EPA Nukes Radiation Rules
July 17th, 2013Via: EnviroReporter:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s draft EPA “Protective Action Guide” (PAG), posted on its website April 15, allows hundreds to thousands of times more radiation in disasters than the agency had previously allowed. Americans have until Monday, July 15 to comment* even though the EPA made the new PAG effective immediately.
According to EPA’s own data, the new PAGs will result in exponentially higher radiation-induced fatal cancers than the current goal of one in ten thousand to one in a million Americans.
In various exposure scenarios listed in the report, depending on which radionuclide, the resultant cancer rates would claim several out of ten, one in eight, one in six – even as low as one in 1.7.
The EPA PAG’s justification for these astronomically higher numbers is that during a disaster like a nuclear meltdown, a terrorist ‘dirty bomb,’ or a nuclear detonation, all limits currently for radiation exposure in air, water, food and soil are targets for revision.
“These PAGs are basically admitting that contamination levels could be so high from such an event that they may not be able to be cleaned up to existing standards such as the drinking water contamination levels,” says Maryland-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “Thus, EPA would permit unacceptably high radiation risks at each of the stages after nuclear disaster without even suggesting any steps to prevent or minimize the potential disasters.”
Research Credit: neverwas
Microsoft Trying to Create System That Predicts Your Physical Location in the Future
July 17th, 2013Via: Fast Company:
Would you like to know how crowded your drive to the beach will be in three weeks? Or where your ex will be on a Friday night next month so that you can avoid him?
Adam Sadilek, formerly of Microsoft, now a researcher at Google, and John Krumm, a principal researcher at Microsoft, were inspired by the question of predicting where people would be in the future and even led off with the query, “Where are you going to be 285 days from now at 2PM?” in their their paper, Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility.
“At first glance,” the researchers told us, “it sounds like a very difficult problem.”
Japan’s Internet Cafes: Home for the Underemployed
July 16th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Over the past 10 years, Internet cafes in Japan have become hotels for the underemployed. Many are equipped with tiny private booths, showers, and laundry service and offer reasonably priced packages for overnight users. The monthly rate at one cafe is 1,920 yen ($19) a day. In 2007, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 60,900 people spent a night at an Internet cafe, and about 5,400 were living in them full time.
The Case for Abolishing the DHS
July 16th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.
Corpus Christi Judge Found Dead from Gunshot Wound
July 16th, 2013Update: Suicide
Via: AP:
South Texas authorities have confirmed that a state district judge found dead in his chambers took his own life.
The Nueces County sheriff’s Office said Tuesday it’s not clear why Judge Tom Greenwell shot himself but that a handwritten will was found nearby.
Greenwell was supposed to be on vacation at the time his body was found Monday by a cleaning crew. His body was discovered after the courthouse in Corpus Christi had closed for the day.
Authorities say he had come to the courthouse to do some work and made a few calls prior to his death.
—
Via: KIIITV:
The body of District Judge Tom Greenwell was discovered Monday evening in his chambers at the Nueces County Courthouse. He suffered what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Greenwell took over the 319th district court in 2001, and became the first Republican in Nueces County to win a county-wide office. He was 57 years old.
The Strange Story of Michael Boatwright
July 16th, 2013Via: My Desert:
The family of Michael Boatwright — who was found unconscious in a Palm Springs motel room four months ago and woke up speaking only Swedish — heard about his whereabouts for the first time Monday.
The Desert Sun located a sister of the 61-year-old who has spent more than 19 weeks at Desert Regional Medical Center insisting he is named Johan Ek and has no memory of his life as Boatwright. Despite the Florida identification found in his wallet, he has been speaking only in Swedish and says he does not understand English.
…
The U.S. Navy veteran — who was raised in Florida and often worked on the beaches near his parents’ Miami home — first visited Sweden in 1981, according to multiple friends.
…
Throughout the 1980s, Boatwright lived on a boat called “Honey Bea” off Rhode Island in 1984, according to the postmarks of letters he sent to Espling. He also spent time in Houston, Mexico and Newport, in addition to stints with his parents in Miami, she said.
Boatwright left Sweden for good around 2003, according to several reports.
“No one had heard from him in over 15 years,” Aftonbladet quotes friend Olle Sahlin as saying.
Boatwright was likely a 3D graphic designer and had taught English in both Japan for 10 years and China for four years, according to online profiles.
Then Boatwright flew to Palm Springs from Hong Kong on Feb. 24, the day his Chinese visa expired. He was found unconscious four days later.
