Colorado City Stops Water Fluoridation
July 28th, 2015Via: Natural Society:
Snowmass, a skier’s paradise tucked into the Colorado Mountains, and part of Aspen, has decided to stop fluoridating its water. The news comes just after the latest groundbreaking study on water fluoridation concluded that there was zero relationship between water fluoridation and cavity prevention.
As Anthony Gucciardi shared with you on July 1st, the study incorporated years of research into a serious conclusion that could help activists remove fluoride from the water worldwide.
The sanitation district board members at Snowmass decided that ‘it wasn’t in the business of medicating’ its citizens, shortly after the federal government revised its recommendations regarding public-water fluoridation to lower the allowable levels.
Deep Neural Nets Can Now Recognize Your Face in Thermal Images
July 28th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
One problem with infrared surveillance videos or infrared CCTV images is that it is hard to recognize the people in them. Faces look different in the infrared and matching these images to their normal appearance is a significant unsolved challenge.
The problem is that the link between the way people look in infrared and visible light is highly nonlinear. This is particularly tricky for footage taken in the mid- and far-infrared, which tends to use passive sensors that detect emitted light rather than the reflected variety.
Today, Saquib Sarfraz and Rainer Stiefelhagen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany say they’ve worked out how to connect a mid- or far-infrared image of a face with its visible light counterpart for the first time. The trick they’ve perfected is to teach a neural network to do all the work.
Britain: “Police May No Longer Attend Burglaries”
July 28th, 2015Via: BBC:
The public should not expect to see a police officer after crimes such as burglary, the head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council has said.
Sara Thornton told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire budget cuts and the changing nature of criminality meant police in England and Wales had to prioritise.
She said it “could be” that if an iPad was stolen from a home an officer would not come round to investigate.
Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers
July 27th, 2015Via: Future of Life Institute:
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.
Major Flaw In Android Phones Would Let Hackers In With Just A Text
July 27th, 2015For Samsung users: Since the payload is in video files, how about unchecking “Auto retrieve” in Multimedia messages in the Samsung Messages app settings? Am I right?
Via: NPR:
Android is the most popular mobile operating system on Earth: About 80 percent of smartphones run on it. And, according to mobile security experts at the firm Zimperium, there’s a gaping hole in the software — one that would let hackers break into someone’s phone and take over, just by knowing the phone’s number.
Just A Text
In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that’s corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message.
“This happens even before the sound that you’ve received a message has even occurred,” says Joshua Drake, security researcher with Zimperium and co-author of Android Hacker’s Handbook. “That’s what makes it so dangerous. [It] could be absolutely silent. You may not even see anything.”
Here’s how the attack would work: The bad guy creates a short video, hides the malware inside it and texts it to your number. As soon as it’s received by the phone, Drake says, “it does its initial processing, which triggers the vulnerability.”
CHINESE SHARES TUMBLE 8.5 PERCENT IN BIGGEST ONE-DAY DROP SINCE 2007
July 27th, 2015Via: Reuters:
Chinese shares slid more than 8 percent on Monday as an unprecedented government rescue plan to prop up valuations ran out of steam, throwing Beijing’s efforts to stave off a deeper crash into doubt.
Major indexes suffered their largest one-day drop since 2007, shattering three weeks of relative calm in China’s volatile stock markets since Beijing unleashed a barrage of support measures to arrest a slump that started in mid-June.
“The lesson from China’s last equity bubble is that, once sentiment has soured, policy interventions aimed at shoring up prices have only a short-lived effect,” wrote Capital Economics analysts in a research note reacting to the slide.
The CSI300 index of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen tumbled 8.6 percent to 3,818.73 points, while the Shanghai Composite Index lost 8.5 percent to 3,725.56 points.
Britain: Chairman of the Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee Filmed Snorting Cocaine with Prostitutes
July 26th, 2015My guess is that any of these scum can get popped with honey pots at any time. More interesting than the fact that this stuff is happening is why does it ultimately becomes public?
Via: BBC:
Lord Sewel is facing a police inquiry after quitting as House of Lords deputy speaker over a video allegedly showing him taking drugs with prostitutes.
Lords Speaker Baroness D’Souza said he had also quit as chairman of the Lords privileges and conduct committee in the wake of the Sun on Sunday’s story.
The footage showed him snorting powder from a woman’s breasts with a £5 note.
Baroness D’Souza said his behaviour was “shocking and unacceptable” and that she was referring him to the police.
“Lord Sewel has this morning resigned as chairman of committees. The House of Lords will continue to uphold standards in public life and will not tolerate departure from these standards,” she said.
“These serious allegations will be referred to the House of Lords commissioner for standards and the Metropolitan Police for investigation as a matter of urgency.”
Research Credit: Jb
NASA: 1 Billion ‘Earths’ in Our Galaxy Alone; Estimate, “May Be a Little Low”
July 25th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
During the NASA newser Thursday, I asked whether the latest Kepler data offered any new insight on the abundance of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars (the shorthand for this formulation is “eta-Earth”), and then followed up with an e-mail to NASA. Batalha, an astrophysicist who is the mission scientist for the Kepler telescope, e-mailed her answer:
Previous estimates of eta-Earth suggest that 15-25% of stars host potentially habitable planets. These estimates are based largely on discoveries of planets orbiting the cooler stars called M dwarfs. These new discoveries suggest that the statistics for sun-like stars are roughly in-line with estimates from the cooler M-type stars. So how does that translate to the number of planets in the galaxy? M, K, and G dwarfs comprise about 90% of the stars in the galaxy. Conservatively speaking, if 15% of stars have a planet between 1 and 1.6 times the size of Earth in the Habitable Zone, then you’d expect 15% of 90% of 100 billion stars to have such planets. That’s 14 billion potentially habitable worlds.
M type stars are the most common in the galaxy comprising about 70% of the population of Main Sequence stars. Here’s how the star types break down for the solar neighborhood within 33 light-years:
357 stars total
248 of those are M dwarfs
44 K dwarfs
20 G dwarfs
That means “only” about a billion of the 14 billion I mentioned above are orbiting G stars. Ha!
Thank you, Dr. Batalha! Keep in mind, she is using conservative estimates. So 1 billion may be a little low.
Chevy Spark EV Review
July 24th, 2015Disclosures: I sell solar power systems in NZ and I’m long Enphase Energy.
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Via: LaserHacker:
Britain: Hundreds of Police Officers Convicted in Past Three Years
July 24th, 2015Via: BBC:
At least 309 police officers and police community support officers in the UK have been convicted of offences in the last three years, figures show.
The offences that led to convictions include sex crimes, assaults and possessing indecent images of children.
However, only 25 of the 45 forces gave figures to the Press Association after a Freedom of Information request.
…
The 20 forces that did not provide information either said they could not reveal the number of convictions because of the cost of retrieving the information, or did not respond to the request.
Research Credit: Jb
