Airbus Counter-UAV System
January 12th, 2016Via: Airbus PR:
Airbus Defense and Space, Inc. has developed a Counter-UAV System which detects illicit intrusions of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) over critical areas at long ranges and offers electronic countermeasures minimizing the risk of collateral damage. The system is on display through January 9 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada in Tech South Hall 2, booth No. 25500.
“All over the world, incidents with universally available small drones have revealed a security gap with regards to critical installations such as factories, airports or nuclear plants,” says Thomas Müller, head of Electronics and Border Security at Airbus Defence and Space. “As a specialist in defense electronics, we have all the technologies in our portfolio and the integration knowledge which are needed to set up a quick-response protection system with extremely low false alarm rates.”
The system offers very high effectiveness by combining sensor data from different sources with latest data fusion, signal analysis and jamming technologies. It uses operational radars, infrared cameras and direction finders from Airbus Defence and Space’s portfolio to identify the drone and assess its threat potential at ranges between 3.1 and 6.2 miles (5 and 10 Kilometers).
$1 Trillion Erased from Stocks So Far in 2016
January 12th, 2016Via: CNN:
Wall Street’s disastrous start to 2016 has caused roughly $1 trillion to vanish from the stock market.
The eye-popping losses highlight the deep fears that has gripped financial markets over China’s economic slowdown and crashing oil prices.
That one-two punch caused the Dow and S&P 500 to suffer their worst start to a trading year on record last week.
The S&P 500’s market valuation has plunged by $1.04 trillion since the end of 2015, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery
January 11th, 2016Building a refinery for Hitler? *pfft*
How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitler’s Rise to Power
Also see:
Wall Street & the Rise of Hitler by Antony C. Sutton
Via: New York Times:
The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.
The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.
But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.
Ford Testing Driverless Cars in Snow
January 11th, 2016Via: BBC:
Motoring giant Ford says it has conducted successful tests of its driverless cars in snowy conditions.
The company said it had been running sensor tests for more than a year, but was now driving autonomous cars in a controlled, snowy environment.
Snow presents a challenge to driverless cars because the sensors they use to detect road markings and hazards do not work well in wintery weather.
Google has also been testing its autonomous vehicles in the snow.
Emergent Chip Vastly Accelerates Deep Neural Networks
January 11th, 2016Via: The Next Platform:
Using nine different deep neural network benchmarking suites, EIE performed inference operations anywhere (depending on the benchmark) between 13X and 189X faster over regular CPU and also GPU implementations, although this is without any compression. Still, however, consider the power envelope. As the benchmarks show, the energy efficiency is better by between 3,000X on a GPU and 24,000X on CPU.
As Han describes, this is the first accelerator for spare and weight-sharing neural networks. “Operating directly on compressed networks enables the first large neural network models to fit in SRAM, which results in far better energy savings compared to accessing from external DRAM. EIE saves 65.16 percent energy by avoiding weight reference and arithmetic as the 70 percent of activations that are zero in a typical deep learning application.”
Attacks on Just Nine Substations in U.S. Could Cause Blackout Across Entire Grid
January 11th, 2016Via: Information Week:
Turns out free and publicly available information can be used to determine the most critical electric substations in the US, which if attacked, could result in a nationwide blackout.
Remember that million-dollar Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) study in 2013 that found that attacks on just nine electric substations in the US could cause a blackout across the entire grid? Well, a group of researchers decided to see just what it would take for a small group of domestic terrorists to identify the US’s most critical substations — using only free and public sources of information.
While FERC relied on confidential and private information in its shocking report and spent a whopping $1 million in research, researchers at iSIGHT Partners used only so-called open-source intelligence, at a cost of just $15,000 total for 250 man-hours by their estimates. The Wall Street Journal, which obtained and first reported on the confidential FERC report, never publicly revealed the crucial substations ID’ed by FERC for obvious reasons, nor does iSIGHT plan to disclose publicly the ones it found.
Organic Farmers Win GMO Fight in Jackson County, Oregon
January 11th, 2016Via EcoWatch:
Organic farmers are racking up new victories in the fight against “franken-food,” as a growing number of counties line up to bar genetically engineered (GE) crop cultivation throughout the country.
A federal judge in Jackson County, Oregon, recently upheld a consent decree that designates the region a “GE-free zone,” a ruling which officially protects the decree from appeal, granting new protections to farmers, consumers and the environment.
That means organic and traditional farms in Jackson County will be protected from chemicals produced by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and other biotech giants. The ruling follows the passage of other similar ordinances in at least eight U.S. counties, including in Hawaii, California and Washington, along with another Oregon county.
Germany on the Brink
January 11th, 2016Via: New York Times:
With the current migration, though, we’re in uncharted territory. The issue isn’t just that immigrants are arriving in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of thousands. It’s that a huge proportion of them are teenage and twentysomething men.
In Sweden, for instance, which like Germany has had an open door, 71 percent of all asylum applicants in 2015 were men. Among the mostly-late-teenage category of “unaccompanied minors,” as Valerie Hudson points out in an important essay for Politico,” the ratios were even more skewed: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”
As Hudson notes, these trends have immediate implications for civil order — young men are, well, young men; societies with skewed sex ratios tend to be unstable; and many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Europe.
But there’s also a longer term issue, beyond the need to persuade new arrivals that — to quote from a Norwegian curriculum for migrants — in Europe “to force someone into sex is not permitted.”
When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work. That’s why the Muslim population in Europe has been growing only at one percentage point a decade; it’s why many of the Turkish and North African immigrants who arrived in Germany and France decades ago are reasonably Europeanized today.
But if you add a million (or millions) of people, most of them young men, in one short period, you get a very different kind of shift.
In the German case the important number here isn’t the country’s total population, currently 82 million. It’s the twentysomething population, which was less than 10 million in 2013 (and of course already included many immigrants). In that cohort and every cohort afterward, the current influx could have a transformative effect.
How transformative depends on whether these men eventually find a way to bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.
But it could also double or treble this migration’s demographic impact, pushing Germany toward a possible future in which half the under-40 population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and their children.
If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.
You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence.
Cologne Gangs Attack Groups of Foreigners as New Year’s Eve Assault Complaints Grow
January 11th, 2016Via: Guardian:
Gangs attacked groups of foreigners in four separate incidents on Sunday in Cologne, the city where dozens of New Year’s Eve assaults on women took place, German police have said, as the government warned against letting the incident lead to suspicion of all migrants.
Cologne police said on Monday afternoon that the victims were two Pakistanis, two Syrians and a group of Africans.
Police said they had stopped and checked 153 people on Sunday evening, 13 of whom were known members of far-right organisations and a further 80 of whom belonged to rocker gangs.
They confirmed they had received information in advance about a “peaceful walkabout” by members of far-right gangs planned on social media for Sunday evening.
In response, police said they would ramp up their presence in Cologne’s inner city with daily special patrols.
Related: Swedish police to Investigate Sexual Assault Cover-Up Allegations
2 Texas Billionaires Bought Up 38,000 Acres of Idaho Land
January 11th, 2016Via: The Olympian:
Over the past six years, two Texas billionaire brothers have bought about 38,000 acres of land on the Joseph Plains in Idaho County and apparently have closed access to local residents for hunting and recreation.
According to the Idaho County Assessor’s Office, beginning in 2008, Farris and Dan Wilks of Cisco, Texas, started purchasing ranches, including the Evergreen Land and Cattle Co., owned by the Hitchcock family, and the Robbins-France ranch in western Idaho County, worth a combined total of $2.4 million. The final transaction took place in September.
Several attempts to reach the Wilks brothers or their spokespeople for comment were unsuccessful.
