Category Archives: Post Human

The human handprint on the natural world has become evident in all too many ways in recent decades. The changing climate, the decline of wildlife and the loss of forests and other natural landscapes all of these factors have led many scientists to conclude that were living in a new age theyve dubbed the Anthropocene, in which the planet is dominated by human, rather than natural, influences.

Now scientists have presented some stunning new evidence in support of this idea. Theyve found human activity is responsible for a huge explosion in the diversity of minerals on Earth possibly the biggest such event in the history of the planet, according to Robert Hazen, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washingtons Geophysical Laboratory who led the new research. The last major mineral diversification event is believed to have occurred about 2 billion years ago.

The research team, which includes Hazen and colleagues Marcus Origlieri and Robert Downs of the University of Arizona and Edward Grew of the University of Maine, published their findings Wednesday in the journal American Mineralogist.

Humans are doing this amazing increase in the number of crystals and the kinds of crystals that occur at or near a surface and many of these minerals are going to persist for billions of years, Hazen said. If youre a geologist who came back 100,000 years or a million or a billion years from now you would find amazing mineralogical evidence of a completely different time.

The International Mineralogical Association (IMA) recognizes about 5,000 different mineral species. Every mineral must have a certain type of crystal structure, and it must be naturally occurring, forming on its own through geological processes. But the strict definition of a mineral may be growing a little hazier, Hazen said.

For one thing, many of the minerals accepted by the IMA originate as a result of human activities, even if they technically form on their own. For example, there are many minerals associated with mining. They form on the walls of mine tunnels or precipitate out of mine water. Others have been found in piping systems or onmetal artifacts, and at least one new mineral was discovered in a storage cabinet in a museum, Hazen said.

After an exhaustive look throughthe 5,000 IMA-official minerals, the researchers concluded that 208 of them are the inadvertent result of human activities.

Additionally, humans have produced a huge assortment of mineral-like crystals through deliberate chemical processes. But theyre not defined as true minerals because they didnt arise naturally. For instance, there are mineral-like compounds produced specifically for use in cement, magnets, batteries, synthetic gemstones and a wide variety of other commercial applications. Altogether, there are tens of thousands of these mineral-like compounds. TheInorganic Crystal Structure Database lists 180,000, the researchers note in the paper, adding: the Anthropocene Epoch is an era of unparalleled inorganic compound diversification.

Theres been some debate among scientists across all fields about when the Anthropocene era began. Climate scientists have pointed to the industrial revolution, which marked the beginning of large-scale greenhouse gas emissions and the rapid, human-caused warming of the atmosphere.

From a mineralogical perspective, scientists are finding human-mediated minerals on structures or artifacts dating back thousands of years. ButHazen added that the biggest diversity explosion comes with the rise of chemistry about the time of 1800, very close to the industrial revolution and thats where you see this incredible spike, the greatest diversification of crystals on earth.

The huge human-mediated diversity of minerals is a major way mankind will leave its mark on geological history, but there are other signs humans will probably leave behind as well. For instance, humans are not only responsible for the creation of all kinds of minerals and mineral compounds but theyvealso been carting them all over the planet. The jewelry business, for instance, has led to the trade of mineral gems all over the world. Thousands of years from now, there will be rubies and sapphires lying around in places they would have never naturally formed.

Human engineering and construction is also likely to leave apermanent markon the geological landscape.

The largest impacts are our roads, our buildings, our cities places where we have huge quantities of transported stones and stone-like materials, Hazen said. These materials will persist, even as they become covered with layers upon layers of sediments over thousands of years, leading to large buried deposits of stone and mineral that only exist in that location because humans placed them there long ago.

Perhaps more than anything, thepapers findings speak to the power and long-lasting influence of human innovation. This effect has manifested in a variety of environmentally destructive waysover the past century fromclimate change, air and water pollutionto sharpdeclines in plants and animals. But from a mineralogical perspective, theres also evidence of the boundless nature of human creativity, Hazen said.

