Cryptogon Reader Signs Up for Hosting with BlueHost
December 31st, 2010The last Cryptogon BlueHost signup of the decade was from dantrevoice.com. Cryptogon received $90. Thank you.
Coal Fires Burn in 20 States, Thousands Burn Worldwide
December 30th, 2010This is from February 2010.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
The fire burning deep below Centralia, Pa., is just one of numerous coal fires burning in at least 20 states today, with thousands more worldwide. They gobble up resources, spew dangerous emissions, and scar the land. Yet little is known about their impact on climate change or human health due to carbon dioxide and mercury emissions, say experts.
Approximately 200 underground coal fires burn in about 20 states, according to Glenn Stracher, a researcher at East Georgia College in Swainsboro, Ga., A separate tally shows 112 fire sites in 21 states, according to Office of Surface Mining data analyzed by Dr. Stracher and fellow researcher Ann Kim.
Causes of such coal fires range from spontaneous combustion to lightning to wildfires that ignite coal seams that then move underground to smolder and burn at temperatures that can reach 500 degrees F. or more.
Analysis of heat-fused rock “clinkers” shows that coal fires are an ancient phenomenon. “We’ve been dating clinkers, showing coal fires have occurred for at least couple of million years, so they’re not new,” says Mark Engle, a researcher at the US Geological Survey, “but undoubtedly human activity has exacerbated it.”
In 2002, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that underground coal fires around the world emitted about 48 tons of mercury annually.
Worldwide, thousands of underground coal fires burn, with perhaps 1,300 in Indonesia alone, says Dr. Stracher, who is editing a four-volume scientific compilation of coal and peat fires around the world. He estimates that fires are burning in at least 20 nations, but notes that researchers have little understanding of their environmental damage and the scope of their impact on human health.
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December 30th, 2010Thank you.
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Letter from Poland
December 30th, 2010Via: Letter from Poland / YouTube:
One Tip Now Enough to Put Name on Terrorist Watch List
December 30th, 2010Oh, well, “As long as it is deemed credible.” But of course. This is The Land of the Free. We don’t just add people to the Magic 8 Ball shit list for Whistling Dixie.
Who helped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab board Northwest Airlines Flight 253?
Sharp-dressed man aided terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab onto plane without passport:
Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.
Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.
While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’”
Via: Washington Post:
A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart an attack in the United States.
The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government’s system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab’s father had told U.S. officials of his son’s radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person’s name on the watch list.
Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.
Empathy Declining: ‘The American Personality Is Shifting In An Ominous Direction’
December 30th, 2010Via: Scientific American:
Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years.
The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.
…
But the new finding that empathy is on the decline indicates that even when a trait is hardwired, social context can exert a profound effect, changing even our most basic emotional responses.
Research Credit: JH
Dawn of the Age of the Robot
December 30th, 2010This article reminded me of reading OMNI magazine in the 1980s, when I should have been doing my homework.
Hopefully, much of this stuff will remain as science fiction / grant swindles for another 20 years… but I doubt it.
Via: Guardian:
The robots are coming. The second decade of the 21st century will see the rise of a mechanised army that will revolutionise private and public life just as radically as the internet and social media have shaken up the past 10 years. Or so says Marina Gorbis, futurologist and head of Californian thinktank The Institute for the Future.
The IFTF is one of the world’s most venerable thinktanks and has been plotting the course of the future for corporate and government clients since it was spun off from the RAND Corporation in 1968.
Gorbis says robots will increasingly dominate everything from the way we fight wars to our work lives and even how we organise our kitchens.
Robots are likely to prompt a political storm to equal the row over immigration as they increasingly replace workers, says Gorbis. But it’s not all bad news. “When IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat chess grand master Gary Kasparov people said that’s it, computers are smarter than people,” she says. “But it didn’t mean that at all. It means they are processing things faster not that they are thinking better.” Working together she believes robots and humans will be able to create a world of new possibilities impossible before our new industrial revolution.
Gorbis says the robots are already here. The US military is backing the development of a four legged mechanical pack-carrying robot, called the BigDogs. Guided by its own sensors BigDog can navigate treacherous terrain carrying 150kg on its back. In the air robot drones are stalking targets in Afghanistan, remote controlled helicopters are ferrying supplies.
California Woman Charged with Insider Trading; Selling Secret Information for Over $200,000
December 30th, 2010Insider Crimes, Funny Money and Options Rackets
They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market
Rest assured: This is the chicken feed.
Via: AFP:
US prosecutors have charged a California woman with insider trading for selling secret information for over 200,000 dollars, the latest arrest in a widening probe, officials said.
Winifred Jiau, aka “Wini,” was arrested Tuesday on charges filed in New York and appeared in court in the western US state of California on Wednesday, the Justice Department said.
Specifically she allegedly conspired to commit securities fraud by selling non-public information about publicly traded companies to multiple hedge funds “for the purpose of executing profitable securities transactions.”
The alleged offences occurred between 2006 and December 2008, and involved information about publicly-traded companies including NVIDIA Corporation and Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
One of the hedge funds made profits of more than 820,000 dollars from trading in Marvell securities on the basis of the information provided by Jiau, who was arrested at her home in Fremont, California.
The charges were announced by Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Janice Fedarcyk, Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The most serious of the charges — securities fraud — carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to five million dollars.
Earlier this month US authorities announced the arrest of five people suspected of providing confidential information on companies, including Apple, as part of a massive insider-trading probe.
James Fleishman, an executive with “expert-networking” firm Primary Global Research, was among four people arrested for allegedly “conspiring to provide confidential information” to clients, which include hedge funds.
Brazil to Replace Oil Rigs with ‘Underwater Cities’
December 30th, 2010When I saw the headline, I had a terrifying Bioshock flashback, but there won’t be any people down there.
Via: Telegraph:
Traditional oil rigs will be replaced with “underwater cities” within a decade under ambitious plans being drawn up by Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned energy group.
Petrobras plans to turn science fiction into reality to extract oil from the vast pre-salt oil fields discovered off the south east coast of Brazil.
The plan is to construct ‘cities’ more than 2,000 metres under water, containing machines, giant pieces of equipment and robots that could inspect the systems being used to extract millions of barrels of oil. Many operations would be fully automated while others would be controlled by humans at a distance.
“Our target is that we won’t need platforms in ten years from now,” said Carlos Tadeu Fraga, executive manager of the Petrobras Research Centre.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
Europe to Ban Hundreds of Herbal Remedies
December 30th, 2010Via: Independent:
Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law.
With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades.
From 1 May 2011, traditional herbal medicinal products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004. The directive was introduced in response to rising concern over adverse effects caused by herbal medicines.
…
According to the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), which represents herbal practitioners, not a single product used in traditional Chinese medicine or ayurvedic medicine has been licensed. In Europe, around 200 products from 27 plant species have been licensed but there are 300 plant species in use in the UK alone.
