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Exciting innovations are challenging the status quo across health and medicine in areas like biotech, health IT, mHealth, life sciences, health tech, and more. TEDMED celebrates the ideas behind this progress in The Hive – an immersive and informal social environment dedicated to exploring and showcasing transformative startups and the inspiring entrepreneurs that power them. At TEDMED we showcase the power of imagination and human potential that emerges from our collective, "hive" mind.
The Hive at TEDMED 2014 was honored to benefit from the wisdom and intellectual generosity of a deeply experienced team of Curators. Each Curator provided their guidance in the review and selection of transformative startups selected to showcase at TEDMED 2014. To this task they brought the multi-disciplinary perspectives of social influencers, venture capitalists, inventors, proven leaders in design and entrepreneurship and more. Each is a seasoned disruptor who has made a powerful impact in health and medicine. Each represents an organization that is committed to creating a healthier world.


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NASA Mars rover: What if we find signs of life? (+video)
If NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, safely touches down on Sunday night, it will begin searching for organic molecules in the Red Planet's soil. What would happen if the rover found something?
In this weekly series, Life's Little Mysteries provides expert answers to challenging questions.
If all goes as planned, NASA's Curiosity rover will touch down on Mars late Sunday night. Then, after a few weeks' respite, it will begin probing the subsurface soils looking for organic molecules that could be the detritus of ancient Martian life.
A few billion years ago, vast oceans might have sloshed over the surface of the Red Planet, and a thick atmosphere probably enshrouded it. The liquids and gases have all but burned away by now, but any organisms Mars harbored in its ancient glory days would have left behind traces in the form of large, carbon-based molecules. "Organic molecules can last for billions of years," explained Alexander Pavlov, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Any simple organic matter Curiosity digs up could have biological origins, but it could also have been generated through more mundane chemical processes. However, if the rover detects complex organic structures — the kind we find in living things, and practically nowhere else but Earth — these would be "a very strong indicator" of ancient life on Mars, Pavlov told Life's Little Mysteries.
As Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute, put it, "It would be like finding 2-ton blocks of limestone in the desert in Egypt and saying, hmm, these might be leftover pieces of a structure around here somewhere."
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Category: South Carolina
America's Best Campgrounds and RV Parks For Hunting and Fishing
Soon the temperatures will begin to ease from summer's heat and cool breezes will blow down from the hills and mountains. Before long, the urge to dress in bright orange will become irresistible. No, not for Halloween – for a great guys getaway to the wilderness! It's nearly time to gather your buddies and take to the woods for a hunting, fishing and laughs. Combine the all-time favorite guy activities of fishing, hunting and hiking and go RVing and camping in some of America's best spots.
Here's a look at some of America's best RV and Camping Parks for hunting, fishing and hiking:
3 Unlikely Places To Visit A Winery – Top US City Locations
Think you need to go to Napa, Long Island or Washington State to tour a winery and sample locally made wine? Think again, because you can find wineries producing their own wine in some well traveled but not-so-obvious places.
It was while living in New York City that I first had the opportunity to learn about wine, and it was there that I fell in love with it. Combine the city's wine and food with its history, architecture and culture and it's easy to see why the Big Apple is a place like no other. You wouldn't expect New York, a city known for busy streets and skyscrapers, to have a winery — but it actually has three!
Winter Restaurant Weeks 2012 – Our Big List!
Here's our list of fantastic restaurant week celebrations across the country for 2012. Just when the winter doldrums have set in, cities across the country want to entice you to get off the couch and experience some memorable meals with friends. Restaurant weeks typically offer 3 course lunches and dinners at a fraction of the […]
Stately Historic Inns for Warm Weather Getaways
If you do decide a warm weather escape is in order, you may want to think about staying at a historical inn. You'll not only get a chance to bask in the soothing rays of sunshine but also under the shadow of stunning Victorian, Georgian and Greek Revival architecture. It's postcard perfect. Consider these charming options:
The Big List – Restaurant Weeks For Winter 2011
Shake off your winter doldrums and get out with some friends for a fabulous meal at a great price. As winter storms sweep across American, we all tend to hibernate leading to boredom and grumpiness. It's definitely time to break out for a cozy meal and a few laughs with friends. Restaurants across the […]
Calling All Golf Fanatics – Play 3/Get 3 Free in Myrtle Beach South Carolina
The Glens Golf Group, parent company to four premier golf courses along the Grand Strand in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, has just announced a tempting special that will light the eyes of golf fanatics everywhere. Effective now and continuing right through to September 8, 2010, golfers who purchase 3 rounds of golf (at any of […]


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ST. LOUIS, Mo. – A Belleville woman is facing allegations she punched and stabbed a man she dated.
Police tell News 4 Christy McDuffie, 34, is facing one count of felony aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and a misdemeanor count of domestic violence.
Police said she stabbed the man, who she dated off-and-on for several years, on June 24.
The man reportedly suffered multiple stab wounds to the head.


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Each day we will post an adorable picture or video of one of our readers' cute kids.
Ali loves playing with any bags she can get her hands on! Thanks to Jamie for submitting.
want to see more of your adorable kid pictures and videos. Submit them
to: email@example.com and you might just see them on the site.


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This is a 1955 Chevrolet Nomad with V8 and Powerglide automatic transmission. It is numbers matching and has had the same owner since 1969.... More
This is a 1958 Chevrolet Impala Convertible has a 409 425hp engine and automatic transmission. It has power steering, power disc brakes, power windows and... More
1967 Chevrolet Chevelle convertible in red base coat/ clear coat. White convertible top and white interior. 454 big block with automatic transmission. Lots of high... More
1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible in red with white top. It has a 283 V8 with power steering, power brakes and an automatic transmission.... More
This excellent 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible has had a frame off restoration. It is powered by a 283 Power Pack V8 with an... More
1956 Chevrolet BelAir Convertible Power Pack V8 Automatic Frame-Off Rotisserie Restoration From bottom to top this car is absolutely like new. Please call Tommy at 256-810-7687 for more info... More
This rare 1965 Chevrolet Impala Convertible is a numbers matchig 409. It is one of the last 409s produced. It has had a complete... More
1965 Chevrolet Impala Convertible. One of 1,893 built with 396cubic in 425 HP. It is a numbers matching 4 speed convertible. This car has... More
This is a 1966 Plymouth Sport Fury California convertible. It is red with a white convertible top with glass backlite. The interior is red, with... More
See more photos at AlabamaClassicCars.com. Please no emails. Tommy can be reached at 256-810-7687 to answer any questions you have about the car.... More
This is a 1972 Ford Mustang Mach 1 in original Bright Red with black stripe and black Ruffino/Coarinthian vinyl seats with red trim. It... More
1957 Chevrolet Project car. Good solid car. Will restore to your specifications or you can restore. Floors are solid. Great car! Please call Tommy... More


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Chili Dogs With Cheese
- 8 beef franks
- 8 hot dog buns, split
- 1 (15 ounce) can Hormel Chili No Beans, heated
- 1 (8 ounce) bag shredded cheese
Cook franks according to package directions.
Place franks in buns; spoon chili over franks. Top with cheese, if desired.
Recipe reprinted by permission of Hormel. All rights reserved.
RecID 12112


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The Prince of Data Mining
Facial recognition is digital alchemy. It's the prince of data mining.
Facial recognition takes previously anonymous images and conjures peoples' identities. It's an invaluable capability. Once they can pick out faces in crowds, trawling surreptitiously through anyone and everyone's photos, the social network businesses can work out what we're doing, when and where we're doing it, and who we're doing it with. The companies figure out what we like to do without us having to 'like' or favorite anything.
So Google, Facebook, Apple at al have invested hundreds of megabucks in face recognition R&D and buying technology start-ups. And they spend billions of dollars buying images and especially faces, going back to Google's acquisition of Picasa in 2004, and most recently, Facebook's ill-fated $3 billion offer for Snapchat.
But if most people find face recognition rather too creepy, then there is cause for optimism. The technocrats have gone too far. What many of them still don't get is this: If you take anonymous data (in the form of photos) and attach names to that data (which is what Facebook photo tagging does - it guesses who people are in photos are, attaches putative names to records, and invites users to confirm them) then you Collect Personal Information. Around the world, existing pre-biometrics era black letter Privacy Law says you can't Collect PII even indirectly like that without am express reason and without consent.
When automatic facial recognition converts anonymous data into PII, it crosses a bright line in the law.
Posted in Social Networking, Privacy, Biometrics, Big Data
Crowd sourcing private sector surveillance
A repeated refrain of cynics and "infomopolists" alike is that privacy is dead. People are supposed to know that anything on the Internet is up for grabs. In some circles this thinking turns into digital apartheid; some say if you're so precious about your privacy, just stay offline.
