Australia Just Stopped China Buying a Farm the Size of Kentucky
November 19th, 2015Via: Fortune:
You can have too much foreign investment, it seems.
The Australian government Thursday blocked the sale of a portfolio of farmland the size of Kentucky to Chinese investors on national interest grounds.
Four separate groups linked to Chinese-based investors had been dominating the bidding for properties amounting to 2.5% of Australia’s farming land owned by S. Kidman & Co. The assets were expected to fetch an estimated 350 million Australian dollars ($250 million). The proposed sale had become a test case for how the country balances concerns over foreign ownership with the need for foreign investment in an economy that has slowed sharply due to the collapse in commodity prices this year.
Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption
November 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
Federal regulators on Thursday approved a genetically engineered salmon as fit for consumption, clearing the way for the first genetically altered animal to reach American supermarkets and dinner tables.
The approval, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes more than five years after agency reviewers made their initial determination that the fish would be safe to eat and for the environment, an unusually long delay.
The salmon has been fiercely opposed by consumer and environmental groups, which have argued that the safety studies were inadequate and that wild salmon populations might be affected if the genetically engineered fish were to escape into the oceans and rivers.
The AquAdvantage salmon, as it is known, is an Atlantic salmon that has been genetically modified so that it grows to market size faster than a conventional farmed salmon. It was developed by AquaBounty Technologies, which is now majority owned by the Intrexon Corporation.
SSI’s Shred of the Week: Hard Drives
November 19th, 2015Via: SSI:
In the digital age, information is a powerful asset that must be protected. As computer systems become outdated and replaced, their hard drives, which can contain valuable or sensitive information, must be securely destroyed so their data has no chance of being read or retrieved. This requires a very specialized piece of shredding machinery. Watch as the SSI Dual-Shear® M55 with SmartFeed technology takes huge bytes out of outdated computer hard drives.
Recovery: Half of New Yorkers Say They Are Barely or Not Getting By, Poll Shows
November 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
Half of New York City residents say they are struggling economically, making ends meet just barely, if at all, and most feel sharp uncertainty about the future of the city’s next generation, a new poll shows.
The poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, shows great disparities in quality of life among the city’s five boroughs. The stresses weighing on New Yorkers vary widely, from the Bronx, where residents feel acute concern about access to jobs and educational opportunity, to Staten Island, where one in five report recently experiencing vandalism or theft.
But an atmosphere of economic anxiety pervades all areas of the city: 51 percent of New Yorkers said they were either just getting by or finding it difficult to do so.
Even in Manhattan, three in 10 said they were just getting by. (Fifty-eight percent said they were doing all right or thriving financially — the highest response of the five boroughs.)
These Biohackers Are Creating Open-Source Insulin
November 19th, 2015Via: Popular Science:
The 370 million people worldwide with diabetes rely on injections of insulin to regulate the amount of sugar in their blood, since their bodies can’t make the hormone themselves. Since there are no generic versions available in the United States, insulin is very expensive—that cost was likely a large proportion of the $176 billion in medical expenditures incurred by diabetes patients in 2012 alone. Now a team of biohackers with Counter Culture Labs, a community lab in Oakland, California, wants to pave the way towards generic insulin, and they’ve started a crowdfunding page for their project.
The biohackers’ goal is fairly straightforward: To make and refine synthetic insulin from E. coli bacteria and document their process. The result, they hope, will be that a generic pharmaceutical company will use that protocol to make insulin that’s affordable for diabetes patients all over the world. There are several types of insulin that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration—some are long-lasting, others are fast-acting—but they are all protected by patents, so there are no generic versions. “It takes legitimate scientific research to create a biosimilar generic [drug], and generic companies don’t want to do scientific research,” says Maureen Muldavin, a program manager at Counter Culture Labs and a biohacker involved in the Open Insulin project.
The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea
November 18th, 2015Via: Vice:
And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they’ve been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they’ll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
It’s a little-watched but fast-approaching milestone that raises serious questions about the future of consumption in our rapidly modernizing, mineral-hungry world: How deep are we willing to dive to get the materials that make our electronics run?
Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
November 18th, 2015Via: Armstrong Economics:
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
Recovery: Japan’s Economy Falls Back Into Recession Again
November 17th, 2015Via: BBC:
Japan’s economy has fallen into recession again after it shrank 0.8% on an annualised basis in the third quarter.
The preliminary data means the world’s third-largest economy has contracted for a second consecutive quarter, marking a technical recession.
Growth was expected to decline after it fell a revised 0.7% in the second quarter on weak domestic demand.
Japan has been in recession four times since the global financial crisis.
The Pentagon’s Plan to Outsource Lethal Cyber-Weapons
November 16th, 2015Via: Engadget:
The Pentagon has quietly put out a call for vendors to bid on a contract to develop, execute and manage its new cyber weaponry and defense program. The scope of this nearly half-billion-dollar “help wanted” work order includes counterhacking, as well as developing and deploying lethal cyberattacks — sanctioned hacking expected to cause real-life destruction and loss of human life.
In June 2016, work begins under the Cyberspace Operations Support Services contract (pdf) under CYBERCOM (United States Cyber Command). The $460 million project recently came to light and details the Pentagon’s plan to hand over its IT defense and the planning, development, execution, management, integration with the NSA, and various support functions of the U.S. military’s cyberattacks to one vendor.
Why Human-In-The-Loop Computing Is The Future Of Machine Learning
November 16th, 2015Via: ComputerWorld:
Now that machine learning is becoming more and more mainstream, some design patterns are starting to emerge. As the CEO of CrowdFlower, I’ve worked with many companies building machine learning algorithms and I’ve noticed a best practice in nearly every successful deployment of machine learning on tough business problems. That practice is called “human-in-the-loop” computing. Here’s how it works:
First, a machine learning model takes a first pass on the data, or every video, image or document that needs labeling. That model also assigns a confidence score, or how sure the algorithm is that it’s making the right judgment. If the confidence score is below a certain value, it sends the data to a human annotator to make a judgment. That new human judgment is used both for the business process and is fed back into the machine learning algorithm to make it smarter. In other words, when the machine isn’t sure what the answer is, it relies on a human, then adds that human judgment to its model.
This simple pattern is at the heart of many well known, real-world use-cases of machine learning. And it solves one of the biggest issues with machine learning, namely: it’s often very easy to get an algorithm to 80 percent accuracy but near impossible to get an algorithm to 99 percent. The best machine learning lets humans handle that 20 percent since 80 percent accuracy is simply not good enough for most real-world applications.
