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The Menlo Park, Calif., company confirmed that it can track users’ unpublished posts after two Facebook researchers disclosed that they had tracked the activity of about 5 million random Facebook users in the U.S. and England.

The researchers’ study looked at how often these users censored themselves while typing posts and comments on Facebook. If users typed more than five characters, the content was tracked. It was considered to be self-censored if it was not published within 10 minutes of being typed.

Facebook said the study did not track the exact words and letters that users typed, but whether or not they typed something. The methodology for the study also kept the tracked users anonymous, Facebook said.

“This is something we looked at to understand to what extent people self censor,” Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld told The Times.

Facebook said it was no longer tracking any users when it comes to unpublished posts. It also has no plans to track the unpublished words and letters that users type.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

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Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.

Over the next five years, Japan will buy hardware including drones, stealth aircraft and amphibious vehicles.

The military will also build a new marine unit, an amphibious force capable of retaking islands.

The move comes with Tokyo embroiled in a bitter row with Beijing over East China Sea islands that both claim.

It reflects concern over China’s growing assertiveness over its territorial claims and Beijing’s mounting defence spending.

“China’s stance toward other countries and military moves, coupled with a lack of transparency regarding its military and national security policies, represent a concern to Japan and the wider international community and require close watch,” the national security document said.

On Monday, the State Department confirmed its openness to engaging with the Islamic Front following the group’s seizure of a Free Syrian Army headquarters last week containing U.S.-supplied small arms and food. “We wouldn’t rule out the possibility of meeting with the Islamic Front,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday. “We can engage with the Islamic Front, of course, because they’re not designated terrorists … We’re always open to meeting with a wide range of opposition groups. Obviously, it may make sense to do so at some point soon, and if we have something to announce, we will.”

On Saturday Reuters reported that Syrian rebel commanders in the Islamic Front were due to meet U.S. officials in Turkey in the coming days to discuss U.S. support for the group. A Syrian opposition source speaking with The Cable said that efforts were in place to unite the Western-backed Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front under the same coalition. “There are negotiations planned for very soon between the [Free Syrian Army’s] SMC and the Islamic Front to determine what the relationship will be,” said the source. America’s role in coordinating the talks remains unclear.

Brought forth by seven unnamed juvenile prisoners, the case hinges on the idea that the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) has consistently failed to keep prisoners under the age of 18 apart from the more hardened adult inmates. It alleges that at least two of the plaintiffs were repeatedly raped because their older cellmates were selling access to the younger ones. It goes on to implicate corrections officers for allowing the rape to continue.

“MDOC staff was aware of the assaults and aware that male adult prisoners were paying John Doe 5’s cellmate access for access to John Doe 5 for purposes of sexually assaulting him,” the suit claims.

Deborah LeBelle, an attorney based in Ann Arbor, told MLive.com that she was aware of the suit when it was initially filed in October, but decided to bring it back to light because of the seriousness of the allegations. When the suit was re-filed, it was classified as a violation of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, a Michigan law that forbids differential treatment based on religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status.

LeBelle told the Michigan news site she was stunned that teens who may have barely gone through puberty are locked up with adults – which also increases their risk of recidivism.

Others are much less well known. One of these battlefronts was in unconventional research—parapsychology (or psychotronics as the Soviets called it), mind control and remote influence and the such like. Some of the US work on these topics is now public and has famously become the basis for various books, TV documentaries and for the Hollywood film “The Men Who Stare at Goats”.

But much less is known about the Soviet equivalents. Today that changes thanks to the work of Serge Kernbach at the Research Center of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany. Kernbach provides an overview of Soviet efforts in unconventional research between 1917 and 2003 based on publications in Russian technical journals and recently declassified documents.

He shows how Soviet research evolved more or less independently of work in the western world but focused on many of the same unconventional themes as secret US programs. And he shows how the Soviets and the Americans used what little they knew of each other’s work to create a self-sustaining cycle of funding. This psychotronic arms race cost as much as $1 billion and only ended in the early 21st century when the funding bubble burst.

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Over the years, the Soviets focused on a number of areas, many of which mirrored US efforts. For example, the US Project MKULTRA, was a 20-year CIA program that studied ways of manipulating people’s minds and altering their brain function.

The Soviets had a similar program. This included experiments in parapsychology, which the Soviets called psychotronics. The work built on a long-standing idea in Soviet science that the human brain could receive and transmit a certain kind of high frequency electromagnetic radiation and that this could influence other objects too.

Various researchers reported that this “human energy” could change the magnetisation of hydrogen nuclei and stimulate the immune systems of wheat, vine and even humans. They even developed a device called a “cerpan” that could generate and store this energy.

Like MKULTRA, this program also included a study of the effects of electromagnetic waves on humans and led to the development psychotronic weapons, which were intended to alter people’s minds.

Kernbach also describes significant Soviet research on non-local signal transmission based on the Aharonov-Bohm effect. This occurs when a charged particle is influenced by an electromagnetic field, even when it is confined to a region where the field strength is zero.

Soviet scientists appear to have called this effect “spin-torsion” and built a number of devices to exploit it. But just how successful this was isn’t clear and this line of work appears to have been killed off in 2003.

One thing that Kernbach’s analysis lacks is any detailed discussion of the results of these programs. Consequently, it’s hard to escape the sense that this research is steeped in jargon and pseudoscience

All this research required substantial investment, says Kernbach. Numbers are difficult to come by but he concludes that Soviet spending on unconventional research must have reached the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars and may have hit $1 billion.

It certainly matched US spending and on projects such as MKULTRA this was in the hundreds of millions. “Soviet and US costs are comparable at least on a level of separate programs,” he says.

Although Kernbach says much of this research was discontinued in 2003, it is not clear whether Russia (or the US) has ongoing programs in these areas. However, Kernbach says there are as many as 500 researchers in Russia that are still active in the field of psychotronics (as measured by the numbers still attending conferences on this topic).

“They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” Roman Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot, told the newspaper in a report published Wednesday. “To hell with them.”

Tritz said the orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned him to the floor, and he initially fought them off. A few weeks later, just before his 30th birthday, he was lobotomized.

Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals, according to the report.

The VA’s use of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy program.