Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes Released in Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil
October 31st, 2011Via: New York Times:
These mosquitoes are genetically engineered to kill — their own children.
Researchers on Sunday reported initial signs of success from the first release into the environment of mosquitoes engineered to pass a lethal gene to their offspring, killing them before they reach adulthood.
The results, and other work elsewhere, could herald an age in which genetically modified insects will be used to help control agricultural pests and insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria.
But the research is arousing concern about possible unintended effects on public health and the environment, because once genetically modified insects are released, they cannot be recalled.
Authorities in the Florida Keys, which in 2009 experienced its first cases of dengue fever in decades, hope to conduct an open-air test of the modified mosquitoes as early as December, pending approval from the Agriculture Department.
“It’s a more ecologically friendly way to control mosquitoes than spraying insecticides,” said Coleen Fitzsimmons, a spokeswoman for the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District.
The Agriculture Department, meanwhile, is looking at using genetic engineering to help control farm pests like the Mediterranean fruit fly, or medfly, and the cotton-munching pink bollworm, according to an environmental impact statement it published in 2008. Millions of genetically engineered bollworms have been released over cotton fields in Yuma County, Ariz.
Yet even supporters of the research worry it could provoke a public reaction similar to the one that has limited the acceptance of genetically modified crops. In particular, critics say that Oxitec, the British biotechnology company that developed the dengue-fighting mosquito, has rushed into field testing without sufficient review and public consultation, sometimes in countries with weak regulations.
“Even if the harms don’t materialize, this will undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the research enterprise,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of international health law at Georgetown University.
The first release, which was discussed in a scientific paper published online on Sunday by the journal Nature Biotechnology, took place in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean in 2009 and caught the international scientific community by surprise. Oxitec has subsequently released the modified mosquitoes in Malaysia and Brazil.
CIA Assassinates 16 Year Old American from Denver
October 30th, 2011Via: Time:
A wave of CIA drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda figures in Yemen is stoking widespread anger there that U.S. policy is cruel and misguided, prioritizing counterterrorism over a genuine solution to the country’s raging political crisis.
Politics has never been a concern to Sam al-Homiganyi and his fellow teenagers. This month, though, they were shocked by the sudden death of a friend and are struggling to understand why.
Fighting back tears, his gaze fixed downward, al-Homiganyi, a lean-looking 15-year-old from the outskirts of Sana’a, told TIME, “He was my best friend, we played football together everyday.” Another of his friends spoke up, gesturing to the gloomy group of jeans-clad boys around him: “He was the same as us. He liked swimming, playing computer games, watching movies … you know, normal stuff.” (See photos of Yemen on the brink.)
The dead friend was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, the third American killed in as many weeks by suspected CIA drone strikes in Yemen. His father, the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, was killed earlier this month, along with alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, who was from New York. When Abdulrahman’s death was first reported in the Western press, his age was given as 21 by local Yemeni officials. Afterward, however, the Awlaki family put out a copy of Abdulrahman’s birth certificate.
Which U.S. Organization Bought Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat System?
October 30th, 2011I’ve been watching Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat saga for over a year, and it just took a turn for the weird.
Cryptogon is read by all of the alphabet agencies, military branches, some members of the Congress (or their staffs), and the White House. Someone reading this post could know the answer to this simple question:
Who bought Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat system?
Via: Wired:
The successful test should pave the way for further work at the University of Bologna, and more contracts with the enigmatic customer. NyTeknik did discover one possible clue to their identity. The customer’s controller, one Domenico Fioravanti, apparently reports to a man whose title is “Colonel”. This suggests that the mystery customer might be DARPA, the Pentagon’s extreme science wing which, as Wired.co.uk has previously noted, has expressed interestin Rossi’s work — but which might not be quite ready to explain to its political masters why it spent millions on a cold fusion device.
Northeast: Snowstorm Leaves Two Million Homes Without Electricity
October 30th, 2011Update: Three Million Homes and Businesses Without Electricity
—End Update—
Via: Reuters:
Transportation in the Northeast was hard-hit on Sunday by a rare October snowstorm that also cut power to more than 2 million homes and killed at least three people.
The heaviest snow was recorded in Western Massachusetts, where 27.8 inches/(71 cm) was measured in Plainfield, according to the National Weather Service. Just 45 minutes northwest of New York City, in West Milford, New Jersey, 19 inches/(48 cm) of snow fell.
“A historic October storm is still crushing New England with heavy snow and howling winds,” meteorologist Meghan Evans said on Accuweather.com on Sunday.
The storm was expected to push out of Maine on Sunday but not before dumping up to a foot/(30.5 cm) of snow on northern New England states, particularly southern Vermont, the NWS said.
The heavy, wet snow snapped enormous trees like twigs, downing power lines from West Virginia to Massachusetts.
New Jersey Transit and Metro-North Railroad suspended service on several lines into New York City on Saturday and continued the suspension on Sunday.
Many flights at New York City-area airports were canceled. Authorities warned drivers to stay off icy roads. Slippery road conditions were blamed for a crash that killed a motorist in Colchester, Connecticut.
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October 30th, 2011Thanks to the owners of bitscape.org, uvw.us and mindofgabe.com for signing up for hosting with BlueHost. Cryptogon received $270 as a result.
