Thousands of NY Sex Offenders Booted From Facebook, MySpace

By Eliot Van Buskirk

New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo backed the e-STOP law under which sex offenders' social networking accounts were terminated.

Facebook and MySpace have terminated the accounts of 3,533 convicted sex offenders in the state of New York after they submitted their account information to the state under 2008’s Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) law, the New York Daily News reports.

The law requires the state’s 30,000 convicted sex offenders to file their home, e-mail and social networking addresses with the state. Out of that pool, only about 27 percent revealed e-mail addresses or social-networking usernames to authorities, and only 10 percent divulged a Facebook or MySpace username.

The remaining 22,000 or so registered sex offenders who did not supply online identity information are either in prison or homeless, lack computer access or simply chose not to respond, an unidentified state Division of Criminal Justice Services representative told the New York Daily News.

The e-STOP system only works if criminals volunteer their social networking identities, as they are required to do within 10 days of creating a new account under penalty of new felony charges. Proponents of the law have declared it a success.

“Before e-STOP, sexual predators freely lurked in social networking sites trolling for innocent victims,” said executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law and the Crime Victims Center Laura Ahearn to the Daily News. “With e-STOP, Attorney General Cuomo has sent a clear message that there is a new sheriff in the cyberworld protecting our most vulnerable.”

New York State supplied the account names to Facebook and MySpace over the past two months as part of the first stage of the e-STOP sweep. The next step is to check whether any of the offenders violated the terms of their early release from prison by setting up a profile on the sites.

Incidentally, sex offenders — like many others — appear to favor Facebook over MySpace. Out of the 3,533 offenders whose accounts were terminated, 79 percent were on Facebook and 51 percent were on MySpace. Many had accounts on both networks, while 21 percent used MySpace exclusively and 49 percent used Facebook exclusively.

(Update: the final paragraph of this article originally failed to distinguish between the number of social networking accounts and the number of account holders; those percentages have since been corrected.)

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Mad As Hell! Kinetic Typography from Aaron Leming on Vimeo.

Council tells woman: gnomes are fire hazard

A council in the West Midlands has apologised to Linda Langford, one of its tenants, after ordering her to remove two garden gnomes from outside her front door for health and safety reasons.

By Jonathan Liew

Linda Langford, 57, has been told her two six-inch garden gnomes must be moved from the front of her council flat in case people trip over them and hurt themselves

Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council sent a letter to Linda Langford instructing her to remove two six-inch gnomes, as well as a pottery tortoise and a welcome plaque from outside her flat in Tipton, West Midlands.

It claimed that the ornaments were illegally blocking a communal area in Mrs Langford’s two-storey block of flats, and that people could trip over them when escaping a fire.

However, the council has now admitted that the letter was based on a misunderstanding of its fire safety rules and should not have been sent.

Mahboob Husaain, the borough’s cabinet member for housing, said that it had “slightly misinterpreted the policy on items in communal areas” and that garden gnomes were not prohibited.

“Our policy is that as long as there is not an excessive number of gnomes or similar items in communal areas, and as long as there isn't a problem with these items being damaged through anti-social behaviour, they can stay,” he added.

Mrs Langford told the Daily Express: “It is health and safety gone mad. It’s barmy.

“The idea that my two little gnomes are a fire hazard or that they are dangerous in any way is absolutely ridiculous.

“The council even told me to remove the doormat from outside my house. Am I supposed to tread mud all over my carpet because the council are panicking about fire hazards?”

USDA Classifies PETA as a Terrorist Threat

by Brian Merchant

PETA is one of the most controversial activist groups operating today. The group's contentious media campaigns, undercover operations, infamous advertising, and high profile demonstrations have made them perhaps the most infamous--and most polarizing--nonprofit organization there is. But are they terrorists? According to the US Department of Agriculture, they are now.

Looks like one of PETA's nude 'stop the seal slaughter' protests might have been a little too realistic. The USDA has just released a new security profile form (pdf), which it distributes to animal experimentation facilities. The form reveals that PETA has been classified as a terrorist threat by the US government--potentially opening up its members to prosecution as terrorists. According to Green is the New Red, an eco-activist rights website, the document was given to all facilities that conduct experiments on animals. They were asked to disclose whether they were the target of attacks or harassment from a list of terrorist groups--one of which, evidently, is PETA.

Here's an excerpt from the form:

B. Terrorist Threat. What terrorist activities have occurred in or around your building/facility in the past 5 years (documented cases)? Please check all that apply.

[ ] Attack from international terrorists
[ ] Attack from domestic special interest terrorists
-[ ] Earth Liberation Front (ELF)
-[ ] Animal Liberation Front (ALF)
-[ ] People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
-[ ] Animal Defense League (ADL)
-[ ] Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)
-[ ] Formal hate group(s) (please specify):
-[ ] Other (please specify): ____________________
[ ] Cyber Attack from a known or unknown source.

As you can see, PETA has apparently been classified as "domestic special interest terrorists", along with the far more radical likes of the Animal Liberation Front.

Maybe the USDA took a too literal interpretation of this photo shoot with Che Guevara's granddaughter . . . Photo via Metro

This clearly reveals that the government has taken to treating PETA as a terrorist group. Now, I've had my many beefs with PETA (hello, pun) before, but this seems beyond the pale. PETA may be controversial, yes, but they are lawful, nonviolent and publicly funded. So how did they end up on a list of the nation's most dangerous domestic threats?

GNR has some ideas:

Because they expose what goes on behind closed doors . . . Animal industries are quite open about their desire to use terrorism laws to keep their practices out of the public spotlight. I recently posted about the Animal Agriculture Alliance calling for federal prosecution of undercover investigators. It's not because the investigators are violent. It is because they pose an even greater threat: educating the public.

In other words, industries that rely on factory farming (the bane of PETA, and one of their hot button issues) may have the lobbying muscle to get PETA listed as a terrorist threat for their benefit.

That may be so. Even if it's not, the 'terrorist' categorization has some very troubling ramifications. For instance, according to the Sacramento Bee, four animal activists in California are currently facing terrorism charges for protesting at individual homes and creating fliers with names and addresses on them. Because they committed what amounts to trespassing, they've received some of the same charges leveled at groups that use bombs and carry out physical harm. While these protesting individuals' actions may very well have been illegal, do they really constitute terrorism?

We'll have to see what develops as more information is revealed--as it stands, listing PETA as domestic terrorists seems be more threatening to the general right for citizens to protest than anything else.

The man who smuggled himself into Auschwitz

More than a million people died in Auschwitz

By Rob Broomby

When millions would have done anything to get out, one remarkable British soldier smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the horror so he could tell others the truth.

Denis Avey is a remarkable man by any measure. A courageous and determined soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a camp connected to the Germans' largest concentration camp, Auschwitz.

But his actions while in the camp - which he has never spoken about until now - are truly extraordinary. When millions would have done anything to get out, Mr Avey repeatedly smuggled himself into the camp.

Denis Avey: "They knew they'd only last five months"

Now 91 and living in Derbyshire, he says he wanted to witness what was going on inside and find out the truth about the gas chambers, so he could tell others. He knows he took "a hell of a chance".

"When you think about it in today's environment it is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous," he says.

"You wouldn't think anyone would think or do that, but that is how I was. I had red hair and a temperament to match. Nothing would stop me."

He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust. He exchanged his uniform for the filthy, stripy garments the man had to wear. For the Auschwitz inmate it meant valuable food and rest in the British camp, while for Denis it was a chance to gather facts on the inside.

Evil

He describes Auschwitz as "hell on earth" and says he would lie awake at night listening to the ramblings and screams of prisoners.

