We all knew that the roll-out of the naked body scanners was a joke and that it was all about manufacturing fear to keep tax-payer money flowing into the defense industry. What we didn’t know was how poorly thought out the whole scanning process is. It turns out that the scanners are very easily beaten by just altering the placement of the object you are trying to hide. Instead of putting it in your front pocket you need to put it in a side pocket.

We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.

The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away.

The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.

In line with these beliefs is the fact that awareness and agency can be split off from the human being – and can be captured and stored in a bottle by abòkò, a type of magician and spirit worker who can be paid to send curses or help individuals achieve their aims.

This purportedly leaves a passive easily-controlled animated body – the zombie – believed to be created to provide free labour on plantations.

Anthropologist Wade Davis claimed to have identified the ingredients of thebòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.

I won’t say much more about the ‘neurotoxin’ theory of zombification, not least because it was brilliantly covered by science writer Mo Costandi and I couldn’t improve on his fantastic article which will tell you everything you need to know.

But on the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.

This means that they are easily identified by the community and Littlewood and Douyon’s study was a medical investigation into three ‘returned zombies’ – each of which was identified as a member of the family who had died and who had returned with the characteristic features.

FI was a 30-year-old woman who had died after a short illness and was buried next to the house, only for her to be recognised in a zombified state three years later by her family, wandering near to her village.

WD died at the age of 18 shortly after his “eyes turned yellow” and his body “swelled up” and was buried in a family tomb. He was identified as a zombie at a cockfight eight years after he had been buried.

MM was a young woman who also died at 18 after a short illness, but who was identified 13 years later in the town market, walking around in the characteristic detached shambling way.

While the families put their fate down to sorcery, a full medical examination was carried out by the two doctors, including the use of EEG and CT brain scans.

FI showed no neurological damage but was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia, a very withdrawn form of psychosis. WD was found to have brain damage, probably from lack of oxygen, and epilepsy, which could be treated with drugs. MM was found to a developmental learning disability, probably caused by her alcoholism when her mother was pregnant with her.

The fact that doctors gave medical explanations for people identified as zombies is, perhaps, no big surprise, but most interesting was that DNA and fingerprinting tests that showed that two of the zombies were cases of mistaken identity. They weren’t the dead relatives that the families thought they were.

The authors of the study noted that it is unlikely that there is a single explanation for all people identified as zombies and there was a hint that the ‘neurotoxin’ theory could explain some cases. Two types of ‘zombification’ powder from local bòkòs were tested, and, in line with Wade Davis’s ideas, tetrodotoxin was found.

But more probable is that most cases are mistaken identification of wandering mentally ill or neurologically impaired strangers by bereaved relatives.

They noted “People with a chronic schizophrenic illness, brain damage, or learning disability are not uncommonly met with wandering in Haiti, and they would be particularly likely to be identified as lacking volition and memory which are characteristics of a zombi.”

Interestingly, the first known photograph of a zombie, shown above, was taken by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and reproduced in her 1938 book Voodoo Gods where it notes that the subject was photographed in a psychiatric hospital, which makes more sense in light of this more recent medical examination.

It’s worth making a final point that while zombies are a particularly well-known aspect of Haitian culture, thanks to the stereotypes and Hollywood hijacking, traditional Haitian psychology and related concepts of illness are hugely fascinating topics in themselves.

If you want to lose yourself in another understanding of ourselves and the world, you could do much worse than reading the World Health Organisation’s short report ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’ which is available online as a pdf. The whole report is fascinating but start at the section on ‘Religion’ from page 6 if you want to get straight to the psychology.

Link to locked case study in The Lancet.
Link to Mo Costandi’s “The ethnobiology of voodoo zombification”.
pdf of WHO report on ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’.

Source: Mind Hacks

Leading neuroscientists believe that the UK Government may be about to sanction the development of nerve agents for British police that would be banned in warfare under an international treaty on chemical weapons.

Hundreds of soldiers from 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment spent last week learning how to contain and arrest “rioters” in a series of exercises mirroring last summers violence.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.

The Pentagon plans to fork over $32 million to develop “fun to play” computer games that can refine the way weapons systems are tested to ensure they are free from software errors and security bugs, according to a Defense Department solicitation.

The goal is to create puzzles that are “intuitively understandable by ordinary people” and could be solved on laptops, smartphones, tablets and consoles. The games’ solutions will be collected into a database and used to improve methods for analyzing software, according to the draft request for proposals put out by the military’s venture capital and research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

As weapons systems have become complex, the military’s methods for verifying that the software running on them is glitch-free and secure against hackers has fallen short. Formal verification is the process analysts use, through the application of mathematical theories, to determine if software code is free from bugs. Crowdsourcing this complicated task would help the Pentagon cut costs while it grapples with a shortage of computer security specialists.

“Formal verification has been too costly to apply beyond small, critical software components,” the document said. “This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the size of software found in modern weapon systems.”

DARPA’s three-year experiment, known as Crowdsourced Formal Verification, will address the question: How can developers translate formal verification problems into compelling puzzles people will want to solve?

The agency estimates that it will spend $4.7 million on the project this year.

The games will be released for testing by the public at the end of the program’s two research phases. Researchers must provide programming tools that allow robots to play the games. “However, some problems are expected to remain beyond any robot’s ability to solve,” the solicitation notes. DARPA did not respond to requests for an interview.

The use of crowdsourcing and games to tackle complex, real-world problems has gained traction since players of Foldit, a protein-folding computer game that analyzes possible protein combinations, recently deciphered an AIDS-related enzyme that had baffled scientists for more than a decade. The creation of Foldit by the University of Washington was funded in part by DARPA.

Another game, EteRNA, allows players to design RNA — or ribonucleic acid — molecules, creating genetic blueprints that scientists could build on to influence what happens inside living cells and possibly treat diseases in new ways.

“One of the really exciting things is that when we inject a new kind of problem in the world and provide tools to solve that problem, experts at the task just emerge,” said Adrien Treuille, an assistant computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been involved in developing both games.

Security professionals, while intrigued by the potential of DARPA’s idea, have reservations about whether the program will meet the ambitious goals.

It would be more cost-effective for the government to focus efforts on ensuring that software is secure while it’s being engineered rather than after it has been deployed in systems, said Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at Cigital, a Dulles, Va.-based security consultancy. “It’s easier to build something right than to build a broken thing and then have to fix it.”

If players know a game is mapped to a weapons system’s software, there’s the alarming possibility that they could rig its results. “They could collude and play the game to show there are no security problems,” said Nasir Memon, director of the Information Systems and Internet Security Laboratory at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. “How can you trust results from that?”

Source: nextgov.com

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.
We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

Source: MapsOfWar.com