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Greetings,

Happy Reading For Today


<Karen>


1)
Federal News Radio

Federal News Radio covers both the Federal Government and those who do business with the government concentrating on management, procurement, technology, security, policy and pay & benefits.

This source often includes items of particular interest to federal employees. Finding the feeds here is tricky; I did not a list. Basically, you have to click around on different items until you unearth an orange RSS icon. Random poking around turned up these:

• Federal News Radio - Podcast Updates
• WFED / Mike Causey / Columns (Causey is the senior correspondence here.)
• WFED / Government / Govt. Stories
• Federal News Radio - Ask The CAO A series of interviews with chief acquisitions officers at a variety of federal departments and agencies. Potentially useful for those looking to do business with the government.
• Federal News Radio - Your Turn with Mike Causey Podcasts on topics of particular interest to federal employees.

2)
Report: Cyber Jihad Set for Nov. 11
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139151-c,hackers/article.html
Security experts are saying that a reported al-Qaeda cyber jihad attack
planned against Western institutions should be treated with skepticism.
The attack was reported by DEBKAfile, an online military intelligence
magazine. Citing anonymous "counter-terror sources," DEBKAfile said it
had intercepted an Oct. 29 "Internet announcement," calling for a
volunteer-run online attack against 15 targeted sites, set to begin Nov.11.
The operation is supposed to expand after its launch date until
"hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold
numbers of anti-Muslim sites," the magazine reported.
Such an attack could be launched with a known software kit, called
Electronic Jihad Version 2.0, said Paul Henry, vice president of
technology evangelism with Secure Computing. This software, which has
been in circulation for about three years, has recently become more
easily configurable so that it could be more effective in a distributed
denial of service attack, such as the one suggested by the DEBKAfile
report.

3)
Secret Postman
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/newsfeed/2007/10/28/secret-postman-78057-20020907/
Exclusive - We Expose Royal Mail Security Shambles Our Man Handles Your
Letters Unchecked
DISASTROUS security lapses at the heart of the Royal Mail are today
revealed in a shock Sunday Mail investigation.
Our reporter strolled into Scotland's biggest sorting office and landed
a job by simply saying he was agency staff.
Incredibly, he spent an hour-and-a-half handling thousands of letters
and parcels - some with credit cards, voter registration documents and
sensitive NHS letters.

4)
Lords: Government doesn't get internet threat
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39290465,00.htm
The government has been accused of putting its 'head in the sand', after
rejecting many recommendations from the House of Lords aimed at
protecting consumers online
The UK government has failed to understand the threat to the continued
growth of the internet posed by cybercrime, according to the influential
House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.
Lord Erroll, a member of the committee, hit out at the government's
reaction to the committee's report into personal internet security,
saying that the government had failed to react appropriately.

5)
Music Education

"Of all the languages that human beings are speaking on the planet, it's some form of grammar," Coleman said of his album. "For me, playing music is analyzing grammar." ~ Ornette Coleman Pulitzar Prize 2007

What is the evolutionary function of music?

Listen to Piraha sung speech - two boys singing about a day's events.

Evolutionary roots of Language - The key to learning the language is the tribe’s singing. The Pirahã habitually whittle nouns down to single syllables. Phonemes (the sounds from which words are constructed) can feature nasal whines and sharp intakes of breath, and sounds made by popping or flapping the lips. Individual words were hard to learn, since Also confounding was the tonal nature of the language: the meanings of words depend on changes in pitch. (The words for “friend” and “enemy” differ only in the pitch of a single syllable.) Pirahã, like a few other Amazonian tongues, has male and female versions: the women use one fewer consonant than the men do.

Rhythm, where does it come from?

6)
The Last Supper in Detail
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/
"This online visualisation system of the highest definition photograph ever in the world (16 billion pixels)" lets viewers enlarge and observe any portion of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper' (in the Church and Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie) down to sections "as little as one millimetre square." Also includes a video showing the photography process and background about da Vinci in Milan, the painting restoration, and related topics. In English, Italian, and Japanese.

7)
New England Female Medical College
http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/organizations-femalemedcollege.html
Historical material about the New England Female Medical College, "established in Boston, Massachusetts, by Dr. Samuel Gregory [in 1848] with the purpose of offering modern medical training in female-related fields, ... [this school] was the first in the world to provide medical training for women." Features a scanned scrapbook with newspaper articles (1847-1865), reports, and a catalog. Part of the "Women Working, 1800-1930" website from Harvard University.

8)
True Colors of the "Mona Lisa" Revealed
http://www.lumiere-technology.com/Pages/News/news3.htm
This October 2007 press release describes and illustrates how "hidden knowledge of the true colors [of this Leonardo da Vinci painting] was revealed by multispectrally scanning the painting in thirteen channels -- from Ultra Violet to Infra Red." This resulted in "the virtual removal of years of accumulated varnish." Also includes links to citations for recent studies and a presentation. In English and French. From Lumiere Technology, the company that scanned the painting.


9)
College network administrators haven't always been psyched about Skype: The popular program, which lets users make phone calls over the Internet, can be a real bandwidth hog and, arguably, a security threat. But some professors who teach courses online are growing quite fond of the software, as Tom Regan notes in a column for The Christian Science Monitor. Skype has proved particularly useful in Web-based foreign-language courses because the tool lets students get instant feedback from native speakers. Conversing with live instructors is surely a better way to learn a language than speaking along with CD's or cassettes, Mr. Regan writes. Yu-Hsiu Lee, a Chinese instructor at Indiana University at Bloomington, offers more details on Skype's educational value in a post on Skype Journal. --Brock Read


10)
IRS to Launch New National Research Program Study in October [2007]
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=173874,00.html
This release describes the Internal Revenue Service's "new National Research Program (NRP) reporting compliance study for individual taxpayers. ... The study will examine about 13,000 randomly selected tax year 2006 individual returns." Includes links to a more extensive fact sheet on the program, and to documents about the tax gap, "the difference between the amount of tax that taxpayers should pay and the amount that is paid voluntarily and on time." From the IRS.


11)
Conservation Register: How to Care for ...
http://www.icon.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9&Itemid=10
These fact sheets "give general advice on the care and conservation of a range of different materials or objects. Each fact sheet gives an overview of the materials involved, what can go wrong and why, [and] what owners and custodians can do to prevent and alleviate deterioration." Topics include archaeological materials, books, carpets, furniture, fashion accessories, oil paintings, prints and watercolors, and silver. From the British Institute of Conservation.


12)
Nobel Prize Winners' Research Freely Available
http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=1257
Fert, Grunberg and Ertl have all published work in several IOP journals including: Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Europhysics Letters (EPL) and New Journal of Physics.

13)
The National Library of Medicine has released a new resource focused on dietary supplements.
http://dietarysupplements.nlm.nih.gov/dietary/
The Dietary Supplements Labels Database includes information from the labels of over 2,000
brands of dietary supplements in the marketplace, including vitamins, minerals, herbs or other
botanicals, amino acids, and other specialty supplements.


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