Lies, Damn Lies and Chinese Economic Data
August 16th, 2013Via: CNBC:
China may be exaggerating the size of its economy to the tune of $1 trillion by releasing “willfully fraudulent” inflation and GDP [gross domestic product] data, according to a study out this week.
Numbers from the world’s second largest economy are treated with skepticism by some economists, but this latest report has attempted to quantify the scale of discrepancy.
“There is strong evidence indicating that the rate of real Chinese GDP growth, and ultimately total real GDP, may be significantly over stated,” said Christopher Balding, associate professor at Peking University’s HSBC Business School, and the report’s author.
Through “significant and systematic irregularities”, official estimates overstate China’s true GDP by 8 to 12 percent, or $1 trillion, according to Balding.
Balding looked at data from between 2000 and 2011, and found that inflation numbers had been manipulated in a way that distorted other measures such as GDP and disposable income.
“If inflation data is not accurate, or is willfully fraudulent, as appears to be the case, it will impact many other areas of economic and financial data leading to large disparities over time,” said Balding. “It is disturbing that a statistical body would so obviously manipulate and produce blatantly fraudulent data.”
Death Toll from Egypt Violence Rises to 525
August 15th, 2013Via: Los Angeles Times / AP:
Egyptian authorities on Thursday significantly raised the death toll from clashes the previous day between police and supporters of the ousted Islamist president, saying more than 500 people died and laying bare the extent of the violence that swept much of the country and prompted the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency and a nighttime curfew.
The death toll, which stood at 525, according to the latest Health Ministry figures, makes Wednesday by far the deadliest day since the 2011 popular uprising that toppled longtime ruler and autocrat Hosni Mubarak — a grim milestone that does not bode well for the future of a nation roiled in turmoil and divisions for the past 2 1/2 years.
Health Ministry spokesman Khaled el-Khateeb put the number of the injured on Wednesday at 3,717.
“Average Cost to Raise a Kid: $241,080” ???
August 15th, 2013Our annual household income is roughly what this report indicates the cost would be to raise one child for a year in the U.S. And we have two children.
Living mortgage free is like living on a different planet compared to those who have a bank’s boot on their necks.
Via: CNN:
From day care to the monthly grocery bill, the cost of raising a child is climbing at a rate that many families can’t keep up with.
It will cost an estimated $241,080 for a middle-income couple to raise a child born last year for 18 years, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday. That’s up almost 3% from 2011 and doesn’t even include the cost of college.
At the same time, wages aren’t keeping up. The country’s median annual household income has fallen by more than $4,000 since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, and many of the jobs lost during the recent recession have been replaced with lower-wage positions.
The USDA’s latest estimates include expenses for housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, education and child care, as well as miscellaneous expenses, such as toys and computers.
Related: 33 Percent of Americans Raised Middle Class Move Downward as Adults
Intel’s New Optical Server Interconnect: 1.6 Terabits Per Second
August 15th, 2013Via: PC World:
Intel is looking to use light and lasers to shuffle data faster among servers, and is proposing a new optical interconnect, MXC, that could change the way servers are implemented in data centers.
The chip maker is pitching MXC as a “next-generation optical connector” that could be a big step in standardizing optical technology and ultimately help bring it to servers faster.
Light provides high-bandwidth connections that are much faster than older electrical wiring technology found in most computers today.
The optical interconnect “can carry up to 1.6 terabits per second and is smaller than the connectors used today,” Intel said in a brief description of an upcoming session on MXC on its website for the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, slated for Sept. 10 to 12. Optical signals will also be able to go more than 300 meters and provide swift transfer rates, according to the session notes.
The chip maker will share more information about MXC at IDC. Intel started working on the technology with Corning Cable Systems two years ago.
Intel declined to comment on MXC specifics.
Encryption Is Less Secure Than We Thought
August 14th, 2013Via: MIT News:
Information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression — also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption.
Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth, demonstrated in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Information Theory (view PDF), that assumption is false. In a follow-up paper being presented this fall at the Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems, the same team shows that, as a consequence, the wireless card readers used in many keyless-entry systems may not be as secure as previously thought.
In information theory, the concept of information is intimately entwined with that of entropy. Two digital files might contain the same amount of information, but if one is shorter, it has more entropy. If a compression algorithm — such as WinZip or gzip — worked perfectly, the compressed file would have the maximum possible entropy. That means that it would have the same number of 0s and 1s, and the way in which they were distributed would be totally unpredictable. In information-theoretic parlance, it would be perfectly uniform.
Traditionally, information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have assumed that the source files are perfectly uniform. In practice, they rarely are, but they’re close enough that it appeared that the standard mathematical analyses still held.
“We thought we’d establish that the basic premise that everyone was using was fair and reasonable,” says Ken Duffy, one of the researchers at NUI. “And it turns out that it’s not.” On both papers, Duffy is joined by his student Mark Christiansen; Muriel Médard, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT; and her student Flávio du Pin Calmon.
The problem, Médard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978.
Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that’s the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. Although Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper dealt with cryptography, it was primarily concerned with communication, and it used the same measure of entropy in both discussions.
But in cryptography, the real concern isn’t with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations. In the years since Shannon’s paper, information theorists have developed other notions of entropy, some of which give greater weight to improbable outcomes. Those, it turns out, offer a more accurate picture of the problem of codebreaking.
