Facebook, Apple Pay for Female Workers to Freeze Eggs
October 14th, 2014Via: New Zealand Herald:
Facebook and Apple are covering the costs for female employees to freeze their eggs to delay childbearing that could hamper their careers, NBC News reports.
The companies are covering up to $US20,000 ($NZ25,526) for the procedure and annual storage costs, NBC said on Tuesday, citing sources at the Silicon Valley firms.
Queried about the reports by AFP, Facebook and Apple declined to comment.
According to the online forum eggsurance.com, the procedure is gaining popularity as more women delay plans to start a family.
“Women today are at a cultural and generational crossroads. We have the same career expectations and demands as men,” says a post on the website.
“As our biological clocks tick away, we must establish ourselves in the workplace, find the right mate and become financially secure enough to establish a family.”
Research Credit: TD
The Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture
October 14th, 2014Via: The Atlantic:
“In the Second World War,” Samuel Zook began, “my ancestors were conscientious objectors because we don’t believe in combat.” The Amish farmer paused a moment to inspect a mottled leaf on one of his tomato plants before continuing. “If you really stop and think about it, though, when we go out spraying our crops with pesticides, that’s really what we’re doing. It’s chemical warfare, bottom line.”
Eight years ago, it was a war that Zook appeared to be losing. The crops on his 66-acre farm were riddled with funguses and pests that chemical treatments did little to reduce. The now-39-year-old talked haltingly about the despair he felt at the prospect of losing a homestead passed down through five generations of his family. Disillusioned by standard agriculture methods, Zook searched fervently for an alternative. He found what he was looking for in the writings of an 18-year-old Amish farmer from Ohio, a man named John Kempf.
Kempf is the unlikely founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a consulting firm established in 2006 to promote science-intensive organic agriculture. The entrepreneur’s story is almost identical to Zook’s. A series of crop failures on his own farm drove the 8th grade-educated Kempf to school himself in the sciences. For two years, he pored over research in biology, chemistry, and agronomy in pursuit of a way to save his fields. The breakthrough came from the study of plant immune systems which, in healthy plants, produce an array of compounds that are toxic to intruders. “The immune response in plants is dependent on well-balanced nutrition,” Kempf concluded, “in much the same way as our own immune system.” Modern agriculture uses fertilizer specifically to increase yields, he added, with little awareness of the nutritional needs of other organic functions. Through plant sap analysis, Kempf has been able to discover deficiencies in important trace minerals which he can then introduce into the soil. With plants able to defend themselves, pesticides can be avoided, allowing the natural predators of pests to flourish.
Research Credit: Eileen
One Dedicated Ebola Hospital for Each State
October 14th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
U.S. and local health officials want to set up dedicated hospitals in each state for Ebola patients, part of a new emphasis on safety for health-care workers after a nurse caring for an infected patient in Dallas tested positive for the virus.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also reconsidering its existing infection control protocols and will boost health-worker training with a series of calls and online seminars, officials said yesterday.
“We’d like to have at least one hospital in every state that does feel they could manage a patient from start to finish,” said Abbigail Tumpey, the CDC official in charge of the education outreach. So far, the new system is only in the discussion stage, and one issue is that there are currently only four U.S. hospitals with top-level bio-containment units.
Very Strange Case Involving Little Known Pentagon Office and Firearm Suppressors
October 13th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.
Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.
The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.
The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.
Court records filed by prosecutors allege that the Navy paid the auto mechanic — the brother of the directorate’s boss — $1.6 million for the silencers, even though they cost only $10,000 in parts and labor to manufacture.
Texas Health Worker Is Positive for Ebola, 1st Known Ebola Transmission in U.S.
October 12th, 2014Via: CNN:
A health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas has tested positive for Ebola after a preliminary test, the state’s health agency said.
Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died Wednesday.
“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, said in a statement Sunday morning.
“We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread.”
The health care worker reported a low-grade fever Friday night and was isolated, the health department said. The preliminary test result came in late Saturday.
If confirmed by the CDC, the health care worker’s case would mark the first known transmission of Ebola in the United States and the second-ever diagnosis in the country.
Ebola Vaccine Trials Under Way in Mali
October 11th, 2014Mmm hmm.
Via: Guardian:
Health workers in Mali have been given an experimental vaccine against Ebola designed to boost the immunity of those on the frontline of the battle against the disease, which has so far claimed more than 3,800 lives in west Africa.
Mali has no Ebola cases but it borders Guinea, where the outbreak began. The trials are taking place to determine whether the potential vaccine is safe and that it does at least have some sort of protective effect.
