U.S. Budget Deficit Will Grow to $1 Trillion in 2020
August 22nd, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. budget deficit is growing faster than expected and President Donald Trump’s trade war is weighing on the economy, according to a new Congressional Budget Office forecast that highlights key challenges ahead of the 2020 elections.
The shortfall is set to widen to $1 trillion by fiscal year 2020, two years earlier than previously estimated, according to the non-partisan group’s annual budget outlook released Wednesday in Washington. That’s up from an estimated $960 billion in the 12 months that ends Sept. 30. The CBO said in January saw a gap of $890 billion next year and didn’t see it topping $1 trillion until 2022.
How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World
August 21st, 2019I’ve been seeing the bales of plastic piling up at my local dump and I thought, “Why not make building materials out of all this stuff?”
It turns out that there are some small moves being made in that direction. Here are a few examples:
Of course, these efforts are noise level in the scheme of things.
Plastic pollution is a grim and difficult problem which is made worse by the industry and crooked politicians.
Via: The Intercept:
The growing output of new cheap plastic further undermines the industry’s own argument that recycling can resolve the waste crisis. It’s already impossible for most recycled plastic to compete with “virgin” plastic in the marketplace. With the exception of bottles made of PET (No. 1) and HDPE (No. 2), the rest of the waste is essentially worthless. Around 30 percent of both types of plastic bottles were sold for recycling in 2017, though some of those may have wound up being landfilled or incinerated. The recent fossil fuel boom makes it even cheaper to make new plastic and thus, even more difficult to sell the recycled product. This, in turn, makes the plastics companies’ push for recycling that much more implausible — and their battle to kill efforts to limit plastics production even more desperate.
Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
August 21st, 2019
Via: Vice:
Every year, millions of students sit down for standardized tests that carry weighty consequences. National tests like the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) serve as gatekeepers to higher education, while state assessments can determine everything from whether a student will graduate to federal funding for schools and teacher pay.
Traditional paper-and-pencil tests have given way to computerized versions. And increasingly, the grading process—even for written essays—has also been turned over to algorithms.
Natural language processing (NLP) artificial intelligence systems—often called automated essay scoring engines—are now either the primary or secondary grader on standardized tests in at least 21 states, according to a survey conducted by Motherboard. Three states didn’t respond to the questions.
Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students’ essays—it varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work.
But research from psychometricians—professionals who study testing—and AI experts, as well as documents obtained by Motherboard, show that these tools are susceptible to a flaw that has repeatedly sprung up in the AI world: bias against certain demographic groups. And as a Motherboard experiment demonstrated, some of the systems can be fooled by nonsense essays with sophisticated vocabulary.
Essay-scoring engines don’t actually analyze the quality of writing. They’re trained on sets of hundreds of example essays to recognize patterns that correlate with higher or lower human-assigned grades. They then predict what score a human would assign an essay, based on those patterns.
U.S. Special Forces Training Exercises Across North Carolina
August 21st, 2019Via: The Charlotte Observer:
A series of Special Forces military training exercises — including gunfire with blanks — is being staged across 21 North Carolina counties starting Aug. 30, and the Army is telling the public not to be alarmed at the suspicious-looking activity.
Known as Robin Sage training, the unconventional warfare exercises can be likened to live-action role playing in the extreme, with hostile engagement playing out between Special Forces students, volunteer civilians and soldiers out of Fort Bragg. It continues through Sept. 12, said a press release.
Heavily populated counties like Wake, Cumberland and Union counties are among training sites, according to the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.
The students will match wits with more seasoned soldiers, who will “act as realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters,” officials said in a release.
Japan Believes North Korea Capable of Building Nuclear Weapons Small Enough to Fit on Missiles
August 21st, 2019Via: Guardian:
Japan’s government will reportedly state that North Korea is capable of miniaturising nuclear warheads in a forthcoming defence report, it has emerged.
Tokyo will upgrade its estimate of the regime’s nuclear capability, having said last year only that the technical feat was a possibility, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said on Wednesday, without citing sources.
The defence report will maintain Japan’s contention that North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes pose a “serious and imminent threat” to its security after recent meetings between Donald Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, failed to make progress on denuclearisation.
Walmart Sues Tesla Over Solar-Panel Rooftop Fires
August 20th, 2019
Via: MarketWatch:
Walmart Inc. is suing Tesla Inc. over a spate of roof fires at several Walmart stores that the retailer alleges were caused by Tesla solar panels.
Walmart is suing for breach of contract and alleges “gross negligence” on Tesla’s part for the fires, which it says all started on the rooftops of several stores in California, Maryland and Ohio that had Tesla solar panels.
“To state the obvious, properly designed, installed, inspected, and maintained solar systems do not spontaneously combust, and the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one unmistakable sign of negligence by Tesla,” according to the complaint filed on Tuesday.
CEO Compensation Increases vs. Average Worker Compensation Increases
August 20th, 2019Via: CBS:
The chasm between what the country’s corporate leaders and their workers earn is widening to Grand Canyon-like proportions, according to new research that shows CEO compensation surged 940% between 1978 to 2018 while the average worker saw a meager 12% pay hike over the same 40-year period.
…
Last year chief execs got $278 for every $1 a typical worker earned, according to Mishel and Wolfe. Back in 1965, top corporate chiefs earned $20 for every dollar a typical worker earned, with that ratio rising to 58-to-1 by 1989. The gap widened dramatically in the following decades, they noted, due to a shift in the 1990s and 2000s to compensate CEOs mostly with stock options, restricted shares and other incentive-based pay fueled a spike in their earnings.
Collapse in Los Angeles
August 19th, 2019China: Researchers to Grow Replacement Organs for Humans in Genetically Modified Animals
August 18th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Recently, a Chinese startup named Qihan Biotech raised $20 million to develop replacement organs for humans. The smallish deal would hardly have rated a headline, except for the fact that the Hangzhou-based gene-editing company is aiming to grow those organs in pigs and other animals. If successful, such transplants could well transform medicine. And, thanks to a unique confluence of need, money, timing and culture, China is poised to lead the way in developing them.
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Xenotransplantation has since become a recognized branch of medicine. Heart valves from pigs, for instance, are commonly used to replace faulty human ones.
However, transplanting a complete, functioning animal organ such as a heart presents far more formidable barriers, the most crucial being the need to suppress or fool the human body’s immune response. China’s scientists have become world leaders in editing the pig genome to do just that. The hope is to produce organs that can help people with a range of illnesses, from heart disease to blindness.
Forensic Pathologist, Dr. Cyril Wecht, On Epstein “Suicide”
August 17th, 2019Via: Fox:
