Worldwide Cancer Cases Expected to Soar by 70% Over Next 20 Years
February 3rd, 2014Via: Guardian:
Cancer cases worldwide are predicted to increase by 70% over the next two decades, from 14m in 2012 to 25m new cases a year, according to the World Health Organisation.
The latest World Cancer Report says it is implausible to think we can treat our way out of the disease and that the focus must now be on preventing new cases. Even the richest countries will struggle to cope with the spiralling costs of treatment and care for patients, and the lower income countries, where numbers are expected to be highest, are ill-equipped for the burden to come.
Related: Cancers That Result from Medical Imaging
XStat for Gunshot Wounds
February 3rd, 2014Via: Popular Science:
When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn’t always work–if bleeding hasn’t stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and start over again. It’s so painful, “you take the guy’s gun away first,” says former U.S. Army Special Operations medic John Steinbaugh.
Even with this emergency treatment, many soldiers still bleed to death; hemorrhage is a leading cause of death on the battlefield. “Gauze bandages just don’t work for anything serious,” says Steinbaugh, who tended to injured soldiers during more than a dozen deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. When Steinbaugh retired in April 2012 after a head injury, he joined an Oregon-based startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers who were working on a better way to stop bleeding.
RevMedx recently asked the FDA to approve a pocket-size invention: a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wounds. Called XStat, the device could boost survival and spare injured soldiers from additional pain by plugging wounds faster and more efficiently than gauze.
The team’s early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires. “That’s what we pictured as the perfect solution: something you could spray in, it would expand, and bleeding stops,” says Steinbaugh. “But we found that blood pressure is so high, blood would wash the foam right out.”
Wall Street Attracts Chop Shops 20 Years After ‘Wolf’
February 3rd, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
When Paul Taboada ran Charles Morgan Securities Inc. at 120 Wall St., he set himself apart by wearing suits with the brokerage’s name stitched into the pinstripes.
He ran into trouble within a few years. A client was sent to jail in 2010 for a fraud prosecutors alleged Taboada facilitated. Customers complained about a fund he set up to invest in Facebook Inc. (FB) before it went public. That didn’t slow him down. He shut the firm amid an investigation by regulators and moved to Blackwall Capital Markets Inc. at 100 Wall St., where trainees call hundreds of strangers a day to pitch stocks.
“What Wall Street does is it affords the common man participation in deals the institutions are doing,” said Taboada, 49, who hasn’t been sanctioned in either matter.
Twenty years after Jordan Belfort and his Stratton Oakmont Inc. defrauded investors out of more than $200 million from its offices on Long Island — a story retold in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” — New York’s financial district has become a hub for veterans of defunct boiler rooms who use decades-old scripts to pressure investors into speculative trades, more than 40 current and former brokers said in interviews.
“They’re preying on the few people who still answer a landline phone,” said Joshua Brown, chief executive officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York, whose 2012 book “Backstage Wall Street” described the sales tactics. “You pitch 50 guys a stock, and you pitch 50 guys another. If one goes higher, you go back to that pile.”
Research Credit: afterhours
U.S. Army Tests Fully Autonomous Convoy
January 31st, 2014Via: Wired:
U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous.
In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Lockheed Martin demonstrated the ability of the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS), which gives full autonomy to convoys to operate in urban environments. In tests, driverless tactical vehicles were able to navigate hazards and obstacles including pedestrians, oncoming traffic, road intersections, traffic circles and stalled and passing vehicles.
Under an initial $11 million contract in 2012, Lockheed Martin developed the multiplatform kit which integrates low-cost sensors and control systems with Army and Marine tactical vehicles to enable autonomous operation in convoys. According to Lockheed, AMAS also gives drivers an automated option to alert, stop and adjust, or take full control under user supervision.
“The Economic Picture Is Looking Brighter”: Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck
January 31st, 2014Recovery!
Via: Time:
But as evidenced by a report out Thursday from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, nearly half of Americans are living in a state of “persistent economic insecurity,” that makes it “difficult to look beyond immediate needs and plan for a more secure future.”
In other words, too many of us are living paycheck to paycheck. The CFED calls these folks “liquid asset poor,” and its report finds that 44% of Americans are living with less than $5,887 in savings for a family of four.
Third Banker Suicided
January 31st, 2014We have Gabriel Magee and William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit from a couple of days ago and now Mike Dueker.
Any more?
Via: Bloomberg:
Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.
He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.
Dueker was reported missing on Jan. 29, and a group of friends had been searching for him along with law enforcement. Troyer said the economist was having problems at work, without elaborating. Dueker was in good standing at Russell, said Jennifer Tice, a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment on Troyer’s statement about Dueker’s work issues.
“We were deeply saddened to learn today of the death,” Tice said in an e-mail. “He made valuable contributions that helped our clients and many of his fellow associates.”
Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Google: Lots of Android Phones Taking Video in the Same Area—Alert the Cops?
January 30th, 2014Via: Phandroid:
Excerpt from US Patent #20140025755
“When there are at least a given number of video clips with similar time stamps and geolocation stamps uploaded to a repository, it is inferred that an event of interest has likely occurred, and a notification signal is transmitted (e.g., to a law enforcement agency, to a news organization, to a publisher of a periodical, to a public blog, etc.).”
Research Credit: bretwalda
New 3D Printer Can Print in Carbon Fiber
January 30th, 2014Via: Popular Mechanics:
Gregory Mark co-owns Aeromotions, which builds computer-controlled racecar wings. To make those wings both strong and lightweight, they use carbon fiber. No surprise there—it’s the material of choice for many advanced motorsports parts. The problem is that making custom racecar parts out of carbon fiber is daunting. The only real method available is the expensive and difficult process of laying up carbon fiber pieces by hand.
To improve the process, Mark looked to 3D printing. But nothing on the market could print the material, and no available materials could print pieces strong enough for his purposes. So Mark devised his own solution: the MarkForged Mark One, the world’s first carbon fiber 3D printer.
Mark debuted his Boston area-based startup MarkForged at SolidWorks World 2014 in San Diego with a working prototype. The Mark One can print in carbon fiber, fiberglass, nylon and PLA (a thermoplastic).
Google and DeepMind Technologies
January 30th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
How much are a dozen deep-learning researchers worth? Apparently, more than $400 million.
This week, Google reportedly paid that much to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a startup based in London that had one of the biggest concentrations of researchers anywhere working on deep learning, a relatively new field of artificial intelligence research that aims to achieve tasks like recognizing faces in video or words in human speech (see “Deep Learning”).
The acquisition, aimed at adding skilled experts rather than specific products, marks an acceleration in efforts by Google, Facebook, and other Internet firms to monopolize the biggest brains in artificial intelligence research.
In an interview last month, before the DeepMind acquisition, Peter Norvig, a director of research at Google, estimated that his company already employed “less than 50 percent but certainly more than 5 percent” of the world’s leading experts in machine learning.
Companies like Google expect deep learning to help them create new types of products that can understand and learn from the images, text, and video clogging the Web. And to a significant degree, leading academic scientists have embraced Silicon Valley, where they can command teams of engineers instead of students and have access to the largest, most interesting data sets. “It’s a combination of the computing resources we have and the headcounts we can offer,” Norvig said. “At Google, if you want a copy of the Web, well, we just happen to have one sitting around.”
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
January 30th, 2014Thank you.
MH $20
JM $25
Eileen $75
JM asked me to mention freestateproject.org and nhlibertyforum.com.
