(United States Fourth Circuit) - In an action challenging defendant Towson University's refusal to allow plaintiff to return to playing football after he suffered a near-death heat-stroke induced coma requiring a liver transplant and additional surgeries, the district court's judgment for plaintiff under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act is reversed where plaintiff was not otherwise qualified to participate in defendant's football program under defendant's reasonably applied Return-to-Play Policy.

(California Court of Appeal) - Revived claims brought by several African-American college basketball players that their head coach had engaged in race-based discrimination and retaliation. The players claimed that the coach reduced their playing time, afforded them fewer opportunities, punished them more severely and otherwise favored their teammates of other races. Reversed summary judgment in relevant part on their claims under title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and California law.

(California Court of Appeal) - Held that mediation costs fall within the category of costs that may be awarded in the trial court’s discretion. Affirmed an award to the prevailing party in this construction dispute.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - In the appeal of a breach of contract and copyright infringement case involving the movie 'The Purge,' the district court's denial of defendant's anti-SLAPP motion to strike a state law claim for breach of implied-in-fact contract, is affirmed where the breach of contract claim did not arise from an act in furtherance of the right of free speech since the claim was based on defendants' failure to pay for the plaintiff's idea, not the creation, production, distribution, or content of the films.

(United States Second Circuit) - Held that a medical device manufacturer did not violate the intellectual property rights of a company it hired to help automate its quality testing process. The issue involved reuse of computer source code. Affirmed a JMOL.

(United States Fifth Circuit) - Reversed and remanded. The Texas Citizens Participation Act does not apply to diversity cases in federal court.

(California Court of Appeal) - Reversed. Plaintiff appealed from judgment that dismissed her medical battery cause of action as time-barred. The appeals court held that the discovery rule applies to medical battery claims under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 as a matter of law.

Latido Music, The Premiere 24-hour Digital Television Network Dedicated To Latin Music, Has Announced The Formation Of Its Advisory Board

(United States Federal Circuit) - Affirmed a judgment of no interference-in-fact in a patent case involving the CRISPR-Cas9 system for the targeted cutting of DNA molecules. The Federal Circuit found no error in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's conclusion of no interference-in-fact, in this case pitting the Broad Institute, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others against the University of California, the University of Vienna, and others.

(United States Seventh Circuit) - Upheld the constitutionality of an Indiana law making it a felony to acquire, receive, sell or transfer fetal tissue. Indiana University sought an injunction barring enforcement of the statute, which impacts medical research. Reversing the district court, the Seventh Circuit held that the statute is not unconstitutionally vague, and also rejected the university's other constitutional arguments.

ASM Completes Its 150th Film Score And Retains Jonathan Firstenberg As North American Rep

(California Court of Appeal) - Reversed decertification of a class of retired University of California employees who claimed they were denied promised health insurance benefits. The retirees, who had worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, appealed the trial court's ruling that decertified the class for lack of commonality. On appeal, the First Appellate District held that the trial court's decertification ruling had relied on erroneous legal standards.

(Supreme Court of California) - Held that it is constitutional for San Francisco to impose a tax on drivers who park their cars in paid parking lots, even when the parking lot is operated by a state university.

“Joyful Sounds” Was First Broadcast In 1982. Founder Rob Green Also Hosts The “Gospel Country” Radio Show And Operates Christian Music Weekly Magazine.

(United States Second Circuit) - Held that a medical device manufacturer did not violate the intellectual property rights of a company it hired to help automate its quality testing process. The issue involved reuse of computer source code. Affirmed a JMOL.

(United States Seventh Circuit) - Reversed, where the district court granted summary judgment in favor of a tenured professor who was dismissed for cause. The University’s use of an informal mediator on the hearing committee did not violate the procedural requirements of the employment contract.

Earlier today [May 8], Governor John Rankin and the Minister of National Security Wayne Caines visited Warwick Camp to mark the 75th Anniversary of...