But socialising and privacy are hardly mutually exclusive; we don't walk around in public with our names tattooed on our foreheads. Why can't we participate in online social networks in a measured, controlled way without submitting to the operators' rampant X-ray vision? There is nothing inevitable about trading off privacy for conviviality.
The privacy dangers in Facebook and the like run much deeper than the self-harm done by some peoples' overly enthusiastic sharing. Promiscuity is actually not the worst problem, neither is the notorious difficulty of navigating complex and ever changing privacy settings.
The advent of facial recognition presents far more serious and subtle privacy challenges.
Facebook has invested heavily in face recognition technology, and not just for fun. Facebook uses it in effect to crowd-source the identification and surveillance of its members. With facial recognition, Facebook is building up detailed pictures of what people do, when, where and with whom.
You can be tagged without consent in a photo taken and uploaded by a total stranger.
The majority of photos uploaded to personal albums over the years were not intended for anything other than private viewing.
Under the privacy law of Australia and data protection regulations in dozens of other jurisdictions, what matters is whether data is personally identifiable. The Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 (as amended in 2014) defines "Personal Information" as: "information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable".
Whenever Facebook attaches a member's name to a photo, they are converting hitherto anonymous data into Personal Information, and in so doing, they become subject to privacy law. Automated facial recognition represents an indirect collection of Personal Information. However too many people still underestimate the privacy implications; some technologists naively claim that faces are "public" and that people can have no expectation of privacy in their facial images, ignoring that information privacy as explained is about the identifiability and identification of data; the words "public" and "private" don't even figure in the Privacy Act!
If a government was stealing into our photo albums, labeling people and profiling them, there would be riots. It's high time that private sector surveillance - for profit - is seen for what it is, and stopped.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Biometrics
Schrodinger's Privacy: A Master Class
Master Class: How to Protect Your Customer's Digital Identity and Personal Data
A Social Media Week Sydney event #SMWSydney
Law Lounge, Sydney University Law School
New Law School Building
Eastern Ave, Camperdown
Fri, Sep 26 - 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
How can you navigate privacy fact and fiction, without the geeks and lawyers boring each other to death?
It's often said that technology has outpaced privacy law. Many digital businesses seem empowered by this brash belief. And so they proceed with apparent impunity to collect and monetise as much Personal Information as they can get their hands on.
But it's a myth!
Some of the biggest corporations in the world, including Google and Facebook, have been forcefully brought to book by privacy regulations. So, we have to ask ourselves:
- what does privacy law really mean for social media in Australia?
- is privacy "good for business"?
- is privacy "not a technology issue"?
- how can digital businesses navigate fact & fiction, without their geeks and lawyers boring each other to death?
In this Social Media Week Master Class I will:
- unpack what's "creepy" about certain online practices
- show how to rate data privacy issues objectively
- analyse classic misadventures with geolocation, facial recognition, and predicting when shoppers are pregnant
- critique photo tagging and crowd-sourced surveillance
- explain why Snapchat is worth more than three billion dollars
- analyse the regulatory implications of Big Data, Biometrics, Wearables and The Internet of Things.
We couldn't have timed this Master Class better, coming two weeks after the announcement of the Apple Watch, which will figure prominently in the class!
So please come along, for a fun and in-depth a look at social media, digital technology, the law, and decency.
Register here.
About the presenter
Steve Wilson is a technologist, who stumbled into privacy 12 years ago. He rejected those well meaning slogans (like "Privacy Is Good For Business!") and instead dug into the relationships between information technology and information privacy. Now he researches and develops design patterns to help sort out privacy, alongside all the other competing requirements of security, cost, usability and revenue. His latest publications include:
- "Big Privacy: The new standard for Big Data Privacy" from Constellation Research, and
- "The collision between Big Data and privacy law" due out in October in the Australian Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Internet, Biometrics, Big Data
Safeguarding the pedigree of personal attributes
The problem of identity takeover
The root cause of much identity theft and fraud today is the sad fact that customer reference numbers, personal identifiers and attributes generally are so easy to copy and replay without permission and without detection. Simple numerical attributes like bank account numbers and health IDs can be stolen from many different sources, and replayed with impunity in bogus transactions.
Our personal data nowadays is leaking more or less constantly, through breached databases, websites, online forms, call centres and so on, to such an extent that customer reference numbers on their own are no longer reliable. Privacy consequentially suffers because customers are required to assert their identity through circumstantial evidence, like name and address, birth date, mother's maiden name and other pseudo secrets. All this data in turn is liable to be stolen and used against us, leading to spiraling identity fraud.
To restore the reliability of personal attribute data, we need to know their pedigree. We need to know that a presented data item is genuine, that it originated from a trusted authority, it's been stored safely by its owner, and it's been presented with the owner's consent. If confidence in single attributes can be restored then we can step back from all the auxiliary proof-of-identity needed for routine transactions, and thus curb identity theft.
A practical response to ID theft
Several recent breaches of government registers leave citizens vulnerable to ID theft. In Korea, the national identity card system was attacked and it seems that all Korean's citizen IDs will have to be re-issued. In the US, Social Security Numbers are often stolen and used tin fraudulent identifications; recently, SSNs of 800,000 Post Office employees appear to have been stolen along with other personal records.
We could protect people against having their stolen identifiers used behind their backs. It shouldn't actually be necessary to re-issue every Korean's ID. Improvements may be made to the reliability of identification data without dramatically changing Relying Parties' backend processes. If for instance a service provider has always used SSN as part of its identification regime, they could continue to do so, if only the actual Social Security Numbers being received were reliable!
The trick is to be able to tell "original" ID numbers from "copies". But what does "original" even mean in the digital world? A more precise term for what we really want is pedigree. What we need is to be able to present attribute data in such a way that the receiver may be sure of their pedigree; that is, know that the attributes were originally issued by an authoritative body, that the data has been kept safe, and that each presentation of the attribute has occurred under the owner's control.
These objectives can be met with the help of smart cryptographic technologies which today are built into most smart phones and smartcards, and which are finally being properly exploited by initiatives like the FIDO Alliance.
"Notarising" attributes in chip devices
There are ways of issuing attributes to a smart chip device that prevent them from being stolen, copied and claimed by anyone else. One way to do so is to encapsulate and notarise attributes in a unique digital certificate issued to a chip. Today, a great many personal devices routinely embody cryptographically suitable chips for this purpose, including smart phones, SIM cards, "Secure Elements", smartcards and many wearable computers.
Consider an individual named Smith to whom Organisation A has issued a unique attribute N (which could be as simple as a customer reference number). If N is saved in ordinary computer memory or something like a magnetic stripe card, then it has no pedigree. Once the number N is presented by the cardholder in a transaction, it has the same properties as any other number. To better safeguard N in a chip device, it can be sealed into a digital certificate, as follows:
1. generate a fresh private-public key pair inside Smith's chip
2. export the public key
3. create a digital certificate around the public key, with an attribute corresponding to N
4. have the certificate signed by (or on behalf of) organisation A.
The result of coordinating these processes and technologies is a logical triangle that inextricably binds cardholder Smith to their attribute N and to a specific personally controlled device. The certificate signed by organisation A attests to both Smith's entitlement to N and Smith's control of a particular key unique to the device. Keys generated inside the chip are retained internally, never divulged to outsiders. It is not possible to copy the private key to another device, so the logical triangle cannot be reproduced or counterfeited.
Note that this technique lies at the core of the EMV "Chip-and-PIN" system where the smart payment card digitally signs cardholder and transaction data, rendering it immune to replay, before sending it to the merchant terminal. See also my 2012 paper Calling for a uniform approach to card fraud, offline and on. Now we should generalise notarised personal data and digitally signed transactions beyond Card-Present payments into as much online business as possible.
Restoring privacy and consumer control
When Smith wants to present their attribute N in an electronic transaction, instead of simply copying N out of memory (at which point it would lose its pedigree), Smith's transaction software digitally signs the transaction using the certificate containing N. With standard security software, any third party can then verify that the transaction originated from a genuine chip holding the unique key certified by A as containing the attribute N.
Note that N doesn't have to be a customer number or numeric identifier; it could be any personal data, such as a biometric template, or a package of medical information like an allergy alert, or an interesting isolated (and anonymous) property of the user such as their age.
The capability to manage multiple key pairs and certificates, and to sign transactions with a nominated private key, is increasingly built into smart devices today. By narrowing down what you need to know about someone to a precise attribute or personal data item, we will reduce identity theft and fraud while radically improving privacy. This sort of privacy enhancing technology is the key to a safe Internet of Things, and fortunately now is widely available.
