Pentagon Spending Billions of Dollars on Accounting Boondoggles; Yes, Trillions Still Missing
December 23rd, 2013Black hole.
Via: Reuters:
With its efforts to build reliable accounting systems in disarray, the Pentagon isn’t likely to meet a congressionally mandated 2017 deadline to be audit-ready. All other federal agencies are audited annually, in accordance with a 1990 law, and with rare exceptions, they pass every year. The Pentagon alone has never been audited, leaving roughly $8.5 trillion in taxpayer dollars unaccounted for since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited.
Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
December 23rd, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
If you’ve ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you’ve ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or “drug paraphernalia” in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
Google-Owned SCHAFT Robot Won DARPA Robotics Challenge
December 22nd, 2013Via: Slashgear:
The Google-owned Japanese robotics company SCHAFT has won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by a wide margin. It scored 27 out of 32 points, beating its nearest competitor IHMC Robotics by seven points. Coming up third was Tartan rescue with 18 points, and MIT following that with 16 points.
The contest took place Dec. 20-21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, where 16 teams from around the world did their best to guide their robots through a series of tasks. The robots were to be programmed in such a way that they could be guided by simple commands issued by a non-expert, e.g., “Open the door” or “Clear away the debris in front of you.”
The object of the challenge, DARPA says, was to create a robot that could stand in for humans in disaster and emergency zones. In all, eight tasks were included: drive a vehicle; walk across rubble; remove debris; open a door and walk through it; climb a ladder and cross an industrial walkway; break a concrete panel with a tool made for humans; find and close a valve; and connect a fire hose to a pipe and open the valve.
Windows XP: Microsoft’s Ticking Time Bomb
December 22nd, 2013I’m surprised by how many of you guys are still using XP.
April 8th, 2014 is the date to circle on your calendar. Whatever you decide to do, make sure that you’ve done it by then.
Via: PC Pro:
The final deadline for Windows XP support will act as a starting pistol for hackers, as they target hundreds of millions of users on unpatched systems.
Microsoft has already granted the 12-year-old OS several stays of execution, but the firm has said it will finally end extended support on 8 April 2014 – despite the fact that XP remains the second-most popular OS, with almost a third of PCs running it.
These hundreds of millions of desktops and laptops will be vulnerable to hackers once XP stops receiving security updates, with Microsoft warning earlier this year that hackers could use patches issued for Windows 7 or Windows 8 to scout for XP exploits.
“The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse-engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares [them],” wrote Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group.
“If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP,” Rains added. “Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a zero-day vulnerability forever.”
Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
December 21st, 2013Via: Scientific American:
Renewables could be the world’s primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem—how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still too expensive or hard to scale. Compressed air is cheap and scalable but not yet efficient enough (although LightSail, a new company backed by Peter Thiel, Vinold Khosla and Bill Gates, hopes to change that). And what about flywheels? The biggest player, Beacon Power, went bankrupt in 2011.
Flywheels may be getting a second life, however. Silicon Valley inventor Bill Gray has a new flywheel design that would deliver distributed and highly scalable storage for around $1,333 a kilowatt, making it price competitive with pumped hydro and compressed air. With an efficiency of more than 80 percent, it would rival the best storage alternatives, and come with a 10-year guarantee. And it would make a perfect complement to an off-grid house with a solar photovoltaic (PV) system, able to charge fully in five hours—within the charging time of most solar PV systems—and store 15 kilowatt-hours of power, enough to run a modest house from sunset to sunrise.
Gray calls his invention the Velkess (for VEry Large Kinetic Energy Storage System). He is currently raising money for the prototype in a Kickstarter campaign.
The Velkess improves on traditional flywheels by better managing the natural “wobble” of a spinning mass. Traditional flywheels have been very expensive because engineers align the natural axis of the wheel’s rotation with the desired rotation of the generator. Thus, they are always struggling to minimize the natural wobble of the wheel using very expensive magnets and bearings, high-precision engineering and materials like high-grade carbon fiber or rigid steel. Beacon’s flywheel for grid storage cost a whopping $3 million per megawatt-hour.
Instead of trying to fight the wobble, Gray redirected it by suspending the wheel within a gimbal—the same concept that makes a gyroscope work.
