Study: Second Opinion from Doctor Results in Different Diagnosis 88% of Time
April 8th, 2017😯
Via: Mayo Clinic:
Many patients come to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion or diagnosis confirmation before treatment for a complex condition. In a new study, Mayo Clinic reports that as many as 88 percent of those patients go home with a new or refined diagnosis — changing their care plan and potentially their lives. Conversely, only 12 percent receive confirmation that the original diagnosis was complete and correct.
Donald Trump Warns That Attacking Syria Could Start World War III
April 8th, 2017
Via: The Dollar Vigilante:
U.S. Carrier Strike Group Sails Toward Korean Peninsula After North’s Missile Test
April 8th, 2017Via: Military.com:
The U.S. Navy’s Carl Vinson carrier strike group has been ordered to cancel planned port visits in Australia and move to the Western Pacific, just four days after the rogue state of North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile from its eastern coast.
Officials with U.S. Third Fleet announced Saturday night that the San Diego-based strike group, which just completed a four-day port visit in Singapore, will now sail north and “report on station” in the Western Pacific. Multiple outlets reported that the ships would be positioned off the Korean peninsula.
U.S. Envoy to UN Threatens Further Military Action in Syria
April 8th, 2017Via: france24:
The United States on Friday threatened to take further military action in Syria following its missile strikes on an air base in the war-wracked country in retaliation for a suspected chemical attack.
“The United States took a very measured step last night,” US Ambassador Nikki Haley told the UN Security Council.
“We are prepared to do more, but we hope it will not be necessary.”
The Security Council was meeting in an emergency session to discuss the US actions in Syria that Russia branded a “flagrant violation of international law and an act of aggression” against Syria.
U.S. Fires Missiles at Assad Airbase, Escalating Tensions with Russia
April 7th, 2017Well, Hillary supporters, maybe you’ll get that war with Russia anyway.
Via: Reuters:
The United States on Friday fired dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase from which it said a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched this week, an escalation of the U.S. military role in Syria that immediately raised tension with Russia.
Just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he had ordered the attack, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the strike had seriously damaged ties between Washington and Moscow.
Two U.S. warships fired 59 cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the Syrian airbase controlled by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in response to a poison gas attack in a rebel-held area on Tuesday, U.S. officials said.
Putin, a staunch ally of Assad, regarded the U.S. action as “aggression against a sovereign nation” on a “made-up pretext” and a cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was cited as saying by agencies.
It was the toughest direct U.S. action yet in Syria’s six-year-old civil war and leaves Trump facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since his Jan. 20 inauguration, raising the risk of confrontation with Russia and Iran, Assad’s two main military backers.
Android Devices Can be Fatally Hacked by Malicious Wi-Fi Networks, iOS Patched on Monday
April 6th, 2017Via: Ars Technica:
A broad array of Android phones are vulnerable to attacks that use booby-trapped Wi-Fi signals to achieve full device takeover, a researcher has demonstrated.
The vulnerability resides in a widely used Wi-Fi chipset manufactured by Broadcom and used in both iOS and Android devices. Apple patched the vulnerability with Monday’s release of iOS 10.3.1. “An attacker within range may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip,” Apple’s accompanying advisory warned. In a highly detailed blog post published Tuesday, the Google Project Zero researcher who discovered the flaw said it allowed the execution of malicious code on a fully updated 6P “by Wi-Fi proximity alone, requiring no user interaction.”
Google is in the process of releasing an update in its April security bulletin. The fix is available only to a select number of device models, and even then it can take two weeks or more to be available as an over-the-air update to those who are eligible. Company representatives didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this post.
Apple Calls Journalists to Explain That the Company Has Not Abandoned the Mac
April 6th, 2017Everything is great! Don’t worry. We love you. We’re sorry. Check back next year, mmmkay?
The picture at the link looks like an action shot for a Touch of Gray ad. *chortle*
Via: TechCrunch:
The Mac has an important long future at Apple. Apple cares deeply about the Mac. We have every intention to keep going and investing in the Mac. It’s important to us, it’s important to our customers — including Mac Pro users, all pro users, including Mac Pro. And if we’ve had a pause in upgrades and updates on that, we’re sorry for that, what happened with the Mac Pro, and we’re going to come out with something great to replace it. And that’s our intention. We care about our Pro users who use MacBook Pros, who use iMacs and who use Mac Pros, who use modular systems as well as all-in-one systems, who use the pro software we make. It’s all important to us and we’re invested in that and we see a long future with that stuff.