Addressing ID theft
Perhaps the best thing governments could do immediately is to adopt smartcards and equivalent smart phone apps for holding and presenting such attributes as official ID numbers. The US government has actually come close to such a plan many times; Chip-based Social Security Cards and Medicare Cards have been proposed before, without realising their full potential. These devices would best be used as above to hold a citizen's identifiers and present them cryptographically, without vulnerability to ID theft and takeover. We wouldn't have to re-issue compromised SSNs; we would instead switch from manual presentation of these numbers to automatic online presentation, with a chip card or smart phone app conveying the data through digitally signatures.
Posted in Smartcards, Security, PKI, Payments, Identity, Fraud, Biometrics
Postcard from Monterey #CISmcc
First Day Reflections from CIS Monterey.
Follow along on Twitter at #CISmcc (for the Monterey Conference Centre).
The Cloud Identity Summit really is the top event on the identity calendar. The calibre of the speakers, the relevance and currency of the material, the depth and breadth of the cohort, and the international spread are all unsurpassed. It's been great to meet old cyber-friends in "XYZ Space" at last -- like Emma Lindley from the UK and Lance Peterman. And to catch up with such talented folks like Steffen Sorensen from New Zealand once again.
A day or two before, Ian Glazer of Salesforce asked in a tweet what we were expecting to get out of CIS. And I replied that I hoped to change my mind about something. It's unnerving to have your understanding and assumptions challenged by the best in the field ... OK, sometimes it's outright embarrassing ... but that's what these events are all about. A very wise lawyer said to me once, around 1999 at the dawn of e-commerce, that he had changed his mind about authentication a few times up to that point, and that he fully expected to change his mind again and again.
I spent most of Saturday in Open Identity Foundation workshops. OIDF chair Don Thibeau enthusiastically stressed two new(ish) initiatives: Mobile Connect in conjunction with the mobile carrier trade association GSM Association @GSMA, and HIE Connect for the health sector. For the uninitiated, HIE means Health Information Exchange, namely a hub for sharing structured e-health records among hospitals, doctors, pharmacists, labs, e-health records services, allied health providers, insurers, drug & device companies, researchers and carers; for the initiated, we know there is some language somewhere in which the letters H.I.E. stand for "Not My Lifetime".
But seriously, one of the best (and pleasantly surprising) things about HIE Connect as the OIDF folks tell it, is the way its leaders unflinchingly take for granted the importance of privacy in the exchange of patient health records. Because honestly, privacy is not a given in e-health. There are champions on the new frontiers like genomics that actually say privacy may not be in the interests of the patients (or more's the point, the genomics businesses). And too many engineers in my opinion still struggle with privacy as something they can effect. So it's great -- and believe me, really not obvious -- to hear the HIE Connects folks -- including Debbie Bucci from the US Dept of Health and Human Services, and Justin Richer of Mitre and MIT -- dealing with it head-on. There is a compelling fit for the OAUTH and OIDC protocols here, with their ability to manage discrete pieces of information about users (patients) and to permission them all separately. Having said that, Don and I agree that e-health records permissioning and consent is one of the great UI/UX challenges of our time.
Justin also highlighted that the RESTful patterns emerging for fine-grained permissions management in healthcare are not confined to healthcare. Debbie added that the ability to query rare events without undoing privacy is also going to be a core defining challenge in the Internet of Things.
MyPOV: We may well see tremendous use cases for the fruits of HIE Exchange before they're adopted in healthcare!
In the afternoon, we heard from Canadian and British projects that have been working with the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) program now for a few years each.
Emma Lindley presented the work they've done in the UK Identity Assurance Program (IDAP) with social security entitlements recipients. These are not always the first types of users we think of for sophisticated IDAM functions, but in Britain, local councils see enormous efficiency dividends from speeding up the issuance of eg disabled parking permits, not to mention reducing imposters, which cost money and lead to so much resentment of the well deserved. Emma said one Attributes Exchange beta project reduced the time taken to get a 'Blue Badge' permit from 10 days to 10 minutes. She went on to describe the new "Digital Sources of Trust" initiative which promises to reconnect under-banked and under-documented sections of society with mainstream financial services. Emma told me the much-abused word "transformational" really does apply here.
MyPOV: The Digital Divide is an important issue for me, and I love to see leading edge IDAM technologies and business processes being used to do something about it -- and relatively quickly.
Then Andre Boysen of SecureKey led a discussion of the Canadian identity ecosystem, which he said has stabilised nicely around four players: Federal Government, Provincial Govt, Banks and Carriers. Lots of operations and infrastructure precedents from the payments industry have carried over.
Andre calls the smart driver license of British Columbia the convergence of "street identity and digital identity".
MyPOV: That's great news - and yet comparable jurisdictions like Australia and the USA still struggle to join governments and banks and carriers in an effective identity synthesis without creating great privacy and commercial anxieties. All three cultures are similarly allergic to identity cards, but only in Canada have they managed to supplement drivers licenses with digital identities with relatively high community acceptance. In nearly a decade, Australia has been at a standstill in its national understanding of smartcards and privacy.
For mine, the CIS Quote of the Day came from Scott Rice of the Open ID Foundation. We all know the stark problem in our industry of the under-representation of Relying Parties in the grand federated identity projects. IdPs and carriers so dominate IDAM. Scott asked us to imagine a situation where "The auto industry was driven by steel makers". Governments wouldn't put up with that for long.
Can someone give us the figures? I wonder if Identity and Access Management is already more economically ore important than cars?!
Cheers from Monterey, Day 1.
Posted in Smartcards, Security, Identity, Federated Identity, e-health, Cloud, Biometrics, Big Data
Webinar: Big Privacy
I'm presenting a Constellation Research webinar next week on my latest research into "Big Privacy" (June 18th in the US / June 19th in Australia). I hope you can join us.
We live in an age where billionaires are self-made on the back of the most intangible of assets – the information they have amassed about us. That information used to be volunteered in forms and questionnaires and contracts but increasingly personal information is being observed and inferred.
The modern world is awash with data. It's a new and infinitely re-usable raw material. Most of the raw data about us is an invisible by-product of our mundane digital lives, left behind by the gigabyte by ordinary people who do not perceive it let alone understand it.
Many Big Data and digital businesses proceed on the basis that all this raw data is up for grabs. There is a particular widespread assumption that data in the "public domain" is free-for-all, and if you're clever enough to grab it, then you're entitled to extract whatever you can from it.
In the webinar, I'll try to show how some of these assumptions are naive. The public is increasingly alarmed about Big Data and averse to unbridled data mining. Excessive data mining isn't just subjectively 'creepy'; it can be objectively unlawful in many parts of the world. Conventional data protection laws turn out to be surprisingly powerful in in the face of Big Data. Data miners ignore international privacy laws at their peril!
Today there are all sorts of initiatives trying to forge a new technology-privacy synthesis. They go by names like "Privacy Engineering" and "Privacy by Design". These are well meaning efforts but they can be a bit stilted. They typically overlook the strengths of conventional privacy law, and they can miss an opportunity to engage the engineering mind.
It's not politically correct but I believe we must admit that privacy is full of contradictions and competing interests. We need to be more mature about privacy. Just as there is no such thing as perfect security, there can never be perfect privacy either. And is where the professional engineering mindset should be brought in, to help deal with conflicting requirements.
If we're serious about Privacy by Design and Privacy Engineering then we need to acknowledge the tensions. That's some of the thinking behind Constellation's new Big Privacy compact. To balance privacy and Big Data, we need to hold a conversation with users that respects the stresses and strains, and involves them in working through the new privacy deal.
The webinar will cover these highlights of the Big Privacy pact:
- Respect and Restraint
- Super transparency
- And a fair deal for Personal Information.
Have a disruptive technology implementation story? Get recognised for your leadership. Apply for the 2014 SuperNova Awards for leaders in disruptive technology.
Posted in Social Media, Privacy, Constellation Research, Biometrics, Big Data
Three billion was a Snap
The latest Snowden revelations include the NSA's special programs for extracting photos and identifying from the Internet. Amongst other things the NSA uses their vast information resources to correlate location cues in photos -- buildings, streets and so on -- with satellite data, to work out where people are. They even search especially for passport photos, because these are better fodder for facial recognition algorithms. The audacity of these government surveillance activities continues to surprise us, and their secrecy is abhorrent.
Yet an ever greater scale of private sector surveillance has been going on for years in social media. With great pride, Facebook recently revealed its R&D in facial recognition. They showcased the brazenly named "DeepFace" biometric algorithm, which is claimed to be 97% accurate in recognising faces from regular images. Facebook has made a swaggering big investment in biometrics.
