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Submission + - NYPD to Identify 'Deranged' Gunmen through Internet Chatter

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Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Michael Wilson writes in the NY Times that top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department are looking for ways to target “apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters" using techniques similar to those being used to spot terrorists’ chatter online. The techniques would include "cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,” says Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.” There are also plans to send officers to Newtown and to scenes of other mass shootings to collect information says the department’s chief spokesman Paul. J. Browne adding that potential tactics include creating an algorithm that would search online “for terms used by active shooters in the past that may be an indicator of future intentions.” The NYPD’s counter-terrorism division released a report last year, "Active Shooter," after studying 202 mass shooting incidents (PDF). “So, we think this is another logical step,” says Kelly."

Comment Corrected Story (Score 1) 1

Jamal Khan reports that the United Nations has suspended its polio vaccination drive in Pakistan after eight people involved in the effort were shot dead in the past two days dealing a grave blow to the drive to bring an end to the scourge of polio in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the crippling disease still survives. Militants accuse health workers of acting as spies for the US and claim the vaccine makes children sterile and Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the US stops drone strikes in the country. Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest. The Pakistani government has condemned the attacks against aid workers, saying they deprive Pakistan's most vulnerable populations - specifically children - of basic life-saving health interventions. Polio usually infects children living in unsanitary conditions, attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze. A total of 56 polio cases have been reported in Pakistan during 2012, down from 190 the previous year, according to the U.N. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. The new campaign aimed to give oral polio prevention drops to 34 million children under the age of five and clerics and tribal elders were recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers. "This is undoubtedly a tragic setback," says UNICEF spokeswoman Sarah Crowe, "but the campaign to eradicate polio will and must continue."
Medicine

Submission + - Polio Eradication Program Suspended in Pakistan After Aid Workers Shot 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jamal Khan reports that the United Nations has suspended its polio vaccination drive in Pakistan after eight people involved in the effort were shot dead in the past two days dealing a grave blow to the drive to bring an end to the scourge of polio in Pakistan, one of only three countries where the crippling disease still survives. Militants accuse health workers of acting as spies for the US and claim the vaccine makes children sterile and Taliban commanders in the troubled northwest tribal region have also said vaccinations can't go forward until the US stops drone strikes in the country. Insurgent opposition to the campaign grew last year after it was revealed that a Pakistani doctor ran a fake polio vaccination program to help the CIA track down and kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in the town of Abbottabad in the country's northwest. The Pakistani government has condemned the attacks against aid workers, saying they deprive Pakistan's most vulnerable populations — specifically children — of basic life-saving health interventions. Polio usually infects children living in unsanitary conditions, attacks the nerves and can kill or paralyze. A total of 56 polio cases have been reported in Pakistan during 2012, down from 190 the previous year, according to the U.N. Most of the new cases in Pakistan are in the northwest, where the presence of militants makes it difficult to reach children. The new campaign aimed to give oral polio prevention drops to 34 million children under the age of five. Clerics and tribal elders were recruited to support polio vaccinations in an attempt to open up areas previously inaccessible to health workers."
The Military

Submission + - DARPA's Headless Robotic Mule Takes Load Off Warfighters

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Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "If robots are ever really going to carry the equipment of US soldiers and Marines, they're going to have to act more like pack animals. Now Terri Moon Cronk reports that DARPA’s semiautonomous Legged Squad Support System — also known as the LS3 — will carry 400 pounds of warfighter equipment and walk 20 miles at a time also acting as an auxiliary power source for troops to recharge batteries for radios and handheld devices while on patrol. “It’s about solving a real military problem: the incredible load of equipment our soldiers and Marines carry in Afghanistan today,” says Army Lt. Col. Joseph K. Hitt, program manager in DARPA’s tactical technology office. The robot’s sensors allow it to navigate around obstacles at night, maneuver in urban settings, respond to voice commands, and gauge distances and directions. The LS3 can also distinguish different forms of vegetation when walking through fields and around bushes and avoid logs and rocks with intelligent foot placement on rough terrain (video). The robot's squad leader can issue 10 basic commands to tell the robot to do such things as stop, sit, follow him tightly, follow him on the corridor, and go to specific coordinates. Darpa figures that it's illogical to make a soldier hand over her rucksack to a robotic beast of burden if she's then got to be preoccupied with "joysticks and computer screens" to guide it forward. "That adds to the cognitive burden of the soldier," Hitt explains. "We need to make sure that the robot also is smart, like a trained animal.""
Technology

