Scientists published the first assessment of the impact that invasive hippos imported by drug lord Pablo Escobar are having on Colombian aquatic ecosystems. The hippos are changing the area's water quality by importing large amounts of nutrients and organic material from the surrounding landscape.

Nearly everyone on Earth is familiar with corn. Literally. Around the world, each person eats an average of 70 pounds of the grain each year, with even more grown for animal feed and biofuel.

1. Bernie Sanders says (repeatedly) that he wants the United States to be more like Sweden. Bring it on! No estate or inheritance taxes, no minimum wage, a much higher ratio of consumption taxes to income taxes, an income tax system that is by some reasonable standards far less progressive, school choice, high deductibles and […]

[I am happy to turn this space over to my former colleague and (I trust) lifelong friend Romans Pancs, who offers what he describes as a polemical essay. It has no references and no confidence intervals. It has question marks. It makes a narrow point and does not weigh pros and cons. It is an […]

Given all we know about facial recognition tech, it is literally jaw-dropping that anyone could make this claim… especially without being vetted independently.

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a PhD student have developed an automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely to be a criminal.

The software is able to predict if someone is a criminal with 80% accuracy and with no racial bias. The prediction is calculated solely based on a picture of their face.

There's a whole lot of "what even the fuck" in CBS 21's reprint of a press release, but let's start with the claim about "no racial bias." That's a lot to swallow when the underlying research hasn't been released yet. Let's see what the National Institute of Standards and Technology has to say on the subject. This is the result of the NIST's examination of 189 facial recognition AI programs -- all far more established than whatever it is Harrisburg researchers have cooked up.

Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.

The faces of African American women were falsely identified more often in the kinds of searches used by police investigators where an image is compared to thousands or millions of others in hopes of identifying a suspect.

Why is this acceptable? The report inadvertently supplies the answer:

Middle-aged white men generally benefited from the highest accuracy rates.

Yep. And guess who's making laws or running police departments or marketing AI to cops or telling people on Twitter not to break the law or etc. etc. etc.

To craft a terrible pun, the researchers' claim of "no racial bias" is absurd on its face. Per se stupid af to use legal terminology.

Moving on from that, there's the 80% accuracy, which is apparently good enough since it will only threaten the life and liberty of 20% of the people it's inflicted on. I guess if it's the FBI's gold standard, it's good enough for everyone.

Maybe this is just bad reporting. Maybe something got copy-pasted wrong from the spammed press release. Let's go to the source… one that somehow still doesn't include a link to any underlying research documents.

What does any of this mean? Are we ready to embrace a bit of pre-crime eugenics? Or is this just the most hamfisted phrasing Harrisburg researchers could come up with?

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal.

The most charitable interpretation of this statement is that the wrong-20%-of-the-time AI is going to be applied to the super-sketchy "predictive policing" field. Predictive policing -- a theory that says it's ok to treat people like criminals if they live and work in an area where criminals live -- is its own biased mess, relying on garbage data generated by biased policing to turn racist policing into an AI-blessed "work smarter not harder" LEO equivalent.

The question about "likely" is answered in the next paragraph, somewhat assuring readers the AI won't be applied to ultrasound images.

With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can predict if someone is a criminal based solely on a picture of their face. The software is intended to help law enforcement prevent crime.

There's a big difference between "going to be" and "is," and researchers using actual science should know better than to use both phrases to describe their AI efforts. One means scanning someone's face to determine whether they might eventually engage in criminal acts. The other means matching faces to images of known criminals. They are far from interchangeable terms.

If you think the above quotes are, at best, disjointed, brace yourself for this jargon-fest which clarifies nothing and suggests the AI itself wrote the pullquote:

“We already know machine learning techniques can outperform humans on a variety of tasks related to facial recognition and emotion detection,” Sadeghian said. “This research indicates just how powerful these tools are by showing they can extract minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality.”

"Minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality." And what, pray tell, are those "minute features?" Skin tone? "I AM A CRIMINAL IN THE MAKING" forehead tattoos? Bullshit on top of bullshit? Come on. This is word salad, but a salad pretending to be a law enforcement tool with actual utility. Nothing about this suggests Harrisburg has come up with anything better than the shitty "tools" already being inflicted on us by law enforcement's early adopters.