"It was pretty ghastly at night, you got this terrible stench," he says.

He talked to Jewish prisoners but says they rarely spoke of their previous life. Instead they were focused on the hell they were living and the work they were forced to do in factories outside the camp.

"There were nearly three million human beings worked to death in different factories," says Mr Avey. "They knew at that rate they'd last about five months.

"They very seldom talk about their civil life. They only talked about the situation, the punishments they were getting, the work they were made to do."

He says he would ask where people he'd met previously had gone and he would be told they'd "gone up the chimney".

"It was so impersonal. Auschwitz was evil, everything about it was wrong."

He also witnessed the brutality meted out to the prisoners, saying people were shot daily. He was determined to help, especially when he met Jewish prisoner Ernst Lobethall.

'Bloody marvellous'

Mr Lobethall told him he had a sister Susana who had escaped to England as a child, on the eve of war. Back in his own camp, Mr Avey contacted her via a coded letter to his mother.

He arranged for cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from Susana to be sent to him and smuggled them to his friend. Cigarettes were more valuable than gold in the camp and he hoped he would be able to trade them for favours to ease his plight - and he was right.

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Auschwitz prisoner's sister meets man who helped save him

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Mr Avey briefly met Susana Lobethall in 1945, when he came home from the war. He was fresh from the camp and was traumatised by what he'd witnessed and endured.

At the time both of them thought Ernst was dead. He'd actually survived, thanks - in part - to the smuggled cigarettes. But she lost touch with Mr Avey and was never able to tell him the good news.

The BBC has now reunited the pair after tracing Susana, who is now Susana Timms and lives in the Midlands. Mr Avey was told his friend moved to America after the war, where he had children and lived a long and happy life. The old soldier says the news is "bloody marvellous".

'Ginger'

Sadly, the emotional reunion came too late for Ernst - later Ernie - who died never even knowing the real name of the soldier who he says helped him survive Auschwitz.

But before he died Mr Lobethall recorded his survival story on video for the Shoah Foundation, which video the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. In it he spoke of his friendship with a British soldier in Auschwitz who he simply called "Ginger". It was Denis.

Ernest Lobethall moved to the US

He also recalled how the cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from his sister in England were smuggled to him in the midst of war.

"It was like being given the Rockefeller Centre," he says in the video.

Mr Avey traded places twice and slept overnight in Auschwitz. He tried a third time but he was almost caught and the plan was aborted.

He suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when he came back from the war and has only recently been able to speak about what he did and what he saw.

He admits some may find it hard to believe and acknowledges it was "foolhardy".

"But that is how I was," he simply says.

Meat grown in laboratory

Scientists have managed to grow a form of meat in a laboratory for the first time, according to reports.

Researchers in the Netherlands created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.

No one has yet tasted their produce, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal.

Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, told The Sunday Times: “What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there.

“This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it.

“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals.”

The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially "exercise" the muscle.

The project is backed by the Dutch government and a sausage maker and comes following the creation of artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.

Meat produced in a laboratory could reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with real animals.

Meat and dairy consumption is predicted to double by 2050 and methane from livestock is said to currently produce about 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

Animal rights group Peta said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

However the Vegetarian Society said: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered.

“It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.”

How Free-Market Delusions Destroyed the Economy

The following is an excerpt from Raj Patel's new book, The Value of Nothing (Picador, 2010).

If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics. The great unwinding of the financial sector showed that the smartest mathematical minds on the planet, backed by some of the deepest pockets, had not built a sleek engine of permanent prosperity but a clown car of trades, swaps and double dares that, inevitably, fell to bits. The recession has not come from a deficit of economic knowledge, but from too much of a particular kind, a surfeit of the spirit of capitalism. The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago: "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil, and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of markets.

One thing is clear: The thinking that got us into this mess is unlikely to rescue us. It might come as some consolation to know that even some of the most respected minds have been forced to puzzle over their faulty assumptions. Perhaps the most pained admission of ignorance happened in a crowded room in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when, on October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan described the failure of his worldview.

Greenspan was one of the acknowledged legislators of the world’s economy over the past nineteen years in his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve. A card-carrying member of the free market brigade, he used to sit at the feet of Ayn Rand who, although largely unknown outside the United States, remains influential long after her death in 1982. Her 1957 book Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic business moguls fight the scourge of government officials and union organizers, has once again scaled the bestseller lists. Regarding altruism as “moral cannibalism," Rand was the cheerleader for an extreme free market libertarian school of thought, which she called “Objectivism."

Drawn into her circle by this heady philosophy, Greenspan earned himself the nickname “the Undertaker" for his jolly demeanor and dress sense. When Greenspan chose a career in government, it was rather like a hippie joining the marines, a lapse that his former friends could never forgive. Despite this, Greenspan remained largely faithful to Rand's philosophy, continuing to believe that egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster.

At the end of 2008, Greenspan was summoned to the U.S. Congress to testify about the financial crisis. His tenure at the Fed had been long and lauded, and Congress wanted to know what had gone wrong. As he began to read his testimony, Greenspan looked exhausted, his skin jowly and sagging, as if the vigor that once kept him taut had all been spent. But he came out swinging. In the first round, he took aim at the information he’d been working with. If only the input had been right, the economic models would have worked, and the predictions would have been better. In his words, a Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivatives markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.

Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape today, in my judgment.

This is a garbage-in-garbage-out argument: The model worked just fine, but the assumptions about risk and data, based only on the good times past, were faulty and so the output was correspondingly wrong. Greenspan’s nemesis on the panel, Henry Waxman, pushed him to a deeper conclusion, in this remarkable exchange:

Waxman: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive -- and this is your statement -- “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivalled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully worked.” That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying the price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?

Greenspan: Well, remember, though, what an ideology is. It’s a conceptual framework with [sic] the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is, whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found the flaw, I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact.

Waxman: You found a flaw?

Greenspan: I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

Waxman: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

Greenspan: Precisely. That is precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

The flaw, to be clear, wasn’t a minor one of shoddy data. Nor was it the bigger Black Swan problem that writers like Nassim Taleb discuss, a problem of failing to account for highly unlikely events that, should they happen, involve catastrophic consequences. Greenspan’s flaw was more fundamental still. It warped his view about how the world was organized, about the sociology of the market. And Greenspan is not alone. Larry Summers, the president’s senior economic advisor, has had to come to terms with a similar error -- his view that the market was inherently self-stabilizing has been "dealt a fatal blow." Hank Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, has shrugged his shoulders with similar resignation. Even Jim Cramer from CNBC’s "Mad Money" admitted defeat: "The only guy who really called this right was Karl Marx." One after the other, the celebrants of the free market are finding themselves, to use the language of the market, corrected.

The extent of Greenspan's admission has passed most of us by. If you trawl the oped pages of the financial press, you'll find plenty of analysis that fits Greenspan's first gambit, with pundits offering stories about how risk was incorrectly priced (which it was), how the lack of regulation allowed the panic to feed back into the financial system (which it has), how the incentive structures rewarded traders who were able to push financial risk far into the future (which they did) and how free market ideologues removed the sorts of circuit-breaking policies that might today have helped (and they did that too). But these are all it-could-have-been-fixed-if-we'd-planned-better responses. I am not sure that we're able to comprehend what Greenspan's admission might really mean for us. It would be too big a shock to have the fundamentals of policy in both government and the economy proved wrong, and to have nothing with which to replace them.

