Real-World Recall Cramming is less effective for remembering something than repeat learning sessions spread over time, numerous experiments have confirmed.Psychologists call this the spacing effect. But the spacing effect may not work as well for “associative memory,” that is, recalling real-world mixes of information, which often involves remembering a single item, say a new co-worker’s name, in a variety of different contexts, say in another location or after your co-worker has a new haircut. In recent experiments, people better remembered information if it was presented in variable scenes or contexts than if it was always paired with the same scene, write cognitive neuroscientist Emily T. Cowan and colleagues. Study subjects also better remembered the paired pieces of information in crammed learning sessions than in sessions spread out over time. Key takeaway:If you’re trying to remember someone’s name in a limited amount of time, simply repeating their name in your mind might not be the most effective approach. Instead, think of their name plus their hair color, their name plus where you met them, and their name plus their favorite food, Cowan writes.
What the experts say:Cramming and repetition both have a place when it comes to remembering material, Cowan writes. In the classroom, “depending on what a teacher wants their student to learn, class materials could be either repeated across lessons identically or embedded within a new lesson plan each time.”
16 Nobel Prize-winning economists warn Trump would ‘reignite’ inflation
Joseph E Stiglitz and other Nobel laureates say former president threatens US’s standing in the world.
Joseph E Stiglitz is among 16 signatories of the letter [Alessandro Della Bella/EPA]
Published On 26 Jun 202426 Jun 2024
Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists have signed a letter warning that the re-election of former United States President Donald Trump would harm the US economy and lead to higher prices for consumers.
In the letter released on Tuesday, the economists said that the Republican candidate would stoke instability and revive high inflation with his “fiscally irresponsible budgets”.
“Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty. For a country like the US, which is embedded in deep relationships with other countries, conforming to international norms and having normal and stable relationships with other countries is also an imperative,” the letter said.
“Donald Trump and the vagaries of his actions and policies threaten this stability and the US’s standing in the world.”
The signatories also praised President Joe Biden’s record on the economy, including a “remarkably strong and equitable” recovery in the labour market since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists said.
“In his first four years as President, Joe Biden signed into law major investments in the U.S. economy, including in infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and climate. Together, these investments are likely to increase productivity and economic growth while lowering long-term inflationary pressures and facilitating the clean energy transition.”
The signatories of the letter, which was first reported by Axios, include Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Yale professor Robert Shiller and Sir Angus Deaton.
Trump and Biden, a Democrat, are running neck and neck in opinion polls ahead of their first presidential debate on Thursday.
Prospective voters, however, have repeatedly rated Trump as more trustworthy on the economy.
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Trump has pledged to slash taxes, crack down on undocumented immigration, raise tariffs on imports and reverse many of Biden’s clean energy initiatives if re-elected to a second term as president.
In an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last month, respondents said they trusted Trump to do a better job on the economy and inflation than Biden by a margin of 14 percentage points.
2024 is fast becoming the most intense year of democracy the world has ever seen. Some 4 billion people, nearly half the global population, are casting ballots in at least 70 countries. With so many people voting around the world, 2024 has been dubbed “The Year of Elections.” And we’re now about halfway through, so how are things going
Alejandro Cáceres, the hacker who took down North Korea’s internet from his home: ‘My attack was a response to their attempt to spy on me’
Better known as P4x or _hyp3ri0n, this cybersecurity expert was recruited by the US government after his exploit. Disillusioned, he has decided to reveal his identity and continue the fight on his own
Alejandro Cáceres, better known by his ‘hacker’ aliases P4x and _hyp3ri0n, in the office of his Florida home in a photo provided by himself.
The start of 2022 must have been hectic in the high offices of Pyongyang. The North Korean army carried out several ballistic missile tests during the month of January, which for the regime is synonymous with joy and celebration. But the festive mood didn’t last long. Right after the last test, the internet went down across the country. A wave of cyberattacks left all systems on hold for more than seven days. First, the main national websites failed, from the official news site to the booking page of the national airline. Then, the Asian state’s connections with the rest of the world were interrupted. Emails could not be sent or received; there was no connection to cloud services. The blockade was complete.
The coincidence in time of the military maneuvers and the cyber assault caused many observers to view the incident as the response by some Western government to North Korea’s war games. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole thing had been orchestrated by a single man from his home in Miami, someone known as P4x (read Pax). He did it at night, in shorts and flip-flops, and with frequent visits to the refrigerator for beer and snacks. He wrote what he considers to be simple programs on his laptop, rented several remote servers, and sat back to watch how his plans panned out. His motivations were not geopolitical, he didn’t care about the missiles. It was personal: he wanted to hit back at the North Koreans, who had tried to break into his computer a year earlier. “Something had to be done. I believe that if someone attacks you, you have to respond,” the American P4x tells EL PAÍS in perfect Spanish.
