Monthly Archives: June 2018

What. DOES Facebook Know About you?

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The 18 things you may not realise Facebook knows about you: Firm reveals the extent of its spying in a 454-page document to Congress

  • Facebook knows your exact mouse movements and battery status
  • It can tell if your browser window is ‘foregrounded or backgrounded’
  • In some cases, it monitors devices around its users or on the same network 
  • The details were revealed in document of answers to Congress following Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in April over the Cambridge Analytica scandal

By TIM COLLINS and AARON BROWN and CHEYENNE MACDONALD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 11:04 EDT, 12 June 2018 | UPDATED: 15:47 EDT, 12 June 2018

WHAT ARE THE 18 METHODS USED BY FACEBOOK TO TRACK USERS REVEALED IN LETTERS TO CONGRESS?

1. ‘Device information’ from ‘computers, phones, connected TVs, and other web-connected devices,’ as well as your ‘internet service provider or mobile operator’

2. ‘Mouse movements’, which can help distinguish humans from bots

3. ‘App and file names’, including the types of files on your devices

4. ‘Device operations’ such as whether a window running Facebook is ‘foregrounded or backgrounded’

5. ‘Device signals’, including ‘nearby Wi-Fi access points, beacons, and cell towers’ and ‘signal strength’ as well as Bluetooth signals

6. ‘Other devices that are nearby or on their network’

7. ‘Battery level’

8. ‘Available storage space’

9. ‘Plugins’ installed

10. ‘Connection speed’

11. ‘Purchases’ Facebook users make on third-party websites

12. Contact information ‘such as an address book’ and ‘call log or SMS log history’ for Android users with these settings synced

13. Information ‘about how users use features like our camera’

14. The ‘location of a photo or the date a file was created’ through the file’s metadata

15. ‘GPS location, camera, or photo’ information found through your device’s settings

16. Purchases from third-party data providers as well as other information about your ‘online and offline actions’

17. ‘Device IDs, and other identifiers, such as from games, apps or accounts users use’

18. ‘When others share or comment on a photo of them, send a message to them, or upload, sync or import their contact information’ text

The creepy ways Facebook spies on its users have been detailed in a bumper document presented to Congress.

They include tracking mouse movements, logging battery levels and monitoring devices close to a user that are on the same network.

The 454-page report was created in response to questions Mark Zuckerberg was asked during his appearance before Congress in April.

Lawmakers gave Zuckerberg a public grilling over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but he failed to answer many of their queries.

The new report is Facebook’s attempt to address their questions, although it sheds little new light on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

However, it does contain multiple disclosures about the way Facebook collects data.

Some are unsurprising, such as the time people spend on Facebook, while others may come as a shock to the majority of users.

Device information

Facebook tracks what device you are using to access the network.

To do this, it will log the hardware manufacturer of your smartphone, connected television, tablet, computer, or other internet-connected devices.

Facebook also tracks the operating system, software versions and web browser.

If you’re using a smartphone, it will keep a record of the mobile carrier, while internet service providers (ISPs) will be stored for users using a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection to access Facebook.

In some cases, it will monitor devices that are using the same network as you.

‘Facebook’s services inherently operate on a cross-device basis: understanding when people use our services across multiple devices helps us provide the same personalized experience wherever people use Facebook,’ the firm wrote in the lengthy document.

According to Facebook, this is done, for example, ‘to ensure that a person’s News Feed or profile contains the same content whether they access our services on their mobile phone or in a desktop computer’s web browser.’

Facebook also says this information is used to curate more personalized ads.