Submission + - Using Technology To Make Guns Safer

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Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Farhad Manjoo writes that there are a number of technologies that gunmakers could add to their products that might prevent hundreds or thousands of deaths per year. One area of active research is known as the “smart gun”—a trigger-identification system that prevents a gun from being fired by anyone other than its authorized user with researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology creating a working prototype of a gun that determines whether or not to fire based on a user’s “grip pattern." Gunmakers been slow to add other safety technologies as well, including indicators that show whether a gun is loaded and “magazine safeties” that prevent weapons from being fired when their ammunition magazine is removed (PDF) that could save 400 lives a year. So why aren’t gunmakers making safer guns? Because guns are exempt from most of the consumer safety laws that have improved the rest of American life because the Consumer Product Safety Commission, charged with looking over thousands of different kinds of products, is explicitly prohibited from regulating firearms. In 2005, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which immunizes gun makers against lawsuits resulting from “misuse” of the products. If they can’t be sued and can’t be regulated, gunmakers have no incentive to make smarter guns. A week before the Newtown massacre, Joseph Loughrey went to a gun store to sell some of his weapons. Loughrey had unloaded the magazine on his handgun, but he didn’t know there was a still a round in the chamber. When he set the gun down on the center console of his truck, it went off, killing his 7-year-old son. " A magazine safety would have prevented Loughrey’s gun from going off after he’d removed the magazine. A smart trigger would have prevented the gun from firing without Loughrey’s hand being on the grip," writes Manjoo. "But Loughrey’s gun lacked both those safety devices, because nobody has ever forced gun makers to live up to the same basic safety requirements as other American companies.""
Science

Submission + - Let the White Tiger Go Extinct

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Many people are under the impression that the white tiger is a variety of Siberian tiger, camouflaged for a snowy climate. Others applaud zoos with white tigers for supporting conservation of white tigers while lamenting a lag in reintroduction efforts. But Jackson Landers writes that almost no one knows that white tigers are not a subspecies at all but rather the result of a mutant gene that has been artificially selected through massive inbreeding to produce oddball animals for human entertainment. "Many of the venues that display white tigers have a long history of shading the truth about their mutants," writes Landers. "The Cincinnati Zoo, an otherwise respectable institution, labels their white tigers as a “species at risk!” Nowhere on the zoo’s website or at its tiger enclosures does it point out that this species at risk is in fact an ecologically useless hybrid of Bengal and Siberian strains, inbred at the zoo’s own facility for big money." One of the Cincinnati Zoo’s biggest sales was to the illusionists Siegfried and Roy who bought three white tigers from the zoo in the early 1980s and quickly set up their own breeding program referring to the cats as “royal white tigers” and giving the public the impression that this was an endangered species that they were helping to protect. "Humanity has a collective responsibility to care for the two-headed calves and white tigers that we create for our own entertainment, but do we really need to be creating more of the genetic disasters that pull resources away from truly endangered species," concludes Landers. "We can choose a future in which white tigers disappear into memory and hopefully one in which truly endangered subspecies of tigers maintain enough genetic diversity to be successfully reintroduced into a wild that can sustain them.""
Facebook

Submission + - At Last You Can 'Friend' Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei on Facebook

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Not to be outdone by the Pope joining Twitter, Brian Fung reports that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei joined Facebook on December 13 and already has been liked by over 6,000 users. The @khamenei_ir handle is thought to be run directly by the Iranian government. Like that one, Khamenei's Facebook profile bears the Supreme Leader's official seal and follows the same username style (khamenei [punctuation] ir) that defines his presence on other social media outlets. US based social media sites are blocked in Iran by a wide-reaching government censor but they are still commonly used by millions of Iranians who use special software to get around the ban. Experts say the social media accounts show that Iran, despite restricting access to such sites show that Iran is keen to use social media to spread its world view to a global audience. "Social media gives the regime leadership another medium of communication, one that can share their message with a younger and far more international demographic," says Afshon Ostovar, a Middle East analyst at CNA, a US-based research organization."
United States

Submission + - Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Here's some breaking news I saw MSNBC this morning that I haven't seen reported anywhere in the print media yet. NBC reporter Pete Williams reported on Chuck Todd's "The Daily Rundown" that (police) "had been hopeful that they could extract some information from the computer at (Lanza's) home. He was very into computers. Before he left his mother's house on the morning that he shot his mother while she was sleeping, he damaged extensively his computer. He took the hard drive out, pulled the disk out, and did a lot of damage to it," said Williams. "It's not clear that (police) are going to be able to extract any information or not." It has previously been reported that Lanza left no online footprint. Police had been eager to examine Lanza's computer in hopes of determining a motive in his killings or finding records of purchases of firearms and ammunition. "If he visited certain websites, they are going to glean whatever information they can from that and see what it means," said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. "Does he have friends he communicates with online? Was there a fight with somebody?""
Earth

Submission + - Should Environmentalists Just Say No to Eating Beef?

