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.
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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.
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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
GreenWave Ocean Farming Model
November 14th, 2015Via: Guardian:
A commercial fisherman who admitted to once pillaging the oceans has won the 2015 Fuller Challenge, one of the most important prizes in sustainability.
Bren Smith, executive director of nonprofit GreenWave, took home $100,000 for his 3D ocean farming model, designed to address overfishing, mitigate climate change, restore marine ecosystems and provide jobs for fishermen.
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Each of Smith’s model farms includes hurricane-proof anchors on the edges. Within its boundaries, seaweed, mussels and scallops hang from floating ropes. Oysters grow in cages below the ropes, and cages of clams hang beneath them. GreenWave farms also harvest salt.
Kelp soaks up five times as much carbon as land-based plants while oysters filter 50 gallons of water a day, pulling out nitrogen, according to Smith. He also said GreenWave is capable of producing 30 times more biofuel than soybeans and five times more biofuel than corn – without polluting the food chain.
“I think it allows us to take the crisis of climate change and flip it into an opportunity to really innovate in sustainable ways,” he said. “Anybody with 20 acres, a boat and $30,000 can start a farm and be up and running within a year.”
GreenWave provides new farmers with grants, low-cost seed, free outdoor gear from Patagonia and training for two years. And they guarantee to purchase 80% of crops over five years at triple the market rate. The crops are then sold to restaurants around the country.
“It’s a stunning, relatively simple, fully-integrated strategy,” Thompson said. “Implemented at scale, it will have an enormous impact.”
Research Credit: emulsified
How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
November 14th, 2015Via: Nautilus:
Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty.
But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?
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No one understands much about the dizzying variety documented so far—which microbes are good, which harmful, which irrelevant. One constant, though, is that people living subsistence lifestyles have tremendous diversity compared to westernized populations—up to 50 percent more species than North Americans or Europeans. That includes not only bacteria but eukaryotes—single-cell protists and large, multicellular worms. These organisms, which are often missing in the West, have historically been considered pathogens. But some evidence now suggests that they can favorably shape the microbiome, benefiting the host.
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The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.
Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.
Research Credit: Pookie
Driverless Buses Will Hit Swiss Roads Next Year
November 14th, 2015Via: Independent:
Autonomous, driverless buses will hit the streets of Switzerland in Spring next year, in one of the world’s first trials of self-driving buses on public roads.
Two of the driverless buses, created by startup BestMile and launched under the banner of Swiss bus company PostBus, will enter service in the city of Sion, in the French-speaking canton of Valais.
The two-year trial period is an important step for autonomous vehicle technology, but the service will be limited – the two buses, capable of carrying up to nine passengers each, will only cover tourist routes in Sion’s Old Town.