The hacker documented his cyberattack, recording videos and taking screenshots of the entire process to prove that he had done it alone.He shared the details of his North Korean incursion with Wired magazine, which confirmed his authorship and published the story in February 2022, shortly after the events. Now, after two years, P4x has made an unusual decision in the world of hackers: to come forward. The man who stopped the internet in an entire country is Alejandro Cáceres, he is 39 years old, and he owns his own cybersecurity company, Hyperion Gray. Born in the United States to Colombian parents, he has tattoos emerging from under the sleeves of his shirt: his right arm shows the nickname he used before the North Korean affair, _hyp3ri0n; on the left arm, there is a cryptographic hash that encloses a word. His commitment to the hacker community goes beyond his arms. When asked if he has participated in the cyber defense of Ukraine, a cause supported by thousands of cybersecurity experts around the world, he answers: “I don’t remember.”
Cáceres has challenged a totalitarian regime and then revealed his identity. He does not seem to fear for his life, although he takes precautions. “In fact… look,” he says during the video call with EL PAÍS from his home-office in Florida. He opens a drawer, takes out an automatic pistol and shows it to the camera. “I don’t like weapons, but talking to military and intelligence service officers, they told me that things could happen. So now on my table I have the keyboard, the mouse, the microphone and the Glock,” he says, laughing. His light eyes stand out on his somewhat pale and bearded face. Brown curls peek out from under his threadbare baseball cap. It is 11 in the morning in Miami and he looks like someone who has spent the night at the computer. He sips an energy drink throughout the interview, which was held a month and a half after he came out of the cyberspace closet.
“During this time no one has attacked me. Before I did what I did, I looked at the numbers. In the last 45 years, the North Korean regime has only murdered two people: one was Kim Jong-un’s brother and the other, an American who was in the country,” he says, alluding to Otto Warmbier, a young man who was imprisoned in North Korea and arrived in a vegetative state in the United States, where he died a few days later. Cáceres decided that the risk was acceptable. “Dennis Rodman hasn’t come to beat me up yet,” he laughs, in reference to the Chicago Bulls legend, who has shown off his friendship with Kim Jong-un.
Dennis Rodman hasn’t come to beat me up yet. But now on my table I have the keyboard, the mouse, the microphone and the Glock
He remembers that “a strange thing” once happened to him. He met a girl through a dating app who claimed to be a Canadian-Japanese neuroscientist. “When we met I saw that she was clearly Korean. I also verified that the person writing the messages was someone else, who was barely understandable. I started looking for information about her and couldn’t find anything. She told me that she had changed her name because she was related to a North Korean dictator named Kim. “That’s where I said goodbye.” That happened in March of this year, shortly before P4x revealed his identity.
Other than that, his life hasn’t changed much: he doesn’t go out a lot and avoids problematic, poorly lit neighborhoods. Since he came forward, he has started receiving about 200 messages a day. “Many people want to partner and work with me, others see me as a good hacker and ask me for help. I’m a little exhausted,” he confesses, although he is an active user of X, where he doesn’t bite his tongue and displays his sarcastic sense of humor.
Romance and disagreements with the Pentagon
One set of people that Cáceres has collaborated with a lot is U.S. authorities. For a decade and a half, through his cybersecurity company, he has worked with the Pentagon, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the FBI, among others. And ever since he took down the internet in North Korea, he has also been approached by the National Security Agency (NSA). Everyone wanted to know how he did it. “Officially they can’t say shit about what they told me regarding my cyberattack, but they were happy. I know what I did is illegal, but I couldn’t imagine North Korea taking me to court.”
Cáceres has tried, but his relationship with the security agencies has not quite worked out. “My attack on North Korea was a response to their attempt to spy on me, but it was also a message to the United States,” he says. He still remembers the exact moment he realized that the North Koreans were inside his computer. On January 24, 2021, he received an alleged exploit (a script that exploits a vulnerability) sent to him by another hacker. The next day, the Google Threat Analysis Group warned him of a North Korean espionage campaign targeting cybersecurity experts. He opened the file in a safe environment and sure enough, it was malware targeting him. He reported it to the FBI, but after three telephone interviews, it didn’t go any further.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversees the launch of a hypersonic missile on January 12, 2022. It was the second such test in less than a week. Before the end of the month, P4x took down the internet in the country.KCNA (via REUTERS)
“It seemed very evident to me that they didn’t know what to do, they had no plan, they had nothing. A group of terrorists protected by a failed state had attacked U.S. citizens and they were not going to do anything? It didn’t seem right to me.” Cáceres accumulated resentment for almost a year until, one night, he decided to start studying the architecture of North Korea’s systems. “I found surprising things,” he explains. There were two large routers that centralized the connections of the entire country (although it has 26 million inhabitants, very few have access to the internet). “I Googled their features and saw that they weren’t even giant, but rather medium-sized.”
From that moment on, the plan began to take shape in his head. He rented all types of servers around the country in the cloud and designed a denial of service (DoS) attack, which consists of saturating the target system with so many actions or data requests that it ends up jamming. In this case, Cáceres, or rather P4x, bombarded the North Korean routers from the servers he had rented, sending many packets of information and making data transmission extremely slow. To do this, it exploited some vulnerabilities in the country’s digital infrastructures, which were very old and, therefore, had security gaps.