When Médard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected.
“It’s still exponentially hard, but it’s exponentially easier than we thought,” Duffy says. One implication is that an attacker who simply relied on the frequencies with which letters occur in English words could probably guess a user-selected password much more quickly than was previously thought. “Attackers often use graphics processors to distribute the problem,” Duffy says. “You’d be surprised at how quickly you can guess stuff.”
Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits
August 14th, 2013Via: Scientific American:
There seems to be a simple way to instantly increase a person’s level of general knowledge. Psychologists Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan recently asked two groups of people to answer questions. People in one group were told that before each question, the answer would be briefly flashed on their screens — too quickly to consciously perceive, but slow enough for their unconscious to take it in. The other group was told that the flashes simply signaled the next question. In fact, for both groups, a random string of letters, not the answers, was flashed. But, remarkably, the people who thought the answers were flashed did better on the test. Expecting to know the answers made people more likely to get the answers right.
Our cognitive and physical abilities are in general limited, but our conceptions of the nature and extent of those limits may need revising. In many cases, thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. There is accumulating evidence that suggests that our thoughts are often capable of extending our cognitive and physical limits.
Google: If You Use Gmail, You Have ‘No Legitimate Expectation Of Privacy’
August 14th, 2013Via: Business Insider:
If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use Google’s Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer Watchdog website.
In a motion filed last month by Google to have a class action complaint dismissed, Google’s lawyers reference a 1979 ruling, holding that people who turn over information to third parties shouldn’t expect that information to remain private.
From the filing (emphasis added):
Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. Indeed, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979). In particular, the Court noted that persons communicating through a service provided by an intermediary (in the Smith case, a telephone call routed through a telephone company) must necessarily expect that the communication will be subject to the intermediary’s systems. For example, the Court explained that in using the telephone, a person “voluntarily convey[s] numerical information to the telephone company and ‘expose[s]’ that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business.” Id. at 744 (emphasis added).
…
“Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, in a news release. “People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents’ privacy don’t use Gmail.”
More Fast and Furious Guns Surface at Crime Scenes in Mexico
August 14th, 2013Via: CBS:
Three more weapons from Fast and Furious have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, CBS News has learned, as the toll from the controversial federal operation grows.
According to Justice Department tracing documents obtained by CBS News, all three guns are WASR-10 762-caliber Romanian rifles. Two were purchased by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino in May and July of 2010. Sean Steward, who was convicted on gun charges in July 2012, purchased a third. The rifles were traced yesterday to the Lone Wolf gun shop in Glendale, Ariz.
During Fast and Furious and similar operations, federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged the Lone Wolf and other gun stores to sell massive amounts of weapons to questionable purchasers who allegedly trafficked them Mexican drug cartels.
Patino is said to have purchased 700 guns while under ATF’s watch. Ever since, a steady stream of the guns have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. But the Justice Department has refused repeated requests from Congress and CBS News to provide a full accounting. An estimated 1,400 guns are still on the street or unaccounted for.
X-47B Lands on U.S. Aircraft Carrier
August 14th, 2013Via: Wired:
The Navy’s X-47B drone completed its newest round of tests off the Virginia shore last week, making it the first pilotless unmanned jet in history to land aboard a moving aircraft carrier — one of aviation’s most challenging maneuvers.
The Navy heralded the achievement as the future of warfare. “It isn’t very often you get a glimpse of the future,” said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus in a statement. “Today, those of us aboard the USS George H.W. Bush got that chance as we witnessed the X-47B make its first-ever arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier.”
…
The X-47B, developed by defense giant Northrop Grumman, was funded under a 2007 contract initially worth $635.8 million that has ballooned to $1.4 billion. Northrop Grumman enlisted the help of a dozen other companies, including General Electric, Dell, Moog, and Lockheed Martin, to carry out the contract. But for a project with such a hefty price tag, the X-47B will never be put into operational use. Instead, next year, four companies are expected to compete for a contract to design the next version of the X-47B with an eye toward putting them in the air in 2020, according to the Navy.
Taiwan Nuclear Power Plant Reportedly Leaking Radioactive Water
August 14th, 2013Via: The Hindu:
An aging nuclear power plant in Taiwan has been leaking radioactive wastewater for three and half years, according to a report released by the government’s watchdog this week.
The report by Control Yuan said spent fuel rod storage pools at the have leaked since December 2009.
The pools of the two reactors leaked 15,370 milliliters and 4,830 milliliters respectively, it said. Radioactive materials such as Caesium-137, Cobalt-60, Manganese-54, and Chromium-51 were detected in water collected at the site.
The First Nuclear Power Plant, on the northern coast, began commercial operation in 1979.
The report said operator Taiwan Power Co had failed to find the causes and the leaks continue.
Taipower said the leak was unavoidable because of condensation, but insisted that the storage pools were safe.
“All water leaked has been recycled. So it poses no threat to the environment,” company spokesman Chung-Cheng Lee said on Saturday. “We’ve provided the Control Yuan with several reasons but they declined to believe our explanation.” The report also directed Taipower to come up with solutions to problems of the shortage of capacity for spent rods at the plant.
Research Credit: RP
