Category: Nets ‘n’ webs
-
VoIP threatened by steganographic attack
Steganography is the art of hiding message when they are sent, in a process akin to camouflage. In cryptography, on the other hand, no attempt is made to hide the message, only to conceal its content. Today, Wojciech Mazurczyk and Krzysztof Szczypiorski of the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland explain how VoIP services are…
-
World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records
The network of links between peasants who farmed a region of small region of south west France called Lot between 1260 and 1340 have been reconstructed by Nathalie Villa from the Universite de Perpignan in France et amis. The team took their data from agricultural records that have been preserved from that time. This is…
-
The mathematics of tackling tax evasion
In recent years, economists have gained the luxury of actually being able to test their ideas in experiments involving the behaviour of real people. And one particularly new and promising area of experimental economics focuses on tax evasion, which ought to be of keen interest to many governments around the world. A couple of years…
-
How many politicians spoil the broth? More than 20…
The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson once said: “politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.” Given that these people run the world’s biggest (and smallest) economies, how many are needed to do a decent job? It is well known in management circles that decision making becomes difficult in groups…
-
Criticality and the brain
Our understanding of how various parts of brain function is advancing at breakneck speed and yet we are as far away as ever from an overarching “theory of the brain” that attempts to encompass these discoveries. Such a theory would unite disparate discoveries in brain science under a unifying theme. Now Dante Chialvo from Northwestern…
-
The coming blackout
On Monday, 17th December 2007, Europe narrowly avoided disaster. A cold snap had lowered the temperature across much of continent to several degrees below average and that evening, as households across the continent switched on their heating systems, the power consumption hit critical levels. France, Italy and Spain all set new records for power consumption.…
-
Proof that a minority of streets handle the majority of traffic
In recent years, physicists have turned their penetrating gaze towards the structure of towns and cities. What they tend to do is measure the “connectedness” of a town by looking at how many roads each street is connected to. It turns out, that cities follow an 80/20 rule, that 80 percent of the streets have…
-
Can data overload protect our privacy?
If you were chatting on MSN messenger in June 2006, your conversation was being recorded and the details (but not the content) passed to Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Using this data, these scientists have created “the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date”. They’ve now published their…
-
Food for thought
Evolution seems to crop up all over the place. In life, business, ideas. And now in recipes through the ages. Yup, that’s recipes. For food. Osame Kinouchi from the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil and buddies, have studied the way in which ingredients used in recipes vary around the world and through the ages.…
-
Why silos burst
Believe it or not, grain silos are interesting structures. They’ve been known to explode without warning, which is hard to explain since they are filled with, well, grain. But grain turns out to be kinda interesting too. In recent years, researchers have begun to get a handle on some of the strange and counterintuitive ways…