 

to find out more, go to:    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5834371/The-18-things-not-realise-Facebook-knows-YOU.html

LIGHTEN UP YOUR WATER

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The Fourth Phase of Water – What You Don’t Know About Water, and Really Should

Story at-a-glance

  • Your body consists of over 99 percent water molecules, but the water in your cells is not regular water, but highly structured water with special properties
  • There is a fourth phase of water, not H2O but H3O2, and can be called living water. It’s more viscous, dense, and alkaline than regular water; has a negative charge, and can hold energy, much like a battery, and deliver energy too
  • The key ingredient to create this highly structured water is light, i.e. electromagnetic energy, whether in the form of visible light, or infrared wavelengths, which we’re surrounded by all the time
  • One reason why infrared saunas make you feel so good is because your body’s cells are deeply penetrated by infrared energy, which builds and stores structured water. The same goes for light therapy, spending time in the sun, and laser therapy
  • Besides optimizing your drinking water by vortexing, you can help support your body’s negative charge by connecting to the Earth, which also has a negative charge. This is the basis of the earthing or grounding technique

Water is clearly one of the most important factors for your health—especially when you consider that your body actually consists of over 99 percent water molecules! I sincerely believe water is a really underappreciated part of the equation of optimal health.

I’ve previously interviewed Dr. Gerald Pollack, who is one of the leading premier research scientists in the world when it comes to understanding the physics of water, and what it means to your health.

Besides being a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, he’s also the founder and editor-in-chief of a scientific journal called Water, and has published many peer-reviewed scientific papers on this topic. He’s even received prestigious awards from the National Institutes of Health.

His book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor, is a phenomenal read that is easy to understand even for the non-professional.

It clearly explains the theory of the fourth phase of water, which is nothing short of ground-breaking. The fourth phase of water is, in a nutshell, living water. It’s referred to as EZ water—EZ standing for “exclusion zone”—which has a negative charge. This water can hold energy, much like a battery, and can deliver energy too.

For years, Dr. Pollack had researched muscles and how they contract, and it struck him as odd that the most common ideas about muscle contraction do not involve water, despite the fact that muscle tissue consists of 99 percent water molecules.

How could it be that 99 percent of the molecules were ignored? How could it be that muscle contracts without involving the water in some way? These questions help catalyze his passionate investigation into water.

So You Think You Understand Water?

Gilbert Ling, who was a pioneer in this field, discovered that water in human cells is not ordinary water (H2O), but something far more structured and organized.

“I began to think about water in the context of biology: if water inside the cell was ordered and structured and not bulk water or ordinary water as most biochemists and cell biologists think, then it is really important,” Dr. Pollack says.

Dr. Pollack’s book also touches on some of the most basic features of water, many of which are really not understood. For example, how does evaporation take place? Why does a tea kettle whistle? Also, despite the fact that conventional science tells us freezing is supposed to occur at zero degrees Celsius, experiments show that it can freeze in many different temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius.

There’s actually no one single freezing point for water! Other experiments show that the boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius (or 212 degrees Fahrenheit) does not always hold true either.

“There’s a famous website1 put together by a British scientist, Martin Chaplin. Martin lists numerous anomalies associated with water,” Dr. Pollack says. “In other words, things that shouldn’t be according to what we know about water…

The more anomalies we have, the more we begin to think that maybe there’s something fundamental about water that we really don’t know. That’s the core of what I’m trying to do. In our laboratory at the University of Washington, we’ve done many experiments over the last decade. These experiments have clearly shown the existence of this additional phase of water.”

The reason this fourth phase of water is called the exclusion zone or EZ is because the first thing Dr. Pollack’s team discovered is that it profoundly excludes things. Even small molecules are excluded from EZ water. Surprisingly, EZ water appears in great abundance, including inside most of your cells. Even your extracellular tissues are filled with this kind of water.

to read more, go to:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/08/18/exclusion-zone-water.aspx

On Declining IQs

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Researchers find IQ scores dropping since the 1970s

June 12, 2018 by Bob Yirka, Medical Xpres
intelligent
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A pair of researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway has found that IQ test scores have been slowly dropping over the past several decades. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg describe their study and the results they found. They also offer some possible explanations for their findings.

