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LAS VEGAS — Here’s some advice for newbies to the largest cybersecurity and hacking conferences in the world, which took place in Las Vegas last week. 

Hackers are going to hack, so do everything you can to get out of their way.

Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on your cellphone. Turn off your computer. Do not use ATMs near the convention site this week. Pay for everything with cash.

Sound extreme? Not to experts at the Black Hat and DefCon 24 conventions, which have drawn about 16,000 people from 108 countries, many of them trained to snoop on other people’s digital devices.

In fact, some of the sessions at the three-day Black Hat convention, which started small in 1997 but now has corporate sponsors and plenty of law enforcement attendees, offered training on how to break into networks or how to attack them surreptitiously. Information security officers find the sessions helpful in understanding the evolving coding of malware, the software tools through which hackers break into systems.

In the unseen air around the Mandalay Bay Convention Centre, it’s mano a mano among digital combatants, hackers and security specialists.

“We’re not stopping attacks. We’re just observing them,” said Neil R. Wyler, speaking at a network monitoring facility with multiple large screens at the convention centre.

Wyler goes by the user name of “Grifter” and his day job is with RSA, a network security company based in Bedford, Massachusetts. His business cards describe him as “hacker-in-residence” and “threat hunting & incident response specialist”. As a security expert, he usually spots network intrusions and goes after them. But at Black Hat, he’s had to take his hand off the holster even while observing that “there’s a significant amount of malware flying around”.

“We have full visibility. Every packet that flies across the network, we see it,” he said.

Some of the harmful coding Wyler detects is instructional, coming from the laptops of experts in various conference rooms offering demonstrations.

“They are teaching them the latest hacking methods, how to stay stealthy,” Wyler said, and if he and other monitors tried to stop the attacks, “you could screw up someone’s demo in front of 4,000 people”.

“Black Hat attracts the most talented hackers around the world in the private and public sectors,” said Vitali Kremez, a cybercrime intelligence analyst at Flashpoint, a cybersecurity company based in New York. “It’s the Wild West. Some people are going to get hurt.”

He looked at a hapless visitor and warned: “Don’t connect.”

The DefCon 24 Hacking Conference, which began Thursday and ends Sunday at the nearby Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, is a little grittier. Sessions include one on how to use digital tools to overthrow a government.

“DefCon is where you really don’t want to leave your cellphone turned on at the show,” said Tim Erlin, security and IT risk strategist at Tripwire, a Portland, Oregon-based security software company. Some attendees take “burners”, cheap disposable phones that they can throw in the trash afterward, he said.

If someone takes a smartphone, pranksters at DefCon “might ‘brick’ your device, make it inoperable”, Erlin said.

It’s not entirely diabolical. Those employing such mischief aren’t out to make money but to prove a point. Hackers and digital renegades want to show security specialists that they remain one step ahead of them.

“If you’re going after the guys who defend the network, it’s like ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’” said Wyler, noting the satisfaction that hackers feel at one-upping those who should know better.

In an article on “How to stay safe at Black Hat”, which was offered to attendees, Wyler emphasised the extent to which hackers might go to infect computers at the conference.

“Every year, we have people dropping random USB drives around the conference floor,” Wyler wrote, referring to portable flash drives. “At Black Hat 2015 someone was literally throwing USB drives into open classroom doors. It’s not just a story, it happens. So if you see a drive on the ground, pick it up and put it in the nearest trash can.”

The flash drives invariably contain malicious coding, he said.

Underlying many of the talks at the Black Hat convention is concern about an explosion in cybercrime, ranging from the Bitcoin-hungry individual who encrypts a victim’s computer and then demands a ransom payment in order to restore access to the major cyber gang that steals credit card information in order to commit massive fraud.

“To become a cyber criminal today, you don’t have to have any skills. You don’t have to be a hacker,” said Eyal Benishti, the founder and chief executive of Ironscales, an Israeli security company. With barely $300, one can buy software to launch a phishing scam, luring unsuspecting e-mail recipients into clicking on links to open doors into their hard drives, potentially revealing banking information. “If you send enough phishing attempts, someone will click.”

Despite recent attention to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, which saw the theft of more than 19,000 e-mails, the public is hardly conscious of the extent of malware floating around the Internet.

