Watch This Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry Evaporate Overnight
June 9th, 2014Via: Linkedin:
Imagine an industry where a few companies make billions of dollars by exerting strict control over valuable information — while paying the people who produce that information nothing at all.
That’s the state of academic, scientific publishing today. And it’s about to be blown wide open by much more open, Internet-based publishers.
This will unfold over the next few years. It will become a classic case study in technological disruption.
Academic journals are a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide — maybe $10 billion annually. It’s dominated by a handful of publishers: Elsevier, with $3.2 billion in revenues in 2012, and Springer, with $1.1 billion in the same year.
Both companies boast margins in excess of 35 percent, thanks in part to their low cost of content production. Scientists who want to publish the results of their research submit their manuscripts to these publishers’ journals (free); other scientists review those papers to assess their credibility and quality (free); and then the journals publish the papers, selling subscriptions to universities and corporations who need them (definitely not free).
How FBI Informant Sabu Helped Anonymous Hack Brazil
June 9th, 2014Via: Vice:
In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.
A year after leaked files exposed the National Security Agency’s efforts to spy on citizens and companies in Brazil, previously unpublished chat logs obtained by Motherboard reveal that while under the FBI’s supervision, Hector Xavier Monsegur, widely known by his online persona, “Sabu,” facilitated attacks that affected Brazilian websites.
The operation raises questions about how the FBI uses global internet vulnerabilities during cybercrime investigations, how it works with informants, and how it shares information with other police and intelligence agencies.
After his arrest in mid-2011, Monsegur continued to organize cyber attacks while working for the FBI. According to documents and interviews, Monsegur passed targets and exploits to hackers to disrupt government and corporate servers in Brazil and several other countries.
Child’s Life Destroyed by Fluvax, Millions in Damages Paid Out to Parents
June 9th, 2014Holy crap.
Via: PerthNow:
THE parents of a WA girl who has been awarded millions in damages after a defective flu jab left her severely disabled say they it’s a “massive relief” the legal battle is over.
Mick and Kirsten Button’s daughter Saba was just 11 months old when she received the Fluvax shot in April 2010.
The then toddler suffered a hypoxic brain injury, kidney, liver and bone marrow failure. She can now no longer walk and talk and needs round-the-clock care.
Three days after Saba was admitted at Princess Margaret Hospital, Fluvax was recalled. It is now banned for children under five.
Holder Announces Task Force on ‘Homegrown’ Terrorists
June 9th, 2014And then police officers are killed in Las Vegas by… Homegrown terrorists?
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The task force will chiefly comprise leaders from the FBI, the Justice Department’s National Security Division and U.S. Attorneys. Called the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, it is a recreation of a task force formed by former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The task force fell into disuse after 9/11.
Though the original task force, which was little known, focused mainly on right-wing zealots, Holder’s version is aimed at U.S. citizens or visitors radicalized via the Internet. Holder said the government will continue to fight terrorists abroad.
“But we also must concern ourselves with a different type of threat. We face an escalating danger from self-radicalized individuals within our own borders,” he said.
Chatbot Passes Turing Test for First Time
June 9th, 2014Via: ZDNet:
A computer program that pretends to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman passed a Turing test at the Royal Society in London yesterday (Saturday 6 June) by convincing 33 percent of the judges that it was human during a five-minute typed conversation. The test was suggested by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, and the competition was held on the 60th anniversary of his death.
Russian Companies Prepare to Pay for Trade in Renminbi
June 9th, 2014Via: Financial Times:
Russian companies are preparing to switch contracts to renminbi and other Asian currencies amid fears that western sanctions may freeze them out of the US dollar market, according to two top bankers.
“Over the last few weeks there has been a significant interest in the market from large Russian corporations to start using various products in renminbi and other Asian currencies and to set up accounts in Asian locations,” Pavel Teplukhin, head of Deutsche Bank in Russia, told the Financial Times.
Streetview Time Machine Shows Detroit’s Collapse
June 9th, 2014Via: ZeroHedge:
With the stock market hitting record highs day after day, it is easy to move on and forget that one of American’s once premier cities, Detroit, has been bankrupt for nearly a year. But out of mind doesn’t mean out of sight, especially now that Google has launched its street view Time Machine, which provides for 7 years worth of street images, showing the time shift of the tumultuous period period starting in 2007. One blogger who decided to take this time lapse data and apply it to the city of Detroit is GooBing Detroit who, as the following time-lapse photos demonstrate, has captured Detoit’s unprecedented slow-motion collapse into death and decay in what is the closest we have to “real time.”
Perhaps what is most stunning about the following series of photos is not the ultimate fate of the bankrupt city, but how quickly a once vibrant metropolis has succumbed to blight and sheer desperation.
Hopefully not coming to a street near you.
