Wired Science News for Your Neurons Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing

By Alexis Madrigal

A defendant’s fMRI brain scan has been used in court for what is believed to be the first time.

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Brain scan evidence that the defense claimed shows the defendant’s brain was psychopathic was allowed into the sentencing portion of a murder trial in Chicago, Science reported Monday. Brian Dugan, who had been convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year old, was sentenced to death, despite the fMRI scans.

“I don’t know of any other cases where fMRI was used in that context,” Stanford professor Hank Greely told Science.

While the possibility of using fMRI data in a variety of contexts, particularly lie detection, has bounced around the margins of the legal system for years, there are almost no documented cases of its actual use. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court allowed brain scans to be entered as evidence received at least one amicus brief based in part on brain scans showing that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains. But it’s not clear that the Court used that evidence in making its decision.

“The Court didn’t not rely on, or even mention, that evidence in support of its conclusion,” Greely wrote in an email to Wired.com.

In any case, that’s a far cry, though, from using fMRI to establish the truth of testimony or that specific structures within an individual defendant’s brain are legally relevant.

It’s difficult to tell whether the Dugan case will be a watershed moment in the use of brain scan evidence in court, or if the evidence impacted the decision in this case.

“The penalty phase of a capital case … is a special situation where the law bends over backwards to allow the convicted man to introduce just about any mitigating evidence,” Greely noted.

Earlier this year, Wired.com reported on another attempt to use fMRI evidence in which Greely’s MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project was involved. In that case, fMRI evidence was entered into a juvenile sexual abuse case in San Diego, but was withdrawn without being admitted.

The debate over whether or not to use fMRI evidence has several dimensions. The first is whether reliable evidence can be obtained. On that score, fMRI appears to perform well. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent (pdf). The real doubts begin to surface about whether the data will be good outside the laboratory in real settings.

“When you build a model based on people in the laboratory, it may or may not be that applicable to someone who has practiced their lie over and over, or someone who has been accused of something,” Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscientist at New York University told Wired.com in March. “I don’t think that we have any standard of evidence that this data is going to be reliable in the way that the courts should be admitting.”

Even if the data isn’t perfect, some law theorists say it might be on par with traditional lie-detection carried out by human beings, if not better.

“It’s not clear whether or not a somewhat reliable but foolproof fMRI machine is any worse than having a jury look at a witness,” Brooklyn Law School’s Edward Cheng said. “It’s always important to think about what the baseline is. If you want the status quo, fine, but in this case, the status quo might not be all that good.”

Others like Greely argue that until studies are conducted under realistic settings, the technology should stay out of the courtroom.

One thing seems clear: If brain scan data has even a remote change of helping a defendant’s case, defense lawyers will keep to try to enter the evidence into court.

Via Greg Miller, Science

11/24: Updated to include further comments by Hank Greely about Roper V. Simmons.

Image: flickr/foreverdigital

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/brain-scan-murder-sentencing/

Polymer With Honeycomb Structure: Scientists Synthesize Graphene-Like Material

Scanning tunneling microscope image of the two-dimensional porous polymer (left side of image) with a model of the material structure superposed (right side: blue-green — carbon; white — hydrogen; gray — silver surface). (Credit: Image courtesy of Empa)

Graphene consists of a two-dimensional carbon layer in which the carbon atoms are arranged on a hexagonal lattice, resembling a honeycomb. Carbon nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of graphene, and thick piles of graphene sheets form graphite. Graphene boasts some very special characteristics — it is extremely tear-resistant, an excellent thermal conductor, and reconciles such conflicting qualities as brittleness and ductility. In addition, graphene is impermeable to gases, which makes it interesting for applications involving air-tight membranes. Because of its unusual electronic properties graphene is viewed as a possible substitute material for silicon in semiconductor technologies.

y inserting holes of a specific size and distribution into graphene sheets, it should be possible to impart the material particular electronic characteristics. For these reasons intensive research is being conducted worldwide into the synthesis and characterization of two-dimensional graphene-like polymers. Graphene and graphene-like polymers are currently hot research topics in materials science, with this year’s Körber European Science Award being awarded to the Dutch physicist Andre Geim for his pioneering studies in the field of two-dimensional carbon crystals.

