The epic poem The Iliad, set amid the final year of the Trojan War, is attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer and is foundational to Western literature, but scholars have not reached a consensus about whether it was written shortly after the war or centuries later. Archaeological and historical evidence have placed the text’s origins in the 7th or 8th century BCE, but such records are sparse and often have an uncertain validity.

Santa Fe Institute External Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University (UK), and colleagues decided to ask what scholars refer to as “The Homeric Question” using a quantitative approach borrowed from study of evolution.

In determining when species emerged and in gauging their relatedness to others, biologists compare genetic and physical traits along with novel adaptations. Similarly, linguists compare words that share an ancestor (e.g., water in English and wasser in German both come from the proto-Germanic wator), as well as words that supplant earlier terms (the modern English dog, for example, largely replaced the Old English hund), to pinpoint when a lexicon or language was in fashion.

Pagel’s team compared the Greek vocabulary in Homer’s Iliad to modern Greek, relying on a 200-word lexicon found in every language and contrasting the distantly related Hittite as an indicator of divergence.

Achilles sacrificing to Zeus, from the Ambrosian Iliad or Ilia Picta, a 5th century illuminated manuscript thought to have been produced in Constantinople – Credit: Wiki Commons

Their methods date Homer’s language to 762 BCE. The statistical model, says Pagel, “is completely ignorant to history — it doesn’t know who Homer is and doesn’t know Greek.” Accordingly, the potential date ranges from the improbable extremes of 376 BCE to 1157 BCE. But the estimate attaches a robust likelihood to the date, and it ties nicely to Nestor’s Cup, a vase dated to 723 BCE that is thought to carry an inscription from The Iliad.

The study reveals “an astonishing regularity in the way languages evolve,” notes Pagel. “That we can blindly apply rates of language change to Homeric and modern Greek and come up with 762 BCE tells us language is behaving in a regular and predictive way.”

Their study was published in BioEssays online on February 18.

Source: Santa Fe Institute [February 27, 2013]

23 international thinkers come together and break their silence about how the world really works and why there is still hope in re-establishing a moral and just society. Four Horsemen is free from mainstream media propaganda, doesn’t bash bankers, criticize politicians or get involved in conspiracy theories.

The film ignites the debate about how we usher a new economic paradigm into the world which, globally, would dramatically improve the quality of life for billions.

During the latter part of World War II lots of allied fliers got shot down over Germany. Many of the survivors – or terrorfliegers as they were termed by the Nazis – got rounded up and were dispatched to Luftwaffe’s interrogation unit at Dulag Luft POW Camp, near Oberursel.

After being marched into the camp, they were placed in solitary confinement and in spite of the provisions of the Geneva Convention, they anticipated rough handling, possibly having their fingernails torn off by Nazi torturers.

Aircrew who anticipated a Gestapo-style battering were in for a surprise when they encountered Obergefreiter Hanns Scharff, who had acquired fluent English when working as a businessman in pre-war South Africa.

Hanns Scharff (left) always made sure he knew about the personal circumstances of prisoners of war before interrogating them

Although his inscrutability secured him the nick-name Stone Face, he was otherwise a genial fellow. He was a self-taught interrogator who used persuasion rather than punishment as a strategy for getting Allied prisoners of war to disclose more than the customary name, rank and number, permitted by the Geneva Convention.

Scharff always began by doing his homework thoroughly. Before commencing an interrogation session, he checked all available data, generally acquainting himself with whatever was known about the pilot’s service and personal circumstances.

Zoo trips
The Scharff method, if so it may be called, relied on the initial premise that it was better for a flier to co-operate with the Luftwaffe, instead of being regarded as a spy and handed over to the Gestapo.

Even though there were a few prisoners who remained button-lipped, Scharff resolutely refused to descend to using physical coercion. Instead of using pliers to squeeze information out of prisoners, Scharff got what he and his superiors wanted by playing on a prisoner’s sense of isolation and psychological insecurity.

Carefully deploying what were sometimes meagre scraps of data, Scharff sought to create the illusion of total knowledge about a prisoner’s activities. Misled into believing that the interrogator knew just about everything anyway, the latter could then be bamboozled into disclosing military secrets.

Scharff appeared to reverse the overtly adversarial relationship between interrogator and prisoner by adopting a subtle, softly-softly approach.

He pretended to be a prisoner’s best pal. Masquerading as a nice guy, Scharff arranged for special treats outside the confines of Dulag Luft. He arranged for one prisoner to enjoy a brief flight in a German fighter plane, prisoners were treated to slap-up feeds with German fliers, granted medical treatment and even permitted to go on an outing to the local zoo.

