Scientists Can Read a Bird’s Brain and Predict Its Next Song
October 12th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review:
“We decode realistic synthetic birdsong directly from neural activity,” the scientists announced in a new report published on the website bioRxiv. The team, which includes Argentinian birdsong expert Ezequiel Arneodo, calls the system the first prototype of “a decoder of complex, natural communication signals from neural activity.” A similar approach could fuel advances towards a human thought-to-text interface, the researchers say.
A songbird’s brain is none too large. But its vocalizations are similar to human speech in ways that make these birds a favorite of scientists studying memory and cognition. Their songs are complex. And, like human language, they’re learned. The zebra finch learns its call from an older bird.
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC:
“What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single pilot is able to operate all of the controls. “There might also be a remote-control pilot on the ground, in case of emergencies, like a heart attack,” he adds. “This remote pilot could monitor many airplanes [at once].” But eventually “they would like to remove the last pilot.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the aviation industry has cut back on crews. In the 1950s, it took five people to fly an airliner — two pilots, a flight engineer, a radio operator, and a navigator. By the 1960s, the radio operator and navigator were gone. In the 1990s, flight engineers disappeared. Given this trend, fully automated aviation may seem inevitable.
One motive for the trend, not surprisingly, is financial. A report released last August suggests that by transitioning to self-flying aircraft the aviation industry could save $35 billion a year.
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian:
Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the tech firms can grab a slice of that, they will.
“The only human beings left in the modern supply chain are truck drivers. If you go to a modern warehouse now, say Amazon or Walmart, the trucks are unloaded by machines, the trucks are loaded by machines, they are put into the warehouse by machines. Then there is a guy, probably making $10 an hour, with a load of screens watching these machines. Then what you have is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid. And that drives the supply chain people nuts,” he says.
The goal, he believes, is to get rid of the drivers and “have ultimate efficiency”.
Research Credit: TD
Tom Delonge Asking for People to Invest in His UFO PSYOP
October 11th, 2017The U.S. Government has funneled trillions of dollars into black world research and projects over decades, but Tom Delonge and his CIA friends are now asking for money to, “Bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows and collaborate with global citizens to apply that knowledge in a way that benefits humanity.”
Your what hurts?
They’re also planning, “An international point-to-point transportation craft that will erase the current travel limits of distance and time. It mimics the capabilities observed in unidentified aerial phenomenon by employing a drive system that alters space-time metric.”
I hesitate to provide a link, but here you go:
As you scroll through Tom Delonge’s happy horseshit, keep in mind, .gov and .mil are playing on his insanely inflated ego and ignorance to take the PSYOP on this topic to the next level.
Tom’s brand of “Disclosure” involves an endless song and dance routine, a hype train for future announcements and incessant peddling of shitty baseball caps and tshirts. Tom might be a rock star, but he’s being played by Uncle $cam on this one.
Of course, I could be wrong, but let’s just say that I won’t be lining up early to buy a ticket to ride on Tom’s spaceship. *chortle*
Google’s Home Mini Needed a Software Patch to Stop Some of Them from Recording Everything
October 11th, 2017Mmm hmm.
Via: The Verge:
Categorize this under “one of the worst possible PR nightmares for a Google smart speaker.” According to Artem Russakovskii at Android Police, the Google Home Mini he was reviewing was randomly and near-constantly recording sounds in his home and transmitting them to Google. The company acknowledged the problem and is issuing a software update to resolve the issue, which appears to boil down to a failure of the touch sensor on the top.
Fentanyl Maker Donates Big to Campaign Opposing Pot Legalization
October 10th, 2017Via: U.S. News and World Report:
An embattled pharmaceutical company that sells the powerful painkiller fentanyl has donated $500,000 toward defeating a ballot initiative that would make recreational use of marijuana legal under Arizona law.
It’s hard to imagine a more sinister donor than Insys Therapeutics Inc. in the eyes of pot legalization proponents, who long have claimed drug companies want to keep cannabis illegal to corner the market for drugs, some addictive and dangerous, that relieve pain and other symptoms.
Insys currently markets just one product, according to an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: a sublingual fentanyl spray it calls Subsys.
Two former company employees pleaded not guilty last month to federal charges related to an alleged kickback scheme to get doctors to prescribe Subsys.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed a lawsuit late last month against the company alleging Insys hawked the drug to doctors for off-label prescribing, saying the company’s “desire for increased profits led it to disregard patients’ health and push addictive opioids for non-FDA approved purposes.”
GM to Buy Sensor-Tech Firm Strobe to Speed Up Self-Driving Car Push
October 10th, 2017Via: Reuters:
No. 1 U.S. automaker General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday it would buy Strobe Inc, which uses LIDAR technology to help self-driving cars identify objects at a distance, to speed up development of autonomous vehicles and slash sensor costs.
LIDAR is one of the major sensor technologies used in autonomous, or self-driving vehicles, and there is fierce competition between large automakers to bring the cars to market first.
Fully self-driving vehicles are expected to hit the market in a limited form by around 2020. GM and its U.S. rival Ford Motor Co (F.N) have both publicly stated that they aim to have fully self-driving cars on sale by 2021.
”This acquisition is a game changer for GM and Cruise,“ because of the cost savings it will bring,” Kyle Vogt, chief executive of GM’s Cruise Automation unit, said.
“We’ve made this acquisition because we aim to speed our path to market,” he added.
Strobe’s new microchip LIDAR system would significantly enhance the capabilities of the self-driving cars GM was developing, Vogt said in a blog post and on a conference call with reporters.
Forensic Acoustic Proof of SECOND Shooter in the Las Vegas Massacre
October 9th, 2017Main post: Las Vegas: Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History
Via: Mike Adams/ Health Ranger:
In essence, because of the differences in the speed of sound vs. the speed of the bullets from a known cartridge (.223 Remington, in this case), the time lag between the last bullet hitting the pavement and the last audible report of the rifle muzzle can be used to very accurately calculate the range of the shooter.
More importantly, when the audio from the Las Vegas shooting is analyzed, it reveals TWO shooters operating at the same time, not just one shooter. Shooter #1 is operating at 425 – 475 yards, which is consistent with the Mandalay Bay hotel, but shooter #2 is operating at approximately 250 – 270 yards.
Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest
October 8th, 2017Via: LiveScience:
It’s harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting.
At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) of spring barley have been harvested from the world’s first robotically tended farm. Everything from start to finish — including sowing, fertilizing, collecting samples and harvesting — has been done by autonomous vehicles on the farm, according to the researchers.
Ted Heath Would Have Been Questioned Over Abuse Claims, Police Say
October 8th, 2017Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
Via: Guardian:
A police report has said there was reason to suspect that Sir Edward Heath, Britain’s seventh postwar prime minister, carried out a string of sex attacks over a span of decades.
The report concludes that the allegations, including the rape of a male child sex worker aged 11 and sexual assault against four other children and two adults, would have met the legal threshold for police to interview Heath under criminal caution had he still been alive.
The police said nothing should be inferred from their findings – after a total of 40 allegations – about the guilt or innocence of Heath, who died in 2005.
