Hate To Break It To You, But Your Car Likely Has A Black Box ‘Spying’ On You Already
April 19th, 2012Via: Forbes:
The big news in the automotive privacy world this week is that Congress is on the verge of passing a transportation bill that will make “big brother” black boxes mandatory in all cars.
…
But the truth of the matter is that most Americans already have black boxes in their cars. They’ve been around since 1996, are found in at least 60 million vehicles, and are a feature of 85% of new cars every year.
Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm
April 19th, 2012Via: Natural Society:
Monsanto, the massive biotechnology company being blamed for contributing to the dwindling bee population, has bought up one of the leading bee collapse research organizations. Recently banned from Poland with one of the primary reasons being that the company’s genetically modified corn may be devastating the dying bee population, it is evident that Monsanto is under serious fire for their role in the downfall of the vital insects. It is therefore quite apparent why Monsanto bought one of the largest bee research firms on the planet.
It can be found in public company reports hosted on mainstream media that Monsanto scooped up the Beeologics firm back in September 2011. During this time the correlation between Monsanto’s GM crops and the bee decline was not explored in the mainstream, and in fact it was hardly touched upon until Polish officials addressed the serious concern amid the monumental ban. Owning a major organization that focuses heavily on the bee collapse and is recognized by the USDA for their mission statement of “restoring bee health and protecting the future of insect pollination” could be very advantageous for Monsanto.
New Research Could Mean Cellphones That Can See Through Walls
April 19th, 2012Via: University of Texas at Dallas:
Comic book hero superpowers may be one step closer to reality after the latest technological feats made by researchers at UT Dallas. They have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.
The team’s research linked two scientific advances. One involves tapping into an unused range in the electromagnetic spectrum. The other is a new microchip technology.
Prototype Wind Turbine Condenses 1,000 Liters of Water a Day from Desert Air
April 19th, 2012Via: geek.com:
Marc Parent, founder of Eole Water, realized that he could extract water from the air after noticing how much water an air conditioner unit collected. He decided to combine a green energy source with the necessary components for condensing water directly from the air. The end result after 10 years of R&D is the WMS1000 wind turbine, capable of condensing and storing up to 1,000 liters of water every day.
The 34 meter tall turbine requires 15mph winds for its 13 meter diameter rotor to turn and generate sufficient energy. It then produces 30kW of power for the system to function. Air is drawn in through vents in the nose of the turbine and a generator heats it producing steam. That steam is then fed through a cooling compressor to form moisture that gets condensed into water. The resulting liquid is piped into a storage tank at the base of the turbine after being purified.
More: Eole Water
Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars
April 19th, 2012Would you like some free course ware with that?
Via: Information Week:
Despite President Obama’s recent call for companies to “insource” jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields–including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It’s available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That’s the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka–until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative’s termination.
A JEEP document published by USAID notes that the program “is classroom based, and focuses on the specialized English skills required by employers in areas such as: nursing and allied healthcare; maritime services; travel and tourism services; business process outsourcing (BPO), and other areas of international employment.” Students–there are about 23,000 in the Philippines currently enrolled–commit to undertake 400 hours of training during two years of study.
It’s the BPO (another name for call center operations) part of the curriculum that’s troubling for U.S. offshoring opponents. When I informed Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York) about the program on Tuesday, he called it “surprising and distressing.” Bishop, who was instrumental in getting USAID to end its Sri Lanka program, recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
The U.S. “has lost five hundred thousand call center jobs in the last five years,” Bishop noted during a phone interview.
Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work
April 18th, 2012Via: The Atlantic:
Chances are, you’ll snag the wrong people, and when you do, how can you tell? How do you clear suspects of crimes that haven’t happened?
Pre-crime prevention is a terrible idea.
Here is a quiz for you. Is predicting crime before it happens: (a) something out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report; (b) the subject of of a Department of Homeland Security research project that has recently entered testing; (c) a terrible and dangerous idea which will inevitably be counter-productive and which will levy a high price in terms of civil liberties while providing little to no marginal security; or (d) all of the above.
If you picked (d) you are a winner!
The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us one step closer to a turn-key totalitarian state. This may sound alarmist, but in cases like this a little alarm is warranted. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioral cues, like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyze these cues algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with nefarious intentions. There are several major flaws with a program like this, any one of which should be enough to condemn attempts of this kind to the dustbin. Lets look at them in turn.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
April 18th, 2012Since MIT did it with Open Courseware years ago, I suspected that the point of the “free education” offerings was to create a pool of relatively skilled workers in some of the poorest countries in the world. You know, places with open sewers where people sleep on dirt floors… and where lots of these people have Internet access! (The way things are headed, this might refer to parts of the U.S. soon.)
Now that there’s talk about these other schools offering certificates, and, “connecting employers with students,” I think my suspicions are being confirmed.
