“The Pentagon Has No Clue How Many Weapons It Has Lost to ISIS”
January 25th, 2016Lost. *wink*
None of this is by design. Oh no. Shit happens.
They forgot to mention the stacks of cash: 2011: $6.7 Billion In Cash Missing in Iraq
Via: Mother Jones:
For more than a decade, the United States has supplied huge quantities of weapons and military hardware to the Iraqi government—and a large chunk of that equipment has disappeared and landed in the hands of ISIS fighters and members of Iranian-backed Shiite militias responsible for massacring civilians. Everything from M-16s and bullets to Humvees and tanks have been lost. But neither the US nor Iraqi governments can say how much US-supplied materiel has been diverted to militant groups or how it’s ending up there.
Losing weapons to extremists and insurgents has long been a problem for the US military and the Iraqi army, but it became more urgent after ISIS seized chunks of Iraq in 2014, overrunning Iraqi troops and sweeping up their weapons. With that equipment, ISIS solidified its hold on its captured territory and drew the United States back into Iraq. Still, the Pentagon has not been able to monitor the loss of its weapons and other supplies to ISIS. “The bottom line is that the US military does not have a means to track equipment that has been taken from the Government of Iraq by ISIL,” Commander Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, wrote in an email to Mother Jones, using the government’s preferred acronym for ISIS.
More Babies Are Being Born with Organs Outside Their Bodies, and Experts Have No Idea Why
January 25th, 2016Related? Pesticides in Paradise: Hawaii’s Spike in Birth Defects Puts Focus on GM Crops:
At a Starbucks just outside Honolulu, Sidney Johnson, a pediatric surgeon at the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children who oversees all children born in Hawaii with major birth defects and operates on many, says he’s been thinking about pesticides a lot lately. The reason: he’s noticed that the number of babies born here with their abdominal organs outside, a rare condition known as gastroschisis, has grown from three a year in the 1980s to about a dozen now.
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Via: Washington Post:
When Brooke gave birth, she wasn’t able to hold her newborn daughter against her, feel the baby’s tiny chest rise and fall as it issued its first, tremendous wail.
Instead, she got only a brief glimpse of her child, Anna, before the little girl was whisked away into surgery.
What she saw was disquieting: Her infant daughter’s intestines protruded outside her body, dark and slick and alien-looking. It would take a nerve-wracking operation and weeks in the intensive care unit until her internal organs were back were they belonged and baby Anna could finally come home, Brooke wrote for the CDC (the post does not give her last name).
Anna was born with gastroschisis, a rare birth defect that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said has become worryingly more common in recent years, particularly for young African American mothers.
In a report published Friday, the public health agency said that it found 30 percent more cases of the disease between 2006 and 2012 than it did from 1995 to 2005. Among African American mothers who were younger than 20, the number of babies born with the disease jumped 263 percent.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts
January 24th, 2016This is what Soviet-style systems do. The U.S. Government is the enabler via the student loan scam.
Via: The Atlantic:
Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats.
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One adjunct teacher, JJ, posting a comment online, calculated his/her pay as an adjunct as $65 per student per semester, adding up to the princely sum of $2,000, noting that “each student paid $45,000 in tuition and took about 4 classes a semester.… I think their parents would be rather upset to learn that only $65 of the $45,000 went to pay one professor for an entire semester.”
“Zika Virus”: El Salvador Asks Women Not to Get Pregnant Until 2018
January 23rd, 2016Via: Washington Post:
The rapid spread of the Zika virus has prompted Latin American governments to urge women not to get pregnant for up to two years, an extraordinary precaution aimed at avoiding birth defects believed to be linked to the mosquito-borne illness.
What until recently was a seemingly routine public health problem for countries that are home to a certain type of mosquito has morphed into a potentially culture-shaping phenomenon in which the populations of several nations have been asked to delay procreation. The World Health Organization says at least 20 countries or territories in the region, including Barbados and Bolivia, Guadeloupe and Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Panama, have registered transmission of the virus.
The Story Behind National Reconnaissance Office’s Octopus Logo
January 21st, 2016Never mind the nauseating gibberish in the release from NRO. I thought this commentary was comedy gold.
Via: Muckrock:
The logo was widely lampooned as emblematic of the intelligence community’s tone-deafness to public sentiment. Incidentally, an octopus enveloping the planet also so happens to be the logo of SPECTRE, the international criminal syndicate that James Bond is always thwarting. So there’s that.