Data mining needs raw material, there's lots of it out there, and Facebook has been supremely clever at attracting it. It's been suggested that 20% of all photos now taken end up in Facebook. Even three years ago, Facebook held 10,000 times as many photographs as the Library of Congress:
And Facebook will spend big buying other photo lodes. Last year they tried to buy Snapchat for the spectacular sum of three billion dollars. The figure had pundits reeling. How could a start-up company with 30 people be worth so much? All the usual dot com comparisons were made; the offer seemed a flight of fancy.
But no, the offer was a rational consideration for the precious raw material that lies buried in photo data.
Snapchat generates at least 100 million new images every day. Three billion dollars was, pardon me, a snap. I figure that at a ballpark internal rate of return of 10%, a $3B investment is equivalent to $300M p.a. so even if the Snapchat volume stopped growing, Facebook would have been paying one cent for every new snap, in perpetuity.
These days, we have learned from Snowden and the NSA that communications metadata is just as valuable as the content of our emails and phone calls. So remember that it's the same with photos. Each digital photo comes from a device that embeds within the image metadata usually including the time and place of when the picture was taken. And of course each Instagram or Snapchat is a social post, sent by an account holder with a history and rich context in which the image yields intimate real time information about what they're doing, when and where.
The hallmark of the Snapchat service is transience: all those snaps are supposed to flit from one screen to another before vaporising. Now of course that idea is contestable; enthusiasts worked out pretty quickly how to retrieve snaps from old memory. And in any case, transience is a red herring, perhaps a deliberate distraction, because the metadata matters more, and Snapchat admits in its Privacy Policy that it pretty well keeps the lot:
- When you access or use our Services, we automatically collect information about you, including:
- Usage Information: When you send or receive messages via our Services, we collect information about these messages, including the time, date, sender and recipient of the Snap. We also collect information about the number of messages sent and received between you and your friends and which friends you exchange messages with most frequently.
- Log Information: We log information about your use of our websites, including your browser type and language, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the website you visited before navigating to our websites.
- Device Information: We may collect information about the computer or device you use to access our Services, including the hardware model, operating system and version, MAC address, unique device identifier, phone number, International Mobile Equipment Identity ("IMEI") and mobile network information. In addition, the Services may access your device's native phone book and image storage applications, with your consent, to facilitate your use of certain features of the Services.
- Location Information: With your consent, we may collect information about the location of your device to facilitate your use of certain features of our Services, determine the speed at which your device is traveling, add location-based filters to your Snaps (such as local weather), and for any other purpose described in this privacy policy.
Snapchat goes on to declare it may use any of this information to "personalize and improve the Services and provide advertisements, content or features that match user profiles or interests" and it reserves the right to share any information with "vendors, consultants and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf".
So back to the data mining: nothing stops Snapchat -- or a new parent company -- running biometric facial recognition over the snaps as they pass through the servers, to extract additional "profile" information. And there's an extra kicker that makes Snapchats extra valuable for biometric data miners. The vast majority of Snapchats are selfies. So if you extract a biometric template from a snap, you already know who it belongs to, without anyone having to tag it. Snapchat would provide a hundred million auto-calibrations every day for facial recognition algorithms! On Facebook, the privacy aware turn off photo tagging, but with Snapchats, self identification is inherent to the experience and is unlikely to be ever be disabled.
As I've discussed before, the morbid thrill of Snowden's spying revelations has tended to overshadow his sober observations that when surveillance by the state is probably inevitable, we need to be discussing accountability.
While we're all ventilating about the NSA, it's time we also attended to private sector spying and properly debated the restraints that may be appropriate on corporate exploitation of social data.
Personally I'm much more worried that an infomopoly has all my selfies.
Have a disruptive technology implementation story? Get recognised for your leadership. Apply for the 2014 SuperNova Awards for leaders in disruptive technology.
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Biometrics, Big Data
The strengths and weaknesses of Data Privacy in the Age of Big Data
This is the abstract of a current privacy conference proposal.
Many Big Data and online businesses proceed on a naive assumption that data in the "public domain" is up for grabs; technocrats are often surprised that conventional data protection laws can be interpreted to cover the extraction of PII from raw data. On the other hand, orthodox privacy frameworks don't cater for the way PII can be created in future from raw data collected today. This presentation will bridge the conceptual gap between data analytics and privacy, and offer new dynamic consent models to civilize the trade in PII for goods and services.
It's often said that technology has outpaced privacy law, yet by and large that's just not the case. Technology has certainly outpaced decency, with Big Data and biometrics in particular becoming increasingly invasive. However OECD data privacy principles set out over thirty years ago still serve us well. Outside the US, rights-based privacy law has proven effective against today's technocrats' most worrying business practices, based as they are on taking liberties with any data that comes their way. To borrow from Niels Bohr, technologists who are not surprised by data privacy have probably not understood it.
The cornerstone of data privacy in most places is the Collection Limitation principle, which holds that organizations should not collect Personally Identifiable Information beyond their express needs. It is the conceptual cousin of security's core Need-to-Know Principle, and the best starting point for Privacy-by-Design. The Collection Limitation principle is technology neutral and thus blind to the manner of collection. Whether PII is collected directly by questionnaire or indirectly via biometric facial recognition or data mining, data privacy laws apply.
It's not for nothing we refer to "data mining". But few of those unlicensed data gold diggers seem to understand that the synthesis of fresh PII from raw data (including the identification of anonymous records like photos) is merely another form of collection. The real challenge in Big Data is that we don't know what we'll find as we refine the techniques. With the best will in the world, it is hard to disclose in a conventional Privacy Policy what PII might be collected through synthesis down the track. The age of Big Data demands a new privacy compact between organisations and individuals. High minded organizations will promise to keep people abreast of new collections and will offer ways to opt in, and out and in again, as the PII-for-service bargain continues to evolve.
Posted in Social Networking, Privacy, Biometrics, Big Data
FIDO Alliance goes from strength to strength
With a bunch of exciting new members joining up on the eve of the RSA Conference, the FIDO Alliance is going from strength to strength. And they've just published the first public review drafts of their core "universal authentication" protocols.
An update to my Constellation Research report on FIDO is now available. Here's a preview.
The Go-To standards alliance in protocols for modern identity management
The FIDO Alliance – for Fast IDentity Online – is a fresh, fast growing consortium of security vendors and end users working out a new suite of protocols and standards to connect authentication endpoints to services. With an unusual degree of clarity in this field, FIDO envisages simply "doing for authentication what Ethernet did for networking".
Launched in early 2013, the FIDO Alliance has already grown to nearly 100 members, amongst which are heavyweights like Google, Lenovo, MasterCard, Microsoft and PayPal as well as a couple of dozen biometrics vendors, many of the leading Identity and Access Management solutions and service providers and several global players in the smartcard supply chain.
FIDO is different. The typical hackneyed elevator pitch in Identity and Access Management promises to "fix the password crisis" – usually by changing the way business is done. Most IDAM initiatives unwittingly convert clear-cut technology problems into open-ended business transformation problems. In contrast, FIDO's mission is refreshingly clear cut: it seeks to make strong authentication interoperable between devices and servers. When users have activated FIDO-compliant endpoints, reliable fine-grained information about their client environment becomes readily discoverable by any servers, which can then make access control decisions, each according to its own security policy.
With its focus, pragmatism and critical mass, FIDO is justifiably today's go-to authentication standards effort.
In February 2014, the FIDO Alliance announced the release of its first two protocol drafts, and a clutch of new members including powerful players in financial services, the cloud and e-commerce. Constellation notes in particular the addition to the board of security leader RSA and another major payments card, Discover. And FIDO continues to strengthen its vital "Relying Party" (service provider) representation with the appearance of Aetna, Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Salesforce.com.
It's time we fixed the Authentication plumbing
In my view, the best thing about FIDO is that it is not about federated identity but instead it operates one layer down in what we call the digital identity stack. This might seem to run against the IDAM tide, but it's refreshing, and it may help the FIDO Alliance sidestep the quagmire of identity policy mapping and legal complexities. FIDO is not really about the vexed general issue of "identity" at all! Instead, it's about low level authentication protocols; that is, the plumbing.
The FIDO Alliance sets out its mission as follows:
- Change the nature of online authentication by:
- Developing technical specifications that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce the reliance on passwords to authenticate users.
- Operating industry programs to help ensure successful worldwide adoption of the Specifications.
- Submitting mature technical Specification(s) to recognized standards development organization(s) for formal standardization.
The engineering problem underlying Federated Identity is actually pretty simple: if we want to have a choice of high-grade physical, multi-factor "keys" used to access remote services, how do we convey reliable cues to those services about the type of key being used and the individual who's said to be using it? If we can solve that problem, then service providers and Relying Parties can sort out for themselves precisely what they need to know about the users, sufficient to identify and authenticate them.