Full Gallery: GooBing Detroit
Las Vegas: Police Officers Killed in Ambush Shooting
June 9th, 2014Interesting Timing: Holder Announces Task Force on ‘Homegrown’ Terrorists
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The task force will chiefly comprise leaders from the FBI, the Justice Department’s National Security Division and U.S. Attorneys. Called the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee, it is a recreation of a task force formed by former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The task force fell into disuse after 9/11.
Though the original task force, which was little known, focused mainly on right-wing zealots, Holder’s version is aimed at U.S. citizens or visitors radicalized via the Internet. Holder said the government will continue to fight terrorists abroad.
“But we also must concern ourselves with a different type of threat. We face an escalating danger from self-radicalized individuals within our own borders,” he said.
—
The Las Vegas Review Journal is reporting a white supremacy component of this, which probably means COINTELPRO.
Via: 8newsnow:
Two Metro Police officers were killed at point-blank range while they ate lunch Sunday at a pizza restaurant in the northeast Las Vegas. The shooting suspects, a man and woman, also killed another person before taking their own lives, Metro Police said.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie identified the two officers as Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo. Both were shot at CiCi’s Pizza on North Nellis Boulevard near Stewart Avenue around 11:22 a.m.
“It is truly a tragic day here in the Las Vegas valley,” said Sheriff Doug Gillespie at an afternoon news conference. “We have lost two officers with young families.”
Beck, 41, had been employed with Metro since 2001 and leaves behind a wife and three children. Soldo, 31, has been employed with Metro since 2006 and leaves behind a wife and baby. Both officers were pronounced dead at University Medical Hospital.
According to police, a man and woman walked into a the restaurant at 309 N. Nellis and appeared to target the two Metro officers who were eating lunch. One person shot one officer in the head. The second person shot the second officer. One of the officers was able to shoot at the suspects.
Police say witnesses told them the suspects took the police officers’ guns and ammunition and, as they were walking out of the restaurant after the shooting, they said, ” tell the police the revolution has begun.”
The two suspects then left the restaurant and went into the Wal-Mart store across the street where they shot and killed a woman near the front doors, police said. Metro officers converged on the store and exchanged gunfire with the suspects. Minutes later, police heard more gunfire from the suspects. They believe the female suspect shot the male suspect and then turned the gun on herself. Both suspects died.
SJR (Super Joule Ringer) Looper LED Flashlight Circuit V3
June 8th, 2014Via: LaserHacker:
Organic Agriculture Attracts a New Generation of Farmers, Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Easy
June 7th, 2014There’s no app for that.
Individuals might consider vertical cells for salad greens, strawberries and some other crops and larger containers on the ground. I like vertical and containers because you’re minimizing the amount of effort required for keeping weeds down. You can compost the spent soil and recharge it with whatever fertilizer you might have on hand (worm wee, fish emulsion, sea weed, livestock manure, humanure etc.) Spuds and the like can be done in barrels, buckets, bathtubs, tires.
Grubbing around in the soil is grim, backbreaking work. I love the guys in the video, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t see that happening on any sort of scale. More people are going to have to grow more stuff for themselves rather than leaving it up to a small number of farmers.
For NZ: I was looking at a well rotted ponga fern trunk and noticed that sawing it into rings produced what seemed like perfect cells for growing salad greens. These could be set in a shallow tub and flooded with whatever nutrient bath one wanted to use. I haven’t tried it yet, but what I was wondering is if the plants would be able to use the ponga as a growing medium without adding any soil at all??? That old ponga seemed like a compost pile that had been formed into a cylinder. Also, might capillary action keep plants perfectly hydrated if the base of the ponga “pot” was left submerged in the nutrient bath?
Anyway, if you toil in the soil enough, try to keep your organic matter up, try to put enough nutrients in, try to keep weeds down, turn the soil over each season (sorry, tried to make no-dig work for years), eventually, “There has to be a better way,” is a phrase that will get lodged in your brain like a splinter.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
By 9 a.m., Jack Motter had been planting peas for hours.
He pushed a two-wheeled contraption that deposited a seed every few inches along neat rows at Ellwood Canyon Farms, just outside Santa Barbara. As clouds gathered overhead, he picked up the pace to avoid losing days of work to the fall rain.
Timing can mean the difference between profit and loss for the 4-year-old farm.
Motter and his business partner, Jeff Kramer, are part of a growing crop of farmers — many of them young — choosing to produce food without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. As consumers demand more fresh and local food grown with minimal environmental effects, a new generation has taken up organic farming.
The two Brawley, Calif., natives, both 30, have learned that small-scale agriculture is neither easy nor lucrative. Their days on the 15-acre farm start at dawn and end with exhaustion.
Aging crop of farmers
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” Kramer said. “It’s hard work and long hours for little pay.”
