FBI Says Search Warrants Not Needed to Use “Stingrays” in Public Places
January 6th, 2015Via: Ars Technica:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed “stingrays,” the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts.
The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were “concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests” of Americans.
Our System Is So Broken, Almost No Patented Discoveries Ever Get Used
January 5th, 2015Via: Wired:
We all know the patent system is broken.
But most people believe that the biggest problem with it is abusive litigants who extort so-called “license fees” from small businesses unable to pay the cost of standing up to them in court. Their activities, of course, have no more in common with real patent licensing than a mob protection racket has with the sale of genuine “liability insurance.”
The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system faces an even bigger problem: a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.
Even the most dramatic estimates of the social cost of abusive patent litigation range in the low tens of billions of dollars. But according to a new study by the distinguished economists Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution and Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy Institute—a study I helped to fund—liberating patent licensing from its litigation-focused costs and risks would enable tens of thousands of currently-dormant inventions to be commercialized and conservatively add up to $200 billion a year in increased output to the U.S. economy. That’s at least ten times bigger than the litigation problem, and directly impacts job creation.
Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance
January 5th, 2015Via: New York Times:
A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result.
The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as “free,” 84 percent in “partly free” countries, and 80 percent in countries that were “not free” said that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about government surveillance in their countries.
Disclosure: Long Oil
January 5th, 2015Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
I bought United States Oil ETF (USO) this morning.
Margin Debt Highest Ever: “This Is Total Insanity”
January 5th, 2015Via: CNBC:
The last six years for the U.S. stock market have been an indomitable buying orgy fueled by the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, causing the S&P 500 to triple in value. One metric says it may have gone too far.
Borrowing to buy stocks, as measured by the NYSE monthly margin debt figures, ended 2014 at its highest level relative to the size of the U.S. economy since 1929. In absolute terms, it’s the highest ever.
“If this doesn’t count, then we might as well throw away everything we’ve ever learned about risk because there is none,” said Alan Newman, who sent this data to customers of his Crosscurrents newsletter last week. “The manias of 2000 and 2007 now both look like small potatoes by comparison. This is total insanity.”
When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw, Using Only a Golf Pencil
January 5th, 2015Via: L.A. Weekly:
In June 2014, I was arrested for violating a court order. I bailed out on July 3. But because I had no money and an overworked public defender, I knew I’d have to serve time for my violation. That’s when my mentor, animator-director Ralph Bakshi, advised me to “document my exploits.” Jailed in the women’s division of the Los Angeles County jail system for two months, I was sent first to Century Regional Detention Facility (CRDF) in Lynwood and then to Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles for my final three weeks. Armed with nothing more than a golf pencil and whatever paper I could get my hands on, I drew the strange world into which I’d been dropped.
Hedge Fund Manager Shot Dead, Son Arrested
January 5th, 2015Via: NY Post:
The elderly founder of a Manhattan hedge fund was fatally shot in the head by his 30-year-old son inside the family’s swank East Side apartment on Sunday, authorities said.
Thomas Gilbert Sr., 70, the Harvard-educated founder and chief investment officer of Wainscott Capital Partners, was gunned down by son Thomas Gilbert Jr., who was arrested about seven hours later at his Chelsea apartment, according to police.
The two had been arguing in the dad’s bedroom at about 3:30 p.m., the sources said. After the shots were fired, the victim’s wife called 911, according to sources.
The son dropped his .40 caliber Glock pistol and fled from the eighth-floor apartment at 20 Beekman Place, the sources said.
Controversial DNA Startup Wants to Let Customers Create Creatures
January 4th, 2015Not The Onion!
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints that DNA quickly, accurately and cheaply.
“Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game,” Heinz said. “And that creates a whole new world.”
Inflammation and Depression
January 4th, 2015I don’t believe that I read this in a mainstream news source.
Via: Guardian:
Barely a week goes by without a celebrity “opening up” about their “battle with depression”. This, apparently, is a brave thing to do because, despite all efforts to get rid of the stigma around depression, it is still seen as some kind of mental and emotional weakness.
But what if was nothing of the sort? What if it was a physical illness that just happens to make people feel pretty lousy? Would that make it less of a big deal to admit to? Could it even put a final nail in the coffin of the idea that depression is all in the mind?
