой речи. Правильно ли мы ставим ударения? Телефонные переговоры: забытые истины. Виды приемов. Гастрономический этикет. Стоимость участия 1 дня: 6 200 рублей Стоимость участия за 2 дня: 10 540 рублей За более подробной информацuей обpащайтеcь по тел: \Моск. код/ 4Ч5\3/9.6.8 \\// 4Ч\54\О95

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intelligence agencies tracking metaphors
by Eugen Leitl 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/why-are-spy-researche… Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'? By Alexis Madrigal May 25 2011, 4:19 PM ET 27 A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors. That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset. "The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time. IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages. "IARPA grants are big," said Jennifer Carter of Applied Research Associates, a 1,600-strong research company that may throw its hat in the Metaphor ring after winning a lead research spot in a separate IARPA solicitation. While no one knows the precise value of the rewards of the IARPA grants and the contracts are believed to vary widely, they tend to support several large teams of multidisciplinary researchers, Carter said. The awards, which would initially go to several teams, could range into the five digits annually. "Generally what happens... there will be a 'downselect' each year, so maybe only one team will get money for the whole program," she said.* All this to say: The Metaphor Program may represent a nine-figure investment by the government in understanding how people use language. But that's because metaphor studies aren't light or frilly and IARPA isn't afraid of taking on unusual sounding projects if they think they might help intelligence analysts sort through and decode the tremendous amounts of data pouring into their minds. In a presentation to prospective research "performers," as they're known, The Metaphor Program's manager, Heather McCallum-Bayliss gave the following example of the power of metaphors in political discussions. Her slide reads: Metaphors shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs. A study presented participants with a report on crime in a city; they were asked how crime should be addressed in the city. The report contained statistics, including crime and murder rates, as well as one of two metaphors, CRIME AS A WILD BEAST or CRIME AS A VIRUS. The participants were influenced by the embedded metaphor... McCallum-Bayliss appears to be referring to a 2011 paper published in the PLoS ONE, "Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning," lead authored by Stanford's Paul Thibodeau. In that case, if people were given the crime-as-a-virus framing, they were more likely to suggest social reform and less likely to suggest more law enforcement or harsher punishments for criminals. The differences generated by the metaphor alternatives were "were larger than those that exist between Democrats and Republicans, or between men and women," the study authors noted. Every writer (and reader) knows that there are clues to how people think and ways to influence each other through our use of words. Metaphor researchers, of whom there are a surprising number and variety, have formalized many of these intuitions into whole branches of cognitive linguistics using studies like the one outlined above (more on that later). But what IARPA's project calls for is the deployment of spy resources against an entire language. Where you or I might parse a sentence, this project wants to parse, say, all the pages in Farsi on the Internet looking for hidden levers into the consciousness of a people. "The study of language offers a strategic opportunity for improved counterterrorist intelligence, in that it enables the possibility of understanding of the Other's perceptions and motivations, be he friend or foe," the two authors of Computational Methods for Counterterrorism wrote. "As we have seen, linguistic expressions have levels of meaning beyond the literal, which it is critical to address. This is true especially when dealing with texts from a high-context traditionalist culture such as those of Islamic terrorists and insurgents." In the first phase of the IARPA program, the researchers would simply try to map from the metaphors a language used to the general affect associated with a concept like "journey" or "struggle." These metaphors would then be stored in the metaphor repository. In a later stage, the Metaphor Program scientists will be expected to help answer questions like, "What are the perspectives of Pakistan and India with respect to Kashmir?" by using their metaphorical probes into the cultures. Perhaps, a slide from IARPA suggests, metaphors can tell us something about the way Indians and Pakistanis view the role of Britain or the concept of the "nation" or "government." The assumption is that common turns of phrase, dissected and reassembled through cognitive linguistics, could say something about the views of those citizens that they might not be able to say themselves. The language of a culture as reflected in a bunch of text on the Internet might hide secrets about the way people think that are so valuable that spies are willing to pay for them. More Than Words IARPA is modeled on the famed DARPA -- progenitors of the Internet among other wonders -- and tasked with doing high-risk, high-reward research for the many agencies, the NSA and CIA among them, that make up the American intelligence-gathering force. IARPA is, as you might expect, a