8/31/2014
8/30/2014
8/29/2014
Ending Human Life Possibly
Scientists have moved closer to being able to stop a
huge asteroid colliding with the Earth and potentially wiping out human life.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee have
discovered that blowing the space rock up could make the collision worse by
causing several devastating impacts.
Instead, small changes could be made to its surface
to disrupt the forces keeping it together and cause it to break up in outer
space.
They were studying asteroid 1950 DA, which first
became infamous in 2002 when astronomers estimated it had a one in 300 chance
of hitting the planet on 16 March, 2880.
However, the odds of a collision were
later revised to a more reassuring one in 4,000.
The asteroid has a diameter of one kilometre and is
travelling at nine miles a second relative to the Earth, which it would hit at
38,000 miles per hour.
The impact would have a force of around 44,800
megatonnes of TNT and cause a huge explosion, tsunamis and change the climate
of the globe, devastating human life.
But with 35 generations to go until its possible
arrival, scientists are confident that the disaster can be averted.
The findings, published in the science journal
Nature, could prompt a change in tactics defending our planet.
Previous research has shown that asteroids are loose
piles of rubble held together by gravity and friction but by calculating 1950
DA’s thermal inertia and bulk density, the team detected the action of cohesive
forces that stop it breaking up.
Ben Rozitis, a postdoctoral researcher, said if only
gravity were holding it together, the spinning would cause it to fly apart.
The rotation is so fast that at its equator, 1950 DA
effectively experiences negative gravity and if an astronaut were to attempt to
stand on the surface, he or she would be thrown off into space.
The presence of cohesive forces has been predicted
in small asteroids but definitive evidence has never been seen before.
8/28/2014
Filming Police
In recent years, there have been countless cases of police officers
ordering people to turn off their cameras, confiscating phones, and, like
Reilly, arresting those who attempt to capture footage of them. Despite a
common misconception, it’s actually perfectly legal to film police officers on
the job.
“There are First Amendment protections for people
photographing and recording in public,” Mickey Osterreicher, an attorney with
the National Press Photographers Association, told The Huffington Post.
According to Osterreicher, as long as you don’t get in their way, it’s
perfectly legal to take photos and videos of police officers everywhere in the
United States.
The NYPD’s reminder comes as police activity is in
the national spotlight. Just two days after Michael Brown’s death, cops in Los
Angeles shot to death an unarmed black man who allegedly
struggled with mental illness. And three weeks ago, a New York City police
officer put Eric Garner in an illegal chokehold that left him dead after gasping “I
can’t breathe!” A bystander caught the entire thing on video.
“There’s no
law anywhere in the United States that prohibits people from recording the
police on the street, in a park, or any other place where the public is
generally allowed,” Osterreicher said.
A number of states do bar people from recording
private conversations without consent. But as long as the recording is made
"openly and not surreptitiously," said Osterreicher, it's fair game.
According to Osterreicher, "assuming the position of holding up a camera
or phone at arm’s length while looking at the viewing screen should be enough
to put someone on notice that they are being photographed or recorded."
So why do so many police officers still act like
filming them is a crime?
Is World Peace Possible?
![]() |
Green countries are the most peaceful |
With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist
militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine,
it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.
But experts believe this is actually almost
universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the
world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness” – and things are only going
to get worse.
The UK, as an example, is relatively free from
internal conflict, making it easy to fall to thinking it exists in a state of
peace. But recent involvement in foreign fighting in the likes of Afghanistan,
as well as a fairly high state of militarization, means Britain actually scores
quite poorly on the 2014 Global Peace Index, coming 47th overall.
Then there are countries which are involved in no
actual foreign wars involving deaths whatsoever - like North Korea – but which
are fraught by the most divisive and entrenched internal conflicts.
The IEP’s findings mean that choices are slim if you
want to live in a completely peaceful country.
The only ones to achieve the
lowest score for all forms of conflict were Switzerland, Japan, Qatar,
Mauritius, Uruguay, Chile, Botswana, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Panama and Brazil.
And even those countries are not entirely exempt
from other problems that, the IEP says, could lend to conflict further down the
line.
Switzerland is famously detached when it comes to
any external conflict, and has a very low risk of internal problems of any kind
– but loses a number of points on the overall index because of its
proportionately huge rate of arms exports per 100,000 of the population.
Analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit must
be satisfied that it has “no conflict” within its borders. This rating on civil
unrest cannot even include “latent” conflict involving “positional differences
over definable values of national importance”.
The Global Peace Index measures the latest data up
to the end of the year before – meaning that the state of international
conflict right now is actually even worse than the study suggests. With the
protests over the World Cup still vivid in collective memory, for instance,
Brazil might find itself off the list of peaceful countries by 2015.
Speaking to The Independent, the director of the IEP
Camilla Schippa warned that the state of peace in our time has been “slowly but
steadily decreasing” in recent years.