Typically, after extracting a precautionary undertaking that he would not use the opportunity to make a bid to escape, a prisoner could enjoy a visit to Oberursel forest, with Scharff acting as chaperone and guide.

Rambling along woodland paths the two men chatted about the flora and fauna and engaged in small talk, including for example, musing about British and US social activities or customs.

Interrogator’s guest book
The prisoners never generally recalled discussing anything of any military significance but all the time Scharff was actually conducting a casual but systematic interrogation, harvesting useful intelligence information.

Prisoners unwittingly divulged details about training regimes, operational plans and data about guns, bomb sights, aircraft capability, tactical manoeuvres, call signs, wireless frequencies and communications.

Before departing for internment in other POW camps, they cheerfully signed their interrogator’s guest book. They expressed appreciation about the professional but hospitable manner in which they felt they had been treated.

As for Scharff, he subsequently claimed that by befriending a POW he could obtain information from 90% of all prisoners. It was a bold claim but Scharff was a good interrogator – he was very, very good.

After the war ended he was summoned to the USA, initially to testify to a Grand Jury in a treason trial that involved US citizens suspected of wartime collaboration with the Nazis.

He settled down in New York and began to develop a business designing and marketing decorative mosaics but could not escape the past.

During the early 1950′s he was feted in newspaper and magazine articles as the “master interrogator”. His former enemies became his friends and wartime POWs welcomed him at their reunions.

Some of the less-well publicised aspects of Scharff’s post-war activities involved him being de-briefed by the US Air Force and lecturing intelligence and security agencies about non-coercive interrogation techniques.

Much of what he had to relate reflected Scharff’s firm conviction that interrogation could succeed without treating prisoners in an inhumane manner.

Scharff died in California 20 years ago but his legacy remains. At first his name did not figure in the sharp and bitter public exchanges about the morality of waterboarding and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were sanctioned by President George Bush and inflicted on alleged terrorists detained in Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA detention centre.

However, nowadays top US interrogators, including Ali Soufan, who are critical about the efficacy of enhanced interrogation being used in today’s “war on terror”, have revived public interest in Scharff’s successful interrogation of Allied “terrorfliegers” during World War II.

Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani advocate for girls’ education, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, has been nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize by three members of the Norwegian parliament from the ruling Labor Party.

She was nominated on Friday, which was the deadline for nominations. Yousufzai was shot in the head in October 2012 by Taliban gunmen who sought to silence her and stop her from “promoting Western thinking.” Hovering at death’s door, Yousafzai underwent emergency skull reconstruction surgery meant to stabilize her, before she was airlifted to Britain, to receive specialized medical care and protection against further Taliban threats.

The attack drew widespread international condemnation and Yousufzai has become a powerful symbol of resistance to the Taliban’s attempts to suppress women’s rights. Three months later, after what doctors called a miraculous recovery, she left the hospital. Last week, in her first video statement since she was nearly killed, she said that she would keep fighting for women’s rights. On Friday, a campaign led by a Pakistani-British woman urged Prime Minister David Cameron and other senior government officials to nominate Yousufzai for the Nobel Peace Prize. Tens of thousands of Britons joined the call.

Spain has decided to offer automatic citizenship to anyone who can successfully prove their Sephardi origins, Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardón announced during a ceremony last week at Madrid’s Casa Sefarad-Israel.

Presiding over the ceremony was Casa Sefarad-Israel director Florentino Portero, and attendees included Gallardón, Foreign and Cooperation Minister José Manuel García-Margallo, and Isaac Querub, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities and Casa Sefarad’s director, the Spanish daily El Pais reported.

In his speech, Querub referred to the “nostalgia” and “longing” of the Sephardim for Spain, and the 500 years that had passed from the 1492 Expulsion Decree until King Juan Carlos’s 1992 visit to Madrid’s Beit Jacob synagogue, where the king emphasized that “the Hispanic Jews are at home.”

Querub said the king’s words had come true in the updated version of the Carta de Naturaleza (“conditions for citizenship”). Continue, JerusalemPost

This morning, @Kanarieman pointed me to an article of my own from 2010: just under two years ago, another very strange case went down in the Netherlands. The same judge, Chris Hensen, ordered that talking about file names was legally the same thing as distributing the actual files so named, and ordered the discussion forum FTD shut down. Yes, a discussion forum distributing no files was ordered to be shut down.

At its time, this case was decried as a blatant violation of free speech (but, alas, actually confirms that you can’t have the copyright monopoly and free speech at the same time).

However, something odd appeared in the aftermath. A brochure was discovered, where the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case.

Let me take that once more, for this is truly mind-boggling: not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case. Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter together with the plaintiff. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt.

