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  • Avatar’s gaze illuminates social brain


    Please follow the link and watch video.
    Video: Follow my eyes

    They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different brain areas than following.

    This could help unravel the brain activity underlying the process of “joint attention”, thought to be key to complex, human social interactions. It could also offer insights into why social interactions can break down for people with autism.

    Joint attention – the ability and motivation to both guide and follow someone else’s gaze – develops early in infants. It is considered necessary for complex social interactions, the learning of language and co-operation. For example, an eye signal from one person to another can indicate a potential meal, mate or menace.

    In people with autism, joint attention seems to be abnormal, which may underpin some of the social difficulties they experience. Previously researchers have studied brain activity in people watching a video designed to engender a feeling of joint attention in the viewer. The new study is the first to separate out the processes of following and initiating joint attention.

    Watch me watch her

    Psychiatrist Leonhard Schilbach at the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues developed an avatar that can hold someone’s gaze and an infrared camera that tracks the eye movement of someone watching the avatar. The system was set up inside an MRI scanner.

    Then the team asked 21 healthy volunteers to use their eyes to guide the avatar’s gaze towards a grey box projected on a computer screen, or to follow the avatar’s gaze, while inside the scanner. The camera allows the researchers to determine when the volunteers are following the avatar’s gaze and when the avatar is following theirs.

    The real-time fMRI scans revealed that when the volunteers successfully got the avatar to follow their gaze, brain areas involved in reward and motivation were activated. When they followed the avatar’s gaze, a different area of the brain, known to be involved in imagining what other people are thinking, was active. “It’s kind of surprising that sharing something as basic as a grey square is something we enjoy,” says Schilbach.

    Get engaged

    The finding is novel, says autism researcher Peter Mundy at the University of California, Davis, because previous studies of joint attention have not distinguished between initiating and responding.

    It points to the possibility that differences in motivation to initiate joint attention “may be involved in the early social impairments of autism”, he says.

    Mundy adds that interactive avatars will be helpful in other areas of social psychology by allowing us to simulate social interactions and observe the neural systems they involve. “Our method is progress in the direction of studying things which stem from being engaged with another person,” agrees Schilbach.

    His team now plans to study the brains of people with autism as they interact with the avatar.

    Journal reference: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21401
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18236-avatars-gaze-illuminates-social-brain.html

  • Seven of the greatest scientific hoaxes

    For this week’s issue of New Scientist I edited a review of The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman, which tells the story of the great moon hoax of 1835. Read the review here.

    This got me thinking about other great scientific hoaxes in the past. After doing a bit of digging, I was amazed by how many there were – and at the variety and creativity of the hoaxes. Here are a few of the best.

    Of course, there are serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data and the South Korean cloning fraud. The following stories, however, are not so serious.

    Piltdown Man

    In 1912, solicitor and amateur palaeontologist Charles Dawson “found” the Piltdown fossils, a skull and jawbone that appeared to be half-man half-ape, in Sussex. They were hailed as the evolutionary “missing link” between apes and humans.

    It was over 40 years later, in 1953, that the fossil was exposed as a fake. In fact, the skull was constructed from a medieval human cranium attached to the jaw of an orang-utan.

    The Cardiff Giant

    A ten-foot “petrified man” was dug up on a small farm in Cardiff, New York, in October 1869. The “Cardiff Giant” became a huge news story and many Americans travelled to see it.

    Early in 1870, it was revealed as a fake, the creation of New Yorker George Hull, who had paid for it to be carved out of stone.

    Beringer’s fraudulent fossils

    Physician Johann Beringer was amazed when he was presented with fossils “found” in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1725, which depicted incredible scenes: the forms of birds, bees, snails, lizards, plants with flowers, frogs mating and insects feeding, not to mention comets, moons and suns.

    It turned out that he was the victim of an elaborate plot: envious colleagues of Beringer had planted the fossils.

    Unfortunately, Beringer fell for it hook, line and sinker, and even published a book to tell the world about the fossils. Rumour has it that once Beringer realised the hoax, he tried to buy up any unsold copies of his book. (See Johann Beringer and the fraudulent fossils)

    There are many more examples of fossil fraud, such as the fake “entombed toad” and the fake fossil fly in amber.

    The Sokal hoax

    In 1996, American physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper loaded with nonsensical jargon to the journal Social Text, in which he argued that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. (Read Sokal’s paper)

    When the journal published it, Sokal revealed that the paper was in fact a spoof. The incident triggered a storm of debate about the ethics of Sokal’s prank.

    The spaghetti tree

    In 1957, the BBC show Panorama broadcast a programme about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland. It showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree.

    After watching the programme, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree. Alas, it was an April Fools’ Day joke.

