Speech-Jamming Gun [???]
March 1st, 2012Via: ExtremeTech:
Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun (pictured above) that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters (100ft) away. The gun has two purposes, according to the researchers: At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling.
The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.
The gun works by listening in with a directional microphone, and then, after a short delay of around 0.2 seconds, playing it back with a directional speaker. This triggers an effect that psychologists call Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), which has long been known to interrupt your speech (you might’ve experienced the same effect if you’ve ever heard your own voice echoing through Skype or another voice comms program). According to the researchers, DAF doesn’t cause physical discomfort, but the fact that you’re unable to talk is obviously quite stressful.
Research Credit: JS
FDA Adds Diabetes, Memory Loss Warnings to Statins
March 1st, 2012As for the rest of this article, which is about how great statins really are *roll eyes*, I’d suggest reading, Cholesterol Drugs Are Dangerous, by Russell Blaylock, M.D. and Niacin Therapy, by Abram Hoffer, M.D. instead.
Via: Reuters:
Health regulators are adding warnings to the labels of widely used cholesterol lowering drugs, such as Lipitor, to say they may raise levels of blood sugar and could cause memory loss.
The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday the changes to the safety information on the labels of statins such as Pfizer Inc’s Lipitor, AstraZeneca’s Crestor and Merck & Co’s Zocor that are taken by tens of millions of people.
McCaffrey Briefs NBC Executives on Upcoming War with Iran
March 1st, 2012Via: Salon:
Apparently, not only does NBC continue to present McCaffrey to its viewers as some sort of objective analyst, but NBC News executives use him as some kind of private consultant and briefer on the news. On January 12, 2012, McCaffrey presented a seminar to roughly 20 NBC executives and producers — including NBC News President Steve Capus — entitled “Iran, Nukes & Oil: The Gulf Confrontation.” We’ve obtained the Power Point document McCaffrey prepared and distributed for his presentation, and in it, he all but predicts war with Iran within the next 90 days: one that is likely to be started by them.
Related: SWIFT READY TO BLOCK IRANIAN BANK TRANSACTIONS
Research Credit: anchoviesmegma
The Virgin Father of Fifteen Children—And Counting
March 1st, 2012As I was reading this, I lapsed into thinking, “This is a cool sci-fi story.”
Except… It’s not a sci-fi story.
Anyway, I would be curious to know what Arsenault’s Aspie-Rating-Picture looks like…
Via: New York Magazine:
Trent Arsenault has never had sex, but he’s the father of fifteen children—and counting. The more he antagonizes the FDA, and unnerves television audiences across America, the more his in-box is flooded with requests for his sperm.
Research Credit: JH
FBI Building Insider Trading Cases on 120 People
March 1st, 2012Via: Herald Sun:
FEDERAL authorities are seeking to build insider trading cases against roughly 120 individuals on and off Wall Street in an expanding criminal insider trading investigation that has shaken the financial and corporate worlds.
The disclosure – the first time authorities have quantified the number of people under scrutiny – comes on the heels of a string of successful prosecutions of insider trading.
Since late 2009, prosecutors have charged 66 individuals at hedge funds and other companies with insider trading and won 57 convictions or guilty pleas.
“We’ve identified them, and now of course we have to build a case around that,” David Chaves, a senior FBI agent, said Monday in an interview following a presentation to reporters at FBI headquarters in Manhattan.
The Madness of Dmitry Itskov
February 29th, 2012Hopefully, consciousness is nonlocal and these lunatics have no chance of success. Otherwise… Well, let’s just say that I don’t want to find out what the Cheney daemon has in mind for me, when it emerges from my virtual bedroom closet, wearing a bozo wig and clown suit.
What could possibly go wrong?
Along these lines, Source Code is somewhat interesting.
Via: Wired:
The Pentagon’s new Avatar project, unveiled by Danger Room a few weeks back, sounds freaky enough: Soldiers practically inhabiting the bodies of robots, who’d act as “surrogates” for their human overlords in battle.
But according to Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old Russian media mogul, the U.S. military’s Avatar initiative doesn’t go nearly far enough. He’s got a massive, sci-fi-esque venture of his own that he hopes will put the Pentagon’s project to shame. Itskov’s plan: Construct robots that’ll (within 10 years, he hopes) actually store a human’s mind and keep that consciousness working. Forever.
“This project is leading down the road to immortality,” Itskov, who founded New Media Stars, a Russian company that runs several online news outlets, tells Danger Room. “A person with a perfect Avatar will be able to remain part of society. People don’t want to die.”
Itskov’s project, also called “Avatar,” actually precedes the Pentagon’s. He launched the initiative a year ago, but recently divulged more details to a group of futurists — including Ray Kurzweil — at a three-day conference, called Global Future 2045, held in Moscow.