low-profile organization. Little information is available from the organization aside from a couple of interviews that its administrator, Lisa Porter, a former NASA official, gave back in 2008 to Wired and IEEE Spectrum. Neither publication can avoid joking that the agency is like James Bond's famous research crew, but it turns out that the place is more likely to use "cloak-and-dagger" in a sentence than in actual combat with supervillainy. A major component of the agency's work is data mining and analysis. IARPA is split into three program offices with distinct goals: Smart Collection "to dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources"; Incisive Analysis "to maximize insight from the information we collect, in a timely fashion"; and Safe & Secure Operations "to counter new capabilities implemented by our adversaries that would threaten our ability to operate freely and effectively in a networked world." The Metaphor Program falls under the office of Incisive Analysis and is headed by the aforementioned McCallum-Bayliss, a former technologist at Lockheed Martin and IBM, who co-filed several patents relating to the processing of names in databases. Incisive Analysis has put out several calls for other projects. They range widely in scope and domain. The Babel Program seeks to "demonstrate the ability to generate a speech transcription system for any new language within one week to support keyword search performance for effective triage of massive amounts of speech recorded in challenging real-world situations." ALADDIN aims to create software to automatically monitor massive amounts of video. The FUSE Program is trying to "develop automated methods that aid in the systematic, continuous, and comprehensive assessment of technical emergence" using the scientific and patent literature. All three projects are technologically exciting, but none of those projects has the poetic ring nor the smell of humanity of The Metaphor Program. The Metaphor Program wants to understand what human beings mean through the unvoiced emotional inflection of our words. That's normally the work of an examined life, not a piece of spy software. There is some precedent for the work. It comes from two directions: cognitive linguistics and natural language processing. On the cognitive linguistic side, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley did the foundational work, notably in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By. As summarized recently by Zoltan Kvvecses in his book, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, Lakoff and Johnson showed that metaphors weren't just the devices of writers but rather "a valuable cognitive tool without which neither poets nor you and I as ordinary people could live." In this school of cognitive linguistics, we need to use more embodied, concrete domains in order to describe more abstract ones. Researchers assembled the linguistic expressions we use like "That class gave me food for thought" and "His idea was half-baked" into a construct called a "conceptual category." These come in the form of awesomely simple sentences like "Ideas Are Food." And there are whole great lists of them. (My favorites: Darkness Is a Solid; Time Is Something Moving Toward You; Happiness Is Fluid In a Container; Control Is Up.) The conceptual categories show that humans use one domain ("the source") to describe another ("the target"). So, take Ideas Are Food: thinking is preparing food and understanding is digestion and believing is swallowing and learning is eating and communicating is feeding. Put simply: We import the logic of the source domain into the target domain. Below, you can check out how one, "Ideas Are Food," is expressed, or skip past the gallery to the rest of the story. Ideas are Food 1 Full Screen The main point here is that metaphors, in this sense, aren't soft or literary in any narrow sense. Rather, they are a deep and fundamental way that humans make sense of the world. And unfortunately for spies who want to filter the Internet to look for dangerous people, computers can't make much sense out of sentences like, "We can make beautiful music together," which Google translates as something about actually playing music when, of course, it really means, "We can be good together." (Or as the conceptual category would phrase it: "Interpersonal Harmony Is Musical Harmony.") While some of the underlying structures of the metaphors -- the conceptual categories -- are near universal (e.g. Happy Is Up), there are many variations in their range, elaboration, and emphasis. And, of course, not every category is universal. For example, Kvvecses points to a special conceptual category in Japanese centered around the hara, or belly, "Anger Is (In The) Hara." In Zulu, one finds an important category, "Anger Is (Understood As Being) In the Heart," which would be rare in English. Alternatively, while many cultures conceive of anger as a hot fluid in a container, it's in English that we "blow off steam," a turn of phrase that wouldn't make sense in Zulu. These relationships have been painstakingly mapped by human analysts over the last 30 years and they represent a deep culturolinguistic knowledge base. For the cognitive linguistic school, all of these uses of language reveal something about the way the people of a culture understand each other and the world. And that's really the target of the metaphor program, and what makes it unprecedented. They're after a deeper understanding of the way people use words because the deep patterns encoded in language