“I would say the public is aware of 5 per cent,” said Christopher Pogue, the chief information security officer at Nuix, an Australian software company that’s involved in cybersecurity and digital investigation.

“Ninety-five per cent is either unreported, underreported or part of a criminal investigation, so it can’t be disclosed,” Pogue said. “Lots of people are hacked and have no idea.”

Digital breaches at companies are on average not detected for 200 to 300 days, Pogue said, giving cyber criminals plenty of time to search for proprietary information. Whoever hacked into the DNC is thought to have had access to the system for nearly a year.

In a keynote speech at Black Hat, renowned security expert Dan Kaminsky warned that the Internet could become overwhelmed by viruses and malicious software unless a major global effort is made to increase security.

“We’re risking losing this engine of beauty,” Kaminsky said. “We could lose the Internet, you know?… It’s not a rule of the universe that we get to have all this fun.”

Despite some criticism of bike helmets for not being protective enough, they do cut the risk of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) by half when riders suffer a head injury, a US study suggests.

Riders with helmets were also less likely to die from their injuries, and less likely to break facial bones, than those not wearing a helmet, researchers report in American Journal of Surgery.

“It’s similar to wearing a seat belt, said Dr Jerri Rose, a paediatric emergency physician at University Hospitals’ Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in the study. “Wearing one doesn’t ensure that you’re not going to get in a car accident, but it lowers the risk of injury and of dying in a car accident.”

Millions of Americans ride bicycles, but less than half wear bicycle helmets, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. 

In the US, there were 900 deaths and an estimated 494,000 emergency room visits due to bicycle-related injuries in 2013, the study authors write.

Using the American College of Surgeons’ National Trauma Data Bank, the researchers analysed records of 6,267 people treated in 2012 for bleeding inside the skull after a bicycle accident. 

One quarter of patients had been wearing a bicycle helmet at the time of their accident. Just over half of the patients had severe traumatic brain injuries and 3 per cent died.

Researchers found that people wearing helmets had 52 per cent lower risk of severe TBI, compared to unhelmeted riders, and a 44 per cent lower risk of death. 

Riders with helmets also had 31 per cent lower odds of facial fractures. The upper part of the face, particularly around the eyes, was most protected. Helmets offered less protection against fractures to the lower part of the face, such as the nose and jaw.

Moreover, people who wore helmets reduced their likelihood of having brain surgery, further confirming a certain level of protection with helmet use, the study team writes.

“Using helmets has always been controversial,” said study coauthor Dr Asad Azim, a research fellow in the department of surgery at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Critics argue that due to its incomplete design bicycle helmets are of no use and do not protect riders when it comes to severe injuries.”

But “the results of the study say different”, he told Reuters Health by e-mail.

Helmeted riders were more likely to be white, female and insured compared to non-helmeted riders. Riders aged 10 to 20 were among the least likely to wear a helmet, while those aged 60 to 70 were most likely to wear one. 

“About 75 per cent of people in this study weren’t wearing helmets so we have a long way to go in terms of making sure that people wear helmets when cycling,” Rose said. 

“Especially teens,” she added, “they perceive it as not cool.” 

The key is to start them early, Rose said. “Starting early is really important. As soon as they start riding their bikes, they should be taught to wear a helmet. It has to become a routine.”

Women in Revolutionary Egypt: Gender and the New Geographics of Identity
Shereen Abouelnaga
Cairo-New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016
Pp. 150

Much has been written about the 25 January Revolution and its aftermath — and women’s role therein, but Shereen Abouelnaga breaks new ground with her precise use of the concepts of gender and agency. For gender is more than sex. Rather, it refers to cultural and social traits ascribed to one according to whether one is female or male. And agency is not free choice, but acting according to one’s perceived desires or needs in a particular situation outside of a fixed, pre-assigned identity. 

Herself a participant in the eighteen days at Tahrir Square, Abouelnaga writes with first-hand knowledge. A professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University, she sprinkles her analysis with literary references, and is especially qualified to present and analyse the new generation of female poets inspired by the revolution. Moreover, she evaluates actual events in Egypt with the help of international feminist theory, making her book cross-disciplinary, and going beyond the usual paradigms of women’s role. 

