Sony Suspends Filming After Hackers Hit Payments
December 12th, 2014Via: The Times:
The Hollywood studio that made the James Bond and Spider-Man films has abandoned shoots after hackers crippled its computer network, and leaked four films and thousands of documents.
Agencies filming for Sony Pictures have cancelled shoots because the problems have left it unable to process payments, a source told The Times.
Persistent Associations Between Maternal Prenatal Exposure to Phthalates on Child IQ at Age 7 Years
December 12th, 2014Via: PLOS One:
Child full-scale IQ was inversely associated with prenatal urinary metabolite concentrations of DnBP and DiBP: b = ?2.69 (95% confidence interval [CI] = ?4.33, ?1.05) and b = ?2.69 (95% CI = ?4.22, ?1.16) per log unit increase. Among children of mothers with the highest versus lowest quartile DnBP and DiBP metabolite concentrations, IQ was 6.7 (95% CI = 1.9, 11.4) and 7.6 (95% CI = 3.2, 12.1) points lower, respectively. Associations were unchanged after control for cognition at age 3 years. Significant inverse associations were also seen between maternal prenatal metabolite concentrations of DnBP and DiBP and child processing speed, perceptual reasoning and working memory; DiBP and child verbal comprehension; and BBzP and child perceptual reasoning.
Conclusion
Maternal prenatal urinary metabolite concentrations measured in late pregnancy of DnBP and DiBP are associated with deficits in children’s intellectual development at age 7 years. Because phthalate exposures are ubiquitous and concentrations seen here within the range previously observed among general populations, results are of public health significance.
Britain: Air Traffic Control System Failure
December 12th, 2014Via: Guardian:
London airspace has been severely restricted after a system failure at the main national control centre in Swanick.
Passengers travelling to and from London’s major airports face lengthy delays and cancellations, with European controllers suggesting skies would be restricted until 7pm GMT.
The restriction, which appears to have been sparked by either a computer failure or power outage, is likely to divert and disrupt hundreds of international flights, with aviation experts warning that the knock-on effects would be felt far beyond London.
A spokeswoman for Nats, the air traffic controllers, confirmed there was a technical failure at Swanwick, Hampshire, the major control centre for the southern UK airspace.
She said: “We are in the process of getting the incident response mobilised. We don’t know what the cause is but there is a technical failure.
“We’re sorry if it causes any delays today. Our priority is to understand what has gone wrong and get things working as quickly as possible.”
Repository of Censored and Sensitive Chinese Keywords
December 12th, 2014Via: CitizenLab:
…we have collected 13 lists of sensitive Chinese keywords and aggregated them into a single, sortable, and share-able CSV file (see a Google docs sample, sorted by the number of lists each keyword appears on). This file, along with a description of the 13 lists and their sources/origins, are located in a GitHub repository that will be updated as new Chinese keyword lists are identified.
The 13 lists contain 9,054 unique keywords, including those in Chinese, English, pinyin, or a combination of the three. The lists go back as early as 2004 (the leaked Tencent QQ blacklist) and were produced as recently as November 2014 by Citizen Lab collaborator Jeffery Knockel (University of New Mexico), who extracted 910 keywords from Sina Show.
U.S. PSYOP Funded Anti-Government Hip-Hop Music in Cuba
December 12th, 2014Via: Reuters:
The U.S. government financed a four-year effort to promote Cuba’s rap music scene as part of an effort to promote democracy on the communist-run island, federal officials confirmed on Thursday.
“It seemed like a good idea to support civil society,” said Matt Herrick, spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which financed the secretive program.
The four-year program which ended in 2012, was revealed by the Associated Press on Thursday, which described it as a largely unsuccessful, “covert” effort run by U.S. government contractors to undermine Cuba’s communist government.
Related? “The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation”
HP: The Machine
December 10th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
Hewlett-Packard will take a big step toward shaking up its own troubled business and the entire computing industry next year when it releases an operating system for an exotic new computer.
