The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.
The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as 'attack', 'Al Qaeda', 'terrorism' and 'dirty bomb' alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like 'pork', 'cloud', 'team' and 'Mexico'.
Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.
The words are included in the department's 2011 'Analyst's Desktop Binder' used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify 'media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities'.
Department chiefs were forced to release the manual following a House hearing over documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which revealed how analysts monitor social networks and media organisations for comments that 'reflect adversely' on the government.
However they insisted the practice was aimed not at policing the internet for disparaging remarks about the government and signs of general dissent, but to provide awareness of any potential threats.
As well as terrorism, analysts are instructed to search for evidence of unfolding natural disasters, public health threats and serious crimes such as mall/school shootings, major drug busts, illegal immigrant busts.
The list has been posted online by the Electronic Privacy Information Center - a privacy watchdog group who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act before suing to obtain the release of the documents.
In a letter to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, the centre described the choice of words as 'broad, vague and ambiguous'.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent $830 million funding obesity studies in fiscal year 2011. Between 2008 and 2011, NIH spent over $3.3 billion on obesity research.
Spending on obesity research also overshadows many other areas of research funded by NIH, including research on Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and breast cancer, which received $448 million, $437 million and $715 million in 2011, respectively.
“Obesity is a very is a very significant cause of current illness in our country and becoming more significant all the time,” said Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director.
Because of the rise in obesity, NIH established the Obesity Research Task Force in 2003 and came out with its first Strategic Plan for NIH Obesity Research in 2004. The plan aims “to serve as a guide to accelerate research that will lessen the personal and public health burdens of obesity” with the help of input of external experts, industry professionals, and health-focused organizations through a public comment period.
It also “encompasses all levels of research, from basic biological and behavioral research through community and population research.”
“The strategic plan is rather sweeping in its set of goals, going all the way from basic science understanding of what are those signals that actually trigger hunger and satiety,” Collins said. “It focuses quite heavily then on interventions. How do you design trials with creative new ideas about how to prevent or treat obesity, and then once you’ve identified possible strategies, how do you develop an approach to find out if they work in the real world.”
An Indian-born teenager has won a research award for solving a mathematical problem first posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago that has baffled mathematicians ever since.
The solution devised by Shouryya Ray, 16, makes it possible to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance.
Shouryya, who lives in Dresden, eastern Germany, came up with the solutions to this and a second mathematical riddle while working on a school project.
He is being hailed as a genius in the German press, but attributes his achievement to “curiosity and schoolboy naivety.”
“When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself: well, there’s no harm in trying,” he said.
The problems he resolved are from the field of dynamics. The first, dealing with the movement of projectiles through the air, was posed by Newton in the 17th century. The second, which relates to the collision of a body with a wall, was posed in the 19th century.
Only partial solutions had been discovered up to now, requiring simplified assumptions or calculations by computer. Shouryya’s elegant solutions could contribute to greater precision in fields such as ballistics.
Shouryya’s family moved to Germany when he was 12 after his father Subhashis Ray, an engineer, got a job at a technical college. Shouryya spoke no German when he arrived but has mastered the language and is due to take the German equivalent of A-levels this week, two years ahead of his peers.
“Ray’s accomplishment is impressive and we are particularly proud of his background as it highlights the achievements of migrants across language and cultural barriers,” said the Youth Research Foundation, which gave him the award.
A keen cricketer, Shouryya cites his father as his inspiration and says he instilled a “hunger for mathematics” after teaching him calculus at the age of six.
"God has given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance." -- Hamlet, Act III, scene 1
As sentient beings we yearn to be loved unconditionally, and we were raised in a highly competitive society that taught us tools to gain love conditionally -- mostly through doing and accomplishing certain tasks, achieving certain goals, and/or appearing and speaking in particular ways. Ever since we were infants we received positive reinforcement -- smiles and "yes!'s" -- when we behaved or appeared in ways that pleased our caretakers, and we received negative reinforcement -- frowns and "no!'s" -- when we behaved or appeared in "uncivilized" ways that displeased our caretakers.
Carl Jung spoke of the personas that we create in order to interact with others. More pejoratively, D.W. Winnicott theorized that we developed "false selves" in order to help survive our childhoods as we acclimated to the demands of our society. I think we can agree that we have facades that we use to interact with most people, and then we have our somewhat unglamorous and often unseemly real or authentic selves that we only show a few close friends and family members.
But what if the tools we developed as children that are now part of our personas/facades don't actually help us get our emotional needs met? What if those tools actually inhibit authentic relationships, connections and interactions?