In fact, according to Abouelnaga, women were not assigned a role in the revolution, but rather “committed to a revolutionary act that was bent on demolishing the old sociopolitical structure, where men and women suffered equally, and, thus, social justice became the main demand”. Despite not participating on a women’s platform, women’s massive presence in the revolutionary process indicated “a change in the way gender was constructed and perceived”. (p. 36) 

This is one of many examples where one needs to go beyond gender to truly understand women’s agency.

Yet, female participation in the 25 January Revolution was soon followed by March 8, when women were viciously attacked while demonstrating on International Women’s Day. These unexpected assaults and subsequent developments raised a lot of questions about the extent and nature of the changes wrought by the revolution, such as the “gender paradox” — why an apparent advance in democracy was so quickly followed by the deterioration of women’s rights. Abouelnaga addresses these questions by analysing pre-2011 state policy and events, the various stages of the political process, and the art and writing generated by the revolution. To her credit, she does not have pat answers to all the issues she raises, but her analysis is key to understanding contradictory developments and how and why women have mobilised for successive, often disparate, causes.

Abouelnaga critiques Western media for focusing on violations against women while often ignoring the unprecedented agency they have been displaying since 2011. In her view, “the 25 January Revolution endowed women with the opportunity to initiate the route to agency while struggling over identity construction… If the Revolution demolished anything, it was the principle of homogeneity [of women and the population at large]; it turned out to be a mere illusory notion, propagated for a long time by the state.” (pp. 2-3) 

The book cover exemplifies protest against such stereotyping with a stencilled image of three different women and the slogan “Do not categorise me”.

A main challenge has been disentangling the women’s movement from the clutches of nationalism, state-sponsored “feminism” and Islamism — all of which try to contain women by imposing a monolithic, essentialist identity, leaving paternalism untouched. In contrast, “The new revolutionary generation has managed to negotiate new tactics of identity politics by going beyond gender, without abandoning gender.” (pp. 6-7)

The revolution also generated a new relationship between art and politics, a new type of poetry, a new language and logic. 

At first, there were not always women-specific images or gender-related issues in the new street art. “The positive side of these drawings is that they take for granted that women are equal partners in the Revolution, that they are already integrated into the fabric of the street.” (p. 46)

At a later stage, women’s collectives carried out more feminist projects, but the real change came when “the graffiti related to the virginity tests and the stripping of [women in public] employed a logic that was completely new to society. In other words, the female body is a human body, and, thus, such violations are not to be categorised as a marker of the woman’s honour but, rather, as a proof of the regime’s barbarity... all this should lead to the formation of new geographics of identity where gender is not the sole lens of reading and interpreting a brave new world” (p. 47)

You can get a pretty good idea of a country’s wealth by seeing how much it shines at night — just compare the intense brightness of China and South Korea to the dark mass of North Korea that’s sandwiched between them.

But night-time lights don’t tell you which neighbourhoods or villages within a large region are merely poor and which are home to people living in abject poverty. That’s the level of detail policymakers need when they decide where to deploy their economic development programmes.

You could get that detail by sending legions of survey-takers into crowded slums and sparsely populated rural areas. But that would be hugely time-consuming and cost tens of millions of dollars or more.

So researchers at Stanford came up with a way to get computers and satellites to do the work for them.

Their computer model, described Thursday in the journal Science, isn’t perfect. But its predictive power is at least as good as — or better than — methods that rely on data from old and out-of-date surveys.

The Stanford approach requires a few key ingredients.

First, you need to have some kind of data that covers every single place where people live. You get bonus points if that data is in the public domain.

You also need a smaller amount of data that you know is pretty accurate.

Finally, you need a powerful computer that can calibrate the trove of “noisy” data to the smaller amount of reliable data.

The Stanford researchers tested their system with five African countries: Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Rwanda. They started with night-time images captured as part of the US Air Force Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme. Places that were brighter at night were presumed to be more economically developed than places that were dim.

Then they had their computer programme compare the night-time images to higher-resolution daytime images available via Google Static Maps. The programme was able to recognise certain shapes in the daytime pictures that were correlated with economic development.

“Without being told what to look for, our machine learning algorithm learned to pick out of the imagery many things that are easily recognisable to humans — things like roads, urban areas and farmland,” study lead author Neal Jean, a computer science graduate student at Stanford’s School of Engineering, said in a statement.