Prior studies have shown that people grew smarter over the first part of last century, as measured by the intelligence quotient—a trend that was dubbed the Flynn effect. Various theories have been proposed to explain this apparent brightening of the human mind, such as better nutrition, health care, education, etc, all factors that might help people grow into smarter adults than they would have otherwise. But, now, according to the researchers in Norway, that trend has ended. Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber.

The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway’s national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009. In all, 730,000 test results were accounted for. In studying the data, the researchers found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a clear reversal of results going back approximately 70 years.

But it was not all bad news. The researchers also found some differences between family groups, suggesting that some of the decline might be due to environmental factors. But they also suggest that lifestyle changes could account for some of the decline, as well, such as changes in the education system and children reading less and playing video games more. Sadly, other researchers have found similar results. A British team recently found IQ score results falling by 2.5 to 4.3 points every decade since approximately the end of the second world war. And this past December, another group from the U.S. found that children who grew up eating a lot of fish tended to have higher IQs—and they slept better, too, which is another factor involved in adult intelligence levels. Notably, children in many countries in the modern era eat very little fish.

More information: Bernt Bratsberg et al. Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1718793115

Abstract
Population intelligence quotients increased throughout the 20th century—a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect—although recent years have seen a slowdown or reversal of this trend in several countries. To distinguish between the large set of proposed explanations, we categorize hypothesized causal factors by whether they accommodate the existence of within-family Flynn effects. Using administrative register data and cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of Norwegian birth cohorts (1962–1991), we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

© 2018 Phys.org

from:    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-iq-scores-1970s.html

CONSIDERATION:  Perhaps IQ scores are declining due to their no longer being relevant to the kinds of intelligence that is needed for this time.  MC

Zero and the Honeybee – Sweet!

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Honeybees can Understand a Complex Mathematical Concept, Study Proves

A couple days ago, a quite interesting study was published that claims to identify the fact that bees are capable of understanding the mathematical concept of “zero.”

The study reportedly confirms that the honeybee is fully capable of understanding the quantitative value of nothing. Not only that, but they are gifted with the ability to correctly place zero at the beginning of a line of sequential numbers: they can understand zero, one, two, ect.

Of all insects out there, this is supposed to be the first concrete evidence to prove that the brain of an insect has the capability of understanding the concept of zero. This discovery has implications for the understanding of insect brains, but it also has implications about the evolution of complex number processing in living beings, according to articles reporting on the study.

Scientists say there are four distinct stages of understanding the concept of zero in both animal learning, and human culture, psychology, and history.

Stage one is a being understanding that zero means the absence of something, such as zero food, or zero air. A simple amount of visual processing ability can probably ensure a being can understand zero at this level.

Stage two is when a living being understands the difference between “nothing” and “something” with the concept of zero. For example, the absence of daylight once the sun sets is an understanding of zero as “something” vs “nothing.”

Stage three of understanding zero is defined as an understanding of the fact that a numeric value can be assigned to zero, and that zero belongs at the low end of a chronological sequence of numbers. The number line goes zero, one, two, three ect.

Stage four, the most advanced stage, is when a being fully understands that zero can be assigned a symbolic representation of “nothing,” for example 3 – 3 = 0.

So where do honeybees fall in these categories? Honeybees have officially achieved stage three in that process.

Believe it or not, it’s an elite few species across the entirety of life that are capable of understanding “zero” to this degree. The ability to learn or spontaneously develop an understanding of the concept of zero has so far only been observed in honeybees, vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, one African gray parrot, and a single chimpanzee.

This is definitely the first time such an advanced understanding of mathematics has been observed in any insects.

So why is zero so important? Throughout the history of humanity, it has apparently been demonstrably significant for a culture to understand it.

For centuries, the concept of zero as a number with a quantitative value went unnoticed. One early example is the Chinese using counting rods to mark a blank space, to represent a place holder in values.

By 628AD as far as we know, zero had a written record and people recognized it as a number by itself. An Indian mathematician named Brahma Gupta wrote about this in his book Brahmasputha Siddhanta.

