Top Item Bought with Food Stamp Money: Soda
August 28th, 2018Via: ZeroHedge:
The top item purchased by food stamp recipients is likely to raise some eyebrows among those who fret about people using benefits to buy junk food. Spending on soda and other sweetened beverages is “slightly higher for SNAP households compared to non-SNAP households (5 cents versus 4 cents per dollar),” the researchers note. Soda is the second most-purchased commodity among people who aren’t on food stamps.
Related: ‘Mountain Dew Mouth’
The Man Who Was Raised by Wolves
August 28th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Abandoned as a child, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja survived alone in the wild for 15 years. But living with people proved to be even more difficult.
Air Pollution Causes Huge Reduction in Intelligence
August 28th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Air pollution causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence, according to new research, indicating that the damage to society of toxic air is far deeper than the well-known impacts on physical health.
The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.
“Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.”
Previous research has found that air pollution harms cognitive performance in students, but this is the first to examine people of all ages and the difference between men and women.
The damage in intelligence was worst for those over 64 years old, with serious consequences, said Chen: “We usually make the most critical financial decisions in old age.” Rebecca Daniels, from the UK public health charity Medact, said: “This report’s findings are extremely worrying.”
Air pollution causes seven million premature deaths a year but the harm to people’s mental abilities is less well known. A recent study found toxic air was linked to “extremely high mortality” in people with mental disorders and earlier work linked it to increased mental illness in children, while another analysis found those living near busy roads had an increased risk of dementia.
The new work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed language and arithmetic tests conducted as part of the China Family Panel Studies on 20,000 people across the nation between 2010 and 2014. The scientists compared the test results with records of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide pollution.
They found the longer people were exposed to dirty air, the bigger the damage to intelligence, with language ability more harmed than mathematical ability and men more harmed than women. The researchers said this may result from differences in how male and female brains work.
Derrick Ho, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said the impact of air pollution on cognition was important and his group had similar preliminary findings in their work. “It is because high air pollution can potentially be associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and neurodegeneration of humans,” he said.
Japan Wants Flying Cars Within a Decade
August 26th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Japan is making a push to develop flying cars, enlisting companies including Uber Technologies Inc. and Boeing Co. in a government-led group to bring airborne vehicles to the country in the next decade.
The group will initially comprise 21 businesses and organizations, including Airbus SE, NEC Corp., a Toyota Motor Corp.-backed startup called Cartivator, ANA Holdings Inc., Japan Airlines Co., and Yamato Holdings Co., according to a statement Friday from the trade ministry in Tokyo. Delegates will gather Aug. 29 to help chart a road map this year, it said.
“The Japanese government will provide appropriate support to help realize the concept of flying cars, such as creation of acceptable rules,” the ministry said.
Flying cars that can zoom over congested roads are closer to reality than many people think. Startups around the world are pursuing small aircraft, which were until recently only in the realm of science fiction. With Japanese companies already trailing their global peers in electric vehicles and self-driving cars, the government is showing urgency on the aircraft technology, stepping in to facilitate legislation and infrastructure to help gain leadership.
Skim Reading Is the New Normal, the Effect on Society Is Profound
August 25th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.
…
We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.
Dan Rather: What Mueller Knows Will Make Cohen/Manafort “Pale By Comparison,” “Stay Tuned”
August 25th, 2018When Rather says, “We’re in a kind of political theater of the absurd now,” I think he’s right! Talk of impeaching Trump, as Bill and Hillary Clinton walk free, is pretty absurd.
Via: Real Clear Politics:
Dan Rather warned Wednesday night that if you think Tuesday was a shock with the Cohen guilty plea and Manafort’s conviction, then “stay tuned.” The former news anchor said other things Mueller is working on will “make yesterday pale by comparison.”
“Always keeping in mind that Mueller knows so much more than he has shown,” Rather said in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. “If you think [Cohen guilty plea, Manafort conviction] was a shock to our democratic system, just stay tuned. Because the other things Mueller is working on, and sooner or later we’ll find out what they are, is going to make yesterday pale by comparison.”
Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy
August 24th, 2018The article mentions a Russian, “Troll factory.”
How about American troll factories?
Here’s what the U.S. Air Force wanted back in 2011:
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.
Mmm hmm.
How about Hillary Clinton on election rigging?
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
How about Israel?
So, take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke. First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done…
There’s so much corporate/mainstream media “outrage” about Russia now…
When the U.S. Air Force does it, or when Israelis do it (Megaphone is one incredible example), where is the outrage? When Hillary suggests rigging an election, where is the outrage? Oh, nothing to see here, I guess.
I wonder what the corporate Internet is going to look like over the next couple of years?
Russia FUD. Hillary (or equivalent) 2020. Trump tweets / hookers.
Russia FUD. Hillary (or equivalent) 2020. Trump tweets / hookers.
Russia FUD. Hillary (or equivalent) 2020. Trump tweets / hookers.
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Via: Buzzfeed:
Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for Friday to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.
Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.
…
In February, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office charged 13 people affiliated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a “troll factory” where employees created personas across multiple platforms — with breaking laws in order to influence American voters. Since then, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube have each had at least one public purge of accounts believed to be foreign influence operations.
Japan: Drones Helping Aging Rice Farmers
August 23rd, 2018Via: Reuters:
The next generation farmhand in Japan’s aging rural heartland may be a drone.
For several months, developers and farmers in northeast Japan have been testing a new drone that can hover above paddy fields and perform backbreaking tasks in a fraction of the time it takes for elderly farmers.
“This is unprecedented high technology,” said Isamu Sakakibara, a 69-year-old rice farmer in the Tome area, a region that has supplied rice to Tokyo since the 17th century.
Developers of the new agricultural drone say it offers high-tech relief for rural communities facing a shortage of labor as young people leave for the cities.
“As we face a shortage of next-generation farmers, it’s our mission to come up with new ideas to raise productivity and farmers’ income through the introduction of cutting-edge technologies such as drones,” said Mr. Sakakibara, who is also the head of JA Miyagi Tome, the local agricultural cooperative.
Flint Water Crisis: Michigan Health Director Ordered to Manslaughter Trial
August 22nd, 2018Via: Ars Technica:
A judge on Monday ordered Michigan’s top health official, Nick Lyon, to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter charges in two deaths linked to the Flint water crisis.
Genesee District Judge David Goggins determined that there was probable cause that Lyon committed involuntary manslaughter against Robert Skidmore and John Snyder in 2015. The two men died during an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, which researchers have connected to the devastating use of improperly treated water in Flint starting in 2014.
Lyon, the director of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, is the highest-ranking official in the state to stand trial in connection with the catastrophe. An additional 14 current or former state and local officials have been criminally charged in connection with the water issues.
As Ars has reported previously, prosecutors allege that Lyon specifically had “willfully disregarded the deadly nature of the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak” and failed to warn the public in time to spare lives. He allegedly knew about the outbreak in early 2015 but waited until early 2016 to release a public advisory.
A Milestone in Afghanistan
August 22nd, 2018Via: Ron Paul Institute:
Sometime late next year, possibly as early as September, news crews will gather in Afghanistan for a unique event: To interview an American serviceman or woman who was not born when the war they are fighting began. He or she will not remember 9/11, and will have grown up with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as background noise. No doubt also a senior commander will be on hand to pronounce that the war against the Taliban is making progress, the same pronouncements the young recruit will have seen on TV all his or her life.
It will be a stark reminder that America has been at war for 225 of the 242 years of its existence: A handful of those conflicts — the defeat of Hitler and Japan, for example — go down as “good wars.” But most go down as operations that cost dearly in blood and treasure for little appreciable result.
In 1961, ?Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only American to make it to the highest offices in both politics and the military, warned, on leaving the presidency more than half a century ago, of the power of the “military industrial complex”, and how war can become an end in itself.
