Bee-Killing Pesticides in 51% of “Bee-Friendly” Plants from Garden Centers Across U.S. and Canada
July 5th, 2014Via: Friends of the Earth:
Many “bee-friendly” home garden plants sold at Home Depot (NYSE: HD), Lowe’s (NYSE: LOW) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT) have been pre-treated with pesticides shown to harm and kill bees, according to a study released today by Friends of the Earth and allies.
The study, Gardeners Beware 2014, shows that 36 out of 71 (51 percent) of garden plant samples purchased at top garden retailers in 18 cities in the United States and Canada contain neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides — a key contributor to recent bee declines. Some of the flowers contained neonic levels high enough to kill bees outright assuming comparable concentrations are present in the flowers’ pollen and nectar. Further, 40 percent of the positive samples contained two or more neonics.
The study is a larger follow up to a first-of-its-kind pilot study released by Friends of the Earth last August. The new study expanded the number of samples and number of locations where plants were purchased, and also assessed the distribution of neonic pesticides between flowers and the rest of the plant.
“The high percentage of contaminated plants and their neonicotinoid concentrations suggest that this problem continues to be widespread,” said Lisa Archer, director of the Food & Technology program at Friends of the Earth-U.S. “Most gardeners have no idea that their gardens may be a source of harm to bees. We’re calling on retailers to get neonicotinoid pesticides out of their plants and off their shelves as soon as possible. Until then, gardeners should buy organic plants to ensure the safety of bees.”
Shale: U.S. Surpasses Saudi Arabia as Largest Oil Producer in the World
July 4th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. will remain the world’s biggest oil producer this year after overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as extraction of energy from shale rock spurs the nation’s economic recovery, Bank of America Corp. said.
U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels in the first quarter, the bank said in a report today. The country became the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2010. The International Energy Agency said in June that the U.S. was the biggest producer of oil and natural gas liquids.
“The U.S. increase in supply is a very meaningful chunk of oil,” Francisco Blanch, the bank’s head of commodities research, said by phone from New York. “The shale boom is playing a key role in the U.S. recovery. If the U.S. didn’t have this energy supply, prices at the pump would be completely unaffordable.”
Oil extraction is soaring at shale formations in Texas and North Dakota as companies split rocks using high-pressure liquid, a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The surge in supply combined with restrictions on exporting crude is curbing the price of West Texas Intermediate, America’s oil benchmark. The U.S., the world’s largest oil consumer, still imported an average of 7.5 million barrels a day of crude in April, according to the Department of Energy’s statistical arm.
Hospitals Are Mining Patients’ Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick
July 4th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in North and South Carolina, such a day could be sooner than they think. Carolinas HealthCare, which runs more than 900 care centers, including hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and surgical centers, has begun plugging consumer data on 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients so that doctors can intervene before they get sick. The company purchases the data from brokers who cull public records, store loyalty program transactions, and credit card purchases.
Information on consumer spending can provide a more complete picture than the glimpse doctors get during an office visit or through lab results, says Michael Dulin, chief clinical officer for analytics and outcomes research at Carolinas HealthCare. The Charlotte-based hospital chain is placing its data into predictive models that give risk scores to patients. Within two years, Dulin plans to regularly distribute those scores to doctors and nurses who can then reach out to high-risk patients and suggest changes before they fall ill. “What we are looking to find are people before they end up in trouble,” says Dulin, who is a practicing physician.
NSA Targets Tor Administrators and People Searching for Privacy Tools
July 3rd, 2014More: NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious
Via: ndr.de:
The investigation discloses the following:
Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA.
Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.
Among the NSA’s targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called “the Linux Journal – the Original Magazine of the Linux Community”, and calls it an “extremist forum”.
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I have no idea how much of this is real, but I’m posting it so 300 of you don’t submit it.
Via: Gigaom:
An investigation by the German broadcasters ARD and WDR has apparently demonstrated the targeting by the NSA of a German student called Sebastian Hahn, who runs a node on the anonymization network Tor. It has also shown that anyone searching for “privacy-enhancing software tools” online may be marked for surveillance.
Tor (“The Onion Router”) works by bouncing traffic off a series of servers so that it’s near-impossible to trace who’s browsing what. It’s partly funded by the U.S. Department of State because it’s handy for dissidents in repressive regimes, but Edward Snowden’s leaks already showed last year that the NSA has been targeting Tor because it believes terrorists also use it.
The German reports on Thursday were based on source code related to XKeyscore, believed to be the front-end system for searching data held by the NSA and its partners. This code includes the IP address for a server run by Hahn, who explained to me by email:
“I saw some source code which appears to belong to an XKeyscore plugin.The IP address was embedded in that source code. We’re not talking about the main tool, just a plugin.”
Hahn, who has been involved in the Tor project for around 6 years, runs one of the Tor “directory authorities”, which list all the roughly 5,000 Tor servers out there. These authorities keep users’ Tor clients up to date. Thursday’s reports say it’s not known whether Hahn’s server was monitored by the NSA as such, or by the agency’s German partners.
The source code includes the IP address of another German target too, according to the reports – the Chaos Computer Club. The CCC is Europe’s oldest and largest hacker collective, and it runs communications services for activists (which is why it’s one of several communications providers suing the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ over surveillance).