The gimbal in the Velkess is asymmetrical, so the two axes of rotation—the flywheel axis as well as that of the rotor, which drives the brushless, inducting DC motor—are not on the same plane, and have different periods of frequency. This dampens the resonance effects that make traditional flywheels hard to control (a resonant disturbance in one of the planes can intensify until the device shatters). With the gimbal, resonance in one plane is translated into the other, which is nonresonant at the same frequency. Accordingly, only very loose engineering tolerances—about one sixteenth of an inch—are required to build the device.
Related:
Residential Energy Storage with Underground Flywheels
A Solar Boom So Successful, It’s Been Halted
December 21st, 2013Greed and incompetence at power companies are running up against the unstoppable force of distributed power generation.
Not long to go now.
Germans laugh at this, by the way.
Flashback 2011: Residential Energy Storage with Underground Flywheels
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Update 2013: Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
Via: Scientific American:
William Walker and his wife, Mi Chong, wanted to join what’s seen as a solar revolution in Hawaii. Shortly after buying their Oahu home earlier this year, they plunked down $35,000 for a rooftop photovoltaic system.
The couple looked forward to joining neighbors who had added panels, to cutting their $250 monthly power bills and to knowing they were helping the environment.
Their plans shifted the day after the PV panels went up in early October. The Walkers learned from a neighbor about a major change in the local utility’s solar policy. It led to those 18 panels sitting dormant nearly three months later.
Hawaiian Electric Co., or HECO, in September told solar contractors on Oahu that the island’s solar boom is creating problems. On many circuits, the utility said, there’s so much solar energy that it poses a threat to the system and a safety issue. Studies are needed on whether grid upgrades are necessary. If they are, residents adding solar must foot the bill. And starting immediately, contractors and residents would need permission to connect most small rooftop systems to the grid.
The new HECO policy was included deep in the text of emails the Walkers’ solar contractor had sent, but it escaped their notice before installation. They’re now paying $300 per month on a loan for the panels, plus the $250 electric bill.
“It goes from frustration to outrage,” William Walker, 33, said of his reaction. “We hear the excuses that HECO provides, that they put out there at least as far as the justification. There’s really not a lot of substantiation. My belief is it’s purely profit-motivated, to keep people away from PV and keep them on the grid.”
Saturnalia
December 21st, 2013Tis the season.
Update: Don’t Forget About Krampus
Krampus is a beast-like creature from the folklore of Alpine countries thought to punish children during the Christmas season who had misbehaved, in contrast with Saint Nicholas, who rewards well-behaved ones with gifts. Krampus is said to capture particularly naughty children in his sack and carry them away to his lair.
Krampus is represented as a beast-like creature, generally demonic in appearance. The creature has roots in Germanic folklore; however, its influence has spread far beyond German borders. Traditionally young men dress up as the Krampus in Austria, southern Bavaria, South Tyrol, northern Friuli, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia during the first week of December, particularly on the evening of 5 December (the eve of Saint Nicholas Day on many church calendars), and roam the streets frightening children with rusty chains and bells. Krampus is featured on holiday greeting cards called Krampuskarten. There are many names for Krampus, as well as many regional variations in portrayal and celebration.
[H/T CP]
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Via: Huffington Post:
Most Christmas traditions were stolen directly from the pagans. The Christmas tree, the Yule log, wreaths, candles, the very date itself (which used to fall on the Winter Solstice, long before the Gregorian calendar was adopted), gift giving, holiday cards in verse, wassailing (or just plain getting drunk with holiday cheer), holly, mistletoe, kissing under the mistletoe, the “12 days” of Christmas, eating a feast, even hooking up at the office party — pretty much none of these had anything to do with Christians. All were pagan winter holiday rituals without a shred of connection to the baby Jesus whatsoever, before the church decided to file off the serial numbers and declare such traditions their own. Ironically enough, the biggest Christmas tradition that today’s traditionalist religious leaders tend to decry — Santa Claus — is one of the few that arose directly from Christianity itself (there really was a Saint Nicholas, although all the “magic elf who gives naughty and nice children presents” trappings were added later).
Wikipedia: Saturnalia
U.S. Tests Surveillance Balloons on Mexico Border
December 21st, 2013Via: AP:
The U.S. Border Patrol will evaluate the use of three helium-filled surveillance balloons along the Texas-Mexico border that were originally used by the Department of Defense in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Standing beneath a 52-foot-long tethered balloon on Thursday in Penitas, the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector Chief Rosendo Hinojosa said the blimp-shaped aerostat would help intercept smuggling along the busiest section of the Southwest border.