I wish we could dig deeper into this but we'll all have to wait until this excitable group of clueless researchers decide to publish their findings. According to this site, the research is being sealed inside a "research book," which means it will take a lot of money to actually prove this isn't any better than anything that's been offered before. This could be the next Clearview, but we won't know if it is until the research is published. If we're lucky, it will be before Harrisburg patents this awful product and starts selling it to all and sundry. Don't hold your breath.

One has the vulns, the other has the brass neck to pull off heists. Right?

Russia might begin carrying out cyber attacks against Britain's 5G networks "at the behest of China", the chairman of a Parliamentary Select Committee has ventured.…

Геймеров отправят на Землю, которую снова захватили динозавры.

Interior decoration is a tremendously crucial element of any kind of dining establishment. If you are in the planning stages of opening up a dining establishment, if you already own one and also are thinking about making adjustments, you will… Continue Reading →

Power reliable ceiling followers are a wonderful method to make your home much more inviting, visually pleasing and also, as an added bonus offer, reduced your overall house power air conditioning bill if you currently have a home cooling system.… Continue Reading →

1.8 million people in the United States drive heavy trucks for a living and are at risk of losing their jobs when trucks become autonomous. That number is from the BLS category heavy and tractor-trailer trucking with 1.8 million employees. A separate category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers has 1.3 million workers. The heavy duty truckers are more at risk than the local delivery drivers because it is easier to automate long haul driving on interstates than to automate driving on more complex (cross traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, etc) local roads. Plus, delivery drivers have to run up to houses and businesses to make most deliveries. Building robots to do that work will take longer. Railroad operation is easier...

Today, Thursday 24 September 2004 there were 164523 hits on one artist's web site. Asbjorn Lonvig's, www.lonvig.dk it is. That's from Denmark in Scandinavia. It might be a new World Record? Is the "well-known" artist he who exhibits on Guggenheim in New York? Or is it he who has 164523 internet hits on one single day?

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Cornel West and Tavis Smiley criticize President Barack Obama for being to the right of even President Richard Nixon. Continue reading →

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT IN OUR HISTORY MUST MAKE A VERY FUNDAMENTAL DECISION, AND THAT DECISION IS DO WE CONTINUE THE STATUS QUO WHICH INCLUDES A 40-YEAR DECLINE OF OUR MIDDLE CLASS AND A HUGE AND GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE VERY, VERY RICH AND EVERYONE ELSE, OR DO WE FIGHT FOR A BOLD AND MEANINGFUL ECONOMIC AGENDA THAT CREATES JOBS, RAISES WAGES, PROTECTS OUR ENVIRONMENT AND PROVIDES HEALTH CARE FOR EVERY AMERICAN Continue reading →

This is one of the best interviews on American politics ever to be broadcasted. Ralph Nader and Jill Stein discuss our corrupt government and corrupt media controlled by corporations, and explain how we no longer have a democracy but corporate tyranny. Continue reading →

Donald Trump sold out his supporters and the 99% by selecting Wall Streeters and war mongers for his top cabinet positions. Continue reading →

Tucker: There’s no value more American than free speech Liberals working to crack down on the First Amendment, ban speech they don’t like. GOOD EVENING, AND WELCOME TO “TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT.” It’s hard to think of an ideal more American … Continue reading →

An updated Disaster Resilience Scorecard to help cities and local government agencies improve their preparedness and reduce risks from disasters was launched today at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. Developed for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction by AECOM, IBM with support from USAID and the European Commission, the Scorecard gives better access to information, knowledge resources, and tools to effectively reduce risks from the impacts of natural hazards and climate change.

IBM and Stone Ridge Technology today announced a performance milestone in reservoir simulation designed to help improve efficiency and lower the cost of production. Working with NVIDIA, the companies shattered previous published results using one-tenth the power and 1/100th of the space. The news demonstrates the ability of NVIDIA GPUs to simulate one billion cell models in a fraction of the published time, while delivering 10x the performance and efficiency than legacy CPU codes.

