China Sends Warplanes to Newly Declared Air Zone
November 28th, 2013Via: BBC:
China has sent warplanes to its newly declared air defence zone in the East China Sea, state media reports.
The vast zone, announced last week, covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
China has said all planes transiting the zone must file flight plans and identify themselves, or face “defensive emergency measures”.
But Japan, South Korea and the US have all since flown military aircraft through the area.
The new dispute in an already tense region has raised concerns it could escalate into an unplanned military incident.
Renault Will Remotely Lock Down Electric Cars
November 28th, 2013Via: FSFE:
For a long time, cars were a symbol of freedom and independence. No longer. In its Zoe electric car, car maker Renault apparently has the ability to remotely prevent the battery from charging. And that’s more chilling than it sounds.
When you buy a Renault Zoe, the battery isn’t included. Instead, you sign a rental contract for the battery with the car maker. In a Zoe owner’s forum, user Franko30 reports that the contract contains a clause giving Renault the right to prevent your battery from charging at the end of the rental period. According to an article in Der Spiegel, the company may also do this when you fall behind on paying the rent for the battery.
This means that Renault has some way of remotely controlling the battery charging process. According to the Spiegel article, the Zoe (and most or all other electric cars) collect reams of data on how you use them, and send this data off to the manufacturer without your knowledge. This data tells the company where you are going, when, and how fast, where you charge the battery, and many other things besides. We already knew that Tesla was doing this with its cars since the company’s very public spat with a journalist who reviewed one of their cars for the New York Times. Seeing the same thing in a mass market manufacturer like Renault makes clear just how dangerous this trend is.
This sort of thing fits well into the dystopian picture which Cory Doctorow paints in his 2011 talk “The coming war on General Computation” (which you really must watch, if you haven’t already), where he argues that “we don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in”. The question then becomes who is in control of this computer: You, the manufacturer, or someone else?
“Ninja Polymers” vs. MRSA?
November 28th, 2013Via: IBM:
In earlier chip development research, IBM researchers identified specific materials that, when chained together, produced an electrostatic charge that allows microscopic etching on a wafer to be done at a much smaller scale.
This newfound knowledge that characterization of materials could be manipulated at the atomic level to control their movement inspired the team to see what else they could do with these new kinds of polymer structures. They started with MRSA.
The outcome of that experiment was the creation of what are now playfully known as “ninja polymers” – sticky nanostructures that move quickly to target infected cells in the body, destroy the harmful content inside, and then disappear by biodegrading without causing damaging side effects or accumulating in the organs.
As a bonus, all of this occurs without damaging healthy cells in the area.
“The mechanism through which [these polymers] fight bacteria is very different from the way an antibiotic works,” explains Jim Hedrick, a polymer chemist in IBM Research. “They try to mimic what the immune system does: the polymer attaches to the bacteria’s membrane and then facilitates destabilization of the membrane. It falls apart, everything falls out and there’s little opportunity for it to develop resistance to these polymers.”
What Happens When Big Data Meets Human Resources?
November 27th, 2013In the mid 1990s, I worked for FedEx and even back then, every minute of the work day had to be accounted for by noting activity codes and times on our timesheets. At random intervals, the bean counters would light fires under our managers’ tails and the managers would get on our cases about, “Productivity.” In short, all the couriers would be brought before their managers and shown a printout of their activity. Faster, faster, faster. Work smarter not harder. And, oh yeah, safety first. *pfft* Yeah, right.
So what would happen is that newbies would actually try to go faster than they already were, they would cause vehicle accidents, sort packages to the wrong containers and get injured; and then the pressure on the managers from above would stop… for a while. This is how they would find the new maximum setting every several months. Anyone with half a clue, that is, those who had been around for a few years, would nod their heads politely, sign the paper and silently think things like, “Blow it out your ass.”
The logic is like this: Keep increasing the pressure on a steam calliope—with the dial already well into the red—until it starts throwing pipes and decapitating onlookers. Now you know how much pressure it can really take.
As for the people who get killed or injured in the process… You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Safety first!
Anyway, so that was the good old days.
Via: The Atlantic:
Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E?mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior. As technologies that analyze language become better and cheaper, companies will be able to run programs that automatically trawl through the e-mail traffic of their workforce, looking for phrases or communication patterns that can be statistically associated with various measures of success or failure in particular roles.
Human Portable Tripwire System
November 27th, 2013Via: Fast Company:
Location-based services are great for things like discounts at nearby restaurants, or a heads-up for traffic, or tracking a morning jog. But what if your phone could take action on your behalf in the event you drove past (say) a rogue nuclear weapon?
Last month on the U.S. government’s Federal Business Opportunities page, a Request for Information was posted for what’s being referred to as a Human Portable Tripwire system. The request serves as a sort of tentative inquiry–it’s not so much a positive indication that the federal government will move ahead with a project as it is an opportunity for private citizens to mentally prepare themselves to become de facto bomb sniffers.
