A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors.

The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90% accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences.

That compares with polygraphs that range from 80% to "no better than chance" at finding the truth, George said.

His results are to be published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

A pair of Web cameras providing Internet images of walruses basking on Round Island will be turned off at the request of Alaska Native leaders, who do not want viewers to see the animals shot and butchered during the traditional fall hunt.

The cameras transmit to a popular website where viewers normally can watch live video of Pacific walruses snoozing on a rocky beach.

Although not approved by the search company, information on crime, sexual predators and cheap gas prices is graphically displayed.

Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas. Pinpointing $ 1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan.

Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how to tinker with the search engine’s mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked or not perceived as clearly.

Yahoo and other sites also offer maps, but Google Inc.’ s 4-month-old mapping service is more easily accessible and manipulated by outsiders, the tinkerers say.

From Jon Udell's blog:

Dave Winer today points to an Scott Rosenberg's excellent take on Google's new library venture. Scott concludes:

The public has a big interest in making sure that no one business has a chokehold on the flow of human knowledge. As long as Google's amazing project puts more knowledge in more hands and heads, who could object? But in this area, taking the long view is not just smart -- it's ethically essential. So as details of Google's project emerge, it will be important not just to rely on Google's assurances but to keep an eye out for public guarantees of access, freedom of expression and limits to censorship. Scott Rosenberg

These ideas fed into our work on indirect reciprocity, a concept that was first introduced by Robert Trivers in a famous paper in the 1970s. I recall that he mentioned this idea obliquely when he wrote about something he called "general altruism". Here you give something back not to the person to whom you owe something, but to somebody else in society. He pointed out that this also works with regard to cooperation at a high level. Trivers didn't go into details, because at the time it was not really at the center of his thinking. He was mostly interested in animal behavior, and so far indirect reciprocity has not been proven to exist in animal behavior. It might exist in some cases, but ethologists are still debating the pros and cons.

In human societies, however, indirect reciprocity has a very striking effect. There is a famous anecdote about the American baseball player Yogi Berra, who said something to the effect of, "I make a point of going to other people's funerals because otherwise they won't come to mine." This is not as nonsensical as it seems. If a colleague of the university, for instance, goes faithfully to every faculty member's funeral, then the faculty will turn out strongly at his. Others reciprocate. It works. We think instinctively in terms of direct reciprocation — when I do something for you, you do something for me — but the same principle can apply in situations of indirect reciprocity. I do something for you and somebody else helps me in return.

Last December, China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, sat down for a remarkably candid online chat with Chinese Internet users.

"People are not too keen about your looks," one participant chided, according to a translation published in The South China Morning Post - and Mr. Li replied, "My mother would not agree with this view."

The exchange was the first time that a senior Chinese official had engaged in an online chat with ordinary citizens, but its improbably personal moments belied the restrictive government's tenuous relationship with the Internet.

Indeed, as the number of people online in China has quintupled over the last four years, the government has shown itself to be committed to two concrete, and sometimes competing, goals: strategically deploying the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down - with surveillance, filters and prison sentences - on undesirable content and use.

Both trends, experts say, are likely to continue.

Personal info is easily accessed online - and privacy laws have yet to catch up.

The highway is packed as you drive home and then a car swerves in front and cuts you off. You jot down the license plate number as the traffic stalls. When you get home, you log onto the Internet, type the plate into publicdata.com, and up pops the owner's name, home address, and driving record.

New neighbors move in across the street. You wonder how much they earn, how old he is, if they're married or just cohabiting. A few clicks on the county court's website and you're privy to the husband's Social Security number, details about his wife, and the fact that he had a financial spat with a local business.

And it is all perfectly legal.

Public records held at the county clerk's office or city hall have always been available for public scrutiny, but to access them you needed to turn up in person between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Now, in the name of efficiency, many counties are putting their public records online and ending the practical obscurity paper records once offered.

And that's what alarms privacy advocates. It's not just checking out the new neighbors that's at issue. Those public files often contain sensitive personal information - particularly court documents, writes Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer education and advocacy group (privacyrights.org) based in San Diego.

Someday it'll happen, probably when you least expect it.

Just as you countersteer while drifting out of a tight corner or after you punch the brakes hard, you'll hear the mechanically animated female voice emanating from your car's audio system: "Collision detected. Calling OnStar."

You need not be anywhere close to a collision, really. During one road test this summer, it was just a matter of running a routine slalom in a Chevrolet Malibu Maxx — without so much as hitting a rubber cone — when OnStar called to check.