New manufacturing method: “bottom-up” synthesis on metal surfaces

Together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, scientists from Empa’s “nanotech@surfaces” laboratory have for the first time succeeded in synthesizing a graphene-like polymer with well defined pores. To achieve this feat the researchers allowed chemical building blocks of functionalized phenyl rings to “grow” spontaneously into a two-dimensional structure on a silver substrate. This created a porous form of graphene with pore diameters of a single atom and pore-to-pore spacings of less than a nanometer.

Until now, porous graphene has been manufactured using lithographic processes during which the holes are subsequently etched into the layer of material. These holes are, however, much larger than just a few atoms in diameter. They are also not as near to each other and significantly less precisely shaped as with the “bottom-up” technique based on molecular self-assembly developed by the Empa and Max Planck group. In this process the molecular building blocks join together spontaneously at chemically defined linking points to form a regular, two-dimensional network. This allows graphene-like polymers to be synthesized with pores which are finer than is possible by any other technique.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Empa.

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Journal Reference:

1. Bieri et al. Porous graphenes: two-dimensional polymer synthesis with atomic precision. Chemical Communications, 2009; (45): 6919 DOI: 10.1039/b915190g

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091120084337.htm

Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics

by Stephen Shankland

Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.

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The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to use graphics cards’ computing power. They’re built into Windows 7, and Microsoft is bringing them to Windows Vista but not Windows XP.

The performance boost from Direct2D and DirectWrite was the centerpiece of Microsoft’s demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 goodies shown last week. Online maps flashed on the screen quickly and tracked mouse movements responsively; text was clearer and changed sizes more gracefully.

But the day of Microsoft’s demo, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard had this to tweet: “Interesting that we’re doing Direct2D support in Firefox as well–I’ll bet we’ll ship it first.”

There’s work to back up his rhetoric. On Sunday, Bas Schouten, the programmer who’s been leading the work for Mozilla, posted a prototype of Firefox using the Direct2D and DirectWrite.

However, any Firefox fans tempted to crow about a victory should be cautious. Mozilla wouldn’t commit to including the technology, much less to a release schedule such as Firefox 3.7 due in the first half of 2010. “We are currently investigating Direct2D for Firefox, but do not have a target for shipping it in Firefox at this time,” the organization said in a statement..

Several Web pages arrive significantly faster using Direct2D rendering technology in Firefox.

 

(Credit: Bas Schouten)

The race is on
Microsoft declined to comment for this story, referring readers just to last week’s blog post about coming Internet Explorer 9 features. “While we’re still early in the product cycle, we wanted to be clear to developers about our approach and the progress so far,” the company said while sharing a Direct2D demonstration video.

There’s no doubt the race is on, though, given the potential benefits of the new interface and the commercial success of Window 7. Microsoft is lighting a fire under its developers, but the company’s browser has lagged Firefox and other rivals in many technological areas for years, and many Web developers loathe earlier versions of IE still widely used. IE’s market share has steadily eroded, though it remains dominant overall.

The attention is giving Google ideas, too. In a Chrome issue logged Sunday, Chrome programmer Peter Kasting pointed to Chouten’s blog post on the subject as “motivation.”

“If we can speed up the rendering time, the most noticeable benefit will probably be smoother-feeling scrolling,” Kasting said. He also directed attention in October to DirectWrite support in Chrome, though cautioning that it might not work with the browser’s present “sandbox” design to isolate elements of the browser for security reasons.