Maybe we acquired tools such as fear, suspicion and doubt, which protected us in our youth but now cause us to hack into our lovers' email accounts to see if they are remaining faithful? Maybe we procured the tool of seduction and know how to attract people's attention and provide them with moments of titillation and glee, but remain unsure if they love us? Maybe we discovered the tool of playing the victim, of drawing people into our dramas and forcing them to take care of us? Maybe we cultivated the tool of providing material comforts for others but end up resenting them for being gold-diggers? Maybe we learned how to fill our lives up with busy-ness in order to seem important but are now perceived as frenetic, disorganized and distant by others? Maybe we were taught to smile and look happy on the outside even when we feel alienated, misunderstood and disconnected on the inside? Maybe we learned passive-aggressive language to avoid being vulnerable?
When I was 26 years old, two of my best friends became pregnant within a month of each other. Upon word of their news, I promptly burst into tears -- and was surprised to find that they weren't the happy kind. Instead of feeling excited for my friends, I somehow felt devastated by their pregnancies. The emotions that rose up for me were a complicated mixture of jealousy, abandonment and insecurity.
It wasn't just that I hadn't forseen this era of my life beginning yet, but rather the intense reaction I had was more to do with all the things about my own life that my friends' pregnancies illuminated. In the shadow of their seemingly glorious news, my life suddenly looked like a mess. I had a boyfriend I was ambivalent about, a flailing career as a fledgling writer, a habit of drinking too much, and I had just lost my second parent. Suddenly the stark contrast between my life and that of my two friends' was too blinding.
In the beginning, I hid my feelings, feigning both busyness and excitement in an effort to conceal my darker emotions and avoid seeing my friends. But it wasn't long before I couldn't bring myself to be in their company at all. I felt like the worst person in the history of the world. What kind of woman hates her best friend for getting pregnant?
But I did. I was angry. I felt left behind, betrayed, and abandoned. On top of that I felt like an utter brat for feeling all of the above. No matter how irrational, part of me felt hurt that they hadn't waited for me to be ready to also make this major life transition. Another part of me thought they were making a huge mistake getting pregnant so young. The rest of me mainly felt jealous. As I struggled poorly to contain these feelings, my relationships with both of them began to crumble.
I knew I was being hurtful by not being able to get past my own issues. I also knew that my friends were both going through one of the biggest life transitions any of us had made yet. It was obvious that they felt unsure and scared of the journey they were embarking on, and that they probably could have used my support more than ever. Still, I stewed in my messy feelings. I pulled it together enough to make it through the baby showers and I even made it to the hospital on the day one of their babies was born, but if I'm going to be honest here, I have to say that I never quite made it past my hurt and resentment long enough to be a good friend during that time.
I wish I could say that once the babies arrived I turned a corner, but I didn't. As my friends moved into this new phase of their lives, I stayed in mine, fairly oblivious to what they were going through as mothers to newborns. For a long time our friendships cooled on the counter like almost-burned pies. Somewhere in that time we all ended up in different cities, the distance easing the pressure to stay close, and it wasn't until almost four years had passed and I found myself married and pregnant myself that things began to turn around.
I'll never forget those trying, early months with my daughter, what it was like to be alone in the house with her after my husband had gone to work, feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, and filled with remorse for how little support I'd given my friends when they'd been in this same place. Over the phone, miles apart, I couldn't stop apologizing to the friend I'd always been closest to. She was warm and accepting and sent me baby presents and helpful advice on a regular basis, and I couldn't have been more thankful -- or humbled.
All of these experiences helped me when I became the target of another friend's resentment. When we were both pregnant with our first children, she miscarried and stopped speaking to me. Her hurt and anger is too familiar for me to feel resentful of her silence. She's since had a baby but still hasn't spoken to me. That stings, but it's also something that I understand on a deeper level than I wish to.
Bleary-eyed customers who stumble into their local Starbucks every morning did so literally Wednesday. That's because hundreds of the coffee chain's stores were closed.
The forced decaffeination of America's morning commuters was due to overnight maintenance work at stores across the country that wasn't finished on time for the morning rush, Maggie Jantzen, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, told NBC station WCMH of Columbus, Ohio.
Jantzen said she didn't know how many stores were affected, but she said about 10 percent to 20 percent of the stores that were due for the work were unable to open on time.
The company said the work was routine maintenance on a standardized water filtration system and that no safety issues were involved.
But because of it, stores were closed across the country — as many as 1,500, mainly in the eastern half of the U.S., a quick tabulation of local news reports and hundreds of tweets by msnbc.com indicated. (A spokesman for Starbucks told msnbc.com on Thursday that the number of stores was in the "low to mid hundreds.")
Coffee drinkers were left dripless from South Dakota to Florida, New York to Texas.
"I like to start my day with Starbucks, so I don't really know what to do," Kelly Furnet told NBC station WJXT as she stood outside a shuttered shop in Jacksonville, Fla.
"It's a huge problem because, in my office, people go there multiple times in a day for their coffee fix," Rebecca Stockdale, who works near one of the closed Starbucks in Columbus, told WCMH. "You can't have them coming to work without their caffeine!"