Other recognisable features included waterways and buildings. The computer even learned to distinguish metal rooftops from those made of grass, thatch or mud, according to the study.

To bring it all together, the Stanford team used statistical methods to determine how the presence (or absence) of items identified in the daytime pictures related to income data collected in surveys. The type of roofing material on a building was directly related to income, for instance. So was a location’s distance from an urban area.

The final computer model was “strongly predictive” of two important measures of poverty — average spending by households and average household wealth. In Rwanda, for instance, the model predicted average household wealth more accurately than data from cellphone records, according to the study. (Another problem with cellphone records: They’re proprietary, and companies aren’t always willing to share them.)

When a computer programme churned through satellite data from just one of the five countries, the resulting model worked best in that country. But in some cases, it did a pretty good job of making predictions in other countries as well. That should make it a valuable tool, they wrote, since the method “is straightforward and nearly costless to scale across countries”.

Jean and his colleagues aren’t the only ones excited about the prospect of using satellites and computers to fight poverty.

In an essay that accompanies the study, Joshua Blumenstock of UC Berkeley’s Data Science and Analytics Lab said that making use of daytime satellite data — which contains far more information than night-time images — can “make it possible to differentiate between poor and ultrapoor regions”. This, in turn, “can help to ensure that resources get to those with the greatest need”.

It’s not every day you get to see a star go nova. Scientists at the Warsaw University Observatory in Poland have managed to catch a binary star system both before and after its explosive flash.

The findings, described in the journal Nature, confirm a long-held theory about novae known as the hibernation hypothesis — and could potentially help scientists better understand when such stellar outbursts occur.

Novae are typically caused by a gravitationally locked pair of stars, called a binary system, consisting of one white dwarf and a companion star. A white dwarf is an ageing star that has already shed much of its mass, leaving behind a small but massive core. Like a gravitational vampire, the white dwarf siphons off material from its stellar companion into its own accretion disk — and every so often, the system becomes so unstable that the white dwarf erupts, producing a cataclysmic explosion that causes it to flare brightly in the night sky.

“The most spectacular eruptions, with a ten-thousandfold increase in brightness, occur in classical novae and are caused by a thermonuclear runaway on the surface of the white dwarf,” the study authors wrote. “Such eruptions are thought to recur on time scales of ten thousand to a million years.”

Such explosions might actually have seeded the universe with some elements and radioactive isotopes, such as lithium (which is used in battery manufacturing), said lead author Przemek Mroz, an astronomer at the observatory.

Around 50 novae go off every year in the Milky Way, but only five to ten are actually observed because most of them are shrouded by interstellar gas and dust, Mroz said in an e-mail. The closest and brightest, however, can potentially be picked out with the naked eye.

But while novae can be seen once they go off, scientists don’t often get the chance to study them in depth before they explode.

Researchers have long had a theory about the cycle that causes these novae: When the mass transfer is low (less than a billionth of the sun’s mass per year), the accretion grows unstable; every so often, stuff gets dumped onto the white dwarf in what the authors called “dwarf nova outbursts”.

But those are just the lead-up to the classical nova, that enormous flare-up in the sky. When the classical nova explosion finally occurs, it actually boosts the mass-transfer rate for centuries, keeping the system more stable until it dwindles and begins to approach the “hibernation” period, thus repeating the process.

But scientists couldn’t say what was really happening until the nova V1213 Cen flashed in 2009 and was caught by the university’s Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE).

“This discovery would be impossible without long-term observations by the OGLE survey,” Mroz wrote in an e-mail. 

“The survey started almost 25 years ago and for 20 years we have had a dedicated 1.3-metre telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. This is another case when OGLE data are crucial for studying unique, extremely rare phenomena.”

The scientists had been observing V1213 Cen since 2003, giving them six years’ worth of data to analyse in the run-up to the big flash, and they continued to study it for years afterward.

“Thanks to long-term pre- and post-eruption observations, we can trace the nova evolution very precisely and [compare] it with theoretical models,” Mroz said. “Our observations are consistent with the hibernation hypothesis predictions (but of course are NOT a definitive proof of this scenario).”

