While I’m very happy to see that Mariah is doing much better, I have to admit … I’m going to miss her brilliantly bedazzled arm slings :( Still, I’d much rather Mimi be well than injured … that way, she can get down to the business of releasing new music again. Her first new single, The Art of Letting Go, will be out in a few short weeks and then … maybe … we’ll get info on when she plans to release her new album. Now that Mariah is almost back to normal, she might be anxious to work her buns off to release as much music as possible for all the loyal Lambs who have been patiently waiting for her return.
RolePlayGateway is proudly powered by obscene amounts of caffeine, duct tape, and support from people like you. It operates under a "don't like it, suggest an improvement" platform, and we gladly take suggestions for improvements or changes.
The custom-built "roleplay" system was designed and implemented by Eric Martindale as of July 2009. All attempts to replicate or otherwise emulate this system and its method of organizing roleplay are strictly prohibited without his express written and contractual permission; violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Cars are beginning to offer WiFi for passengers, analyst Jarad Carleton pointed out, and "that network connection is a potential route into the control systems for the automobile, many of which are controlled by computer software," he warned. "Things like applying the brakes, accelerating or even turning off the engine while driving at highway speeds are possibilities that hackers are already looking into today."
The Internet is actualizing the vision of a global village today. Cars are becoming infotainment centers with online connections; printers, home appliances and even door locks are being connected to the Internet; and some cities have begun putting in hundreds of sensors to help them better manage their buildings and utilities.
The world is fast becoming interconnected, in other words, and that helps save money and make things more efficient, according to major players such as IBM and Cisco. It also gives rise to what is called the Internet of Things, also known as the Internet of Everything.
The other side of all this connectivity, however, is a security problem that threatens to overshadow anything we've ever seen.
Forget about the NSA spying on everyone everywhere; they're our madmen and we know where they are. Think instead of the assorted cybercriminals and cyberpranksters who will strike through Internet-connected appliances and cars and disappear before we even know what has happened.
'An Increasingly Large Attack Surface'
"The Internet of Everything connects things all around us, from baby monitors to TVs and other home appliances," Alex Watson, director of security research at Websense, told TechNewsWorld.
"These devices run very basic operating systems without the mechanisms for security updates that we expect from our PCs and mobile devices," Watson continued. "This has created an increasingly large attack surface for criminals to exploit as an initial foothold or vector into otherwise well-protected IT environments."
Medical devices, connected cars and increasingly networked public safety systems such as dedicated short-range communications for traffic safety present a particularly high level of risk to attack, Watson suggested.
The Global IP-based Village
The IoT, or IoE, is "billions of smart connected things -- a sort of universal global neural network in the cloud -- that will encompass every aspect of our lives," states a white paper published jointly by mobile chip maker ARM and semiconductor manufacturer Freescale.
It consists of smart machines interacting and communicating with other machines, objects, environments and infrastructures.
The IoT covers machine-to-machine communications; machine-to-infrastructure communication; telehealth -- the remote or real-time pervasive monitoring of patients, diagnosis and drug delivery; continuous monitoring of and firmware upgrades for vehicles; tracking goods on the move; automatic traffic management; remote security and control; environmental monitoring and control; and home and industrial building automation.
The IoE creates more than US$14 million in value due to a combination of increased revenues and lower costs, Cisco says.
Players in the IoT Business
IBM has been actively positioning itself as an IoT player with its Smarter Planet initiative. This includes the company's Smarter Cities campaign.
The basic idea is, you pay IBM lots of money to put in sensors everywhere and replace your servers and software with its own and pay it a monthly fee to manage these systems and analyze the data they collect. Nice work, if you can get it.
Big Blue is chugging merrily along with these campaigns, turning out supporting products such as MessageSight, an appliance it launched in April to handle M2M communications.
IBM is involved in more than 2,000 projects with cities worldwide to monitor, manage and measure most of their physical systems.
One such city, South Bend, Ind., is using IBM's Smarter Cities Cloud Analytics to handle its wastewater management system. It expects to save $120 million in infrastructure systems while avoiding costly fines for overflows.
Its stance is that the Internet Protocol will replace most of the 92 legacy protocols used today in connected devices. Cisco's ONE technologies will make those devices programmable.
