IRS: We Can Read Emails Without Warrant
April 11th, 2013Via: The Hill:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.
In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.
CourseSmart E-Textbooks Monitor Student Reading Habits
April 10th, 2013In technofascist America, E-books read you.
Via: New York Times:
Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.
They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.
“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.
The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
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CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.
Manager of a South Pacific Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong Franchise Says That Kids Should Consider Learning Mandarin
April 10th, 2013Via: New Zealand Herald:
Prime Minister John Key wants more students to consider learning Mandarin.
And a Herald-DigiPoll survey shows a surprisingly high number of people, more than 25 per cent, would like Maori and a foreign language to be compulsory at school – although the majority prefer no compulsion.
The Prime Minister is visiting China this week.
He said the argument against teaching Mandarin was that there were not enough teachers “but I think that’s not a very strong argument”.
There were 250,000 New Zealanders of Chinese ethnicity, a great many of whom spoke Chinese and many of them would teach on a part-time basis, he said.
Any student going through school today, faced with the choice of learning Mandarin or another language, would be well served to think about learning Mandarin.
When he went to the Lantern Festival in Auckland, the Asia Foundation executive director John McKinnon had given the entire speech in Mandarin “and boy did he have the audience engaging”.
Band-Aid on Band-Aid: All 104 Nuclear Reactors Currently Operational in the U.S. Have Irreparable Safety Issues
April 10th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.
The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.
“I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”
Laser Scans Objects in 3D from Half a Mile Away
April 10th, 2013Via: Engadget:
3D scanning at a range of 0.62 miles? It just became possible, thanks to a laser camera developed by physicists at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. You can pretty much see how it works from the images above — laser beams are bounced off the target and the duration of their return journey is measured precisely enough to detect millimeter depth changes even at extreme distances.
Chinese Colonel Says Latest Bird Flu Virus Is U.S. Biological Weapon
April 10th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Colonel Dai Xu of the People’s Liberation Army wrote online that the new strain of bird flu hitting China, known as H7N9, is an American “bio-psychological weapon” meant to destabilize China. The rant, posted to Dai’s account on the Twitter-like service Weibo, had already been shared by more than 30,000 fellow users by the time that the South China Morning Post reported it on Monday. Dai now has a quarter million followers on Weibo, which is quite a platform.
In general, Chinese Web users appear to have rejected Dai’s argument. In response to the criticism, though, he’s only dug in. “It is common knowledge that a group of people in China have been injected with mental toxin by the U.S.,” he wrote at one point. “I will not retreat even half a step.” He urged Chinese officials to ignore the virus’s apparent spread and argued that the disastrous 2003 SARS outbreak was also an American plot.
Dai’s conspiracy theory does not appear to be widely held, although fears about the United States and its supposed secret desire to topple the Chinese Communist Party are not uncommon among Chinese officials. He is a lecturer at the National Defence University, giving him a not insignificant platform for his theories and the worldview behind them.
Helmut Kohl: I Acted Like a Dictator to Bring in the Euro
April 10th, 2013Via: Telegraph:
Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum.
In an interview conducted for a journalist’s PhD thesis, Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by an overwhelming majority.
“I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany,” he said. “We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.”
The interview was conducted by Jens Peter Paul, a German journalist in 2002, the year when the Deutsche Mark was replaced by euro notes and coins, but has only been published now.
Comex Gold Inventories Collapse
April 10th, 2013Via: Bull Market Thinking:
A stunning piece of information was brought to my attention yesterday. Amid all the mainstream talk of the end of the gold bull market (and the end of the gold mining industry), something has been discretely happening behind the scenes.
Over the last 90 days without any announcement, stocks of gold held at Comex warehouses plunged by the largest figure ever on record during a single quarter since eligible record keeping began in 2001 (roughly the beginning of the bull market).
Request for Assistance from Cryptogon Readers in Geneva, Switzerland
April 10th, 2013Update: Day 4: Live Feed Down Again
What a disaster….
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Update: Day 3: Live Feed Down
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Update: Day 2: Both Motors Not Working
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Update: It’s Not Working
The livestream shows the Yildiz motor, but it’s not running. People are making hilarious comments in the chat about how it must need new bearings, etc. You’d laugh if you remembered back to Steorn’s almost painful-to-watch public humiliation during the Orbo demo back in 2007 in London…
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Consider stopping by to check this out, and let us know what you think: Yildiz All-Magnet Motor at the Inventors Expo in Geneva, Switzerland.
Also, I’d like to hear from anyone who works for France Telecom. For what purpose would a technician attach a Pelican case to a telephone pole, as seen here?
Forbes: ‘Unemployment Is Really 14.3%–Not 7.6%’
April 10th, 2013Unemployment is really about 23%, but, hey, it’s Forbes.
Via: Forbes:
The current job-creation numbers are meaningfully below the level we might expect during a period of record corporate earnings and the reaching of new peaks in the major stock market indices.
Let’s go to the videotape –
The unemployment rate is 7.7%. But, there is another 0.6% of discouraged workers,(about 800,000) mainly the young, minorities and those without the all-necessary high school diploma. Another 0.9% are only marginally employed (whatever that means) and have mostly stopped looking for a job recently. More crushing is the 5.1% of the workforce most impacted by the 2008 downturn, who are working only part-time and would prefer to have a full-time position. That 5.1% part-time workers total 8 million people, who mostly are having trouble making ends meet and most likely have no health plan from their employer, according to Bob Eisenbreis, vice chairman and chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisers, a New York-based investment firm that makes useful comments on the economy.
These numbers added together suggest that the true unemployment level– when part-time workers are included– is 14.3%–meaning that one in seven of every potential full-time employee in the U.S. economy is not able to earn a proper living wage–and thereby contribute to the snails-pace of economic growth.