Were talking about a time of declining biodiversity, but thanks to human ingenuity, we have a time of increased crystal diversity, he said. In fact, the greatest increase in the history of the globe.

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Humans have caused an explosion of never-before-seen minerals all over the Earth - Washington Post

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik lost a human rights case on Wednesday when an appeals court overturned a lower court verdict that his near-isolation in a three-room cell was inhuman.

Breivik, an anti-Muslim neo-Nazi, massacred 77 people in Norways worst peacetime atrocity in July 2011. He killed eight with a bomb in Oslo and then gunned down 69, many of them teenagers, at a youth meeting of the then-ruling Labour Party.

The Borgarting Court of Appeal has determined that Anders Behring Breivik is not, and has not been, subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, the court said in a statement.

Strict conditions for Breivik, who has no contact with other inmates and has not repented for the attacks, were justified because there was a high risk that he would use violence in future and because other prisoners might attack him, it said.

Wednesdays verdict overturned a lower Oslo court ruling in 2016 that Breivik was held in a completely locked world with frequent strip searches in violation of a ban on inhuman or degrading treatment under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Survivors and relatives of the 77 dead welcomed the verdict after denouncing last years ruling as a perversion of a Convention that starts with the sentence everyones right to life shall be protected by law.

Were very relieved, Lisbeth Roeyneland, whose 18-year-old daughter Synne was shot dead and who now leads the main support group, told Reuters. I hope we dont hear any more about that terrorist for many, many years.

Breivik, now 38, is serving Norways longest sentence, 21 years, which can be extended if he is still considered a threat.

Breiviks lawyer Oeystein Storrvik said he would appeal to Norways Supreme Court. If that fails, Breivik can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. His isolation is the main problem, Storrvik said.

But the Norwegian Supreme Court generally only accepts cases that raise wider issues of legal principle.

The appeals court noted that Breiviks three-room cell includes a gym for exercise, and he can watch television and read newspapers. Limited contact with other inmates is under consideration, it said.

Some aspects of Breiviks detention have already been relaxed. Since late last year, Breivik can meet his lawyer separated by bars, allowing more contact than a previous thick glass wall rigged with microphones and speakers.

At a 2016 hearing in the district court, Breivik had said he was feeling bad in jail, complained about cold coffee and grumbled that jail food was worse than waterboarding.

But the appeals court heard in January that he wrote a thank you note to his guards after the lower court hearing, saying he did not mean to seem critical of them. He has also resumed a university course in international relations.

On Wednesday the appeals court upheld a finding by the lower court that extreme restrictions on Breiviks letters and visitors were justified. Breiviks only family visitor was his mother, who gave him a hug shortly before she died in 2013.

Norways Attorney General Fredrik Sejersted, the governments top lawyer sent to lead the appeal, said the verdict vindicated prisons and prison staff, who he said had been unfairly criticized in the lower courts decision.

The verdict recognizes the work done by the correctional service, he said, adding that prisons had invested far more to guard Brevik than a normal inmate.

(Editing by Gareth Jones)

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Mass Killer Breivik Loses Human Rights Case Against Norway - Huffington Post

Fairfax County police were searching for human remains in two parks Wednesday after receiving a tip.

Homicide, gang and crime scene detectives, members of the search-and-rescue unit, live find and cadaver dog teams are combing Holmes Run Park, near the 6000 block of Crater Place in the Lincolnia section of Fairfax County, and Lemon Road Park, in the Falls Church area.

Police wrapped up the search of Lemon Road Park without finding anything Wednesday afternoon.

Police declined to say what information led them to those locations, but they said the searches could go on for some time. Holmes Run Park was the scene of a 2013 killing of an MS-13 gang member.

[MS-13 member laughs while recalling killing]

There is a possibility that this situation is gang-related, said Officer Don Gotthardt, a Fairfax County police spokesman. Ive been told its not related to these specific, overlapping investigations that are ongoing.