IBM Research scientists have achieved a new world record in tape storage – their fifth since 2006. The new record of 201 Gb/in2 (gigabits per square inch) in areal density was achieved on a prototype sputtered magnetic tape developed by Sony Storage Media Solutions. The scientists presented the achievement today at the 28th Magnetic Recording Conference (TMRC 2017) here.

IBM has been recognized as a storage software Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions1. In its Magic Quadrants’, Gartner analysts evaluate technology and solutions with an ‘Ability to Execute’ and a ‘Completeness of Vision’.

IBM Security today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a Leader for the sixth consecutive year in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites1 for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

IBM today announced second-quarter 2015 diluted earnings from continuing operations of $3.58 per share, down 15 percent year-to-year. Operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings from continuing operations were $3.84 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $4.43 per share in the second quarter of 2014, a decrease of 13 percent.

IBM today announced second-quarter earnings results.

IBM announced today two significant quantum processor upgrades for its IBM Q early-access commercial systems. These upgrades represent rapid advances in quantum hardware as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.

IBM inventors received a record 9,043 patents in 2017, marking the company’s 25th consecutive year of U.S. patent leadership and crossing the 100,000-patent milestone. The new patents were granted to a diverse group of more than 8,500 IBM researchers, engineers, scientists and designers in 47 different U.S. states and 47 countries.

IBM today announced that it broke the U.S. patent record with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in 2016, marking the 24th consecutive year of innovation leadership. IBM’s 2016 patent output covers a diverse range of inventions in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, cognitive health, cloud, cybersecurity and other strategic growth areas for the company.

Hace posible el cifrado en tiempo real sobre todas las transacciones móviles a escala. Primer sistema mainframe con análisis integrado que proporciona conocimientos de transacciones en tiempo real, 17 veces más rápido en comparación a sistemas competidores en una fracción del costo.

IBM today announced that it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marking the 19th consecutive year that the company has led the annual list of patent recipients. IBM inventors earned a record 6,180 U.S. patents in 2011, more than quadrupling Hewlett-Packard’s issuances and exceeding by six times those of Oracle/Sun.

AXA Seguros anunció que sus ventas digitales en México aumentaron 208% en los últimos tres años, gracias a la tecnología de eCommerce IBM Marketing Cloud, lo que permite a la compañía de origen francés maximizar la atención a sus potenciales compradores y ofrecer ofertas personalizadas.

At the Smarter Cities Forum in Shanghai today, IBM announced a collaboration with South China's largest hospital, Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, to apply new analytics technology to help doctors uncover trends and new knowledge about disease treatment from thousands of anonymous Electronic Medical Records (EMR)The tool will also enable clinicians to perform empirical studies on the efficacy of certain traditional Chinese treatments.

Unitec today announced that the number of people employed in two Delivery Centres at its Mount Albert campus now exceeds 500, and continue to drive benefits for Unitec students and the Auckland economy.

IBM anunció que fue nombrada líder en el informe 2013 IDC MarketScape, que analiza a los proveedores de consultoría en movilidad empresarial a nivel mundial. El informe cita al recientemente anunciado Customer Experience Lab y la iniciativa Mobile First de IBM como ejemplos de su liderazgo en Consultoría en Movilidad Empresarial.

La empresa se afianza como líder de Proveedores Autorizados de Certificación (PAC) y logra procesar grandes volúmenes de transacciones de manera sencilla

IBM today announced the findings of a major new study of over 1,900 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and senior finance executives from 81 countries and 35 industries worldwide, which reveals that more than 60 percent of CFOs plan major changes to respond to the new economic climate.

Declares Intent to Break the Exaflop Barrier; Develops Exascale Research Collaboratory in Dublin

aufeminin.com a choisi la solution de Bouygues Telecom Entreprises pour sa simplicité d’utilisation et sa sécurité

The 2009 IBM Cognos Partner Awards recognise Australian channel partners that meet or exceed assigned revenue targets , such as license sales and maintenance deals, and, create successful customer relationships through the delivery of IBM Cognos Performance Management based solutions for the IBM full fiscal year 2008, ended December 31st 2008.

IBM today announced the opening of a new data centre facility in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland. The data centre will augment IBM’s existing recovery centre located nearby, to provide exceptional and unrivalled risk mitigation for client information and data.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today reported record online and mobile sales for Australia’s third Click Frenzy ahead of the Christmas shopping blitz. The results are based on Australian online shopping transactions analysed by IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark.

