Facebook face recognition technology is here

Facebook is at the centre of another privacy row after bringing in facial recognition technology to automatically identify users in pictures.

The world’s leading social network has begun rolling out new technology that automatically identifies and ‘tags’ people in photos uploaded to the website.

The feature has been expanded from a test run in the United States to ‘most countries’, Facebook said on its official blog yesterday – and, by default, it’s turned on.

Tag your friends: Facebook’s new facial recognition technology has raised the hackles of privacy campaigners

But the sudden implementation of the feature, without warning, has sparked concerns among privacy campaigners.

Daniel Hamilton, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘Facebook users will rightly be alarmed to hear that their private information will be used in this way. This is yet another nail in the coffin for online privacy.

‘Websites like Facebook owe it to their users to respect their privacy, not to scan their photo albums with facial recognition software.’

Internet security consultant firm Sophos first reported the change yesterday, after Facebook users reported that the site had enabled the facial recognition option in the last few days without giving users any notice.

‘Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,’ wrote Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, in a blog post.

HOW TO SWITCH OFF FACIAL RECOGNITION

• Sign into your Facebook account.
• Click on Account on the top right of the page and then Privacy Settings on the drop-down menu.
• Click on Customise settings.
• Scroll down to ‘Suggest photos of me to friends’ and click Edit.
• Change setting from Enabled to Disabled and save.

Facebook, which announced in December that it planned to introduce the service in the United States, acknowledged that the feature was in fact now more widely available.

When asked about the Sophos blog post, a spokesman for the company conceded that they ‘should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process’.

They made clear that tag suggestions would only be made to friends of those pictured, and that the users can switch off the feature to stop their names being but forward.

But Marc Rotenberg, President of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, noted that other companies had offered more users more control when implementing facial recognition features.

He highlighted Apple’s iPhoto software, which let users decide whether or not to use the technology with their personal photo collections.

Facebook’s technology, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across a broad swathe of newly uploaded photos.

Mr Rotenberg said such a system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook’s database.

He also criticised Facebook’s decision to automatically enable the facial-recognition technology for Facebook users.

‘I’m not sure that’s the setting that people would want to choose. A better option would be to let people opt-in,’ he said.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, pictured in April, argued last year that privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’

Facebook’s ‘Tag Suggestions’ feature is designed to speed up the process of labeling friends in photos posted on Facebook.

If a friend ‘tags’ you in one photo, the technology will automatically scan your face and then try and find matches among all their pictures.

It will then suggest that they ‘tag’ these photos of you as well.

A serious concern intially expressed over Facebook and other social networks is the ability to publish photographs online without any express permission from those pictured.

Although it is possible for users to ‘de-tag’ themselves, those pictured cannot demand photographs removed.

The new feature will raise fears among those who have photographs they would prefer do not come to light.

A spokesman from Facebook said: ‘We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that’s currently done more than 100 million times a day.

‘Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.’

It emerged last week that Google recently decided to hold back similar application that would have let someone snap a picture of a person’s face using a smartphone, then use the internet to find out who that person is.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference he believed it was the first time his company’s engineers had completed a project and shelved it for privacy reasons, CNN reported.

Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint about Facebook’s privacy practices with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which Mr Rotenberg said was still pending.

Via DailyMail

Weather satellites capture shots of volcanic plume blasting through clouds

Just in case you forgot that the Earth is one of the most geologically active worlds in the solar system, the Icelandic volcano Grimsvötn has sent a very loud reminder: after seven years of relative inactivity, the volcano woke up on Saturday, rocketing a plume 11 kilometers (7 miles) into the air. The ash column blasted through the cloud layer, and was seen by weather satellites in space.

That was the view from the Meteosat-9, a European satellite in geostationary orbit. The animation is composed of visible light images and covers just under a three hour time span on May 21. You can clearly see the plume breaching the cloud layer and spreading out, then a second plume blowing through shortly thereafter. The shadow of the plume on the clouds gives an excellent but eerie sense of the scale of this event.

Here’s a similar view from the US GOES 13 satellite showing 3.5 hours of the eruption:

Note the oblique angle and distance; GOES 13 orbits the Earth far west of the volcano. In the last frame of the animation you can see the outline of Iceland to give you an idea of the size of this event.