It is particularly important to test its effects on health workers, who in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are at the sharp end of the battle against the virus.
Safety trials began at Oxford University and in the US a couple of weeks ago. The healthy people who volunteered have so far shown no ill effects, so the trials have moved into Africa itself.
“This research will give us crucial information about whether the vaccine is safe, well-tolerated and capable of stimulating adequate immune responses in the highest priority target population – healthcare workers in west Africa,” said Prof Myron Levine, director of the centre for vaccine development at the University of Maryland, which is running the trial in conjunction with the Malian ministry of health.
“If it works, in the foreseeable future it could help alter the dynamic of this epidemic by interrupting transmission to healthcare and other exposed frontline workers.”
At this point, the researchers hope to establish that there are no significant ill effects, beyond perhaps a temporarily sore arm. But they will also be testing blood samples of the volunteers to ensure there is an antibody response, which is the signal that the vaccine may teach the immune system to recognise the virus and fight it off. Until it is used in health workers treating people with Ebola, however, there will be no real proof that it works.
The trials are proceeding with unprecedented speed with the cooperation of a large number of international organisations and governments, in the hope of having something available that is at least partially protective before the end of the year.
NSA Core Secrets: “Exceptionally Compartmented Information,” or ECI
October 11th, 2014Via: First Look:
The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
The documents, leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also indicate that the agency has used “under cover” operatives to gain access to sensitive data and systems in the global communications industry, and that these secret agents may have even dealt with American firms. The documents describe a range of clandestine field activities that are among the agency’s “core secrets” when it comes to computer network attacks, details of which are apparently shared with only a small number of officials outside the NSA.
“It’s something that many people have been wondering about for a long time,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, after reviewing the documents. “I’ve had conversations with executives at tech companies about this precise thing. How do you know the NSA is not sending people into your data centers?”
Previous disclosures about the NSA’s corporate partnerships have focused largely on U.S. companies providing the agency with vast amounts of customer data, including phone records and email traffic. But documents published today by The Intercept suggest that even as the agency uses secret operatives to penetrate them, companies have also cooperated more broadly to undermine the physical infrastructure of the internet than has been previously confirmed.
In addition to so-called “close access” operations, the NSA’s “core secrets” include the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to weaken their encryption systems; the fact that the NSA spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on technology to defeat commercial encryption; and the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to penetrate computer networks, possibly without the knowledge of the host countries. Many of the NSA’s core secrets concern its relationships to domestic and foreign corporations.
Some of the documents in this article appear in a new documentary, CITIZENFOUR, which tells the story of the Snowden disclosures and is directed by Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras. The documents describe a panoply of programs classified with the rare designation of “Exceptionally Compartmented Information,” or ECI, which are only disclosed to a “very select” number of government officials.
Key Figures In CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin To Come Forward
October 11th, 2014Via: Huffington Post:
Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews.
“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and … raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee’s letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)
Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.
Documentary Film Claims That There Is Another NSA Leaker with Higher Rank Than Snowden
October 11th, 2014Via: The Hollywood Reporter:
A second National Security Agency whistleblower exists within the ranks of government intelligence.
That bombshell comes toward the end of Citizenfour, a new documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras about NSA informant Edward Snowden that had its world premiere on Friday at the New York Film Festival.
In the key scene, journalist Glenn Greenwald visits Snowden at a hotel room in Moscow. Fearing they are being taped, Greenwald communicates with Snowden via pen and paper.
While some of the exchanges are blurred for the camera, it becomes clear that Greenwald wants to convey that another government whistleblower — higher in rank than Snowden — has come forward.
The revelation clearly shocks Snowden, whose mouth drops open when he reads the details of the informant’s leak.
Also revealed by Greenwald is the fact that 1.2 million Americans are currently on a government watch-list. Among them is Poitras herself.
Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics
October 10th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”
Microsoft is now almost a decade into that project and has just begun to talk publicly about it. If it succeeds, the world could change dramatically.
…
Microsoft has yet to even build a qubit. But in the kind of paradox that can be expected in the realm of quantum physics, it may also be closer than anyone else to making quantum computers practical. The company is developing a new kind of qubit, known as a topological qubit, based largely on that 2012 discovery in the Netherlands. There’s good reason to believe this design will be immune from the flakiness plaguing existing qubits. It will be better suited to mass production, too. “What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. His company is also working on how the circuits of a computer made with topological qubits might be designed and controlled. And Microsoft researchers working on algorithms for quantum computers have shown that a machine made up of only hundreds of qubits could run chemistry simulations beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer.