(UPDATE: @LeHoax explains, “It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.” This is relevant to the context, of course, and mitigates the situation somewhat, but doesn’t detract from the fact that plaintiff and judge were together in a commercial venture on the direct subject matter – the plaintiff’s side, piraterijbestrijding (fighting piracy), is clearly readable in the brochure.)

This judge, this corrupt judge Chris Hensen, is the exact same judge Chris Hensen that has now banned links to the Pirate Bay from a political party, another equally crazy whackdown on fundamental freedoms of speech. But seeing this background, things fall better into place: the judge Chris Hensen was corrupted to begin with, and has been since at least 2010.

I can’t help feeling that this is getting ridiculous. From the IPRED champion in the European Parliament who was married to the Vivendi chairman, to the lead police investigator in The Pirate Bay case who got a job with Warner Brothers (a plaintiff) immediately on finishing the investigation, to the judge in the Pirate Bay case who was a member of the plaintiff’s pro-copyright organization, and now this – can’t the copyright industry fight for the monopoly ideas on their own merits, without needing biased, prejudiced, and corrupted officials?

UPDATE 2: There are several more interesting references, links, and facts surrounding this story over at the discussion thread on Hacker News. Also, here is a Dutch source that confirms the factual circumstances regarding the business relationship between plaintiff and judge in the FTD case.

(Footnote: before somebody points out that this would be libel or slander against the corrupt judge Chris Hensen, I am a licensed journalist in the Kingdom of Sweden, making this site run under constitutional Freedom-of-Press laws (Swedish: utgivningsbevis). This kind of whistleblowing against corrupt officials is what those laws were made for.)

Author: Rick Falkvinge | Source: Falkvinge.net [May 09, 2012]

Under the new law, mobile internet providers like KPN won’t be able to charge for access to particular services like Skype or throttle traffic through them — both techniques that the company was intent on using to manage its mobile traffic.

Some exceptional reasons, such as network congestion and security, are allowed for slowing down users’ connections, but the general thrust of the law is that operators ought to be blind to the traffic they carry and treat all of it equally. Dutch lobbying group Bits of Freedom also notes that the net neutrality law includes anti-wiretapping provisions, making it unlawful to use deep packet inspection on users’ internet communications without their express consent or a legal warrant. All in all, it’s a good day for privacy and internet freedom in the Netherlands, now how about we spread the good cheer throughout the whole European Union? Source>The Verge

Researchers at Duke University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated on a linear time scale that 51 percent of Americans will be obese by then, Duke Health Organization reported.

As of now, about 35 percent of the adult population are obese, and should the rate be maintained at the current level, more than half a trillion dollars in health care expenditures would ensue, the experts added.

The forecast is a huge leap from the figure of $147 billion that CDC estimated for 2008. The findings were based on data gathered by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System along with other state-level data from other sources. These results were outlined at the CDC’s “Weight of the Nation” conference held in Washington Monday, with the main focus being awareness and prevention of obesity.

Experts forecast that over the course of 18 years, 11 percent of the population will be severely obese; i.e., one in 10 Americans in comparison to today’s 1 in 20 ratio, WebMD said.

“If these forecasts prove accurate, this will further hinder efforts for health care cost containment,” the authors of the research paper said.

The findings noted that individuals on the higher end of obesity faced the risk of heart disease, diabetes in addition to other ailments. Such variables as availability of fast food, alcohol consumption, unemployment, Internet access, price differences among grocery and non grocery items were factored in.

“This is a group at risk of really great health implications, yet they are increasing at even a greater rate than overall obesity,” Justin Trogdon of the Research Triangle Institute, and co-author of the study, said at the conference, according to WebMD.

A mere 1 percent decrease in the predicted rise would mean 2.9 million fewer obese adults by 2030, saving $4.7 billion in annual health care costs, the health website said.

In a bid to combat escalating obesity related health expenditures in the country, experts from the Institute of Medicine are scheduled to release a review of anti-obesity measures Tuesday, the Raleigh News & Observer said.

Source: IB Times [May 09, 2012]

“Drive-by attacks” in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.
Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.

Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.

“We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it’s not good for repeat business.”

The report was based on information gathered last year by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which monitors cyber attack activity in more than 200 countries through its services and sensors.

Symantec said that it blocked 5.5 billion attacks in 2011 in an increase of 81 percent from the prior year.
In keeping with trends seen by other Internet security firms, Symantec reported surges in hacks aimed at smartphones or tablet computers and in attacks targeting workers in companies or government agencies.

Source: phys.org [May 8, 2012]

Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns said while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”

Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.

“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.

“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.

“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”

Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.

Source: AlJazeera [Apr. 20, 2012]