“Major
economic and geopolitical shocks, such as the global financial crisis and the
Arab Spring, have left countries more at risk of falling into conflict,” Ms
Schippa said.
She added: “Continuing global unrest means that
there is unlikely to be a reversal of this trend in the short run.”
8/27/2014
Cooking Robots
A restaurant in China is electrifying customers
by using more than a dozen robots to cook and deliver food.
Mechanical staff greet customers, deliver dishes to
tables and even stir-fry meat and vegetables at the eatery in Kunshan, which
opened last week.
"My daughter asked me to invent a robot because
she doesn't like doing housework," the restaurant's founder Song Yugang
told AFP.
Two robots are stationed by the door to cheerfully
greet customers, while four short but humanoid machines carry trays of food to
the tables.
In the kitchen, two large blue robots with glowing
red eyes specialize in frying, while another is dedicated to making dumplings.
Song told the local Modern Times newspaper that each
robot costs around 40,000 yuan ($6,500) -- roughly equal to the annual salary
of a human employee.
"The robots can understand 40 everyday
sentences. They can't get sick or ask for vacation. After charging up for two
hours they can work for five hours," he added.
The restaurant, in the eastern province of Jiangsu,
follows in the tracks of another robotic eatery which opened in the
northeastern city of Harbin in 2012.
Rising labour costs in China have encouraged
manufacturers to turn to automation, and the country last year surpassed Japan
to become the world's biggest consumer of industrial robots.
The cooking robots -- which have a fixed repertoire
-- exhibit limited artificial intelligence, and are loaded with ingredients by
human staff, who also help to make some dishes.
But customers at the restaurant who tucked into
fried tomatoes with egg, soup, and rice were thrilled with the experience.
"My children are really excited by the
robots," said Yang Limei, a mother of three.
The round-headed waiter robots can only move along
fixed paths, and politely ask customers to move out of their way whenever their
routes are blocked.
"I've never seen a robot serving food
before," said Yuan Yuan, nine. "I'm really surprised."
Dirty Names List
There is no doubt that slavery is still a thriving
business across the world.
According to the International
Labor Organization, an estimated 21 million people across
the world are trapped in some
form of forced labor and other types of modern-slavery,
feeding a booming industry in human exploitation generating profits of more
than $32bn each year.
The United Nations estimates that
people-trafficking is the third
biggest criminal industry behind guns and drugs.
In recent years there has been a growing awareness
that modern-day slavery is largely a labor and economic, as well as a human
rights issue, and that the worst forms of human exploitation continue to lurk
in the murky depths of many global supply chains. Slavery isn't a word that any
business wants to be linked with.
So far the association between global brands and
slave labor comes largely from damaging media exposés – such as last week's
story on the sugar giant Tate & Lyle, accused of child
labor on plantations in Cambodia, allegations which
the company
has denied.
Yet interesting models for how to get businesses to
engage with the problem of forced labor are starting to emerge.
Since 2006,
more than 170 global companies have signed up to the Athens
Ethical Principles, where signatories pledge to ensure
their own businesses are slavery-free and declare zero tolerance for dealing
with other corporations benefiting from human trafficking.
In California the Transparency
in Supply Chains Act, which came into force last year,
legally requires companies doing business in California to report on what they
are doing to eradicate slavery from their product lines. The act stipulates
that larger companies must make this information public through a disclosure on
their websites.
In Brazil an aggressive anti-slavery strategy
launched by the government in the mid-90s has led to a controversial yet
seemingly effective name-and-shame strategy towards eliminating slavery from
major industries.
Thousands of Brazilians and laborers from
neighboring South American countries are thought to be trapped in slavery in
Brazil's booming agrarian, mining and materials sectors.
Last year, Greenpeace released
a report linking Brazil's charcoal industry, which
fuels iron ore smelters producing metals for the international car
manufacturing markets, to widespread environmental destruction and forced
labor.
8/26/2014
Sexual Slavery
Men, women and children are being kidnapped and held
for months as slaves by militias in eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Healthcare professionals working for Médicins sans Frontières in the
gold and diamond mining regions of Okapi forest, Orientale province, say they
have treated hundreds of women who had been seized from villages and held as
sex slaves, many of whom have life-threatening injuries from sustained abuse.
Men and children are also being kidnapped and made to work in the mines.
"They describe what they have lived through as
hell," said Ana Maria Tijerino, an MSF psychologist who works in the
nearby town of Nia Nia, to which thousands of people have fled to escape the
violence.
"I have trouble believing that such a level of horror is
possible. Victims have been held as sex slaves – sometimes for months at a time
– and sexually assaulted violently by several men, several times a day, often
in front of their parents, husbands or relatives."