It's as if one day, you were to wake up and find yourself transformed into a cockroach. This is the premise of Franz Kafka's novella Metamorphosis. In the first sentence, a young salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes up, after a night of bad dreams, to find that he has turned into an enormous bug. Gregor Samsa's response is revealing, telling us a little bit more about ourselves than we'd like. For what does Samsa do when he discovers he's a bug? He doesn't scuttle from his room screaming, or ponder how this happened, or what his transformation means, and what he might become tomorrow. His response is essentially this: "Poor me! How am I going to keep my job?" Which is almost exactly how we've reacted to this economic crisis. While no one has yet woken up in the body of a bug, we have all found ourselves in a world turned upside down, where everything we were told was to our advantage has turned out to be its opposite. Greenspan's "flaw" has profound repercussions -- to understand it fully would mean a complete reappraisal of the way we conduct our lives. We would need not only a new way of mooring our expectations of our society and our economy, one based on richer assumptions about human nature, but also a different ideology governing the exchange of goods and services.

Prices do some heavy ideological lifting in Greenspan's world. They provide a way to see and know the collective wants and resources of our small planet. This is Friedrich Hayek's economic philosophy, in which prices are the tendrils through which wants and needs are communicated. Science fiction fans will already be familiar with what this looks like. In "The Matrix," liberated humans (and the programs who hunt them) can see the world in its raw form, as a digital rain of symbols and signs. This is the science fiction that governs economic fact. Data pelting down monitors is what the masters of the universe on the global financial exchanges stare at, their eyes darting from screen to screen, trying to see through the world and profit from it. In "The Matrix," the signs were a simulation of the real world, hiding more than they revealed. The trouble is that this unreliable digital ticker tape has now become a central prop in the drama of modern commerce.

Consider the fate of Volkswagen, which at the end of October 2008 managed briefly to become the world's most valuable corporation without having to sell a single vehicle. With the economy still in free fall, traders on stock market floors were taking a dim view of Volkswagen. They looked at their screens and concluded that, just like every other auto manufacturer, Volkswagen was heading for tough times. Imagine you're a trader who feels in your bones that the stock price can only fall. One way to cash your hunch in is to sell Volkswagen stock today, and buy it back when the price falls. Since you don't walk around with Volkswagen stock falling out of your pockets, you'll turn to someone who does, like an institutional investor. You borrow their stock, for a price, and promise to return all of it very soon. The institutional investor is happy because they make money from lending out the stock, which they will get back in one piece. You're happy because you can sell this stock, wait for the price to fall, buy it back and, with the profit, not only pay back the institutional investor, but make the next installment on your yacht in Monaco. This practice is called "shorting."

The trouble was that Volkswagen's rival, Porsche, had started quietly buying Volkswagen stock, aiming to secure 75 percent of the company. When the scale of Porsche's buying spree came to light, it became rapidly clear that there was little of the company left to trade. With Porsche sucking up all the shares, the price for Volkswagen didn't drop. Traders were selling borrowed stock to Porsche, and when Porsche announced its intentions to hold the stock, traders panicked. This led to a "short squeeze," a flocking of investors looking to cover the ill-conceived bets that they'd paid for with stock that they didn't own. They'd wagered that Volkswagen's price, like that of any other car company in a recession, would fall. When it became clear that even if Volkswagen wasn't doing well in the car market, its share price was nonetheless defying gravity, the speculators rushed to buy before the price went any higher.

Their combined purchases drove the price of shares up further. So high did the price rise that Volkswagen entered the DAX 30 index of the largest corporations on the German bourse. This triggered another buying spree, driven not by stock market gamblers, but by their polar opposites -- conservative institutional investors. Pension funds, for instance, invest with an eye to long-term returns; they prefer a slow and certain accumulation of wealth rather than risky bets. One way that they keep their portfolio on an even keel is to buy shares in nothing but blue chip corporations, ones that are guaranteed to be least susceptible to the shocks that stocks are heir to, ones that are in the top, say, thirty corporations traded in the open market. When Volkswagen joined the ranks of the DAX 30, a flock of institutional investors automatically wanted in. So they bought Volkswagen shares at what ever price they could find them. The result? The price per share went from 200 to 1,000 in a week--an increase in company value of 300 billion (244 billion; $386 billion). It made Volkswagen, briefly, bigger than ExxonMobil (with a book value of a mere $343 billion). And for this, the company didn't raise a finger.

In the end, the rules on the DAX were changed, the price settled down and, in 2009, Volkswagen bought Porsche. It is easy enough to tell this story as one where institutional investors got caught with their pants down, where there was imperfect information about the size of the market, where the rules of different short-run and long-run games tangled. But look more closely. Underwriting this version of the story is a conceptual structure that lies beneath every story of excess and crash. The very notion of a bubble relies on the premise that when the bubble pops, things return to a normal state, a situation of price reflecting value more accurately. This is the story told after every boom and bust, from the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the housing catastrophe of 2008. There's a widely shared opinion that normality will ultimately return to the world economy--but it's a consensus view that rests on a story where bubbles are exceptions to the standard (and successful) procedures of market valuation. If those procedures themselves were flawed, as Greenspan suggests, then our faith in a gentle return to earth is misplaced, for there is and never has been any solid ground beneath our feet.

There is a discrepancy between the price of something and its value, one that economists cannot fix, because it's a problem inherent to the very idea of profit-driven prices. This gap is something about which we've got an uneasy and uncomfortable intuition. The uncertainty about prices is what makes the MasterCard ads amusing. You know how it goes -- green fees: $240; lessons: $50; golf club: $110; having fun: priceless. The deeper joke, though, is this: The price of something doesn't measure its value at all. This prickly intuition has become entertainment. An alien from another planet would find it strange that one of the most popular TV shows in dozens of countries is one that trades on the confusion around what something's worth: "The Price Is Right." In the show, the audience is presented with various consumer durables, and asked to guess the retail price of each. Crucially, you don't win by correctly guessing how useful something is or how much it costs to make -- prices are poor guides to use and true costs of production. You win by developing an intuitive sense of what corporations believe you're willing to pay.

In the world of fund management, the systematic confusion surrounding what something is worth has made some people very rich. Traders' salaries are linked to the returns above expected rates for the risk they take on, the so-called alpha that they contribute to the returns. Think of a bet on a coin flip, with odds of two to one. I bet $1 that I will hit heads, and every time I do, I get $2. In the long run, I'd expect a dollar bet with those odds to return a dollar because I'll come up heads about half the time. But if I'm returning $1.50 on the bet, I'm making magic happen. This magic gets turned back into coins that I get to keep, through bonuses and increased salary. This is a tough trick to pull off because there are only a handful of ways to create added value in fund management -- I can pick undervalued stocks that outperform expectations, I can nurture innovations that change the rules of the game, or I can create new bespoke assets that institutional investors might like.

So we would expect alpha to be rare, and it is, but driven by the desire to cash in, there were many who created fake alpha through bets that appeared to produce consistently good returns despite having a small built-in chance of catastrophic loss. If the expected value of this loss were factored in, the alpha would disappear. But the risks were ignored and bonuses flowed. The frat boys who ran the economy, and profited from its poor regulation, made billions. They were paid today for outcomes that they predicted would happen in the future, using a "mark to model" accounting practice that essentially allowed them to book today what they projected they'd earn tomorrow. This practice was justified on the grounds that "markets know best."

That markets should know best is a relatively recent article of faith, and it took a great deal of ideological and political work to make it part of governments' conventional wisdom. The idea that markets are smart found its apotheosis in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, an idea first formulated by Eugene Fama, a Ph.D. student in the University of Chicago Business School in the 1960s. In the ideological foundations it provided for financiers, it was a mighty force -- think of it as Atlas Shrugged, but with more equations.

