NJ to Use Military Trucks as Polling Places in Storm-Battered Areas, Extends Mail-In Voting
November 2nd, 2012Via: AP:
New Jersey will deploy military trucks to serve as polling places on Election Day in storm-battered communities, the state secretary of the state announced Thursday during a visit to this flood-ravaged town. The state is also extending the deadline on mail-in ballots.
Department of Defense trucks will be parked at regular polling places that have lost power, as long as the sites are still accessible. Paper ballots will be used.
Republican Secretary of State and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno said voters will find “a DOD truck with a well-situated National Guardsman and a big sign saying, “Vote Here.”
Guadagno said it was still unclear how many of the state’s 3,000 polling places are without power, but she would know by Friday. Alternate sites are to be identified in cases where polling places are gone, she said.
Panic to Sell Businesses Before Tax Increase
November 2nd, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
A looming increase in the capital-gains tax rate next year is fueling sales of some privately-held businesses.
Many business owners—mostly founders who could gain a lot from a sale—are looking to close deals before next year, when the maximum tax on investment income is scheduled to rise from 15% currently to at least 23.8% on most capital gains, at least for higher-income households. Many sellers intend to convert their equity into retirement funds or just start anew.
Related: George Lucas’s Jedi Estate Planning
‘Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves’
November 2nd, 2012“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art o War
Update: Nicholas Negroponte Is the Brother of John Negroponte
Reader DW tipped me off to something pretty remarkable that I hadn’t noticed before:
I saw your take on that amazing story about OLPC program in remotest Ethiopia as well as your reaction to it. I think you are on to something there and something else you should know is that Nicholas Negroponte is the brother of John Negroponte and at this point I think you probably know more about that latter character than anybody else I check in with. Now put John N. together with your Sun-Tzu-esque suspicions and I think you are on the right track, regrettably.
Negroponte speaks five languages (English, French, Greek, Spanish, and Vietnamese). He is the elder brother of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and of the One Laptop per Child project.
Ok, so the person mainly responsible for the One Laptop Per Child operation is the brother of a guy who: was linked to atrocities in Honduras and activities supporting U.S. covert operations in Nicaragua; was a key figure in getting NAFTA done; presided over the Iraq WMD scam; served as Director of National Intelligence from 2005–2007; and who now is a Lecturer at Yale in International Affairs (John Negroponte Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy and Senior Lecturer in International Affairs).
More from the same Wikipedia link above:
He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, alongside William H.T. Bush, the uncle of President George W. Bush, and Porter Goss, who served as Director of Central Intelligence and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Negroponte from 2005 to 2006.
Thanks, DW, for noticing the elephant in the room for us!
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Wow, on the one hand, it’s incredible to see what happened here given the lack of instruction. On the other hand, the materials were in English! So, whatever positives can be ascribed to this, it’s also war against these people. If you doubt it, see The American Culture Bomb:
Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures.
…
America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.
…
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
If you’re at war, what’s cheaper and easier? Using flying terminator robots to kill your enemies, or repurposing potential enemies (that is, anyone who isn’t already like you) from an early age into wanting to be like you?
Via: MIT Technology Review:
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.
The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week.
The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.
After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”
Related: Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
Efficiency Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
November 2nd, 2012Via: MIT Technology Review:
Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals.
The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you’ve noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that’s why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day.
Now an MIT spinout company called Eta Devices, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, cofounded by two MIT electrical engineering professors, Joel Dawson and David Perreault, say they have cracked the efficiency problem with a new amplifier design.
It’s currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones.
Tokelau: 100 Percent Solar-Powered
November 2nd, 2012Via: Wired:
Tokelau, a tiny collection of atolls in the South Pacific, is now completely able to support itself with solar energy — the first nation in the world to do so.
A one-megawatt solar panel array has been erected across the three atolls to provide its more than 1,400 residents with 150 percent of their electricity needs. It comes at a cost of £4.7 million, which might seem pricey considering the territory’s entire GDP is only £187,000 — but the long term savings from not having to import diesel and petrol will more than make up the cost in the long-term.
The 4,032 solar panels and 1,344 batteries have been installed by New Zealand company PowerSmart. The original plan was to generate 93 percent of Tokelau’s needs, with the remainder coming from burning coconut oil. It turns out that the panels can actually manage up to 150 percent of Tokelaun energy requirements, but the coconut oil is still around for cloudy days, working by night and emergencies.
IBM’s Watson Goes to Medical School
November 1st, 2012Via: New York Times:
Next up for Watson, I.B.M.’s clever question-answering computer? A stint as a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.
The collaboration, announced on Tuesday, includes a bit of controlled crowdsourcing, with the Cleveland clinicians and medical school students answering Watson’s questions and correcting its mistakes.
“Hopefully, we can contribute to the training of this technology,” said Dr. James K. Stoller, chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic. The goal, he added, was for Watson to become a “very smart assistant.”
Court OKs Warrantless Use of Hidden Surveillance Cameras
November 1st, 2012Via: Cnet:
Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday.
CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission — and without a warrant — to install multiple “covert digital surveillance cameras” in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana plants were being grown.
This is the latest case to highlight how advances in technology are causing the legal system to rethink how Americans’ privacy rights are protected by law. In January, the Supreme Court rejected warrantless GPS tracking after previously rejecting warrantless thermal imaging, but it has not yet ruled on warrantless cell phone tracking or warrantless use of surveillance cameras placed on private property without permission.
Yesterday Griesbach adopted a recommendation by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan dated October 9. That recommendation said that the DEA’s warrantless surveillance did not violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and requires that warrants describe the place that’s being searched.
“The Supreme Court has upheld the use of technology as a substitute for ordinary police surveillance,” Callahan wrote.
Related: All Three Branches Agree: Big Brother Is the New Normal
MTA Walkthrough in Flooded NYC Subway Station
November 1st, 2012Anyone play Crysis 2?
Via: CBS News:
The MTA has released video of a walkthrough inside New York City’s South Ferry and Whitehall Street Subway station flooded by Superstorm Sandy.
MTA Pictures: Flooded Subway Stations
Why Germany Wants to See Its U.S. Gold
November 1st, 2012Via: Der Spiegel:
For decades, almost half of Germany’s gold has been stored deep below the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Now, with the euro crisis swirling, German politicians are asking their central bankers to take stock of the reserves. Some even say that the gold should be shipped home.
Research Credit: cgroove69
Shit and Gasoline in Manhattan Floodwater
November 1st, 2012Via: ABC News:
Water is everywhere in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy – in basements, on the streets and in transit systems – but the one place that flood water is most dangerous is in your body.
ABC News chief health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser collected floodwater and drinking water in some of the areas hit hardest by Sandy and had them tested at The Ambient Group lab. The floodwater collected in Lower Manhattan tested positive for gasoline and two types of bacteria found in sewage: E. coli and coliform.
“Very dangerous,” Besser said. “Make sure you wear protective gear if you are coming into contact with flood water.”
