How the Pentagon Used Video Games to Spy on Users Worldwide
April 11th, 2013Via: Democracy Now:
Research Credit: ottilie
U.S. Rice Imports Contain Harmful Levels of Lead Paper Withdrawn by Author
April 11th, 2013
Via: Natural News:
But the authors themselves discovered worrisome discrepancies when they sent the samples to a third-party lab for verification. According to an email acquired by Natural News, the results from this third-party lab showed all sub-ppm levels of lead, not the much higher numbers the Tongesayi team had reported.
Why the Tongesayi team did not conduct third-party lab verification before announcing the results has not been explained.
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Via: BBC:
Analysis of commercially available rice imported into the US has revealed it contains levels of lead far higher than regulations suggest are safe.
Some samples exceeded the “provisional total tolerable intake” (PTTI) set by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by a factor of 120.
The report at the American Chemical Society Meeting adds to the already well-known issue of arsenic in rice.
The FDA told the BBC it would review the research.
Lead is known to be harmful to many organs and the central nervous system.
It is a particular risk for young children, who suffer significant developmental problems if exposed to elevated lead levels.
Because rice is grown in heavily irrigated conditions, it is more susceptible than other staple crops to environmental pollutants in irrigation water.
…
Rice from China and Taiwan had the highest lead levels, but Dr Tongesayi stressed that all of the samples significantly exceeded the PTTIs.
Dr Tongesayi has also worked on quantifying arsenic contamination – and is in effect working his way through the heavy metals one by one to determine their prevalence.
The problem, he said, is the range of agricultural practices around the world.
“If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent,” he explained.
“Research has been done in those countries, and concerns have been raised because of those practices, but it’s still ongoing.”
Dr Tongesayi also said that the increasing practice of sending electronic waste to developing countries – and the pollution it leads to – exacerbates the problem.
PC Shipments Post the Steepest Decline Ever in a Single Quarter
April 11th, 2013Via: IDC:
Worldwide PC shipments totaled 76.3 million units in the first quarter of 2013 (1Q13), down -13.9% compared to the same quarter in 2012 and worse than the forecast decline of -7.7%, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. The extent of the year-on-year contraction marked the worst quarter since IDC began tracking the PC market quarterly in 1994. The results also marked the fourth consecutive quarter of year-on-year shipment declines.
Despite some mild improvement in the economic environment and some new PC models offering Windows 8, PC shipments were down significantly across all regions compared to a year ago. Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market while tablets and smartphones continue to divert consumer spending. PC industry efforts to offer touch capabilities and ultraslim systems have been hampered by traditional barriers of price and component supply, as well as a weak reception for Windows 8. The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy, and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly.
Boston Dynamics: PETMAN
April 11th, 2013They expect us to believe that this is just a sort of moving mannequin to test military clothing.
Have a nice day.
Via: Boston Dynamics / YouTube:
The PETMAN robot was developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the DoD CBD program. It is used to test the performance of protective clothing designed for hazardous environments.
U.S. Killer Robot Operators ‘Weren’t Always Certain Who They Were Killing’
April 11th, 2013Via: McClatchy:
Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.
The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.
“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.
The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”
…
The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”
IRS: We Can Read Emails Without Warrant
April 11th, 2013Via: The Hill:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.
In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.
CourseSmart E-Textbooks Monitor Student Reading Habits
April 10th, 2013In technofascist America, E-books read you.
Via: New York Times:
Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.
They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.
“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.
The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
…
CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.
Manager of a South Pacific Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong Franchise Says That Kids Should Consider Learning Mandarin
April 10th, 2013Via: New Zealand Herald:
Prime Minister John Key wants more students to consider learning Mandarin.
And a Herald-DigiPoll survey shows a surprisingly high number of people, more than 25 per cent, would like Maori and a foreign language to be compulsory at school – although the majority prefer no compulsion.
The Prime Minister is visiting China this week.
He said the argument against teaching Mandarin was that there were not enough teachers “but I think that’s not a very strong argument”.
There were 250,000 New Zealanders of Chinese ethnicity, a great many of whom spoke Chinese and many of them would teach on a part-time basis, he said.
Any student going through school today, faced with the choice of learning Mandarin or another language, would be well served to think about learning Mandarin.
When he went to the Lantern Festival in Auckland, the Asia Foundation executive director John McKinnon had given the entire speech in Mandarin “and boy did he have the audience engaging”.
Band-Aid on Band-Aid: All 104 Nuclear Reactors Currently Operational in the U.S. Have Irreparable Safety Issues
April 10th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
All 104 nuclear reactors currently operational in the US have irreparable safety issues and should be taken out of commission and replaced, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko said.
The comments, made during the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, are “highly unusual” for a current or former member of the safety commission, according to The New York Times. Asked why he had suddenly decided to make the remarks, Jaczko implied that he had only recently arrived at these conclusions following the serious aftermath of Japan’s tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daichii nuclear facility.
“I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”
Laser Scans Objects in 3D from Half a Mile Away
April 10th, 2013Via: Engadget:
3D scanning at a range of 0.62 miles? It just became possible, thanks to a laser camera developed by physicists at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. You can pretty much see how it works from the images above — laser beams are bounced off the target and the duration of their return journey is measured precisely enough to detect millimeter depth changes even at extreme distances.
