UC Davis Spent At Least $175,000 on PR Related to Pepper-Spraying of Students
April 14th, 2016Via: Sacramento Bee:
UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.
The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.
Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”
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The objectives Nevins outlined for the contract included “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor.”
That objective was to be achieved by advising UC Davis officials on the use of Google platforms as part of “an aggressive and comprehensive online campaign to eliminate the negative search results for UC Davis and the Chancellor.”
Online reputation management is a growing field in which companies offer to improve Google and other search engine results by churning out positive news stories, press releases and announcements to minimize previous negative results.
Japan’s Demographic Time Bomb
April 14th, 2016Via: Vox:
Japan has a major demographic problem: 26 percent of its population is elderly, the largest percent of any country in the world. That’s because Japan’s birthrate is declining, as is its overall population. In other words, a huge chunk of its population is getting old and leaving the workforce, and not enough people are being born to take their place.
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By 2050, the OECD projects, nearly 40 percent of Japan’s population will be elderly.
This is very, very bad: Countries need new people to support the older ones who can’t work and to generate economic growth. If Japan doesn’t turn its birthrate problem around, or somehow make each of its workers a hell of a lot more productive, it’s in for a disaster.
“The working age population is falling by about 1 percent per year, and the rate of shrinkage will eventually approach 1.7 percent per year, so that even productivity growth of two percent or more will deliver very low aggregate or per capita growth,” the OECD report explains. “There will simply be no way to sustain high living standards and quality public standards in a ‘super-aging’ Japan unless the country is able to achieve much higher rates of productivity growth.”
The Plan to Send Featherweight Robotic Spacecraft to the Nearest Star at One-Fifth of the Speed of Light
April 13th, 2016100 billion-watt laser???
Via: Guardian:
In an unprecedented boost for interstellar travel, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner and the world’s most famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking have announced $100m (£70m) for research into a 20-year voyage to the nearest stars, at one fifth of the speed of light.
Breakthrough Starshot – the third Breakthrough initiative in the past four years – will test the knowhow and technologies necessary to send a featherweight robot spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years: that is, 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres or 25 trillion miles.
A 100 billion-watt laser-powered light beam would accelerate a “nanocraft” – something weighing little more than a sheet of paper and driven by a sail not much bigger than a child’s kite, fashioned from fabric only a few hundred atoms in thickness – to the three nearest stars at 60,000km a second.
Milner, a Russian-born billionaire investor who began as a physicist, was one of the founders of the Breakthrough prizes, the biggest in science, announced in 2012 and awarded for fundamental research in physics, life sciences and mathematics. Last year, he and Professor Stephen Hawking of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge announced another $100m Breakthrough Listen initiative to step up the search for extraterrestrial life beyond the solar system. The project has just released its first data from stars within 16 light years of Earth. The entrepreneur describes science as his “hobby.”
Japan Prepares for Release of Tritium from Fukushima Plant
April 12th, 2016Via: Japan Today:
To dump or not to dump a little-discussed substance is the question brewing in Japan as it grapples with the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima five years ago. The substance is tritium.
The radioactive material is nearly impossible to remove from the huge quantities of water used to cool melted-down reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which was wrecked by the massive tsunami in northeastern Japan in March 2011.
The water is still accumulating since 300 tons are needed every day to keep the reactors chilled. Some is leaking into the ocean.
Huge tanks lined up around the plant, at last count 1,000 of them, each hold hundreds of tons of water that have been cleansed of radioactive cesium and strontium but not of tritium.
Ridding water of tritium has been carried out in laboratories. But it’s an effort that would be extremely costly at the scale required for the Fukushima plant, which sits on the Pacific coast. Many scientists argue it isn’t worth it and say the risks of dumping the tritium-laced water into the sea are minimal.
Their calls to simply release the water into the Pacific Ocean are alarming many in Japan and elsewhere.
Rosa Yang, a nuclear expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, based in Palo Alto, California, who advises Japan on decommissioning reactors, believes the public angst is uncalled for. She says a Japanese government official should simply get up in public and drink water from one of the tanks to convince people it’s safe.
Swiss Banker Whistleblower: CIA Behind Panama Papers
April 12th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world.
Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive amounts of tax evasion by Americans with secret accounts in Switzerland. By the end of his whistleblowing career, Birkenfeld had served more than two years in a U.S. federal prison, been awarded $104 million by the IRS for his information and shattered the foundations of more than a century of Swiss banking secrecy.
In an exclusive interview Tuesday from Munich, Birkenfeld said he doesn’t think the source of the 11 million documents stolen from a Panamanian law firm should automatically be considered a whistleblower like himself. Instead, he said, the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by a U.S. intelligence agency.