Theoretically, the Human Portable Tripwire system would involve a wearable device that would passively scan for radiation and relay any discoveries of radioactive material back to Homeland Security via satellite phone or Internet connection. As the project calls for a passive system, it would function much like Near-Field Communication (NFC) or any other location-aware tech–once you turn it on, you don’t have to do anything else.
Italy’s Senate Expels Ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi
November 27th, 2013Via: BBC:
The Italian Senate has voted to expel ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from parliament with immediate effect over his conviction for tax fraud.
Berlusconi, who has dominated politics for 20 years, could now face arrest over other criminal cases as he has lost his immunity from prosecution.
Atmospheric Electricity Powers Small Motor
November 27th, 2013Update: Atmospheric Powered Motor 2.0
Via: LaserHacker:
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Via: Laser Hacker:
Narcotrafficking, Murder and Toxic Soup
November 27th, 2013Via: MCAS El Toro Superfund Site:
As was his custom when expecting a visitor, Marine Colonel Jim Sabow placed his television on mute, arose from his easy chair, and left his house through the patio door. He walked the length of the patio, called the dogs in the back yard and enclosed them in the garage. Whether he opened the front door to greet his visitor or went out the back door onto his patio is not known, but we do know that he had only moments to live.
Colonel Sabow, decorated Vietnam fighter with 221 combat missions, met his death at the hands of others on January 22, 1991. The unexpected blow to the right side of the head was violent, resulting in unconsciousness. Occipital skull fragments from the shotgun blast penetrated into the back of his brain. He was near death due to the massive brainstem trauma in which agonal hyperventilation characteristic of this type of injury occurs. Sabow was aspirating blood from a wound in his pharynx that resulted from a basilar skull fracture. In fact, the tracheae, bronchi, bronchioles and alveoli were filled with blood, doubling the weight of the right lung. There was no mention of the depressed skull fracture from the violent blow to his head in the autopsy report.
Government investigation reports made no mention of the intrusion of three men who entered the crime scene with government credentials, forcing Naval Investigative Service (NIS) agents and Marine MPs to leave the crime scene and wait across the street until ordered to return. A Marine MP told a documentary film maker in 2013 that the patio chair was placed over the body by an NIS agent (now a senior executive in the NCIS) to support the official report of suicide as the manner of death. Another Marine MP at the crime scene who was a reservist called to active duty in 1991 and a full time Detroit police officer could not be located because the Marine Corps denied the availability of the duty roster, which would identify the man. The duty rosters are maintained on file at Quantico but the El Toro duty roster for MPs from January 1991 was not available, even when a FOIA was submitted to the Corps.
A doctored autopsy photograph was submitted to Congress in 2004 and a sworn affidavit to the NIS by a renowned pathologist who reported homicide and crime scene tampering was unexceptionally withdrawn. Michael Jacobs, the former Supervisor, Homicide Trials Division, Orange County District Attorney’s Office, reported that, “Colonel Sabow’s death could not have been a suicide but had to have been a homicide inflicted by the hands of another.” Gene Wheaton, a former military investigator and expert in homicide investigations, told Dr. David Sabow, the younger brother of Colonel Sabow, that a military assassination team within the DoD/Pentagon exists to murder military officers who are a threat to blow the whistle on covert operations. The evidence strongly supports that Colonel Sabow was murdered by this assassination team. There’s every reason to believe that this assassination team remains in place today.
Research Credit: Dr. David Sabow, Brother of Col. James Sabow
U.S. B-52s Flew Through China’s Newly Declared Air Defense Zone
November 26th, 2013Update: Japanese Airliners Also Ignoring Chinese Directive
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Via: CNN:
Two U.S. military aircraft flew into China’s newly claimed and challenged air defense zone over the East China Sea, a U.S. official said, an action that could inflame tensions between the world powers.
The large U.S. Air Force B-52 planes — which were not armed because they were on a training mission — set off Monday from Guam and returned there without incident. The mission lasted for several hours, and the aircraft were in China’s newly declared air zone for about an hour, according to the U.S. official.
The planes’ pilots did not identify themselves upon entering the disputed airspace, as China would have wanted, according to the official.
Quantum Light Harvesting Hints At Entirely New Form of Computing
November 26th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Light harvesting in plants and bacteria cannot be properly explained by classical processes or by quantum ones. Now complexity theorists say the answer is a delicate interplay of both, an idea that could transform computation.
Physicists have long known that plants and bacteria convert light into chemical energy in a way that is hugely efficient. But only in recent years have they discovered that the molecular machines behind this process rely on quantum mechanics to do the job.
That’s a big surprise because of the temperatures involved. Quantum states are highly fragile—sneeze and they disappear in a puff of smoke. Physicists can maintain these states for some time in carefully controlled environments at low temperature but nobody can explain how it can be possible in the warm wet environments inside living things.
Today, Gabor Vattay at Eotvos University in Budapest and Stuart Kauffman at the University of Vermont in Burlington have the answer. They say the processes behind light harvesting are a special blend of the quantum and the classical. And that this delicate mix represents an entirely new form of computing that nature might exploit in other systems too.
