IDair’s New Fingerprint Reader Captures Prints from 6 Meters Away
June 21st, 2012Via: Huntsville Times:
Forget the key card to your office building? Just wave your hand at the door, and you’re in. “You don’t have to stop at a station. Nobody checks your ID. You just walk through,” explains Clemson-educated physicist Joel Burcham of his new Huntsville company called IDair.
IDair makes a machine that Burcham says can photographically capture a fingerprint from as far away as six meters in enough detail to match against a database. Add facial and iris-recognition technology, Burcham said, and you have the basis for a good biometrics system that can control access to any building or room within a building.
Who needs this level of security? “Sooner, rather than later, we’re all going to need it,” Burcham said in a recent interview at his office at Huntsville’s HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.
Reddit Cofounder Says Site Was Built By Horde of Fake Accounts
June 21st, 2012Have you ever wondered how Reddit’s shit-for-brains Hive Mind formed?
Read on.
Via: Slashdot:
“How, exactly, did Reddit get so big? Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ’til they made it.’ In a video for Udacity, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site’s content with tons of fake accounts. These days, with the site’s users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content. But early on, Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Early on the Reddit crew could shape the discourse of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held allowing the fake accounts to fade away.”
Credit Suisse Cut 3 Levels As Moody’s Downgrades Biggest Banks
June 21st, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
Credit Suisse Group AG’s credit rating was cut three levels by Moody’s Investors Service, Morgan Stanley was reduced two levels and 13 other banks were downgraded in moves that may shake up competition among Wall Street’s biggest firms.
Credit Suisse, the second-largest Swiss bank, received the maximum reduction that Moody’s said in February it may make during a review of global banks with capital markets operations. Morgan Stanley and UBS AG (UBSN), the other firms singled out for such a steep cut, were lowered two steps instead.
“All of the banks affected by today’s actions have significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital-markets activities” Moody’s Global Banking Managing Director Greg Bauer said today in a statement.
The downgrades may force banks to post additional collateral to trading partners in derivatives deals while boosting the companies’ borrowing costs. Moody’s said when it announced the review that it was seeking to reflect the banks’ reliance on fragile confidence in funding markets and increased pressures from regulation and a difficult market environment.
Baby Soaps and Shampoos Trigger Positive Results on Pot Tests
June 21st, 2012[???]
Via: Time:
Commonly used baby soaps and shampoos, including products from Johnson & Johnson, Aveeno and CVS, can trigger a positive result on newborns’ marijuana screening tests, according to a recent study. A minute amount of the cleansing products in a urine sample — just 0.1 milliliters or less — was found to cause a positive result.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, began studying the issue after an unusually high number of newborns in their nursery began testing positive for marijuana exposure. Newborn screening for marijuana at hospitals, particularly among babies of women who are considered at high risk of drug use, is not uncommon: at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, 10% to 40% of newborns are tested.
Positive results can precipitate an investigation by child welfare authorities. “We really did this to help protect families from being falsely accused,” study co-author Dr. Carl Seashore, a pediatrician in the U.N.C. Chapel Hill newborn nursery, told My Health News Daily.
Research Credit: alvinroasting
Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
June 21st, 2012Via: AP:
Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has reached a deal to buy 98 percent of the island of Lanai from its current owner, Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie said Wednesday.
The land’s owner, Castle & Cooke Inc., filed a transfer application with the state’s public utilities commission, which regulates utilities on the island that serve its two resorts.
The sale price for the property, which comprises the vast majority of the island’s 141 square miles, was not immediately clear. Lawyers for the seller redacted a copy of the sale agreement signed May 2, saying it includes confidential information that would competitively hurt Ellison and the seller if disclosed. The Maui News previously reported the asking price was between $500 million and $600 million.
‘My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.’
June 21st, 2012The pickers are being replaced by robots.
Instead of people walking around and picking products (as described in the piece below), robots pick up the racks and deliver them to a queue where a handful of remaining human workers box up the orders.
The main player in this type of automation is Kiva Systems, and they were recently acquired by Amazon:
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is making its biggest acquisition since the 2009 purchase of Zappos.com, agreeing to pay $775 million for Kiva Systems Inc., a maker of robots that move items around warehouses.
The all-cash deal for closely held Kiva will close in the second quarter, Seattle-based Amazon said today in a statement. Kiva’s orange robots, which can slide under shelves and bins of products, are used by Quidsi Inc. — the company behind Soap.com and Diapers.com that Amazon acquired for about $545 million last year.
Via: Mother Jones:
At lunch, the most common question, aside from “Which offensive dick-shaped product did you handle the most of today?” is “Why are you here?” like in prison.
G4S Chief Predicts Mass Police Privatisation
June 21st, 2012Via: Guardian:
Private companies will be running large parts of the UK’s police service within five years, according to the world’s biggest security firm.
David Taylor-Smith, the head of G4S for the UK and Africa, said he expected police forces across the country to sign up to similar deals to those on the table in the West Midlands and Surrey, which could result in private companies taking responsibility for duties ranging from investigating crimes to transporting suspects and managing intelligence.
The prediction comes as it emerged that 10 more police forces were considering outsourcing deals that would see services, such as running police cells and operating IT, run by private firms.
…
G4S, which is providing security for the Olympics, has 657,000 staff operating in more than 125 countries and is one of the world’s biggest private employers. It already runs six prisons in the UK and in April started work on a £200m police contract in Lincolnshire, where it will design, build and run a police station. Under the terms of the deal, 575 public sector police staff transferred to the company.
‘Checkpoint of the Future’ Takes Shape at Texas Airport
June 21st, 2012Via: USA Today:
After checking their luggage, passengers would identify themselves not with driver’s licenses and paper boarding passes, but by scanning fingerprints or irises to prove they have an electronic ticket.
Acxiom Corp
June 21st, 2012Via: The Week:
What is Acxiom Corp., and what does it do?
The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year. “In essence, it’s as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined, and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge,” says The Times’ Singer.
What kind of data does it have?
“If you are an American adult,” says Singer, “the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.” It does more than collect that information, though. It uses it to pigeonhole people into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters in an attempt to predict how they’ll act, what they’ll buy, and how companies can persuade them to buy their products. It gathers its data trove from public records, surveys you’ve filled out, your online behavior, and other disparate sources of information, then sells it to banks, retailers, and other buyers.
Spain and Italy to be Bailed Out in £600bn Deal
June 20th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
European leaders are poised to announce a £600 billion deal to bail out Spain and Italy, it emerged at the G20 summit on Tuesday night.
wo rescue funds are to be used to buy the debts of the troubled economies, the cost of which have reached record highs in recent weeks.
It is hoped that the move, which represents a substantial shift in policy for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, will send a strong signal to financial markets that Europe’s biggest economy is finally prepared to back its weaker neighbours.
Mrs Merkel and other European leaders have come under intense pressure at this week’s G20 summit to take radical action to stem the growing euro crisis which has pushed up the cost of Spanish bonds to unsustainable levels.
The communiqué issued at the end of the G20 summit, which finished in Mexico last night, said that European leaders had agreed to take action to bring down borrowing rates.
Under the proposed deal, two European rescue funds – the £400?billion (€500? billion) European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the £200?billion (€250? billion) European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) – will buy bonds issued by European countries.
