Volvo Gave Away the Most Important Design They Ever Patented
August 2nd, 2013Via: Priceonomics:
In 1958, people rarely buckled up. While race car drivers and fighter pilots wore harnesses, the seat belts available in cars simply banded across one’s lap. In crashes, they frequently did more harm than good. The sudden pressure put on the abdomen during a crash caused internal injuries.
At the time, Volvo was already pushing its brand as a safety conscious automaker. Its CEO, whose relative had recently died in a car crash, decided to hire Nils Bohlin, a man who had previously designed ejector seats for fighter jets, as chief safety engineer (a new position).
Bohlin turned his attention to seat belts. He had worked with four point harnesses in fighter jets, but doubted that consumers would use such a bulky contraption. “It was just a matter of finding a solution that was simple, effective and could be put on conveniently with one hand,” he later told the New York Times.
In 1959, Volvo delivered its first car that used Bohlin’s answer, a three point seat belt that can be seen in the above image and every car sold today. Volvo received a patent for the design in 1962, but rather than hoard it, they gave it to the world. Volvo shared the design, allowed any carmaker to use it, and sent Bohlin on a world tour to encourage its use.
Over the next decades, accolades rolled in. Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents estimates that Bohlin’s 3 point seat belt has saved over 1 million lives. German patent registrars named it one of the 8 most significant patents of the century – an honor shared with inventors like Thomas Edison.
Berlusconi Jail Term Confirmed for Tax Evasion
August 2nd, 2013My guess is that this is a wrist slap over his repeated failure to maintain appearances with regard to young prostitutes. If unchecked, this might lead to exposure of much more sinister activities, not necessarily by Berlusconi, but by others in his milieu.
Via: BBC:
Italy’s highest court has upheld a prison sentence given to former PM Silvio Berlusconi for tax evasion.
The court also ordered a further judicial review on whether he should be banned from holding public office.
In an emotional video statement, Berlusconi denounced the decision as “based on nothing, and which deprives me of my freedom and political rights”.
The sentence cannot be appealed against further but Berlusconi, 76, is unlikely to go to jail because of his age.
The ruling by Rome’s Court of Cassation came after a three-day hearing. Berlusconi was not in court.
The former prime minister was sentenced to four years in prison at the conclusion of the trial in October last year, though this was automatically reduced to a year under a 2006 pardon law.
Berlusconi is likely to serve house arrest or carry out community service.
His lawyers described Thursday’s ruling as “unjust”.
Google Searches Result in Visit from Joint Terrorism Task Force
August 2nd, 2013Any lawyers who click through are likely to experience grand mal seizures when they read about how the suspect dealt with this bogus fishing expedition.
Suspect: Invited Joint Terrorism Task Force (mainly FBI, but could actually include people from a variety of agencies) inside his house.
Suspect: Consented to a search of his house.
Suspect: Answered questions posed by law enforcement without being in the presence of a lawyer, possibly incriminating himself.
Since they asked to search his house, it means that they didn’t have a warrant. Sure, if the suspect had asked for them to come back with a warrant, they probably would have, and they probably would have trashed his house in the process of conducting the search.
Bonus gift for all questionable Google search suspects: Free membership in Club MAIN CORE.
Have a nice day.
Via: Medium:
It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.
Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now. And in these times, when things like the Boston bombing happen, you spend a lot of time on the internet reading about it and, if you are my exceedingly curious news junkie of a twenty-year-old son, you click a lot of links when you read the myriad of stories. You might just read a CNN piece about how bomb making instructions are readily available on the internet and you will in all probability, if you are that kid, click the link provided.
Which might not raise any red flags. Because who wasn’t reading those stories? Who wasn’t clicking those links? But my son’s reading habits combined with my search for a pressure cooker and my husband’s search for a backpack set off an alarm of sorts at the joint terrorism task force headquarters.
That’s how I imagine it played out, anyhow. Lots of bells and whistles and a crowd of task force workers huddled around a computer screen looking at our Google history.
This was weeks ago. I don’t know what took them so long to get here. Maybe they were waiting for some other devious Google search to show up but “what the hell do I do with quinoa” and “Is A-Rod suspended yet” didn’t fit into the equation so they just moved in based on those older searches.
I was at work when it happened. My husband called me as soon as it was over, almost laughing about it but I wasn’t joining in the laughter. His call left me shaken and anxious.
NSA Pays £100m in Secret Funding for GCHQ
August 2nd, 2013Via: Guardian:
The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes.
The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. “GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight,” a GCHQ strategy briefing said.
The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK’s biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain’s dependency on the NSA has become too great.
In one revealing document from 2010, GCHQ acknowledged that the US had “raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA’s minimum expectations”. It said GCHQ “still remains short of the full NSA ask”.
Ministers have denied that GCHQ does the NSA’s “dirty work”, but in the documents GCHQ describes Britain’s surveillance laws and regulatory regime as a “selling point” for the Americans.
Dozens of CIA Operatives on the Ground During Benghazi Attack
August 2nd, 2013Via: CNN:
CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11 in eastern Libya.
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.
Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings.
The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.
It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.
California: Largest Solar Thermal Energy Plant in the World
August 1st, 2013Via: National Geographic:
The Ivanpah Valley of the Mojave Desert in California is home to spiky yucca trees, long-nosed leopard lizards, loggerhead shrikes, and a rare species of tortoise—and soon, the largest solar thermal energy plant in the world.
More than six years in the making, the Ivanpah plant is now slated to begin generating power before summer’s end. It was designed by BrightSource Energy to use more than 170,000 mirrors to focus sunlight onto boilers positioned atop three towers, which reach nearly 500 feet (150 meters) into the dry desert air. The reflected sunlight heats water in the boilers to make steam, which turns turbines to generate electricity—enough to power more than 140,000 homes.