Ultimately, these findings may better help researchers to understand the evolution of binary stars (and, because they produce at least some of the elements that populate the universe, into the makeup of the universe).

For now, scientists continue to monitor the binary star. Mroz said he wants to make spectral observations of V1213 Cen in order to better understand the system’s properties as well as conditions in the accretion disk around the white dwarf.

“V1213 Cen is now slowly fading,” the study authors wrote. “What will be its fate? We can expect that the system will remain bright for a few decades and then it will again transform into a dwarf nova, following the hibernation theory predictions.”

PARIS — Neonicotinoid pesticides, already blamed for short-circuiting honeybee brains, also diminish their sperm, possibly contributing to the pollinators’ worrying global decline, researchers recently said.

Widespread neonicotinoid use may have “inadvertent contraceptive effects” on the insects which provide fertilisation worth billions of dollars every year, said a study in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In their experiment, researchers divided bees into two groups.

One group was fed pollen containing field-realistic concentrations of two neonicotinoids — thiamethoxam and clothianidin.

The other group was given untainted food.

After 38 days, the male drones — whose key role in life is to mate with the egg-laying queen — had their semen extracted and tested.

The data “clearly showed... reduced sperm viability” — which is the percentage of living versus dead sperm in a sample, said the study.

Honeybee queens mate for just a single short period, but with many males in a sort of bee orgy, before storing the sperm for the rest of their fertile lifetime.

Bees have been hit in Europe, North America and elsewhere by a mysterious phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder”, which has alternatively been blamed on mites, a virus or fungus, pesticides, or a combination.

The new study adds reduced sperm quality to the list of possible causes.

“As the primary egg layer and an important source of colony cohesion, the queen is intimately connected to colony performance,” the paper said.

Previous studies have found neonicotinoids can cause bees to become disorientated to the extent that they cannot find their way back to the hive, and can lower their resistance to disease.

The European Union has placed a moratorium on the sale of neonicotinoids.

Last year, a study found that wild bees provided crop pollination services worth more than $3,250 (2,950 euros) per hectare every year.

Bees account for an estimated 80 per cent of plant pollination by insects.

High-end, top of the line, smartphones are as expensive as a good laptop computer and sometime cost even more. Does it make sense? Samsung’s new Note 7 and Apple’s iPhone 6, for example, are about JD700 in Amman. You can easily find a mid-range decent laptop for JD400 or JD500. Does this mean that laptop are cheap and smartphones expensive?

There is more than one way to explain this apparently strange price structure. To start with, powerful smartphones do for you more than what the typical laptop does, and end up being more essential, more critical to what you do every day; if only for the excellent camera that is built in the device. Moreover, smaller has never meant cheaper. When it comes to advanced electronics and digital systems it is quite the opposite actually. When you think of all the functionality that they are able to squeeze in a smartphone, it is simply mind blowing, unbelievable, by any standard. So smartphones prices are justified.

One also should compare apples with apples — and I don’t mean any word play here on the brand that bears the same name.

When you buy a smartphone you get the operating system (Android, Apple iOS or Windows Mobile) with it, and are also able to download and install hundreds of perfectly legal, perfectly free for most, and perfectly working applications. It is all included, and it is not a minor point.

On the other hand when you buy a laptop you typically have to pay for expensive software licences that significantly raise the total cost and in most cases make the computer more expensive than the smartphone in the end. Say you purchased a laptop at JD500; that is bare hardware. If it is a Windows-based model you still have to acquire a Windows licence (about JD130, approximately) and an MS-Office licence (about JD300). This is as much as the bare computer itself. And of course if you are planning to buy other software like Photoshop or such, you easily end up paying two or three times the initial price of the bare machine.

There was a time when software piracy represented the biggest share of the market in a place like Jordan. Buyers would only take into consideration the price of the hardware, betting on obtaining and using illegal software copies afterwards. These days are gone and software piracy though still existing has significantly decreased, and today has become marginal. Public awareness and usage ethics have improved and users not only realise the importance to abide by the law but also have come to appreciate the quality and the intrinsic value of original software licences, the fact that they can update them online, and so forth.

When you consider paying JD700 or so for a high-end smartphone you should not think that this is money paid on a mobile telephone. You are buying an excellent camera, a GPS device and a real window open on the Internet with all that this entails, in particular a superb tool to communicate via text, photo and sound with the world, and what is more for free, thanks to apps like WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and the like. This alone more than justifies the price initially paid.