Gotthardt was referring to the gang-related killing of 15-year-old Damaris A. Reyes Rivas, whose body was found near an industrial area in Springfield on Feb. 11, and the disappearance and return of two other teenage girls from Fairfax County.

Ten people, including six juveniles, have been charged in connection with the killing of the Gaithersburg teen, who police say was held against her will at Springfields Lake Accotink Park, assaulted and then slain on or around Jan. 8.

[Murder charges in slaying of Gaithersburg teen]

Police have declined to name the gang involved, but the girls mother said she had fallen in with MS-13, before voluntarily leaving home in mid-December. Two of those arrested in Damariss killing were also charged in the disappearance of 16-year-old Lizzy Rivera Colindres, who left her Springfield home with her 5-month-old son in mid-January and returned last month.

Damariss killing also has connections to the disappearance of 17-year-old Venus Lorena Romero Iraheta, of Alexandria. Iraheta also left home in mid-January and returned last month.

In addition, Prince William County police said Iraheta had a relationship with a 21-year-old Fairfax man, Christian Alexander Sosa Rivas, who was found dead along the Potomac River in Prince William County on Jan. 12.

Prince William County police have charged six people in the slaying and said it has connections to MS-13.

[Six arrested in MS-13 killing tied to other Va. cases]

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Tip spurs search for human remains in two parks, Fairfax County police say - Washington Post

The World Health Organization published a list naming 12 superbugs that pose the greatest threat to human health on Feb. 27, in a push for more research and drug development to fight these pathogens. (WHO via AP)

The World Health Organization announced its first list of antibiotic-resistant priority pathogens on Monday, detailing 12 families of bacteria that agency experts say pose the greatest threat to human health and kill millions of people every year.

The list is divided into three categories, prioritized by the urgency of the need for new antibiotics. The purpose is to guide and promote research and development of new drugs, officials said.Most of the pathogens are among the nearly two dozen antibiotic-resistant microbes that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in a 2013 reportcould cause potentially catastrophic consequences if the United States didn't act quickly to combat the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant infections.

This list is not meant to scare people about new superbugs, said Marie-Paule Kieny, an assistant director-general at WHO. It's intended to signal research and development priorities to address urgent public health threats.

[The superbug that doctors have been dreading just reached the United States]

Superbugs that the WHO considers the highest priority are responsible for severe infections and high mortality rates, especially among hospitalized patients in intensive care or using ventilators and blood catheters, as well as among transplant recipients and people undergoing chemotherapy. While these pathogens are not widespread, the burden for society is now alarming, she said.

Included in this highest-priority group is CRE,or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, which U.S. health officials have dubbed nightmare bacteria. In some instances, it kills up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. An elderly Nevada woman who died last year contracted an infection caused by CRE that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the United States.

Also in the first-tier group is Acinetobacter baumannii; the infections tied to it typically occur in ICUs and settings with very sick patients. The other bacteria tagged as a critical priority:Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can be spread on the hands of health-care workers or by equipment that gets contaminated and is not properly cleaned.

WHO's list follows a summit on superbugs that world leaders held last fall only the fourth time they had addressed a health issue at the U.N. General Assembly.

[Dangerous antibiotic-resistant infections on the rise for children in the U.S., study finds]

The list's second and third tiers the high and medium priority categories cover bacteria that cause more common diseases, such as gonorrhea and food poisoning caused by salmonella. While not associated with significant mortality rates, they have a dramatic health and economic impact, particularly in low-income countries, Kieny said.

Although there has been renewed interest and research investment in antibiotics because of the growing threat that antibiotic resistance poses, much of the work is more focused on antibiotics with a broad range, she said.We have to focus specifically for a much smaller range of bacteria, targeting the three highest-priority pathogens, Kieny said.

