Michigan: Cars with Self Drive Mode Allowed on Roads; On Board Human Supervision Required
December 28th, 2013Via: CBS:
Gov. Rick Snyder has signed a law allowing companies to test driverless cars on Michigan roads.
But there’s a key point: Someone must be in the car.
In a statement Friday, Snyder says the law is important to keep Michigan involved in research and development of car technology. He also mentioned a need for the law in his 2013 State of the State speech.
Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013-2038
December 28th, 2013Via: U.S. Department of Defense:
4.1.5 Autonomy and Cognitive Behavior
Nearly all unmanned systems require active control of basic vehicle operations and behavior that affects communications, manpower, and system effectiveness. One of the largest cost drivers in the budget of DoD is manpower. A significant amount of that manpower, when it comes to operations, is spent directing unmanned systems during mission performance, data collection and analysis, and planning and replanning. Therefore, of utmost importance for DoD is increased system, sensor, and analytical automation that can not only capture significant information and events, but can also develop, record, playback, project, and parse out those data and then actually deliver “actionable” intelligence instead of just raw information.
Report PDF: Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 2013-2038
Identifying People Reflected in the Pupils of Portrait Subjects
December 27th, 2013Via: Los Angeles Times:
Can the eyes of photographed crime victims help authorities spot their victimizers?
According to new research published Thursday in the journal PLOS One, high-resolution photographs can be “mined” for hidden information. Specifically, the authors said that photographs of faces can reveal enough visual information on bystanders to identify them.
In a small sampling of 32 study participants, test subjects were able to spot familiar faces reflected in the pupils of someone who was photographed 84% of the time, researchers said. When the reflected images were of unfamiliar people, observers were able to match the person to a second mug shot with 71% accuracy.
“The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers.”
December 27th, 2013Via: Truthdig:
Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. It is one more sign that the business of locking up poor people in corporate America is booming.
Aramark, whose website says it provides 1 million meals a day to prisoners, does what corporations are doing throughout the society: It lavishes campaign donations on pliable politicians, who in turn hand out state and federal contracts to political contributors, as well as write laws and regulations to benefit their corporate sponsors at the expense of the poor. Aramark fires unionized workers inside prisons and jails and replaces them with underpaid, nonunionized employees. And it makes sure the food is low enough in both quality and portion to produce huge profits.
Aramark, often contracted to provide food to prisoners at about a dollar a meal, is one of numerous corporations, from phone companies to construction firms, that have found our grotesque system of mass incarceration to be very profitable. The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers. More than 2.2 million men and women are in prisons and jails in the U.S.
Neural Net Learns Breakout Then Thrashes Human Gamers
December 27th, 2013Via: Medium:
The Atari 2600 games console has a special place in the hearts of any gamers who grew up in the 1970s. It popularised a number of games that changed the games industry for ever, such as Pong, Breakout and Space Invaders. Today, these games have legendary status and still play an important role in the gaming world.
One curious thing about these games is that computers themselves have never been very good at playing them in the same way as humans. That means playing them by looking at the monitor and judging actions accordingly. This kind of “hand-to-eye” co-ordination has always been a special human skill.
Not any more. Today, Volodymyr Mnih and pals at DeepMind Technologies in London say they’ve created a neural network that learns how to play video games in the same way as humans: using the computer equivalent of hand-to-eye co-ordination.
‘We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education’
December 27th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
Universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, and other states have cut the number of credits students need to graduate. A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process. A California legislator introduced a measure that would have substituted online courses for some of the brick-and-mortar kind at public universities.
Some campuses of the University of North Carolina system are mulling getting rid of history, political science, and various others of more than 20 “low productive” programs. The University of Southern Maine may drop physics. And governors in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin have questioned whether taxpayers should continue subsidizing public universities for teaching the humanities.
Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.
Related: Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
$19M AIDS Vaccine Fraud
December 26th, 2013The remarkable thing here is that he was busted.
Via: Medical Daily:
Iowa State University researcher, Dr. Dong-Pyou Han, resigned after news broke of an investigation into the validity of his AIDS research. Han is believed to have tampered with research results for a possible AIDS vaccine.
“At Iowa State’s request, the research samples in question were examined by researchers at another university; they confirmed samples had been spiked,” ISU spokesman John McCarroll wrote in an email to the Des Moines Register. “He later admitted responsibility and resigned from Iowa State, effective Oct. 4, 2013.”