    Watch the BBC’s spaghetti tree footage

    The Upas tree

    An account was published in the London Magazine in 1783 by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch (his initials were variously given as NP and JN). It claimed the existence of a tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius.

    Read the original account (scroll down to find it)

    This was the start of a legend. Even Erasmus Darwin wrote about it in a poem in 1791. A note to the poem read, “There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country… in a district of 12 or 14 miles round it, the face of the earth is quite barren and rocky, intermixed only with the skeletons of men and animals; affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described or painters delineated.”

    You really can find the Upas tree in Indonesia. Though not as potent as legend would have it, the latex of the tree does contain a powerful toxin, which was traditionally used on arrow points.

    Read more about the Upas tree (PDF: go to page 8)

    The secret of immortality

    Johann Heinrich Cohausen, an 18th-century physician, wrote a treatise on the prolongation of life, entitled Hermippus redivivus. Amongst other secrets of longevity, it claimed that life could be prolonged by taking an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles.

    Actually, Cohausen admitted in the last few pages of the work that it was a satire, so any gullible readers wouldn’t have been duped for too long
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15012-seven-of-the-greatest-scientific-hoaxes.html

  • 7-Eleven Hack From Russia Led to ATM Looting in New York

    Flashback, early 2008: Citibank officials are witnessing a huge spike in fraudulent withdrawals from New York area ATMs — $180,000 is stolen from cash machines on the Upper East Side in just three days. After a stakeout, police arrest one man walking out of a bank with thousands of dollars in cash and 12 reprogrammed cards. A lucky traffic stop catches two more plunderers who’d driven in from Michigan. Another pair are arrested after trying to mug an undercover FBI agent on the street for a magstripe encoder. In the end, there are 10 arrests and at least $2 million dollars stolen.

    The wellspring of the dramatic megaheist turns out to be more prosaic than imagined: It started with a breach of the public website of America’s most famous convenience store chain: 7-Eleven.com.

    In his most-recent plea agreement, filed in court Monday, confessed hacker Albert Gonzalez admitted conspiring in the 7-Eleven breach and fingered two Russian associates as the direct culprits. The Russians are identified as “Hacker 1″ and “Hacker 2″ in Gonzalez’s plea agreement, and as “Grigg” and “Annex” in an earlier document inadvertently made public by his attorney.

    The Russians, evidently using an SQL injection vulnerability, “gained unauthorized access to 7-Eleven, Inc.’s servers through 7-Eleven’s public-facing internet site, and then leveraged that access into servers supporting ATM terminals located in 7-Eleven stores,” the plea agreement reads. “This access caused 7-Eleven, Inc., on or about November 9, 2007, to disable its public-facing internet site to disable the unauthorized access.”

    At the time, there were 5,500 Citibank-branded ATMs at 7-Eleven stores around the country. According to SEC documents, 7-Eleven ran its own transaction-processing server to handle 2,000 of them: advanced models called Vcom machines, manufactured by NCR. The 7-Eleven Vcoms support special functions like bill payment, check cashing and money-order purchases. For two weeks in September 2007, anyone who typed a PIN in one of these was exposed.

    Court records from the New York–area Citibank cases show how that single breach from Russia trickled over the internet and down to the streets of New York.

    The first break in the case had its roots in a Jan. 30, 2008, traffic stop. Westchester County police pulled a car over for speeding on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Dobbs Ferry, New York. The driver, 21-year-old Nue Quni, was driving on a suspended license, so the officers decided to have the vehicle impounded. While they waited for the tow truck, they conducted a routine “inventory search” of the car.

    Inside, police found $3,000 in cash, a laptop computer, a magstripe writer — which is used to reprogram cards — and 102 blank, white plastic cards. They also recovered receipts showing cash withdrawals from ATMs in Manhattan and the Bronx, and more showing wire transfers.

    Facing federal access-device-fraud charges, the passenger in the car, 22-year-old Luma Bitti, began cooperating with the FBI. She explained that she was hired over the internet in December 2007 to program cards with the stolen information, then withdraw money from ATMs and wire it to other people. With Bitti’s consent, an FBI agent took over her IM and e-mail accounts, and began corresponding with the person who hired her.

    Citibank ATM plunderer Yuriy Ryabinin is shown in a 2003 photo taken at a ham-radio convention.
    The FBI arranged in April 2008 to meet the man in Manhattan, supposedly to provide him with a magstripe writer. An FBI agent, still posing as a fraudster, showed up at the meeting with a magstripe writer in hand.

    But the man, who is identified in one court record by the initials “DK”, double-crossed the undercover agent, and sent two proxies in his place: 21-year-old Andrey Baranets and one Aleksandr Desevoh, according to an FBI affidavit. When the agent refused to hand over the magstripe writer, Desevoh took a swing at the agent, who ducked the blow and ran away.

