Hennes DNA länkades till 40 brottsplaster i Tyskland, Österrike och Frankrike. Jakten pågick i femton år. Polismördare, tjuv  och mycket annat kunde hon lägga till sina titlar. Fast till slut så verkar det som om det var en kvinna som paketerade topsarna man tog DNA-spår som förorenat dem. För ett år sedan skrev BBC om fantomkvinnan som man inte fick tag i:

The suspect, known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, is wanted in connection with 30 crimes, including six murders and dozens of robberies.

Ska bli spännande att se vad som händer i framtiden, nu när vi tex vet att en människa kan flera människors DNA i sig, pga gravididet, transplantion eller vara en naturlig chimera. I Tyskland har man f ö just släppt ett par tvillingar ur häktet. Man tror att båda gjort juvelstöten, men man kan inte bevisa det riktigt...

She was one of Germany's most-wanted criminals. Dubbed "The Phantom of Heilbronn" and "The Woman Without a Face," she apparently committed an extraordinary series of crimes across Germany over more than 15 years, including murders, break-ins and theft. Lab tests showed her DNA at 40 different crime scenes. Investigators had to admit they were stumped.

Läs mer: Q-Tip-Off: Police Fear 'Serial Killer' Was Just DNA Contamination - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

The most notorious case was in April 2007 in Heilbronn where a 22-year-old policewoman was shot dead and her colleague (25) seriously injured. On the back seat of the police car, detectives found what they thought was DNA from the mysterious killer. As part of the investigation, 800 previously convicted women were questioned - but there was no match to the sample. Her DNA was found over and over again: in bottles, tank lids, on bullets – and once even on a biscuit! Traces were found in southern Germany, Austria and France.

Läs mer: Phantom killer was a myth: Police track DNA of a cotton bud maker for two years - Bild.de

Det finns inte klimatförändringar - bara fel kläder.

Finn Ahrenkiel, Malmö Der findes ikke klimaforandringer - kun forkert påklædning.

Läs mer: Politiken.dk - det levende net

En nu 93-årig man var på affärsresa i Hiroshima när atombomben föll, och inte bar det sig bättre några dagar senare hemma i Nagasaki. Man måste ju undra just hur mycket posttraumatisk stress man får efter att ha blivit prickad av två atombomber...

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Ok, han blev nog inte rakt av prickad, men fick bl a brännskador.

Läs mer: Japanese man certified as double A-bomb victim - Boston.com

The bottom line of both studies is that P.S.A. screening does find more prostate cancers — but finding those cancers early doesn’t do much to reduce the risk of dying from the disease.

Läs mer: Well - Screen or Not? What Those Prostate Studies Mean - NYTimes.com

Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected.

Läs mer: Oozing Through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong - NYTimes.com

Learn how to salsa dance, including demonstrations of the basic steps, moves, turns and footwork of salsa dancing, in this series of free video dance lessons for beginners.

Läs mer: Salsa Dancing for Beginners | Expert Village Videos

Eller rättare sagt, våra vokalljud ligger ofta på intervaller som stämmer med musikaliska skalor. I alla fall i engelskan och på mandarin, tycks det som:

When people say the 'o' sound in rod, the ratio between the first two formants corresponds to a major sixth - the interval between C and A. When they say the 'oo' sound in booed, the ratio matches a major third - the gap between C and E. Ross found that every two in three vowel sounds contain a hidden musical interval. Her results didn't just apply to English either. Ross repeated her experiments with people who spoke Mandarin, a vastly different language where speakers use four different tones to change the meaning of each word.

Läs mer: Not Exactly Rocket Science : Why music sounds right - the hidden tones in our own speech

Det verkar som om en människas ansikte ger en viss vägledning till hur bra de är på att hantera pengar och inte sätta sig i skuld. Forskare använde webbsajten prosper.com, som kopplar ihop långivare och låntagare, för att få tag på information om folk som ville ta lån. Man anlitade sedan arbetskraft från Amazons mechanical turk, som fick sitta och avgöra kreditvärdighet från bara fotona på dessa personer. Mechanical Turk's sammanlagda bedömning korrelerade med låntagarnas ekonomiska bakgrund vad gäller att kunna hantera pengar.

The researchers looked at 6,821 loan applications, 733 of which were successful. Their first finding was that the assessments of trustworthiness, and of likelihood to repay a loan, that were made by Mechanical Turk workers did indeed correlate with potential borrowers’ credit ratings based on their credit history.

