Artificial Intelligence Is Going to Supercharge Surveillance
January 29th, 2018Via: The Verge:
Artificial intelligence is giving surveillance cameras digital brains to match their eyes, letting them analyze live video with no humans necessary. This could be good news for public safety, helping police and first responders more easily spot crimes and accidents and have a range of scientific and industrial applications. But it also raises serious questions about the future of privacy and poses novel risks to social justice.
What happens when governments can track huge numbers of people using CCTV? When police can digitally tail you around a city just by uploading your mugshot into a database? Or when a biased algorithm is running on the cameras in your local mall, pinging the cops because it doesn’t like the look of a particular group of teens?
With Teen Mental Health Deteriorating Over Five Years, There’s a Likely Culprit
January 28th, 2018“All signs point to the screen.”
Via: The Conversation:
Around 2012, something started going wrong in the lives of teens.
In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.
In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background – more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country. All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call “iGen” – those born after 1995 – is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.
What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.
Plug Wars: The Battle for Electric Car Supremacy
January 27th, 2018Via: Reuters:
German carmakers hope a network of high-power charging stations they are rolling out with Ford will set an industry standard for plugs and protocols that will give them an edge over electric car rivals.
At the moment, Tesla and carmakers in Japan and Germany use different plugs and communication protocols to link batteries to chargers, but firms building the charging networks needed for electric vehicles to become mainstream say the number of plug formats will need to be limited to keep costs down.
Carmakers behind the winning technology will benefit from having an established supply chain and an extensive network, making their vehicles potentially more attractive to customers worried about embarking upon longer journeys, analysts say.
Manufacturers that back losing plugs, however, could end up with redundant research and development and may have to invest to adapt assembly lines and vehicle designs so their customers can use the most widespread fast-charging networks.
Swiss bank UBS has estimated that $360 billion will need to be spent over the next eight years to build global charging infrastructure to keep pace with electric car sales, and it will be key to limit the numerous technologies now in use.
ICE Is About to Start Tracking License Plates Across the U.S.
January 27th, 2018Via: The Verge:
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.
The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”
Mexican Marines Executed Three U.S. Citizens
January 27th, 2018Via: Newsweek:
Three U.S. siblings found dead in Mexico in 2014 were executed by Mexican marines and a border mayor’s paramilitary security team, the country’s National Human Rights Commission said Thursday.
Erica Alvarado Salinas, 26, Alex Alvarado, 22, and Jose Angel Alvarado, 21, all American citizens, disappeared on October 13, 2014, while visiting their father in El Control, a small town near Matamoros, a Mexican city in the dangerous state of Tamaulipas, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
The siblings were en route to their mother’s home in Progreso, Texas, but they never made it across the border.
Wearing a Pretend ‘God Helmet’ Fooled Spiritual People Into Proclaiming Mystical Experiences
January 27th, 2018They ought to try to convince the test subjects that jet fuel can melt steel.
Via: Newsweek:
The “God helmet” is an odd-looking psychology tool that can evoke mystical experiences in wearers akin to religious visions—despite being nothing more than an elaborate hat. The helmet is purely a placebo and new research shows that self-proclaimed spiritual people are even more susceptible to fall for its illusion than intoxicated people.
The study published online in Religion, Brain, & Behavior found new information to further back previous evidence that a purely aesthetic hat, referred to as a God helmet, can elicit mysterious experiences. This new study, published in December 2017, builds on past research in that it also tested if alcohol consumption played a role in users’ susceptibility to having visions while wearing the God helmet.
“We knew from previous studies that supernatural believers are more prone to placebo brain stimulation-induced mystical experiences than non-believers,” lead study researcher David Maij, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who focuses on brain cognition and psychology told Newsweek. “We wanted to investigate whether intoxication with alcohol, through lowering cognitive control, would increase people’s proneness to have extraordinary experiences.”
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam had 193 volunteers wear the God helmet for 15 minutes while blindfolded and listening to white noise through earbuds. The volunteers were told that the helmet would electromagnetically stimulate their brains and cause them to have supernatural experiences. However, in reality the helmet did absolutely nothing.
USAF Is Jamming GPS In The Western U.S. For Largest Ever Red Flag Air War Exercise
January 27th, 2018Via: The Drive:
The year’s first iteration of the USAF’s premier set of aerial war games, known commonly as Red Flag, is kicking off today at Nellis Air Force Base just outside of Las Vegas, but this exercise will be different than any in the past. Not only is it the largest of its kind in the exercise’s 42 year history, but the USAF is going to blackout GPS over the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range to challenge aircrews and their weaponry under realistic fighting conditions. The tactic will spill over throughout the region, with warnings being posted stating inconsistent GPS service could be experienced by aircrews flying throughout the western United States.
Canadian Billionaires Murdered
January 27th, 2018Via: National Post:
Toronto police say a six-week examination of an enormous amount of evidence leads them to believe billionaire pharmaceutical giant Barry Sherman and his philanthropist wife Honey Sherman were the targeted victims of a double murder.
Barry Sherman, 75, who founded the generic drug manufacturing giant Apotex, and Honey Sherman, 70, were found dead in their Toronto mansion on Dec. 15, 2017.
East China Sea: Worst Tanker Oil Spill in Decades
January 26th, 2018Via: Reuters:
The worst tanker oil spill in decades is unfolding across hundreds of miles of the East China Sea after an Iranian oil tanker carrying more than 100,000 tonnes of toxic oil collided with a freighter and exploded, killing all 32 crew onboard. The ship burned, spewing its cargo, for more than a week before sinking in the waters between China, Japan and South Korea.
Tesla Gigafactory Production Problems Worse than Previously Disclosed
January 26th, 2018The Hacker News comments on this are interesting.
Via: CNBC:
Tesla’s problems with battery production at the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, are worse than the company has acknowledged and could cause further delays and quality issues for the new Model 3, according to a number of current and former Tesla employees. These problems include Tesla needing to make some of the batteries by hand and borrowing scores of employees from one of its suppliers to help with this manual assembly, said these people.
…
Many of the company’s quality control workers are relatively inexperienced, make sloppy calculations and don’t know when they’re looking at flaws, according to several current and former employees. They said many quality inspectors were temp-to-hire workers with no automotive experience who Tesla hired via a staffing agency.
Tesla acknowledged the relative inexperience of some employees, but said new hires involved in battery production receive “extensive training, including safety training.”
Two current engineers told CNBC that they are concerned some of the batteries being shipped do not have the minimum gap required between lithium-ion cells. These engineers warned that this “touching cells” flaw could cause batteries to short out or, in worse cases, catch fire.