General Motors in February announced a global strategy to deliver new connected cars and trucks with 4G LTE capability built in. This is a joint venture with AT&T.
Meanwhile, AT&T has gone full tilt into the connected car business. In August, it opened a connected home and car foundry, an innovation and developer collaboration center in Atlanta, Ga. This will focus on the IoT.
A Connected Car Expo will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in November, and every major brand will be there. Other participants will include Intel, Qualcomm, the Car Connectivity Consortium, Sprint, AOL, Facebook, Apple, Google, HD Radio, Microsoft, Nuance, Tumblr and Yahoo.
"The automotive industry understands there is a [security] danger, and they have representatives that participate in some cybersecurity working groups," Jarad Carleton, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, told TechNewsWorld.
GM vehicles with 4G LTE connectivity will feature a built-in WiFi hot spot, making the vehicle its own rolling mobile device.
One of the "most frightening" issues is that cars are beginning to offer WiFi for passengers, Carleton said.
"That network connection is a potential route into the control systems for the automobile, many of which are controlled by computer software," he elaborated. "Things like applying the brakes, accelerating or even turning off the engine while driving at highway speeds are possibilities that hackers are already looking into today."
Stop, Look and Listen to Your Heart Race
Indeed, "we have already seen cases where people are being exploited -- both in terms of basic privacy violations and in some cases for financial gain -- as a result of device insecurity," Kevin O'Brien, enterprise solution architect at CloudLock, told TechNewsWorld.
"Certain devices simply should not be accessible via the Internet because the value added by their connected state is outweighed by the risk created," he continued.
"There are an increasing number of exploits occurring in more recent times that suggest a quasi-anarchist 'for the lulz' approach to hacking," O'Brien concluded. "By placing highly visible or highly useful systems online, we are apt to see more and more of this behavior."
Richard Adhikari has written about high-tech for leading industry publications since the 1990s and wonders where it's all leading to. Will implanted RFID chips in humans be the Mark of the Beast? Will nanotech solve our coming food crisis? Does Sturgeon's Law still hold true?
According to Standard & Poor's Ratings Services (MHFI) the recently concluded government shutdown cost a total of $24 billion. Due to this unanticipated expense, the ratings agency has lowered its fourth-quarter GDP estimate by a minimum of .6%. If there's anything of which the nation can be completely certain, it's this: That number is inaccurate and ultimately unimportant.
If there are lessons to be learned from the ongoing, shambling disaster of a debt ceiling fight/Obamacare showdown, they are philosophical and long term. Economics is a social science. There's no need for higher math, just higher thinking. In the attached clip author, economist, pundit, lawyer and general polymath Ben Stein shares takeaway lessons from the last three weeks.
The country is angry, divided, confused.
"We learned how very angry and divided this country is. And learning that people opposed to the entitlement state are ready to take extremely drastic action to stop it... some kind of process of national reconciliation must be going on," says Stein. We knew we were angry, but the price of the reconciliation between entitlement and taxation factions is growing.
The nature of the debate was disheartening, as neither side had a realistic perspective on the balance between income (taxes) and expenditures. This wasn't a serious debate about budgets, but rather a heated exchange between ideologues. The real conversation wasn't about tightening our national belt, it was about which group got a bigger portion of assumed deficits.
"We cannot both be a high-entitlement state and a low-tax state," Stein states plainly. "Arithmetic is the boss."
Unfortunately for the extreme right, the sword cuts both ways. We don't simply have a spending problem, we're not paying our share.
Supply-side economics does not work. It's a disaster we have over the long period, and it's just going to get worse.
While sympathetic to the views of those willing to take extreme stances against the "entitlement state," Stein also thinks our taxes are simply too low for the services we have now. Forget Obamacare for a moment and remember that, for decades, America has run balanced budgets for only brief periods of time. Balanced budgets are flukes stemming from high taxes produced by economic bubbles and a one-time Cold War dividend.
"We got to this crisis because we lowered taxes too much," Stein explains. "We have to raise taxes or else drastically lower entitlements — which we're not going to do."
Taxes have become the new third rail.