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As for the question of “why a giant octopus,” the NRO offers up these two clunky paragraphs, written with all the verve of a ninth-grader who only made it two-thirds of the way through the book.
Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
January 20th, 2016Via: California Institute of Technology:
Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.
The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.
“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”
Oil Breaks Below $27, Down Over 5%
January 20th, 2016S&P500 October 2014 low is taken out intraday.
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S&P500 leaning over, real ugly. Through all recent weekly supports now.
If anyone at the PPT is awake at the switch… This is it.
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USO bids $8
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This move is nuts.
Crude Oil Feb 16 (CLG16.NYM) -NY Mercantile
$26.86 Down $1.60(5.62%) 11:07AM EST
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Via: Reuters:
Oil futures extended their decline on Wednesday, with U.S. crude touching its lowest since 2003, as a global supply glut bumped up against bearish financial news that sparked deeper worries over demand.
DARPA: Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide
January 20th, 2016Via: U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:
A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. The goal is to achieve this communications link in a biocompatible device no larger than one cubic centimeter in size, roughly the volume of two nickels stacked back to back.
The program, Neural Engineering System Design (NESD), stands to dramatically enhance research capabilities in neurotechnology and provide a foundation for new therapies.
“Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.”
Among the program’s potential applications are devices that could compensate for deficits in sight or hearing by feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain at a resolution and experiential quality far higher than is possible with current technology.
Neural interfaces currently approved for human use squeeze a tremendous amount of information through just 100 channels, with each channel aggregating signals from tens of thousands of neurons at a time. The result is noisy and imprecise. In contrast, the NESD program aims to develop systems that can communicate clearly and individually with any of up to one million neurons in a given region of the brain.
Neurosurgeon Claims Successful Head Transplant on Monkey
January 20th, 2016Via: Independent:
The scientist who claims to be about to carry out the first human head transplant says that he has successfully done the procedure on a monkey.
Maverick neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has tested the procedure in experiments on monkeys and human cadavers, he told New Scientist.
Dr Canavero says that the success shows that his plan to transplant a human’s head onto a donor body is in place. He says that the procedure will be ready before the end of 2017 and could eventually become a way of treating complete paralysis.
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The newly-revealed success is likely to be an attempt to help generate funds for the ultimate aim of giving a head transplant to Valery Spriridonov, the Russian patient who has been chosen to be the first to undergo the procedure. Dr Canavero has said that he will need a huge amount of money to fund the team of surgeons and scientists involved, and that he intends to ask Mark Zuckerberg to help fund it.
IBM Watson Head Mike Rhodin On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
January 20th, 2016Did you ever read, The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson?
Do you remember Nell’s copy of the Primer?
But to call it a book does not really do it justice — it is really a massively parallel computer in which each page can dynamically rearrange itself to tell a story.
Check this out, from the piece below about IBM’s Watson AI:
A company called Elemental Path has built and branded a product called CogniToys. They are shipping a dinosaur that is connected to Watson. It allows children to talk to their toys, but have a knowledge base on the back end that not only can answer them, but can adapt to their age and make sure the answers are age appropriate, and also use the information in that dialogue to start to track the progress of the child developmentally. That is just a great ecosystem example of using the technology for engagement.
Mmm hmm.
Via: Forbes:
The key breakthrough was that we were able to feed the system natural language text: reference material, the internet, Wikipedia, web pages. In essence, we taught the system to read. The process of building a system initially is about figuring out what domain your application is going to be part of. Curating, in many ways figuring out what the information sources that are important within your profession or within that domain are, and then ingesting that information into the system or having the system read it all.
The second step in that is to create a level of ground truth around training the system. Think of this in the analogy of when you are in school. The first thing a teacher will have you do is read a book. The next thing they will do is ask you questions about the book so they can figure out whether you understood it. Watson operates much the same way: it reads the information that you have decided is pertinent to your application, and then you train or test it based on asking questions and checking the answers and creating a level of grounding underlying truth. Then you continue to update the system with more information, and that ground truth continues to evolve and learn with machine learning algorithms over time. The idea is, simply put, you read a lot of information, you make sure you understand it, and then you start to become more “expert” at that information. The basis of the system is that you read it, you train it, and then you continue to learn through use– much like we do. It is mirroring the human learning process.
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You see the early stages of what I think is going to be the third technological revolution getting started here. I think of this as the information revolution. This is something that is going to be with us for decades, and we are maybe in year three of something that is going to last for forty to fifty years.