According to a growing number of scientists, this is exactly how we should be thinking about the condition. George Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, has spent years studying depression, and has come to the conclusion that it has as much to do with the body as the mind. “I don’t even talk about it as a psychiatric condition any more,” he says. “It does involve psychology, but it also involves equal parts of biology and physical health.”
The basis of this new view is blindingly obvious once it is pointed out: everyone feels miserable when they are ill. That feeling of being too tired, bored and fed up to move off the sofa and get on with life is known among psychologists as sickness behaviour. It happens for a good reason, helping us avoid doing more damage or spreading an infection any further.
It also looks a lot like depression. So if people with depression show classic sickness behaviour and sick people feel a lot like people with depression – might there be a common cause that accounts for both?
The answer to that seems to be yes, and the best candidate so far is inflammation – a part of the immune system that acts as a burglar alarm to close wounds and call other parts of the immune system into action. A family of proteins called cytokines sets off inflammation in the body, and switches the brain into sickness mode.
Both cytokines and inflammation have been shown to rocket during depressive episodes, and – in people with bipolar – to drop off in periods of remission. Healthy people can also be temporarily put into a depressed, anxious state when given a vaccine that causes a spike in inflammation. Brain imaging studies of people injected with a typhoid vaccine found that this might be down to changes in the parts of the brain that process reward and punishment.
There are other clues, too: people with inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis tend to suffer more than average with depression; cancer patients given a drug called interferon alpha, which boosts their inflammatory response to help fight the cancer, often become depressed as a side-effect.
As evidence like this continues to stack up, it’s not surprising that some people have shifted their attention to what might be causing the inflammation in the first place. Turhan Canli of Stony Brook University in New York thinks infections are the most likely culprit, and even goes as far as to say that we should rebrand depression as an infectious – but not contagious – disease.
Others aren’t willing to go that far, not least because infection is not the only way to set off inflammation. A diet rich in trans fats and sugar has been shown to promote inflammation, while a healthy one full of fruit, veg and oily fish helps keep it at bay. Obesity is another risk factor, probably because body fat, particularly around the belly, stores large quantities of cytokines.
Add this to the fact that stress, particularly the kind that follows social rejection or loneliness, also causes inflammation, and it starts to look as if depression is a kind of allergy to modern life – which might explain its spiralling prevalence all over the world as we increasingly eat, sloth and isolate ourselves into a state of chronic inflammation.
If that’s the case, prevention is probably the place to start. It’s not a great idea to turn off inflammation entirely, because we need it to fend off infections, says Slavich, but “lowering levels of systemic inflammation to manageable levels is a good goal to have”.
The good news is that the few clinical trials done so far have found that adding anti-inflammatory medicines to antidepressants not only improves symptoms, it also increases the proportion of people who respond to treatment, although more trials will be needed to confirm this. There is also some evidence that omega 3 and curcumin, an extract of the spice turmeric, might have similar effects. Both are available over the counter and might be worth a try, although as an add-on to any prescribed treatment – there’s definitely not enough evidence to use them as a replacement.
Robots Can Now Learn to Cook by Watching YouTube Videos
January 3rd, 2015Via: Venture Beat:
Researchers have come up with a new way to teach robots how to use tools simply by watching videos on YouTube.
The researchers, from the University of Maryland and the Australian research center NICTA, have just published a paper on their achievements, which they will present this month at the 29th annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The demonstration is the latest impressive use of a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. A hot area for acquisitions as of late, deep learning entails training systems called artificial neural networks on lots of information derived from audio, images, and other inputs, and then presenting the systems with new information and receiving inferences about it in response.
The researchers employed convolutional neural networks, which are now in use at Facebook, among other companies, to identify the way a hand is grasping an item, and to recognize specific objects. The system also predicts the action involving the object and the hand.
To train their model, researchers selected data from 88 YouTube videos of people cooking. From there, the researchers generated commands that a robot could then execute.
“We believe this preliminary integrated system raises hope towards a fully intelligent robot for manipulation tasks that can automatically enrich its own knowledge resource by “watching” recordings from the World Wide Web,” the researchers concluded.
