Israeli-Style Airline Passenger Screening Starting in Boston
August 2nd, 2011Via: Boston Herald:
Boston’s TSA screeners — part of a security force whose competency has come under fire nationwide — soon will be carrying out sophisticated behavioral inspections under a first-in-the-nation program that’s already raising concerns of racial profiling, harassment of innocent travelers and longer lines.
The training for the Israeli-style screening — a projected $1 billion national program dubbed Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques — kicks off today at Logan International Airport and will be put to use in Terminal A on Aug. 15. It requires screeners to make quick reads of whether passengers pose a danger or a terror threat based on their reactions to a set of routine questions.
But security experts wonder whether Transportation Safety Administration agents are up to the challenge after an embarrassing string of blunders — including patting down a 95-year-old grandmother in Florida and making her remove her adult diaper and frisking a 3-year-old girl who screamed “stop touching me” at a checkpoint in Tennessee.
“I’m not convinced that the TSA has good enough people to make the Israeli approach work on a large scale,” said Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed the TSA at his blog, Instapundit.com.
But he noted, “Almost anything would be an improvement over the clown show we’ve got now.”
Gold Still Running Higher
August 2nd, 2011Update: $1661.07
—End Update—
Update: Korea on the Bid
Via: The Street:
Gold prices were hitting record highs Tuesday as the Bank of Korea announced it bought gold for the first time since 1998, reminding investors of gold’s large safe haven appeal as global economies slow.
—End Update—
New record high: $1641.05.
Internet Archivist Seeks One Copy of Every Book Ever Published
August 2nd, 2011Here’s one for your Svalbard Seed Vault Gives Me The Willies file folder.
Via: AP:
Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.
Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”
New Zealand Medical Establishment Attempted to Murder Man Rather Than Let Him Recover from Terminal Pneumonia With High Doses of Vitamin C
August 2nd, 2011Watch and learn.
Via: 3News:
The amazing story of a King Country dairy farmer who caught swine flu and very nearly died.
Debt Bill Vote
August 1st, 2011Reuters: Passed in House.
Live CSPAN: Passed in Senate.
Obombya Regime Wants Changes to Arms Export Licensing Process… To Export More Arms
August 1st, 2011Via: Aviation Week:
The Obama administration is proposing to shift tanks, trucks and other military vehicles currently controlled on the U.S. Munitions List (USML) to the less-restrictive U.S. Commerce Control List (CCL) by year’s end as part of a broader effort to reform the U.S. arms export licensing process.
The licensing process governs foreign sales of sensitive U.S. technologies to other countries, including commercial communications satellites. Under a proposed federal rule issued July 15, the Commerce Department would implement a new regulatory framework for the transfer of defense articles that the president determines no longer warrant control under the Arms Export Control Act, which governs the State Department-administered USML.
As a first step, a rewrite of an initial tranche of items — U.S. tanks, trucks and other military vehicles contained within Category VII of the USML — is to be complete by year’s end, according to a senior administration official.
…
Marion Blakey, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, welcomed the administration’s proposed changes to the export licensing system.
TEPCO: HIGHEST RADIATION YET DETECTED AT FUKUSHIMA DAI-ICHI
August 1st, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, said it detected the highest radiation to date at the site.
Geiger counters, used to detect radioactivity, registered more than 10 sieverts an hour, the highest reading the devices are able to record, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility, said today. The measurements were taken at the base of the main ventilation stack for reactors No. 1 and No. 2.
Useless Studies, Real Harm
August 1st, 2011Via: New York Times:
In an age of for-profit clinical research, this is the new face of scandal. Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit, and patients naïvely sign up, unaware of the ways in which they are being used. Nobody really knows how often companies conduct such trials, but they appear with alarming regularity in pharmaceutical marketing documents.
Research Credit: DP
Android Tablet for Toddlers
August 1st, 2011Via: Engadget:
When some of us were tots, there was one family computer, and we were lucky if we got our sticky little fingers on it while we were still in diapers. Times have changed, though, and for some parents, sharing the ‘ol iPad or 10.1 with curious babies just won’t do. Enter Rullingnet’s Vinci tablet, that ruggedized tablet for toddlers…
Japanese Monitor Radiation On Their Own
August 1st, 2011Via: Times Union:
Kiyoko Okoshi had a simple goal when she spent about $625 for a dosimeter: She missed her daughter and grandsons and wanted them to come home.
Local officials kept telling her that their remote village was safe, even though it was less than 20 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But her daughter remained dubious.
So starting in April, Okoshi began using her dosimeter to check nearby forest roads and rice paddies. What she found was startling. Near one sewage ditch, the meter beeped wildly, and the screen read 67 microsieverts per hour, a potentially harmful level. Okoshi and a cousin who lives nearby worked up the courage to confront elected officials, who did not respond, confirming their worry that the government was not doing its job.
With her simple yet bold act, Okoshi joined the small but growing number of Japanese who have decided to step in as the government fumbles its reaction to the widespread contamination, which leaders acknowledge is much worse than originally announced. Some mothers as far away as Tokyo have begun testing for radioactive materials.
