The plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the use of the “no fly list” to bar a US citizen from boarding an aircraft said last week that he would introduce a leaked copy of the government's Watchlisting Guidance “to show just how objectionable and evidence-free Defendants' watch listing process is.”
The government said it did not acknowledge the authenticity of the leaked document, and that the case should be dismissed since the Attorney General had invoked the state secrets privilege concerning core issues that it raised.
I've been fighting a losing battle for 25 years to reassert the primacy of the human factor within the craft of intelligence (decision-support). Although I have no doubt this will happen eventually — industrial era technology is in performance free-fall — I am now becoming interested in plant and animal intelligence, and in how we might harness the distributed intelligence of plants and animals — including as sensors — at the same time that we radically enhance our ability to harness the distributed intelligence of humans.
Known for detecting land mines, the rodents could also help detect disease.
EXTRACT
“Rats are very fast,” said his trainer, Catia Souto, adding that one rat can evaluate more samples in ten minutes than a lab technician can evaluate in a day.
. . . . . . .
And so far, rats seem to be a promising solution: In the first 16 months of the Maputo program, the rats evaluated samples from roughly 12,500 patients. Of those, 1,700 had been found positive at the health clinics. The rats detected another 764 patients, an increase in detection rate of around 44 percent, according to APOPO.
In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty
EXTRACT
Ms. Guidry, 35, earns money by using her own car to ferry around strangers for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, ride services that let people summon drivers on demand via apps. She also assembles furniture and tends gardens for clients who find her on TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for chores.
Her goal is to earn at least $25 an hour, on average. Raising three children with her longtime partner, Jeffrey Bradbury, she depends on the income to help cover her family’s food and rent. That has become more unpredictable of late. Uber and Lyft, her driving mainstays, recently cut certain passenger fares. Last month, TaskRabbit overhauled the way its users select their helpers; immediately after the change, Ms. Guidry’s stream of new clients dried up.
“You don’t know day to day,” she said. “It’s very up in the air.”
Phi Beta Iota: Anything less than a dollar a mile (50 cents for wear and gas, 50 cents for labor, home base door and return) is a losing proposition — to clear $25 an hour one must drive at least 50 billable miles in that hour. To make the $50,000 a year that $25 an hour would normally add up, one must have eight full revenue hours. Very few people achieve this, dog walkers being a possible exception. There are two sharing economies — perhaps many more. The first leverages existing assets and created variable income increases. The second leverages labor, and appears to be a losing proposition for most. What we see is a dearth of analytic models and a dearth of data — we see a desperate need for the rethinking and redesign of entire communities and cities to achieve cost of living reductions on the order of 50%, while optimizing the time-energy composition of the constituent individuals in any given community.
Reports state that that the internet is running out of space – but is this really a problem, and do we have to worry about it?
Reports this week have claimed that the internet is in danger of becoming “full” because the number of internet connections rose above a crucial limit. A small number of sites could have been taken momentarily offline by the issue with the infrastructure supporting parts of the internet.
The issue revolved around a limit on the number of concurrent connections made to routers that underpin the internet. These operate in a similar manner to home routers spreading data about the global internet, rather than simply within a single address.
“Old hardware that is at least five years past its end-of-life sulked, because it ran out of memory,” explained James Blessing, chair of the Internet Service Providers Association, which has close to 300 members across the UK.
Something very interesting is happening with social media. It is becoming a sharing venue where people otherwise unconnected can share common experiences of police violence. If this trend takes off, as I think it will, hundreds if not thousands of these confrontation episodes, that normally go largely unremarked except locally, will get posted online where they can be picked up and passed around. This will make it impossible f! or media to ignore them.
I've known for decades that plants can see and hear and sense and communicate feelings — the 1970's experiment with plants witnessing an individual “murdering” on of their own, and then the plants reacting on a polygraph machine when the one individual out of a line of many individuals came back into the room, was for me a compelling indicator.
Similarly I have been both awed by Koko the gorilla knowing over 1,000 words in sign language and able to interpret between other gorillas and humans, and dismayed to not see a Manhattan Project seeking to extend inter-species communication.
Then we've had the recent advances in linking plants to cell phones such that changes in their chemistry and water content are as ably charted from the micro-level as SPOT Image pioneered at the macro level.
Now we learn beyond doubt that plants do have a form of language using RNA. This has huge implications for true cost economics and big data — implications that suggest that our earlier doubts about the capacity of existing big data concepts and capacities are severely under-stated. If humans with their 183 languages are a tower of babel, the idea of one day being able to integrate the languages of animals and plants into a larger world brain that integrates the 183 human languages (and ideally resurrects the other 5,000 largely lost human languages) with the languages of all animals and plants, is a breathtaking possibility to contemplate. For engineers, it will be a bio-mimicry and cause and effect revolution inspiring a modern renaissance in sensible sustainable science.
“Never mind buying a second home when you can rent a chateau in France on Airbnb for $200. Why hire a chauffeur when they don’t come with an app that tracks their relative location to yours, like Uber?” she says. “Even owning the latest album of your favorite band feels a lot less appealing when you can stream it immediately on and offline with a Spotify pro membership, without taking up any space on your hard drive.”
