Affect Recognition: Face Scanning Combined with Insane Pseudoscience
December 14th, 2018You’ll love this one.
Via: The Intercept:
Facial recognition has quickly shifted from techno-novelty to fact of life for many, with millions around the world at least willing to put up with their faces scanned by software at the airport, their iPhones, or Facebook’s server farms. But researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute have issued a strong warning against not only ubiquitous facial recognition, but its more sinister cousin: so-called affect recognition, technology that claims it can find hidden meaning in the shape of your nose, the contours of your mouth, and the way you smile. If that sounds like something dredged up from the 19th century, that’s because it sort of is.
AI Now’s 2018 report is a 56-page record of how “artificial intelligence” — an umbrella term that includes a myriad of both scientific attempts to simulate human judgment and marketing nonsense — continues to spread without oversight, regulation, or meaningful ethical scrutiny. The report covers a wide expanse of uses and abuses, including instances of racial discrimination, police surveillance, and how trade secrecy laws can hide biased code from an AI-surveilled public. But AI Now, which was established last year to grapple with the social implications of artificial intelligence, expresses in the document particular dread over affect recognition, “a subclass of facial recognition that claims to detect things such as personality, inner feelings, mental health, and ‘worker engagement’ based on images or video of faces.” The thought of your boss watching you through a camera that uses machine learning to constantly assess your mental state is bad enough, while the prospect of police using “affect recognition” to deduce your future criminality based on “micro-expressions” is exponentially worse.
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Doorbell Cameras
December 14th, 2018Via: ACLU:
Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year.
While the details are sketchy, the application describes a system that the police can use to match the faces of people walking by a doorbell camera with a photo database of persons they deem “suspicious.” Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. In either case, if a match occurs, the person’s face can be automatically sent to law enforcement, and the police could arrive in minutes.
As a former patent litigator, I’ve spent a lot of time reading patents. It’s rare for patent applications to lay out, in such nightmarish detail, the world a company wants to bring about. Amazon is dreaming of a dangerous future, with its technology at the center of a massive decentralized surveillance network, running real-time facial recognition on members of the public using cameras installed in people’s doorbells.
Virgin Galactic Test Flight Reaches Edge of Space for First Time
December 13th, 2018Via: CBS:
Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo carried two test pilots out of the discernible atmosphere Thursday, the company’s first piloted flight to the edge of space and a major milestone for Richard Branson’s plans to eventually launch tourists on brief, sub-orbital trips to space.
It was the fourth non-government, purely commercial flight to carry pilots out of the lower atmosphere and into the realm of space, the first since 2004, and the first by any piloted spacecraft built in the United States since the space shuttle’s final flight in 2011.
Did the crew make it all the way to space? The Air Force considers 50 miles up as the point where aerodynamic effects become insignificant and space begins. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reached an altitude of 51.4 miles during Thursday’s test flight.
Harvard’s $39B Endowment Is Reportedly Buying Up California’s Vineyards—and Their Water Rights
December 13th, 2018Via: Fortune:
Harvard University’s endowment is reportedly buying up vineyards in California’s wine country, along with the water rights belonging to those properties.
Instead of making the land purchases in its own name, Harvard is using a wholly owned subsidiary—named Brodiaea after the scientific name for the cluster lily—to buy vineyards. Harvard created Brodiaea in 2012, and by 2015 the unit had already purchased 10,000 acres in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties for about $60 million, according to an earlier report by Reuters.
Earlier this year, the Harvard Crimson reported that Brodiaea had continued to buy up land in the area, especially vineyards with good access to ground water. Unlike many California vineyards, the ones owned by Harvard don’t welcome tourists to tastings but instead feature “no trespassing signs” on the properties, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday.
France in a Nutshell: “The Government Stopped Listening to the People 20 Years Ago”
December 13th, 2018Via: Of Two Minds:
The elites’ clever exploitation of politically correct cover stories has enthralled the comatose, uncritical Left, but not those who see their living standards in a free-fall.
California Considering Text Messaging Tax
December 13th, 2018Via: CBS:
Californians may or may not type OMG at the news, but texting may soon come with an extra fee on their mobile phone bills. State regulators are weighing a tax on text messaging to help fund a program that makes phone service available to low-income residents.