Drug companies have also tended to focus more on Gram-positive bacteria that tend to colonize the skin of healthy individuals and generate less resistance, said Evelina Tacconelli, who heads the infectious diseases division at the University of Tbingen in Germany, which helped develop the WHO list. By comparison, Gram-negative bacteria more frequently colonize intestinal reservoirs and can cause sepsis and severe urinary tract infections, especially among elderly patients.

[Common weed could help fight deadly superbug, study finds]

There have been no new classes of antibiotics discovered that have made it to market since 1984, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts antibiotic-resistance project. And there aren't enough drugs in the pipeline to meet future needs, Allan Coukell, senior director of health programs at Pew, said Monday.

Of the 40 antibiotics in clinical development in the United States, fewer than half even have the potential to treat the pathogens identified by WHO, he said. And based on history, most of those will fail to reach the clinic for reasons of efficacy or safety. So the outlook is grim.

Historical data show that generally only one of five drugs that reach the initial phase of testing in humans will receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration.Developing antibiotics to treat highly resistant bacterial infections is especially challenging because only a small number of patients contract these infections and meet the requirements to participate in traditional clinical trials.

Public health experts welcomed the announcement, including the need to address the problem in a comprehensive fashion.

While research and development are essential, we cannot just discover and develop our way out of this crisis, said Helen Boucher, an infectious diseases doctor at Tufts University and a spokeswoman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Prevention, the appropriate use of antibiotics and surveillance are all necessary as part of a coordinated approach, she said.

In the United States, antibiotic-resistant infections kill an estimated 23,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC. Global estimates are difficult because there is no uniform way to include antimicrobial resistance in causes of death. But experts say that drug-resistant infections, especially those caused by the WHO's highest-priority pathogens, double or triple the risk of death.

We are talking about millions of people affected, Tacconelli said.

Tuberculosis, whose resistance has been growing in recent years, was not included in the list because it is targeted by other dedicated programs, WHO said.

Here is the list from WHO:

Priority 1: Critical

1.Acinetobacter baumannii, carbapenem-resistant 2. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, carbapenem-resistant 3. Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant, ESBL-producing

Priority 2: High

4.Enterococcus faecium, vancomycin-resistant 5.Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant, vancomycin-intermediate and resistant 6.Helicobacter pylori, clarithromycin-resistant 7.Campylobacter spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant 8. Salmonellae, fluoroquinolone-resistant 9.Neisseria gonorrhoeae, cephalosporin-resistant, fluoroquinolone-resistant

Priority 3: Medium

10.Streptococcus pneumoniae, penicillin-non-susceptible 11.Haemophilus influenzae, ampicillin-resistant 12.Shigella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant

Read more:

1 in 3 antibiotics prescribed in the U.S. are unnecessary

New global coalition launched to create vaccines, prevent epidemics

Trump is energizing the anti-vaccine movement

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These 12 superbugs pose the greatest threat to human health, WHO says - Washington Post

President Donald Trump has been dogged by questions about conflicts of interest. He has declined to divest himself of his assets or put them in a blind trust, as is customary for presidents, news reports say. He has tweeted in defense of his daughters clothing line. And taxpayer money may go toward the Department of Defense leasing space in Trump Tower the presidents property to remain close to the president when he is in Manhattan, CNN recently reported.

At the heart of any conflict-of-interest situation is the question of whether to act in your own best interest or do what is best for the greater good. Trumps issues might make a cynic shrug. After all, dont we all look out only for ourselves?

Psychological research suggests the opposite: that self-interest is far from peoples primary motivation. In fact, humans are prone to act for the good of the group, many studies have found.