Meanwhile, according to an English-language ARD article published later on Thursday — and partly written by members of the Tor project — the NSA “tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
The XKeyscore plugin source code reportedly also includes a reference in a comment column to Tor users being “extremists” and, worryingly, it also suggests that people may be marked for surveillance by the NSA simply by visiting the Tor site or searching for the Tor-connected “incognito” operating system Tails, the reports claimed. The website LinuxJournal is also targeted and referred to as an “extremist forum.”
U.S. Military Has Secretly Operated in Somalia Since Around 2007
July 3rd, 2014Via: Reuters:
U.S. military advisors have secretly operated in Somalia since around 2007 and Washington plans to deepen its security assistance to help the country fend off threats by Islamist militant group al Shabaab, U.S. officials said.
The comments are the first detailed public acknowledgement of a U.S. military presence in Somalia dating back since the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and add to other signs of a deepening U.S. commitment to Somalia’s government, which the Obama administration recognized last year.
The deployments, consisting of up to 120 troops on the ground, go beyond the Pentagon’s January announcement that it had sent a handful of advisors in October. That was seen at the time as the first assignment of U.S. troops to Somalia since 1993 when two U.S. helicopters were shot down and 18 American troops killed in the “Black Hawk Down” disaster.
Dean Kamen’s Stirling Engine
July 2nd, 2014Via: Forbes:
Kamen’s contribution has been in engineering his Stirling with the most high-performance materials. He started off using skilled welders to put together key parts of the engine made out of exotic alloys. More recently he’s figured out how make those pieces with even more precision using 3-D printing. Crane says a key element in Kamen design was the perfection of a little plastic membrane that looks like a condom. The Beacon, which weighs about 1,500 pounds and is the size of a washing machine, also includes a battery system, which can be integrated with other distributed generation systems like solar panels.
So what’s Kamen’s vision for the future of these things? Well the one in Crane’s basement is far too big for the average American home, generating 10 continuous kilowatts, while most of us only draw about 2 kw. “I love bulldozers, but I wouldn’t put one in my garage,” quips Kamen.
Kamen believes that aside from mansion owners, the Beacon 10 is just right for businesses like laundries or restaurants that use a lot of hot water. With commercialization partner NRG Energy, he’s so far deployed roughly 20 of the machines.
Kamen expects to put them into production within 18 months. “Within two years I would expect high-end builders to be installing them.”
Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Has Been Operating In Near-Secrecy For 30 Years
July 2nd, 2014Via: Business Insider:
“We’ve been keeping a very low profile, mostly intentionally,” said Doug Lenat, President and CEO of Cycorp. “No outside investments, no debts. We don’t write very many articles or go to conferences, but for the first time, we’re close to having this be applicable enough that we want to talk to you.”
IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri stirred up a hunger and awareness throughout the United States for something like a Star Trek computer that really worked — an artificially intelligent system that could receive instructions in plain, spoken language, make the appropriate inferences, and carry out its instructions without needing to have millions and millions of subroutines hard-coded into it.
As we’ve established, that stuff is very hard. But Cycorp’s goal is to codify general human knowledge and common sense so that computers might make use of it.
Cycorp charged itself with figuring out the tens of millions of pieces of data we rely on as humans — the knowledge that helps us understand the world — and to represent them in a formal way that machines can use to reason. The company’s been working continuously since 1984 and next month marks its 30th anniversary.
“Many of the people are still here from 30 years ago — Mary Shepherd and I started [Cycorp] in August of 1984 and we’re both still working on it,” Lenat said. “It’s the most important project one could work on, which is why this is what we’re doing. It will amplify human intelligence.”
It’s only a slight stretch to say Cycorp is building a brain out of software, and they’re doing it from scratch.
New Record for a Trapped Field in a Superconductor
July 2nd, 2014Via: University of Cambridge:
A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
The Cambridge researchers managed to ‘trap’ a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla – roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet – in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla. The results are published today in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology.
The research demonstrates the potential of high-temperature superconductors for applications in a range of fields, including flywheels for energy storage, ‘magnetic separators’, which can be used in mineral refinement and pollution control, and in high-speed levitating monorail trains.
More Books Sold Online Than in Brick-And-Mortar Retail
July 2nd, 2014Via: Book Industry Study Group:
In formats, eBooks hit record volume numbers while revenue was flat; downloaded audiobooks hit all-time highs in both revenue and units. In sales channels, publishers’ net revenue from sales of digital and print content via online retail is now ahead of revenue from brick-and-mortar retail.
PayPal Froze Account of Secure Email Startup ProtonMail Due to “Technical Problem”
July 2nd, 2014Via: Gigaom:
About 6 weeks ago my colleague Barb Darrow covered a new secure email startup called ProtonMail, which was set up by a bunch of MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers who are annoyed with the NSA’s intrusive ways.
The team’s Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has done pretty well in the last 2 weeks, thus far raising $283,675 off a $100,000 goal. But Geneva-headquartered ProtonMail, which is keen to rent servers and get the product out of beta, hit a snag on Monday when it discovered PayPal had frozen its account.
Restrictions on the account were lifted on Tuesday, with ProtonMail crediting the reversal to media coverage, but PayPal said the account had only been frozen in the first place due to a technical problem. However, when ProtonMail was trying to find out why the block had been put in place, a PayPal representative apparently asked whether the startup had sought government approval for offering encrypted services.
Research Credit: alvinroast