As for the countless extra apps found on Apple Store or Google Play to download and install, they are either free or cost an average of JD5. Thinking it over, I find smartphones truly inexpensive.

SAN FRANCISCO— You’re not paranoid, you really are being followed more online.

A study that looked at web tracking over the last 20 years found that at least 75 per cent of the world’s 500 most popular websites contain web trackers, up from fewer than 5 per cent in 1998.

“The number of trackers have increased, the ability of the top trackers to track you across sites has increased and the complexity of the trackers has increased,” said Adam Lerner, a security and privacy researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the study designers.

The researchers used a unique Internet archive, the Wayback Machine, to look at third-party tracking code used on websites over time. These-third party trackers first appeared in 1998 and their use has been rising almost continuously ever since.

“Obviously they have legitimate purposes, but they also have privacy implications,” said Franziska Roesner, the professor of computer science at the University of Washington and an author on the paper, which was presented last week at a computer conference in Austin, Texas.

Half of the top 500 websites they looked at contained at least four of the third-party trackers, the researchers found.

And it’s not simply those individual companies that are tracking users, said Ali Lange, a policy analyst with the Centre for Democracy and Technology in Washington DC.

“It’s important to remember that those four brokers are then selling that data to others, so it’s much broader,” she said.

The rise of web tracking and more targeted advertising has helped fund the explosion of online content and build such web behemoths such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. It’s even part of the reason Verizon recently bought Yahoo, to bolster its potential audience for ads. It’s also led to more consumers installing ad-blocking software, which resulted in pushback from companies like Facebook to thwart it.

The most commonly-found ad server, Google-owned DoubleClick, appeared on over 15 per cent of all the sites. Other third-party trackers the researchers found included Scorecard Research and Quantcast.

The researchers also found that Google analytics, a Google programme that allows the owner of a webpage to analyse traffic to it, was on more than 30 per cent of sites. However, the programme doesn’t generally track information about users for ad use, the researchers noted.

How they work

Websites today commonly include tracking code from third parties, such as advertisers, social media sites and website analytics services.

In the simplest tracking mechanism, those third parties store a “cookie” containing a unique identifier (such as “USER1234”) in the user’s browser.

Whenever a user visits a website containing code from one of those third party trackers, that code is used to look for the user’s unique identifier stored in the user’s browser.

If it finds the unique identifier, it sends information about what the user viewed to its collection of information about them out to the company that placed it.

Thus, the third party trackers are able to build “browsing profiles” of users. While these don’t include their name, they do include information of interest to advertisers. For example, a profile might show that USER1234 frequently visits sites about guitars, probably lives in Kansas, has looked at ads for amplifiers, buys dog food from a specialty site and has searched for information about cement shingles.

“They can create a pretty fine-grained view of who you are and what you’re interested in,” said Lerner.

It’s these trackers that result in “those annoying ads following you around and kind of creeping you out”, said Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco.

If you were not already aware of it, I would like to inform my readers that Hong Kong is the most selfie-obsessed city in the world. I have not visited Beijing or Shanghai, as yet, and maybe I will correct my impression after a trip to China. But for now, let me reiterate that the people of Hong Kong are more preoccupied with clicking a selfie, than the folks of any other metropolis in the entire globe.

Till the advent of the smartphones, I did not even know what a selfie was. For those of us still unfamiliar with the term, “selfie” is defined in the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (ALD) as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically clicked with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”.

However, the ALD omits to mention that a selfie is the best thing that happened to narcissists, who are people with an inordinate fascination with oneself, and suffer from excessive self-love. What I really admire about this statement is the analysis that excess of self-love is a suffering, but here I digress.

Coming back to Hong Kong, which was inundated with excursionists because of a local holiday, I saw more families gathered before a selfie stick than around a picnic basket. My stress levels rose every time I saw a person wandering towards the main road without taking their eyes off a cellphone that was mounted on a horizontal stick. But somehow, just before I mustered the courage to shout out a warning to the strangers, they would stop, smile one last time at their camera image, and turn back to the safety of the sidewalk. My sigh of relief would be short lived as another group duplicated the actions of the former. 