The hypothesis states that the price of a financial asset reflects everything that a market knows about its current and future prospects. This is different from saying that the price actually does reflect its future performance -- rather, the price reflects the current state of beliefs about the odds of that performance being good or bad. The price involves a bet. As we now know, the market's eye for odds is dangerously myopic, but the hypothesis explains why economists find the following joke funny:

Q: How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. If the lightbulb needed changing, the market would have already done it.

The problem with the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is that it doesn't work. If it were true, then there'd be no incentive to invest in research because the market would, by magic, have beaten you to it. Economists Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated this in 1980, and hundreds of subsequent studies have pointed out quite how unrealistic the hypothesis is, some of the most influential of which were written by Eugene Fama himself. Markets can behave irrationally -- investors can herd behind a stock, pushing its value up in ways entirely unrelated to the stock being traded. Despite ample economic evidence to suggest it was false, the idea of efficient markets ran riot through governments. Alan Greenspan was not the only person to find the hypothesis a convenient untruth.

By pushing regulators to behave as if the hypothesis were true, traders could make their titanic bets. For a while, the money rolled in. In the mid-1990s, the Financial Times felt able to launch a monthly supplement, titled "How to Spend It," to help its more affluent readers unburden themselves. The magic of the past decade's boom also touched the middle class, who were sucked into the bubble through houses that were turned from places of shelter into financial assets, and into grist for the mill of the financial sector. But ordinary homeowners couldn't muster the clout that banks could: Governments enabled the finance sector's binge by promising to be there to pick up the pieces, and they were as good as their word. When the financiers' bets broke the system, the profit that they made from these bad bets remained untouchable: The profit was privatized, but the risk was socialized. Their riches have cost the whole world dear, and yet in 2009 the top hedge fund managers have had their third best year on record. George Soros is, in his own words, "having a very good crisis," and staff at Goldman Sachs can look forward to the largest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history.

What this suggests is that the rhetoric of "free markets" camouflages activities that aren't about markets at all. Goldman Sachs employees are doing well because their firm turned some distinctly nonmarket tricks. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi has recently revealed, with characteristic verve, how Goldman Sachs has bought the U.S. government. In the Obama administration's economic team, Wall Street has a generation of finance-friendly appointees, from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who arranged a historic $29 billion loan to persuade JPMorgan Chase to acquire Bear Stearns during his tenure as chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; to Larry Summers, who earned $5.2 million by working one day a week for a couple of years in a large Wall Street hedge fund. Their new positions in the White House make them the Tarzans of the economic jungle. Wall Street has reason to be pleased. Goldman had invested heavily in AIG, the insurance giant whose financial products division had brought the 90-year-old giant to bankruptcy. With the 2008 AIG rescue, the $13 billion that Goldman invested was repaid at full face value. Investors in Chrysler, by contrast, stand to get 29 cents for every dollar they invested.

Anyone concerned with democracy should be worried that the seam between Wall Street and the government is almost invisible. At the very least, it raises serious reasons to doubt that the institutions that facilitated the crisis can clean up their mess. Nassim Taleb points to the absurdity here: "People who were driving a school bus (blindfolded) and crashed it should never be given a new bus." The problem is that because both our economy and to a larger extent our politicians aren't really subject to democratic control, the bus drivers are always going to be graduates of the same driving school.

Despite the ongoing hijack of government by Wall Street, a word that hasn't been heard in over a generation is being uttered by politicians: "regulation." It's true that Goldman Sachs and others are profiting handsomely from the collapse, but there is nonetheless a growing sense among politicians that the market may have been allowed too free a rein. Naomi Klein's devastating critique The Shock Doctrine demonstrates how disasters were turned into platforms for rabidly free market policies, and it's an analysis that explains the post-World War II era and today's ongoing financial plunder, from California to Wall Street to the City of London, very well. But there is a recognition among the public and some politicians that today's economic crisis is a failure of free market thinking, and not a warrant for more. In response to popular outcry, politicians around the world seem ready to discuss how to regulate and restrain the market. The question is, can they, and, if they can, in whose interests will this regulation work?

From its inception, the free market has spawned discontent, but rare are the moments when that discontent coalesces across society, when a sufficiently large group of people can trace their unhappiness to free market politics, and demand change. The New Deal in the United States and the postwar European welfare states were partly a result of a consortium of social forces pushing for new limits to markets, and a renegotiation of the relationship between individuals and society. What's new about this crisis is that it's pervasively global, and comes at the last moment at which we might prevent a global climate catastrophe.

Protests grow over digital bill

The Digital Economy bill has sparked a wave of protest among consumers and rights groups.

Soon after the bill began its journey through Parliament on 19 November, many expressed worries about parts of it.

The bill suggests the use of technical measures to tackle illegal file-sharing that could involve suspending the accounts of persistent pirates.

Critics fear this and other powers the bill reserves could damage the UK's growing digital economy.

The Digital Economy Bill is the end result of the consultation and research that went into the creation of the Digital Britain report that was published in June 2009.

As well as trying to tackle illegal file-sharing, the wide-ranging legislation also proposes a shake-up of the radio spectrum and a classification system for video games.

Left out is the proposal for a broadband tax to fund next-generation broadband that will be handled in the Finance Bill due in early 2010.

The proposals on file-sharing have garnered most criticism.

One of the first responses was the creation of a petition on the Number10.gov.uk website. Set up by Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk's head of strategy and development, it calls for the abolition of the proposal to disconnect illegal filesharers.

By 24 November, the petition had gathered more than 16,000 signatures.

The number of signatures got a boost from Stephen Fry who used micro-blogging site Twitter to direct people to it.

Mr Fry wrote: "Dear Mandy, splendid fellow in many ways, but he is SO WRONG about copyright. Please sign and RT {retweet]".

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns on digital issues, said: "It's quite a shocking bill. We're extremely worried about it."

Mr Killock said Section 17 of the Bill was worrying because it gave the Secretary of State "reserve powers" to draft fresh laws to tackle net-based copyright infringement without needing parliamentary approval.

"It could destabilise business and destabilise innovation," said Mr Killock. "It means entirely trusting to bureaucrats and politicians to get it right."

Mr Killock said membership of the Open Rights Group had jumped by 20% in the run-up to the publication of the Bill. He said protests were being co-ordinated in many places such as Facebook and other social media sites.

He predicted that the protests would soon lead to some form of civil unrest, be that lobbying, a protest march or public meetings.

DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL Legal framework for tackling copyright infringement via education and technical measure Oftcom given powers to appoint and fund independently funded news consortia New duties for Ofcom to assess the UK's communications infrastructure every two years Modernising spectrum to increase investment in mobile broadband Framework for the move to digital radio switchover by 2015 Updating Channel 4 functions to encompass public service content, on TV and online Age ratings compulsory for all boxed video games for those over 12 years

US digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation declared that giving the Secretary of State such powers amounted to the creation of a "pirate finder general" that could enact "draconian" copyright enforcement controls.

The Bill envisages that any proposed change to copyright law should be opened up to public comment before it is made.

In a bid to defuse some of the criticisms, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills created a webpage entitled: "Filesharing: some accusations and some answers".

It pointed out that some of the criticisms levelled at the Bill were unfounded. It said it had not been drafted at the behest of the music industries.

It added that "technical measures" to slow down or suspend net connections would not be imposed without those accused going through a tribunal system that assesses their case.

The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) also issued a statement saying that it "strongly opposes" the measures introduced to tackle file-sharing.

