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n2doc's JournalScientists have developed a monkey-english translator
By Joshua A. Krisch
There is a mystery on Tiwai Island. A large wildlife sanctuary in Sierra Leone, the island is home to pygmy hippopotamuses, hundreds of bird species and several species of primates, including Campbell’s monkeys. These monkeys communicate via an advanced language that primatologists and linguists have been studying for decades. Over time, experts nearly cracked the code behind monkey vocabulary.
And then came krak. In the Ivory Coast’s Tai Forest Campbell’s monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli) use the term krak to indicate that a leopard is nearby and the term hok to warn of an eagle circling overheard. Primatologists indexed their monkey lexicon accordingly. But on Tiwai Island they found that those same monkeys used krak as a general alarm call—one that, occasionally, even referred to eagles.
“Why on Earth were they producing krak when they heard an eagle,” asks co-author Philippe Schlenker, a linguist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research and professor at New York University. “For some reason krak, which is a leopard in the Tai Forest, seems to be recycled as a general alarm call on Tiwai Island.”
In a paper published in the November 28 Linguistics and Philosophy Schlenker and his team applied logic and human linguistics to crack the krak code. Their findings imply that some monkey dialects can be just as sophisticated as human language.
more
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkey-see-monkey-speak-video/
The Myth of the Megalith
BY ELIF BATUMAN
Baalbek, Lebanon, is the site of one of the most mysterious ruins of the Roman Empire, a monumental two-thousand-year-old temple to Jupiter that sits atop three thousand-ton stone blocks. (The pillars of Stonehenge weigh about a fortieth of that.) The blocks originated in a nearby limestone quarry, where a team from the German Archaeological Institute, in partnership with Jeanine Abdul Massih, of Lebanese University, recently discovered what they are calling the largest stone block from antiquity, weighing one thousand six hundred and fifty tons and matching those that support the temple. Its provenance is more shadowy than one might expect of a three-million-pound megalith. Nobody seems to know on whose orders it was cut, or why, or how it came to be abandoned.
Baalbek is named for Baal, the Phoenician deity, although the Romans knew the site by its Greek name, Heliopolis. The historian Dell Upton has noted the unusual lack of documentation regarding who might have commissioned, paid for, or designed the temple. For Upton, the site is a metaphor for the role of imaginative distortion in architectural history. In the absence of concrete information, he writes, Baalbek has become “a very accommodating screen upon which to project strikingly varied stories.” There are many local legends about the origin of the temple: Cain built it to hide from the wrath of God; giants built it, at Nimrod’s command, and it came to be called the Tower of Babel; Solomon built it, with djinns’ assistance, as a palace for the Queen of Sheba. (It is said that the reason some blocks were left in the quarry is that the djinns went on strike.)
Testimony to Baalbek’s flummoxing properties can be found in the 1860 diary of the Scottish traveller David Urquhart, whose mental capacities were “paralyzed” by “the impossibility of any solution.” Urquhart devotes several pages to the “riddles” posed by the giant stones—“so enormous, as to shut out every other thought, and yet to fill the mind only with trouble.” What, for example, was the point of cutting such enormous rocks? And why do it out there in the middle of nowhere, instead of in a capital or a port? Why were there no other sites that looked like Baalbek? And why had the work been abandoned midway? Urquhart concludes that the temple must have been built by contemporaries of Noah, using the same technological prowess that enabled the construction of the ark. Work was halted because of the flood, which swept away all the similar sites, leaving the enigma of Baalbek alone on the face of the earth.
Scholars today like to laugh at Urquhart, particularly at his alleged belief that mastodons transported the stones. (I didn’t see any reference to mastodons in his diary.) But archaeologists are still trying to solve the riddles that he posed. Margarete van Ess, a professor from the German Archaeological Institute, told me that the purpose of the investigation that turned up the new stone block was precisely to ascertain how the three temple blocks were transported, and why two others like them were left in the quarry. (One of these previously discovered megaliths, known as the Hajjar al-Hibla, or Stone of the Pregnant Woman, turned out to have a crack that would have impeded its transport.)
more
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/baalbek-myth-megalith
The US spent more to 'reconstruct' Afghanistan than it did to rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan
As the U.S. continues its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s worth taking a look at how much the nation has spent on aid–and how effective it has (or hasn’t) been.
Certainly, the numbers are high. A July quarterly report (PDF) released by special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction John F. Sopko declared that in passing $104 billion mark ”the United States will have committed more funds to reconstruct Afghanistan, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it spent on 16 European countries after World War II under the Marshall Plan.” It is safe to say that the $103.4 billion current-day dollars spent on the Marshall Plan led to better nation building, and critics were quick to malign much of the spending in Afghanistan as ill-conceived and poorly managed.
But as this Reuters graphic makes clear, a number of social and economic indicators describe an marked improvement quality of life in Afghanistan. Against the most recent numbers, Afghan life expectancy has jumped by 5 years since 2002 and total GDP has quintupled. In 2011, the number of children who died before the age of five was less than 40 percent of the 2003 figure, and the number of women dying in child birth was almost one-fifth the 2002 rate. Doctors per 1,000 people have tripled; access to reliable electricity has better than quadrupled; school enrollment has better than octupled; and high school enrollment has tripled.
In the long wars triggered by the 9/11 attacks, making people’s lives tangibly better beats torture every time, and the Taliban massacre of scores of Pakistani school children this week can’t be winning hearts and minds in the region. The war in Afghanistan has taken more than 3,400 U.S. and Coalition lives, with over 20,000 wounded, at a price tag of almost $1 trillion. It is important to recognize that some good has come from those costs.
http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2014/12/19/the-good-news-in-afghanistans-marshall-plan/
U.S. ends TARP with $15.3 billion profit
Source: CNN
The U.S. government essentially closed the books on TARP with a $15.3 billion profit.
