Oprah Winfrey top of Forbes celebrity power list

US TV host Oprah Winfrey has has been named the most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes magazine.

Winfrey knocked film star Angelina Jolie off the top spot of Forbes’s annual Celebrity 100 list, which is based on earnings and media exposure.

Singer Beyonce came second, while film director James Cameron re-entered the chart at number three following his success with Avatar.

Lady Gaga was the highest new entry on the list at number four.

Like Beyonce, her earnings and profile have been boosted in the past 12 months by a global tour and endorsement deals.

Jolie, meanwhile, slipped from the top spot to a lowly 18th place.

Beleaguered golf star Tiger Woods was the only sports star to make the top 10.

Britney Spears was at six, followed by U2 in seventh place, making a return to the top 100. …

via BBC News – Oprah Winfrey top of Forbes celebrity power list.

Methane Release From the Gulf, How Bad Could it Get?

Tremendous quantities of methane are being emitted by the Gulf oil spill.

The methane could kill all life in large areas of the Gulf.

However, rumors being spread widely around the Web claiming that the methane could bring on a doomsday catastrophe are not credible.

This essay will attempt to clear up the confusion and convey the facts regarding methane and the oil spill. …

But most people don’t know that the government has actively encouraged drilling for methane in the Gulf of Mexico as well.

For example, Congress passed the Methane Hydrate Research and Development Act of 2000 “to promote the research, identification, assessment, exploration, and development of methane hydrate resources….”

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 also providedgovernment support for methane hydrate research, exploration and development – including in deep water.

The Department of Energy has actively encouraged deepwater drilling for methane hydrates. See this and this.

Indeed, this has specifically included support for deepwater drilling for methane in the Gulf of Mexico. See this, this, this, this, this,

In fact, the government, oil industry and academia have been exploring the high methane content in the Mississippi Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico – where the spill is occurring – for years.

Unprecedented Release of Methane

As CBS notes:

The oil emanating from the seafloor contains about 40 percent methane, compared with about 5 percent found in typical oil deposits, said John Kessler, a Texas A&M University oceanographer who is studying the impact of methane from the spill.As Kessler also points out:

This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history.
A U.S. scientist says that methane levels in the Gulf are “astonishingly high”, that 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the oil spill, high enough to create “dead zones” devoid of life. Methane depletes oxygen, and the scientist noted:

At some locations, we saw depletions of up to 30 percent of oxygen based on its natural concentration in the waters. Another scientist writes:

Researchers studying the [plumes] have found concentrations of methane up to 10,000 times greater than normal and oxygen levels depleted by 40 percent below normal.This unprecedented release of methane into the ocean kill all life within large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico. …

There is speculation on the Web that the methane being released from the oil spill will cause a tsunami or a firestorm.

It is true that one scientist speculates that methane bubbles released from the seafloor have caused extinction-level events in the past.

But the odds that the release of methane from the leaking oil will cause a tidal wave or a firestorm are infinitesimally small.

There are many real things to worry about – such as the destruction of the Gulf ecosystem, and the threat to human health from toxic chemicals in the oil and dispersants.

Tidal waves and firestorms are not worth worrying about. And – unlike the destruction of the ecosystems and the threat to human health which we can do something about (by stopping the use of Corexit dispersant and using proven clean-up and containment methods) – there’s nothing much we can do about such low-probability Armageddon scenarios. …

washington’s blog

Gulf Seafood After the Oil Spill: Who Decides How Safe Is Safe?

… “Fresh. Wild Gulf Shrimp. Never Frozen. $16.99 lb.” read the sign.

“They’re my favorites, but are they safe?” the woman asked the fishmonger.

“We couldn’t and wouldn’t sell them if they weren’t,” he answered, and quickly added that someone is testing the hell out of everything coming from the gulf.

He was telling the truth.

But several questions remain to be answered for consumers:

• Petroleum contamination is known to cause cancer and brain damage. But how much oil and gas does it take to make seafood dangerous?

• Who’s in charge of determining how safe is safe?

• The Food and Drug Administration is supposedly the nation’s food protector. What exactly is FDA’s role in this process?

• How can you really tell where seafood is coming from? Is there any way to distinguish a gulf shrimp from a Pacific one?

AOL News spent the past two weeks chasing down precisely who is doing that testing and how they decide what is safe to eat.

The analysis is important. Public health experts say they are not concerned about E. coli or salmonella coming from seafood heavily tainted with oil. What they fear is the possibility of cancer or neurologic impact.

Analyzing whether dangerous contaminants are in the seafood is an intricate process that uses a complex array of CSI-like instruments that can find bad things down to the parts per billion level.

But these are everyday tasks for marine biologists, toxicologists and other technical wizards in Louisiana state laboratories in Baton Rouge and in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. These are the two primary sites scrutinizing thousands of samples of shrimp, crab and fin fish gathered from the Gulf of Mexico.

The multiple chemical analyses have detected no harmful level of contaminants, both labs say. …

The bible that most risk assessors seem to be relying on is a lengthy 2002 NOAA report, “Managing Seafood Safety After an Oil Spill,” issued after the Valdez spill. It explains that the acceptable cancer risk assessment is derived from how much seafood a person eats, over what period of time and the level of contamination found.

What that means is the seafood is deemed safe if it doesn’t increase a person’s lifetime cancer rate by more than one additional case in a million people. Some states like Maine use a higher risk levels, such as a lifetime cancer risk of no greater than 1 in 100,000 people, NOAA says. …

As far as determining whether the shrimp, crab and fish came from the gulf or were farmed in foreign waters, the best advice is to know your fishmonger because buying seafood today clearly demands that the buyer beware.

via Gulf Seafood After the Oil Spill: Who Decides How Safe Is Safe?.

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Illegal Ghana gold mine owner arrested after collapse

Police in Ghana have arrested the owner of an illegal gold mine which collapsed on Sunday after heavy rains, burying large numbers of miners.

There are fears that an estimated 100 people have been killed in the accident in Dunkwa-on-Offin, central Ghana.

At least 15 people survived. Rescue workers are continuing search efforts, but have been hampered by flooding.

The West African nation is one of the continent’s largest gold exporters.

Municipal chief Peter Owusu-Eshia said the owner had allegedly hired 136 people to work in the mine.

As the mine was being run illegally, it is unclear how many were in the mine at the time of the incident.

Local fire official DO Adusa said survivors were withholding information about the operation.

Pumps and divers

Faced with flooding, rescue teams are using water pumps and divers to look for bodies and survivors.

“At this stage I don’t think we can get any survivors, those who are already trapped, I believe they may be dead now,” local police commander Supt SK Buabeng was quoted as saying by the Joy Online website.

“We are trying our best to get the bodies recovered.”

Last year, the death of 15 miners was said to be Ghana’s worst such disaster.

Ghana, previously known as the Gold Coast, remains one of Africa’s biggest producers of the precious metal.

Multinationals operate in the country but villagers often dig their own pits or hope to strike it rich in abandoned mines.

In such cases, there are few, if any, safety precautions.

via BBC News – Illegal Ghana gold mine owner arrested after collapse.

Larry King to end long-running US TV chat show

Veteran broadcaster Larry King has announced that he will be ending his nightly show on CNN in the autumn.

Over 25 years of the show, King, famous for wearing braces, has conducted more than 40,000 interviews.

Larry King Live recently made it into in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot.

The news comes at a time of falling ratings for the show. King, 76, said he would spend more time with his family.

His marriage to seventh wife Shawn Southwick had appeared to be on the point of breaking up earlier this year when King filed for divorce.

The couple have since reconciled their differences.

On his blog, King wrote that CNN had agreed to his request to wrap up the show in the autumn “giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ little league games”.

He said he would “still be a part of the CNN family” and planned to host special programmes on major national and international events.