His work constituted the first written record to provide an actual framework for people doing math to use zero when making calculations.

(Image credit: pixabay,  booksfact, huffingtonpost, sciencebuzz)

from:    https://themindunleashed.com/2018/06/study-proves-honeybees-can-understand-a-complex-mathematical-concept.html

Influences of Light & Color on the Mind

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How Color and Light Influence the Mind

Anadi Martel

The following article is excerpted fromLight Therapies: A Complete Guide to the Healing Power of Light by Anadi Martel, published by Inner Traditions.

Meditation is the inner sun,
The source of inner light.
Osho

Right from the very start of my interest in light in the 1980s what intrigued me most was to find out whether it could contribute to enhancing altered states of consciousness—specifically, the higher state of meditative consciousness. This propelled my interest in developing new techniques for the control of light based on its modulation. I started out by studying its effects directly on myself, and then I examined its effects on others. This process, which was of an empirical nature, showed clearly that certain types of light could indeed have profound effects on the mind and on the psyche.

At the same time it was obvious to me that no technical method could create a state of meditation. Meditation is being present to oneself, a conscious awareness of our experience in the moment. No machine, no technology, can give us this state of awareness. However, nothing prevents us from using technology to contribute to the creation of an interior space that is favorable to meditation, and in so doing helping it to occur—which is what we intended to do by means of visual stimulation. When we accomplished this we discerned that this sort of sensorial approach could have other applications as well. Ma Premo and I both realized that light could have considerable potential for psychotherapeutic applications. However, though we could clearly recognize its effects, we were still incapable of fully comprehending why they were taking place; it was very difficult to understand this correctly by simply relying on the scientific or psychological facts that were available to us at that time.

We discovered in our early experiments that the light we were using seemed to intervene in an intermediate zone between the physiological influence of color in its most concrete biophysical aspect and its purely cognitive impact through its capacity to evoke a rich interior universe. The conventional scientific references at the time took into account only one of these two influences, and this seemed inadequate to us. In fact, it was only gradually, over the course of about twenty years, that we developed a model to better understand the nature of this intermediary domain, and as a result we were able to identify the scope of therapeutic applications of this type of light.

The Power of Color on the Mind

One of our early inspirations came as a result of the first studies about the way the brain reacts to the perception of color. Generations of researchers had already explored the cerebral structures connected to vision, the most important of all our senses. They had started to identify a complex organization capable of decoding information coming from the retina by means of a successive sequence of cerebral centers, each one processing a particular aspect of the visual field, with the major part of the visual cortex found at the back of the brain, where the optic nerve extends to the occipital lobe.

But it was only in 1989 that Lueck et al. identified the anatomical center that specifically processes information about color. This study was accomplished with positron emission tomography (PET), which enabled scientists to see the metabolic activity in the brain in a very direct way. The technique consisted of having subjects view two analogous images, one a set of rectangles in multiple colors (known as “Mondrians” because they evoke similar-looking images made by painter Piet Mondrian) and the other the same set of rectangles in achromatic shades of gray (see fig. 11.1). They took care to preserve equal luminosity in both types of images in order to create the same level of nervous stimulation in the brains of the test subjects. Then they tested to see which cortical zones reacted differently. In this seminal study, which was later published in the journal Nature, they demonstrated that they were able to isolate the brain’s color center* in a region of the visual cortex called the V4 area (Lueck et al. 1989).

*The color center located in the V4 area of the visual cortex includes the lingual gyrus and the fusiform gyrus.

A particular detail that stood out when I read this study was a graph that depicted the levels of activity in the different cerebral areas when subjects viewed the color images and the achromatic images. Naturally, the color center in the brain reacted more actively to the colored version of the image, while another area, called the frontal eye fields, showed a clear suppression of activity with the colored image (see fig. 11.2). This area is to be found in the frontal cortex, the cerebral lobe generally associated with evolved mental activity, such as language, motivation, and planning.