Treasury sold its remaining shares Friday in Ally Financial, its last remaining major stake from the $426 billion bailout of banks and the U.S. auto industry.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program was passed in 2008, in the wake of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, as the nation's financial system was on the verge of collapse and economists feared another Great Depression. At the height of the bailout, Treasury owned a significant stake in all of the major U.S. banks, such as Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC), two of the nation's Big Three automakers -- General Motors (GM) and Chrysler Group (FCAM) -- as well as one of its largest insurers, AIG (AIG).
But with the sale of the Ally (ALLY) stock, Treasury now only holds stakes in 35 small community banks.
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/news/companies/government-bailouts-end/
Families flee out-of-control natural-gas leak at eastern Ohio fracking well
About 25 families in eastern Ohio have been unable to live in their houses for the past three days because of a natural-gas leak at a fracking well that crews cannot stop.
Bethany McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the state agency that regulates oil and gas, said crews lost control of the Monroe County well on Saturday.
Families were evacuated from about 25 houses within a 1.5-mile radius of the well, located near the Ohio River about 160 miles east of Columbus.
The well is not on fire, but the gas could be explosive. “There’s still a steady stream of natural gas coming from the wellhead,” McCorkle said yesterday.
more
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/12/17/families-flee-out-of-control-natural-gas-leak.html
Quantum physics just got less complicated
Here's a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. The result is published 19 December in Nature Communications.
Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner made the breakthrough while at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. They found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.
"The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system. Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information," says Wehner, who is now an Associate Professor at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The discovery deepens our understanding of quantum physics and could prompt ideas for new applications of wave-particle duality.
more
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-quantum-physics-complicated.html
Birds sensed imminent tornadoes, and escaped the day before, study finds
They may be tiny little songbirds, but U.S. researchers have discovered that golden-winged warblers are also keen weather predictors that know when to fly the coop when a dangerous storm is about to descend.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, the scientists say they made their finding by accident last April, as they were testing a new way to track the songbirds. Warblers weigh slightly more than a loonie and the researchers were trying out a new lightweight geolocator placed on the backs of 20 of the birds.
Nine of the birds kept the geolocators on as they migrated thousands of kilometres from South America to their breeding grounds in eastern Tennessee. But the researchers were puzzled when the geolocators revealed that the birds had suddenly taken a detour and headed back south.
About a day later, a huge supercell storm system moved in, spawning 84 tornadoes. In all, 35 people were killed in the devastating storms.
The evacuation saved the warblers, which were able to return to the breeding ground after the storm passed.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/birds-sensed-imminent-tornadoes-and-escaped-the-day-before-study-finds-1.2155508
The lack of any official condemnation for CIA torture ensures it will happen again
The details shocked. Shackled prisoners were treated like cattle, watched by their CIA interrogators. Testimony from one observer stated that men blindfolded and tied “were made to run down a steep hill, at the bottom of which were three throws of concertina barbed wire. The first row would hit them across the knees and they would plunge head first into the second and third rows of wire”.
This wasn’t CIA torture after the September 11 attacks, exposed in detail in a recent Senate report, but the Phoenix programme, instituted by the CIA and US, Australian and South Vietnamese militaries in Vietnam between 1965 and 1972 to “neutralise” the Vietcong. The result was more than 60,000 people tortured and killed. No senior politicians, generals or decision-makers were prosecuted for these crimes. A culture of immunity, despite occasional media and public outrage, thrived across the US.
Questioned before a US House operations subcommittee in the late 1960s to investigate widespread Phoenix-inspired torture, future CIA head William Colby used language that sounds familiar today. It’s just the official enemy that has changed. The “collateral damage” was justified, he said. Phoenix was “an essential part of the war effort … designed to protect the Vietnamese people from terrorism.”
In 2007, decades after its cessation, the CIA was still worried that the public felt Phoenix was an “unlawful and immoral assassination programme targeting civilians.” Instead, they claimed, it was “pacification and rural security programmes”.
more
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/the-lack-of-any-official-condemnation-for-cia-torture-ensures-it-will-happen-again
New Kansas jobs figures stun Sam Brownback, and not in a good way
The new Kansas jobs numbers were released Friday morning, bringing horrible news to state taxpayers and Gov. Sam Brownback.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the total number of nonfarm jobs in Kansas fell by 4,100 in November.
Kansas’ disturbing experience was at odds with how much of the rest of the country did. A total of 37 other states gained in employment in November, while only 13 others, including Kansas, dropped.
Missouri boosted employment by 4,500 in November, for instance, while Oklahoma gained 3,400 jobs. Two other neighbors, Nebraska and Colorado, were among the job losers, though not close to the number shredded in Kansas.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/yael-t-abouhalkah/article4668108.html
The beatings will continue until people wise up.
New York City’s best public schools are harder to get into than the Ivy Leagues
About 6%.
That was your child’s shot at being accepted to one of New York City’s gifted-and-talented programs this school year. A report out this morning from the city’s Independent Budget Office finds that 36,000 students took the test to get in—for only 2,200 kindergarten seats (and a handful in grades 1 to 3).
Of course, many more children qualified by scoring in the 90th percentile or above. But the IBO points out that “in recent years most of the G&T programs can only accommodate students ranking closest to the 99th percentile.” Indeed, a snapshot of the 5,400 qualified kindergarteners shows that very few of those who scored between the 90th and 96th percentile got a seat:
more
http://qz.com/315245/new-york-citys-best-public-schools-are-harder-to-get-into-than-the-ivy-leagues/
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