Monarch Butterflies and Monsanto: Collateral Damage

Monarch butterflies are dying off in record numbers. A recent census taken at the monarchs’ wintering grounds found their population had declined 59 percent over the previous year and was at the lowest level ever measured.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor suggests that it’s likely that genetically engineered crops are largely to blame.

Monsanto first introduced Roundup-resistant soybeans in 1997, and Roundup-resistant corn a year later. By 2004, Taylor estimates that about 50% of commercial farms were using the modified seeds. About that same time the monarch population started to significantly decline.

Continue reading: http://animals.oreilly.com/monarch-butterflies-and-monsanto-collateral-damage/

Blackhatonomics
An Inside Look at the Economics of Cybercrime
By Will Gragido, Daniel Molina, John Pirc, Nick Selby

Get our ebook Deal of the Day: Blackhatonomics: Inside Look at the Economics of Cybercrime - Save 50% w/code DEAL http://oreil.ly/10D43iy

Blackhatonomics explains the basic economic truths of the underworld of hacking, and why people devote hours to develop malware around the world. The root cause analysis of the monetization of cybersecurity in the inner circle of cybercrime is analyzed from the impact of multiple. Written by an exceptional author team, they take practical academic principles back them up with use cases and extensive interviews, placing you right into the mindset of the cyber criminal.

•     Historical perspectives of the development of malware as it evolved into a viable economic endeavour
•     Country specific cyber-crime analysis of the United States, China, and Russia, as well as an analysis of the impact of Globalization on cyber-crime.
•     Presents the behind the scenes methods used to successfully execute financially motivated attacks in a globalized cybercrime economy.
•     Provides unique insights, analysis, and useful tools for justifying corporate information security budgets.
•     Provides multiple points of view, from pure research, to corporate, to academic, to law enforcement.
•     Includes real world cybercrime case studies and profiles of high-profile cybercriminals.

Sascha Bates on Configuration Management: It’s Not about the Tool
Velocity 2013 speaker series

Courtney Nash interviews Sascha Bates about her Velocity Talk,

“Puppet and Chef are completely different, and yet exactly the same,” admits Sascha Bates. In this interview about her talk at the upcoming Velocity Conference, she discusses common pitfalls that people can avoid when getting started with configuration management. And here’s a hint: it isn’t about which tool you choose.

After years in the trenches helping a variety of organizations implement Chef, Sascha learned (often the hard way) a few critical things that she’ll share in her talk. Key points from our discussion include:

• When getting started with configuration management, people often fret over which tool they use, when they should be thinking more about the overall integration with their particular system. [Discussed at the 0:50 mark.]
• Both Chef and Puppet have the concept of a package manager, and if you’re not setting that up properly, things can spiral out of control quickly. [Discussed at the 1:25 mark.]
• Her top configuration management anti-patterns. [Discussed at the 2:43 mark.]
• What superpower someone will have after attending her talk. [Discussed at the 3:55 mark.]

Watch the whole interview here:

http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/sascha-bates-on-configuration-management-its-not-about-the-tool.html

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Mining the Social Web
Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites
By Matthew A. Russell

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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and other social web properties generate a wealth of valuable social data, but how can you tap into this data and discover who’s connecting with whom, which insights are lurking just beneath the surface, and what people are talking about? This book shows you how to answer these questions and many more. Each chapter combines popular and useful social web data with analysis techniques and visualization to help you find the needles in the social haystack that you’ve been looking for—as well as many you probably didn’t even know existed.

In this expanded and thoroughly revised second edition you’ll learn how to:

* Navigate the most popular social web APIs to access, collect, analyze, and visualize social web data
* Employ IPython Notebook and other easy to use Python packages such as the Natural Language Toolkit, NetworkX, and Matplotlib to efficiently sift through social web data as part of an experimentally-driven approach to discovering insights in social web data
* Apply advanced text-mining techniques such as TF-IDF, cosine similarity, collocation analysis, document summarization, and clique detection to human language data that you’ll encounter all over the web
* Bootstrap interest graphs by discovering latent affinities between people, programming languages, and coding projects from GitHub data
* Visualize social web data with D3, a state-of-the-art HTML5 and JavaScript toolkit

The book’s source code is maintained in a GitHub repository maintained by the author and can be deployed as turn-key virtual machine with each chapter’s source code presented in an interactive and easy to use IPython Notebook format. No complex third-party installations or advanced Python knowledge is required to get the most out of this book.

Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition
Unix for the Practical Paranoid
By Michael W. Lucas

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This long-awaited second edition of Absolute OpenBSD maintains author Michael Lucas’s trademark straightforward and practical approach that readers have enjoyed for years. You’ll learn the intricacies of the platform, the technical details behind certain design decisions, and best practices, with bits of humor sprinkled throughout.

Farmers, Elephants, and Bees: A Winning Combination

As if African elephants didn’t have enough to worry about, habitat loss is yet another key issue affecting their survival. Although elephant populations have increased since the 1970s, the human population has grown even more quickly, cutting the elephants’ habitat up into farms and roads. The elephants’ key migratory routes have been cut off in many places. As result, they regularly break through fences, where they eat and destroy crops. When the farmers confront elephants on their property, things don’t generally end well for either party.

Lucy King, a researcher working with Save the Elephants, has spent many years investigating the problems involved in crop protection. Her goal is to find long-term solutions that reduce the frequency of human-elephant conflicts—and that can be financed and managed by local farmers.

As Ms. King looked into the elephants’ habits for any clues to keeping them out of fields planted with crops, she noticed that they tended to avoid acacia trees with active nests of African bees. Elephants, it so happens, are afraid of the bees, and will move away from an area and warn other elephants if they hear bees buzzing nearby.

And so the beehive fence was invented.

Learn more: http://animals.oreilly.com/elephants-and-bees/

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