“With this chapter closing I’m looking forward to the future and what my next chapter will bring, but for now it’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders (braces),” he concluded.

via BBC News – Larry King to end long-running US TV chat show.

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer’s brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

“I said, ‘Jim, why don’t you find out about your father’s relatives?’ ” Jenny Fallon recalls. “I think there were some cuckoos back there.”

Fallon investigated.

“There’s a whole lineage of very violent people — killers,” he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. “Cousin Lizzy,” as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

“Here is a brain that’s not normal,” he says. There are patches of yellow and red. Then he points to another section of the brain, in the front part of the brain, just behind the eyes.

“Look at that — there’s almost nothing here,” Fallon says.

This is the orbital cortex, the area that Fallon and other scientists believe is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control.

“People with low activity [in the orbital cortex] are either free-wheeling types or sociopaths,” he says.

He’s clearly oversimplifying, but Fallon says the orbital cortex puts a brake on another part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there’s an imbalance — the orbital cortex isn’t doing its job — perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was born that way.

“What’s left? What takes over?” he asks. “The area of the brain that drives your id-type behaviors, which is rage, violence, eating, sex, drinking.”

Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease.

After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife’s scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

“And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about,” he says.

What he didn’t want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

“If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers.”

Fallon cautions that this is a young field. Scientists are just beginning to study this area of the brain — much less the brains of criminals. Still, he says the evidence is accumulating that some people’s brains predispose them toward violence and that psychopathic tendencies may be passed down from one generation to another.

And that brings us to the next part of Jim Fallon’s family experiment. Along with brain scans, Fallon also tested each family member’s DNA for genes that are associated with violence. He looked at 12 genes related to aggression and violence and zeroed in on the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A). This gene, which has been the target of considerable research, is also known as the “warrior gene” because it regulates serotonin in the brain. Serotonin affects your mood — think Prozac — and many scientists believe that if you have a certain version of the warrior gene, your brain won’t respond to the calming effects of serotonin.

Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members’ names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

“You see that? I’m 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern,” he says, then pauses. “In a sense, I’m a born killer.”

Fallon’s being tongue-in-cheek — sort of. He doesn’t believe his fate or anyone else’s is entirely determined by genes. They merely tip you in one direction or another.

And yet: “When I put the two together, it was frankly a little disturbing,” Fallon says with a laugh. “You start to look at yourself and you say, ‘I may be a sociopath.’ I don’t think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I’ve seen before.”

I asked his wife, Diane, what she thought of the result.

“I wasn’t too concerned,” she says, laughing. “I mean, I’ve known him since I was 12.”

Diane probably does not need to worry, according to scientists who study this area. They believe that brain patterns and genetic makeup are not enough to make anyone a psychopath. You need a third ingredient: abuse or violence in one’s childhood.

“And fortunately, he wasn’t abused as a young person,” Diane says, “so I’ve lived to be a ripe old age so far.” …

via A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret : NPR.

Firefox addressbar search hijacked by Microsoft Bing

Previously, whenever I type something in Firefox addressbar and press enter, the search engine used is Google. Nowadays whenever I type something in the Firefox addressbar and pressed enter, the search engine used have changed to Microsoft’s Bing! I never recalled changing it so I did a search and found the following solution….

1. Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar.

2. In the Filter box, type keyword.

3. You should find a few keyword entries. Make sure that keyword.enabled is set to true.

4. Look for keyword.url and right click on it to modify. Copy this string value http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q= and enter it in the box.

Restart Firefox.

Source: Mozilla Support

via Firefox addressbar search hijacked by Microsoft Bing « Troubleshooting PC Problems.

Military Mulls New Name for Psychological Operations: MISO

“Psychological Operations” sounds awesomely creepy. In actuality, the military discipline can be pretty mundane: designing leaflets and driving sound trucks around, not plying your enemies with LSD.

Now the Pentagon brass is mulling a name change that would make the cadre seem even more humdrum. If the switch goes through. Psychological Operations would become Military Information Support and/to Operations. PSYOP would become MISO.

