The inner voice ..

as i claim to be a mania of computer forensic, i dont seem to be one yet.  i was much delighted that Prof Azizah stopped me in the cafe, just to tell me that my research proposal was ok. Grin..thank God, as it meant two things: first: i can start the research seriously and second: she agreed to supervise me.  Prof Azizah is a ’sought after’ supervisor for computer forensic and stegano.

So here’s the ‘big’ area that give me ‘butterfly in the stomach:

- i need to make sure my vmware and virtualbox behave as i want

- i need to understand the existing complexity of email timestamp

- i need to understand of the flow between web-based email and client-based email

- i need to understand how zeitline works if i were to use it in my simulation analysis

-i just read about Paraben Email Examiner, which i have not explore yet but already spark my curiosity

there are so much work to be done, but my passion will keep me solid, God willing

by Sheikh Salman al-Oadah|

There is an old saying that goes: “The calmer the ocean, the deeper it is.” Another old saying goes: “An empty cart makes more noise than the full cart.”

These sayings point to the same thing: that calm is a virtue. There can be no doubt about the truth of this point.

The human mind works at its best when the surrounding environment is calm and settled. Likewise, it works at its best when the thinker’s temperament is calm. When the human mind is beset with external or internal commotion, its powers become weak and it more easily falls prey to rashness and reckless passion.

It is a strategy of debate to get one’s opponent angry, since once the opponent loses his or her composure, his or her defeat is almost imminent, especially if one is able to keep one’s cool and a smile on one’s face.

Allah describes those who believe and rely on their Lord as being: “those who avoid the worst sins and shameful deeds, and, when they are angry even then forgive.” [Sûrah al-Shûrâ: 37]

The Prophet (peace be upon him) warns us that: “Anger is a burning ember in the human heart that is stoked up.” [Musnad Ahmad (11158)]

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24 December 2008 by Devin Powell

PROFESSIONAL pickpocket Apollo Robbins has an uncanny ability to control minds. He can manipulate people to an extraordinary degree, drawing their attention away from his thieving hands as he purloins watches and wallets in plain sight. These days, Robbins gives his ill-gotten gains back - he has given up a life of crime to become an entertainer - but most of his victims still have no idea they’ve been robbed until it’s too late.

Watching Robbins at work is like watching somebody with supernatural powers. Yet, like his fellow conjurors, Robbins deceives his targets using nothing more than a finely honed understanding of human psychology. “I think of myself as a folk psychologist,” he says. “It’s all about developing an instinct for how the human mind works.”

After years of ignoring magic, researchers are starting to realise that the methods magicians use to manipulate the human mind might hold important insights into how it works. “We’re all thinking about the same questions,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We just come at the problems from different angles.”

Magic is all about appearing to break the laws of nature - making solid objects appear or disappear, sawing human beings in half, reading people’s minds, and so on. The laws of nature, of course, are inviolable, which is why magicians target the human brain instead, packed as it is with glitches and weaknesses that can be exploited to create the illusion of doing the impossible. And they’re brilliant at it: magic tricks only work if you fool all of the people all of the time.

Cognitive neuroscientists also have a long-standing interest in tricks of the mind, as these are a useful source of insight into how the brain works. Visual illusions, for example, have taught them a huge amount about how the brain processes visual information. Now they’re dipping into the treasure chest of cognitive illusions provided by magic.

Over the past couple of years, neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called “magicology”. If successful, both sides stand to benefit. By plundering the magicians’ book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can’t explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works. Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn’t already know about. “The real proof that a science of magic has come of age will be when we can use science to build a better magic trick,” says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.

According to his fellow psychologist Gustav Kuhn at the University of Durham in the UK, a good starting point for the science of magic is the magicians’ own classification of their art into three broad types of trick: misdirection, illusion and forcing.

Misdirection lies at the heart of magic. It is the art of diverting the audience’s attention away from what magicians call the “method” - the act of deception itself (see diagram).

In neuroscience terms, misdirection relies on the fact that the brain has a very limited supply of attention. Over the past decade or so it has become clear just how scarce attention is: focusing on one thing can make you oblivious to other things that would otherwise be obvious. This bizarre phenomenon is called inattention blindness, and it was famously demonstrated in 1999 by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They made a video of six people in a circle bouncing two basketballs around. When asked to count the number of bounces, around half of the people who watch the video fail to notice a man in gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game and beating his chest (New Scientist, 18 November 2000, p 28).

Not surprisingly, magicians use this powerful effect all the time to pull off blatant deceptions right under our noses. Kuhn recently demonstrated this using a trick where he makes a cigarette and lighter “disappear”. In truth he simply drops them into his lap when your narrow spotlight of attention is pointing elsewhere.