Läs mer: Physiognomy and moneylending | About face | The Economist

Recently, this blog was moved from one ISP to Amazon EC2. At the old location I used a perl script to periodically download 60 odd news sources in Atom and RSS formats, and then used some custom python code in combination with the feedparser module, to parse and present this in Plone. I used this for years and since the results were publically available I know at least one more person who used them (hi Johan!).

Yahoo pipes

With the new location I decided to ditch those old scripts and go for an external solution. The reason? It was so darn simple to do. Yahoo has an Internet control language called Yahoo pipes. It works by stringing together, visually, modules that each does a specific task, such as collecting data, filtering or aggregating. Data flows through connectors between the modules. The way it's done  brings back memories to me from the old visual programming language ProGraph.

With the old system I presented the five last entries for each news source, grouped by source. An effect of this is that I had to visually scan through a number of "stale" news sources that hadn't had anything updated for a while. Another way to present news feeds is to mash them all together and sort the on the item level. This is callled to make a "River of news". This is how I did it with Yahoo pipes:

That is just three modules, a fetch feed modules with a looong list of feed urls (the blue connector is coming up from the bottom of that module in the screen shot), a sorter, and the output. The sorter auto detects what criteria can be sorted on. You can see the output here. Click at the list tab to get away from the image flow.

To the left in the screen shot above you can see the modules available: Sources, user inputs, operators and more.

When you get what you wished for

Now, when I have a river of news feed, I realise that it is not always what you want. On of my sources lists popular keywords on Swedish blogs. That source is updated so frequently that the keywords often make it to near the top of my river of news. Some sources seem to give the same pub date to all their items, which means you will have to wade through them as you are, ehrm, I suppose "wading" in the river of news. Some news sources seem to give a new pub date for an item on any update of the item; I notice some news  persistently turning up among the top twenty items, when I know for a fact that I read that piece twelve hours ago. I also do not know right now how good Yahoo pipes is in mashing together different feed formats, such as Atom, RSS and versions of these.

Update 2009-03-23

There are a number of pipe construction on pipes.yahoo.com that deal with news feeds, and some are a lot more complicated than what I show above. This indicates that there is a lot of complexity to deal with still. About my complaint that some news items turn up on the front page long after they've been published, this seems to be a side effect of a subscription feed that shows the top x blogged about news items. So, the same news items "sticking" near the top of the combined feed is expected behaviour.

Vad gäller datorkomponenter, så finns det standarder för hur de ska kunna detektera och rapportera om något är fel på dem. En sådan standard heter S.M.A.R.T. Men den mänskliga kroppen har inget sådant system. Eller, jo det har det väl, men det är inte datoriserat. Men det kanske det blir i framtiden:

Finally, we have Toumaz, maker of a wearable body monitor similar to Sensewear, but apparently even more sophisticated and capable. The Toumaz system, called Sensium, provides ultra low power monitoring of ECG, temperature, blood glucose and oxygen levels. It can also interface to 3 axis accelerometers, pressure sensors and includes a temperature sensor on chip.

Läs mer: Body 2.0 - Continuous Monitoring Of The Human Body | Singularity Hub

I noticed today that Googles web crawler googlebot parses and executes javascript correctly, in such a way that it triggers Statcounter's logging function. My guess is that Statcounter will filter this out soon. In the meantime, visitor and page stats will be a bit inflated from this very browser like robot..

Kvinnornas mörkerseende var oförändrat när de var utan syrgas och när syrgashalten i blodet sjunkit till nivåer som råder på 4 000 meter nivå. Förklaringen är med stor sannolikhet att äldre har koldioxid i blodet, en viktig gas som bergsbestigaren andas ut vid den fysiska ansträngningen.

Läs mer: Malmöstudie: Bergbestigares mörkerseende sämre än åldringars - Malmö - Sydsvenskan - Nyheter dygnet runt

Jag försöker fortfarande få ett grepp på vad det här med finanskris är. Jag har haft på känn att det beror på att för många satt sina pengar på att framtiden ska se ut på precis ett sätt, men inte kunnat uttrycka det noggrannare. En finanskris borde ju vara en kris när det gäller att finansiera saker, dvs det finns inte pengar att göra saker för. Men vad är det, och vad innebär det? Man kan t ex inte köpa lastbilar, därför att dessa lånas det nästan alltid till, och ingen vill låna ut pengar.