Taking a selfie was an art form initially, but with the new beauty apps that one can download, it has now become a science. These days, along with smiling beatifically one can also, quite literally, transform oneself. The “eye-widening, skin lightening, chin narrowing and cheeks thinning” beautifying apps are easily assessable and capitalise on the spending power of the consumers. Rather than acquire feelings of inadequacy, the fans of selfie photo editing insist that it gave them confidence.

A 25-year-old college student I met said that she spent at least two hours a day taking selfies. When I looked at her in disbelief, she explained that these days when youngsters went out, it simply meant finding a place to take pictures and after editing them to make themselves look beautiful, post them on the social media. She loved the compliments that she received on Facebook and she wished that she could live in the world of a soft hued filtered version of herself, forever. 

To underline her point she handed me her selfie stick and asked me to click my picture on her phone. She then got to work on the snapshot of my face and widened my eyes to unnatural proportions. My lips acquired an artificial pout and my hair looked glossier than when I was a teenager. Impulsively, I SMSed my photograph to my husband who was tied up in an official conference.

“You made a new friend today?” he messaged. 

“Well, yes,” I typed. 

“Beautiful lady, where did you meet her?” he was curious. 

“Ahem, that’s me,” I wrote. 

“You didn’t look like that this morning!” he exclaimed. 

“It’s my selfie reincarnation,” I replied, adding a smiley emoticon.

WASHINGTON — In the cold waters of the Arctic, a denizen of the deep lurked for centuries. Now scientists calculate that this female Greenland shark was the Earth’s oldest living animal with a backbone.

They estimated that the grey shark, part of the species named after Greenland, was born in the icy waters roughly 400 years ago and died only recently. That conclusion puts the entire species at the top of the longevity list.

Using a novel dating technique, an international team of biologists and physicists estimated the age of 28 dead female Greenland sharks based on tissue in their eyes. Eight of the sharks were probably 200 years or older and two likely date back more than three centuries, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Until now, that record holder was a bowhead whale that hit 211 years old, according to study lead author Julius Nielsen and AnAge, an animal longevity database.

The oldest of the Greenland sharks examined was nearly 5 metres and estimated to be 392 years old when it was caught around four years ago. But that calculation comes with a huge margin of error — plus or minus 120 years — due to the newness of the dating technique, said Nielsen, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

That means the shark was probably born sometime between 1500 and 1740 with the most likely birth year 1620.

“It’s an estimate. It’s not a determination,” Nielsen said. “It is the best we can do.”

Even at the lowest end of the margin error, the shark would have been 272 years old when it died, and still would be the longest-living animal with a backbone, Nielsen said. Other experts agreed.

Joao Pedro Magalhaes, a University of Liverpool ageing researcher, said because the study is based on an indirect measurement he wouldn’t necessarily concentrate on exact numbers, especially when they exceed 400 years, where the upper end of the margin of error goes.

“But the study is convincing enough for us to say that these animals live way longer than human beings and possibly longer than any other vertebrate,” said Magalhaes, who runs the longevity database and wasn’t part of Nielsen’s team.

Some animals without backbones live longer. An ocean quahog, a clam, lived 507 years and two different types of sponges are said to survive for 15,000 and 1,500 years.

While not surprised that Greenland sharks live a long time, “I’m really shocked by the magnitude of that longevity”, wrote Christopher Lowe, director of the shark lab at California State University Long Beach. He wasn’t part of the study, but praised it as creative and compelling.

Greenland sharks love cold water — preferring temperatures near freezing — and are all over the Arctic. The cold water and the slow metabolism that comes with it might have something to do with their long lives, Nielsen said. Lowe, in an e-mail, said “the rule of thumb is deep and cold = old when it comes to fishes.”

“I don’t know why they get as old, but I hope someone will find out,” Nielsen said.

For the age estimates, he uses a complex and indirect system that combines chemical tracking, mathematical modelling and growth measurements. He focuses on the shark eye lens. Those form while the shark is still developing inside the mother’s uterus and measures of carbon in them won’t change after birth, so it gives a good, rough sense of when the shark was born.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shark expert Allen Andrews said the dating method “is novel and is likely robust” but he said there are still a number of uncertainties.