Change We Can Believe In: U.S. Sets New Record for Denying Federal Files Under Freedom of Information Act
March 18th, 2015Via: Guardian:
The US has set a new record for denying and censoring federal files under the Freedom of Information Act, analysis by the Associated Press reveals.
For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the open-government legislation.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly one in three cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law – but only when it was challenged.
Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000.
Women-Led Companies Perform Three Times Better Than the S&P 500
March 17th, 2015Via: Fortune:
Boston-based Quantopian looked at how well Fortune 1000 companies led by women performed compared to the S&P 500 over a 12-year period.
You’ve heard that companies with women executives at the helm tend to perform better than those led by men— and a new study furthers that claim, finding that women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men.
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Here’s how the simulation works: Rubin invests a hypothetical $100,000 in the companies that had women CEOs between Jan. 1, 2002 and Dec. 31, 2014 and another $100,000 in the S&P 500. Rubin buys a company’s stock when the woman becomes CEO, and holds it through the CEO’s tenure.
According to the algorithm, the women CEO fund would end up being worth $448,158, or a return of 348%, while the S&P 500 investment would have risen to $222,306, or a return of 122 %. The results are even on the conservative side for the performance of the women CEOs, since dividends weren’t reinvested automatically as they were with the S&P 500.
Makani: Google’s Energy Harvesting Kites
March 17th, 2015Via: Google:
Makani is working to accelerate the shift to clean, renewable energy by developing energy kites, a new type of wind turbine that uses lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software to generate more energy with less materials—all at lower cost.
How About That Erl?
March 17th, 2015Via: MarketWatch:
U.S. oil prices were dipping lower in early Tuesday trade after sinking to a six-year low on persistent worries about a supply glut on Monday.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in April CLJ5, -1.78% traded at $42.85 a barrel, down $1.04, or 2.4%, from Monday’s settlement on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
May Brent crude LCOK5, -1.37% lost 84 cents, down 1.6%, to trade at $53.10 on London’s ICE Futures exchange.
The tumbling prices in oil come after both Brent and Nymex crude-oil suffered a more than 2% drop as a monthly report released by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries forecast a drop in U.S. output by the end of the year. However. that OPEC news was mostly shrugged off amid nagging signs of further supply increases and dwindling storage, which threatens to send prices lower yet.
How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over
March 16th, 2015Via: The New York Review of Books:
Here is what that future—which is to say now—looks like: banking, logistics, surgery, and medical recordkeeping are just a few of the occupations that have already been given over to machines. Manufacturing, which has long been hospitable to mechanization and automation, is becoming more so as the cost of industrial robots drops, especially in relation to the cost of human labor. According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, currently the expectation is that machines, which now account for 10 percent of all manufacturing tasks, are likely to perform about 25 percent of them by 2025. (To understand the economics of this transition, one need only consider the American automotive industry, where a human spot welder costs about $25 an hour and a robotic one costs $8. The robot is faster and more accurate, too.) The Boston group expects most of the growth in automation to be concentrated in transportation equipment, computer and electronic products, electrical equipment, and machinery.
Meanwhile, algorithms are writing most corporate reports, analyzing intelligence data for the NSA and CIA, reading mammograms, grading tests, and sniffing out plagiarism. Computers fly planes—Nicholas Carr points out that the average airline pilot is now at the helm of an airplane for about three minutes per flight—and they compose music and pick which pop songs should be recorded based on which chord progressions and riffs were hits in the past. Computers pursue drug development—a robot in the UK named Eve may have just found a new compound to treat malaria—and fill pharmacy vials.
Xerox uses computers—not people—to select which applicants to hire for its call centers. The retail giant Amazon “employs” 15,000 warehouse robots to pull items off the shelf and pack boxes. The self-driving car is being road-tested. A number of hotels are staffed by robotic desk clerks and cleaned by robotic chambermaids. Airports are instituting robotic valet parking.