Right before your eyes

By tracking eye movements as people watched a video of the trick, Kuhn showed that people miss the deception even when they’re looking directly at it. It works because, at the crucial moments, he makes attention-grabbing gestures and eye movements that divert attention (but not gaze) away from the action. If you watch the video a few times it’s hard to believe that you could ever fall for it.

Magicians are so adept at manipulating attention that cognitive scientists have started bringing them into their labs to learn more. Susana Martinez-Conde of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, is one. “My hope is that the cognitive illusions of magicians can help scientists understand awareness, just as visual illusions have helped us to understand sight,” she says. To that end she recently started working with Robbins.

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my comment: an interesting article on new innovation. “Software that can offer real-time emotional advice” sounds too good to be true.  Nevertheless, it will benefits some people..dot dot..as it claims “a software agent based on a learning algorithm that has been trained to recognise abusive comments”.  Unless the comments are in local dialect..you are safe. Do not forget to read the comments too!

• 18:03 08 May 2009 by Tom Simonite
• For similar stories, visit the Invention Topic Guide

The internet allows anyone with the appropriate hardware to freely express themselves to the world at large using a website or blog. But we are not sharing our thoughts with only other humans: web pages are read by software agents all the time, including search engine spiders and spambots.

Now a new kind of agent is starting to roam the web that can understand the emotional content of what we write – and they could soon arrive on your desktop too.

These “sentiment analysis” tools are a branch of a wider area of computer science that is trying to teach computers to understand the feelings expressed in text just as well as humans do, and the commercial applications of such technology are already starting to be realised.

The early adopters of these tools are the owners of big brand names in a world where company reputations are affected by customer blogs as much as advertising campaigns. A small but growing group of firms is developing tools that can trawl blogs and online comments, gauging the emotional responses brought about by the company or its products.

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by Sheikh Sâlih al-Mughâmisî, professor at the Islamic University in Madinah

original source from islamtoday.com

Faith is the most precious of possessions. It is the greatest gift. Allah has made it the distinction of those who are destined for Paradise.

Allah says: “Are those who believe like those who are iniquitous? They are not the same.” [Sûrah al-Sajdah: 18]

We must value the gift of faith. Allah withheld the gift of faith from some of the closest relatives of His Messengers, like Abraham’s father and one of Noah’s sons. They were so close to those noble Prophets, but they were not blessed to have faith. Be thankful that Allah has bestowed this blessing on you. We must praise Him for giving us this gift. We would not have been guided had it not been for Allah guiding us.

We should take care of this most valuable gift. We must safeguard it. We must not let it deteriorate or fall into peril. How do we do this?

It is well-known that faith increases and decreases. Faith increases most effectively through the performance of good deeds.

Abû Hurayrah relates the following:

Once when the Prophet (peace be upon him) was sitting with his Companions, he asked: “Who among you started his day fasting?”

Abû Bakr said: “I am fasting.”

Then the Prophet (peace be upon him) asked: “Who among you has visited the sick?”

Abû Bakr said: “I have.”

Then the Prophet asked: “Who among you gave food to the poor?”

Abû Bakr who answered: “I have.”

The Prophet then asked: “Who attended a funeral procession today?”

Abû Bakr again replied in the affirmative.

At this point, the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “These deeds do not come together in a single person except that the person is admitted into Paradise.” [Sahîh Muslim]

Consider how Abû Bakr engaged in all of these good deeds in a single day. We should not be surprised to know that, on another occasion, the Prophet (peace be upon him) said about Abû Bakr: “Abû Bakr’s faith weighs as much as the faith of the rest of my followers put together.”

In order to renew your faith and increase it, read the Qur’ân. Put your mind into it, and think carefully about what you are reading. There is no better way to remember Allah or beseech His favor than by using His own words.

Also, read the stories of the Prophets to learn about the exemplary lives of those who possessed the greatest faith of all. We can see how Abraham (peace be upon him) was willing to sacrifice his own son for the love of Allah, how he was willing to let Nimrod cast him into a bonfire, and how he gave hospitality to his guests, His heart was sincere in everything that he did and he always turned penitently to his Lord. Because of this, he earned the epithet “Friend of Allah.”

“And Allah took Abraham as a friend.” [Sûrah al-Nisâ': 125]

When we read about the lives of the Prophets and contemplate on the lessons that their lives teach us, it increases our faith and bolsters our conviction. Consider when Allah says: “They are the ones whom Allah guided, so follow their guidance.” [Sûrah al-An`âm: 90]

To further increase your faith, visit the graveyard. See how everyone’ s state in the physical world is made equal by death. Then consider how the status of their souls differs. How many believing souls are saying in expectation: “My Lord! Bring on the Day of Resurrection!” How many other souls are pleading in fear and dread: “My Lord! Do not bring on the Day of Judgment.”

May Allah increase us in faith and make us all God-fearing.