The logical implication is that color appears to reduce mental activity while simultaneously stimulating the visual cortex. It is as though pure color consisted of complete information in itself, in such a way that the brain is not obliged to pursue any further mental analysis. This was in stark contrast to the same image in black and white, in which the frontal eye fields—i.e., higher cortical functions—are stimulated by the absence of color. Could color be a stimulus permitting the increase of global cerebral energy, yet calming the mind at the same time? This was a seductive possibility, because such a function is precisely what meditation does.

This close relationship between color and the mind was again emphasized in an astonishing study carried out by Kosslyn et al. (2000). He applied the same technique as Lueck (PET measurements resulting from viewing the Mondrian images); however, Kosslyn used subjects who were highly suggestible and placed them under hypnosis.* He discovered that in this case the color center reacts less to the actual coloring of the test image than to the suggestion under hypnosis that the image is colored (or not). Not only does color perception influence the mind, as Lueck had shown, but mind influences color perception: the two are intimately linked.

*According to Kosslyn’s study about 8 percent of the general population is highly suggestible to hypnosis.

The Domains of Influence of Light

Let’s examine more closely two important areas where color exerts its influence: the objective domain (working through the physiological and biophysical channels) and the cognitive domain (animating our thoughts and our consciousness).

We have explored a number of influences coming from the objective domain, which are influences mediated by the purely physical properties of light. This includes all those influences to be found in the new light medicine. So we have photobiomodulation, through which light acts directly at the cellular level, stimulating the mitochondrial respiratory chain and modulating the production of ATP, our metabolic energy source. Also influenced is the nonvisual optical pathway, through which light governs the endocrine system by means of the retinohypothalamic tract. Notably, this includes a profound influence on our central internal clock and consequently on circadian rhythm. Another objective effect of light is that of photic entrainment. Here, pulsating light interacts with brain waves to directly induce different mental states.

Many modalities of alternative light medicine come from the objective domain as well. For example, in syntonic optometry the visual field of the subject is exposed to precise colors in order to obtain specific autonomic effects. In Colorpuncture, the colors are chosen and applied according to the stimulated reflex points. The common characteristic of all of these objective influences is the systematic manner in which their action takes place, independent of the will or of any cognitive involvement of the subject.

The cognitive domain of light is that which passes through the sense of vision; this influence is one of the most profound we can have in life. Through vision, we build an interior representation of our entire world. Vision informs our superior cognitive faculties; it can evoke all the emotions, sensations, and thoughts that define us.

We’ve all heard that old truism, “An image is worth a thousand words.” The arts of painting and photography, television, and cinema are visual forms that can give meaning to our existence. In their most exalted manifestations such as sacred geometry or mandalas, images are capable of exerting influence of a higher spiritual nature. When light interacts in such a way with our mental universe, it is not only acting through its physical properties; it becomes a vehicle for the transfer of information through images that are formed by our visual system. The influence of light in this cognitive domain is characterized by the complexity of its form and by its rich informational content.

The Subjective Domain, the Third Area of Influence

So we possess many ways of using light, which can act on either one or the other of these two domains, the objective and the cognitive. But what happens at the boundary between these two? Essentially, in this intermediate domain we try to induce perceptions of a superior cognitive order by using the objective properties of light. For this reason I call this third domain of influence the subjective domainbecause it intervenes at the level of our interior perception, which is subjective. We will see that it concerns one of the most fertile of regions, and this has profound implications for the therapeutic application of color.

What do we mean when we say “perceptions of a superior cognitive order”? This has to do with all cognitive activity capable of inducing within us a harmonious and positive state of being. Such activity can take several forms: any emotion that evokes beauty or pleasure; the sensation of unity with the flow of life; deep relaxation; or, again, an impression of immense peace and security. Why would such perceptions be of particular therapeutic interest? Most of us understand this intuitively: they permit us to rediscover our natural equilibrium, and they open the door to an intrinsic mechanism of healing always ready to move into action when we give it the opportunity.

from:  http://realitysandwich.com