‘Robots to Revolutionize Farming’
July 16th, 2013Via: AP / Time:
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.
Water Requirements for NSA’s New Facility in Utah
July 15th, 2013“A significant benefit to the city” haha
Via: KSL:
More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool.
Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the usage could be closer to half that amount.
“Our planning is anywhere from 1,000 acre-feet per year to 2,000 acre-feet per year, and that represents – if it was 1,000 acre-feet per year, that would be about 1 percent of our total demand,” said Jordan Valley River Conservancy District assistant general manager and chief engineer Alan Packard.
Packard said that amount of water – while large – could be easily accommodated and was on par with industrial operations such as soft drink bottling plants.
“At build-out, it will be several years before the data center uses that amount of water, so we have the opportunity to prepare for that through both conservation and developing new supplies,” Packard said.
Packard said the district was actively working to develop the new supplies – including those at the Southwest Groundwater Project, the Central Utah Project and additional groundwater development in the Salt Lake valley.
“It’s no more than we were already planning,” Packard said. “Our normal activities are designed to accommodate this kind of demand on our system.”
Bluffdale City manager Mark Reid described the NSA project and the new water and electrical infrastructure around it as a significant benefit to the city.
In Iraq, the Bomb-Detecting Device That Didn’t Work, Except to Make Money
July 15th, 2013Step right up, step right up, step right up,
Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore
That’s right, you too can be the proud owner
Of the quality goes in before the name goes on
One-tenth of a dollar, one-tenth of a dollar, we got service after sales
You need perfume? we got perfume, how ’bout an engagement ring?
Something for the little lady, something for the little lady,
Something for the little lady, hmm
Three for a dollar
We got a year-end clearance, we got a white sale
And a smoke-damaged furniture, you can drive it away today
Act now, act now, and receive as our gift, our gift to you
They come in all colors, one size fits all
No muss, no fuss, no spills, you’re tired of kitchen drudgery
Everything must go, going out of business, going out of business
Going out of business sale
Fifty percent off original retail price, skip the middle man
Don’t settle for less
How do we do it? how do we do it? volume, volume, turn up the volume
Now you’ve heard it advertised, don’t hesitate
Don’t be caught with your drawers down,
Don’t be caught with your drawers down
You can step right up, step right up
—Tom Waits, “Step Right Up”
I’m going through my roughly annual research binge on looking for trading systems—that actually work. I’m looking at ES this time. While I have no good news to report on the blackbox development front, the websites and books I’ve been reading about trading the ES remind me a lot of the story below about the expensive fake bomb detector.
With the ES, there is an entire economy the revolves around selling TOTALLY USELESS custom indicators, books, access to private forums, video training courses, etc. I’ve been at this for so long that I can just read the description of what’s on offer and it serves as a bit of comic relief for the grinding reality of what that backtester reports as more data is added…
Anyway, “Step right up!”
Via: Bloomberg:
What McCormick failed to mention was that the device was not, strictly speaking, his own invention, or that he knew very well it wouldn’t detect explosives. The ADE 651 was modeled on a novelty trinket conceived decades before by a former used-car salesman from South Carolina, which was purported to detect golf balls. It wasn’t even good at that.
By the time police in Britain raided his offices nine days later, McCormick had spent three years selling the Iraqi government these devices, sometimes for more than $30,000 each. The best estimates suggest that the authorities in Baghdad bought more than 6,000 useless bomb detectors, at a cost of at least $38 million.
Technical Feasibility of Decrypting HTTPS by Replacing the Computer’s Pseudorandom Number Generator
July 15th, 2013Via: Stack Exchange:
Intel has an on-chip RdRand function which supposedly bypasses the normally used entropy pool for /dev/urandom and directly injects output. Now rumors are going on that Intel works together with the NSA… and knowing that PRNGs are important for cryptography is enough to get this news spreading.
I personally don’t believe this is true, so this is entirely hypothetical: Let’s assume that indeed RdRand does what news says it does and that it indeed outputs randomness into a place where applications and libraries would look for cryptographically secure randomness.
How feasible is it that the chip’s manufacturer can predict the output of this PRNG when it passed tests from the people applying the use of this RdRand instruction in kernels?
If the chip’s manufacturer can predict the output of the PRNG to some extent, how feasible is it that they can decrypt any https traffic between two systems using their chips? (Or anything else requiring randomness, https is only an example.)
My reason for asking: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm
As said, I don’t believe everything written here, but I find it very interesting to discuss the possibility technically.