Related:
Scientific Fraud in Medicine: More Than a Few Bad Apples
American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
The Science-Is-Self-Correcting Myth
Only 6 of 53 Landmark Cancer Studies Could be Proved Valid
France: Half of Drugs Prescribed Useless or Dangerous
No Hands on Deck: Dawn of the Crewless Ship
December 26th, 2013Automation, lower costs, you know the routine.
The monkey wrench in the gears appears further down in the piece.
Via: Financial Times:
Remote-controlled ships used to come wrapped up as presents under the Christmas tree, but if European researchers and one of the world’s best-known engineering groups have their way, full-size versions will start replacing much of the tonnage afloat on the high seas in the coming years.
There are plenty of compelling reasons to switch to crewless ships. But the main driver for Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation at Rolls-Royce, is cost.
A ship that does not have to accommodate a crew for weeks on end can dispense with many if not all the life-support systems needed by humans, from the galley to the sewage treatment system, the accommodation area and the deck house.
Removing these would not only leave more space for cargo but would also mean lighter ships, holding out the prospect of big savings on fuel bills, which account for about half of a ships total operating cost. Mr Levander says crew expenses vary but can range between 10 and 30 per cent of operating costs.
He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.
…
But Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping is more circumspect. He says the highly complex collision avoidance rules would have to be rewritten to allow autonomous ships to operate in the same environment with crewed ships, a change that could take decades to implement.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, Soviet Inventor of the AK-47, Dies at 94
December 23rd, 2013Via: Time:
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Soviet general who designed the ubiquitous automatic weapon that now bears his name, died Dec. 23 at the age of 94. Iterations of the gun he invented now exist in the tens of millions, making it the most popular rifle in the wars of the latter half of the twentieth century.
A former Soviet tank gunner of humble Siberian origins, Kalashnikov submitted his prototype as part of a competition held to design a new Soviet infantry rifle in the waning moments of World War II. The AK-47 was born: a light-weight automated gun that was both easy to use and maintain. As C.J. Chivers, the New York Times journalist and author of a history of the AK-47, writes, Soviet infantry first wielded these rifles during the brutal crackdown on the Hungarian uprising in 1956. It was “repression’s chosen weapon, the rifle of the occupier and police state,” writes Chivers. But it was also the chief instrument of a new generation of global conflict.
Use of the weapon first spread along ideological lines, proliferating among armies and militias that had common cause with the Soviet Union. It sprung up in Vietnam in the 1960s and made its way to insurgencies in Africa and Latin America. The flag of Mozambique—an ensign adopted after the successful struggle of leftist guerrillas against Portuguese colonial rule—still features an AK-47 armed with a bayonet.
Subsequent models and versions of the gun mushroomed elsewhere. It became synonymous with the activities of militant groups. In the 1980s, mujahideen brandishing Kalashnikovs clashed with the Soviet army occupying Afghanistan and, to this day, the culture that spawns the Taliban’s footsoldiers is branded with a telling alliteration: the Quran and the Kalashnikov.
Kalashnikov, the man himself, remained through his life a figure of Soviet and later Russian nationalism. He still professed loyalty to Lenin and Stalin, despite losing family members to Siberian prison. He also claimed the creation of his weapon was not for offensive purposes, but the “defense of the motherland”—no matter that there’s now virtually no place on earth not in range of a Kalashnikov’s muzzle.
The OpenWorm Project
December 23rd, 2013Via: Telegraph:
An ambitious project to recreate an entire roundworm, cell by cell, in a software model has reached a crucial breakthrough as the digital animal wriggled for the first time.
The OpenWorm project brings together scientists and programmers from around the world in the common goal of entirely recreating the structure and behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans inside a machine.
The 1mm worm lives in warm soil and was the first multi-cellular organism to have its whole genome completely sequenced. The creature is the perfect candidate for the project because it exhibits relatively advanced behaviour such as finding a mate and avoiding predators despite being composed of just 1,000 cells, and has been the focus of a huge amount of scientific research.
All of the basic elements of the creature are being created in software from the bottom-up. It is hoped that the observed behaviour of real worms will eventually emerge once the model is adequately accurate. Each cell in the animal is being simulated one-by-one, along with neuron links between them, inside a new simulation environment called Geppetto.
The latest version of the model has now been shown to move and writhe in the same way and at the same speed as the real roundworm, showing that the team are making progress towards their ultimate goal, although the latest demonstration was driven by hard-coded instructions rather than the “synthetic brain” currently under development and comprised of 302 neurons.