Latido Music, The Premiere 24-hour Digital Television Network Dedicated To Latin Music, Has Announced The Formation Of Its Advisory Board

A Night Of Music Featuring The Cream Of Local Indie Talent

(United States Second Circuit) - Affirmed. Financial institutions that hold junior notes issued by the defendant, as trustee, appeal the grant of summary judgement. The district court erred in holding that ICA § 47(b) does not give rise to a private right of action. However, the district court ordered distribution of the assets of the trust according to the terms of the trust’s governing indenture, so summary judgment affirmed.

(United States Second Circuit) - Vacated and remanded. Finding the district court’s decision conflicts with 2nd Circuit precedent in Doe v. Columbia University, the judgement dismissing Menaker’s complaint for failure to make a claim reversed.

(United States First Circuit) - Reinstated a university professor's claims that she was retaliated against in violation of Title VII and the Maine Human Rights Act. The professor alleged that she was transferred to a different department and suffered other retaliation after she complained of being sexually harassed by her department chair. Agreeing that genuine disputes of material fact existed, the First Circuit reversed the entry of summary judgment for the university and remanded.

New Studio Album Fight Back To Be Released May 1, 2018; 40th Anniversary World Tour

"My king, my heart, my best friend."

Bimonthly newsletter released by the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University

Within the academic aviation world, good textbooks can be hard to come by. Not only do few aviation textbook publishers exist, but the aviation industry is constantly changing. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's latest Impacts on Practice brief, ACRP in the Classroom: Reimagining the Textbook at the University of North Dakota Department of Aviation , details how Dr. Kim Kenville uses ACRP Research Report 16, Second Edition: Guidebook for Managing Small Airports , in her classes. “This publica...

If Bryan Fuller had stayed with Star Trek: Discovery, his vision for a Mirror Universe wouldn’t have been like the type shown...

If you look out on the sky on a nice clear dark night, you’ll see thousands of intense points of light. Those stars are incredibly far away, but bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from that great distance – a considerable feat. But what you don’t see are all the small stars, …

Continue reading "In the far future, the universe will be mostly invisible"

The post In the far future, the universe will be mostly invisible appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

Elon Musk thinks a universal basic income is inevitable. Musk doesn't see plausible alternatives. I hope not. So here's the optimistic scenario: On the one hand, manual and low skilled work will mostly get automated out of existence. So one could imagine why demand for people at lower skill levels and lower levels of cognitive ability could just evaporate. On the other hand, automation will cut costs and boost the wealth of those still employed. Even if the pay of manual laborers is low the goods a manual laborer will need to survive should become very cheap. So any upper class people who can find a use for them might pay them enough to survive. But I see a stronger...

The Joker 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 will feature an all-star creative team including James Tynion IV, Dan Mora, Tom Taylor, and many more

The post PREVIEW: The origin of Punchline is revealed in the JOKER 80TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL appeared first on The Beat.

Taking place tomorrow 1:00PM PT/4:00PM ET

The post WB announces a watch party for JL DARK: APOKOLIPS WAR, the endgame of the DC Animated Movie Universe appeared first on The Beat.

Each year, weather-related power outages cost the U.S. economy as much as $33 billion a year. Additionally, one severe weather event has the potential to impact the daily lives and routines of millions of people. As 2017 marks the fifth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, The Weather Company, an IBM Business (NYSE: IBM) and Zpryme are releasing the results of a survey that found that U.S. utility companies still feel underprepared for weather-related outages and that their reactive approach to outage prediction leads to lost time and resources.

Walmart, JD.com, IBM, and Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies announced today they will work together in a Blockchain Food Safety Alliance that will kick off with a collaboration designed to enhance food tracking, traceability and safety in China, to achieve greater transparency across the food supply chain.

IBM and West Virginia University’s Center for Disability Inclusion (CDI) today announced they are developing a first generation mobile workplace accommodation case management app to help U.S. businesses create inclusive workplaces for employees with disabilities.

IBM announced today that Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) has integrated IBM Watson Analytics to help create new services and programs based on data-driven insights to improve students’ academic achievement and development.