How Exercise Can Keep the Brain Fit

Doesn't even need to be that hard of exercise, apparently.

Obligingly, a number of important new studies have just been published that address those very questions. In perhaps the most encouraging of these, Canadian researchers measured the energy expenditure and cognitive functioning of a large group of elderly adults over the course of two to five years. Most of the volunteers did not exercise, per se, and almost none worked out vigorously. Their activities generally consisted of “walking around the block, cooking, gardening, cleaning and that sort of thing,” said Laura Middleton, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and lead author of the study, which was published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine.

But even so, the effects of this modest activity on the brain were remarkable, Dr. Middleton said. While the wholly sedentary volunteers, and there were many of these, scored significantly worse over the years on tests of cognitive function, the most active group showed little decline. About 90 percent of those with the greatest daily energy expenditure could think and remember just about as well, year after year.

“Our results indicate that vigorous exercise isn’t necessary” to protect your mind, Dr. Middleton said. “I think that’s exciting. It might inspire people who would be intimidated about the idea of quote-unquote exercising to just get up and move.

...

For those among us, and they are many, who can’t get excited about going for walks or brisk gardening, scientists from the Aging, Mobility and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of British Columbia and other institutions have shown, for the first time, that light-duty weight training changes how well older women think and how blood flows within their brains. After 12 months of lifting weights twice a week, the women performed significantly better on tests of mental processing ability than a control group of women who completed a balance and toning program, while functional M.R.I. scans showed that portions of the brain that control such thinking were considerably more active in the weight trainers.”

On the future of cyberspace

Statement for the Record By Rafal Rohozinski, Commission on Security and Corporation Europe ( US Helsinki Commission). 15 July, 2011.

Chairman, distinguished members of the Commission,

I'd like to thank the Commission for the opportunity to appear and testify at today's hearing, which comes at a particularly important moment. The Internet has precipitated perhaps the fastest and largest expansion of rights in human history. And yet we are also at a constitutive moment - where our actions, and leadership can lead to two opposing outcomes. One promises a future of greater freedoms and transparency; the other threatens a return to a darker, more authoritarian past.

My name is Rafal Rohozinski, I am a senior scholar at the Canada Center for Global Security Studies, and the CEO of the SecDev Group and Psiphon Inc. For the past 10 years I've been a Principal Investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative international research project between the University of Toronto, Harvard University, Cambridge University, and the SecDev Group, which has studied and documented the practice and policy of Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. We have published more than two dozen case studies and thematic reports and are in the process of publishing our third volume documenting censorship practices in over 70 countries worldwide. The OpenNet Initiative has amassed the largest, most complete profile of how countries seek to shape access to cyberspace using a combination of regulation, repression, and technical means.

***

Just over 65 years ago, Winston Churchill warned an American audience of the danger of an Iron Curtain falling across Europe - casting a shadow of authoritarianism and depriving citizens of their democratic rights. Churchill spoke in 1946, at a time when the United States stood uncontested as a global power. He urged the creation of norms and institutions that would safeguard freedom, and actively oppose the forces of authoritarianism. For Churchill, the end of World War II was a constitutive moment: the choices made by the victorious Allies would have enduring consequences for the cause of freedom in Europe, and elsewhere.

Today, we stand at the threshold of a similar constitutive moment brought about by a revolution whose long-term consequences we are only now starting to grasp. For the past two decades, the emergence of the Internet and cyberspace has led to the largest sustained global expansion of knowledge, rights, and freedoms. Over a third of all humanity is connected to the Internet, and there are almost as many cell phones in circulation globally there are people. Significantly, we are now seeing the coming-of-age of the “digital natives” who have grown up knowing only a connected world. Two-thirds of those currently accessing cyberspace are under the age of 25, and over 80% use at least one form of social media.

But the numbers do not do justice to the social significance of this expansion. This revolution is so pervasive and so all encompassing that it's difficult to see just how fundamentally it has changed the exercise of individual human rights, how much it has added to the cause of basic freedoms, and the ability of all peoples - no matter how small - to make their voices heard. We need not look further than the Color Revolutions of the Commonwealth of Independent States, or the recent Arab Spring, to witness the extraordinary power of the networked social movements.
But the tectonic plates of cyberspace are also shifting. The US - once the heartland of the Internet - now makes up approximately 13% of the global Internet connected population. Europe and the US together constitute approximately 40%. The center of gravity is fast shifting to the South and East. The consequences of the shift are of direct relevance to today's proceedings.

A Digital Curtain is descending across the globe that threatens to reverse the gains made possible through the emergence of the global commons of cyberspace. Just over half of the world's Internet-connected population live under one form on-line restriction or another, and that number is fast rising. Since 2003, when we first documented the emergence of the “Great Firewall” of China, more than 45 states worldwide have adopted similar means for turning the Internet from a global commons into a gated community.

Eurasia, and in particular the states of the former Soviet Union, are a petri dish of experimentation in new forms of online repression that deprive citizens of the means to demand transparency from their leaders, accountability from their governments, and the right to seek social and political change.

These new forms of restrictions, which we have documented as second and third generation controls, leverage the ability of governments to create restrictive legal environments that attempt to enforce self-censorship through fear of punishment. They also include the application of sophisticated technical means, just-in-time blocking, disrupting access to critical information resources at times when they are most needed, sowing disinformation, and otherwise manipulating information flows – as well as the use of targeted online attacks, denial of service, injecting false content, and sophisticated information operations turned inwards at the domestic populations. These controls are pervasive, but also applied selectively, such as during elections, in order to discredit legitimate opposition groups and deprive them of the right to free and unfettered speech.

In Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Russia, and notably in Belarus, these techniques have been used with great success to silence opposition groups, driving them and their followers offline. In fact, the Internet is subject to some form of control in all post-Soviet states. Indeed, the mechanisms for control are getting deeper and more coordinated through regional bodies such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as well as via bilateral cooperation between governments and their security services.

Tragically, perhaps, we are complicit in this growing trend towards authoritarianism. Our own fears of cyber insecurity and terrorism make it easier for others to appropriate these terms to justify political repression.

The label "terrorists” can be applied to anyone inconveniently opposed to the political status quo; and calls for changing the Internet, introducing greater security, and the ability to identify users - helpful in tracking down hackers and cyber criminals - find their place in the arsenal of repressive regimes as a means of selectively prosecuting human rights activists, journalists, or anyone seeking to struggle for social and political reform.

Our emphasis on harmonizing laws on cybercrime and seeking global solutions to cyber security paradoxically makes it difficult to assert and demand respect for freedom of expression and access to information online.

And security is not the only means by which rights can be suppressed. Net neutrality, copyright enforcement, and the empowerment of telecommunications carriers to "clean pipes" are convenient means for regimes with less than Democratic tendencies to offload and outsource policing and ultimately repression.

There are no simple solutions to these challenges, only difficult trade-offs. To paraphrase the words of the immortal Pogo, "we have met the enemy and he is at least partially us."
So what is to be done?

Future historians will look back at this time and see it as a constitutive moment. Before us are some hard choices - but also clear norms and ideals that have been core to the Euro Atlantic alliance over the past 50 years, and part of our shared cultural and historical heritage.
Leadership comes from the courage to make the hard decisions in pursuit of a greater common good. In this respect, a commitment to an open global commons of cyberspace is by far the most important far-reaching objective for the US and its like-minded partners worldwide to support.
Security is an important obligation of the state, but must be balanced against preserving the right to dissent, communicate, and act online - even if it comes at some costs. This is especially true as the new generation of digital natives find their own voice in the online world. New forms of protest, whether they come in the form of making public confidential information, as in the case of Wikileaks, or “hacktavism” as has been exercised by LulzSec and Anonymous, may be the necessary friction for preserving a global norm that enshrines the right to seek and access information. We carefully adjust our own laws to accommodate some of the new forms of dissent that will emerge. Is there a difference between picketing an employer during a labor dispute, and making his website and Internet systems inaccessible through a denial of service attack? These are important questions and we must pause before we consider how to address them, as the rules we apply will have repercussions well beyond their own borders. In a global world, there is no such thing as a purely domestic policy.

In specific terms, at the highest level this Commission should encourage our European partners to remain committed to a global commons of cyberspace.

- Calls such as those put forward by some members of the UN to end the multi-stakeholder engagement on the governance cyberspace should be strongly resisted.
- Pressure should be applied through bilateral agreements, as well as by organizations such as the WTO to ensure that restricted access to content is also framed as a trade issue, with consequences and sanctions against countries pursuing these practices.
- Access to an uncensored Internet should become a basic measure of freedom and democratic progress, and should be made a condition for recipients of preferential US trade relationships or development assistance;
- Access to political content via the Internet should become a central component of monitoring the freedom and fairness of national elections - as important as the right to assembly, and balloting.

Preserving the global Internet commons will not be easy, but the costs of not doing so are greater. The rise of new superpowers in the East is occurring just as the tectonic plates of cyberspace are shifting to the same region.

The historical moment in which we live and which have expanded the means for human expression made possible a quest for knowledge, and an ability to network and act on a planetary scale – which risks becoming a fading chapter in the future where the same technologies enable surveillance societies that far exceed those which George Orwell's 1984 could imagine.

The future is ours to lose, and as in those March days of 1946 when Churchill warned of the Iron Curtain, now is the time for us to courageously make choices so that our constitutive moment - the future of Cyberspace – furthers, rather than constrains, the universal values of dignity, freedom, and the right to choose.

Flatland and the 4th dimension

Open Science

Cell phones and Cancer: the truth

Oooh, the Schadenfreude...

Decline and fall of the Murdoch Empire?

The headlines are happening so fast that it’s nigh impossible to get a comprehensive reading of the situation. One thing seems clear, though – Rupert Murdoch is in deep, deep trouble. The News of the World phone-hacking scandal seems to have exposed a weakness in the media mogul’s formerly impenetrable defences, and all his old enemies will now be gathering for the kill

I'll have to think about it...

TED's Chris Anderson Proposes New Rules for Email

1. Respect Recipients' Time
This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

2. Short or Slow is not Rude
Let's mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we're all facing, it's OK if replies take a while coming and if they don't give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don't take it personally. We just want our lives back!

3. Celebrate Clarity
Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions
It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by "Thoughts?". Even well-intended-but-open questions like "How can I help?" may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. "Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!"

5. Slash Surplus cc's
cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don't default to 'Reply All'. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.

6. Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it's usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it's rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what's not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.

7. Attack Attachments
Don't use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there's something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email.

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR
If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with "No need to respond" or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

9. Cut Contentless Responses
You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

10. Disconnect!
If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can't go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an 'auto-response' that references this charter. And don't forget to smell the roses.