may help intelligence analysts understand the people, not just the texts. For Lakoff, it's about time that the government started taking metaphor seriously. "There have been 30 years of neglect of current linguistics in all government-sponsored research," he told me. "And finally there is somebody in the government who has managed to do something after many years of trying." UC San Diego's Bergen agreed. "It's a totally unique project," he said. "I've never seen anything like it." But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to create a system that can automatically deduce what Americans' biases about education from a statement like "The teacher spoon-fed the students." Lakoff contends that it will take a long, sustained effort by IARPA (or anyone else) to complete the task. "The quick-and-dirty way" won't work, he said. "Are they going to do a serious scientific account?" Building a Metaphor Machine The metaphor problem is particularly difficult because we don't even know what the right answers to our queries are, Bergen said. "If you think about other sorts of automation of language processing, there are right answers," he said. "In speech recognition, you know what the word should be. So you can do statistical learning. You use humans, tag up a corpus and then run some machine learning algorithms on that. Unfortunately, here, we don't know what the right answers are." For one, we don't really have a stable way of telling what is and what is not metaphorical language. And metaphorical language is changing all the time. Parsing text for metaphors is tough work for humans and we're made for it. The kind of intensive linguistic analysis that's made Lakoff and his students (of whom Bergen was one) famous can take a human two hours for every 500 words on the page. But it's that very difficulty that makes people want to deploy computing resources instead of human beings. And they do have some directions that they could take. James Martin of the University of Colorado played a key role in the late 1980s and early 1990s in defining the problem and suggesting a solution. Martin contended "the interpretation of novel metaphors can be accomplished through the systematic extension, elaboration, and combination of knowledge about already well-understood metaphors," in a 1988 paper. What that means is that within a given domain -- say, "the family" in Arabic -- you can start to process text around that. First you'll have humans go in and tag up the data, finding the metaphors. Then, you'd use what they learned about the target domain "family" to look for metaphorical words that are often associated with it. Then, you run permutations on those words from the source domain to find other metaphors you might not have before. Eventually you build up a repository of metaphors in Arabic around the domain of family. Of course, that's not exactly what IARPA's looking for, but it's where the research teams will be starting. To get better results, they will have to start to learn a lot more about the relationships between the words in the metaphors. For Lakoff, that means understanding the frames and logics that inform metaphors and structure our thinking as we use them. For Bergen, it means refining the rules by which software can process language. There are three levels of analysis that would then be combined. First, you could know something about the metaphorical bias of an individual word. Crossroads, for example, is generally used in metaphorical terms. Second, words in close proximity might generate a bias, too. "Knockout in the same clause as 'she' has a much higher probability of being metaphorical if it's in close proximity to 'he,'" Bergen offered as an example. Third, for certain topics, certain words become more active for metaphorical usage. The economy's movement, for example, probably maps to a source domain of motion through space. So, accelerate to describe something about the economy is probably metaphorical. Create a statistical model to combine the outputs of those three processes and you've got a brute-force method for identifying metaphors in a text. In this particular competition, there will be more nuanced approaches based on parsing the more general relationships between words in text: sorting out which are nouns and how they connect to verbs, etc. "If you have that information, then you can find parts of sentences that don't look like they should be there," Bergen explained. A classic kind of identifier would be a type mismatch. "If I am the verb 'smile,' I like to have a subject that has a face," he said. If something without a face is smiling, it might be an indication that some kind of figurative language is being employed. >From these constituent parts -- and whatever other wild stuff people cook up -- the teams will try to build a metaphor machine that can convert a language into underlying truths about a culture. Feed text in one end and wait on the other end of the Rube Goldberg software for a series of beliefs about family or America or power. We might never be able to build such a thing. Indeed, I get the feeling that we can't, at least not yet. But what if we can? "Are they going to use it wisely?" Lakoff posed. "Because using it to detect terrorists is not a bad idea, but then the question is: Are they going to use it to spy on us?" I don't know, but I know that as an American I think through these metaphors: Problem Is a Target; Society Is a Body; Control Is Up. * This section of the story was updated to more accurately reflect the intent of Carter's statement.