This volcano has erupted many times over the past few decades. I knew Iceland was active, but what really brought it home to me in this case was a quote by a company that operates the airport facilities in Iceland, when a 220 km no-fly zone around the volcano was established: it was described as “standard procedure around eruptions”.

Yikes. The fact that they even need a “standard procedure” is eyebrow-raising to me; where I live, volcanoes are somewhat rare (maybe more so now than a millennia ago). However, this eruption doesn’t currently look like it will be a big danger to air travel like last year’s eruption of Eyjafjalajökull was; the ash is made of bigger particles which fall to the ground more quickly, and the volcano itself is located in a relatively isolated part of southeast Iceland.

Still, clearly, researching volcanoes and their eruptions is critical to many areas of life. Besides the knowledge added to our basic scientific understanding of geology and the Earth, monitoring and understanding volcanoes has a huge impact on air traffic, weather, and the daily lives of millions of people.

Image credits: CIMSS, UW-Madison (from images by EUMETSAT and NOAA). Tip o’ the caldera to Jonatan Gislason.

Lightning is common in volcanic plumes, but this one produced quite a bit more than usual. The footage is striking.

Also, NASA released a beautiful image of the plume as seen by the Earth-observing Terra satellite:

Note the scale; the ash column is over 20 km (12 miles) across. I said in the post earlier it reached 11 km in height; however the NASA news release states that it reached over 20 km high!

There is some indication the ash may be a threat to air travel in the UK, too. That’s a bummer; Eyjafjalajökull disrupted air travel for weeks. Let’s hope this one subsides sooner.

Video from Jon Gustafsson on Vimeo; Terra image from Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

Via DiscoverMagazine

Mississippi Allowed to Flood Cajun Country

U.S. authorities on Saturday opened up a major floodgate to ease pressure from the swollen Mississippi River, hoping to save urban centers from historic flooding as rising waters swept south.

One bay of 125 available bays in Louisiana’s Morganza Spillway was opened to stop flood waters from washing into major cities, the Army Corps of Engineers said, aiming to ease the Mississippi’s flow as it heads for the Gulf of Mexico.

“Baton Rouge and New Orleans will flood if we don’t open that spillway,” retired general Russel Honore, best known for leading the military response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, warned on CNN.

Opening the spillway means waters will gush over thousand of acres (hectares) of farmland and rural towns, prompting warnings of flash floods from forecasters and urgent evacuation orders in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The American Red Cross is already readying shelters for thousands of expected evacuees.

But Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said people had time to prepare and pack, adding that the Corps had told him the spillway would be opened Saturday, according to the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper.

“Now is the time to take action. Don’t delay. Don’t hope something will change,” said Jindal, quoted by the New Orleans Times Picayune, adding it would be a slow release of water.

The river, cresting upstream in Arkansas, is set to eclipse the high water records set in the epochal floods of 1927.

Near its height, the Mississippi town of Vicksburg is expecting a forecasted 57.5-foot (17.5-meter) crest on May 19, topping the 56.2-foot historic crest set 84 years ago this month, National Weather Service data said.

The Mississippi is the third-longest river in North America and its watershed is the fourth-largest in the world, according to the US National Park Service.

According to flood projections from the Corps, a flood as high as 15 feet (4.57 meters) was set to bear down on the small Louisiana community of Butte La Rose when the spillway is opened.

Despairing resident Pierre Watermeyer told CNN, simply: “It’s over with, it’s over with.”

“It’s worse than we thought,” resident Kelli Trimm told the news network as the town scrambled to gather belongings and flee.

“It’s going to take everything, everything we’ve got. It’s scary. It’s going to take out our whole community,” she said.

If the Morganza Spillway were not opened in time, the Corps warned earlier this week, flooding reaching as high as 25 feet (7.6 meters) could be expected to soak New Orleans.

The worst floods to hit the central United States in more than 70 years have already swallowed up thousands of homes, farms and roads in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi.

Heavy rains last month filled rivers and creeks already swollen from the melting of a thick winter snow pack, and which are now backing up because the Mississippi is so full.

The American Red Cross said back-to-back disasters over the last two months has prompted it to launch 23 separate relief operations backed by over 7,700 relief workers in 18 states, from North Dakota to the southern coast, and along the eastern seaboard.