Between May and early July, MSF staff in Nia Nia
provided 3,586 consultations to local people. They also gave psychological
support to 143 women, three men and two children who had experienced sexual
violence, and to more than 36 survivors of other types of violence, including
torture and being forced to witness atrocities against relatives.
Last month,
the team treated 20 women in a single village who had been raped.
MSF says security and the rule of law have collapsed
in recent months and that the military are struggling to overcome militiamen,
many of whom are former poachers with detailed knowledge of Okapi's dense
forested areas.
"After a militia leader was killed by the
military in April, the level of violence, and the brutality, increased
significantly, targeting both the mining communities and people in the
surrounding villages," Kevin Coppock, MSF's head of mission in Orientale
province, said.
"Militia members simply show up, steal what they can and
take men and women out of local communities who are then kept captive under the
most horrendous conditions for months at a time."
Rural Electrification
In countries where the energy infrastructure
is under-developed and few towns are adequately electrified, extending the grid
is often not financially viable, and certainly not likely to happen in the
short to medium term.
And so 1.4 billion people are currently living without electricity.
In sub-Saharan Africa, only
8% of the population in rural areas has access to mains electricity but
mini-grids – localized generation, transmission and distribution of power –
could change all that.
As the cost of solar energy in rural Africa, parts
of India and other countries in Asia has fallen dramatically in recent years,
setting up a mini-grid powered by renewable energy has
become the cheapest way to provide electricity.
The people of Bellewakh, Lemcid, Loubeir and
Lemhaijratt currently get by with candles, kerosene lamps and car batteries for
lighting, and use costly and dangerous canisters of butane to power
refrigeration units.
Their new mini-grid will consist of 18 wind turbines of
15kW and will provide electricity for households, schools, health facilities,
civic buildings, a desalination plant to produce drinking water and an
ice-making plant.
Where mini-grids already exist but are currently
powered by diesel Wouters says it is now a no-brainer for them to switch to
renewables: "Where people are using diesel to generate electricity any
renewable source of energy is at the moment more cost effective."
Hydroelectricity is by far the cheapest – where it is
available – followed by wind power, and then solar panels. A report by the Alliance for
Rural Electrification found that towns could save up to
60% of their bill if they switched from diesel to hydroelectricity or 16% if
they switched to solar.
The cost effectiveness of renewable energy has
really changed the marketplace. Before, says Wouters, people thought:
"solar is nice for [communities that are] off-grid, but it's expensive,
but that is not true anymore. It's now cheap as well as being reliable, clean
and low maintenance."
Wouters says the first challenge has been making
people aware of the falling prices. "When something halves in price every
two years it's hard to catch up, but I think that we've reached the point where
people understand.
8/25/2014
Potato Chip Bag Listening
Imagine
someone listening in to your private conversation by filming the bag of chips
sitting on the other side of the room.
Researchers
at MIT did just that: They've created an algorithm that can reconstruct sound (and even intelligible speech)
with the tiny vibrations it causes on video.
When
sound hits an object, it makes distinct vibrations. “There’s this very subtle
signal that’s telling you what the sound passing through is,” said Abe
Davis, a
graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and
first author on the paper.
This
particular study grew out of an earlier experiment at MIT, led by Michael
Rubinstein, now
a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England.
In 2012,
Rubinstein amplified tiny variations in video to detect things
like the skin color change caused by the pumping of blood. Studying the
vibrations caused by sound was a logical next step. But getting intelligible
speech out of the analysis was surprising, Davis said.
In one
example shown in a compilation video, a bag of chips is filmed from 15 feet
away, through sound-proof glass. The reconstructed audio of someone reciting
“Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the same room as the chips isn’t crystal clear. But
the words being said are possible to decipher.
In most
cases, a high-speed camera is necessary to accomplish the feat. Still, at 2,000
to 6,000 frames per second, the camera used by the researchers is nothing
compared to the best available on the market, which can surpass 100,000 frames
per second. And the researchers found that even cheaper cameras could be used.
“It’s
surprisingly possible to take advantage of a bug called rolling shutter,” Davis
said. “Usually, it creates these artifacts in the image that people don’t
like.”
When cameras use rolling shutter to capture an image, they don’t capture one
single point in time. Instead, the camera scans across the frame in one
direction, picking up each row at a slightly different moment.
“It kind of turns a two-dimensional low-speed
camera into a one-dimensional high-speed camera,” Davis explained. “As a
result, we can recover sounds happening at frequencies several times higher
than the frame rate of the camera, which is remarkable when you consider that
it’s just a complete accident of the way we make them.”
There
are definitely limitations to the technology, Davis said, and it may not make
for better sound reconstruction than other methods already in use. “Big brother
won't be able to hear anything that anyone ever says all of a sudden,”
Davis said.
“But it is possible that you could use this to discover sound in
situations where you couldn’t before. It’s just adding one more tool for those
forensic applications.”
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