Book: The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr
Hertz Puts Cameras In Its Rental Cars, Says It Has No Plans To Use Them
March 16th, 2015Via: Fusion:
Hertz has offered the NeverLost navigational device for years, but it only added the built-in camera feature (which includes audio and video) to its latest version of the device — NeverLost 6 — in mid-2014. “Approximately a quarter of our vehicles across the country have a NeverLost unit and slightly more than half of those vehicles have the NeverLost 6 model installed,” Hertz spokesperson Evelin Imperatrice said by email. In other words, one in 8 Hertz cars has a camera inside — but Imperatrice says that, for now, they are inactive. “We do not have adequate bandwidth capabilities to the car to support streaming video at this time,” she said.
So why is Hertz creeping out customers with cameras it’s not using? “Hertz added the camera as a feature of the NeverLost 6 in the event it was decided, in the future, to activate live agent connectivity to customers by video. In that plan the customer would have needed to turn on the camera by pushing a button (while stationary),” Imperatrice explained. “The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so.”
Britain: Investigation Into Claims Metropolitan Police Covered Up Child Sex Offenses Because of Involvement of Police Officers and MPs
March 16th, 2015Via: BBC:
The police watchdog is investigating alleged corruption in the Metropolitan Police, including claims it covered up child sex offences because of the involvement of police officers and MPs.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating 14 referrals relating to child sex offences from the 1970s to the 2000s.
It said the claims were of “high-level corruption of the most serious nature”.
The Met said it had voluntarily referred the allegations.
The investigation is to look at claims the police force suppressed evidence and hindered or halted investigations, the IPCC said.
“3D Printer” for Small Molecules
March 16th, 2015Via: HHMI News:
Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have simplified the chemical synthesis of small molecules, eliminating a major bottleneck that limits the exploration of a class of compounds offering tremendous potential for medicine and technology.
Scientists led by Martin Burke, an HHMI early career scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used a single automated process to synthesize 14 distinct classes of small molecules from a common set of building blocks. Burke’s team envisions expanding the approach to enable the production of thousands of potentially useful molecules with a single machine, which they describe as a “3D printer” for small molecules. Their work is described in the March 13, 2015, issue of the journal Science.
According to Burke, the highly customized approach that chemists have long relied on to synthesize small molecules is time consuming and inaccessible to most researchers. “A lot of great medicines have not been discovered yet because of this synthesis bottleneck,” he says. With his new technology, Burke aims to change that. “The vision is that anybody could go to a website, pick the building blocks they want, instruct their assembly through the web, and the small molecules would get synthesized and shipped,” Burke says. “We’re not there yet, but we now have an actionable roadmap toward on-demand small-molecule synthesis for non-specialists.”
U.S. Post Offices Have Installed Hidden Spy Cameras to Film Customers
March 16th, 2015Via: Gizmodo:
While the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is typically tasked with looking into mailbox vandalism and mail fraud, an investigation in Denver reveals that they’re also installing hidden cameras at post offices and spying on Americans.
This postal surveillance program sounds shady as hell. FOX31 Denver found one camera disguised as a utility box that “was positioned to capture and record the license plates and facial features of customers leaving a Golden Post Office.” Within an hour of the local news station’s discovery, the Postal Inspection Service had ripped it out of the ground, though the force later admitted that it had a “number of cameras at their disposal.”
This Microscope Can See Down to Individual Atoms
March 16th, 2015Via: Vice:
As our devices get ever smaller, so do the materials we use to make them. And that means you have to get really close to see them. Really close. A new electron microscope unveiled at the UK’s national SuperST?EM facility images objects at an unprecedented resolution, right down to the individual atoms.
SuperSTEM is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and has three electron microscopes that UK scientists can use. The newest was unveiled last m?onth: a £3.7 million ($5.5 million) Nion Hermes Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope that EPSRC says is one of only three in the world. It can image objects a million times smaller than a human hair.