A long-time Republican who wrote speeches for both Nixon and Ford, Stein wonders at the way Republicans have somehow taken serious conversations about taxes off the agenda. Railing against entitlements incites the pitchfork- and torch-wielding masses, but only in the abstract.
We rail against excess, but "raise the retirement age to 75" is hardly a Republican battle cry. America is an aging nation with an insufficient tax base. No politician on earth — of either side — is willing to address the fact that paying for the Boomers through their dotage is going to require more tax revenue or a willingness to eliminate entitlements that even the staunchest conservative takes for granted.
The end isn't near.
Pointing to Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio, Stein notes that it's entirely possible, even probable, that the U.S.'s day of reckoning can be held off for a long time — but not forever. Forget the threat of China buying our debt. The real creditor of the U.S. is the Federal Reserve.
Paraphrasing his father, Stein notes that if something can't go on forever it won't. The current fiscal pattern is dysfunctional in a bipartisan way. As Stein sees it, taxes are going to have to come up under any circumstance and entitlements are going to have to be discussed in a grown-up way.
What we ultimately learned from the last three weeks is valuable but painful: The country is divided, entrenched and uniformly delusional. We haven't seen the last of this ridiculous showdown.
More from Breakout:
Time to Dump the Debt Ceiling Once and for All?
T-Mobile Knocking Down Everything You Hate About Wireless: Pogue
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency collects hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts around the world, including many from Americans, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
The collection program intercepts email address books and "buddy lists" from instant messaging services as they move across global data links, the newspaper said in an article posted on its website, citing senior intelligence officials and documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The Post said analyzing that data lets the NSA search for connections and map relationships among foreign intelligence targets.
The data collection takes place outside the United States, but sweeps in the contacts of many Americans, the report said, citing two senior U.S. intelligence officials.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about foreign intelligence targets. "We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans," he told the Post.
Snowden's revelations about the reach and methods of the NSA, including the monitoring of vast volumes of Internet traffic and phone records, have upset U.S. allies from Germany to Brazil. Admirers call him a human rights champion and critics denounce him as a traitor.
The 30-year-old is now living in a secret location in Russia, beyond the reach of U.S. authorities who want him on espionage charges because he leaked the details of top-secret electronic spying programs to the media.
He traveled to Hong Kong in May and later, under pressure from China, flew to Moscow, where he has been granted a year's asylum.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Jackie Frank)
Ghrelin, a stress-induced hormone, primes the brain for PTSD
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Andrew Carleen acarleen@mit.edu 617-253-1682 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT study finds that ghrelin, produced during stressful situations, primes the brain for post-traumatic stress disorder
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- About a dozen years ago, scientists discovered that a hormone called ghrelin enhances appetite. Dubbed the "hunger hormone," ghrelin was quickly targeted by drug companies seeking treatments for obesity none of which have yet panned out.
MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that ghrelin's role goes far beyond controlling hunger. The researchers found that ghrelin released during chronic stress makes the brain more vulnerable to traumatic events, suggesting that it may predispose people to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Drugs that reduce ghrelin levels, originally developed to try to combat obesity, could help protect people who are at high risk for PTSD, such as soldiers serving in war, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 15 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.
"Perhaps we could give people who are going to be deployed into an active combat zone a ghrelin vaccine before they go, so they will have a lower incidence of PTSD. That's exciting because right now there's nothing given to people to prevent PTSD," says Goosens, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Lead author of the paper is Retsina Meyer, a recent MIT PhD recipient. Other authors are McGovern postdoc Anthony Burgos-Robles, graduate student Elizabeth Liu, and McGovern research scientist Susana Correia.
Stress and fear
Stress is a useful response to dangerous situations because it provokes action to escape or fight back. However, when stress is chronic, it can produce anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
At MIT, Goosens discovered that one brain structure that is especially critical for generating fear, the amygdala, has a special response to chronic stress. The amygdala produces large amounts of growth hormone during stress, a change that seems not to occur in other brain regions.
In the new paper, Goosens and her colleagues found that the release of the growth hormone in the amygdala is controlled by ghrelin, which is produced primarily in the stomach and travels throughout the body, including the brain.