“The CIA I’m sure is behind this, in my opinion,” Birkenfeld said.
Birkenfeld pointed to the fact that the political uproar created by the disclosures have mainly impacted countries with tense relationships with the United States. “The very fact that we see all these names surface that are the direct quote-unquote enemies of the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Argentina and we don’t see one U.S. name. Why is that?” Birkenfeld said. “Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation.”
Asked why the U.S. would leak information that has also been damaging to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, a major American ally, Birkenfeld said the British leader was likely collateral damage in a larger intelligence operation.
“If you’ve got NSA and CIA spying on foreign governments they can certainly get into a law firm like this,” Birkenfeld said. “But they selectively bring the information to the public domain that doesn’t hurt the U.S. in any shape or form. That’s wrong. And there’s something seriously sinister here behind this.”
Goldman Sachs to Pay $5 Billion in Damages Over Mortgage Bond Swindling
April 11th, 2016Via: Reuters:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc has agreed to pay $5.06 billion to settle claims that it misled mortgage bond investors during the financial crisis, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Monday.
The settlement, which Goldman disclosed in January, stems from the firm’s conduct in its packaging, securitization, marketing and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities between 2007 and 2009, the Justice Department said.
Investors suffered billions of dollars in losses from the securities bought during the period, the department said.
A Goldman Sachs spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
The settlement comprises a $2.385 billion civil penalty and $1.8 billion in other relief, including funds for homeowners whose mortgages exceed the value of their property, as well as distressed borrowers.
High Radiation Triggers Alert at Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant
April 11th, 2016Via: Times Free Press:
The Tennessee Valley Authority activated the lowest of four emergency notifications Wednesday afternoon when high radiation levels were detected in a main steamline at the newest reactor at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama.
TVA detected the high radiation condition around 3:35 p.m., central daylight time, on Wednesday. But the notice of an unusual event was cleared almost immediately. TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said the high radiation levels were quickly lowered to acceptable levels and there was no risk of radiation exposure or other safety problems to the public or plant workers.
New Zealand: Solar Tax, “Desperate Move to Squeeze Every Last Dollar Out of a Dying Business Model”
April 9th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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They’re going to gouge people while battery prices are still high. The NZ electricity cartel knows it only has a couple of years left to screw people before grid defection sweeps over this place like a tsunami. In the meantime, get used to hearing about how solar isn’t fair and solar users kill kittens, etc. from the CEOs of the electricity cartel.
Via: SolarCity:
“Trustpower is supporting a solar tax when the Electricity Authority says the move is out of step with its recommendations.”
“Just six months ago Trustpower told delegates at the Sustainable Electricity Association conference that it was commercially logical for generators and retailers, who have billions of dollars of assets, to try and delay the take-up of solar for as long as they can.
“They know it’s only a matter of time before there’s a massive uptake of solar and delaying tactics, like a solar tax, are a desperate move to squeeze every last dollar out of a dying business model.
“Utilities have a fundamental financial incentive of ‘build more to profit more’. This conflicts with the public interest of building and maintaining an affordable grid which uses current assets and renewable technologies to reduce costs and to create a sustainable and robust energy service.
“The old financial incentive model was originally constructed to encourage the expansion of electricity access, but it’s now broken and new technology is increasingly making it irrelevant and costly both for consumers and the planet.
“Adding distributed energy systems, which generate electricity at the point of use, will help lower overall electricity prices and make the grid more resilient.”
Google Owned Schaft Unveils New Bipedal Robot
April 9th, 2016Via: IEEE:
Right now, the New Economic Summit (NEST) 2016 conference is going on in Tokyo, Japan. One of the keynote speakers is Andy Rubin. Rubin was in charge of Google’s robotics program in 2013, when the company (now Alphabet) acquired a fistful of some of the most capable and interesting robotics companies in the world. One of those companies was SCHAFT, which originated at the JSK Robotics Laboratory at the University of Tokyo and is best known for winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by an absurd amount.
We haven’t heard anything from SCHAFT over the past three years, and all we know is that they’re now part of X, Alphabet’s experimental technology lab. Somehow, Rubin convinced them to show up to his NEST keynote, and they brought a brand new bipedal robot along with some absolutely incredible video of what they’ve been up to.
Crewless ‘Drone Ships’ Will be Sailing the Seas by 2020
April 9th, 2016Via: Telegraph:
Remote-controlled “drone ships” will be plying the sealanes without crews on board by the end of the decade, according to Rolls-Royce.
The FTSE 100 company best known for its aircraft engines is heading a consortium working to develop the technology needed for ships controlled from land bases, making them cheaper to run.
“This is happening. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” said Oskar Levander, head of innovation for Rolls’s marine unit. “We will see a remote controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade.”