It said: "Rather than focusing blindly on enforcement, the government should be asking rights holders to reform the licensing framework so that legal content can be distributed online to consumers in a way that they are clearly demanding."

Law firm Eversheds said the copyright plans seemed "hurriedly put together and not clearly thought-through" and warned that they could have "unforeseen effects."

It added: "Critics... may have taken some comfort from the fact that the proposals have yet to wend their way through an already congested legislative timetable before the next election, meaning it is questionable whether they will ever become law."

Man Arrested For Not Tweeting

By Stephen Johnson

Police in Garden City, NJ apparently arrested a man this weekend for not sending a tweet.

It all started at The Roosevelt Mall on Long Island, where teen singing sensation Justin Bieber was apparently scheduled to appear. Over 3,000 fans jammed into the shopping center and began chanting and yelling and carrying on. It looked like this:

The cops apparently asked James Roppo, a senior vice president of Island Def Jam Records, to send a tweet letting the fans know that the singer wouldn't show. He apparently failed to tweet and was cited for“endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration."

Bieber, who got his start after being discovered on YouTube, did tell his fans to go home via twitter, but apparently it didn't work.

Feeling Nervous? 3,000 Behavior Detection Officers Will Be Watching You at the Airport This Thanksgiving

By Liliana Segura

Nearly 100,000 passengers were pulled aside by TSA behavior watchers last year, and it remains to be proven whether you can spot terrorists by the looks on their faces.

Here's a question to ponder the next time you're taking off your shoes at airport security: Can you spot terrorists by the look on their faces?

For the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the answer is yes. For the past few years, airports across the country have been using what many call "behavioral surveillance" to weed out potential hijackers among us, by covertly examining travelers' facial expressions and body language as they go through security. Unlike those airport employees who herd us along as we remove our shoes and relinquish all liquids over three ounces (with dubious results), this new program, named "Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques," or "SPOT," is carried out by TSA employees who have been trained to monitor travelers' faces and movements. As Americans head out of town this holiday season, more than 3,000 "Behavior Detection Officers" will be at 161 airports nationwide, watching our every move.

Tthe TSA boasts that the SPOT program is "derivative of other successful behavioral analysis programs that have been employed by law enforcement and security personnel both in the U.S. and around the world." Yet, the success of the SPOT program remains highly questionable. This month the Washington Post reported that, in 2008 alone, Behavior Detection Officers across the country pulled 98,805 passengers aside for additional screenings, out of which 9,854 were questioned by local police. 813 were eventually arrested.

The cost of the program, according to TSA spokesperson Ann Davis, was $3.1 million.

In an e-mail correspondence with AlterNet, Davis could not say how many of the 813 arrests led to convictions -- or for that matter, whether any terrorists were caught. "Many of the SPOT cases that resulted in arrests remain under active investigation by law enforcement," she said. "TSA doesn't always hear back from the investigative agencies on the outcome of the cases so we cannot track convictions."

But as Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis points out, "Even if the arrests are justified, they are less than 1 percent of the total singled out. What happens to more than 9,000 who are subjected to questioning and released?"

This question cuts to the heart of protests by civil liberties advocates and others who argue that, not only is the SPOT program a violation of people's privacy, but it is actually counterproductive, a wasteful exercise in false positives.

"By the math alone, rare events are impossible to accurately detect," says Soldz. "One will either miss most of what one is interested in [false negatives] or else identify many people falsely [false positives]."

ACLU attorney Jay Stanley concurs. "The problem with the SPOT program," he told AlterNet, "is that it is based on trying to stop terrorism by searching for supposed 'signs of terrorism' that are so commonplace that it results in an increase in the monitoring of individuals to no good end."

"We Need to Use Them Everywhere"

Like the Department of Homeland Security that oversees it, the SPOT program is a post-9/11 phenomenon, partly inspired by the surveillance tapes that showed the 9/11 hijackers making their way through security at Boston's Logan Airport.

According to TSA analyst Carl Maccario, each man kept his eyes low to the ground, avoiding the gaze of the airport security guards. "They all looked away and had their heads down," he told USA Today in 2005. As the federal government looked for new ways to augment its counterterror tools after the attacks, the TSA set out to develop a program that would seek to identify would-be terrorists based on this type of behavior. Like the Pentagon, FBI, and CIA, the TSA sought out an army of psychologists to lend their expertise.

Key among them was Dr. Paul Ekman, a San Francisco-based psychologist and pioneer in the study of deceit and "microexpressions" -- the subtle, involuntary ways in which our faces betray our inner emotions. Ekman received a call from Maccario in 2005. "They were really contacting everyone who was doing any kind of work in this area," he recalled, in an interview with AlterNet. Maccario asked him to come on board as an adviser to the SPOT program.

Ekman visited Logan Airport, where a pilot version of SPOT was being implemented. What he saw impressed him enough that he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2006, praising the program.

"SPOT's officers, working in pairs, stand off to the side, scanning passengers at a security checkpoint for signs of any behaviors on the officers' checklist, such as repeated patting of the chest -- which might mean that a bomb is strapped too tightly under a person's jacket -- or a micro-expression," he wrote.

Ekman argued that the 9/11 hijackers had deception written all over their faces, but that tragically, no one was in a position to detect it. "The hijackers' lies -- to visa interviewers and airport check-in workers -- succeeded largely because airport personnel weren't taught how to spot liars, he wrote. "They had to rely on their hunches. The people who might have saved the lives of many Americans were needlessly handicapped."

"Observational techniques are not a substitute for all the other techniques we now use to catch would-be terrorists," Ekman concluded. "But they add another layer to transportation security. They are now being used at fewer than one in 10 major U.S. airports. We need to use them everywhere."

Three years later, the SPOT program has been vastly expanded, going beyond airports nationwide. According to Davis, the TSA "regularly deploys SPOT-trained officers to other transportation venues, including mass transit and rail stations."

But if the 2008 data is any indication, even trained officers cannot easily differentiate between a person who is acting nervous because he or she is, say, afraid of flying, and a nervous person who is armed and dangerous. (Even Ekman's Washington Post article described a "fidgety" man, "slumped in line, staring at the ground," who was occasionally gripped with a "momentary look of anguish." He was taken aside and questioned by Boston police, who discovered that the man was no terrorist -- his brother had just died unexpectedly, and he was on his way to his funeral.)

"Real life is not like in a spy thriller where people can magically perceive the people who have something to hide," says Stanley. "When people are asked to detect wrongdoing based on overbroad signs," he adds, "the usual result is racial profiling."

Catching Bad Guys?

The TSA has not released data on the almost 99,000 people who were pulled aside by Behavior Detection Officials, last year, or the 9,854 who were questioned by police. But for the overwhelming majority, who were innocent of any wrongdoing, the result has been harassment, aggravation, and missed flights at best, a violation of their rights at worst.

Not to mention wasted time and resources by security agents and law enforcement.

TSA spokesperson Ann Davis cites the "deterrent value" of the program as something that "cannot be overstated" -- "SPOT adds another layer of security to the airport environment and presents the terrorists with yet one more challenge they need to overcome in attempt to defeat our security system" -- but the claim is fairly impossible to prove.

Also, she argues, "we may not know if the people SPOT caught in the country illegally, using fake passports or IDs or smuggling money or drugs were doing so to assist with a larger plot."

Indeed, critics point out that the relatively small number of arrests that have come out of the SPOT program have been mostly people with fake IDs and undocumented immigrants, but there's not much evidence that any of them had plans to carry out a terrorist attack. Still, the notion that there's anything wrong with detaining these people anyway strikes Ekman as odd. "I would think that the American public would not feel badly that they are catching money or drug smugglers, or wanted felons for serious crimes," he says. "I didn't think that was a bad thing."