Mozilla has its own results to show off, too. Schouten offered a graph showing improved performance displaying a variety of Web pages. Facebook, Google, and Twitter rendered on the screen in half the time using the Direct2D; Slashdot and a Wikipedia entry were barely changed. One taxing page using the Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG) to show movable, resizable graphics showed more than twice as fast, dropping from about 11 milliseconds to less than 4 milliseconds.

Microsoft’s DirectWrite permits smoother display of many fonts.

 

(Credit: Microsoft)

What actually changes?
Direct2D replaces an older technology called Graphics Device Interface (GDI) used in Windows XP. Both offer a way for programs to tap into computing hardware without having to worry about the particulars of video card capabilities and settings, but Direct2D taps into hardware acceleration features.

The technology lets programmers control basic elements such as transparent boxes, curved lines, and resizable photos. Out of these, user interface elements are constructed; Direct2D calls upon a computer’s graphics processor to speed that up. It’s particularly helpful for dynamic situations that change element properties such as color, size, or opacity.

DirectWrite offers a similar graphics chip boost to the task of displaying text. That may not sound computationally intense, but some parts of it are. In particular, DirectWrite offers a more sophisticated mechanism for displaying text to take advantage of something called sub-pixel positioning of letters.

Each pixel on an LCD screen is actually made of three tiny slices–for red, green, and blue components–and sub-pixel technology subtly draws letters using pieces of these pixels to make the overall appearance smoother. The older GDI permitted some sub-pixel positioning, but only smoothed letters in the horizontal direction; DirectWrite smooths curves vertically as well.

Using the graphics chip in Direct2D and DirectWrite operations brings several advantages. Performance is the first: some operations are faster or smoother, and having more power on hand lets programmers tackle more ambitious projects. Second, the general-purpose central processor, relatively inefficient at handling graphics tasks, is unburdened, freeing it up for other tasks and saving battery power.

Firefox already has a graphics system of its own called Cairo. Schouten has been adding a Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Firefox is of course a browser that doesn’t just work on Windows. The DirectWrite technology helps that operating system catch up to its rivals, said Mozilla’s John Daggett in a blog post Sunday. “Platform APIs [application programming interfaces] on Mac OS X and Linux already do a good job rendering Postscript CFF [Compact Font Format] fonts,” he said. “This just brings them up to parity under Windows 7.”

Direct2D is used elsewhere in the browser. “We’ve made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU,” or graphics processing unit, Schouten said. And because Cairo is used by other open-source software, other projects will benefit from the work, he added.

The Direct2D work is Mozilla’s second hardware acceleration effort; the company also is working on one using a different hardware acceleration interface called OpenGL for mobile devices using Nvidia’s Tegra chips, according to Mozilla.

This Mozilla demonstration of photos and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with transparency and click-and-drag resizing, works more than twice as fast Direct2D graphics.

 

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The interactive Web
Microsoft went out of its way to emphasize that the Direct2D and DirectWrite work will help existing Web pages without programmers having to change a line of code. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, contrasted that to other hardware acceleration efforts including Native Client and O3D from Google and WebGL from Mozilla and the Khronos Group.

Native Client, O3D, and WebGL are part of a long list of developments designed to transform the Web into a foundation not just for static pages but also for interactive applications. Those technologies, though, require new programming skills and tools.

Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera have been pushing this interactive Web agenda, and Microsoft is showing signs of interest, too. However, for now, Microsoft emphasizes that Direct2D support will help the existing Web. But the browser makers have their eyes on interactive technology as well. Direct2D will help with complex sites that use 2D graphics interfaces such as SVG and Canvas, Mozilla said.

Added Schouten, “As Web sites become more graphically intense, dynamic graphics will start playing a larger role, especially in user interfaces.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10403604-264.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Practical Nanotube Electronics

Nanotube array: This photo shows a three-inch silicon wafer covered with an array of carbon-nanotube transistors. Though these transistors were made using simple processes at room temperature, their performance is good enough to drive display pixels.  Credit: ACS/Nano Letters

Researchers develop a new method for making efficient nanotube transistor arrays.