Judging by the online reaction,the PSYOP community is none-too-pleased with the idea of a watery new acronym.

“Some of us joined Psychological Operations because it sounded awesome for it’s name alone,” notes one anonymous commenter on the Small Wars Journal blog. “Today, we fall under people who get to dictate and control what we do without knowing fully what our capabilities are. To now have the name changed from PSYOP to MISO is a slap in the face. The intimidation factor brought on by the words alone are what attracts many recruits to the MOS [Military Occupation Specialty]. Now when you hear MISO you might as well just join admin or supply.”

“One can only imagine the hue and cry that would arise if a proposal were made to change the name of the infantry, the artillery, or armor,” PSYOP historian Alfred Paddock writes in Joint Force Quarterly. “These are combat arms units that use lethal means to accomplish their missions. Thus, it is particularly ironic that some would change the name of PSYOP units that employ nonlethal means to support these combat arms. Apparently, undermining the morale of the enemy is more politically incorrect than killing them.”

But I think my favorite comment comes from “Alex,” a rather sensitive officer posting on the PSYOP Regimental Blog. To illustrate the acronym switch, the blog posted a picture of a bowl of miso soup. Well, that was too much for Alex. “Sir, I found your comments and a photo in your article totally inappropriate and distasteful,” he huffs. Apparently, some PSYOP guys are awfully easy to influence.

via Military Mulls New Name for Psychological Operations: MISO | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Military Intelligence Snake-like Objective?

Homeland Security Committee Passes “Kill Switch” Legislation

As a brief follow-up to Adam’s post earlier this week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs passed the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″, S.3480 by voice vote. The bill grants the authority to the President to declare a national “cyber emergency”.

A website called Govinfosecurity.com wrote:

Under the amended bill, a national cyber emergency could last for up to 30 days, and the president could renew it up to three times. It could only be renewed beyond 120 days with the approval of Congress. The bill limits the presidential action to only the most critical IT systems.

Senator Susan Collins had this to say:

The fact is: We cannot fail to act. We can’t wait until there is a cyber 9/11 and say, ‘Why didn’t we act? We knew this was coming.’ The attacks are ongoing even as we meet. So we must act, and I believe we have drafted a responsible bill to do so. [emphasis added]

A cyber 9/11? Really, Senator? (I think someone watched “Live Free or Die Hard” too many times…)

via Campaign For Liberty — Homeland Security Committee Passes “Kill Switch” Legislation.

Here is what this is really about:

54:51 “… or we need you to put this part of your network DOWN for uh 12 hours or a day or whatever…” – video

In other words, if you have information about a crime inside the government, the government, thanks to this “protection,” could tell your network provider to shut YOU DOWN for a day while thugs go in and confiscate the evidence against them.

And the government guarantees that you can’t sue your network provider for doing that.

Why not just give the government a switch that makes everyone deaf and blind?

“Red alert! Red alert! Citizens of the USA, open your wallets and put these bags over your heads while we protect you from criminals you can not see! (us, heh heh)”

Cyber 9/11? Give me a break. Jesus, just get a firewall.

Just don’t hire idiots to secure your network and you won’t have to worry about being hacked. If something major could happen, it would have already happened!

The proof is in their own argument, billions of “attacks” and NOTHING has happened other than a some people being tricked into loading fake “windows anti-virus” malware that tells them to give their credit card to a scam site.

Authority already exists to go after these criminals.

Those billions of “attacks” are mostly worthless automated port scans that any hardware or software based stateful firewall stops. Most network administrators aren’t morons and don’t need your “protection”, Mr. Homeland Protection Racket.

There is no National Cyber Emergency. There will be no real National Cyber Emergency. The net is a web. Take down a part of it and connections are re-routed automatically. Dams, electric grids and financial networks have all been attacked for years with no problems.

Screw these lies. Your freedom to communicate is under attack. Democracy is under attack. Fight back. Sink the censorship!