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Stanford researchers propose AI in-home system that can monitor for coronavirus symptoms
During the “COVID-19 and AI” livestream event run by the Stanford Institute of Human-Centered AI (HAI), Stanford professor and HAI codirector Dr. Fei-Fei Li presented a concept for an AI-powered in-home system that could track a resident’s health, including for signs of COVID-19, while ensuring privacy.
#Comment: A highly intrusive "AI" in your living room, constantly analysing your bio-signals and sending it to its shadowy corporate owners. What could possibility go wrong? But don't worry and smile - cause comments like this will soon be banned by A.I, so we can feel better:
Microsoft claims its AI framework spots fake news better than state-of-the-art baselines
In a study Microsoft propose an AI framework — Multiple sources of Weak Social Supervision (MWSS) — that leverages engagement and social media signals to detect fake news. They say that after training and testing the model on a real-world data set, it outperforms a number of state-of-the-art baselines for early fake news detection.
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Spanish Government Aims to Roll Out Basic Income ‘Soon’ (Bloomberg)
The Spanish government is working to roll out a universal basic income as soon as possible, as part of a battery of actions aimed at countering the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Economy Minister Nadia Calvino. But the government’s broader ambition is that basic income becomes an instrument “that stays forever, that becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument,” she said.
#Comment: Leveraging the virus crisis, the UBI people (mostly same old finance fundamentalist wallstreet types, just with a new branding) are having their moment. Most likely, the UBI will be the pretext to "simplify and streamline" (e.g. radically remove and destroy) the existing complex network of social services in the EU. Once all citizens have been indoctrinated with propaganda of "free money and progress" and the UBI is "in", the owners of the money supply can simply dial-in a ever so slightly higher inflation rate (one of many options) and silently erode the real-world purchasing power of the €1000/m within just a few years. By the time people wake up to this scheme, it will be too late: All previous social systems will be gone, replaced by a aggressive totalitarian digital police state. There are many far more sane alternatives to explore - such as universal basic infrastructure ownership - but those seem "to radical" for the old owner-class apparently.
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Top 10 Marijuana And Psychedelic Stock News Stories Of The Week (Yahoo Finance)
Comment: You know things are really changing, when illegal drug industry news are regularly discussed prominently in the finance section of the mainstream media.
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Great Barrier Reef Suffers Its Most Widespread Mass Bleaching Event On Record (washingtonpost.com)
Surveys conducted by scientists at Australia's James Cook University and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority show that a summer of extreme heat has caused the reef to suffer a mass bleaching of unprecedented scale. Corals from the far north to the southern tip of the 1,400 mile-long ecosystem are experiencing severe impacts. It was also one of the reef's worst mass bleaching episodes in terms of intensity, second only to 2016.
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New Renewable Energy Capacity Hit Record Levels In 2019 (theguardian)
According to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power, marking another record. Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the U.S., with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world's oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 was renewable.
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In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: (1) Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international stage and (2) Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event.
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In other news Stanford has made a toilet that identifies you based on your butthole (Nature)
Here, we describe easily deployable hardware and software for the long-term analysis of a user's excreta through data collection and models of human health. The 'smart' toilet, which is self-contained and operates autonomously by leveraging pressure and motion sensors, analyses the user's urine using a standard-of-care colorimetric assay that traces red -- green -- blue values from images of urinalysis strips, calculates the flow rate and volume of urine using computer vision as a uroflowmeter, and classifies stool according to the Bristol stool form scale using deep learning [...] Each user of the toilet is identified through their fingerprint and the distinctive features of their anoderm, and the data are securely stored and analysed in an encrypted cloud server. The toilet may find uses in the screening, diagnosis and longitudinal monitoring of specific patient populations.
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Trump signs executive order to support moon mining, tap asteroid resources (Space.com)
The new executive order makes things even more official, stressing that the United States does not view space as a "global commons" and sees a clear path to off-Earth mining, without the need for further international treaty-level agreements.
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Hackers target Chinese government agencies, diplomatic missions and WHO amid pandemic (SCMP)
More than 200 VPN servers have been compromised in a massive campaign by hackers, according to a report by leading Chinese internet provider Qihoo 360. The report attributed the attacks to advanced hacker group DarkHotel
Facebook Asks Users About Coronavirus Symptoms, Releases Friendship Data To Researchers (reuters.com)
Facebook said on Monday it would start surveying some U.S. users about their health as part of a Carnegie Mellon University research project aimed at generating "heat maps" of self-reported coronavirus infections.
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Robert Anton Wilson talks about optimism, and stupidity
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Tuberculosis (WHO)
Tuberculosis (TB) is a global disease, found in every country in the world. It is the LEADING infectious cause of death worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.8 billion people—close to one quarter of the world's population—are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the bacteria that causes TB. Last year, 10 million fell ill from TB and 1.5 million died. Tuberculosis kills five thousand people every day. TB is an airborne disease that can be spread by coughing or sneezing and is the leading cause of infectious disease worldwide.
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This window of opportunism (about intel)
The Chinese Communist Party is using the current crisis to showcase its most dystopian iteration of total surveillance yet. As Europe anxiously looks to Beijing for technological solutions to Covid-19, the window of what we perceive to be acceptable surveillance practice may shift accordingly. It is therefore essential that we stick to the principles of proportionality and necessity. They force us to spell out the aim of surveillance and tell us where to search for inspiration instead.