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Biopunks, biohackers, and the movement to own your own DNA
by Eugen Leitl 01 Jun '11

01 Jun '11

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/05/biopunks_biohackers_and_the_mo.php Biopunks, biohackers, and the movement to own your own DNA Category: Biology b" Policy and Politics Posted on: May 25, 2011 2:07 AM, by Josh Rosenau On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They'd do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year's worth of their online subscription service. A much smaller version of that same genome survey would have cost you a thousand dollars or more only a couple of years ago. For your money, you get data on single nucleotide polymorphisms at about a million spots in your chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA: mutations that can tell you about your ancestors' migrations across the globe, about your propensity for certain diseases, and about various behaviors and traits, from eye color or hair color and on to the ability to detect the odd odor some people's urine emits after they eat asparagus. For the price (nearly free up front, and a modest cost for the online community provided), my wife and I jumped on the deal. Since I got the results back two weeks ago, I've been exploring not only the services and information provided by 23 and Me, but the various other tools that individuals have started producing to help analyze and investigate this insight into my ubiquitous but invisible DNA. Declining cost of sequencing DNAIn years to come, the ability to learn about our personal genetic information, and other personal molecular biology, will only increase. The cost of sequencing DNA keeps dropping, and the level of detail possible through microarrays like those used by services like 23andMe keeps growing. At the same time, the amount of information available about the effects of individual genes and individual gene mutations is rising rapidly. The possibilities are tremendous, but this is not without its risks. My genome, for instance, revealed a genetic predisposition towards late-onset Alzheimers. The odds of getting Alzheimers are still quite small, but elevated because of this particular mutation to the APOE4 gene. This wasn't a total surprise, given my family history, and as a healthy, young guy with a background in biology and biostatistics, it wasn't hard for me to put that information into a context and move on. Down the road, I'll probably keep an eye out for new research on Alzheimers medicines and look into tools for early detection, but I'm not going to kill myself if I forget my keys. (Thanks to the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the Affordable Care Act's prohibition on "pre-existing conditions" - not to mention the inherent uncertainties in translating this genetic result to a specific outcome - I'm not especially worried about discussing that result in public). But I can see how someone with a different background, different family history, different training, or different genetic risks, might find these results scary. A 30 year-old woman with certain mutations related to breast cancer could be advised to undergo prophylactic double mastectomies, a decidedly fraught decision. Because of that tension, the FDA and Congress (as well as state regulators in New York and California) have held hearings into the practices of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing services like 23andMe, questioning whether the tests should be treated as medical devices, whether results should have to be passed to consumers through a doctor or a trained genetic counselor, thus increasing the cost and making the services inaccessible to folks with low income or without health insurance. Critics note that most doctors haven't got the background to say anything informative about the results. They also raise a more fundamental objection, one at the heart of Marcus Wohlsen's fascinating new book Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life. They argue that our DNA is as much a part of ourselves as our hair color or height, and that we have as much a right to access and explore that genetic information as we have to find out about our hair and skin and eyes and teeth. DNA is not destiny, but it is certainly a key part of who we are, and we shouldn't have to rely on intermediaries to be able to interpret the results. Wohlsen chronicles the nascent movement of folks taking this a step further, not just using the increasing ubiquity of genetic information to learn about themselves, but using the increasing ubiquity of molecular biology equipment and information to turn biotechnology and molecular biology research into a sort of hobby. Some - like the folks at OpenPCR who I met at Maker Faire last weekend - are working to make the equipment needed cheaper and easier to build on your own and to reconfigure and tweak for your own needs. Others are using results from genetic tests as a basis for research into their own biology, with one person conducting a small clinical trial among people with a shared mutation, to help him find out which vitamin supplements would be most readily absorbed into his body (give his particular genetics), to help him avert a disease his genetic screening revealed he was likely to experience. Another