In the US we have very, very good people working on our cyber defense, but they are hogtied
His feat did not go unnoticed. Over the next year he had meetings with officials from the United States Cyber Command, the branch of the armed forces dedicated to this field. He also met with officers from the Marines, the Space Operations Command and intelligence (NSA). Cáceres shared with them the keys to his successful operation and told them that, in his opinion, similar operations could be carried out with small commandos of two to four hackers. That would give them agility, autonomy and the ability to react.
He tried, but failed. “To do anything you need authorization, which takes six months to get. And when you get it, what you wanted to do no longer works. That is the reality here in the U.S.: we have very, very good people working on our cyber defense, but they are hogtied. They can’t do anything, even though I know we have the resources to do a lot.”
Cáceres got fed up and decided to stop working with the government. He is working again on his own with his company, Hyperion Gray, although he has added a partner, George Perera, a veteran police officer specializing in cybercrime.
Cáceres’ disillusionment with the system is one of the reasons that led him to reveal his identity.He believes the U.S. should take a much more aggressive approach in the cyber arena. If there are groups like the North Korean Lazarus, capable of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies in a single year, why aren’t they being attacked? “Sometimes I have been told that this cannot be done, that there are diplomatic relations to maintain. And I say: it’s North Korea, who gives a shit. Others say that if the door to retaliation in cyberspace is opened, it will no longer be closed. But, let’s not be fooled, that door was opened a long time ago.”
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The use of ketamine in slow-release pill form, as opposed to the intravenous treatment currently available, is cheaper, more convenient and has potentially fewer side-effects. Photograph: Chinnapong/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Slow-release ketamine tablets help prevent depression relapses, UK trial finds
71% of patients found to experience a relapse compared with 43% who received the pills twice a week
Hannah Devlin Science correspondentMon 24 Jun 2024 17.00 CESTLast modified on Mon 24 Jun 2024 17.01 CEST
Slow-release ketamine pills have been found to prevent relapse into depression, in a trial that could pave the way for a new treatment option for patients with severe illness.
Ketamine is already used as a treatment for depression when conventional antidepressant drugs and therapy have failed. But ketamine is currently only administered intravenously, which requires supervision in a clinic, and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ruled that a ketamine-like nasal spray should not be available on the NHS.
If the apparent benefits are confirmed in a larger trial, ketamine tablets could be taken at home more cheaply, conveniently and potentially with fewer side-effects, the researchers said.
“We’re seeing a clinically meaningful effect,” said Prof Allan Young, of King’s College London and a co-author of findings. “This is not a definitive result, but the effect size is gratifyingly large.”
The phase 2 trial used an extended-release formulation of ketamine, designed to release the drug into the body over a 10-hour period. The hope was that this would make the treatment more effective and reduce adverse effects such as dissociation, high blood pressure, a racing heart or feelings of numbness. The “slow peak” would also reduce the drug’s abuse potential, Young said.
For most depression treatments – including those proved to be effective – a significant subset of patients do not respond. To get around this challenge, the latest trial used an innovative design in which all 231 were initially given the new drug formulation for five days to identify “treatment responders”. Of these, the 168 who showed a significant reduction in symptoms entered the trial’s second phase, where they were randomly assigned either to continue taking ketamine tablets or to receive a placebo.
In the placebo group, 71% of patients experienced a relapse into depression after 13 weeks, compared with 43% of patients who received the tablets twice weekly. The patients had no significant changes in blood pressure and minimal reports of feeling drowsy. However, those at higher doses, who appeared to get most benefit, were also more likely to report feelings of dissociation and dizziness. There was also a suicide of a 65-year-old man in the treatment group, which the principal investigator considered was due to his illness rather than the treatment.
The team behind the trial hope the drug could become an alternative for the millions of people living with chronic depression who have not responded to conventional drugs. The most commonly used drugs, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are thought to act on the brain chemical serotonin, while ketamine appears to act on a different neurotransmitter called glutamate.
Dr Rupert McShane, consultant psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS trust, said the findings were encouraging. “If a form of ketamine can be found that mimics the intravenous ketamine benefit and which is safe in the long term that would be a huge advance,” he said.
However, he added that it was not yet clear whether ketamine treatments would remain an appropriate treatment only for severe cases of depression or whether trial evidence would ultimately support more mainstream applications. “Whether it’s got a place in the wider population is uncertain and this is a good way of testing this,” he said.
Dr Paul Keedwell, a consultant psychiatrist, said: “This novel study further underlines the impressive antidepressant effect of ketamine, but in the much more convenient and acceptable form of a slow-release tablet. A potential downside of taking oral ketamine is that there are likely to be large individual differences in absorption and metabolism, so further research is needed to determine the ideal dosing regime.”
273,118 views 22 Jun 2024 Is antizionism same as antisemitism? Zionism was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, more than half a century before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Zionism is “a worldwide movement founded with the purpose of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, which now provides support to the state of Israel”. Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews and that can be manifested through speech through action, through intimidation. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism, which is a political ideology. ———– Support: Venmo: @AKMedia
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