Cornell researchers in Human Development and Law have published research suggesting that children's legal testimony may be more reliable than adults', since kids interpret their memories less and are more likely to give an accurate accounting of events as they occurred.

This research shows that meaning-based memories are largely responsible for false memories, especially in adult witnesses. Because the ability to extract meaning from experience develops slowly, children are less likely to produce these false memories than adults, and are more likely to give accurate testimony when properly questioned.

The finding is counterintuitive; it doesn't square with current legal tenets, and may have important implications for legal proceedings.

"Because children have fewer meaning-based experience records, they are less likely to form false memories," says Reyna. "But the law assumes children are more susceptible to false memories than adults."

Link

Edwin Smith, the VP for "Compliance/Quality/Certification" at voting-machine manufacturer Sequoia Voting Systems has sent a threatening legal letter to Ed Felten -- the Princeton law professor who's led many security audits of voting machines in the past.

The letter warns that if Felten and his colleagues publish any kind of security audit information of Sequoia's machines ("Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same") that Sequoia will "take appropriate steps" through its "retained counsel."

It's hard to imagine a stupider legal threat. Honestly.

First of all, if Sequoia's voting machines actually, you know, work, then why would they threaten legal action against Felten and co., should they publish their findings after a security audit? Presumably, manufacturers want testers to publish glowing reports of their goods -- Sequoia's basically saying, "We're scared of what you'll find when you pop the hood on our product."

The next time a jurisdiction is thinking of sourcing its voting machines from Sequoia, activists just have to show up with copies of this letter: "Why should we entrust our precious votes to a machine from a manufacturer who threatens to sue anyone who does a quality assessment of its products?"

And of all the people to send legal threats to, Felten is just the Wrong Guy. He's the guy whom the EFF represeted in a suit against the RIAA when they threatened to sue him for giving a talk on the abortive SDMI DRM initiative -- he gave the talk as scheduled. Felten doesn't fold, and he's friends with some really smart lawyers.

Dear Professors Felten and Appel:

As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.

Very truly yours,
Edwin Smith
VP, Compliance/Quality/Certification
Sequoia Voting Systems

Dear Edwin Smith: put it back in your pants before someone cuts it off.

Link

(Image: Sequoia Voting Machine)

From the Big City Little Kitchen blog, a timely Guinness cupcake recipe with "foam" made from cream-cheese glaze.

Despite the addition of Guinness, these cakes are not at all bitter; instead, the beer adds richness and moisture, and balances the sweetness of the sugar. Working from another Nigella recipe, this one the Guinness Cake from Feast, I substituted brown sugar for white to add depth of flavor, and made tiny cakes instead of a large one in a springform. Topped with a cream cheese glaze, these are a crowd-pleasing, not-too-sweet dessert (and, if you call them muffins instead of cupcakes, and play up the beer angle, you can easily pass them off to guys). They’re also super-easy.

Link (via Craft)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes,

John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation alerted me to a situation about a month ago that we've been pursuing (with EFF's help) at the Government Accountability Office, which is an arm of the U.S. Congress.

The law librarians at GAO have compiled complete federal legislative histories from 1915 on. These are the definitive dossiers that track a bill through the hearing process and into law. If you want to divine the intent of Congress, this is where you go.

GAO cut a contract with Thomson West to have these documents scanned. Thomson West claims they have exclusive access to these public documents and even go so far as to boast that you should purchase this exclusive "product" from West because the GAO law librarians (public employees!) have done all the work for you!

If you're interesting in tracking this issue, I've created a Scribd group that has all the documents we've obtained so far. Next step: we asked for a copy of every document scanned under the FOIA laws!

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

Chris, the manager at Toronto's Bakka Books, the venerable science fiction bookstore where I once worked, writes, "A bunch of stores in our section of Queen West are having an Alien Abduction Festival on Thursday March 20th. We're running the 'Build Your Own Spaceship' station; you can make/identify aliens at 3rd Quadrant; Happy Worker will host Tin Foil Hat Tailoring; and Come As You Are [Ed note: woman-owned, sex-positive sex-shop] will teach 'Probology 101'. We've also got some MiBs on tap to search for aliens, and free rides in a UFO. Mostly we're participating just to have fun and promote community, but we'll also be taking donations for the Queen West Fire Fund."

That Queen West Fire Fund is to benefit the businesses and residents who were burned out of an historic stretch of Queen Street last month. Link

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets, I had the pleasure of announcing the long-awaited-for launch of my friend Mike McWhertor's videogame-themed t-shirt store, Meat Bun; discovered a charming but grating pop paean to the Mac; took a gander at hand-made toys in Africa; watch a daschund go nuts over an automated tennis ball launcher; lusted a bit over a net-shooting rod; segued that lust right into a gorgeous VOIP phone; had someone point out that rechargeable stun guns imply quite a daily social hurdle; talked about a talk at SXSWi about black tech bloggers; uploaded some videos of irascible folk beardo Jonathan Coulton; applauded a drive-in car for the wheelchair-bound; a commercial for a Pontiac tha riffs on Spy Hunter; tried to get Hyena, a system for playing interactive audiobooks, working on my DS (it didn't); asked why projector bulbs are so expensive and got tons of great answers; saw a "Life Clock" in which the hour hand had been changed to a year hand; watched TI's slow but promisng sub-vocalization neck band, making it possible to speak without speaking; and found a map data quirk in which three seasons are on one Google Map.