* this article prompt me as sometimes we(i for sure) incline toward self-justification..enjoy reading and hopefully we get something out of it *

by ‘Abd al-`Azîz `Alî al-Suwayd

All of us – to a greater or lesser extent – have a tendency to justify and rationalize our mistakes. It is part of our mindset that makes us try to flee from criticism and from having to make amends. At the very least, we sometimes try to find an excuse for our errors instead of shouldering the full weight of the blame.

This mindset can surface in all kinds of situations, even in our most private thoughts. It is a mindset bolstered and nourished by emotion, and if it comes to dominate our thinking, we can lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

This is because the power of emotional sentiment and self-interest, when coupled with a self-justifying mindset, is persuasive and dangerous. A person with this frame of mind is always ready to cover up his bad deeds or make them seem less onerous than they really are. The person does this at the expense of reason and logic. He ceases to think clearly. He only sees what serves his selfish interests, what absolves him from blame and responsibility.

In his mind, the fault is always someone else’s. Worse still, it is never just an innocent mistake. That other person is always deliberately and maliciously in the wrong and without any excuse.

When we let our thoughts take us in this dangerous direction, we cease to be self-critical. Instead of acknowledging our mistakes and resolving to avoid them in the future, we become determined to commit the same mistake again and again.

The most serious problem is a person’s ability to justify to himself his deliberate errors and misdeeds. It is possible for a person to convince himself that his worst transgressions and acts of injustice are true and correct. He can reconcile in his mind the most blatant contradictions with far-fetched interpretations that make integrity and deception synonymous terms. He ceases to distinguish his rights from the rights of others, his personal interests from the needs of society.

The self-justifying mind is one of oversimplifications. It is also very dismissive. It plays down the harm that one’s bad and selfish deeds causes for other people, for society, and for the environment. When it cannot deny that harm, it always finds a way to rationalize it. By doing so, it belies the basic values and ethics that the person would otherwise be very well aware of and that are essential for the proper functioning of human society.

Turning a blind eye to one’s mistakes is an easy way to avoid guilty feelings and a sense of responsibility. However, this means that those mistakes will never be confronted and remedied. They invariably becoming larger, uglier, and more deeply-entrenched over time. Ignoring mistakes or justifying them does not make those mistakes go away. The only way we can make positive changes within ourselves is to be true to ourselves and in our dealings with others.

[exerpted from the Arabic article "al-`Aql al-Tabrîrî fî al-Fi`l al-Ijtimâ`î"]

• 11:27 04 September 2006 by John Pickrell
• For similar stories, visit the Nanotechnology Topic Guide

Imagine a world where microscopic medical implants patrol our arteries, diagnosing ailments and fighting disease; where military battle-suits deflect explosions; where computer chips are no bigger than specks of dust; and where clouds of miniature space probes transmit data from the atmospheres of Mars or Titan.

Many incredible claims have been made about the future’s nanotechnological applications, but what exactly does nano mean, and why has controversy plagued this emerging technology?

Nanotechnology is science and engineering at the scale of atoms and molecules. It is the manipulation and use of materials and devices so tiny that nothing can be built any smaller.

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*extract from the Fatwa Archive from Islamtoday.com *

Question: I feel that I have a hard heart. I do not feel humility before my Lord, though I am constant in my prayers and strive to perform righteous deeds. What can I do?

Answered by Amal bint Fadl al-Jamîl, professor at al-Imâm Islamic University

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on personal encounter last 2 days..

my son and i was on our way to the car right infront of the ELD block, we bumped into 2 young men, which I believed are not IIUM staff(looking at the visitor tag pinned on their shirt).  As usual, the sight of stray cats always caught my son’s attention.  I had to wait until he’s done with the cats.   These 2 men noticed my son, and commented “eh…macam muka Arab”.  I just kept quiet, and one of the man looked at me and asked ” ada darah Arab ye?  ”Ha ah”..was my replied.   “Bapa dia Arab ye?”..”Ha ah” again the same reply I gave.  I did not plan to answer further, and I was thinking of walking  away but my son was still ‘eyeing’ the cats.  

“Arab dari mana kak?”..Not to be rude, I answered him briefly.  ”OO…patut la hensem sikit, klu la dari XXXX..”replied him with a big grin.  To that, I forced myself to ’sengih’ reluctantly, though I feel disgusted with the remark.  I knew he meant to compliment my son, but if the origin of my hubby is from XXXXX could be the other way around for him.

In a first place, I dont know whether he was trying to be funny, or friendly, but I concluded that he was rude and racist .  When people speaks Arabic that doesnt make them an Arab..this man definitely doesnt know that XXXX is not Arab.   He thinks all people from XXXX are not good looking or can never produce a good looking offspings.  I came to know a family, where the father is from XXXX and the mother is from Swiss and their kids are damn gorgeous.

Tired and disgust with people having this kinds of mentality

”

dont you dare callin me ..

when you did not know what i had gone thru..

dont you dare think i am no good ..