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Qantas Airways Grounds Entire Global Fleet Due To Strikes
October 30th, 2011Via: AP:
Australia’s government ordered an emergency arbitration hearing on Sunday after Qantas Airways grounded its global fleet amid a bitter dispute with striking workers, stranding passengers around the world.
Government leaders, who expressed frustration over the airline’s actions, were expected to argue at the hearing that Qantas should be forced to fly in Australia’s economic interests.
“It’s not our place to start allocating responsibility, but what I also know is there is a better way to resolve these matters … than locking your customers out,” Australian Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten told reporters ahead of the arbitration hearing in the southern city of Melbourne. “We want more common sense than that.”
Qantas, the world’s 10th-largest airline, announced Saturday that it would ground all flights. But CEO Alan Joyce said the airline could be flying again within hours if the three arbitration judges rule to permanently terminate the grounding and the unions’ strike action.
The unions want the judges to rule for a suspension so that the strikes can be resumed if their negotiations with the airline fail.
“Within six hours, we can get the fleet flying again” after the aviation regulator provides a routine clearance, Joyce told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television Sunday.
“We have to wait and see what that process generates today,” he said, referring to the court hearing.
Planes in the air when the grounding was announced continued to their destinations, and at least one taxiing flight stopped on the runway, a passenger said. Among the stranded passengers are 17 world leaders attending a Commonwealth summit in the western Australian city of Perth.
When the grounding was announced, 36 international and 28 domestic Australian flights were in the air, the airline said.
Syria Using U.S. Made Web Surveillance and Censorship Systems
October 29th, 2011These boxes are probably rooted by NSA. The Syrians are clueless enough to have allowed them to phone home, so, my guess is that Uncle is on board too.
Via: Cnet:
Blue Coat Systems has confirmed that its devices were being used by Syria to censor the Web and said it is investigating how they got into that country despite a strict U.S. trade embargo, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
The appliances were “transmitting automatic status messages back to the company” Blue Coat executives told the newspaper.
“Blue Coat says it doesn’t monitor where such ‘heartbeat’ messages originate from,” according to the report. “Computer code reviewed by the Journal indicates that Syrians were also using other Blue Coat products, raising questions about how the tools came to be used this way and whether Blue Coat has violated the trade embargo.”
Reports began trickling out this summer that the devices were being used by Syria to monitor its citizens’ Internet activity in a crackdown on opposition that has left thousands of protesters dead and injured.
Last month, Blue Coat told ZDNet UK that company policy forbade the sale of equipment to the Syrian government.
Fourteen of the Blue Coat devices were shipped to Dubai late last year destined for the Iraq government, and at least 13 of them were found in use in Syria, company executives said.
Snake Oil Economic Models
October 29th, 2011Remember, this isn’t physics.
—Gold Eyes Biggest 3-Day Fall In 28 Years
This is hilarious. It reminds me of my experiences in trying to develop black box trading systems. It’s relatively easy, for example, to program an autotrading system for EURUSD that does extremely well on some finite chuck of historical data. Initially, I thought that increasing the size of the dataset would help to produce better results over a variety of conditions. It turns out that the size of the initial dataset didn’t really matter because everything I tried resulted in overtraining my algorithm to that particular dataset. Once calibrated, what do you think happened as more data was added? That’s right, the %Profitable trades decreased. Eventually, it became clear that I was developing ornate coin tossing systems.
Anyone who works with trading systems should print this out, frame it and hang it on the wall. It’s from the article below:
That financial models are plagued by calibration problems is no surprise to Wilmott–he notes that it has become routine for modelers in finance to simply keep recalibrating their models over and over again as the models continue to turn out bad predictions. “When you have to keep recalibrating a model, something is wrong with it,” he says.
Yeah, buddy.
One more thing: The headline on the piece below is, “Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong.” I would argue that if something was always wrong, it would be easy to win! You could simply go the other way. In my experience, over time and given enough data, everything I’ve done nauseatingly approaches a coin toss. “Always wrong,” in a financial model would be a winning lottery ticket.
Via: Scientific American:
When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated mathematic financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. [See “A Formula For Economic Calamity” in the November 2011 issue]. But what if there were a way to come up with simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?
Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we’d still get bad predictions from models.
The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate.
Research Credit: minerva
NYPD Monitors Everyone in City Who Changes Their Name
October 29th, 2011Via: AP:
For generations, immigrants have shed their ancestral identities and taken new, Americanized names as they found their place in the melting pot. For Muslims in New York, that rite of assimilation is now seen by police as a possible red flag in the hunt for terrorists.
The New York Police Department monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name, according to interviews and internal police documents obtained by The Associated Press. For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks that include reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents.
All this is recorded in police databases for supervisors, who review the names and select a handful of people for police to visit.
The program was conceived as a tripwire for police in the difficult hunt for homegrown terrorists, where there are no widely agreed upon warning signs. Like other NYPD intelligence programs created in the past decade, this one involved monitoring behavior protected by the First Amendment.
Since August, an Associated Press investigation has revealed a vast NYPD intelligence-collecting effort targeting Muslims following the terror attacks of September 2001. Police have conducted surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life including where people eat, pray and get their hair cut. Police infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds more.
Research Credit: midnightagain
