Japan: Automated, Clean Room Agriculture
January 27th, 2016Via: TechInsider:
The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots.
So much so that Spread is creating the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day.
Don’t expect a bunch of humanoid robots to roam the halls, however; the robots look more like conveyor belts with arms. They’ll plant seeds, water plants, and trim lettuce heads after harvest in the Kyoto, Japan farm.
“The use of machines and technology has been improving agriculture in this way throughout human history,” J.J. Price, a spokesperson at Spread, tells Tech Insider. “With the introduction of plant factories and their controlled environment, we are now able to provide the ideal environment for the crops.”
Americans Hate the U.S. Government More Than Ever
January 27th, 2016Via: CBS:
A handful of industries are those “love to hate” types of businesses, such as cable-television companies and Internet service providers.
The federal government has joined the ranks of the bottom-of-the-barrel industries, according to a new survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Americans’ satisfaction level in dealing with federal agencies –everything from Treasury to Homeland Security — has fallen for a third consecutive year, reaching an eight-year low.
Oregon Standoff Spokesman Robert ‘LaVoy’ Finicum Killed, Bundys in Custody After Shooting Near Burns
January 27th, 2016Update: About 10 Insurgents Remain at Malheur
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Update: Insurgent Firing at UAV
One of those guys just took a few shots at a UAV.
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Update: Possible Livestreamer Inside Malheur
This purports to be a livestream from one of the people holding the Malheur facility. As of this update, there’s radio chatter of those guys trying to sort out their perimeter defenses. They obviously know the Government has all of their coms so they don’t care about livestreaming it.
Again: I have no confirmation of who or what is streaming this.
DefendYourBase (He keeps having to reset the stream, so if it goes down, here’s the home page that shows the current live broadcast.)
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Update: Authorities Seal Off Oregon Refuge
Via: Washington Post:
After an exchange of gunfire that left one man dead and another injured, the two brothers who orchestrated the armed occupation of a remote central Oregon wildlife refuge were taken into custody along with six of their followers Tuesday. Then, early Wednesday the government shut down the area, initiating what authorities called a “containment” with checkpoints and promising to arrest any unauthorized people attempting to travel into the refuge.
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Update: Insurgents Still Control Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Buildings
Via: Washington Post:
Armed occupier Jason Patrick, who was at the Malheur refuge Tuesday, said that the arrests don’t change his group’s demands. He wouldn’t say how many people remain at the refuge, or who else was with him, but said they don’t plan to pick up and leave because of Tuesday’s events.
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Via: OregonLive:
Oregon standoff spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns.
Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum’s daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 55, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.
“My dad was such a good good man, through and through,” said Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, one of Finicum’s 11 children. “He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved.”
Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said.
Also arrested during the stop were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont., Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.
Orison Battery: Plug and Play Home Energy Storage
January 25th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Wow! Pretty cool, but, questions, questions…
* How does it know when your solar system is making excess power? Current clamp? Inverter coms? Other?
* How, specifically, does it deal with grid failures (islanding)?
In other news, over in Germany, SMA just teased their new Sunny Boy Storage system that will allow the Tesla Powerwall to be added to any existing solar installation. The full unveiling in on 29 January, with shipments in Germany beginning in March.
With regard to storage, my advice continues to be to keep your credit card in your wallet, pop a big bowl of popcorn and stay tuned.
Via: Kickstarter:
Orison gives you power over energy like never before. Whether you get your energy from the grid, a solar array, or some other source, you can now control when to store it and when to use it. Orison will automatically store energy when utility rates are low, and then use that energy to power your home or business when rates are high. During a power outage, it will automatically power your home or business and make sure none of your stored energy is sent back to the grid. By localizing your energy distribution, you save money and reduce peak demand on the grid.
Ecotricity: A More Solar Friendly Electricity Retailer in New Zealand
January 25th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Do you live in New Zealand?
Do you have a grid-tie solar power system?
and/or
Do you own an electric car?
Check out Ecotricity.
Time-of-use tariffs mean that the price of your electricity drops dramatically at night, in other words, when your solar system isn’t generating power.
Do you own and electric car?
With Ecotricity, you can charge it at night when the rates drop.
There are other scenarios where Ecotricity makes sense. I have a solar power customer who runs a lot of space heating in the winter at night. While her 4KW solar system helps out during the day, her bill gets shot to hell running those heaters at night. This is an example of no-brainer case to move to Ecotricity.
While it’s common for companies to offer “night” rates, Ecotricity is the only retailer offering solar plans with seven different import tariffs to most of NZ.
If Ecotricity isn’t available where you are in NZ, let me know. I have a contact at Ecotricity who really gets things done. This is not the normal, “Hamish is on holiday in Aussie for the next two months” sort of company that we’re all used to in NZ. (No offense meant to any Hamishes out there.) These guys are very serious about offering a good alternative to the more established retailers.
Harvard Is Trying to Build an AI as Fast as the Human Brain
January 25th, 2016Via: Wired UK:
Harvard University has been awarded $28 million (£19m) to investigate why brains are so much better at learning and retaining information than artificial intelligence. The award, from the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA), could help make AI systems faster, smarter and more like human brains.
While many computers have a comparable storage capacity, their ability to recognise patterns and learn information does not match the human brain. But a better understanding of how neurons are connected could help develop more complex artificial intelligence.
Blizzard Senate Antics: Senate Leader Surprises Lawmakers with New ISIS War Powers Request
January 25th, 2016Via: DefenseOne:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered members a snow-weekend surprise late Wednesday night: Quietly teeing up a debate on the legal underpinning for the fight against ISIS.
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The AUMF put forward by McConnell would not restrict the president’s use of ground troops, nor have any limits related to time or geography.
“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.”