The folks at Dolores Labs used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have folks identify a series of random colors. Then they made a color wheel with the data. It's fun to see the adjectives and odd names people came up with for certain colors. From a post by Brendan O'Connor who made the experiment, titled "Where Does 'Blue' End And 'Red' Begin?":

This study is basically the same design as the famous World Color Survey, where anthropologists showed color patches to speakers of many different languages and asked for names. Of course, we only have English speakers (most Turkers live in the U.S.). However, we can get much more data. (The... picture and links use only a small percentage of all the colors and names we collected.) There’s tons more that can be done. Want to make a better visualizer? Statistical analysis of colors to name terms? Let us know and we should be able to get this data set online.

Link

The delightful "Space House" in Chattanooga, Tennessee sold at auction this weekend for just $135,000. The 38-year-old, three-bedroom home was expected to go for much more, according to the auctioneer. From The Associated Press:

The house has a retractable staircase that lowers to the ground. A neighbor says that feature came in handy for one former owner who was having an argument with her husband. She pulled up the stairway, drove her husband's truck underneath it so he couldn't get the stairs down and left him stuck inside.

Link to AP article, Link to more on saucer houses at Cabinet of Wonders

From BB Gadgets:

This new video of "Big Dog," the amazing quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, shows of its latest tricks: the ability to walk through snow and even over ice, catching itself when it slips and falls. Its normal gait is unnatural, but when it starts to scramble to recover it looks eerily real.

Link

Scoop: New video of BDI's Big Dog robot [Spectrum.IEEE.org via Gizmodo] (Thanks, Douglas!!)

Our pals at GAMA-GO, creators of the Boing Boing hoodie, have released a slew of new styles. (The BB/GG hoodie is also still available but very few remain in the most popular sizes.) These new hoodies are available in limited numbers and each one has a numbered patch of authenticity inside. Seen here, the Yeti Woodland hoodie with a non-repeated design printed on the front, back, and sides.
Link

Hedonia has a short biography and art gallery of prolific illustrator Richard Powers, whose style defined the look of science fiction paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ian Ballantine was the first publisher to recognize [Richard] Powers' genius. Ballantine engaged him in 1953 to do the now famous paperback edition of Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End. While never a great fan of science fiction, Powers nonetheless found endless inspiration in this genre, and single-handedly revolutionized science fiction illustration. Until then, science fiction illustration had consisted mostly of conceivably realistic representations of alien worlds, but Powers unleashed subconscious imagery that explored the endless possibilities of speculative fiction. Over the course of his almost 50-year career as a science fiction illustrator, he produced an estimated 1,400 illustrations.

Contrary to what one would expect from such a seemingly visionary artist, Powers was also a writer of children's books and a keen sportsman, playing semi-pro baseball until a potentially career threatening hand injury forced him to change to become a highly competitive tennis player. His quick temper was evidenced in his poor sportsmanlike behavior on the court when he would lose -- presaging such tennis bad-boys as John McEnroe. One person in particular who incited his wrath was Richard M. Nixon. His son wrote that, "He loathed Nixon as soon as he learned he existed."

Link

Funny stuff from the Panopticist:

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best.

Link

Fantagraphics published Gary Groth's 1987 interview with illustrator Dave Stevens, who died last week of luekemia.

You have your priorities. Well, to what do you attribute your preoccupation with cheesecake?

All I know is that I draw what I like. I like those images. I think I'm also taking delight in that I'm able to draw the female figure because when I was a kid I could never draw one for the life of me. Although mine are kind of interchangeable — the same basic baby face, big eyes, and similar bodies. It's just an image that I find real appealing and positive. I don't see anything negative about it or unhealthy. The proportions are sometimes stretched, but there's nothing really gross in those proportions. It's bouncy and it's cute and I find that women enjoy it, too. I've never had a gal come to me or write to me and say, "This is exploitive. This is ugly. I don't like it."

Is that right?

Yeah, I've never had any complaints.

Not even from Cat Yronwode?

Uhhh....

Or are you discounting her as a woman?

[Laughter.] In the beginning I had a little bit of a problem with her over Betty because Cat thought that I was swiping a Frazetta character who was a blonde. What she hooked into was that striped blouse Betty wore. That I definitely got from Frazetta, but Cat didn't realize that it was Betty Page that I was drawing, who was a real person. Cat kind of let me have it in print about stealing from another artist — I don't remember the context. As far as the pin-up art itself, I've never had anybody give me a hard time. The only time I did get one negative response was to that page of Betty in The Rocketeer when she was in the doorway. [Again, Rocketeer #2 from Pacific.] I got to admit that it was a little far. I should have had her at least in a negligee.

