Britain: Students Can’t Read Analog Clocks, Traditional Clocks, “Could Be a Cause of Unnecessary Stress”
April 29th, 2018Prediction: Students won’t be able to write, so they will need screens to take the exams.
Via: Telegraph:
Schools are removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time, a head teachers’ union has said.
Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock.
Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said youngsters have become accustomed to using digital devices.
“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” he told The Telegraph.
“They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere.”
Mr Trobe, a former headmaster, said that teachers want their students to feel as relaxed as possible during exams. Having a traditional clock in the room could be a cause of unnecessary stress, he added.
Dark Journalist X-Series: Pine Gap
April 28th, 2018Dark Journalist is slowly and carefully weaving many strange threads together with his outstanding X-Series. I usually post this sort of material on the Cryptogon Backchannel, but I’m posting this to the main page because Pine Gap is a standard Cryptogon topic, in terms of the surveillance and communications aspects of the facility that we’re all aware of.
I think there’s more to the place than that.
I’ve had a very weird feeling about Pine Gap since I first started researching the ECHELON system back in the early 1990s. Look into Pine Gap, even a little, and you’re going to encounter the woowoo. Is it PSYOP to distract from the communications mission? Or, is something genuinely weird happening there?
Via: Dark Journalist YouTube Channel:
Two Koreas Agree to End War This Year, Pursue Denuclearization
April 27th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed Friday to finally end a seven-decade war this year, and pursue the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.
…
Kim and Moon embraced after signing the deal during a historic meeting on their militarized border, the first time a North Korean leader set foot on the southern side. They announced plans to replace the 1953 armistice that ended hostilities with a peace treaty by year’s end.
High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads Line Up For University
April 27th, 2018Via: NPR:
Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor’s degree.
“All through my life it was, ‘if you don’t go to college you’re going to end up on the streets,’ ” Morgan said. “Everybody’s so gung-ho about going to college.”
So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he is doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Morgan and several other men and women are dressed in work boots, hard hats and Carhartt’s, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They’re being timed as they wrestle 600-pound I-beams into place.
Seattle is a forest of construction cranes, and employers are clamoring for skilled ironworkers. Morgan, who is 20, is already working on a job site when he isn’t at the Pacific Northwest Ironworkers shop. He gets benefits, including a pension, from employers at the job sites where he is training. And he is earning $28.36 an hour, or more than $50,000 a year, which is almost certain to steadily increase.
As for his friends from high school, “they’re still in college,” he said with a wry grin. “Someday maybe they’ll make as much as me.”
Latin America: ‘Breathtaking Homicidal Violence’
April 26th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Latin America has suffered more than 2.5m murders since the start of this century and is facing an acute public security crisis that demands urgent and innovative solutions, a new report warns.
“The sheer dimensions of homicidal violence are breathtaking,” says the report by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based thinktank focused on security and development issues.
The publication, released on Thursday, paints a bleak portrait of what it calls the world’s most homicidal continent.
Latin America suffers 33% of the world’s homicides despite having only 8% of its population. One-quarter of all global homicides are concentrated in four countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela – all of which are gearing up for presidential elections in which security is a dominant theme.
“The overall trend right now in Latin America is one of increasing homicides and deteriorating security,” said Robert Muggah, one of the report’s authors.
Pig Brains Kept Alive After Decapitation
April 26th, 2018Via: MIT Technology Review:
In a step that could change the definition of death, researchers have restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours.
The feat offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab in stunning detail. But it also inaugurates a bizarre new possibility in life extension, should human brains ever be kept on life support outside the body.
The work was described on March 28 at a meeting held at the National Institutes of Health to investigate ethical issues arising as US neuroscience centers explore the limits of brain science.
During the event, Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry
April 24th, 2018Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Where’s the electricity coming from to charge up those buses?
A lot of it is still coming from coal, but China’s coal use has peaked:
The real game changer is clean energy. The price of solar photovoltaic is at an all-time low, enough to compete against coal for power generation. Additionally, wind power is well positioned to play an even bigger role.
Nevertheless, China is still the single largest coal user in the world, and coal represents more than 60 percent of its energy mix. But in the long run, coal consumption will continue declining – with current policies and the structural transformation of the economy from being a heavy industry-led, export-driven model to one sustained by services and domestic consumption – despite the annual and seasonal fluctuations.
We have no doubt that China’s coal consumption has peaked and coal-fired economic growth has come to an end.
Via: Bloomberg:
Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD Co. showed an early model.
“Everyone was laughing at BYD for making a toy,” recalled Isbrand Ho, the Shenzhen-based company’s managing director in Europe. “And look now. Everyone has one.”
Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport—and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand.
The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla Inc. to Toyota Motor Corp.
“INTERROGATING ZUCKERBERG” – A Bad Lip Reading
April 24th, 2018Via: Bad Lip Reading:
Scientists Plan Huge European AI Hub to Compete with U.S.
April 24th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe.
The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US.
Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research.
World Wine Output Falls to 60-Year Low
April 24th, 2018DOOOOOOOM!
Via: Reuters:
Global wine output fell to its lowest level in 60 years in 2017 due to poor weather conditions in the European Union that slashed production in the bloc, international wine organization OIV said.
Wine production totaled 250 million hectoliters last year, down 8.6 percent from 2016, data from the Paris-based International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) released on Tuesday showed.
It is the lowest level since 1957, when it had fallen to 173.8 million hectoliters, the OIV told Reuters.