All of these leaves the 'I' in the acronym "FIDO" a little contradictory. It's such a cute name (alluding of course to the Internet dog) that it's unlikely to change. Instead, I overheard that the acronym might go the way of "KFC" where eventually it is no longer spelled out and just becomes a word in and of itself.
FIDO Alliance Board Members
- Blackberry
- CrucialTec (manufactures innovative user input devices for mobiles)
- Discover Card
- Lenovo
- MasterCard
- Microsoft
- Nok Nok Labs (a specialist authentication server software company)
- NXP Semiconductors (a global supplier of card chips, SIMs and Secure Elements)
- Oberthur Technologies (a multinational smartcard and mobility solutions provider)
- PayPal
- Synaptics (fingerprint biometrics)
- Yubico (the developer of the YubiKey PKI enabled 2FA token).
FIDO Alliance Board Sponsor Level Members
- Aetna
- AGNITiO
- Dell
- Discretix
- Entersekt
- EyeLock Inc.
- Fingerprint Cards AB
- FingerQ
- Goldman Sachs
- IdentityX
- Infineon
- Kili
- Netflix
- Next Biometrics Group
- Oesterreichische Staatsdruckerei GmbH
- Ping Identity
- SafeNet
- Salesforce
- SecureKey
- Sonavation
- STMicroelectronics
- Wave Systems
Stay tuned for the updated Constellation Research report.
Posted in Smartcards, Security, Identity, Federated Identity, Constellation Research, Biometrics
Facebook's challenge to the Collection Limitation Principle
Facebook's challenge to the Collection Limitation Principle
An extract from our chapter in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining (to be published by Springer in 2014).
Stephen Wilson, Lockstep Consulting, Sydney, Australia.
Anna Johnston, Salinger Privacy, Sydney, Australia.
Key Points
- Facebook's business practices pose a risk of non-compliance with the Collection Limitation Principle (OECD Privacy Principle No. 1, and corresponding Australian National Privacy Principles NPP 1.1 through 1.4).
- Privacy problems will likely remain while Facebook's business model remains unsettled, for the business is largely based on collecting and creating as much Personal Information as it can, for subsequent and as yet unspecified monetization.
- If an OSN business doesn't know how it is eventually going to make money from Personal Information, then it has a fundamental difficulty with the Collection Limitation principle.
Facebook is an Internet and societal phenomenon. Launched in 2004, in just a few years it has claimed a significant proportion of the world's population as regular users, becoming by far the most dominant Online Social Network (OSN). With its success has come a good deal of controversy, especially over privacy. Does Facebook herald a true shift in privacy values? Or, despite occasional reckless revelations, are most users no more promiscuous than they were eight years ago? We argue it's too early to draw conclusions about society as a whole from the OSN experience to date. In fact, under laws that currently stand, many OSNs face a number of compliance risks in dozens of jurisdictions.
Over 80 countries worldwide now have enacted data privacy laws, around half of which are based on privacy principles articulated by the OECD. Amongst these are the Collection Limitation Principle which requires businesses to not gather more Personal Information than they need for the tasks at hand, and the Use Limitation Principle which dictates that Personal Information collected for one purpose not be arbitrarily used for others without consent.
Overt collection, covert collection (including generation) and "innovative" secondary use of Personal Information are the lifeblood of Facebook. While Facebook's founder would have us believe that social mores have changed, a clash with orthodox data privacy laws creates challenges for the OSN business model in general.
This article examines a number of areas of privacy compliance risk for Facebook. We focus on how Facebook collects Personal Information indirectly, through the import of members' email address books for "finding friends", and by photo tagging. Taking Australia's National Privacy Principles from the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) as our guide, we identify a number of potential breaches of privacy law, and issues that may be generalised across all OECD-based privacy environments.
Australian law tends to use the term "Personal Information" rather than "Personally Identifiable Information" although they are essentially synonymous for our purposes.
Terms of reference: OECD Privacy Principles and Australian law
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has articulated eight privacy principles for helping to protect personal information. The OECD Privacy Principles are as follows:
- 1. Collection Limitation Principle
- 2. Data Quality Principle
- 3. Purpose Specification Principle
- 4. Use Limitation Principle
- 5. Security Safeguards Principle
- 6. Openness Principle
- 7. Individual Participation Principle
- 8. Accountability Principle
Of most interest to us here are principles one and four:
- Collection Limitation Principle: There should be limits to the collection of personal data and any such data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the data subject.
- Use Limitation Principle: Personal data should not be disclosed, made available or otherwise used for purposes other than those specified in accordance with [the Purpose Specification] except with the consent of the data subject, or by the authority of law.
At least 89 counties have some sort of data protection legislation in place [Greenleaf, 2012]. Of these, in excess of 30 jurisdictions have derived their particular privacy regulations from the OECD principles. One example is Australia.
We will use Australia's National Privacy Principles NPPs in the Privacy Act 1988 as our terms of reference for analysing some of Facebook's systemic privacy issues. In Australia, Personal Information is defined as: information or an opinion (including information or an opinion forming part of a database), whether true or not, and whether recorded in a material form or not, about an individual whose identity is apparent, or can reasonably be ascertained, from the information or opinion.
Indirect collection of contacts
One of the most significant collections of Personal Information by Facebook is surely the email address book of those members that elect to have the site help "find friends". This facility provides Facebook with a copy of all contacts from the address book of the member's nominated email account. It's the very first thing that a new user is invited to do when they register. Facebook refer to this as "contact import" in the Data Use Policy (accessed 10 August 2012).
"Find friends" is curtly described as "Search your email for friends already on Facebook". A link labelled "Learn more" in fine print leads to the following additional explanation:
- "Facebook won't share the email addresses you import with anyone, but we will store them on your behalf and may use them later to help others search for people or to generate friend suggestions for you and others. Depending on your email provider, addresses from your contacts list and mail folders may be imported. You should only import contacts from accounts you've set up for personal use." [underline added by us].
Without any further elaboration, new users are invited to enter their email address and password if they have a cloud based email account (such as Hotmail, gmail, Yahoo and the like). These types of services have an API through which any third party application can programmatically access the account, after presenting the user name and password.
It is entirely possible that casual users will not fully comprehend what is happening when they opt in to have Facebook "find friends". Further, there is no indication that, by default, imported contact details are shared with everyone. The underlined text in the passage quoted above shows Facebook reserves the right to use imported contacts to make direct approaches to people who might not even be members.
Importing contacts represents an indirect collection by Facebook of Personal Information of others, without their authorisation or even knowledge. The short explanatory information quoted above is not provided to the individuals whose details are imported and therefore does not constitute a Collection Notice. Furthermore, it leaves the door open for Facebook to use imported contacts for other, unspecified purposes. The Data Use Policy imposes no limitations as to how Facebook may make use of imported contacts.
Privacy harms are possible in social networking if members blur the distinction between work and private lives. Recent research has pointed to the risky use of Facebook by young doctors, involving inappropriate discussion of patients [Moubarak et al, 2010]. Even if doctors are discreet in their online chat, we are concerned that they may run foul of the Find Friends feature exposing their connections to named patients. Doctors on Facebook who happen to have patients in their web mail address books can have associations between individuals and their doctors become public. In mental health, sexual health, family planning, substance abuse and similar sensitive fields, naming patients could be catastrophic for them.
While most healthcare professionals may use a specific workplace email account which would not be amenable to contacts import, many allied health professionals, counselors, specialists and the like run their sole practices as small businesses, and naturally some will use low cost or free cloud-based email services. Note that the substance of a doctor's communications with their patients over web mail is not at issue here. The problem of exposing associations between patients and doctors arises simply from the presence of a name in an address book, even if the email was only ever used for non-clinical purposes such as appointments or marketing.
Photo tagging and biometric facial recognition
One of Facebook's most "innovative" forms of Personal Information Collection would have to be photo tagging and the creation of biometric facial recognition templates.
Photo tagging and "face matching" has been available in social media for some years now. On photo sharing sites such as Picasa, this technology "lets you organize your photos according to the people in them" in the words of the Picasa help pages. But in more complicated OSN settings, biometrics has enormous potential to both enhance the services on offer and to breach privacy.
In thinking about facial recognition, we start once more with the Collection Principle. Importantly, nothing in the Australian Privacy Act circumscribes the manner of collection; no matter how a data custodian comes to be in possession of Personal Information (being essentially any data about a person whose identity is apparent) they may be deemed to have collected it. When one Facebook member tags another in a photo on the site, then the result is that Facebook has overtly but indirectly collected PI about the tagged person.
Facial recognition technologies are deployed within Facebook to allow its servers to automatically make tag suggestions; in our view this process constitutes a new type of Personal Information Collection, on a potentially vast scale.
Biometric facial recognition works by processing image data to extract certain distinguishing features (like the separation of the eyes, nose, ears and so on) and computing a numerical data set known as a template that is highly specific to the face, though not necessarily unique. Facebook's online help indicates that they create templates from multiple tagged photos; if a user removes a tag from one of their photo, that image is not used in the template.
Facebook subsequently makes tag suggestions when a member views photos of their friends. They explain the process thus:
- "We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend's pictures to information we've put together from the other photos you've been tagged in".
So we see that Facebook must be more or less continuously checking images from members' photo albums against its store of facial recognition templates. When a match is detected, a tag suggestion is generated and logged, ready to be displayed next time the member is online.
What concerns us is that the proactive creation of biometric matches constitutes a new type of PI Collection, for Facebook must be attaching names -- even tentatively, as metadata -- to photos. This is a covert and indirect process.
Photos of anonymous strangers are not Personal Information, but metadata that identifies people in those photos most certainly is. Thus facial recognition is converting hitherto anonymous data -- uploaded in the past for personal reasons unrelated to photo tagging let alone covert identification -- into Personal Information.
Facebook limits the ability to tag photos to members who are friends of the target. This is purportedly a privacy enhancing feature, but unfortunately Facebook has nothing in its Data Use Policy to limit the use of the biometric data compiled through tagging. Restricting tagging to friends is likely to actually benefit Facebook for it reduces the number of specious or mischievous tags, and it probably enhances accuracy by having faces identified only by those who know the individuals.
A fundamental clash with the Collection Limitation Principle
In Australian privacy law, as with the OECD framework, the first and foremost privacy principle concerns Collection. Australia's National Privacy Principle NPP 1 requires that an organisation refrain from collecting Personal Information unless (a) there is a clear need to collect that information; (b) the collection is done by fair means, and (c) the individual concerned is made aware of the collection and the reasons for it.
In accordance with the Collection Principle (and others besides), a conventional privacy notice and/or privacy policy must give a full account of what Personal Information an organisation collects (including that which it creates internally) and for what purposes. And herein lies a fundamental challenge for most online social networks.
The core business model of many Online Social Networks is to take advantage of Personal Information, in many and varied ways. From the outset, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to have been enthusiastic for information built up in his system to be used by others. In 2004, he told a colleague "if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask" (as reported by Business Insider). Since then, Facebook has experienced a string of privacy controversies, including the "Beacon" sharing feature in 2007, which automatically imported members' activities on external websites and re-posted the information on Facebook for others to see.
Facebook's privacy missteps are characterised by the company using the data it collects in unforeseen and barely disclosed ways. Yet this is surely what Facebook's investors expect the company to be doing: innovating in the commercial exploitation of personal information. The company's huge market valuation derives from a widespread faith in the business community that Facebook will eventually generate huge revenues. An inherent clash with privacy arises from the fact that Facebook is a pure play information company: its only significant asset is the information it holds about its members. There is a market expectation that this asset will be monetized and maximised. Logically, anything that checks the network's flux in Personal Information -- such as the restraints inherent in privacy protection, whether adopted from within or imposed from without -- must affect the company's futures.
Perhaps the toughest privacy dilemma for innovation in commercial Online Social Networking is that these businesses still don't know how they are going to make money from their Personal Information lode. Even if they wanted to, they cannot tell what use they will eventually make of it, and so a fundamental clash with the Collection Limitation Principle remains.
An earlier version of this article was originally published by LexisNexis in the Privacy Law Bulletin (2010).
- Greenleaf G., "Global Data Privacy Laws: 89 Countries, and Accelerating", Privacy Laws & Business International Report, Issue 115, Special Supplement, February 2012 Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 98/2012
- Moubarak G., Guiot A. et al "Facebook activity of residents and fellows and its impact on the doctor--patient relationship" J Med Ethics, 15 December 2010
Posted in Social Networking, Social Media, Privacy, Biometrics


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ACParadise Network:
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Photographer BlizzardTerrak > Photoshoots > Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Photoshoot Info
- Series:
- Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Title:
- ALA 2012 - Dragon Born
- Convention:
- Anime LA 2012
- Most Recent Photo:
- 01-29-2012 (15 Photos Total)
- Location:
- Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel
- Equipment:
- Nikon D7000 Nikon AF-S Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G DX Lens SB-600 AF Speedlight i-TTL Shoe Mount Flash +w/ Cap Diffuser Adobe Lightroom 3
- Details:
- Dragon Born - nihilistique Now THIS was a surprise for me! D8 Man, that axe and shield was HEAVY DUTY stuff. Just a lot of awesome the way she made the armor and bucket too. :o (Anyone does that damned arrow joke, and I'll delete your comment. As much as I love comments, that joke is overused. Make it funny or on topic, or don't bother posting)
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Selva Vinayagar Temple: Discourse on 'Periapuranam' by K. Shanmugam, Railway Colony, 7.30 p.m.
Panniru Tirumurai Mandram: Tirunavukkarasar guru puja, Tirumurai recitation and archana, South Adi Street, Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple, 10.30 a.m.
Tiruvalluvar Kazhagam: Discourse on 'Moovar Tamil' by Arunachalam, North Adi Street, Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple, 7 p.m.
Tiruvalluvar Mandram: Discourse on 'Villi Bharatham' by K. Manickam, Sakthi Velammal Nagar, 5 p.m.
Ramakrishna Mutt: Bhajan, New Natham Road, 6.30 p.m.
Indian National Apostalic Diocese: Episcopalian convocation day, Paul R. T. Maren addresses, De Nobili Pastoral Centre, K. Pudur, 5 p.m.
Prajapita Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya: Free Rajayoga meditation classes, 36 Meenakshi Nagar, P and T Nagar; 40 Sambandamoorthy Street, 211/95 East Veli Street and 357 Church Road, Anna Nagar, 6.30 a.m. and 5.30 p.m.
Gandhi Memorial Museum: Yoga, meditation and pranayama classes, 6 a.m., 10.30 a.m. and 5 p.m.; summer course in histrionic talents and performing arts, 10 a.m.
International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre: Yoga for beginners, 6 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.; for women, 10.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m.; for senior citizens, 23 Dr. Sathar Road, Anna Nagar, 5.30 p.m.
Yoga Research Centre: V. Saravanan conducts yoga therapy classes, Department of Philosophy, Madura College, 6.30 a.m.
Velammal College of Engineering and Technology: Valedictory of ECE Association, V.R. Jeevan Babu speaks, SM. Kannan, Principal, presides, Auditorium, 3.15 p.m.
Anbagam Institution for Mentally Handicapped Children: 38th Annual Day, A. Devadoss speaks; Savithri Devadoss distributes prizes; M. Rajapandian presides, DRO Colony, 10.30 a.m.
Vidiyal: Human chain on solidarity for working children, Rathinapuram, 4 p.m.
Citizens' Association for Traffic Improvement in Madurai: S. Prabhakaran, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic), addresses, M. Amanullah presides, 231 East Veli Street, 6.30 p.m.
Town Official Language Implementation Committee: 39th meeting, P. V. Valsala Kutti, Joint Secretary, Department of Official Language, addresses, Hotel Sangam, 3.30 p.m.
Rotary Club of Madurai Central: S. Subramaniam speaks on 'In search of excellence,' Hotel Sangam, 6 p.m.
Alcoholics Anonymous: Meeting, Dr. Dheep Clinic, K. Pudur, 7.30 p.m.


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NFDA Home > News & Events > Death Notices > Bernard J. "Bernie" Schad
former owner of Schad Funeral Homes, now Patton-Schad Funeral & Cremation Services, Melrose, Minnesota, died December 5, 2011, at age 80. Schad served in the U.S. Army and attended State Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in mortuary science. He began work as a funeral director at Werness Brothers Funeral Home in Minneapolis and then Evans-Nordby Funeral Home in Osseo.
In 1966, Schad moved to Melrose and began serving the community and surrounding areas as a funeral director. He later expanded Schad Funeral Homes to include locations in Grey Eagle, Sauk Centre and Freeport. In 1993, the funeral homes were sold to Pat and Sue Patton, and Schad continued to work there until his retirement from full-time funeral directing in 1995. Over the past 16 years, he worked at the funeral home whenever he was needed, including participating in the annual Service of Remembrance. Schad was a past president of the Melrose Chamber of Commerce and longtime member of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association, serving as president of the association from 1986-87.
He is survived by wife Mary; children Julie, Joe, Mike and Patrick; 10 grandchildren and two great-grandsons.


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Storms, sales and sermons in the papers
Almost all the front pages are united by one topic this Christmas Eve - the weather.
Many use striking photographs of storm-battered Britain, although the Daily Express goes one further and predicts even more bad weather after Christmas.
