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Archive for December, 2009
When an ad hoc team of 5000 people who assembled in just two hours found 10 weather balloons hidden across the US by the Pentagon's research agency earlier this month, it was just another demonstration of the power of crowdsourcing – solving a task by appealing to a large undefined group of web users to each do a small chunk of it. So far crowdsourcing has been associated with well-meaning altruism, such as the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia or searching for lost aviators. But crowdsourcing of a different flavour has started to emerge. Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico. To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010. Check out the original source here
# 1 Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation Check out the original source here "If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong." ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians–OSHA inspectors, insurance agents, religious workers–in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens has reported a web-exclusive companion piece on ICE agents' ruse… Check out the original source here
Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens. The so-called ICE "subfield offices" are mainly used to house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE and even military prisoners. At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in "a barely converted storage facility." "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," explained Ahilan Arulanantham, an ACLU immigration attorney interviewed by The Nation. "Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel." The report continued: "B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area… Check out the original source here
'KopBusters' filmmaker hails collective effort to 'fight corruption' A high-profile Texas drug prisoner is prisoner no more. On Friday, Dec. 18, a federal judge in Odessa granted Yolanda Madden her freedom, allowing her to walk out of state custody for the first time in nearly five years. Federal judge Rob Junell ordered Madden's sentence vacated because the prosecution had withheld evidence that might have negated a key piece of material evidence, according to The Odessa American. He added that neither the Odessa police nor the U.S. District Attorney's office appeared to be involved in wrongdoing in the case. A retrial is possible in March, 2010. Check out the original source here
The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm. The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD. The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history. The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition. But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. Check out the original source here
One of the large mental health hospitals in Israel was recently surprised to receive a young, good-looking patient in a psychotic state who was accompanied by a personal security guard, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday. The doctors, who asked why the woman was accompanied by a guard, were shocked to learn that she was a Mossad agent and that the security guard was not assigned to her in order assure her safety or protect her life, but to ensure that she not reveal any state secrets in her shaky mental state. The Mossad guard's orders were clear: "It is forbidden that the organization's secrets be passed on to those unauthorized to hear them." The doctors, who are unaccustomed to the presence of a third party during their treatment sessions, were left with no choice but to acquiesce to their demands. In addition, the staff had to receive a security clearance before being allowed to work on her exceptional case. Check out the original source here
US arms globocorp Boeing has announced yet another military robot demonstration – but this time, one with a difference. Rather than spying on meatsacks or mowing them down with the traditional array of automated weaponry, the war-bots in this trial sought to win over their fleshy opponents using psychological warfare. The demo was carried out for the US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), the organisation which runs the noted Green Berets, Rangers etc. "Working with USASOC, we were able to pull together a team to demonstrate this integrated, multimodal operation in just 45 days," says Boeing bigwig Vic Sweberg. "We brought together hardware and software from five different contractors into a single system that allowed the control of different unmanned systems capabilities to accomplish a particular mission." Apart from its legions of hardy throatcutters, USASOC is also in charge of the US Army's active psychological-warfare troops. Check out the original source here
Approximately 40 years ago, psychologist David Rosenhan conducted a daring experiment.1 He and seven confederates presented themselves for psychiatric evaluation at several psychiatric institutions, with each claiming to hear voices that said “empty,” “hollow,” or “thud.” All eight were subsequently admitted to the hospitals in all but one case with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Once entry was gained, each was instructed to tell hospital staff that he or she felt better, and desired to be discharged. In reality, of course, neither Rosenhan nor his confederates were hearing voices or having any symptoms of mental illness. None had any psychiatric history whatsoever, in fact. Rosenhan’s experiment sought to determine just how long it would take for the psychiatric experts in a hospital setting to figure out that the pseudopatients were not mentally ill. The results were alarming. The pseudopatients were not easily detected – in fact they were never detected to be pseudopatients Check out the original source here 1969 was a great year for hippies, a bad year for Beatles fans and an even worse year for UFO enthusiasts. Forty years ago, on Dec. 17th, the U.S. Air Force officially shuttered Project Blue Book, the agency's third and final attempt to investigate extraterrestrial sightings, and the country's longest official inquiry into UFOs. From 1952 until 1969, more than 12,000 reports were compiled and either classified as "identified" — explained by astronomical, atmospheric or artificial phenomenon — or "unidentified," which made up just 6% of the accounts. Thanks to such a meager percentage and an overall drop in sightings, officials axed the program and ended the research. So much for the truth being out there. The U.S. government search for extraterrestrials began in 1948, a year after an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed he saw nine crescent-shaped objects in the sky while flying near Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold evoked images of "saucers Check out the original source here |
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