Jaha, där har vi det. Ingen vågar låna ut pengar för de är inte säkra på att få igen dem. Är det så? Eller är det snarare så att risken i sig inte är så stor för banken, men banken "återförsäkrar" sig bakåt (hedgar) närhelst de lånar ut pengar, och det är det återförsäkringssystemet som har brakat ihop. Anledningen till att det har brakat ihop är att man inte längre har förtroende för de instrument som utgör det, dvs den kedja av kontrakt som finns. Dessa kontrakt är som ett slags vadslagningar om hur framtiden kommer att se. Marknaden har då gjort en kollektiv centrering av dessa på ett litet utfallsrum. Om man då plottar dessa i något slags histogram skulle man få en bellkurva som är väldigt hoptryckt till mitten, och när det verkliga utfallet sedan ligger en bit åt sidan så blir det väldigt många kontrakt som slår fel.

Men hur kan detta leda till att pengar försvinner? Jag antar att det beror på att man räknat hem för stor del av lånen som säkra (säg 90%). Det visar sig sedan att en mycket högre andel var osäkra än man trott, (säg 30%). Men det kan ju inte räcka för att ge en global finanskris!

Så det måste finnas något annat. På något sätt så amplifieras problemet. Det kunde vara lätt att säga att det är när problemet möter verkligheten, dvs när fler inte kan betala sin lån, så kan de inte konsumera eller nåt, men det räcker inte heller för att förklara, verkligheten är ju i motsats till ingångna finansiella kontrakt, enormt anpassningsbar.

Istället så måste amplifieringen nog ske genom att med hjälp av instrument gör samma vadslagning flera gånger, utan att gå vägen via verkligheten. Det är väl det som kallas leverage. Man gör en investering, sedan belånar man dem så att man kan göra mer av samma investering, belånar den, osv. Aha, det är så man gör för att sätta allt (och mer därtill) på ett exakt utfall av framtiden!

Jaha nu tror jag att jag förstår. Finanskrisen beror på leverage möjliggjord av en samsyn och flockmentalitet. Komplicerade finansiella instrument har gjort att folk inte fattat detta. Och när en svart svan kommer, eller när bara en tillräckligt störning inträffar, då brakar det. Pengarna fanns aldrig. De var funny money. Motivationen att jobba med hög leverage är att man kan ta en procent i kommission som i faktiska tal till slut blir enorm.

Med hedging har man byggt in "knutar" i det finansiella systemet, knutar som inte klarar förändring. De tornar upp sig som berg hotar att kollapsa över det finansiella landskapet, så snart marken sätter sig lite.

För en mer pedagogisk bloggpost på denna blogg, se finanskrisen förklarad.

..no matter where you are trying to transfer the file: It could be a file upload, an attachment to the e-mail your sending, or an unusually long e-mail. It is the same problem with different files and different destinations. Still web-surfing works just fine.

So what is the problem? The problem is the MTU setting of your network connection. The MTU setting controls the longest piece that can be transfered in one chunk over your network connection.  Sometimes Internet Everywhere has very bad performance and can only handle small chunks. You can get file transfer working again by setting MTU to a small value of 576.

On Ubuntu, you can do this for Internet Everywhere by typing:

sudo ifconfig hso0 mtu 576

Taken and modified from this guide. This is not a persistent setting though. For Windows there is also a way of changing the MTU but I have not looked it up since I do not need it right now.

Among the college sample, the vicious dogs were predominantly male and weighed 68 pounds. The owners had more self-reported overall criminal behaviors as well as violent criminal behavior. They endorsed significantly more sensation seeking and primary psychopathic traits.

Läs mer: Mind Hacks: Psychological characteristics of vicious dog owners

The results showed that people with slow reactions were 2.6 times more likely to die prematurely from any cause. Smoking was the only factor linked to a larger risk of death – as it made it 3.03 times more likely. Physical exercise, blood pressure, heart rate, waist-hip ratio, alcohol consumption and body-mass index all had a lesser effect.

Läs mer: The secret of long life? It's all down to how fast you react | Mail Online

Summary: At Whistles, 168 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London, E2 0RY Phone: 020 8981 2044 (Google map)

The Swiss shirtmaker Eterna makes cotton shirts that are non-iron. And they really are. You can wash them at 60 degrees, and then tumble them dry, and somehow they come out of this process as if they had been ironed. I've been using them for ten years and have only worn out one so far.

Searching for these shirts in London on the Internet turned out to be almost impossible. You get at fair number of hits in the UK, but they are all located outside of London, with Surrey being the closest.