Zunum Aero Developing Electric Powered Aircraft for Regional Flights
April 5th, 2017They’re actually going to be hybrid to start, according to the Zunum Aero website:
Did you know that short-haul flights produce over 40% of aviation emissions? With our aircraft, we believe these will be largely eliminated within twenty years. Our aircraft are “hybrids to electrics” that sip fuel only when they have to, will use even less over time as batteries upgrade, and will one day go completely without — so that flying will be kind to the Earth.
Via: USA Today:
Zunum Aero announced Wednesday it is developing electric aircraft to get travelers out of their cars and into planes for regional commercial flights of up to 1,000 miles.
The Kirkland, Wash.-based company is working with Boeing HorizonX, an arm of the jet manufacture that invests in innovative technology, and JetBlue Technology Ventures to develop 10- to 50-seat aircraft for flights that could begin in the early 2020s. The goal is to return flights to smaller communities that lost air service during the last 30 years as regional airlines consolidated routes aboard larger aircraft.
“We believe that the industry is on the cusp of a golden era on regional air,” Zunum CEO Ashish Kumar told USA TODAY. “Air used to be a much larger factor of the travel over these distances.”
Despite flying lower and slower than airliners, Zunum officials hope to cut airfares and overall travel times in half with more-efficient planes flying mostly out of general-aviation airports. Passengers would carry their luggage straight from their cars to the planes, rather than pass through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.
“The cabin is designed to bring all your bags on board,” Kumar said. “It’s much more like a bus or a train.”
Related: Electric Plane Using Siemens Motor Sets 2 New Speed Records
Florida’s Money Laundering Suburb
April 5th, 2017Via: USA Today:
In a community known mostly as a getaway from the urban problems of Miami, the flood of drug money has confounded law enforcement agencies.
“We always thought we would get to it at some point,” said Charlie Blau, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the first money laundering sting in Miami. “We knew it would be a bigger problem.”
Federal agents say the criminal organizations use many methods to launder their money, including overseas bank wires and cash smuggling over the border.
They also have turned to other laundering areas, like the garment district in Los Angeles and the jewelry centers in New York City, to clean millions in drug profits.
But the export shops west of Miami remain among the oldest conduits in the country to launder money — and the most difficult to infiltrate and shut down.
Twice, local law enforcement task forces targeted the area, but no business owners were arrested nor were their shops closed.
Internal records of the most recent sting operation, in 2012, show for the first time the stunning amount of money that moved through the businesses and their importance to powerful drug organizations.
Tens of thousands in cash bundles were dropped off at a cellphone outlet tucked inside an aging storage center on the edge of town. Hundreds of thousands were wired into the bank account of a computer store with a glitzy showroom on one of Doral’s busiest thoroughfares.
In just three years, at least $25 million in drug money was funneled through 201 exporters by the police sting — just a fraction of the total number of businesses that were used to launder hundreds of millions in the past decade, according to records and former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.
Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading
April 5th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
It was Amazon that drove America’s warehouse operators into the robot business.
Quiet Logistics, which ships apparel out of its Devens, Mass., warehouse, had been using robots made by a company called Kiva Systems. When Amazon bought Kiva in 2012, Quiet hired scientists. In 2015 it spun out a new company called Locus Robotics, which raised $8 million in venture capital. Last year, Locus unveiled its own warehouse robotics solution called the LocusBot—first using it for its own business, then selling them to companies that ship everything from housewares to auto parts.
Now, Locus has landed a bigger fish: It’s selling its robots to DHL Worldwide Express, the world’s largest third-party logistics company. DHL will use the machines at a South Haven, Miss., location to help ship surgical devices to operating rooms across the country.
To do that, Locus’s software directs a LocusBot to a shelf where the specific item is located. A human worker meets it there, reads a description of the item off an iPad, and drops it into a plastic bucket mounted on the machine. The idea is that the robot does the majority of the traveling, while the worker simply patrols a specified zone.
“The first trend was to try to replace humans,” said Rick Faulk, chief executive of Locus. “Now it’s about humans and robots working collaboratively.”