Ghrelin levels are elevated by chronic stress. In humans, this might be produced by factors such as unemployment, bullying, or loss of a family member. Ghrelin stimulates the secretion of growth hormone from the brain; the effects of growth hormone from the pituitary gland in organs such as the liver and bones have been extensively studied. However, the role of growth hormone in the brain, particularly the amygdala, is not well known.
The researchers found that when rats were given either a drug to stimulate the ghrelin receptor or gene therapy to overexpress growth hormone over a prolonged period, they became much more susceptible to fear than normal rats. Fear was measured by training all of the rats to fear an innocuous, novel tone. While all rats learned to fear the tone, the rats with prolonged increased activity of the ghrelin receptor or overexpression of growth hormone were the most fearful, assessed by how long they froze after hearing the tone. Blocking the cell receptors that interact with ghrelin or growth hormone reduced fear to normal levels in chronically stressed rats.
When rats were exposed to chronic stress over a prolonged period, their circulating ghrelin and amygdalar growth hormone levels also went up, and fearful memories were encoded more strongly. This is similar to what the researchers believe happens in people who suffer from PTSD.
"When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms," Goosens says.
New drugs, new targets
Over the last century, scientists have described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which produces adrenaline, cortisol (corticosterone in rats), and other hormones that stimulate "fight or flight" behavior. Since then, stress research has focused almost exclusively on the HPA axis.
After discovering ghrelin's role in stress, the MIT researchers suspected that ghrelin was also linked to the HPA axis. However, they were surprised to find that when the rats' adrenal glands the source of corticosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline were removed, the animals still became overly fearful when chronically stressed. The authors also showed that repeated ghrelin-receptor stimulation did not trigger release of HPA hormones, and that blockade of the ghrelin receptor did not blunt release of HPA stress hormones. Therefore, the ghrelin-initiated stress pathway appears to act independently of the HPA axis. "That's important because it gives us a whole new target for stress therapies," Goosens says.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least a dozen possible drug compounds that interfere with ghrelin. Many of these drugs have been found safe for humans, but have not been shown to help people lose weight. The researchers believe these drugs could offer a way to vaccinate people entering stressful situations, or even to treat people who already suffer from PTSD, because ghrelin levels remain high long after the chronic stress ends.
PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults, including soldiers and victims of crimes, accidents, or natural disasters. About 40 to 50 percent of patients recover within five years, Meyer says, but the rest never get better.
The researchers hypothesize that the persistent elevation of ghrelin following trauma exposure could be one of the factors that maintain PTSD. "So, could you immediately reverse PTSD? Maybe not, but maybe the ghrelin could get damped down and these people could go through cognitive behavioral therapy, and over time, maybe we can reverse it," Meyer says.
Working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Goosens' lab is now planning to study ghrelin levels in human patients suffering from anxiety and fear disorders. They are also planning a clinical trial of a drug that blocks ghrelin to see if it can prevent relapse of depression.
###
The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Ghrelin, a stress-induced hormone, primes the brain for PTSD
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Andrew Carleen acarleen@mit.edu 617-253-1682 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT study finds that ghrelin, produced during stressful situations, primes the brain for post-traumatic stress disorder
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- About a dozen years ago, scientists discovered that a hormone called ghrelin enhances appetite. Dubbed the "hunger hormone," ghrelin was quickly targeted by drug companies seeking treatments for obesity none of which have yet panned out.
MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that ghrelin's role goes far beyond controlling hunger. The researchers found that ghrelin released during chronic stress makes the brain more vulnerable to traumatic events, suggesting that it may predispose people to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Drugs that reduce ghrelin levels, originally developed to try to combat obesity, could help protect people who are at high risk for PTSD, such as soldiers serving in war, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Oct. 15 online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.
"Perhaps we could give people who are going to be deployed into an active combat zone a ghrelin vaccine before they go, so they will have a lower incidence of PTSD. That's exciting because right now there's nothing given to people to prevent PTSD," says Goosens, who is also a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Lead author of the paper is Retsina Meyer, a recent MIT PhD recipient. Other authors are McGovern postdoc Anthony Burgos-Robles, graduate student Elizabeth Liu, and McGovern research scientist Susana Correia.