But if the primary duty of the TSA is to keep travelers and transportation hubs safe, expending resources on ordinary crime-fighting would seem to be a distraction from weeding out actual potential terrorists.

This, argues Ekman, is just the nature of behavior surveillance. "Nature didn't design us in a way that we have a different appearance if we are a terrorist compared to a wanted rapist," he says. "You're basically catching what they call 'bad guys.' You're not catching a specific type of bad guy."

Can Anyone Be a Human Lie Detector?

One might describe Dr. Paul Ekman as a true believer, both in human capacity to detect deceit -- "Anybody can learn how to recognize concealed emotions," he tells me. "It takes about an hour" -- as well as the need for behavior surveillance in the post-9/11 era. If the TSA SPOT program is not as effective as it could be, he argues, it is because it's underfunded.

"I do not think Congress is taking it as seriously as it should," he says. "I hope we do not have to wait until there's some disaster before [spending on the program] is increased."

More money might mean more Behavior Detection Officers. But ideally it might mean more training as well. The positions require no scientific background; training in the art of lie detection takes place over the course of less than a week -- "four days of classroom instruction in behavior observation/analysis and 24 hours of on-the-job-training in an airport security checkpoint environment," according to Davis. The average Behavior Detection Officer position pays anywhere between $31,411 and $56,964 a year, depending on where they work. "Would more training be better?" asks Ekman. "Probably. But TSA operates within a budget that Congress gives them and they're doing the best they can do given that budget."

Ekman cites Israel, the country that largely pioneered the use of behavior surveillance as one place where similar programs have proven effective. The U.S. program was inspired in large part by Israel's; Ekman himself has been a consultant to the Israeli government for 20 years.

For Jay Stanley, this is nothing to be proud of. "There are real questions about whether the Israeli system is as sophisticated as its boosters say or whether in isn't truly just a system of racial profiling," he says. "… In any case, there are only 6.5 million Israelis, but 300 million Americans … it is doubtful that Israel's system could scale to the U.S. airline transportation system."

Stanley argues that the SPOT program overemphasizes the capacity for people to act as human lie detectors. "Studies show that people are actually very bad at detecting lies and typically overestimate their ability to do so," he says. In an airport, he adds, "people have a million reasons to be nervous or anxious. In fact, if you're in today's airports and you're not a little crazed there's almost something wrong with you."

For his part, Ekman seems intent on popularizing the science of lie detection. He is an adviser on the new FOX drama "Lie to Me," which is is based on him and his work; Ekman is an adviser on every script and writes critiques of each episode on his website. He also markets and sells interactive kits on his website, ranging from $20 to $69, that promise to train customers in the finer points of facial and micro-expressions. The kits, he says, are "really for anybody who wants to learn how to recognize emotion: doctors, nurses, salespeople, negotiators, bargainers, suspicious spouses, law enforcement … there are tens of thousands of people who learn that."

"But," he warns, "you can't turn it off once you've learned it. I try to warn people you may not always like what you see."

Do the Ends Justify the Means?

Since 9/11, the FBI has started training all new recruits in non-verbal behavior analysis. The CIA has been conducting research on how to use computers to recognize micro-expressions. Also in the works is a new initiative by the Department of Homeland Security that "uses various ways of measuring your physiology as you walk by in the hopes of picking up signs of people who are intending to do harm." The Orwellian-named "Future Attribute Screening Technology," or FAST, would measure such things as heart rate, breathing, and body temperature. ("It's not being used because it's still in the research phase," says Ekman, "but I'm one of their advisers.") The civil liberties questions raised by such potential programs make the SPOT program look tame by comparison.

One politician who has been an outspoken critic of the TSA's SPOT program is former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. In a recent column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, he decried the new initiatives in the works as "yet another step in [the TSA and DHS's] relentless drive to bring '1984' front and center to America's airports."

"Eager always to take advantage of the willingness of passengers to surrender all sense of privacy if made to feel safe, DHS is spending millions of our tax dollars to develop technology that would remotely monitor certain bodily functions and alert TSA employees whenever someone is exuding signs of nervousness," he wrote.

Ekman dismisses concerns that the TSA's officers are violating anyone's rights. "They don't do this in the men's room," he told AlterNet. "They look at you while you're standing in line, which is a very public place. So I don't think it's an invasion of privacy."

Regardless of these questiosn, the SPOT program continues to be expanded. In January, Behavior Detection Officers were dispatched to Tampa, Florida to "look for suspicious behavior," among spectators attending Super Bowl XLIII at Raymond James Stadium. The ACLU raised alarm over the implications. As analyst Barry Steinhardt told USA Today, "If we're going to use this at high-profile sporting events, why not start using it on streets?"

From violations of privacy to racial discrimination, or the ACLU has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to curb the ever-expanding authority of the TSA. Earlier this year, the the ACLU sued the TSA for its detaining of a traveler who was stopped and questioned by officers after he was found to be carrying some $4,700 in cash at the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport in March. The man, Steven Bierfeldt, a former treasurer for the Ron Paul presidential campaign, was taken to a room and questioned about the cash. According to the ACLU, "Bierfeldt repeatedly asked the agents to explain the scope of their authority to detain and interrogate him and received no explanation."

"Instead, the agents escalated the threatening tone of their questions and ultimately told Bierfeldt that he was being placed under arrest. Bierfeldt recorded audio of the incident with his iPhone."

In September the TSA revised its policy to emphasize that "screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security." (Soon thereafter, it added that "traveling with large amounts of currency is not illegal," among other directives.) Earlier this month, the ACLU dropped the suit.

"This new policy provides much needed clarity to TSA screeners and reflects the critical requirement that TSA agents must adhere to their important but limited mandate of protecting flight safety," said Ben Wizner, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The airport is not a Constitution-free zone, and the price of traveling is not exposure to limitless government searches."

The TSA continues to vigorously defended its policies as "non-intrusive" and critical to national security. TSA spokseperson Suzanne Trevino denied that the low arrest rates from last year reflect poorly on the TSA program. Anyway, "we don't arrest people," she told AlterNet. "If we find something that we are concerned about, we will call over local law enforcement. They're the ones who do the arresting."

Man trapped in 23-year 'coma' reveals horror of being unable to tell doctors he was conscious

By Allan Hall

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.

'I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.

'I dreamed myself away': Rom Houben, now 46, has told of the nightmare of being trapped in a paralysed body, unable to tell doctors that he was awake, for 23 years

Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was 'extinct'.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Mr Houben described the moment as 'my second birth'. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.

Mr Houben said: 'All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.'

His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys.

'Medical advances caught up with him,' said Dr Laureys, who believes there may be many similar cases of false comas around the world.

The disclosure will also renew the right-to-die debate over whether people in comas are truly unconscious.

Rom said he wants to enjoy life again - now that his friends and family know he is not in a coma after all

Mr Houben, a former martial arts enthusiast, was paralysed in 1983.

Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses. But each time he was graded incorrectly.

Only a re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege discovered that he had lost control of his body but was still fully aware of what was happening.

He is never likely to leave hospital, but as well as his computer he now has a special device above his bed which lets him read books while lying down.

Mr Houben said: 'I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me - it was my second birth.

'I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.'

Dr Laureys's new study claims that patients classed as in a vegetative state are often misdiagnosed.

'Anyone who bears the stamp of "unconscious" just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again,' he said.

The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, found Mr Houben's brain was still working by using state-of-the-art imaging.

He plans to use the case to highlight what he considers may be similar examples around the world.