So, companies will still be hiring people from slums and paying next to nothing for the labor, but, maybe a person who got a certificate in the free computer science curriculum from the College of Knowledge will be selected for a job over someone who doesn’t have a certificate.
In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about how great all of it is.
I suppose that positive wildcard outcomes are possible from this. Some people will figure out how to start their own businesses with the knowledge they gain from the free online classes. Most, though, will just feel lucky to be able to show up for any paid work at all.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to people who are still attending classes on campus and buying those $200 textbooks. Sure, there will be a few slots somewhere up in the skyscrapers for engineers and managers, but the machine will always, and I mean, ALWAYS, be gunning for them. For most, it’s going to be like the house flippers who couldn’t find a greater fool that one last time as the Ponzi scheme came down. There are millions of people out there with $20K, $50K, $100K or more sunk into worthless degrees… How is that situation going to unwind?
Get busy, boys and girls. Your new career in a building with a suicide net awaits. If you’re lucky.
I don’t offer a lot of advice on here, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell my sons. It’s what my dad told me and it has held pretty true:
“If you’re working for someone else, chances are, you’re fucked.”
That said, free products and services usually exist to monetize, in some way, the people who use them. In this case, the goal of the free courses is to create a larger pool of qualified workers to fill a dwindling number of positions, driving labor costs down.
So, if you want to take free courses, go for it. But if you’re thinking that it’s going to give you an edge in the market, remember that the thronging, jobless hordes have the same idea.
I’m not saying to not do it, but through it all, try to think about how you can use what you’re learning to avoid having to show up somewhere to make someone else (or a bunch of stockholders) rich.
Via: Reuters:
Five prestigious U.S. universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera, the founders announced Wednesday.
The two founders, both professors of computer science at Stanford University, also announced that they had received $16 million in financing from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
Coursera will offer more than three dozen college courses in the coming year through its website at coursera.org, on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to neurology, from calculus to contemporary American poetry. The classes are designed and taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
Coursera joins a raft of ambitious online projects aimed at making higher education more accessible and affordable. Many of these ventures, however, simply post entire lectures on the web, with no interactive component. Others strive to create brand-new universities from scratch.
Founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university’s name and will adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums — even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.
Multiple-choice and short-answer tests will be computer scored. Coursera will soon unveil a system of peer grading to assess more complex work, such as essays or algorithms.
Students will not get college credit. But Coursera may offer “certificates of completion” or transcripts for a fee. The company may also seek to turn a profit by connecting employers with students who have shown aptitude in a particular field, a spokeswoman said.
‘Factor in taxes, transportation costs, clothing and lunch — what is the true net that you bring home after salary?”
April 18th, 2012Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes
Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World by Kelly Coyne
“What if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something?”
Via: CNN:
After factoring in the rising cost of child care, the daily commute and other work-related expenses, a growing number of mothers are figuring out that having a job just doesn’t pay.
“It comes down to a cost analysis and I have several clients that have taken the route of quitting,” said Anna Behnam, a financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial in Rockville, Md. “Factor in taxes, transportation costs, clothing and lunch — what is the true net that you bring home after salary?”
Over the past few years, the debate over which lifestyle is more financially feasible — working and paying for child care versus staying at home — has come up more often among Behnam’s clients than ever before.
For most working parents, child care is by far the greatest expense.
3D Printer Creates Drugs to Order
April 18th, 2012I can see it now: The Pirate Bay: Better Living Through Chemistry.
Via: University of Glasgow:
A new 3D printing process developed at the University of Glasgow could revolutionise the way scientists, doctors and even the general public create chemical products.
Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry at the University, believes his research could lead to the development of home chemical fabricators which consumers could use to design and create medicine at home.
Human-Made Earthquakes Reported in Central U.S.
April 18th, 2012Via: Reuters:
The number of earthquakes in the central United States rose “spectacularly” near where oil and gas drillers disposed of wastewater underground, a process that may have caused geologic faults to slip, U.S. government geologists report.
The average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater in the U.S. midcontinent – an area that includes Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas – increased to six times the 20th century average last year, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey said in an abstract of their research.
The abstract does not explicitly link rising earthquake activity to fracking – known formally as hydraulic fracturing – that involves pumping water and chemicals into underground rock formations to extract natural gas and oil.
But the wastewater generated by fracking and other extraction processes may play a role in causing geologic faults to slip, causing earthquakes, the report suggests.
“A remarkable increase in the rate of (magnitude 3) and greater earthquakes is currently in progress,” the authors wrote in a brief work summary to be discussed Wednesday at a San Diego meeting of the Seismological Society of America.
“While the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade, it remains to be determined how they are related to either changes in extraction methodologies or the rate of oil and gas production,” the abstract said.