Via Discovery

Louisiana floodwaters creep toward bayou towns

Waters unleashed by the opening of a key Mississippi River floodway crept through the Louisiana bayou on Monday in a surge that could leave thousands of homes and farms under as much as 20 feet of water.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was continuing to open floodgates at the Morganza Spillway northwest of Baton Rouge in an effort to spare the state capital as well as New Orleans from being flooded by a swollen Mississippi River.

The opening — a move last taken in 1973 — will channel water into the Atchafalaya River basin, toward towns and farmland that line a giant swamp.

Waters will crest at lower levels than originally predicted in Morgan City, Butte LaRose and other cities in the floodwaters’ path, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said. He added that no deaths or injuries had been reported.

But the possibility of “backwater flooding” for areas not protected by levees and earthen works was still high, the Republican governor said. “We are still looking at a very significant amount of water,” Jindal said. “We know it’s going to impact households. We know it’s going to impact families.”

Weeks of heavy rains and runoff from an unusually snowy winter caused the Mississippi River to rise, flooding 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of farmland in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas and evoking comparisons to historic floods in 1927 and 1937.

The bulge of water released by those rains was still upriver and making its way toward Louisiana. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Mississippi River’s height swelled to 56.3 feet, eclipsing the record set in 1927.

In Morgan City, a coastal town about 100 miles from the Morganza Spillway, the Louisiana National Guard and construction crews scrambled to bolster levees and erect new flood defenses, with floodwaters forecast to arrive Tuesday.

City officials said the levee system should handle record river levels but expressed concern about potential backwater flooding that could occur from water receding shoreward after it reached the Gulf of Mexico.

“Outside of a major change to the estimates, we think we’re going to be fine,” Morgan City Mayor Tim Matte said. “We do believe we are prepared for the levels they are now forecasting.”

FLOODWATERS COULD LINGER FOR WEEKS

About 2,500 people live in the spillway’s flood path and 22,500 others, along with 11,000 buildings could be affected by backwater flooding — the water pushed back into streams and tributaries that cannot flow normally into what will be an overwhelmed Atchafalaya River.

Some 3,000 square miles (7,770 sq km) of land could be inundated for several weeks. When flows peak around May 22, the spillway will carry about 125,000 cubic feet per second, about one quarter of its capacity.

Jindal estimated the state’s crop damage at $300 million.

Failing to open the spillway would have put New Orleans at risk of flooding that, according to computer models, would eclipse that seen during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when about 80 percent of the city was flooded and 1,500 people killed.

River levels have hit their peak in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, located 45 miles southeast of the Morganza Spillway, and are not expected to rise, officials said.

Opening the gates also lowers the risk of flooding for eight refineries and at least one nuclear power plant that are nestled along the river downstream from the spillway.

The refineries make up about 12 percent of the nation’s capacity for making gasoline and other fuels.

A small refinery in Krotz Springs, the 80,000 barrel-per-day plant operated by Alon USA Energy, should also be safe from flood waters due to new levees built in recent weeks.

Provided by NewsDaily.

The Fallacy of WMD’s & Iraq

Exposed: Secret evidence has been disclosed proving Alastair Campbell lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Unprincipled bully Alastair Campbell was forced to resign in disgrace after ‘sexing up’ the dossier that took us to war with Iraq.

The New Labour zealot was too toxic to remain even in Tony Blair’s morally feckless government.

Ever since, Campbell has appeared before numerous public inquiries where he has maintained his innocence, insisting there was a solid case for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein.

Now, however, the mendacious former red-top tabloid political editor has been exposed. Devastating secret evidence has been declassified which proves that Campbell and Blair lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. There was none.

A former chief spy, Major-General Michael Laurie, said: ‘We could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to WMDs.’ When asked if the dossier gave a false picture of the intelligence, he replied: ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

This proves, too, that weapons expert Dr David Kelly was right. This honourable man, who blew the whistle on Blair and Campbell’s lies, ended up being driven to his death by these two men.

As a consequence of that dodgy dossier, 179 British soldiers have died in Iraq, hundreds maimed and up to 600,000 Iraqi civilians killed. What’s more, the conclusion earlier this month of the inquests into the deaths of those killed in London by the July 7 bombers was a reminder of how the invasion of Iraq led to the dangerous radicalisation of Islamic extremists in Britain.