    The two men gave chase through the streets of Manhattan, before they were grabbed by other FBI agents who’d been watching the scene. In pleading guilty last February, Desevoh said DK had told him to “take this device using force.”

    Federal prosecutors in New York had by then charged three more people in the ATM-cashing conspiracy, including 32-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Yuriy Ryabinin, aka Yuriy Rakushchynets, and 30-year-old Ivan Biltse.

    In addition to looting Citibank accounts, Ryabinin had participated in a global cybercrime feeding frenzy that tore into four specific iWire prepaid MasterCard accounts, issued by St. Louis–based First Bank, in the fall of 2007. On Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 — just two days — the iWire accounts were hit with more than 9,000 actual and attempted withdrawals from ATM machines around the world, resulting in $5 million in losses.

    At the time of the ATM capers, FBI and U.S. Secret Service agents had been investigating Ryabinin for his activities on Eastern European carder forums. Ryabinin used the same ICQ chat account to conduct criminal business, and to participate in amateur-radio websites. The feds compared photos of Ryabinin from some of the ham sites to video captured by New York ATM cameras in the Citibank and iWire withdrawals, and determined it was the same man — right down to the tan jacket with dark-blue trim.

    When they raided Ryabinin’s home, agents found his computer logged into a carding forum. They also found a magstripe writer and $800,000 in cash — including $690,000 in garbage bags, shopping bags and boxes stashed in the bedroom closet. Another $99,000 in cash turned up in one of the safe-deposit boxes rented by Ryabinin and his wife, Olena. Biltse was also found with $800,000 in cash.

    Ryabinin’s wife told investigators that she witnessed her husband “leave the couple’s house with bundles of credit cards in rubber bands and return with large sums of cash,” a Secret Service affidavit (.pdf) reads.

    Two of the ATM scammers arrested by the FBI filled in the bureau on the details of the operation, explaining how, beginning in December 2007, they began working with a ringleader in Russia, who provided them with ATM account numbers and PINs. The deal was straightforward: They’d use the information to encode fraudulent ATM cards and withdraw cash, sending 70 percent of the take to the Russian and keeping 25 percent for themselves. Another 5 percent went for expenses.

    The duo initially used Western Union money transfers to get cash to their boss in Russia, according to an FBI affidavit. Later, they exploited a relationship with 30-year-old Ilya Boruch, an “exchanger” for the site WebMoney, a PayPal-like internet-payment system.

    Exchangers are normally legitimate businesspeople who swap cash for WebMoney’s internet currency. But according to the feds, Boruch had gone bad and become a money-laundering service for the Citibank ATM heists, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ringleader in Russia, without reporting the transactions to the government, as required by U.S. law.

    Through his business, Bidding Expert, Boruch allegedly funneled as much as $80,000 to $100,000 a week on behalf of the two fraudsters, who delivered the cash to Boruch in person, sometimes by tossing envelopes into an open window in his car.

    One of the FBI informants, identified as co-conspirator 1, or CC-1, in court documents, held this instant-message exchange with Boruch on Jan. 10, 2008, according to the FBI. (Punctuation is added).

    CC-1: Need more wm [WebMoney] …

    Boruch: How much?

    CC-1: 60 [$60,000]

    Boruch: Wow. OK. Listen, is everything OK?

    CC-1: So far. Why?

    Boruch: Well, you need so much wm! It’s just kinda strange

    CC-1: We’re working

    Boruch: OK. Drop it off all in 100s …

    CC-1: When can the wm be ready?

    Boruch: Don’t know

    CC-1: Approximately

    Boruch: If you pay an additional 0.5 percent then it’ll be ready tomorrow

    CC-1: And if not?

    Boruch: Then I don’t know. I can buy it from my people, but they’re expensive

    Boruch was charged last year with conspiracy to launder money.

    The final known arrests in New York came on May 8 of last year. Citibank noticed that a large number of the fraudulent withdrawals were coming through its 65th Street branch, prompting them to put the location under surveillance. When the Citibank official staking out the spot got a call alerting him to a theft in progress, he crossed the street to peer through the vestibule glass, and watched as a man in a baseball cap, jeans and a sports coat put a thick envelope into a briefcase and moved from one ATM to the next.

    The official flagged down two nearby NYPD officers who’d already been briefed on the fraud, and the cops arrested 28-year-old Aleksandar Aleksiev. With his consent, they searched his bag and found six ATM-deposit envelopes stuffed with cash, and 12 blank cards with stickers on them and a different PIN code written on each.

    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/seven-eleven/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))