By Katherine Bourzac

Carbon nanotubes are a promising material for making display control circuits because they’re more efficient than silicon and can be arrayed on flexible surfaces. Until recently, though, making nanotubes into transistors has been a painstaking process. Now researchers at the University of Southern California have demonstrated large, functional arrays of transistors made using simple methods from batches of carbon nanotubes that are relatively impure.

The pixels in a computer or television screen, whether it’s an LCD or plasma, are each controlled by several transistors. In today’s devices, these transistors are made from silicon. Arrays of these transistors need to be made at high temperatures and in a vacuum, so they’re very expensive, says Chongwu Zhou, an associate professor of electrical engineering at USC and researcher on the nanotube project.

Transistors have also been made from carbon nanotubes, but that, too, presents challenges. “Many people use one nanotube to make a very small, high-performance transistor” for computer chips, says Zhou. But that one-to-one ratio won’t work for displays, in which a large surface must be covered in transistors. “If we use one nanotube for one transistor, the yield will never be high enough” to work for large-scale manufacturing of big screens, he says. Zhou believes his approach will solve this problem by making larger transistors from mats of nanotubes.

The USC researchers make large arrays of carbon nanotube transistors using solution-processing techniques at room temperature. They start by placing a silicon wafer in a chemical bath to coat its surface with a nanotube-attracting chemical, then rinse off the residue. The treated wafer is then immersed in a solution of semiconducting carbon nanotubes, which are attracted to its surface. The wafer, now coated with a carpet of nanotubes, is rinsed clean again. To make transistors from this tangled mess, the researchers put down metal electrodes at selected locations. The electrodes define where each transistor is and carry electrons into and out of the nanotubes that lie between them. Areas of silicon underlying each device act as the transistors’ gates. So far, they’ve built a prototype device on a four-inch silicon wafer and used it to control a simple organic light-emitting diode display. This work is described online in the journal Nano Letters.

Other researchers have made transistors from nanotube carpets using solution-processing, but these projects started from mixtures of conducting and semiconducting nanotubes, leading to very poor performance. And late last year, researchers at IBM and Northwestern University used highly purified semiconducting nanotubes to make higher-performance transistor arrays in which all the nanotubes line up in nearly straight lines, which improves their electrical properties.

The significance of the USC work is that it shows that arrays made from only 95 percent semiconducting nanotubes that aren’t aligned still have good enough performance for displays, says Zhou.

Article Continues – http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23995/?a=f

Explaining the Air Traffic Breakdown

It wasn’t the fault of a creaky old radar system, but of high-tech flight-monitoring computers.

By David Talbot

The major failure of air-traffic control yesterday (Thursday November 19th) was yet another sign that our outdated radar-based system needs to be replaced with a sleek new satellite-based one, right? That’s the logical progression of much of the coverage out there.

The reality is that, yes, the system needs to be replaced. But yesterday’s failure was a high-tech one that could afflict a system based on satellites, too.

The problem wasn’t directly related to radar, but with the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, a system for processing flight plans and information for all flights in the country. It failed in both of its locations: Salt Lake City and Atlanta. This meant that automated regional FAA systems couldn’t process flight information. As a result, controllers had to enter information manually. This caused delays that rippled across the country. “A satellite-based system would have had the same problem,” R. John Hansman, an MIT aerospace and air traffic control expert, wrote to me this afternoon.

The Federal Aviation Administration hopes to roll out a Global Positioning System-based control system, called Next Generation or NextGen, in stages. By 2020 most planes will carry a cockpit gadget that continuously broadcasts the planes’ GPS-derived location, altitude, and speed to ground controllers. In later years, the system will extend so that this information is picked up by other planes, too, so that pilots can gain more control over their routing and spacing. As they beam their position information to one another they’ll be able, to some extent, to self-navigate. However, there will always be an FAA air-traffic system keeping track. It’s unlikely that pilots will ever be permitted to make all takeoff, routing, and landing decisions entirely by themselves in the event of failures of national air-traffic computers, as happened yesterday.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24444/?a=f