Until now, most of the work on Itskov’s Avatar has taken place in Russia, where he claims to have hired 30 researchers — all of them paid out of his own deep pockets. Now, Itskov plans to take the mission global. “I want to collaborate with scientists from around the world,” he says. “This is a new strategy for the future; for humanity.”
Windows 8 Consumer Preview Presentation
February 29th, 2012I’m watching the live presentation that’s happening in Barcelona and it looks like Windows 8 is going to be using a cloud based log-in feature that is going to sync settings, and a lot of other stuff, across devices. I have no idea if there’s an opt out to let it function as a standalone client. It reminds me of domain sign on with Active Directory, but with the whole Metro “app” veneer out front.
You know what the purpose of domain sign on is with Active Directory, right? In short, it allows the system to be managed by someone other than the person using it. This is how PCs in corporations are managed. You can login on any PC in the organization and your personal desktop will load, you’ll have access to the same network shares and permission to execute whatever programs the IT people allow you to execute. If management chooses, they can record every keystroke or even capture video of your screen as you work. In other words, when you sign into that thing, everything you do can be monitored, the information that you can access and the programs that you can use can be changed at any time.
This is all old news in the corporate world.
But this Windows 8 presentation is geared toward regular home users…
Considering what we know about the Windows 8 Kill Switch, it’s going to be very interesting to see what else Microsoft is going to be capable of doing on systems that are running this thing.
Is it possible to use this OS without transmitting a whole lot of very personal information to Microsoft?
This entire presentation is very much reminiscent of Apple’s vending machine take on computing in iOS, and increasingly in MacOS. Windows 8 looks a bit different, but the core functions, and dire privacy implications seem pretty similar to me.
Update: The Verge Sums It Up
I love it. This is it, in a nutshell:
Decisions, decisions...
Google Once Considered Issuing Digital Currency
February 29th, 2012Via: IT World:
Google once considered issuing its own currency, to be called Google Bucks, company Chairman Eric Schmidt said on stage in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress Tuesday.
At the end of his keynote speech, Schmidt hit on a wide array of topics in response to audience questions. “We’ve had various proposals to have our own currency we were going to call Google Bucks,” Schmidt said.
The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals. “Ultimately we decided we didn’t want to get into that because of these issues,” Schmidt said.
Related: Bitcoin
Short Film: ‘There’s No Tomorrow’
February 29th, 2012Graham let me know that Dermot finished his film, There’s No Tomorrow.
Via: Incubate Pictures:
DOE/ARPA-E and GM Sponsored Envia Systems More Than Doubles Energy Density for Lithium-Ion Batteries While Reducing the Cost by Half
February 29th, 2012“What does all of this mean for GM?
I have no idea. But if something really, really strange happens, it might make much more sense in hindsight.”
—Obama Fired GM’s CEO; What’s Stirring Behind the Black Curtain?
“The Manhattan Project, a project lasting roughly five years from start to finish, had cost $2.3 billion in 1945 dollars. A contemporary sum of about $26.8 billion: a tremendous amount. But here, a startling fact: The budget for the entire Manhattan Project was still billions of dollars less than the present day’s annual black budget. Every year, the United States spends more black dollars than it took to build the bomb.
In the few short years it took to build the bomb, and with the ensuing Cold War, the notion of having classified industries, multibillion-dollar secret budgets, legions of security-cleared personnel, and entire branches of science devoted to secret science went from being unthinkable to being so natural that few people even bothered questioning it.”
—Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World by Trevor Paglen
Via: Envia Systems (.pdf):
Envia Systems, a technology leader in high-?performance, low-cost lithium-ion energy storage solutions today announced test results that verify the company’s next-generation rechargeable battery has achieved the highest recorded energy density of 400 Watt-hours/kilogram (Wh/kg) for a rechargeable lithium-ion cell. When commercialized, this 400 Wh/kg battery is expected to slash the price of a 300-mile range electric vehicle by cutting the cost of the battery pack by more than 50 percent.
The testing of Envia’s next-generation lithium-ion battery was performed by the Electrochemical Power Systems Department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Crane, Ind., under the sponsorship of ARPA-E. Tests at various cycling rates at NSWC confirmed that Envia’s automotive battery cell demonstrated energy density between 378-418 Wh/kg for rates between C/3 to C/10 for a 45 Amp-hour (C/3) cell. Similar cells have been cycling in Envia’s test labs for over 300 cycles. NSWC Crane will also test these cells to validate cycling performance.
…
“In an industry where energy density tends to increase five percent a year, our achievement of more than doubling state-of-art energy density and lowering cost by half is a giant step towards realizing Envia’s mission of mass market affordability of a 300-mile electric vehicle,” said Envia Systems Chairman and CEO Atul Kapadia.
