Flint, Michigan: State of Emergency Declared Over High Levels of Lead in Children’s Blood
December 15th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?
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The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.
The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency.
“The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement.
The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.
All Schools in Los Angeles Unified School District Closed Due to Some Sort of Threat
December 15th, 2015Update: Hoax
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Via: ABC7:
All Los Angeles Unified School District schools are closed on Tuesday after a threat was made against multiple schools in the district, officials said.
LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines said that the district received an electronic threat that mentioned backpacks and other objects. Cortines said the threat was broad and did not point out specific schools.
Cortines called this threat “rare” and said the decision to close all schools for the day was made out of an abundance of caution.
ISIS Twitter Accounts Run from British Government IP Addresses
December 15th, 2015Maybe honeypots. Maybe not.
In other news, ISIS Armed with U.S. Weapons.
Via: Russia Today:
At least three Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) supporters’ social media accounts are run from IP addresses linked to the British government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), a group of hackers has claimed.
The group of teenage computer experts, known as ‘VandaSec,’ have unearthed details of internet protocol (IP) addresses used by three jihadists to access Twitter accounts used to carry out online recruitment.
The addresses were thought to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection they linked back to the DWP’s London offices, according to the Daily Mirror.
“Don’t you think that’s strange?” one of the hackers asked the Daily Mirror.
“We traced these accounts back to London, the home of the British intelligence services,” they added.
This revelation has sparked speculation that someone inside the government is running IS-supporting accounts, or they were created by intelligence services to trap wannabe terrorists.
The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
December 14th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There’s no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Antidepressants Taken During Pregnancy Increase Risk of Autism by 87 Percent
December 14th, 2015Via: ResearchGate:
Using antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), during the 2nd/3rd trimesters of pregnancy increases the risk of having a child with autism (87 percent increased risk of autism with any antidepressants; more than doubling the risk with SSRI use specifically) – this risk is above and beyond the risk associated with maternal depression alone (maternal depression was associated with a 20 percent increased risk of autism in our study). Given the mounting evidence showing increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome with antidepressant use during pregnancy, our study shows that depression should be treated with other options (other than antidepressants) during this critical period.
OpenAI Hopes to Prevent Superintelligence Doom
December 14th, 2015Via: Medium:
Essentially, OpenAI is a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizenry.
Air Force proposes $3-Billion Plan to Vastly Expand Its Drone Program
December 14th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times:
The Air Force wants to vastly expand its drone program over the next five years by doubling the number of pilots and deploying them to bases in California and elsewhere to give commanders better intelligence and more firepower.
Disney’s ‘FaceDirector’ Software
December 14th, 2015Via: Engadget:
The new tool out of Disney Research’s labs could turn an ingénue’s semi-decent attempt into a finely nuanced performance. This software called FaceDirector has the capability to merge together separate frames from different takes to create the perfect scene. It does that by analyzing both the actor’s face and audio cues to identify the frames that correspond with each other. As such, directors can create brand new takes during post-production with zero input from the actor. They don’t even need specialized hardware like 3D cameras for the trick — it works even with footage taken by regular 2D cams.
Source: FaceDirector: Continuous Control of Facial Performance in Video
LG Chem Quietly Surges in Battery Race
December 14th, 2015Via: Automotive News:
Three years ago, LG Chem’s $303 million battery plant garnered unwanted attention when news reports revealed workers were watching movies and playing cards rather than building batteries.
As the facility sat idle, LG Chem was shipping lithium ion batteries from South Korea to power General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt — an embarrassment since the Michigan plant had been built with the aid of federal grants.
The slow days are now gone. Two of the three assembly lines operate 24 hours a day, and the plant is adding a fourth production line for an as-yet-unnamed customer. The plant also is expected to produce batteries for GM’s next electric car, the Chevrolet Bolt, although LG Chem has not yet confirmed that.
Add it all up, and LG Chem appears likely to beat Tesla to the punch as the operator of North America’s first battery “gigafactory,” the name Tesla has given to the giant battery plant it is building in Nevada.
Tesla’s plant has drawn headlines, but LG Chem quietly has positioned its Holland plant to be a formidable competitor and possibly the market leader. Navigant, a research firm based in Chicago, estimates the LG Chem factory could account for as much as one quarter of North America’s total EV battery capacity by 2017.
The plant produces 650 megawatt-hours worth of battery cells annually, according to Navigant — a production rate that could rise to 3 gigawatt-hours within a couple of years. If so, the Holland plant will be North America’s biggest EV battery plant.
Autonomous System Aborts Takeoff of Qatar Airways Airbus A350 Rolling Down Runway at Full Throttle
December 13th, 2015Via: Daily Mail:
It was meant to celebrate an aircraft model’s first-ever journey from the US, but this Qatar Airways charter flight carrying journalists and staff didn’t go as planned.
Nerve-wracking footage shows the moment the Airbus A350-900 XWB abandoned its takeoff attempt as it sped along a runway at New York’s JFK Airport and came to a screeching halt.
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Honig told MailOnline Travel that the airline’s chief operating officer assured passengers an ‘indicator’ was responsible for the aborted takeoff.
He said the executive told those on board that the A350’s computer system decided the 11,000ft runway was ‘too short’ and applied the brakes at full force on its own.