Neptune’s Trident case mod honors the god of liquid cooling

By Tim Stevens

What do you do if your Battlestar Galactica case mod has conquered Earth and space with its awesomeness? Why, you conquer the seas, of course. Brian Carter is back with this Neptune’s Trident mod, a lovely blue thing with three separate cooling loops, one for each of the three EVGA GeForce GTX260 video cards inside. The result? A powerhouse for sure and something that we think would look quite appropriate in Tron Legacy.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/23/neptunes-trident-case-mod-honors-the-god-of-liquid-cooling/

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened

Photo: Joe Pugliese

By Evan Ratliff

Officially it will be another 24 hours before the manhunt begins. That’s when Wired’s announcement of my disappearance will be posted online. It coincides with the arrival on newsstands of the September issue of the magazine, which contains a page of mugshot-like photos of me, eyes slightly vacant. The premise is simple: I will try to vanish for a month and start over under a new identity. Wired readers, or whoever else happens upon the chase, will try to find me.

1  – August 13, 6:40 PM: I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe.

What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can’t be detected. Nor will it note that I then double back on rural roads to I-5 and drive south through the night, cutting east at Bakersfield. There will be no digital record that at 4 am I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile.

The Adventure continues, continue reading - http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/

Intel Core i9 Benched: Six Cores of Pure Joy

On paper, the Core i9 might not sound that exciting: It’s a lot like the Core i7, except built with a 32nm fabrication process and two extra cores, for a total of six. Early benchmarks, though, say it flies. Sometimes.

The i9 doesn’t extract significant advantages from its pumped core count (which brings processing thread count up to 12) in a lot of day to day tasks, so don’t expect to see an increase in game performance, Windows startup speed or other single-core optimized tasks. It’s when you start rendering video or doing 3D modeling—tasks that are suited to parallelization—that the i9 flexes its muscles.

That’s roughly a 50% increase in video encoding performance over a similarly clocked i7—already no slouch by any existing standards.

The i9 processors won’t ship until sometime in early to mid 2010, and when they do, expect them to be a bit on the expensive side. But man, 50%. I think I can stand to save up a few more bucks, honestly. [PCLab via Electronista]

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

http://gizmodo.com/5411119/intel-core-i9-benched-six-cores-of-pure-joy

E-tailers snagged in marketing ’scam’ blame customers

by Greg Sandoval

Mark Goldston, chairman and CEO of United Online, parent company of Classmates.com, which banked $70 million from marketing practices now under investigation by the Senate Commerce committee. (Credit: United Online)

First the good news for consumers: the U.S. government’s investigation into how dozens of well-known online stores worked with controversial marketers to “deceive” customers out of $1.4 billion has prompted some retailers, including Continental Airlines, to sever ties with the marketers.

Now, the bad news: the marketers–Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty–are still in business and judging from the responses of many of the retailers involved, such as Priceline, Classmates.com, FTD, Shutterfly, and Orbitz, it will be business as usual. They see nothing wrong with the marketing practices that millions of angry online shoppers and members of the U.S. Senate have called a “scam,” “robbery” and “theft.”

While the U.S. Senate Commerce committee produced a staggering amount of documentation during a hearing last week that appears to show consumers are misled into signing up for so-called loyalty programs, the retailers continue to suggest it’s their customers who are at fault.

The controversy began last May, when the Commerce committee launched an investigation into the practices employed by Vertrue, Affinion, and Webloyalty. The committee’s investigators found thousands of complaints going back years from people who said they discovered “mysterious charges” on their credit cards and struggled to discover how they got there.

The Senate’s investigators said they learned that the retailers had made an unholy alliance with the marketers. Under most of the agreements between the marketing firms and retailers, an advertising page is presented to a shopper while they complete a transaction at the retailer’s online store. Many shoppers say they entered their e-mail address and pushed a large “Yes” button on the ad because it appears to be a $10 cash-back offer or coupon. Many of those that complain say they thought they were being rewarded by the retailer for making a purchase.