At 377 megawatts (MW), Ivanpah’s capacity is more than double that of the Andusol, Solnava, or Extresol power stations in southern Spain, which previously were the largest in the world (150 MW each).
Research Credit: emulsified
Man Arrested At Theater Had Armor, Gun, Fake CIA ID
August 1st, 2013Lawyer: “Costume” [???]
Via: Michigan Live:
The attorney for the man accused of impersonating a federal officer while wearing body armor and openly carrying a loaded gun claims the fake Central Intelligence Agency ID was part of a costume he was wearing.
Jeff Clothier, attorney for Cassidy Delavergne, the man who was arrested this week at NCG Trillium theater for having a fake ID and badge, said his client was returning to his car to put his gun away at the request of the theater manager when police came up to him in the parking lot.
Delavergne, 24, also was wearing a necklace with an attached golden, shied-shaped badge with the words of special agent and Central Intelligence Agency on it. Clothier said his client bought the badge on the Internet and made the ID through a computer program.
Clothier likened what Delavergne was wearing to a costume. The movie he was seeing, “Red 2” is about a group of retired CIA officers.
“You don’t arrest people for wearing consumes,” Clothier said.
He also wore the same outfit the week previous without incident when he saw “Despicable Me 2” at the same theater, his attorney said.
Clothier said Delavergne was unlawfully detained at the time he was searched.
“But for the unlawful detention, they may never have found the ID,” said Clothier.
Grand Blanc Township police could not be reached for comment on Clothier’s claims.
—
Random nutter, or???
Via: AP:
The FBI said a man arrested at a Michigan movie theater was wearing body armor and carrying a gun.
FBI spokesman Simon Shaykhet says police were called to the Trillium Theater in Grand Blanc Township near Flint on around 8:20 p.m. Tuesday after someone noticed the vest and gun.
Cassidy Delavergne was watching a movie when police approached him. According to investigators, Delavergne flashed a fake Central Intelligence Agency identification badge and told the officers that he was a federal agent.
Suspicious of his story, police arrested Delavergne and found he was wearing body armor and carrying a 9 mm pistol with 34 rounds of ammunition.
Federal agents arrived and searched Delavergne’s car, where they found an additional 111 rounds of ammunition. Shaykhet declined to say whether agents believe Delavergne planned to use his handgun.
A court filing says Delavergne told an agent he displayed the phony ID to minimize concerns about his gun.
Reporter Andrew Keller said right now, Delavergne has only been charged with having a CIA identification card.
“Right now, the FBI is not releasing anything about possible motives, but did say Delavergne claims he was wearing the body armor and carrying the gun because he just got off work and did not want to leave them in his car. The FBI also said he claimed to have a concealed weapons permit,” he said.
How Hollywood Helped Hitler
August 1st, 2013Via: Hollywood Reporter:
Beginning with wholesale changes made to Universal’s 1930 release All Quiet on the Western Front, Hollywood regularly ran scripts and finished movies by German officials for approval. When they objected to scenes or dialogue they thought made Germany look bad, criticized the Nazis or dwelled on the mistreatment of Jews, the studios would accommodate them — and make cuts in the American versions as well as those shown elsewhere in the world.
It was not only scenes: Nazi pressure managed to kill whole projects critical of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Hollywood would not make an important anti-Nazi film until 1940. Hitler was obsessed with the propaganda power of film, and the Nazis actively promoted American movies like 1937’s Captains Courageous that they thought showcased Aryan values.
Historians have long known about American companies such as IBM and General Motors that did business in Germany into the late 1930s, but the cultural power of movies — their ability to shape what people think — makes Hollywood’s cooperation with the Nazis a particularly important and chilling moment in history.
Book: The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand
Behavioral Insights Team
August 1st, 2013Unfortunately, Fox News is the the original source for this one, but it needs to be posted.
Via: Fox News:
The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.
While the program is still in its early stages, the document shows the White House is already working on such projects with almost a dozen federal departments and agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.
“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.
The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.
The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a “Behavioral Insights Team.” One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.
“Sending letters to late taxpayers that indicated a social norm — i.e., that ‘9 out of 10 people in Britain paid their taxes on time’ — resulted in a 15 percent increase in response rates over a three-month period, rolling out to £30 million of extra annual revenue,” the document reads.
Another policy aimed to convince people to install attic insulation to conserve energy.
“Offering an attic-clearance service (at full cost) to people led to a five-fold increase in their subsequent adoption of attic-insulation.”
Such policies — which encourage behavior subtly rather than outright require it — have come to be known as “nudges,” after an influential 2008 book titled “Nudge” by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and Chicago Booth School of Business professor Richard Thaler popularized the term.
Original Document: Research to Results: Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights
Related: Obama Staffer Wants ‘Cognitive Infiltration’ of Conspiracy Groups
Florida: Christian Cannibal Puppeteer Arrested with Kiddie Porn; Planned to Abduct and Eat Child
August 1st, 2013Via: Dangerous Minds:
This is one of those stories that just makes your blood run cold: Ronald William Brown of Largo, Florida, the 57-year-old proprietor of “Puppets Plus,” has been charged with the possession of child pornography and of conspiring with another man to kidnap and then eat a child.
The Christian Television Network kids program Joy Junction regularly featured Brown and his ventriloquist dummy “Marty,” who would warn about things like… pornography.
Brown, an active member of the Gulf Coast Church in Largo, and an accomplice, Michael Arnett, were planning to abduct a specific child who was a member of the church and who took part in Brown’s “Puppet Ministry Kidz Zone” youth ministry program.
Homeland Security agents who searched Brown’s home and tool shed yesterday discovered images of bound and gagged kids, photographs of dead children and a flier for a missing child.
Research Credit: EG