It seems the adverse conditions provided a punning opportunity that the Daily Mirror's sub-editors couldn't resist. After using "Blast Xmas" on the front (it took this paper reviewer a while to tease out the Wham reference), they opted for the more straightforward "A winter's gale" and "'Tis the season for a brolly" on the inside pages.
Other page designers let the pictures do the talking, and the spread in the Daily Star features trees blocking roads, waves lashing Brighton's pier, cars driving through deep water and - somewhat incongruously - a squirrel eating a mince pie.
Rivals focus on transport, the Daily Express showing snow ploughs on the roads and the Isle of Wight ferry bobbing on the Solent, while the Daily Mail describes the "chaos at Euston" railway station in London.
And the Times gives its weatherman Paul Simons room to explain the scale this "monster" storm.
He says: "It's no exaggeration to say that this tempest is a 'bomb' that exploded in the Atlantic, its pressure plunging 50 millibars in 24 hours." Meteorologists apparently use the term "bomb" to refer to a drop of more than 24 millibars in that timescale.
Not-so-mega Monday?The inclement weather "put a dampener on the late dash for gifts", with 1.1% fewer people in the shops than this time last year, according to the Guardian.
It says the wind and rain was a further blow to retailers - particularly on the High Street - who've already been forced into early discounts to battle the online competition.
And the Times agrees that the tills "failed to jingle", pointing out that the number of shoppers on the High Street last week was 5.7% down on last year. It did, however, publicise a few deals that might entice shoppers to venture out on Christmas Eve, ranging from 80p children's plimsolls to a six-bottle case of champagne for £96.
The Daily Express says millions still "braved the heavy rain and howling winds", with retailers expecting to have taken £3.6m by the end of Monday. That's £2.6m per minute, it says.
Meanwhile, one mother who tried to take the labour out of shopping was left "stunned" when her festive fare arrived from the supermarket complete with ONE sprout, the Sun says. Apparently, it was the customer's first attempt at online grocery shopping and she'd intended to order a kilo. But at least it only cost her 4p.
Royal pardonA decision to grant a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, the World War II codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted for homosexual activity, makes the front page of the Guardian. The paper quotes Justice Secretary Chris Grayling as saying the move recognised his "fantastic contribution to the war effort", explaining the belief that his role in cracking Germany's enigma code shortened the war by up to two years.
Wind out of sales?
The bottom has fallen out of the beans market, according to the Daily Mirror. It quotes the Grocer magazine as saying Britons spent nearly £21m less on tinned baked beans this year than last.
However, it seems that could be good news. "The snack's slump could be a sign the economy has turned a corner. Sales of the cheap meal tend to go up when times are hard," the Mirror adds.
The Daily Mail points out that only three others have been granted royal pardons since the war.
Reviewing the papers for the BBC News Channel, former Professional Footballers' Association chairman Clarke Carlisle said "If you're going to start to look over all the incidents that have happened… and posthumously change decisions that were made throughout history then the Queen's going to be incredibly busy doling out pardons."
However, Independent columnist Owen Jones said the lives of many more people were "mercilessly ruined" as a result of prosecutions that remained a "disgraceful blot on the history of the country". He added: "A pardon is not enough. What we need now is the overturning of all these convictions of [gay men] whose lives were trashed."
The Sun points out that - thanks to a change in the law last year - thousands of gay men who were similarly convicted can have their offence deleted from the record. As Turing can't, the posthumous pardon is right, it says.
Meanwhile, the Mirror is thankful we're living in "more enlightened times" and says the pardon "recognises that Turing and thousands of other gay Britons were unfairly persecuted".
Ecumenical mattersIt's a day for reflection on spiritual matters, with Prime Minister David Cameron using his Christmas message to, as the Daily Express puts it, "link his 'Big Society' drive... with the Christian faith". Meanwhile, the Archbishop of York writes in the Sun that the Church is "for life... not just for Christmas".
Islam and M&S
Marks & Spencer came in for flak on social media after backing a Muslim checkout assistant who refused to serve alcohol. It later back-tracked but not before influential Muslims "lined up" to condemn the stance as "ridiculous", says the Daily Mail, which quotes various bemused Islamic commentators.
Britain's proud liberal democracy should allow respect for Muslim views and the right to buy booze, says the Times: "It is hard to think of anything more characteristically British than transferring Muslim staff to the underwear department while customers queue quietly for alcohol."
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey's comment in the Daily Telegraph echoes the concerns of Prince Charles that ancient Christian communities in the Middle East are on the verge of disappearing from the homelands. But it's his suggestion that, in the West, churchgoers are too timid to talk to work colleagues about faith that make the front page.
However, he draws hope from the "very significant new leaders" of both Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. And it's a sentiment shared by the Times, which writes in its editorial that their "inspiring leadership... exemplifies the dual message of care for humanity and the mystery of the incarnation".
Meanwhile, the Guardian visits Ely, in Cambridgeshire, to find "a tale of two Christmases". One is the magnificent 12th Century cathedral, just along the road from the Lighthouse Church - housed in a converted garage - with its less wealthy, younger congregation. "It is a stark juxtaposition," says writer Andrew Brown, adding: "But with their respective congregations not too dissimilar in size, the two together represent the state of the church in modern Britain."
Festive wishesSeveral papers take time to wish readers a merry Christmas - and to remind them to pick up the next copy on Boxing Day.
Cabinet Christmas Carol
A ban on prisoners receiving Christmas presents has resulted in Justice Secretary Chris Grayling being branded "Scrooge", reports the Independent. It says even right-wing commentators have taken issue with the move.
Meanwhile, the Guardian's cartoon presents "A lovely Dickensian Christmas," with the ghost of Christmas present telling several senior Conservatives, tucked up in bed together: "Behold your children ignorance and want!!" The replies come back: "Nonsense! They're just skivers!", "Trots!", "Foreigners!", "Politically motivated troublemaker charities!" and - from David Cameron - "God bless us every one!"
The Sun notes that the day means different things to different people. "If you're a believer, it's about the birth of Jesus. If you're a Belieber, it's about getting tickets for the pop pillock's Boxing Day movie," it notes under a matey: "Merry Crimbo."
Given the weather, the Daily Mirror is concerned for its readers welfare. "We wish you a safe journey if you're on the move today and a Merry Christmas tomorrow," it says.
Never mind, the Daily Express says: "There is great comfort to be had from being indoors with family and friends while the wind buffets and the rain lashes down."
But the Financial Times expresses its good wishes over 12 verses which sum up the holiday in the internet age. It begins: "'Twas the night before Chistmas and all through the house, no hard drive was whirring, no click of a mouse...
"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, but dangled in vain, filled only with air. While mama on the high street and I in a flap, searched frantically for presents not killed off by apps." It goes on in similar vein, before wishing: "Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night," with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore.
Making people clickTelegraph: Kim Jong-un 'very drunk' when ordered executions
Daily Mirror: 'Happy Holidays' Google Doodle created to mark Christmas Eve
The Times: Three young men who died in crash were street racers
Daily Mail: Courtney Stodden is not pining for Doug this holiday... as she goes tree shopping with hunky man
Financial Times: China cash crunch eases as PBoC reassures


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You won't be able to dismiss this by usual means (escape or click button), but you can close it programatically based on user choices or actions.
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Current Students, Faculty, Staff: my OLLU online resources Password Help
Three-day workshop to prep for the Project Management Professional (PMP®) Exam Presented by Dr. Hamid Khan and Our Lady of the Lake University Receive project management training from an expert in the field and get prepared to take your Project Management certification exam in just 1 day. Includes • 3-day workshop • All class materials You Will Learn How To • Plan a project to ensure successful delivery and stakeholder satisfaction • Apply best practices to plan and run projects using a 6-step project management process • Implement risk management techniques and deploy mitigation strategies • Estimate and schedule task work, duration and costs with confidence • Implement monitoring tools and controls to keep you fully in command of the project • Recognize and practice the leadership skills needed to run a motivated team Workshop Benefits As an effective project manager, you organize scarce resources, work under tight deadlines, control project change and generate maximum team performance. Through a simulated case study, you learn how to successfully plan, manage and deliver projects. You also learn how to implement project management processes, develop leadership skills and respond to real-world scenarios. At the end of the course, you leave with templates and checklists for use back at the workplace. Who Should Attend Individuals who need to strengthen their project management skill sets, those new to project management, or project managers seeking a refresher on fundamental project management knowledge, skills and current tools. In the project management executive development program consists of elementary project management technique which will develop essential project management skills in current executives using the following project management essentials: • Introduction to modern project management • Integration of organizational strategy with projects • Defining the project • Developing a network plan • Managing risk reducing project time • Rescheduling resources • Organization • Leadership: being an effective project manager • Managing project teams • Partnering: managing editor organizational relations • Progress and performance measurement and evaluation • Project audit and closure
About the Professor Dr. Hamid Khan, professor of management in OLLU's School of Business and Leadership, has an extensive background in Management and Organizational Behavior, including Performance Management, Human Resource Management, Strategic Management, Management Development of Executives and Management Development of R&D and technical personnel. Dr. Khan has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, a Master of Science in Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, a Master of Business Administration, and a Doctorate in Education. Dr. Khan is a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas, and has consulted with various engineering, management and technology companies.