biopunk converted her apartment closet into a biotech lab so that she could create a simple, cheap genetic test for hemochromatosis, a difficult-to-diagnose genetic disease which affected her father, but which her insurance company wouldn't pay to test her for. Most of the biopunks Wohlsen introduces us to aren't trying to cure diseases or create genetic tests. They surely wouldn't mind if they changed the world somehow, but their interest in DIY biology is driven more by a sense of personal exploration and a pure fascination with how things work. The goal, one of these biopunks explains, is to "increase the tinkerability" of biology, "simplifying and domesticating" it to make it accessible to anyone who wants to play with it. Groups like the Bay area's Biocurious aim to create communal molecular biology labs which anyone can join and tinker in; Biocurious will open its lab this summer in Mountain View, not far from Google and the researchers at NASA's Ames facility. Wohlsen, an AP reporter who covers the Bay Area biotech industry, does a brilliant job bringing us inside this movement, and exploring the hopes and enthusiasm of its advocates. He acknowledges the concerns that exist, but nicely defuses concerns that DIYbio could simplify bioterrorism. A terrorist could accomplish all they might wish without any of the new technology coming out, and the supply companies which will sell you custom stretches of DNA and other essential tools of molecular biology are, by Wohlsen's account, smart and ethical enough to screen out dangerous gene sequences. I'm fascinated by this movement for various reasons. Partly because I know that this is the future, and it's awe-inspiring to see this unfold, to see molecular biology join insect collecting, bird-watching, and astronomy among the sciences people bring home as hobbies. There's tremendous power there, and tremendous opportunity, and I wish I'd paid more attention to molecular biology in school so I could take part. But I'm also fascinated because this is the future even for people whose aversion to biochemistry is even greater than my own. Just as everyone in the mid- to late 20th century needed some grasp of physics to be able to think sensibly about nuclear energy, nuclear war, and a host of related issues, the 21st century is sure to be dominated by biology. And DIYbio can play a key role in democratizing science, precisely because it's more focused on what's neat than on what's likely to turn up a new Nobel Prize or a new patent and venture funding for a biotech startup. Its openness will be a great strength as a tool for improving science literacy, and biopunks know it. Wohlsen quotes from Meredith Patterson's Biopunk Manifesto: Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can do science.... Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them. This is a point I constantly return to in my own work on evolution education. Within the lifetime of a student in high school today, the cost of genome sequencing will surely drop low enough that a genome sequence will be a standard part of everyone's medical chart. To understand that wealth of information, doctors and patients will need to be able to understand the common ancestry of life, and the evolutionary forces driving the differences in genes and their effects between humans and model organisms like mice and flies and roundworms. Increasingly, doctors without that context will be worse doctors, and patients without that context will be worse patients: less involved in their own care, and less able to understand the advice their doctors will be giving them. They'll be less able to understand new discoveries when they are reported in mass media. They'll be cut off from an essential part of themselves. It's clear that Wohlsen, like me and the opponents of FDA regulation of DTC genetic testing, agrees with the idea that this information is and must be our own, to play with and interpret as we see fit. Biopunks, with their commitment to the idea that "knowledge set free will empower everyone," are trying to change society and prepare it for the potential of the revolutions happening in biology today. Wohlsen summarizes: Do-it-yourself biotech strives to bring biotech out of these closed-off [academic and industrial lab] spaces and give it to the public. Whether the public actually wants to have it is another question. Do-it-yourself biologists believe they should want it, if only because they have a right to it. Here, DIYers say. This is yours. Because DNA is us. ... Biopunks have not achieved any major scientific breakthroughs. Maybe they never will. But they all exhibit a goofy joy in what they do, like they're getting away with something. Because rather than wait for science to be done to them, they have decided to do science. That's a vision I agree with, and a movement I want to be part of. Most of my reason for getting my own genetic analysis was precisely so I could explore these same ideas, and so I could have first-hand experience that could inform my opinion on policy decisions being made today which will affect the future of this fascinating movement. Whether or not you decide to look under the hood at your own DNA, I'd encourage you to read Wohlsen's book and think about the issues it raises.

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