Stress and fear
Stress is a useful response to dangerous situations because it provokes action to escape or fight back. However, when stress is chronic, it can produce anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
At MIT, Goosens discovered that one brain structure that is especially critical for generating fear, the amygdala, has a special response to chronic stress. The amygdala produces large amounts of growth hormone during stress, a change that seems not to occur in other brain regions.
In the new paper, Goosens and her colleagues found that the release of the growth hormone in the amygdala is controlled by ghrelin, which is produced primarily in the stomach and travels throughout the body, including the brain.
Ghrelin levels are elevated by chronic stress. In humans, this might be produced by factors such as unemployment, bullying, or loss of a family member. Ghrelin stimulates the secretion of growth hormone from the brain; the effects of growth hormone from the pituitary gland in organs such as the liver and bones have been extensively studied. However, the role of growth hormone in the brain, particularly the amygdala, is not well known.
The researchers found that when rats were given either a drug to stimulate the ghrelin receptor or gene therapy to overexpress growth hormone over a prolonged period, they became much more susceptible to fear than normal rats. Fear was measured by training all of the rats to fear an innocuous, novel tone. While all rats learned to fear the tone, the rats with prolonged increased activity of the ghrelin receptor or overexpression of growth hormone were the most fearful, assessed by how long they froze after hearing the tone. Blocking the cell receptors that interact with ghrelin or growth hormone reduced fear to normal levels in chronically stressed rats.
When rats were exposed to chronic stress over a prolonged period, their circulating ghrelin and amygdalar growth hormone levels also went up, and fearful memories were encoded more strongly. This is similar to what the researchers believe happens in people who suffer from PTSD.
"When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms," Goosens says.
New drugs, new targets
Over the last century, scientists have described the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which produces adrenaline, cortisol (corticosterone in rats), and other hormones that stimulate "fight or flight" behavior. Since then, stress research has focused almost exclusively on the HPA axis.
After discovering ghrelin's role in stress, the MIT researchers suspected that ghrelin was also linked to the HPA axis. However, they were surprised to find that when the rats' adrenal glands the source of corticosterone, adrenaline, and noradrenaline were removed, the animals still became overly fearful when chronically stressed. The authors also showed that repeated ghrelin-receptor stimulation did not trigger release of HPA hormones, and that blockade of the ghrelin receptor did not blunt release of HPA stress hormones. Therefore, the ghrelin-initiated stress pathway appears to act independently of the HPA axis. "That's important because it gives us a whole new target for stress therapies," Goosens says.
Pharmaceutical companies have developed at least a dozen possible drug compounds that interfere with ghrelin. Many of these drugs have been found safe for humans, but have not been shown to help people lose weight. The researchers believe these drugs could offer a way to vaccinate people entering stressful situations, or even to treat people who already suffer from PTSD, because ghrelin levels remain high long after the chronic stress ends.
PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults, including soldiers and victims of crimes, accidents, or natural disasters. About 40 to 50 percent of patients recover within five years, Meyer says, but the rest never get better.
The researchers hypothesize that the persistent elevation of ghrelin following trauma exposure could be one of the factors that maintain PTSD. "So, could you immediately reverse PTSD? Maybe not, but maybe the ghrelin could get damped down and these people could go through cognitive behavioral therapy, and over time, maybe we can reverse it," Meyer says.
Working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Goosens' lab is now planning to study ghrelin levels in human patients suffering from anxiety and fear disorders. They are also planning a clinical trial of a drug that blocks ghrelin to see if it can prevent relapse of depression.
###
The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
President Obama speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, on Thursday.
Charles Dharapak/AP
President Obama speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, on Thursday.
Charles Dharapak/AP
President Obama slammed the partisan standoff "spectacle" that he said had damaged the economy and America's international credibility and called on Congress to pass a comprehensive budget, immigration reform and a farm bill by year's end.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uZVJ7kGxhhjvKWNmRwV6tYBqt1PIln611xTwT2MFVVUGI_lYsh6jCwdOY8RV5AEBnV09Ji8DJjR8iA7cTF5P3hhUCTVLZe4mvvIQkLLnk=s0-d){kind=small}
Share