If you're anything like the test drivers, it won't be until after you've explained to the distant helper that you didn't have an accident, the airbags did not deploy and you don't need assistance, that you'll begin to experience an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.

How'd they know you were driving like that? What else do they know? And who else knows?

Welcome to Paranoiaville — the driving equivalent of George Orwell's "1984," brought to life in the post-9/11 world of Homeland Security.

Your first impulse might be to complain of the intrusion to those behind the bright blue OnStar button, but here's a flash: You should be far more alarmed by what alerted OnStar in the first place — the black box insidiously hard-wired into your car's electronic guts, unstoppable, unalterable, and unbeknownst to most drivers, silently recording every dramatic move.

These 4-inch square boxes (actually silver, not black) — known as event data recorders or crash data recorders — collect an array of information every five seconds. Unlike aircraft recorders pulled from plane crash wreckage, these devices don't record cockpit voices or such a wide range of information over such a long period, but they do constantly record everything from seat belt use and airbag deployment to throttle position and braking action — information retained the moment G-forces, called g's, indicate that a crash is imminent.

The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.

The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist.

Applied Digital Solutions, based in Delray Beach, Fla., said that its devices, which it calls VeriChips, could save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatment. And it expressed hope that such medical uses would accelerate the acceptance of under-the-skin ID chips as security and access-control devices.

Scott R. Silverman, chairman and chief executive of Applied Digital, said the F.D.A.'s approval should help the company overcome "the creepy factor" of implanted tags and the suspicion it has stirred.

Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, the House and Senate are moving toward setting rules for the states that would standardize the documentation required to obtain a driver's license, and the data the license would have to contain.

Critics say the plan would create a national identification card. But advocates say it would make it harder for terrorists to operate, as well as reduce the highway death toll by helping states identify applicants whose licenses had been revoked in other states.

The Senate version of the intelligence bill includes an amendment, passed by unanimous consent on Oct. 1, that would let the secretary of homeland security decide what documents a state would have to require before issuing a driver's license, and would also specify the data that the license would have to include for it to meet federal standards. The secretary could require the license to include fingerprints or eye prints. The provision would allow the Homeland Security Department to require use of the license, or an equivalent card issued by motor vehicle bureaus to nondrivers for identification purposes, for access to planes, trains and other modes of transportation.

The teenagers who stabbed wealthy Joao Da Costa Mitendele to death before burgling his home were careful to conceal the crime. They used a pretty girl to gain access to his apartment, where they wore rubber gloves while committing their crimes.

What they hadn't counted on was the phalanx of video cameras that silently watched and recorded them leaving the local subway station, buying those gloves and approaching 45-year-old Mitendele's apartment in suburban north London. The same cameras caught their hasty return journey to the station half an hour later.

The tapes sealed the fate of the so-called "Honey Trap" gang when played in court earlier this year. Seven of the group were convicted of offenses ranging from manslaughter to conspiracy to rob and sent to jail for a minimum of seven years each.

Big Brother is always watching in Britain.

An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras observe people going about their everyday business, from getting on a bus to lining up at the bank to driving around London. It's widely estimated that the average Briton is scrutinized by 300 cameras a day.

For most of our history, privacy was a luxury—we were too busy just staying alive. Clustering together in caves, our distant ancestors knew who the best hunters were, and who was sleeping with whom. Later, in the fiefs, villages, and towns, everybody knew who was dependable, who was a drunk, who had money. Amid such intimacy, anonymous sociopathology was pretty hard to pull off.

Later on, when we didn't really need to huddle for security, we came to see privacy as "a fundamental human right," as a columnist put it in London's Evening Standard a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks. We became obsessed with privacy, at least in developed countries, to the point that the United States had to pass a law so that a family could be informed when a convicted child molester moved in next door.

Amendment to prevent searches of library and bookstore records fails on a tie vote.

Bowing to a veto threat from President Bush and heavy pressure from its Republican leaders, the House on Thursday barely defeated an effort to scale back the USA Patriot Act, the controversial, administration-backed law to combat terrorism on the home front.

On a vote of 210 to 210 — a roll call that GOP leaders extended for more than 20 minutes to sway dissident Republicans — the House rejected an amendment that would have limited the Patriot Act by preventing the Justice Department from searching library and bookstore records to probe individuals' reading habits.

Proposal to keep some prisoners 'off the books' went against promises for yearly case reviews.

Despite pledging yearly reviews for all prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret "for intelligence reasons," senior defense officials said Thursday.

Under the proposal, some prisoners would in effect be kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges.