These Biohackers Are Creating Open-Source Insulin
November 19th, 2015Via: Popular Science:
The 370 million people worldwide with diabetes rely on injections of insulin to regulate the amount of sugar in their blood, since their bodies can’t make the hormone themselves. Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive—that cost was likely a large proportion of the $176 billion in medical expenditures incurred by diabetes patients in 2012 alone. Now a team of biohackers with Counter Culture Labs, a community lab in Oakland, California, wants to pave the way towards generic insulin, and they’ve started a crowdfunding page for their project.
The biohackers’ goal is fairly straightforward: To make and refine synthetic insulin from E. coli bacteria and document their process. The result, they hope, will be that a generic pharmaceutical company will use that protocol to make insulin that’s affordable for diabetes patients all over the world. There are several types of insulin that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration—some are long-lasting, others are fast-acting—but they are all protected by patents, so there are no generic versions. “It takes legitimate scientific research to create a biosimilar generic [drug], and generic companies don’t want to do scientific research,” says Maureen Muldavin, a program manager at Counter Culture Labs and a biohacker involved in the Open Insulin project.
The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea
November 18th, 2015Via: Vice:
And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they’ll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
It’s a little-watched but fast-approaching milestone that raises serious questions about the future of consumption in our rapidly modernizing, mineral-hungry world: How deep are we willing to dive to get the materials that make our electronics run?
Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
November 18th, 2015Via: Armstrong Economics:
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
Recovery: Japan’s Economy Falls Back Into Recession Again
November 17th, 2015Via: BBC:
Japan’s economy has fallen into recession again after it shrank 0.8% on an annualised basis in the third quarter.
The preliminary data means the world’s third-largest economy has contracted for a second consecutive quarter, marking a technical recession.
Growth was expected to decline after it fell a revised 0.7% in the second quarter on weak domestic demand.
Japan has been in recession four times since the global financial crisis.
The Pentagon’s Plan to Outsource Lethal Cyber-Weapons
November 16th, 2015Via: Engadget:
The Pentagon has quietly put out a call for vendors to bid on a contract to develop, execute and manage its new cyber weaponry and defense program. The scope of this nearly half-billion-dollar “help wanted” work order includes counterhacking, as well as developing and deploying lethal cyberattacks — sanctioned hacking expected to cause real-life destruction and loss of human life.
In June 2016, work begins under the Cyberspace Operations Support Services contract (pdf) under CYBERCOM (United States Cyber Command). The $460 million project recently came to light and details the Pentagon’s plan to hand over its IT defense and the planning, development, execution, management, integration with the NSA, and various support functions of the U.S. military’s cyberattacks to one vendor.
Why Human-In-The-Loop Computing Is The Future Of Machine Learning
November 16th, 2015Via: ComputerWorld:
Now that machine learning is becoming more and more mainstream, some design patterns are starting to emerge. As the CEO of CrowdFlower, I’ve worked with many companies building machine learning algorithms and I’ve noticed a best practice in nearly every successful deployment of machine learning on tough business problems. That practice is called “human-in-the-loop” computing. Here’s how it works:
First, a machine learning model takes a first pass on the data, or every video, image or document that needs labeling. That model also assigns a confidence score, or how sure the algorithm is that it’s making the right judgment. If the confidence score is below a certain value, it sends the data to a human annotator to make a judgment. That new human judgment is used both for the business process and is fed back into the machine learning algorithm to make it smarter. In other words, when the machine isn’t sure what the answer is, it relies on a human, then adds that human judgment to its model.
This simple pattern is at the heart of many well known, real-world use-cases of machine learning. And it solves one of the biggest issues with machine learning, namely: it’s often very easy to get an algorithm to 80 percent accuracy but near impossible to get an algorithm to 99 percent. The best machine learning lets humans handle that 20 percent since 80 percent accuracy is simply not good enough for most real-world applications.
Huawei Develops New Fast Charge Lithium-Ion Batteries
November 14th, 2015Via: Android Authority:
Huawei says its new lithium-ion batteries can achieve charging speeds ten times faster than normal batteries.
The company has shared videos of two types of batteries. One has a 600mAh capacity and can reach 68% capacity in two minutes.
The larger battery has a capacity of 3,000mAh. It apparently takes just five minutes to reach 48%.
Robot Audits Store Shelves
November 14th, 2015Via: ComputerWorld:
An autonomous robot was unveiled this week that can make sure that when you’re hankering for Doritos, there’s a bag waiting for you at the market.
Simbe Robotics, based in San Francisco, announced its first product, a 30-pound robot called Tally that can move up and down a store’s aisles checking inventory. The robot determines what products need restocking and send reports to workers who can add more stock. Tally also is set up to work during normal store hours, alongside employees and customers.
“Tally performs repetitive and laborious tasks of auditing shelves for out-of-stock items, low stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors,” the company said in a release. “Tally has the ability to audit shelves cheaper, more frequently, and significantly faster than existing processes; and with near-perfect accuracy.”
The robot is equipped with multiple sensors that not only scan shelves for inventory but scan the aisles to make sure the robot isn’t bumping into shelves, displays or shoppers.
Data that the robot captures is sent to the cloud where it is processed and analyzed. Store employees access the cloud data, along with inventory recommendations, through front-end applications.
The robot comes with a charging dock that the machine will autonomously navigate back to when it needs charging.
The End-Point in Financial Credit
November 14th, 2015Via: GoldMoney:
Since the 1980s, markets have had to adapt to a world of infinite credit.
Of course, this credit has not been available to everyone: it has been principally deployed in favour of governments, financial markets, and big business. It amounts to a cartel, planned or unplanned, a partnership between banks and government that dominates and controls previously free markets.
The justification for this arrangement is based on anti-market macroeconomic theories, always sympathetic to central planning. The partnership is between governments, their central banks and the commercial banks, granting them a licence to operate by expanding credit out of thin air. To this state-sponsored monopoly has been added control of securities markets, inflating them as well. Bank credit and securities markets are on parallel tracks, because bank credit fuels the securities business. We should look at them both to make sense of the implications, and to understand the consequences for the ordinary person.
…
Perhaps not one in a hundred thousand fully understands the implications of the banks taking over the securities business. It’s said to be a good thing, because the banks have enhanced market liquidity. But the twin nexus of government and banks has not only acquired the ordinary person’s money through fractional reserve banking, but it now controls the value of his assets as well. It’s a wonderful trick to be able to devalue your own obligations by flooding the economy with money created out of thin air, while at the same time increasing the values of everyone else’s assets. Nobody complains.
Research Credit: Pookie
Michael Hand Found Living in the United States
November 14th, 2015Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
One of Australia’s most wanted fugitives, Michael Hand, the co-founder of the Sydney-based international merchant bank Nugan Hand, has been found alive and well and living in small-town America.
He vanished in 1980 amid rumours of CIA and organised crime involvement in the bank as the United States attempted to back anti-communist governments and anti-communist insurgents at the height of the Cold War.
…
Over the years, the two words Nugan Hand became shorthand for drug-dealing, gun-running, organised crime and clandestine intelligence activities.
But nobody has been convicted. Governments, security and espionage agencies ran dead or appeared to look the other way. Many men associated with the bank’s affairs in Australia, the US and Asia have died early or in mysterious circumstances.
The most problematic death was William Colby’s. Director of the CIA between 1972 and 1976 as the US wound down its involvement in Vietnam, Colby became a legal adviser to the Nugan Hand bank. He was found face-down in the water after leaving his Maryland home on a solo canoe trip in 1996.
Butt thought Hand had been protected since fleeing Australia in June 1980.
“It turns out that the FBI could have dealt with Michael Hand long ago. A simple background check reveals Fuller’s social security number is identical to the one allocated to Michael Hand in New York in 1960,” he said.
“The fact that Hand has been allowed to live the free life in the United States suggests that he belongs to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind. Indeed, an intelligence document I found places Michael Hand back working for the CIA in Central America 18 months after his disappearance.”
Book: Merchants of Menace: The True Story of the Nugan Hand Bank Scandal by Peter Butt
Research Credit: almaverdad2