But not one to give up, I located the Eterna company's German home page and eventually found a list of resellers in the UK. Only five of these were in London, and one had stopped carrying them and another one only took them in on request. Whistles turned out to be the one store that both carried them and was readily accessible from the Tube.

Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating "terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinized undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.

Läs mer: Schneier on Security: Privacy in the Age of Persistence

Numera finns det program som kan identifiera vilka personer som finns på ett foto, givet att programmet fått träna lite innan. Google har ett online-fotoalbumprogram, Picasa,  som lär sig att känna igen ansikten och klassificera dem med namn och e-postadress. Det innebär i praktiken att de som använder Picasa på detta sätt hjälper till att bygga upp en databas till Google, som kan hitta människor på utseendet. Steget är ju inte så långt att använda denna information i övervakningskameror. Det innebär ju om systemet kopplas ihop att man kan spåra en person på utseendet världen över. Det är lite läskigt.

Fast det är klart att på global skala så måste det finnas en hel del som ser likadana ut med dagens teknik. Med dagens teknik...

Google takes every photo that you've uploaded to Picasa, searches them all for faces, then "clusters"these faces into groups of, supposedly, the same people. You then go through each group and tell Google who a person is--including his or her full name, nickname, and e-mail address.

Läs mer: Technology Review: Face Recognition: Clever or Just Plain Creepy?

Assuming that the uploaded pictures also contain the proper EXIF data, then Google will also know exactly when was the picture taken. If you they can also figure out the location the picture was taken on (perhaps as a tagging feature connected to Google Maps?), then they'll be able to track people - where and when they were, and in whose company. They could even extend the concept to try to combine pictures of the same event from different albums into a massive "super-album" of the event, even if the owners of the photographs never found out about each other.

Läs mer: Face Recognition — Clever Or Just Plain Creepy?

Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating "terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinized undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.

Läs mer: Schneier on Security: Privacy in the Age of Persistence

Summary: It is called tiling Window managers. There is a guide for Ubuntu: "xmonad - tiling window manager"

What if a big screen on Linux could work like a dual screen monitor setup? With the new, big LCD screens you run into the problem that when you expand a Window, it expands to cover the entire screen. This means that there are many people that actually prefer to have two independent monitors than one big screen.

But it ought to be possible to use X, a Window manager or whatever it is that is in charge, to divide the screen into virtual monitors. In this way your e-mail application could expand to fill a quadrant at the lower right, a chat window the upper right and the rest could be used for surfing and development (or whatever your needs might be).

I have googled around and found a couple of questions asked in different forums, asking if this feature is available. It does not seem that any one has come up with a good answer. Instead the ansers seem to be along the lines of:

• "I do not understand what you mean"

followed by

• "You do not want that"

Which is less than helpful. I have asked a number of friends and they would all be interested in a solution to this large screen conundrum. Today I found something that might be a solution but with some caveats. There is a window manager for X called ion. It is a tiling window manager, which seems to mean that it windows are not overlapping. However a screen shot from linux.com seems to indicate that you can have several frames open at the same time (with one frame being as I understand it a window). However according to Wikipedia the author of ion does not like some of the packaging done with it for Linux distributions, so I do not know how usable it would be for a standard Linux desktop user.

This find suddenly opened up my eyes to the concept of tiling Window managers. It feels like I have found the latin name for something, and suddenly a world of knowledge opens up. It is a tiling Window manager you want! They seem however to often be keyboard centric; can they play well with Gnome, KDE and mousing around? Can each tile house multiple windows and unexpanded windows?

Following the link on Wikipedia there is another tiling Window manager (Which is how Wikipedia classifies Ion which led me on track). It is called dwm, but the text on Wikipedia says:

dwm is a dynamic tiling window manager for X11 exhibiting the principles of minimalism. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally much simpler. dwm is written purely in C and, for simplicity, lacks any configuration interface besides editing the source code.

(My boldface) That might be a little bit too hardcore for my taste. So maybe then wmii? The Wikipedia screenshot looks promising:

The windows seem tiled, but there is also a window on top. One of these days I'll install one of these and see if it can do the trick, while still being able to play well with most (all) Linux desktop applications I use. These tiling window managers seem to be targeted towards the keyboard centric use.

I now just found xmonad, which according to the Wikipedia page has Gnome support. xmonad is configured in haskell, which means you could probably get away with it as hard core at parties :-) 

Oh, there is a guide for it for Ubuntu: "xmonad - tiling window manager".

And there is a window manager called awesome.