One hundred IBM (NYSE: IBM) employees from 33 countries – including six from Australia and New Zealand – have been selected to participate in the company's new Corporate Service Corps program. The program is part of the Global Citizen's Portfolio initiative announced by CEO Sam Palmisano to develop leadership skills, while addressing socio-economic challenges in emerging markets.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today announced that more than 2.6 million households across Australia submitting Census forms via the web-based eCensus solution. This represents a significant jump from the 2006 Census, when 778,000 (9.1 per cent) of Australian households completed their forms online.

Voldemort believes he has uncovered a new means of gaining the supreme power he craves in the depths of the oldest recorded history - a civilization lost over the centuries. But history is known to distort with time. Reeling from the loss of his Godfather, Harry must navigate grief, love, and growing up while surviving another year at Hogwarts as the Second War begins.

The square root cancellation heuristic, briefly mentioned in the preceding set of notes, predicts that if a collection of complex numbers have phases that are sufficiently “independent” of each other, then similarly, if are a collection of functions in a Lebesgue space that oscillate “independently” of each other, then we expect We have already seen […]

I'll be at Fanime in San Jose in May!

This will be our only convention in California this year!

See you there! <3 -Hamlet

Will He Get A Second Term?

Donald Trump has proven himself to be the most corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent president in American history. 

But despite all of the lies, abuses of power, and damage to the country – I must warn you – there’s a very real possibility he could be reelected. This doesn’t have to be the case. 

Let me explain.

Although Trump has been impeached and is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history, he still has devoted support among his core base. Nearly 90 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing, a rate that’s held constant throughout his presidency. According to one survey, a third of Trump supporters said there was nothing he could do to lose their support.

Trump still maintains substantial support in key swing states as well. Recent polls show him neck and neck with leading Democratic candidates in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Remember, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes but still lost the election because of the power of these states in the Electoral College.

Big money donors are also forking over record sums of money to keep Trump in office. In the last quarter of 2019 alone, he raked in a staggering $46 million, far outpacing any of his Democratic opponents. He now has more than $100 million in the bank, not to mention the millions raised by pro-Trump Super PACs. The GOP’s biggest donors – some of whom didn’t support him in 2016, but received massive windfalls from Trump’s tax cut – are now paying him back.  

At the same time, voter suppression is on the rise. To suppress turnout by likely Democratic voters, Republican officials have doubled down on their efforts to keep low-income and minority voters from the polls. They are intimidating immigrant voters, purging voter rolls, closing polling places, and making it harder to register in the first place. 

Florida went so far as to institute a modern-day poll tax, requiring people with past felony convictions to pay off any fines or fees before exercising their right to vote. In 2016, over 20 percent of black voting-age Floridians weren’t able to vote due to past felony convictions, and now, hundreds of thousands could still be prevented from going to the polls this November in this key state.

We are also at risk of foreign powers trying to interfere in the election, as they did in 2016. Experts warn that many states still lack the necessary safeguards to protect against interference. The FBI, Department of Justice and National Security Agency have also raised concerns that Russia, China, and Iran might attempt misinformation campaigns. I can’t believe I even have to say this, but foreign governments should not have a say in our elections.

So why am I telling you all of this? I don’t mean to scare you. And the last thing I want to do is cause you to be hopeless, and give up. To the contrary, I want you to be more determined than ever. Despite all these attacks on democracy, we have what it takes to make Trump a one-term president. But only if we remain focused and united.

It may seem daunting. We’re up against a full-fledged attack on our democratic institutions. But there is a way forward: 

We can defeat Trump and his enablers by building a multiracial, multi-class coalition. And we do that by supporting a true progressive with a bold vision for an economy and democracy that works for all Americans. That way enough voters will be inspired to show up to the polls and stop Trump’s authoritarian machine for good.

This isn’t a pipe dream. We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 – handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged – and we must keep fighting.

If we come together, we will prevail.

Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes...

While several entities start ecommerce activities, not all succeed. There are a few things you need to keep in mind if you want your venture ...

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