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Sunderland Linked With Two Defenders!
Sunderland are continuing their search for a defender and have two players on their "wanted" list.
Martin O'Neill has added FC Groningen's Virgil van Dijk, 21, and Kader Mangane, 29, of Al Hilal to his list of targets.
Van Dijk (pictured right): "I'm aware of the interest of a few clubs and Everton is one of them'.
"I hear and read a lot. Soon I have dinner with my agent Henk-Maarten Chin. He will tell me how things are going.
"I enjoy the interest, but if I leave it must be a good decision when I leave."
Mangane, who has six caps for Senegal, left French club Rennes last summer to join the Saudi Arabian outfit Al Hilal.
The 6' 5" former Senegal international, who has been a target for West Ham and Arsenal.
He was suspended for two months for breaking the leg of Valenciennes midfielder Jonathan Lacourt.
Al Hilal president Prince Abdulrahman: "Today we received the official bid from Sunderland for Mangane, we will look into the offer and consider our position and we may see the player leave Al-Hilal this month."
Source: Sunderland-Mad
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Dialogue from nearly 300 movies expertly spliced into everyone's favorite song about butts. Consider your afternoon made.
Sir Mix-a-Lot recently mixed up the vibe at a recent Seattle Symphony concert with an orchestral rendition of his hit, "Baby Got Back." It was one particular audience-member-turned-dancer in a black dress that really seemed to steal the show. Watch this video to find out what she's all about.


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Plant Description
Its relatively small size, glossy green foliage & airy pinkish-red flowers set this extraordinary selection apart from others. Especially attractive planted in mass where flowers can be backlit by the sun. Drought tolerant but looks best with regular water.
Light Needs:
Partial to full sun
Watering Needs:
Needs regular watering - weekly, or more often in extreme heat.
Average Landscape Size:
Fast growing clump to 4 feet tall in bloom and as wide.
Key Feature:
Showy Flowers
Late summer to fall
Landscape Uses:
Botanical Pronunciation:mew-len-BERG-gee-uh kap-ill-AIR-iss
Plant type:Ornamental Grass
Growth rate:Fast
Average landscape size:Fast growing clump to 4 feet tall in bloom and as wide.
Special features:Deer Resistant, Easy Care, North American Native Selection, Waterwise
Foliage color:Green
Blooms:Late summer to fall
Flower color:Pink
Flower attributesFlowers for Cutting, Showy Flowers
Garden styleRustic
Design IdeasWonderful planted in mass with a solid wall background to highlight the flowers. Also attractive planted out in the open next to a pond or pool. The delicate, airy flowers wave and shimmer in the wind. This plant is versatile and can be mixed into ornamental or native landscape designs.
Companion PlantsVersatile plant that looks best planted in drifts or with other ornamental or native shrubs and perennials. Green evergreen shrubs like Holly and Euonymus highlight the light, airy blooms, or try Blueberry, Heath and Scotch Broom for added interest and color.
Care Information
Follow a regular watering schedule during the first growing season to establish a deep, extensive root system. For a neat appearance, shear old foliage before new leaves emerge.Pruning time: late winter or early spring.Light Needs:
Partial to full sun
Watering Needs:
Needs regular watering - weekly, or more often in extreme heat.
The Genus (A group of related species classified within a family) of this plant is named for Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg (1753-1815),a Lutheran minister and the first president of Franklin College in Pennsylvania. He is most famous due to his work in the field of botany where he named and classified over 150 species of plants. Muhlenbergia capillaris is native to the Southern U.S and found in pine flatlands, coastal uplands and sandy prairies along the Gulf States. Regal Mist is a selection of Gulf Coast Muhly made by Ron Gass of Mountain States Wholesale Nursery in Arizona.


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A man is working at a pharmaceutical store and is always messing up orders. His boss tells him if he screws up one more time, he is fired.
An old man walks in and orders cough syrup. He cant find any so he gives him a laxative instead. The man takes the laxative and leaves the store. The boss comes up and asks why he gave the man a laxative in place of cough syrup. He points towards the old man who is suddenly leaning on a lightpost and says, "Look at him -- hes afraid to cough."


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2015 News
2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 Archives
February 13, 2015
Mouse Model Helps Researchers Target Deadly Brain Disease
At upper left, a healthy astrocyte — a supportive brain cell — is shown in blue between green sheaths of myelin, which are produced by oligodendrocytes, the tentacled objects also seen in green.In individuals suffering from Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, JC viruses (red particles) first infect the astrocyte (upper right) and mutate, eventually causing the astrocyte to explode (bottom image). The viruses then infect the oligodendrocytes.
When University researchers Steven Goldman and Maiken Nedergaard created a mouse model whose brains consisted of both animal neurons and human glia cells, their study initially focused on findings that the human cells essentially made the mice smarter.
However, they also created a powerful new platform for researchers to study human glial cells in experimental animals. And that is providing new insights into Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML).
The study, out today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, suggests that the evolution of a subset of glia called astrocytes – which are larger and more complex in humans than other species – may have been one of the key events that led to the higher cognitive functions that distinguish us from other species.
For more information please visit the URMC Newsroom article.
February 4, 2015
NBA Faculty Candidate: Krishnan Padmanabhan, PhD
Krishnan Padmanabhan, PhD
Faculty candidate Dr. Padmanabhan, Junior Fellow Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biolgy The Salk Institute of Biological Studies, will present the talk
The Role of Diversity in the Neural Computations
Monday, February 23rd at 2:00pm in K-307 (3-6408)Abstract
A key question in neuroscience is to understand how neuronal circuits process sensory information and generate behaviors in response to that information. Consider the sense of smell for instance. In a single sniff, mammals can synthesize data about dozens of volitile chemical compounds to create a singular unified perception, like the smell of coffee. In the olfactory system of mice, feedforward projections from the principle cells of the main olfactory bulb relay information about these odors directly to cortical regions as an early step toward forming a sensory percept. Feedback projections from these cortical areas back to early olfactory structures dynamically impact the way incoming odor information is processed based on such features as experience, memory and brain state. How these two computations are done, and how the olfactory system uses these computations to generate behavior remain open questions.
In my talk, I will discuss our recent work tackling 2 aspects of this process.
- How the biophysical properties of neurons improves information transmission in the feedforward direction.
- How the anatomy of connections from the higher processing areas may reveal key computational principles about sensory processing.
February 1, 2015
MSTP Announces 40th Anniversary Celebration!
Edward M.
RubinThe Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) is excited to announce a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the MSTP NIH training grant on Friday, October 9, 2015.
The keynote speaker will be an MSTP alumni from the Class of 1980: Edward Rubin, MD, PhD, Director, DOE Joint Genome Institute.
Edward M.
Rubin is an internationally-known geneticist and medical researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, where he became head of the Genomic Sciences Division in 1998. In 2002 he assumed the directorship of the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) to lead the JGI 's involvement in the Human Genome Project (HGP).For more information and schedule of events for the day, please visit the MSTP 40th Anniversary page.
January 12, 2015
NIH Neuro Start Up Challenge
Several neuroscience graduate students and clinicians from the University of Rochester are involved in the NIH Neuro Start Up Challenge and have developed their elevator pitch and executive summary as part of the public voting phase. We encourage the neuroscience community to visit their Showcase page and provide votes and constructive feedback on the discussion board this week. Public voting will run Monday, January 12th through Friday, January 16th.
Team: University of Rochester- 8&9.A (Inventions 8 and 9)
Company Name: VasoMark
About the Challenge: The Neuro Start Up Challenge, launched by the NIH in partnership with the CAI and HPN, is designed to bring brain-related, patented technologies from the NIH to market. Teams of medical, scientific and business experts compete in several phases to create a company and execute a business plan with the ultimate goal of launching their start-up.
Thank you for your support
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If the government continues to not pay it's bills and refuse to go to work my Mom might divorce my step-dad and marry it. #eatadickSteve
Nothing scares me more than seeing "[Relative's Name] shared a link on your Timeline."
Author Tom Clancy has passed. The official cause of death is a lot of technical, jargony stuff that you can skip over w/o missing anything.