The company’s research division is working to create a computer HP calls The Machine. It is meant to be the first of a new dynasty of computers that are much more energy-efficient and powerful than current products. HP aims to achieve its goals primarily by using a new kind of computer memory instead of the two types that computers use today. The current approach originated in the 1940s, and the need to shuttle data back and forth between the two types of memory limits performance.
“Could the U.S. Bail Out Its Own Oil Sector?”
December 10th, 2014Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
“…there’s a part of me, a gut feeling, that thinks that the shale apocalypse will just continue on somehow.”
—Oil Down 6.88% On OPEC Strategy to Destroy U.S. Shale Business
My long side trigger finger will start to itch if it gets under $50. Until then, no so much.
Via: CNBC:
An economist who correctly predicted the fall in oil price this year has told CNBC that the U.S. government could look to bail out its energy sector in 2015 as the commodity’s low price starts hitting the country’s economy.
“The U.S. energy sector is clearly important,” Steen Jakobsen, the chief economist at Danish investment bank Saxo Bank, told CNBC Wednesday. “They are paramount to the long-term strategic issue that the U.S. will be self-dependent on oil.”
British Tycoon Impaled on Spikes Following 60ft Fall from Luxury London Penthouse
December 10th, 2014Update: Scot Young
Via: Telegraph:
A financier at the heart of one of Britain’s biggest divorce battles has died after falling from his £3 million home and impaling himself on iron railings.
Scot Young, 52, suffered horrific injuries after plummeting four storeys from a window of his luxury central London penthouse.
His death comes almost a year after an extraordinary legal fight with his ex-wife concluded at the High Court.
Michelle Young, 49, won a £20 million payout after a seven-year legal battle but declared the sum a “disgrace” and is never believed to have received the cash.
She said she thought Mr Young was worth “billions” and claimed that he had hidden his fortune.
—
Via: International Business Times:
A man has died in an horrific accident, falling 60 feet from the window of a Marylebone flat after being impaled on iron railings.
He was pronounced dead at the scene and police are not treating the death as suspicious.
Neighbours believe the man, who was in his 50s, worked in banking or the financial services and was from the UK.
Firefighters cut through the 5ft railings with an angle grinder before the body could be moved, according to the Evening Standard.
A neighbour said: “It is horrific and very sad. My cleaners were here and saw the man’s body. They were traumatised.
“It was a very gruesome scene. The body was hanging there for a while.
“Police covered it with a tent straight away when they arrived but quite a few people must have seen it. I couldn’t look, I was horrified.”
A Met spokesman said: “Police were called to Montagu Square, W1 at 17:18hrs on Monday, 8 December to reports of a man having fallen from a fourth floor window. A man, believed aged in his early 50’s, was pronounced dead at the scene. The death is not being treated as suspicious at this time.”
Residents were still in shock at the horrific death. Hanne Kristiansen, a physiotherapist, said: “I tried to look out our window, but the police yelled ‘get back inside’. I saw the police using a chainsaw and sparks went everywhere.”
The man is understood to have lived in the flat with his American girlfriend for the past few months.
Related: Slain MassMutual Executive Held Wall Street “Trade Secrets”
Retail Neuroscience
December 10th, 2014Via: CBS:
Retailers are trying to get into customers’ brains and they now have the technology to do it. It’s called consumer neuroscience and companies are getting valuable shopper intel that can shape the shopping experience.
Facebook AI Assistant for Imbeciles
December 10th, 2014Via: Wired:
Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.
It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”
The idea is more than just an idle suggestion. LeCun is the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, a team of AI researchers inside the internet giant that spans offices in both California and New York, and this rapidly expanding operation is now laying the basic groundwork for his digital assistant.
Fashioning such a tool is largely about building image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self, and using a red-hot form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning”—a technology bootstrapped by LeCun and other academics—Facebook has already reached a point where it can identify your face and your friends’ faces in the photos you post to its social network, letting you more easily tag them with the right names.
