U.S., Allies to Stage Exercises in West Ukraine
September 3rd, 2014Via: Reuters:
As fighting between the army and Russian-backed rebels rages in eastern Ukraine, preparations are under way near its western border for a joint military exercise this month with more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its allies.
The decision to go ahead with the Rapid Trident exercise Sept. 16-26 is seen as a sign of the commitment of NATO states to support non-NATO member Ukraine while stopping well short of military intervention in the conflict.
The annual exercise, to take place in the Yavoriv training center near Ukraine’s border with Poland, was initially scheduled for July, but was put back because early planning was disrupted by the crisis in the eastern part of the country.
“At the moment, we are still planning for (the exercise) to go ahead,” U.S. Navy Captain Gregory Hicks, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s European Command said on Tuesday.
Google Unveils Quantum Computing Research Initiative
September 3rd, 2014Via: Business Week:
Google Inc. is broadening efforts to create its own cutting-edge computer technology, seeking to use more artificial intelligence in designs that could someday speed up its services.
The company yesterday unveiled a hardware initiative to develop and build processors for its Quantum Artificial Intelligence group, which focuses on technology capable of super-fast calculations based on principles of quantum mechanics. A research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara is joining the initiative, Mountain View, California-based Google said on its research blog.
NASA Building Air Traffic Control System for Drones
September 2nd, 2014Via: The Verge:
NASA is developing an air traffic control system for drones. The New York Times reports the US space agency is working on creating a management system for vehicles that fly at around 400 to 500 feet off the ground — much lower than conventional aircraft — at its Moffett Field base around four miles from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The system would check for other low-flying drone traffic, help the small unmanned vehicles avoid buildings, and scan for adverse weather conditions that might knock a drone out of the sky.
While the drone system would follow the same principles as full-fledged air traffic control, the NYT says its control center would be fully automated. Parimal H. Kopardekar, the NASA principal researcher managing the program, said that the first applications for the system would be in sparsely populated areas, performing such tasks as monitoring oil pipelines or crops. “In agriculture,” Dr. Kopardekar said, “I’m hoping we will see some action inside of the next year.”
Halliburton Will Pay $1.1 Billion to Settle Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster Lawsuits
September 2nd, 2014Bargains.
Via: The Verge:
Halliburton has agreed to pay $1.1 billion to settle much of its part in 2010’s Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster. The incident killed 11 people, and resulted in the largest oil spill in this history of the US after offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded. Halliburton was responsible for cement mixture used to seal the oil well, which ended up being faulty.
The agreement, which requires approval from a federal judge, covers claims against Halliburton as part of BP’s 2012 class action settlement, as well as punitive damages claims on property and in the commercial fishing industry. The agreement also removes Halliburton’s liability for compensating members of the 2012 BP settlement. That money is going into a trust, while other parts of the litigation involving companies like BP and rig operator Transocean continue to work their way through appeals.
The settlement is separate from a $200,000 fine the company paid to the US Department of Justice for destroying evidence related to the incident. According to the Justice Department, Halliburton ordered its employees to destroy simulations for structural tolerance of the concrete mix with system of metal collars. The number of collars, as well as the cement mix, could have made the difference in the outcome of the disaster, investigators found.
350 More U.S. Troops to Iraq
September 2nd, 2014Via: ABC:
An additional 350 U.S. troops will go to Iraq to protect U.S. personnel stationed in Baghdad, the White House announced today.
The State Dept. had requested extra military personnel for security, and after the Department of Defense reviewed that request and recommended it be granted, President Obama approved the additional forces today, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced in a statement to reporters.
Millions of Americans Living in Extreme Poverty
September 2nd, 2014Via: Brookings Institution:
In the United States, the official poverty rate for 2012 stood at 15 percent based on the national poverty line which is equivalent to around $16 per person per day. Of the 46.5 million Americans living in poverty, 20.4 million live under half the poverty line. This begs the question of just how poor America’s poorest people are.
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Using an alternative dataset from the one employed for the official U.S. poverty measure, Shaefer and Edin show that millions of Americans live on less than $2 a day—a threshold commonly used to measure poverty in the developing world. Depending on the exact definitions used, they find that up to 5 percent of American households with children are shown to fall under this parsimonious poverty line.
These numbers are intended to shock—and they succeed. The United States is known for having higher inequality and a less generous social safety net than many affluent countries in Europe, but the acute deprivations that flow from this are less understood. A crude comparison of Shaefer and Edin’s estimates with the World Bank’s official $2 a day poverty estimates for developing economies would place the United States level with or behind a large set of countries, including Russia (0.1 percent), the West Bank and Gaza (0.3 percent), Jordan (1.6 percent), Albania (1.7 percent), urban Argentina (1.9 percent), urban China (3.5 percent), and Thailand (4.1 percent). Many of these countries are recipients of American foreign aid. However, methodologies for measuring poverty differ wildly both within and across countries, so such comparisons and their interpretation demand extreme care.
Related:
The U.S. Is Now a ‘Third World’ Country
Are 12 Million Americans Living on Less Than $2 a Day?
Nigeria Launches New Biometric ID Card – Brought to You by Mastercard
September 2nd, 2014😯
Via: ZDnet:
13 million person pilot of national identity card combines both biometric verification for state services and a prepayment wallet aimed at bringing financial services to the poorest.
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Civil liberties NGO Privacy International, which has raised concerns about misuse of surveillance data in Nigeria in the past — including the arrest of four journalists last year — said that the ambition of the data integration is worrying.
“Centralising and combining government databases makes it easy to link together pieces of information about an individual and build a near complete picture of someone’s life,” said the organisation’s legal officer, Anna Crowe.
“This type of capability is extremely invasive. The crucial issue is to put in place safeguards that guarantee fundamental principles of data protection are being respected, such as only using data for the purposes for which it was collected. This is extremely challenging for any country, let alone one that already faces significant challenges around corruption and ensuring respect for human rights.”
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the cards, however, is that they combine a civil national identity scheme with a strongly commercial initiative. The new cards won’t just operate as proof of identity for citizens — they also function as payment cards backed by the local Access Bank and carry the Mastercard logo on the back.
“National ID schemes can prove problematic in many respects, but commercialisation of such a scheme raises additional, and serious, questions,” Crowe said. “What does Mastercard and the bank’s involvement entail? Will data be shared for commercial gain? How can Nigerians be confident that their right to privacy is being upheld?
“When you register to vote you are doing so for a specific purpose — to be able exercise your rights — not to see your information handed on to a private company without your consent or knowledge.”
In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist
September 2nd, 2014Via: The Atlantic:
A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—”taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.
A Call for a Low-Carb Diet
September 2nd, 2014New York Times, is that really you?
Via: New York Times:
People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.
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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.
While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.
“They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,” Dr. Mozaffarian said. “Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that’s a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.”
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In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.
First Published in 2005: Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon
Mystery Illness Hits Girls in Small South American Town
September 1st, 2014Mass hysteria. That’s the ticket.
Via: AP:
A mystery illness has overwhelmed a small town in northern Colombia as scores of teenage girls have been hospitalized with symptoms that parents fear could be an adverse reaction to a popular vaccine against cervical cancer.
Authorities say they still don’t know what caused more than 200 girls in El Carmen de Bolivar to come down with symptoms ranging from fainting to numbness in the hands and headaches. Some have hinted that the town of 95,000 near Colombia’s Caribbean coast could be experiencing a rare case of mass hysteria.
Parents are on edge, however, because all the girls, ranging in ages from 9 to 16, were injected in recent months with the vaccine Gardasil. On Wednesday, residents marched peacefully to demand a thorough investigation.