Dr Laureys said: 'In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury.

'About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health.

'But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage - they go on living without ever coming back again.'

Supporters of euthanasia and assisted suicide argue that people who have lain in persistent vegetative states for years should be given the opportunity to have crucial medical support withdrawn because of the 'indignity' of their condition.

But there have been several cases in which people judged to be in vegetative states or deep comas have recovered.

Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.

Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive.

In the UK in 1993, doctors switched off the life support system keeping alive Tony Bland, a 22-year- old who had been in a coma for three years following the Hillsborough disaster.

Dr Laureys was not available for comment yesterday and it is not clear why he thought Mr Houben should have the hi-tech screening when so many years had passed.

Atheist student groups flower on college campuses

By ERIC GORSKI

AMES, Iowa – The sign sits propped on a wooden chair, inviting all comers: "Ask an Atheist."

Whenever a student gets within a few feet, Anastasia Bodnar waves and smiles, trying to make a good first impression before eyes drift down to a word many Americans rank down there with "socialist."

Bodnar is the happy face of atheism at Iowa State University. Once a week at this booth at a campus community center, the PhD student who spends most of her time researching the nutritional traits of corn takes questions and occasional abuse while trying to raise the profile of religious skepticism.

"A lot of people on campus either don't know we exist or are afraid of us or hate us," says Bodnar, president of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society. "People assume we're rabble-rousing, when we're one of the gentlest groups on campus."

As the stigma of atheism has diminished, campus atheists and agnostics are coming out of the closet, fueling a sharp rise in the number of clubs like the 10-year-old group at Iowa State.

Campus affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance, a sort of Godless Campus Crusade for Christ, have multiplied from 80 in 2007 to 100 in 2008 and 174 this fall, providing the atheist movement new training grounds for future leaders. In another sign of growing acceptance, at least three universities, including Harvard, now have humanist chaplains meeting the needs of the not-so-spiritual.

With the growth has come soul-searching — or the atheist equivalent — about what secular campus groups should look like. It's part of a broader self-examination in the atheist movement triggered by the rise of the so-called "new atheists," best-selling authors who denigrate religion and blame it for the world's ills.

Should student atheist groups go it alone or build bridges with Christian groups? Organize political protests or quiet discussion groups? Adopt the militant posture of the new atheists? Or wave and smile?

___

As teenagers move into young adulthood, some leave God behind. But not in huge numbers.

More than three-quarters of young adults taking part in the National Study of Youth and Religion profess a belief in God. But almost 7 percent fewer believe in God as young adults (ages 18 to 23) than did as teenagers, according to the study, which is tracking the same group of young people as they mature.

What young adults are less likely to believe in is religion. The number of those who describe themselves as "not religious" nearly doubled, to 27 percent, in young adulthood.

Growing hostility toward religion was found, too. About 1 in 10 young adults are "irreligious" — or actively against religion — after virtually none of them fit that description as teenagers.

At Iowa State, most of the club's roughly 30 members are "former" somethings, mostly Christians. Many stress that their lives are guided not by anti-religiousness, but belief in science, logic and reason.

"The goal," said Andrew Severin, a post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics, "should be to obtain inner peace for yourself and do random acts of kindness for strangers."

Severin calls himself a "spiritual atheist." He doesn't believe in God or the supernatural but thinks experiences like meditation or brushes with nature can produce biochemical reactions that feel spiritual.

When the ISU club began in 1999, it was mostly a discussion group. But it soon became clear that young people who leave organized religion miss something: a sense of community. So the group added movie and board-game nights and, more recently, twice-monthly Sunday brunches to the calendar.

"It's nice to be around people who aren't going to bash me for believing in nothing," said Bricelyn Rector, a freshman from Sioux City who, like others, described community as the club's greatest asset.

Members also seek to engage their peers at Iowa State, a 28,000-student science and technology school where the student body leans conservative. There's a "Brews and Views" night at a local coffee house and talks by visiting speakers common to any college campus.

"This is not a group of angry atheists. It's a group of very exuberant atheists," said faculty sponsor Hector Avalos, a secular humanist and well-known Biblical scholar who used to be a Pentecostal preacher. "Their primary aim is not to destroy the faith of Christians on campus. It's more live and let live."

The "Ask an Atheist" booth is the club's most visible outreach. On a recent Friday, a handful of members stand ready to intercept students on their way to eat lunch or withdraw money from a nearby ATM.

Traffic is slow. Scott Moseley, a Bettendorf, Iowa, senior, stops for a polite conversation.

He explains that he was raised Methodist, has a Buddhist friend and dates a Wiccan.

"My entire concept of one religion is kind of out the window," Moseley says.

Bodnar, an ex-Catholic married to a Buddhist, recommends the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, a haven for a grab bag of religious backgrounds and a few members of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.

The closest thing to a confrontation comes when another student, a baseball cap pulled tight to his brow, talks briefly about heaven before he mutters, "I can't listen to you guys," and walks away.

___

On most college campuses, secular groups take shape when non-believing students arrive and find a couple-dozen Christian groups but no home for them. It isn't that atheism is necessarily growing among students — surveys show no uptick in the number of atheist and agnostic young adults over the last 20 years.

But the greater willingness to speak out, paired with the diversity within the movement, has resulted is a patchwork of clubs across the country united in disbelief but different in mission.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, a group of freethinkers led by a former Lutheran organizes rock-climbing outings and has co-sponsored a debate with a campus Christian group.

The University of South Florida is home to two active clubs: a freethinkers group that held a back-to-school barbecue and an atheist group that protested an anti-abortion group's campus visit.

Still other clubs embrace rituals. At the University of Southern Maine, a secular humanist organization has celebrated HumanLight, a secular alternative to Christmas and Hanukkah.

Just in the past year, the Iowa State club has evolved in new directions. Some are things churches have traditionally done — like the club's first foray into volunteerism, sleeping outside in cardboard boxes to raise money for homeless youth.

Others get at the heart of tensions within the atheist movement. The club worked with a Methodist church on a gay rights candlelight vigil, a gesture that would make some atheists cringe.

"The trouble is, any time you start working with other groups, religion starts coming in," said Victor Stenger, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and author of "The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason."

"People bring up Jesus, they're trying to proselytize, trying to get people to go to church," Stenger said. "The atheist groups just can't put up with it. They have to argue against it."

More recently, the ISU club's non-confrontational philosophy has been tested by a debate over the fate of a small chapel at Memorial Union on campus.

The club has avoided taking a position because members are divided. Some want the chapel's religious symbols — including an eight-foot wooden cross — removed on First Amendment grounds. Others fear repercussions and don't think a fight is worth it.

"The point of the club is not to make waves or controversy," said Bodnar, adding that she is uncomfortable with "calling out religion as wrong."

Some club members would like to be more confrontational when circumstances merit. Junior Brian Gress was interested in participating this fall in a nationwide "Blasphemy Day," a stick in the eye to religion. But the club passed and the idea fizzled.

"You should always try to make friends, but there are certain things about religion that can't be tolerated," Gress said. "Basically, the intolerance of religion can't be tolerated."

Most affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance fall somewhere between militant and why-can't-we-all-just-get-along, said Lyz Liddell, senior campus organizer for the Columbus, Ohio-based group.

"College students can be a little more susceptible to the more reactionary anti-religion voices, partly because it's so new to them," she said. "My impression is after a couple of years, they mellow out."

Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and a principal investigator on the youth and religion study, said campus atheist groups are better off without militancy. Young adults are taught their entire lives to be nonjudgmental, that different points of views are OK and that there is no one truth, he said.

"Emerging adults are just not into trying to make other people be or do something," Smith said. "If I were advising atheists and humanists, I would say their long-term prospects are much better if they can successfully create this space where people view them as happy, OK, cooperative, nice people."

At Iowa State, what one club member describes as a band of misfits and outcasts is trying to carve out a space where atheists who raise a fist and atheists who wave and smile can coexist peacefully.

By ERIC GORSKI

AMES, Iowa – The sign sits propped on a wooden chair, inviting all comers: "Ask an Atheist."

Whenever a student gets within a few feet, Anastasia Bodnar waves and smiles, trying to make a good first impression before eyes drift down to a word many Americans rank down there with "socialist."

Bodnar is the happy face of atheism at Iowa State University. Once a week at this booth at a campus community center, the PhD student who spends most of her time researching the nutritional traits of corn takes questions and occasional abuse while trying to raise the profile of religious skepticism.

"A lot of people on campus either don't know we exist or are afraid of us or hate us," says Bodnar, president of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society. "People assume we're rabble-rousing, when we're one of the gentlest groups on campus."

As the stigma of atheism has diminished, campus atheists and agnostics are coming out of the closet, fueling a sharp rise in the number of clubs like the 10-year-old group at Iowa State.

Campus affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance, a sort of Godless Campus Crusade for Christ, have multiplied from 80 in 2007 to 100 in 2008 and 174 this fall, providing the atheist movement new training grounds for future leaders. In another sign of growing acceptance, at least three universities, including Harvard, now have humanist chaplains meeting the needs of the not-so-spiritual.

With the growth has come soul-searching — or the atheist equivalent — about what secular campus groups should look like. It's part of a broader self-examination in the atheist movement triggered by the rise of the so-called "new atheists," best-selling authors who denigrate religion and blame it for the world's ills.

Should student atheist groups go it alone or build bridges with Christian groups? Organize political protests or quiet discussion groups? Adopt the militant posture of the new atheists? Or wave and smile?

___

As teenagers move into young adulthood, some leave God behind. But not in huge numbers.

More than three-quarters of young adults taking part in the National Study of Youth and Religion profess a belief in God. But almost 7 percent fewer believe in God as young adults (ages 18 to 23) than did as teenagers, according to the study, which is tracking the same group of young people as they mature.

What young adults are less likely to believe in is religion. The number of those who describe themselves as "not religious" nearly doubled, to 27 percent, in young adulthood.

Growing hostility toward religion was found, too. About 1 in 10 young adults are "irreligious" — or actively against religion — after virtually none of them fit that description as teenagers.

At Iowa State, most of the club's roughly 30 members are "former" somethings, mostly Christians. Many stress that their lives are guided not by anti-religiousness, but belief in science, logic and reason.

"The goal," said Andrew Severin, a post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics, "should be to obtain inner peace for yourself and do random acts of kindness for strangers."

Severin calls himself a "spiritual atheist." He doesn't believe in God or the supernatural but thinks experiences like meditation or brushes with nature can produce biochemical reactions that feel spiritual.

When the ISU club began in 1999, it was mostly a discussion group. But it soon became clear that young people who leave organized religion miss something: a sense of community. So the group added movie and board-game nights and, more recently, twice-monthly Sunday brunches to the calendar.

"It's nice to be around people who aren't going to bash me for believing in nothing," said Bricelyn Rector, a freshman from Sioux City who, like others, described community as the club's greatest asset.

Members also seek to engage their peers at Iowa State, a 28,000-student science and technology school where the student body leans conservative. There's a "Brews and Views" night at a local coffee house and talks by visiting speakers common to any college campus.

"This is not a group of angry atheists. It's a group of very exuberant atheists," said faculty sponsor Hector Avalos, a secular humanist and well-known Biblical scholar who used to be a Pentecostal preacher. "Their primary aim is not to destroy the faith of Christians on campus. It's more live and let live."

The "Ask an Atheist" booth is the club's most visible outreach. On a recent Friday, a handful of members stand ready to intercept students on their way to eat lunch or withdraw money from a nearby ATM.

Traffic is slow. Scott Moseley, a Bettendorf, Iowa, senior, stops for a polite conversation.

He explains that he was raised Methodist, has a Buddhist friend and dates a Wiccan.

"My entire concept of one religion is kind of out the window," Moseley says.

Bodnar, an ex-Catholic married to a Buddhist, recommends the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, a haven for a grab bag of religious backgrounds and a few members of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.

The closest thing to a confrontation comes when another student, a baseball cap pulled tight to his brow, talks briefly about heaven before he mutters, "I can't listen to you guys," and walks away.

___

On most college campuses, secular groups take shape when non-believing students arrive and find a couple-dozen Christian groups but no home for them. It isn't that atheism is necessarily growing among students — surveys show no uptick in the number of atheist and agnostic young adults over the last 20 years.

But the greater willingness to speak out, paired with the diversity within the movement, has resulted is a patchwork of clubs across the country united in disbelief but different in mission.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, a group of freethinkers led by a former Lutheran organizes rock-climbing outings and has co-sponsored a debate with a campus Christian group.

The University of South Florida is home to two active clubs: a freethinkers group that held a back-to-school barbecue and an atheist group that protested an anti-abortion group's campus visit.

Still other clubs embrace rituals. At the University of Southern Maine, a secular humanist organization has celebrated HumanLight, a secular alternative to Christmas and Hanukkah.

Just in the past year, the Iowa State club has evolved in new directions. Some are things churches have traditionally done — like the club's first foray into volunteerism, sleeping outside in cardboard boxes to raise money for homeless youth.

Others get at the heart of tensions within the atheist movement. The club worked with a Methodist church on a gay rights candlelight vigil, a gesture that would make some atheists cringe.

"The trouble is, any time you start working with other groups, religion starts coming in," said Victor Stenger, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and author of "The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason."

"People bring up Jesus, they're trying to proselytize, trying to get people to go to church," Stenger said. "The atheist groups just can't put up with it. They have to argue against it."

More recently, the ISU club's non-confrontational philosophy has been tested by a debate over the fate of a small chapel at Memorial Union on campus.

The club has avoided taking a position because members are divided. Some want the chapel's religious symbols — including an eight-foot wooden cross — removed on First Amendment grounds. Others fear repercussions and don't think a fight is worth it.

"The point of the club is not to make waves or controversy," said Bodnar, adding that she is uncomfortable with "calling out religion as wrong."

Some club members would like to be more confrontational when circumstances merit. Junior Brian Gress was interested in participating this fall in a nationwide "Blasphemy Day," a stick in the eye to religion. But the club passed and the idea fizzled.

"You should always try to make friends, but there are certain things about religion that can't be tolerated," Gress said. "Basically, the intolerance of religion can't be tolerated."

Most affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance fall somewhere between militant and why-can't-we-all-just-get-along, said Lyz Liddell, senior campus organizer for the Columbus, Ohio-based group.

"College students can be a little more susceptible to the more reactionary anti-religion voices, partly because it's so new to them," she said. "My impression is after a couple of years, they mellow out."

Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and a principal investigator on the youth and religion study, said campus atheist groups are better off without militancy. Young adults are taught their entire lives to be nonjudgmental, that different points of views are OK and that there is no one truth, he said.

"Emerging adults are just not into trying to make other people be or do something," Smith said. "If I were advising atheists and humanists, I would say their long-term prospects are much better if they can successfully create this space where people view them as happy, OK, cooperative, nice people."

At Iowa State, what one club member describes as a band of misfits and outcasts is trying to carve out a space where atheists who raise a fist and atheists who wave and smile can coexist peacefully.