Category Archives: Transhuman News

A U.S. post office in the Third Ward area will be named after former U.S. Representative Mickey Leland.

The bill to name the Southmore post office building in the 4100 block of Almeda after the civil rights pioneer was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced Tuesday.

The building was the site of a 1960 civil rights demonstration that became Houston's first sit-in, she said.

"This post office had a very unique history and story. That is why I am pleased (it) will be named after a civil rights and human rights activist," Jackson Lee said.

Mickey Leland was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979 after earlier serving in the Texas legislature. He died in a 1989 plane crash while on an anti-poverty mission in Ethiopia.

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Post office named for Leland

Think of all the ways you can now experience Barcelona from your couch. You can read about it at length on Wikipedia and peruse snapshots of the Sagrada Familia on Flickr. You can order delivery from the tapas place down the street and enjoy your meal while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona on demand.

About the only thing you cant do is have the embodied experience of actually walking through the city, deciding which streets to explore, which performer to listen to, which bar to duck into. If a handful of Spaniards has their way, though, youll soon be doing all that from your couch, too.

Omnipresenz is your chance to explore the world with a human avatar. The project, under development by researchers in Spain, works much as youd expect. Someone in a distant city wears a helmet with a GoPro and an internet connection. You, at your computer, use a proprietary interface to dictate where they go and what they do in real time. Their eyes, their ears and, most importantly, their agency become yours.

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A Freaky Idea for Remote-Controlled Sightseeing With Human Avatars

Members of the Gulabi Gang (Pink Gang), a group of women in rural India who strive for social justice and fight for womens rights. Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images

Human rights activists often face threats of violence, intimidation and imprisonment while campaigning against injustice. Women campaigning for their rights can face further challenges as they battle against gender stereotypes and opposition to their roles as leaders. To mark Human Rights Day on Wednesday, we hosted a live chat with three human rights defenders who answered your questions on their campaigning work and the challenges they face in uncovering abuses.

Dinara Yunus, Azerbaijan

Yunus is an independent human rights activist who has lived in exile in the Netherlands for the past five years. Her parents, Arif and Leyla Yunus, are prominent human rights defenders who are imprisoned in Azerbaijan. Leyla is founder and director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy. Leyla and Arifs campaigning work included compiling and disseminating a list of political prisoners held in in Azerbaijan. Dinara is working on her parents case.

Christina Tinay Palabay, Philippines

Palabay is the secretary general of Karapatan, a human rights organisation monitoring and documenting violations in the Philippines. She is also the convenor of Tanggol Bayi (Defend Women), an association of female human rights defenders in the country.

Alejandra Ancheita, Mexico

Ancheita is founder and executive director of the Mexico City-based ProDESC (project of economic, cultural and social rights). She is a lawyer and activist focusing on the rights of migrants, workers and indigenous communities. She has dedicated more than 15 years to protecting peoples land and labour rights in the face of increasing infringements from multinational mining and energy companies.

Readers asked about the challenges the campaigners face, particularly from authorities wishing to quash any form of dissent:

Readers also asked what was required for campaigners to affect change:

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Human Rights Day: what do you want to ask campaigners?

Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web. Now its applying that expertise to searching for clues to the genetic causes of autism in the vast sea of data contained in the human genome.

On Tuesday, autism advocacy group Autism Speaks said it was partnering with Google to sequence the genomes of 10,000 people on the autism spectrum along with their family members. Google will host and index the data for qualified researchers to sift as they hunt for variations in DNA that could hint at autisms genetic origins.

We believe that the clues to understanding autism lie in that genome, Rob Ring, Autism Speaks chief science officer, told WIRED. Wed like to leverage the same kind of technology and approach to searching the internet every day to search into the genome for these missing answers.

The project will make use of Google Genomics, a tool launched by the company several months ago with little fanfare on Googles Cloud Platform. As sequencing the human genome becomes ever-faster and cheaperRing says it can be done for about $2,500, compared to nearly $3 billion for the Human Genome Projectthe volume of genetic data generated by researchers has grown astronomically. By allowing researchers to dump that data onto its servers, Google gets to show off and improve the capabilities of its cloud while providing a potentially important service.