This is likely to have significant implications for surveillance policy in other parts of the world. For one because the CCP has a strong political and economic interest in convincing other countries that its model of governance is viable. Covid-19 has only given wings to its attempt to broadly export authoritarianism. For another, because the attention citizens and politicians in Europe pay to the Chinese example in the pandemic is likely to shift what they will consider reasonable surveillance practice.
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A Google Plan to Wipe Out Mosquitoes Appears to Be Working (Bloomberg)
Alphabet unit Verily, which is also running coronavirus test sites, reports major progress in Debug project.
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Edible insects set to be approved by EU in 'breakthrough moment' (Guardian)
It is being billed as the long-awaited breakthrough moment in European gastronomy for mealworm burgers, locust aperitifs and cricket granola. Within weeks the EU’s European Food Safety Authority is expected by the insect industry to endorse whole or ground mealworms, lesser mealworms, locusts, crickets and grasshoppers as being safe for human consumption. The ruling is likely to lead to the final authorisation of their sale across the EU as a “novel food” by as soon as the autumn, opening up opportunities for mass production of a range of insect dishes to be sold across Europe for the first time. “These have a good chance of being given the green light in the coming few weeks,” said Christophe Derrien, the secretary general of the industry organisation International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed.
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Scientists Create 'Xenobots' -- Virtual Creatures Brought to Life (nytimes.com)
Strictly speaking, these life-forms do not have sex organs — or stomachs, brains or nervous systems. The one under the microscope consisted of about 2,000 living skin cells taken from a frog embryo. Bigger specimens, albeit still smaller than a millimeter-wide poppy seed, have skin cells and heart muscle cells that will begin pulsating by the end of the day. These are all programmable organisms called xenobots, the creation of which was revealed in a scientific paper in January, by Sam Kriegmana, Douglas Blackistonb, Michael Levinb, and Josh Bongarda,
A xenobot lives for only about a week, feeding on the small platelets of yolk that fill each of its cells and would normally fuel embryonic development. Because its building blocks are living cells, the entity can heal from injury, even after being torn almost in half. But what it does during its short life is decreed not by the ineffable frogginess etched into its DNA — which has not been genetically modified — but by its physical shape. And xenobots come in many shapes, all designed by roboticists in computer simulations, using physics engines similar to those in video games like Fortnite and Minecraft...
All of which makes xenobots amazing and maybe slightly unsettling — golems dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh. The implications of their existence could spill from artificial-intelligence research to fundamental questions in biology and ethics. "We are witnessing almost the birth of a new discipline of synthetic organisms," said Hod Lipson, a roboticist at the Columbia University who was not part of the research team. "I don't know if that's robotics, or zoology or something else."
An algorithm running for about 24 hours iterated through possible body shapes, after which the the two researchers tried "to sculpt cellular figurines that resembled those designs." They're now considering how the process might be automated with 3-D cell printers, and the Times ponders other future possibilities the researchers have hinted at for their Xenobots. ("Sweep up ocean microplastics into a larger, collectible ball? Deliver drugs to a specific tumor? Scrape plaque from the walls of our arteries?")
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Illuminati: New World Order - a card game by Steve Jackson Games (1994)
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Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)
Since 1996, the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is the national DNA data-base of the USA, created and maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI). It combines forensic science and computer technology into a tool which enables federal, state, and local forensic laboratories to exchange and compare DNA profiles electronically.
In that way the CODIS STR loci help in linking serial violent crimes to each other and to identify the offenders. The DNA Identification Act of 1994 dignified the FBI’s authority to establish a National DNA Index System (NDIS) for law enforcement purposes. Across the USA, over 190 public law enforcement laboratories participate in NDIS. More than 90 forensic laboratories in more than 50 countries use the CODIS software for their own database initiatives.
Thirteen core STR loci were selected to be the basis of the future CODIS national database on November! 3-14, 1997, in STR Project meeting. Later, additional seven loci (D1S1656, D2S441, D2S1338, D10S1248, D12S391, D19S433,and D22S1045) were added to the CODIS core in 2015, which came to effect from January 2017.
Different countries employ different STR-based DNA-profiling systems, e.g., 20 core CODIS universal in North America, 17 loci system in the UK(DNA-17), and 18 loci system in Australia. CODIS STR loci DNA-profiling system is based on multiplex reactions which result in testing many STR regions at the same time.
Text from the book "DNA Fingerprinting: Advancements and Future Endeavors"
The following related text on DNA Profiling from Wikipedia
The U.S. Patriot Act of the United States provides a means for the U.S. government to get DNA samples from suspected terrorists. DNA information from crimes is collected and deposited into the CODIS database, which is maintained by the FBI. CODIS enables law enforcement officials to test DNA samples from crimes for matches within the database, providing a means of finding specific biological profiles associated with collected DNA evidence.
When a match is made from a national DNA databank to link a crime scene to an offender having provided a DNA sample to a database, that link is often referred to as a cold hit. A cold hit is of value in referring the police agency to a specific suspect but is of less evidential value than a DNA match made from outside the DNA Databank.
FBI agents cannot legally store DNA of a person not convicted of a crime. DNA collected from a suspect not later convicted must be disposed of and not entered into the database. In 1998, a man residing in the UK was arrested on accusation of burglary. His DNA was taken and tested, and he was later released. Nine months later, this man's DNA was accidentally and illegally entered in the DNA database.
