Tianjin Explosions
August 13th, 2015Via: Guardian:
Armed troops and elite military units trained to handle nuclear, biological and chemical disasters are being dispatched to the scene of a deadly explosion in northern China as Beijing vowed to deploy “every resource available” to help survivors.
At least 50 deaths have been confirmed and 701 people admitted to hospital with injuries – 71 of those said to be “severe” – after a fire at warehouse containing “dangerous chemicals” sparked a series of blasts on Wednesday night.
By Thursday afternoon at least 1,000 firefighters were attempting to bring the flames under control around the main disaster zone, a portside industrial estate in Tianjin.
Around 10,000 medical staff were working at 10 different hospitals to treat survivors, Zhang Yong, a local Communist party official, told a press conference. “We will bring things back on track as soon as possible,” he said.
New Competition for Tesla: Fisker to Open Factory in Riverside County
August 13th, 2015Update: Audi to Build a Tesla Competitor
—
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Southern California is in the car business again.
Fisker Automotive has signed a deal to lease a large factory in Moreno Valley, where it will begin building plug-in electric hybrid vehicles that could be offered for sale as early as the middle of next year.
The region, the nation’s biggest car market, has not been home to an automobile manufacturing plant since General Motors closed a Van Nuys facility in 1992.
The admired but beleaguered luxury carmaker, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and was purchased by Chinese auto parts giant Wanxiang Group a year later, has signed an 11-year lease worth an estimated $30 million in the Riverside County city — signaling a long-term commitment by the company.
The assembly plant, part of a growing network of alternative-fuel technology companies putting down roots in California, will be the state’s second electric car manufacturing factory, joining entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors plant in the Bay Area city of Fremont.
Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police
August 12th, 2015The countries that run ECHELON, the largest civilian communications surveillance program in the world, have developed unified standards for biometric identification.
See how this might look in the future by looking at Iraq. That’s the beta testing phase for what’s in store for the rest of us.
Via: New York Times:
Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.
Chinese Military Trains Students to Control Machines with Their Minds
August 12th, 2015The source article is in Chinese.
So, Daily Mail warning.
Via: Daily Mail:
Forget joysticks and exoskeletons, the future of warfare could see robot armies controlled using just a commander’s mind.
China has been training students at a military academy to use headsets that detect and interpret the brain activity of the wearer, allowing them to control the machines.
At a demonstration at the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University in Zhengzhou, students used the device to send robots trundling in different directions.
They were also able to turn the robot’s heads and get them to pick up objects.
The technology uses a brain computer interface known as a electroencephalograph, which uses electrodes embedded in a cap to detect tiny changes in the electrical activity of the brain.
By training a computer to recognise particular patterns that accompany commands, such as turn left or turn right, this can be then transmitted to control the robot.
The technology is being developed at the military academy’s laboratory for brain-machine coordination.
The Coddling of the American Mind
August 12th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
…
The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
Trans-Fats: “Consumption of industrial trans-fats was associated with a 34 percent increase in all causes of mortality”
August 12th, 2015Via: Independent:
The latest findings, published in the British Medical Journal, appear to confirm the growing realisation that the prevailing health advice for the past half century to cut down on foods that are rich in saturated fats such as butter and cheese may have been misguided.
The study, carried out in Canada by Russell de Souza of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues found no association between saturated fats and ill health, but did find a link with the consumption of foods containing trans-fats, such as margarine.
The scientists found that the consumption of industrial trans-fats was associated with a 34 per cent increase in all causes of mortality, a 28 per cent increase in death from coronary heart disease and a 21 per cent increase in the risk of being diagnosed with heart disease.
The Teflon Toxin
August 12th, 2015Via: First Look:
Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.
This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.
The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay
August 11th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
Can the site’s dwindling ranks of volunteer editors protect its articles from the influence of money?
Google Creates New Company Called Alphabet, Restructures Stock
August 11th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
Google Inc. is reorganizing into a holding company that gives its main Web operations greater independence while offering investors more visibility into ambitious plans to expand new businesses, including health and Internet access.
Alphabet Inc. will be name of the new conglomerate. Google Inc., along with YouTube, Android mobile software and other Web-based products, will be a key part of that. Alphabet will also include Calico, Google Ventures, Google Capital, Google X and other subsidiaries, the Web company said in a blog post Monday. The goal isn’t to make Alphabet a consumer brand, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page said.
Yuan Devaluation
August 11th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
China devalued the yuan by the most in two decades, a move that rippled through global markets as policy makers stepped up efforts to support exporters and boost the role of market pricing in Asia’s largest economy.
The central bank cut its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent, triggering the yuan’s biggest one-day drop since China unified official and market exchange rates in January 1994. The People’s Bank of China called the change a one-time adjustment and said it will strengthen the market’s ability to determine the daily fixing.