“This is going to give us a capability we don’t have here,” Hinojosa said.
During a similar demonstration last year, an aerostat tethered 2,500 feet above the ground easily made out the make, model and color of vehicles a couple of miles away. Their infrared cameras are controlled by operators inside computer-filled shipping containers near where the balloons are anchored. Many of the devices were previously used in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide security around bases.
John Milne, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s site director for the project, said the six-month trial will allow the agency to evaluate how the technology can be applied at the border.
The large white balloon displayed Thursday had a 1,300-foot tether, though it was hovering just above its trailer in gusty winds. Milne said its camera can reach five to 10 miles in optimal weather conditions.
Coalition of Leading Scientists Claim H5N1 Ferret Experiments Could Lead to Pandemic
December 21st, 2013Conspiracy theorists!
Via: Independent:
Some of the world’s most eminent scientists have severely criticised the arguments used by some influenza researchers who are trying to make the H5N1 bird-flu virus more dangerous to humans by repeatedly infecting laboratory ferrets.
More than 50 senior scientists from 14 countries, including three Nobel laureates and several fellows of the Royal Society, have written to the European Commission denouncing claims that the ferret experiments are necessary for the development of new flu vaccines and anti-viral drugs.
…
Professor Palu said that Dr Fouchier’s “gain of function” experiments are designed to see what kind of mutations are necessary to enable the bird-flu virus to be transmissible between mammals in order to make better vaccines and drugs, and that these mutations have already been seen in nature.
“It has to be mentioned that, in this specific case, the ‘gain of function’ was used to reproduce what nature already selected (as demonstrated by sequencing of field mutants) with the variation that the aim of the study was to predict/anticipate biological evolution and to provide us with critical information to specify preventive and therapeutic measures,” Professor Palu wrote.
However, the letter from the 56 scientists, including Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist, states that this assertion is wrong and gives a false impression about the medical need to undertake such dangerous research.
“The sole purpose of the experiments in question was to generate H5N1 viruses that could be transmitted between mammals as readily as seasonable flu via respiratory droplets ie coughing and sneezing,” the letter says.
“Despite intensive field surveillance conducted by national health authorities, government agencies, local and regional disease surveillance networks in Southeast Asia and elsewhere over a period of 16 years, there is no evidence that efficiently mammalian transmissible H5N1 viruses have ever emerged naturally in the wild,” it says.
“In summary, the statement that ‘gain of function’ was used to reproduce ‘what nature already selected (as demonstrated by sequencing of field mutants)’ is simply untrue,” it adds.
The signatories of the letter, who include eminent virologists, microbiologists and vaccine experts, as well as Nobel laureates Sir Richard Roberts, Harald zur Hausen and Richard Ernst, warned that there is a serious risk of an accidental release of a pandemic H5N1 virus from laboratories undertaking such research.
“The potential for accidental release of a hazardous pathogen is real, not hypothetical, as demonstrated by an alarming increase in the number of potential and actual release events in laboratories working with high-threat pathogens,” they say.
“We are in a situation where the probabilities of a laboratory accident that leads to global spread of an escaped mutated virus are small but finite, while the impact of global spread could be catastrophic,” they add.
Professor Palu was unavailable for comment.
Majority of Scientific Data Lost Due Within 20 Years
December 21st, 2013Via: Nature World News:
The vast majority of scientific data are evaporating, never to be heard from again.
The reason, based an analysis published in the journal Current Biology, is almost boring – old email addresses and obsolete storage devices are making off with hard-earned research, according to Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, and his colleagues.
In all, Vines and his team estimated that some 80 percent of data are lost within 20 years of the publication of their accompanying study.
“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” Vines said. “Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other datasets are expensive to regenerate.”
Today’s system of leaving data with authors is simply not working, the researcher said, noting that nearly all of the information is going missing. This is problematic if anyone down the line hopes to validate the work done with it or use it for other purposes.
“I don’t think anybody expects to easily obtain data from a 50-year-old paper, but to find that almost all the datasets are gone at 20 years was a bit of a surprise.”