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Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Marc Gunther writes in Yale Environment 360 that most environmentalists would point to beef as being responsible for an array of ills — the greenhouse gas emissions that the cattle generate; the groundwater pollution from their manure; the use of antibiotics in animal feed; the vast quantities of monoculture corn grown to feed the cattle; and the enormous amount of chemical fertilizers and water needed to grow the corn. But Jason Clay, senior vice president for market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and an expert on the environmental impacts of farming, has set out to “green” the hamburger — along with the steak, the prime rib, and the rest of the steer by helping launch the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, an association of businesses and environmental groups that has begun to “facilitate a global dialogue on beef production that is environmentally sound, socially responsible, and economically viable.” Environmentalists could take a far simpler approach: advise people to eat less beef. Mark Bittman has noted that if Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by a mere 20 percent, “it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius.” Nevertheless, green groups that readily fight coal plants or suburban sprawl have for the most part shown little desire to do battle with meat. “Most environmental groups don’t want to tell people what to eat or what not to eat," says Danielle Nierenberg adding that ground meat is a far more ecologically wise choice than strip steak. "It’s a personal issue that’s tied to your culture, to your history, to what your mom fed you when you were five years old.”"
The Internet

Submission + - Researchers Develop an Internet Truth Machine

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Will Oremus writes that when something momentous is unfolding—the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy, Friday’s horrific elementary school shooting in Connecticut—Twitter is the world's fastest, most comprehensive, and least reliable source of breaking news and in ongoing events like natural disasters, the results of Twitter misinformation can be potentially deadly. During Sandy, for instance, some tweets helped emergency responders figure out where to direct resources. Others provoked needless panic, such as one claiming that the Coney Island hospital was on fire, and a few were downright dangerous, such as the one claiming that people should stop using 911 because the lines were jammed. Now a research team at Yahoo has analyzed tweets from Chile's 2010 earthquake and looked at the potential of machine-learning algorithms to automatically assess the credibility of information tweeted during a disaster. A machine-learning classifier developed by the researchers uses 16 features to assess the credibility of newsworthy tweets and identified the features that make information more credible: credible tweets tend to be longer and include URLs; credible tweeters have higher follower counts; credible tweets are negative rather than positive in tone; and credible tweets do not include question marks, exclamation marks, or first- or third-person pronouns. Researchers at India's Institute of Information Technology also found that credible tweets are less likely to contain swear words (PDF) and significantly more likely to contain frowny emoticons than smiley faces. The bottom line is that an algorithm has the potential to work much faster than a human, and as it improves, it could evolve into an invaluable "first opinion" for flagging news items on Twitter that might not be true writes Oremus. "Even that wouldn't fully prevent Twitter lies from spreading or misleading people. But it might at least make their purveyors a little less comfortable and a little less smug.""
United States

Submission + - Marijuana Prosecution Not a High Priority Says Obama

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "VOA reports that President Obama says it does not make sense for federal authorities to seek prosecution of recreational marijuana users in states where such use is legal. "As it is, you know, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions," said Obama during a television interview with ABC's Barbara Walters . "It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that, under state law, that's legal." When asked if he supported legalizing marijuana, the president said he was not endorsing that. ""I wouldn't go that far, but what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you've seen the voters speak on this issue.""
Google

Submission + - Imagine if Google Had Been Developed in the 1960s

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jennifer O'Mahony writes in the Telegraph about Google parody web sites including one by Designer Norbert Landsteiner that allows users to imagine what google would be like if it had been invented in the era of 'Mad Men' complete with a punch card machine, magnetic tape unit and central processor using Job Control Language (JCL), a scripting language used on IBM 360 mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem. To complete the theme, the search engine is quite noisy, with typewriter key clicks and bells, and constant printing and paper-loading noises. Landsteiner says the goal of the project is to “explore distances and heroism in user interfaces.” Another Landsteiner project re-imagines Google as as a BBS terminal in the 1980s."
Power

Submission + - Solar Panels for Every Home?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "David Crane and Robert F.Kennedy Jr. write in the NY Times that with residents of New Jersey and New York living through three major storms in the past 16 month and suffering sustained blackouts, we need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles. Some have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered generators to give themselves varying degrees of grid independence but these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure and there is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses: electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, warehouses and over parking lots wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails. "Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states," write Crane and Kennedy. "So why isn’t there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?" First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. While it can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany, in the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days. "As we restore crucial infrastructure after the storm, let’s build an electricity delivery system that is more resilient, clean, democratic and reliable than the one that Sandy washed away," write the authors. "We have the technology. The economics makes sense. All we need is the political will.""

Comment Life on Land May Not Have Evolved From the Sea (Score 5, Interesting) 41

Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated."

Comment Life on Land May Not Have Evolved From the Sea (Score 1) 1

by Hugh Pickens writes (#42281157) Attached to: Scientists Say Life on Land May Not Have Evolved From the Sea
Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated."

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