P2P Faceoff — CNET’s Eliot Van Buskirk: “Six months ago, not long after Napster shuttered its service, I pitted the top eight file-sharing competitors against each other to find out which one found the largest number of MP3s. At the time, Gnotella snared the music-swapping crown. But a lot has changed since July; most of these apps have been updated, and the shifting popularity of the programs means that some of them now work better than others. That’s why I decided to run my survey again. My test methods might not be terribly scientific (after all, everyone has their favorite method of finding and downloading MP3s), but they do give a snapshot of how these various networks are performing.”

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Developed World Sees Rise in Youth Suicide, Murder — ‘Since the mid-1950s, an analysis of data from 26 industrialized nations reveals, the rate of death among adolescents and young adults has decreased by almost 50%. But death rates in this group from motor vehicle accidents, homicide and suicide combined have risen by 17%, according to the analysis.

And among 15- to 34-year-olds in the sampled countries, the US had the second highest rate of death from homicide, and the third highest rate of death due to motor vehicle accidents, the researchers found.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

Digging Deep Into Compression. Because file compressibility is intimately related to degree of repetitiousness in data (which differs from language to language and even author to author within languages) researchers have shown that measurement of compressibility with common utilities such as WinZip or StuffIt can “discern the language of mystery texts as short as 20 characters. Furthermore, using a database of 90 texts from 11 different authors, they found their method could even pick out individual authors with a success rate of 93 percent.

Search engines, they say, could use this simple technique to categorize their quarry by semantic content and more qualitative categories such as style and readership level.” Wired

Further analysis of Palm OS 5.0; only around 80% of existing applications will be compatible. The Register

Choosing the Right Enemies: Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the damage to our security which will be done by Dubya’s undiscerning aggregation of “countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea with their terrorist associates”, particularly with respect to Kim Jong Il. NY Times op-ed Bush’s speech shuts door on tenuous opening to Iran Washington Post; and a commentator finds that Bush’s omission of Syria from the list leaves a bad taste. Ha’Aretz Meanwhile, Angered by snubbing, Libya, China, Syria form Axis of Just as Evil,

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs. SatireWire

Henry Kloss, 72, Innovator in Audio and Video, Dies. Over the years, my listening pleasure has been channelled through a number of Henry Kloss’ innovations including AR-1, Advemt and KLH speakers, Model 8 and Model One table radios, and of course Dolby B. I’ll continue to think of him… NY Times

A Curator Defends His Show Exploring Nazi Imagery

More than a month before the March 17 opening of his new exhibition, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” and long before anyone has even seen any of the pieces in the show, the ink is flowing: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, Newsweek and The New York Times have all mentioned the exhibition in conjunction with “Sensation,” the Brooklyn Museum of Art show that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to shut down in 1999.

Mr. Kleeblatt has an odd take on this. The problem, he said, is that at this point “the works are shown only in reproduction” in the catalog. And that is the worst way to see installation art and sculpture, which many of this exhibition’s works are, he noted. These pieces are big and confrontational. They are meant to engage the viewer, to raise questions. They are incomplete without the viewer in the gallery. NY Times

Bye, Bye Love: How Men, Women Dish Out Rejection — ‘It can cut like a knife, or make your brown eyes blue. It’s romantic rejection, and a new study finds big differences in how men and women give would-be partners the brush-off.

When it came to the reasons cited most often for turning someone down, “men and women were different on every one of them,” according to researcher Dr. William F. Chaplin of the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa.

He and co-researcher Susan Reneau presented their findings here Saturday at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

[Yeah, but the study was done in Alabama! – FmH]

Thinking robots go to war in fight for survival:

‘With a hiss and a clank, one of the world’s first predatory robots seized its metal prey yesterday, plunged a claw into its electronic heart and then whirred off to a computerised mate to “breed”.

“It’s pure survival of the fittest,” said Noel Sharkey, happily preparing another victim for the arena in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the frontiers of artificial intelligence yesterday took a dramatic leap forward.

Designed to mature robotic “thinking”, to allow machines to adapt and survive in extreme conditions without human help, the tests mimic a child’s development with eerie accuracy.

Predators and prey do battle – from next month in front of human audiences at the £42m Magna science centre – for limited supplies of electric power, storing the lessons of victory and defeat in their micro-computers.’ Guardian UK

[The Comedy Channel is probably beating down their door for a t.v. contract… -FmH]

Bush Eyeballs Heavy Tech Spending — Declan McCullagh:

President Bush is asking Congress to grant federal police hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance, information-sharing and computer upgrades.

In his proposed 2003 budget sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, Bush proposed an unprecedented increase on spending for anti-terrorism efforts, saying that doing so “recognizes the new realities confronting our nation, and funds the war against terrorism and the defense of our homeland.”

Because the complex document is merely a proposal, Congress will spend much of this year wrangling over what form the final budget will take for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2002. Wired

Who You Calling Mediasaurus? – The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence. Jack Schafer:

‘ “To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years,” novelist-filmmaker Michael Crichton wrote in a widely quoted Wired magazine piece, “Mediasaurus,” which he adapted from an April 1993 speech before the National Press Club. “Vanished, without a trace.”

…Replacing the established media within a decade, Crichton predicted, would be an Infotopia in which “artificial intelligence agents” would roam “the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests.”

…Where did Crichton go wrong? (Where did I go wrong?) Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.’ Slate

The Few, the Proud, the Marins – A top conservative is wrong about John Walker. Scott Shuger:

It is, to say the least, hard to believe that a young American could have ended up in the Taliban. But saying the least is not the conservative’s discourse of choice. And so it was that soon after John Walker’s dirty, bearded face was beamed worldwide, conservative commentator Shelby Steele appeared on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page with a 1,100-word unified Walker theory, which boiled down to this: The 20-year-old Walker could do what he did only because his formative years were spent in hot-tubbing, wine-loving, liberal Marin County, California. Steele explained that in Marin “there are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights and wrongs … just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool,” and that there, “a little anti-Americanism becomes a sophistication, a mark of authenticity.”

A few days later, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, detecting a rash generalization, begged to differ. “I am willing to wager,” Cohen wrote, “that most of the kids born in 1981 (or any year, for that matter) are still in America. In fact, there may be more of them with the U.S. armed forces than with the Taliban. I am way out on a limb on that one, I know.” Slate