Link

Mickey Mouse flies in with a squadron of mouse-headed pterodactyls to attack an island populated with cute Japanese animals, including a surreal Felix the Cat with sausage-link arms. Link (Via Pink Tentacle)

UPDATE: Kim says: "Actually that cartoon is from 1934, not 1936. It *takes place* in 1936. That may seem weird, but here's how a commenter at Cartoon Brew explains it:"

[I]n the aftermath of the Mukden (Manchurian) Incident and Japan’s announced withdrawal from the League of Nations after the League concluded they were the aggressor, right wing elements in the country started an opinion campaign that once the Five Power naval limitation treaty ran out in 1936, America was planning to attack Japanese possessions, so Japan needed to expand its military… just in case.. Apparently, this cartoon was an attempt to stir the pot."'

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE says:

If you wonder what Maker Faire is all about, check out this video, created by eric michael berg, a video intern working with us out of New York. He came to Maker Faire Austin and put together this simple but snappy video called "I Make...". It's all about the makers.

Maker Faire Bay Area is less than two months away -- May 3rd and 4th. If you'd like to participate as a maker, the deadline for entries is this Wednesday, March 19 at midnight. It's going to be another exciting event.

Harry White designed this measuring cup with units of measure like "tyrannosaurus rex brain," "vol. of body cells that die on a good day," and "enough plutonium to make a bomb." He also has a cookbook with recipes that use these measurement units. Link (Via about:blank)

Now that the economy is collapsing, investors are becoming more interested in gold. Here's an item from PopSci that says it wouldn't be too difficult to make convincing fake gold bars out of gold-plated tungsten (which costs $30 a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold).

start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don't know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16" layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You'd pretty much have to drill it to find out it's fake.

Link (Via Museum of Hoaxes)

Pam says: "Spotted this interesting drink whilst in Romania. American Action Cola! Just like we drink! In America!!" Link

We Make Money Not Art has a write-up of the Pricked: Extreme Embroidery show at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York -- I'm especially fond of these embroidered "Phrenology Heads" by Morwenna Catt.

One of the works that most impressed me was Morwenna Catt Phrenology Heads. Phrenology, developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall around 1800, and very popular in the 19th century, is a discipline which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (i.e., by reading "bumps" and "fissures"). Catt's soft sculptures of heads have long animal ears, Frankenstein-like stitches all over their face, one eye is shut by a patch and a needle is stuck in their head as if the work was unfinished.

The heads are embroidered with fragments of texts: the Mother one has "You will need eyes at the back of your head". The Father has "The gloom and the silence, i am terrified when i realise i am alone", etc.

Link

Today on Boing Boing tv: Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero -- so the BBtv crew is doing all we can to help him reach that goal, by forcibly embedding him in superhero training quests. Today, he must sing and swordfight his way through a Pirate Musical, performed in a public park.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion, downloadable video, credits, and links to previous Klaus Pierre episodes.

Love the custom baby blankets from Baby Leo Designs, in a variety of groovy retro prints -- we've got the retro robots (shown here) and the golgothan spiral of skulls ("I am become death, filler of nappies"), and we've given away a couple as gifts already. They're made to order -- you can choose coloring for the satin edge and the lining. Link

The DHS wants airlines to foot the bill for fingerprinting foreigners as they leave the US; this is part of the failed US VISIT program, which has spent $15,000,000,000 without catching a single terrorist (the program has caught approximately 1,000 minor immigration cheats who'd overstayed their visas -- a cost of $15,000,000 per cheat). See update below

The airlines are playing hardball in fighting the proposal -- they don't want to assume all those costs.

The Homeland Security Department, which currently fingerprints foreigners coming into U.S. airports, wants airlines to be responsible for taking fingerprints as these travelers leave...

"Carriers are pulling out all the stops to kill" the proposal, said Stewart Verdery, a former Homeland Security assistant secretary for border and transportation policy. "My guess is they're going to be successful."

Robert Mocny, who heads the fingerprint program, said fingerprinting foreigners as they leave is essential. The information helps track those whose visas have expired and allows monitoring of people whose movements in and out of the USA suggest terrorist plotting. "It's a better way of monitoring the movement of individuals we have an interest in without them hiding behind a fake name," he said.

Link

See also: US-VISIT immigration system spent $15 million per crook caught

Update: Updates to Schneier's post show that the cost is in the hundreds of millions, not billions, and that in addition to visa cheats, some petty criminals were also caught.

In honor of St Paddy's day, here's a classic Muppet sketch -- a rendition of "Danny Boy," performed by Animal, the Swedish Chef, and Beaker on the high notes. I nearly wept. Link (via Making Light)

Robbo sez, "As reported in The Guardian: Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard, says primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life. Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a 'science fiction novel'. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a 'police state'."

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society...'

Concern over the issue of civil liberties will be further amplified by news yesterday that commuters using Oyster smart cards could have their movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Link (Thanks, Robbo!)