Meanwhile, Blair has gone on to amass an estimated £20 million fortune, mainly down to his lucrative work in America — where he is loved, thanks to his poodle-like support of the White House over Iraq.

As for Campbell, he picked up £1 million for peddling more lies in his memoirs and continues to parade himself as a respected commentator on political affairs — constantly available to mouth his opinions on the BBC.

Via DailyMail.

Bombers take bin Laden revenge in Pakistan

Suicide bombers killed 80 people at a Pakistani paramilitary academy on Friday in revenge for the death of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid and militants in Pakistan vowed to carry out more attacks.

A member of the Pakistani parliament said Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistan’s spy chief, said he was “ready to resign” over the bin Laden affair that has embarrassed the nation. Pakistan’s opposition leader accused the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, spy agency of negligence and incompetence.

Followers of bin Laden have vowed revenge for the al Qaeda chief’s death and the Pakistani Taliban said Friday’s attack by two suicide bombers in the northwestern town of Charsadda was their first taste of vengeance.

“There will be more,” militant spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The bombers struck as recruits were going on leave and 65 of them were among the 80 dead. Pools of blood strewn with soldiers’ caps and shoes lay on the road outside the academy as the wounded, looking dazed with parts of their clothes ripped away by shrapnel, were loaded into trucks.

Pakistan’s military and government have drawn criticism at home, partly for not finding bin Laden but more for failing to detect or stop the U.S. raid on May 2 that killed him.

A senior Pakistani general also canceled a planned visit to the United States. Pakistan depends heavily on U.S. aid.

In addition, U.S. authorities in Pakistan interviewed three of bin Laden’s widows, detained by Pakistan in the compound after the U.S. raid, but gathered little new information, U.S. officials said in Washington.

Pakistan said it would repatriate the three widows and their children. One is from Yemen and the others from Saudi Arabia.

U.S. special forces killed bin Laden, the man behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, at a compound near Pakistan’s top military academy in the northern town of Abbottabad. Pakistan welcomed his death as a major step against militancy but called the secret U.S. raid a violation of its sovereignty.

Shahid Ali, 28, was on his way to his shop when the bombs went off in Charsadda. He tried to help survivors. “A young boy was lying near a wrecked van asked me to take him to hospital. I got help and we got him into a vehicle,” Ali said.

‘DISRUPT, DISMANTLE AND DEFEAT’

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner condemned the attack, offered condolences to the families of the victims, and stressed the U.S. alliance with Pakistan.

“Terrorists have shown time and again that they are the true enemy … of the people and the government of Pakistan,” Toner said. “We respect the nation’s sacrifices in the fight against terrorism and will continue to stand with Pakistan in our joint struggle to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and allied terrorist organizations.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the United States would be “very vigilant” about revenge attacks.

Hours after the bombing, a U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at a vehicle in North Waziristan on the Afghan border, killing five militants, Pakistani security officials said.

It was the fourth drone attack since bin Laden was killed, inflaming another sore issue between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan officially objects to the attacks, saying they violate its sovereignty and feed public anger.

Military and intelligence chiefs gave parliament a closed-door briefing in which ISI chief Pasha told legislators he was ready to take responsibility for any criminal failing, Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said.

“If any of our responsibility is determined and any gap identified, that our negligence was criminal negligence, and there was an intentional failure, then we are ready to face any consequences,” Awan told Express TV, citing Pasha.

Another member of parliament said Pasha told the assembly he did not want to “hang around” if parliament deems him responsible. “I am ready to resign,” Riaz Fatyana quoted the ISI chief as saying.

The spy chief also told parliament bin Laden had been isolated, Awan said. “We had already killed all his allies and so we had killed him even before he was dead. He was living like a dead man,” Awan quoted Pasha as saying.

The chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff committee, General Khalid Shameem Wynne, canceled a five-day visit to the United States that had been set to begin on May 22.

“The visit could not be undertaken under existing circumstances,” a military official told Reuters.

He did not elaborate, but the decision to cancel the visit came as the Cabinet defense committee said it was reviewing cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism.

U.S. officials are sifting through what they describe as a treasure trove of intelligence material seized in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed on Friday that a stash of video pornography was found in the hideout there but said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the material.