Written in much smaller print within the ad are the full terms of the deal. A customer is notified there that by providing their e-mail address they are joining a membership program and agreeing to pay one of the marketing firms a monthly fee, typically between $10 and $20.

Despite being blasted last week by members of the Commerce committee, most of the retailers involved haven’t done much repenting.

Orbitz “does not pass on any personally identifiable customer information to third party vendors without their permission,” the travel site said in a statement.

United Online, parent company of FTD and Classmates.com, a company that the government said banked $70 million via the three marketers said: “We believe that our marketing practices provide clear disclosure. We do not transfer our customer’s credit or debit card information to third parties without our customer’s consent.”

Priceline said the terms of the deal have “been clearly and fully explained.”

It’s all your fault
The inference is clear: The people complaining about this are the ones who screwed up. The terms of the deal were all in the ad so that means anyone who was charged the monthly fee either wanted it at the time or was negligent.

I can start by listing all the information that the government has found that shows that as many as 30 million consumers were unaware that they were signing up for the loyalty programs. But first, let’s look at the obvious.

Webloyalty, Affinion and Vertrue all say they do their best to make it clear to consumers what they’re signing up for. That’s nonsense of course. If their claim was true, they would simply insert the following graph or something like it high up into their ads:

BY ENTERING YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER YOU ARE REGISTERING FOR MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM AND YOUR CREDIT CARD WILL BE CHARGED $12 PER MONTH FOR THIS SERVICE UNTIL YOU CANCEL YOUR MEMBERSHIP. ENTER CARD NUMBER HERE:________. EXPIRATION DATE HERE:________.

Voila. End of confusion.

This simple fact was presented in a Jan. 8, 2007 court filing that was part a class-action lawsuit filed against Webloyalty, one of several suits filed against the three marketing companies over the years. In this case, the attorneys representing plaintiff Joe Kuefler sized up why they believed Webloyalty doesn’t display its terms in this clear way or ask consumers to input their credit card information themselves.

“The answer is nefarious,” the lawyers wrote. “If customers had to retype their credit card numbers, they would know that they were registering for a monthly fee-based service and defendants would not be able to get rich by fooling people into signing up.”

Confusion breeds deception
Here’s the next obvious fact that readers should know: burying important contractual information deep inside big blocks of text isn’t new. Creating confusion around a purchasing experience and then obtaining a consumer’s credit card information from someone other than the owner to make charges isn’t novel. These ideas have been around in some form or another for decades and are outlawed in many parts of the brick-and-mortar world. These tactics won’t fool everyone, but they will mislead enough consumers for the companies to profit.

In the court filing against Webloyalty, Kuefler’s lawyers said that if they could get their hands on the company’s internal documents they could prove Webloyalty knew that most “members” were duped into signing up. Well, the government did obtain documents.

According to the Senate Commerce committee’s report a Vertrue employee once wrote that “cancellation calls represent approximately 98 percent of call volume” to the company’s customer service operations. One Webloyalty employee said in an e-mail that “90 percent of our members don’t know anything about the membership.”

Documents obtained by the government show Affinion estimated that the chances of obtaining money from a consumer would be four times higher if a retailer handed over a customer’s credit-card information to the marketing firm than if the firm had to get it from the actual cardholder.

Prentiss Cox, a former assistant attorney general and now a Minnesota law professor, says that in his decade-long experience studying the marketing practices employed by Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty, it’s clear to him that those that voluntarily sign up for the loyalty memberships run by those companies is less than 5 percent.

Since I began writing about this in July, I’ve seen a lot of reader feedback from people who don’t believe they could ever be misled into signing up for the membership programs. But I’ve also read thousands of complaints, which can be found here, here, and here, among those that have claimed to have been duped are lawyers, computer programmers, vice presidents, U.S. Army veterans, and journalists.