David Glazer, director of engineering for Google Genomics and formerly director of engineering for Google Plus, says that instead of searching for keywords, researchers can search for particular regions and sequences along genomes and find sections with common variations. And because a single human genome can run to 100 gigabytes, having the data in a central location makes remote collaboration among researchers easier. Youre a lot more efficient than shipping around station wagons full of hard drives, Glazer says.

Liz Feld, president of Autism Speaks, says she hopes that intense genetic analysis will help researchers tailor more individualized treatments, much as genomic analysis has led to a more refined understanding of different subtypes of cancer. What matters most to us is that this research is going to allow us to uncover and understand the various forms of autism, Feld says.

The autism genomics project is hardly the first Google foray into health and medicine. The company has targeted everything from Parkinsons disease to cancer, though genomics research is especially well suited to Googles technological strengths. In recent years, researchers have come to see biology as ripe for understanding by way of computing as much as chemistry. After all, nature has spent billions of years perfecting DNA as its most efficient way for storing and transferring information.

Autism Speaks has itself been collected genomic data for more than a decade, Ring says. Now he says he believes they have the tools to do something valuable with it: We realized that some of our biggest biology problems were really big data problems.

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Google Opens Its Cloud to Crack the Genetic Code of Autism

DAVAO CITY Thousands of protesters joined the commemoration of the International Human Rights day in different parts of the regionWednesday.

An estimated 8,000 protesters joined the protest actions in Digos (4,000), Kidapawan (3, 000), and Davao City (2,000).

According to Sheena Duazo, spokesperson of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), human rights violations are rampant under the present administration because of the military operations of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the communities.

Bayan claimed that in the region alone there are already 92 cases of extra-judicial killings recorded under the present administration.

Despite the intensified protests and resistance of the people, state forces have forcibly occupied civilian homes in rural areas, barangay halls and chapels, Duazo said.

Duazo cited the cases of encampments of schools in the countrysidesincluding the ones in Talaingod, Davao del Norte, where military troop encampment affected 1,500 students.

In an interview with Radyo ni Juan, Officer-in-Charge of the Commission on Human Rights region XI Atty. Irene Montero confirmed that, supposed to be, encampment near the school including passable roads of the civilians, violate the International Humanitarian Law.

She said that encampment should not be allowed in the communities, adding that civilians might get caught in the crossfires.

According to Montero, the CHR is already investigating the recent cases of the human rights violations that resulted from military encampment in the communities.

We have already started the investigation on the recent case of military presence in Talaingod and Kapalong, Davao del Norte, but I cannot disclose the information because the investigation is still going on, she said.

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Protests marks commemoration of Human Rights day in Davao region

DAVAO CITY Thousands of protesters joined the commemoration of the International Human Rights day in different parts of the regionWednesday.

An estimated 8,000 protesters joined the protest actions in Digos (4,000), Kidapawan (3, 000), and Davao City (2,000).

According to Sheena Duazo, spokesperson of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), human rights violations are rampant under the present administration because of the military operations of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the communities.

Bayan claimed that in the region alone there are already 92 cases of extra-judicial killings recorded under the present administration.

Despite the intensified protests and resistance of the people, state forces have forcibly occupied civilian homes in rural areas, barangay halls and chapels, Duazo said.

Duazo cited the cases of encampments of schools in the countrysidesincluding the ones in Talaingod, Davao del Norte, where military troop encampment affected 1,500 students.

In an interview with Radyo ni Juan, Officer-in-Charge of the Commission on Human Rights region XI Atty. Irene Montero confirmed that, supposed to be, encampment near the school including passable roads of the civilians, violate the International Humanitarian Law.

She said that encampment should not be allowed in the communities, adding that civilians might get caught in the crossfires.

According to Montero, the CHR is already investigating the recent cases of the human rights violations that resulted from military encampment in the communities.

We have already started the investigation on the recent case of military presence in Talaingod and Kapalong, Davao del Norte, but I cannot disclose the information because the investigation is still going on, she said.

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Protests mark commemoration of Human Rights day in Davao region