The White House also said President Barack Obama would lay out his vision for Middle East policy next Thursday, using bin Laden’s death as a chance to recast the U.S. response to political upheaval in the Arab world.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who spent years searching in vain for bin Laden, described for the first time the call he received from Obama informing him that U.S. forces had killed the al Qaeda leader.

Bush said he was eating souffles at a Dallas restaurant when he got word Obama was trying to reach him.

“I excused myself and went home to take the call,” Bush said. “Obama simply said, ‘Osama bin Laden is dead.'” After Obama described the U.S. raid and the decision he made to go ahead with the mission, Bush said he told Obama, “Good call.”

Via NewsDaily

China, U.S. grapple with military distrust on PLA visit

China and the United States next week hold their first top level military-to-military talks since 2009 to try to bring more trust to a relationship overshadowed by weapons sales to Taiwan and unease over the growing reach of Beijing’s armed forces.

The week-long visit by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Chief of General Staff Chen Bingde follows this week’s talks of top government officials seen as making some ground in easing tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.

“The lack of high-level and sustained military-to-military engagement means that the whole of the U.S.-China relationship remains unbalanced,” said Cheung Tai Ming, a senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

China sharply cut back military contacts after the Obama administration announced in early 2010 major weapons sales to Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.

Chen told a visiting U.S. delegation last month that those arms sales were still the biggest obstacle facing military relations.

His talks with Obama administration officials and military commanders are unlikely to yield breakthroughs but could help warm relations.

“The U.S. has a whole range of proposals on information and operational exchanges on the table, and none of that can take place until the upper echelons within the military, as well as the civilian apparatus, agree on this,” Cheung said.

But military strains could still flare, especially with a U.S. presidential race and leadership transition in China in 2012 that could distract decision-makers and make them less willing to compromise on disputes.

“Pretending that tensions between our two militaries can be placed in an isolation ward and not affect the views of the top leadership in each country is wishful thinking,” said David Finkelstein, director of China Studies at CNA, which advises Washington policy-makers on security issues.

“I am confident that officials on both sides understand that the military dimensions of U.S.-China relations are too important to be held hostage to polls, bloggers, and Op-Eds,” he said.

The United States, and others in the region, have watched with concern as China’s military has extended its reach in Asia and built up its military prowess.

In one display of military muscle, China confirmed it had held its first test flight of the J-20 stealth fighter jet during a January visit to Beijing by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

It is also possible China will launch its first aircraft carrier later this year.

RISK OF DANGEROUS MISSTEPS

Chinese ships shadowing U.S. vessels in the South China Sea and Beijing’s surprise launch of a missile that destroyed an inactive Chinese satellite in 2007 have raised worries about the risk of dangerous missteps, especially as China’s expanding military capabilities rub up against U.S. forces in Asia.

For its part, China sees the heavy U.S. military presence in Asia, especially bases in South Korea and Japan, as threats to its influence and interests.

However, both also see the need to communicate better.

“This military relationship is taking on more importance, not only because as China’s military develops so do the chances of mistrust, but also because cooperation in problem spots like Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot develop without it,” said Peking University professor Zhu Feng.

Apart from meeting top U.S. civilian and military leaders, including Defense Secretary Gates, Chen will visit key military sites, something a Chinese official praised ahead of the visit.

“The U.S. side has made considerate arrangements. Some sites have not accepted visiting military leaders for years,”the state-run China Daily quoted Defense Ministry official Huang Xueping as saying.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, and Phil Stewart in Washington; Editing by Don Durfee and Jonathan Thatcher)

 

Via NewsDaily

Bush tells Obama on bin Laden: “Good call”

Former President George W. Bush, who spent years searching for Osama bin Laden, had two words for President Barack Obama when Obama told him of the al Qaeda leader’s death: “Good call.”

Bush, who has shied away from the public eye since leaving office in January 2009, spoke about the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden in remarks to a conference of hedge fund managers. An ABC News contributor attended the event and reported on them.

Bush said he was eating souffles at a Dallas restaurant with his wife, Laura, and two friends when he got word that Obama, his successor as president, was trying to reach him.

“I excused myself and went home to take the call,” Bush said. “Obama simply said, ‘Osama bin Laden is dead.'”

After Obama described in detail the secret U.S. raid on Osama’s compound in Pakistan and the decision he made to go ahead with the mission, Bush said he told Obama: “Good call.”

ABC News said Bush told the group that bin Laden’s death was a victory for the American people and “a great victory in the war on terror.”

He said U.S. intelligence services deserve a lot of credit for tracking down bin Laden and spoke of meeting in Afghanistan with Navy SEAL Team Six, the highly skilled strike team that reportedly conducted the raid.

“They are awesome, skilled, talented and brave,” he added. “I said, ‘I hope you have everything you need. One guy said, ‘We need your permission to go into Pakistan and kick ass.'”

Bush escalated a U.S. hunt for bin Laden after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, but the al Qaeda leader escaped from the mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and ended up living in a large house in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, apparently for years.

Bush’s predecessor, President Bill Clinton, launched missile strikes against bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan in 1998 in an unsuccessful effort to kill bin Laden following al Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Will Dunham)

Via NewsDaily

Artificial Grammar Reveals Inborn Language Sense

Parents know the unparalleled joy and wonder of hearing a beloved child’s first words turn quickly into whole sentences and then babbling paragraphs. But how human children acquire language-which is so complex and has so many variations-remains largely a mystery. Fifty years ago, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed an answer: Humans are able to learn language so quickly because some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. In other words, we know some of the most fundamental things about human language unconsciously at birth, without ever being taught.

Now, in a groundbreaking study, cognitive scientists at The Johns Hopkins University have confirmed a striking prediction of the controversial hypothesis that human beings are born with knowledge of certain syntactical rules that make learning human languages easier.

“This research shows clearly that learners are not blank slates; rather, their inherent biases, or preferences, influence what they will learn. Understanding how language is acquired is really the holy grail in linguistics,” said lead author Jennifer Culbertson, who worked as a doctoral student in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences under the guidance of Geraldine Legendre, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, and Paul Smolensky, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the same department. (Culbertson is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester.)

The study not only provides evidence remarkably consistent with Chomsky’s hypothesis but also introduces an interesting new approach to generating and testing other hypotheses aimed at answering some of the biggest questions concerning the language learning process.

In the study, a small, green, cartoonish “alien informant” named Glermi taught participants, all of whom were English-speaking adults, an artificial nanolanguage named Verblog via a video game interface. In one experiment, for instance, Glermi displayed an unusual-looking blue alien object called a “slergena” on the screen and instructed the participants to say “geej slergena,” which in Verblog means “blue slergena.” Then participants saw three of those objects on the screen and were instructed to say “slergena glawb,” which means “slergenas three.”

Although the participants may not have consciously known this, many of the world’s languages use both of those word orders-that is, in many languages adjectives precede nouns, and in many nouns are followed by numerals. However, very rarely are both of these rules used together in the same human language, as they are in Verblog.

As a control, other groups were taught different made-up languages that matched Verblog in every way but used word order combinations that are commonly found in human languages.

Culbertson reasoned that if knowledge of certain properties of human grammars-such as where adjectives, nouns and numerals should occur-is hardwired into the human brain from birth, the participants tasked with learning alien Verblog would have a particularly difficult time, which is exactly what happened.

The adult learners who had had little to no exposure to languages with word orders different from those in English quite easily learned the artificial languages that had word orders commonly found in the world’s languages but failed to learn Verblog. It was clear that the learners’ brains “knew” in some sense that the Verblog word order was extremely unlikely, just as predicted by Chomsky a half-century ago.

The results are important for several reasons, according to Culbertson.

“Language is something that sets us apart from other species, and if we understand how children are able to quickly and efficiently learn language, despite its daunting complexity, then we will have gained fundamental knowledge about this unique faculty,” she said. “What this study suggests is that the problem of acquisition is made simpler by the fact that learners already know some important things about human languages-in this case, that certain words orders are likely to occur and others are not.”

This study was done with the support of a $3.2 million National Science Foundation grant called the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship grant, or IGERT, a unique initiative aimed at training doctoral students to tackle investigations from a multidisciplinary perspective.

According to Smolensky, the goal of the IGERT program in Johns Hopkins’ Cognitive Science Department is to overcome barriers that have long separated the way that different disciplines have tackled language research.

“Using this grant, we are training a generation of interdisciplinary language researchers who can bring together the now widely separated and often divergent bodies of research on language conducted from the perspectives of engineering, psychology and various types of linguistics,” said Smolensky, principal investigator for the department’s IGERT program.

Culbertson used tools from experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics and mathematics in designing and carrying out her study.

“The graduate training I received through the IGERT program at Johns Hopkins allowed me to synthesize ideas and approaches from a broad range of fields in order to develop a novel approach to a really classic question in the language sciences,” she said.

Via ScienceDaily

Small Quake in Spain Makes Big Impact

• A 5.1-magnitude quake in southern Spain was the deadliest tremor in Spain in more than five decades.
• Eight people were killed and another 167 were injured. The quake also caused extensive property damage.
• The tremor struck in the evening with a depth of 10 kilometers (six miles) and could be felt as far away as the capital Madrid

A magnitude 5.1 quake killed at least eight people in southern Spain, sending historic buildings crashing down as panicked residents fled.

Eight people including one child perished in the southeastern city of Lorca in the deadliest tremor in Spain in more than five decades, the regional government of Murcia said in a statement.

Another 167 were injured including three in grave condition in hospital, health officials reported.

The quake collapsed the fronts of buildings and ripped open walls. Streets were littered with crumbled buildings, chunks of masonry, fallen terraces and crumpled cars.

A church clocktower tumbled and smashed into pieces, narrowly missing a television reporter as he conducted an interview on Spanish public broadcaster TVE. A bronze bell lay in the rubble.

Fearful residents including families with children gathered outside with blankets as night fell. About 10,000 people were evacuated from the cordoned-off city-center.

In an outdoor basketball court and children’s playground, dozens of people spent the night on the ground wrapped in blankets.

One group of four evacuees sat in fold-up chairs in the early hours of Thursday, unable to sleep. As they escaped their damaged building they had seen the corpses of three people outside killed by falling bricks.

“I was scared to death,” said one elderly woman who declined to give her name.

The tremor struck in the evening with a depth of 10 kilometers (six miles) and could be felt as far away as the capital Madrid. It hit nearly two hours after a smaller 4.4-magnitude quake.

A doctor said many people had been hurt.

“I had just finished attending to a patient. We all went out into the streets and had to treat people, some with serious injuries, many unconscious, because the ambulances could not reach them,” the doctor, identified only as Virtudes, told the online edition of El Pais. “They just took away a man who had a wall fall on top of him.”

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero ordered military emergency units in after being told of the disaster while he was in a meeting with King Juan Carlos, the premier’s office said in a statement.

The damage was concentrated in the towns of Lorca and Totana, which lie in one of the most active seismic zones of the Iberian peninsula, but also spread as far as Albacete and Velez-Rubio in Almeria, the premier’s office said.

Train services were halted and emergency vehicles clogged roads to the city.

A total 225 emergency military units deployed to the quake zone along with another 400 safety workers including rescuers with search dogs, the interior ministry said.

Police also sent in two specialized trucks with floodlights and three helicopters including a Superpuma, the ministry said. The Red Cross moved in 24 ambulances and set up three field hospitals.

A total of 350 ambulances transferred 400 patients out of two of the town’s hospitals, the regional government said.

Residents described confusion in the town of 92,700 inhabitants about 70 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Murcia. Lorca traces its history back more than 2,000 years and boasts many medieval monuments.

Cristina Selva, 32, said she was playing with her two two-year-old daughters.

“The building moved and I was was very scared for the girls. I took them and the three of us got under the table to wait for it to pass,” she told El Pais. “It was the longest 20 seconds of my life.”

Francisco Martinez, 61, was watching television on the fourth floor when the building shook and he fled with his sister.

“We don’t know what the damage is because we cannot get in,” he said as he spent the night sitting down outside.

It was the deadliest earthquake in Spain since April 19, 1956 when a tremor wrecked buildings and killed 11 people in Albolote, a town in the southern Spanish province of Granada.

Ironically, it struck on the same day many residents stayed away from work in the Italian capital Rome fearing a supposed prophecy of a devastating tremor by a self-taught Italian seismologist who died in 1979.

Via Discovery