The government wrote that more than 35 million people have been enrolled in Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty’s clubs.

Cox says the marketing techniques used by Affinion, Webloyalty, and Vertue work because shoppers have been conditioned to believe that on the Web they can’t be charged without entering their credit card information. He notes the ads that Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty stick in the faces of consumers come late in the transaction process, when a consumer might think they need to click the “yes” button and enter their e-mail address to verify their identities. In addition, the ads “are sold as free offers,” Cox said. This lowers a shopper’s guard.

Another effective technique employed by the marketing companies is that they know many people will be embarrassed. Many consumers will hear that they entered their e-mail address and will assume they erred. Some won’t make a stink because they don’t want to admit that they don’t check their bank statements well enough.

By saying, “we never release credit card information without the consumers authorization,” the marketing companies and their retail partners imply that the money their customers lost was caused by their own negligence.

Affinion, Vertrue, Webloyalty, and their retail partners are all profiting from their customers’ shame, when it is they who should be ashamed.

Webloyalty illustrated for potential clients how much easier it is to generate “high revenue” from a consumer when the firm can get their credit card information from a retailer (‘card on file’) instead of the card owner. Members of a Senate committee have called such practices a ’scam.’  (Credit: U.S. Senate Commerce committee)

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10403286-83.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Cloud computing: Which IT projects are right for the cloud?

Some IT functions are perfect for cloud computing. Others need to stay in your data center. Here’s how to determine which are which.

By Cara Garretson

- Cloud computing is poised to win the title of most popular, and populist, buzzword of 2009.It certainly is gaining traction outside of IT. In fact, the idea of cloud computing has become so popular that executives and employees who don’t even work in the IT department are starting to ask for it by name.

 

Budget-minded CEOs are telling IT managers to look into cloud computing to reduce the amount of expensive hardware running their data centers; CFOs are interested because they’ve heard the model can slash costs associated with new IT projects; tech-savvy employees are asking for it because they think it sounds cool.

To be clear, the actual number of corporations that have deployed cloud computing remains small; the Corporate Executive Board’s Infrastructure Executive Council doesn’t expect to see mainstream adoption — meaning at least 50% of corporations have embraced cloud computing — until 2012. And even then, they believe companies will only use some of the services that fall under the cloud computing umbrella.

Still, IT departments large and small feel obligated to at least look into cloud computing’s potential to save money, reduce overhead and increase efficiency and flexibility.

What’s more, those IT shops that drag their feet might find overeager users are beating them to the cloud, warns James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. For example, “application developers are using the cloud and not telling IT,” he says. To avoid being caught unaware, IT should take the lead in deciding what goes into the cloud and determining how to get it there, says Staten.

But where to start? What’s the best way for an IT manager to determine whether his company’s corporate culture is suited for shipping computing tasks to Web-based third parties? What expectations should service providers be required to meet? How should the success — or failure — of a cloud computing project be measured?

These are not questions to be taken lightly, since the success or failure of a company’s foray into the cloud will influence corporate perceptions of the model going forward. Computerworld gathered advice from tech execs, analysts and experts on how IT managers should go about determining which of their corporations’ applications, tasks or services are best suited for the cloud.

Pick a project — the right project

The Corporate Executive Board, a research and membership organization designed to support the functions surrounding CEOs, has studied corporate adoption of cloud computing through its Infrastructure Executive Council and its Data Center Operations Council, both of which are headed by practice manager Mark Tonsetic.

Tonsetic’s advice to IT managers: Find a project that supports a business opportunity and could be easily moved into the cloud to save costs and resources — but it should be something that doesn’t involve core competencies, and moving it offsite shouldn’t create a security risk. In other words, find a project where moving some or all functions to the cloud would improve the bottom line but the company wouldn’t face disaster if security or availability was compromised.

Article Continues – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141024/Cloud_computing_Which_IT_projects_are_right_for_the_cloud_