A texting surcharge could help sustain the Public Purpose Program budget, which has risen to $998 million in 2017 from $670 million in 2011, according to a report from the California Public Utilities Commission. Revenue from the telecom industry that funds the program has declined to $11.3 billion last year from $16.5 billion in 2011, the CPUC report stated.
“Parties supporting the collection of surcharges on text messaging revenue argue that it will help preserve and advance universal service by increasing the revenue base upon which Public Purpose Programs rely. We agree,” CPUC stated in its findings.
The agency could vote on the issue as soon as Thursday. But the wireless industry and business groups are fighting the proposal, which if enacted, would likely show up as a flat surcharge in the small print of bills, not a fee per text.
“It’s a dumb idea,” said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council business-sponsored advocacy group. “This is how conversations take place in this day and age, and it’s almost like saying there should be a tax on the conversations we have.”
Under Trump, U.S. Debt Grew by Size of Brazilian Economy in Just Two Years
December 12th, 2018Via: Los Angeles Times:
U.S. government debt is on track this year to rise at the fastest pace since 2012, as a stronger economy fails to keep pace with the wave of red ink that’s rising under the Trump administration.
Total public debt outstanding has jumped by $1.36 trillion, or 6.6%, since the start of 2018, and by $1.9 trillion since President Trump took office, according to the latest Treasury Department figures. The latter figure is about the size of Brazil’s gross domestic product.
If this year’s growth rate is sustained through the end of the year, it would be the biggest jump in percentage terms since the last year of President Obama’s first term, when the economy needed fiscal stimulus in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
As of Monday, the nation’s debt stood at a record $21.9 trillion.
Related: Trump Commits to $750 Billion U.S. Defense Budget a Week After Saying $717 Billion Is ‘Crazy’
Record for High-Temperature Superconductivity
December 12th, 2018Room temperature superconductors belong in the same basket as fusion power plants artificial general intelligence: They were only a couple of decades away when we read about them in Omni magazine in the 1980s.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Chemists found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
…
The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce. Indeed, physicists have a name for this: USOs, or unidentified superconducting objects.
So new claims of high-temperature superconductivity have to be treated with caution. Having said that, the news today that the record for high-temperature superconductivity has been smashed is worth looking at in more detail.
Trump Commits to $750 Billion U.S. Defense Budget a Week After Saying $717 Billion Is ‘Crazy’
December 11th, 2018Drain the swamp. Mmm hmm.
Via: Independent:
President Donald Trump has backtracked on his proposal to shrink military spending, instead agreeing to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis’ request for a $750 billion budget for the upcoming 2019 fiscal year.
Last week, Mr Trump tweeted that a $716 billion Defence Department budget is “crazy.”
The following day, Mr Mattis, Texas Representative Mac Thornberry and Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe—both Republicans and chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively—met with Mr Trump to discuss the need and justifications for an increase to military spending.
The three Republicans all oppose the White House’s initial budget plan for $700 billion, which were part of the Trump administration’s plan to cut five per cent of budget spending on all federal agencies. The proposed budget cut would have reduced the $716 billion allocated funding in 2019 to $700 billion in 2020, a stark contrast to the Pentagon’s proffered $733 billion budget for 2020.
Following the meeting, Mr Trump reversed his positions supporting Defence budget cuts and agreed to the $750 billion budget request. The new proposed budget is about a $20 billion increase from the $733 billion budget proposal Pentagon officials initially proposed.
Walmart Testing Robotic Fry Cook
December 11th, 2018Via: Yahoo Finance:
Walmart (WMT) is in the early stages of testing a kitchen robot assistant named “Flippy” at its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters to see whether or not it’s the right fit for its in-store delis.
Flippy is the world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant powered by artificial intelligence from Miso Robotics, a two-year-old startup. The robot made headlines a year ago debuting as the burger-flipping robot at a CaliBurger franchise in Pasadena.
More recently, Flippy got a gig at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles with vending food service company Levy Restaurants, part of Compass Group, to fry up chicken tenders and tater tots. Through the World Series, Flippy churned out 17,000 pounds worth of the fried foods. It’s able to fry up to eight baskets of food simultaneously.