In the past 20 years, we have discovered that people all around the world are a lot more moral and a lot less selfish than economists and evolutionary biologists had previously assumed, and that our moral commitments are surprisingly similar: to reciprocity, fairness and helping people in need, even if acting on these motives can be personally costly for a person, Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and author of The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (Yale University Press, 2016), wrote in an email to Live Science. [No I in Team: 5 Key Cooperation Findings]

Philosophers have been arguing about whether people are inherently selfish since there has been such a thing as philosophers. In Platos Republic, Socrates has a discussion with his older brother Glaucon in which Glaucon insists that peoples good behavior actually only exists for self-interest: People only do the right thing because they fear being punished if they get caught. If human actions were invisible to others, Glaucon says, even the most just man would act purely for himself and not care if he harmed anyone in the process.

Its the sort of argument that might have appealed to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher famous for saying that the natural state of mans life would be nasty, brutish and short. According to Hobbes, humans must form social contracts and governments to prevent their selfish, violent tendencies from taking over.

Not all philosophers have agreed with this dour point of view, however. Philosopher John Locke, for example, thought that humans were inherently tolerant and reasonable, though he acknowledged humanitys capacity for selfishness.

So what does the science say? In fact, people are quite willing to act for the good of the group, even if its against their own interests, studies show. But paradoxically, social structures that attempt to give people incentives for good behavior can actually make people more selfish.

Take a classic example: In 2000, a study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that trying to punish bad behavior with a fine backfired spectacularly. The study took place at 10 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. First, researchers observed the centers for four weeks, tracking how many parents arrived late to pick up their children, inconveniencing the day care staff. Next, six of the centers introduced a fine for parents who arrived more than 10 minutes late. The four other centers served as a control, for comparison. (The fine was small but not insignificant, similar to what a parent might have to pay a babysitter for an hour.)

After the introduction of the fine, the rate of late pickups didnt drop. Instead, it nearly doubled. By introducing an incentive structure, the day cares apparently turned the after-school hours into a commodity, the researchers wrote. Parents who might have felt vaguely guilty for imposing on teachers patience before the fine now felt that a late pickup was just something they could buy. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

The Haifa day care study isnt the only one to find that trying to induce moral behavior with material incentives can make people less considerate of others. In a 2008 review in the journal Science, Bowles examined 41 studies of incentives and moral behavior. He found that, in most cases, incentives and punishments undermined moral behavior.

For example, in one study, published in 2000 in the journal World Development, researchers asked people in rural Colombia to play a game in which they had to decide how much firewood to take from a forest, with the consideration that deforestation would result in poor water quality. This game was analogous to real life for the people of the village. In some cases, people played the games in small groups but couldnt communicate about their decisions with players outside their group. In other cases, they could communicate. In a third condition, the players couldnt communicate but were given rules specifying how much firewood they could gather.

When allowed to communicate, the people in the small groups set aside self-interest and gathered less firewood for themselves, preserving water quality in the forest for the larger group as a whole. Regulations, on the other hand, had a perverse result over time: People gradually began to gather more and more firewood for themselves, risking a fine but ultimately putting their self-interest first.

People look for situational cues of acceptable behavior, Bowles said. Literally dozens of experiments show that if you offer someone a money incentive to perform a task (even one that she would have happily done without pay), this will turn on the Whats in it for me? way of thinking, often to such an extent that the person will perform less with the incentive than without.

Though cooperation is ingrained in the human psyche to some extent, its also obvious to anyone who has worked on a team that not everyone approaches group activities with the same attitude. An increasing focus on individual differences in humans reveals that some people tend to cooperate more than others.

It has been known for quite a while that people differ quite a lot, and they differ in all kinds of behavioral tendencies, said F.J. Weissing, a theoretical biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. But when people conducted experiments, they typically looked at the average behavior and not so much at the variation between subjects. [Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special]

That variation among subjects turns out to be quite important. In 2015, Weissing and his colleagues published a paper in the journal PNAS in which they allowed people to play a game where they could choose to seek out either information about the choices of other players, or information about how successful those other players were. People were remarkably consistent about the kind of information they sought, the researchers found: Two-thirds always asked for the same kind of information, whether they preferred information about choices or success.

Then, the researchers split people into groups based on which information they preferred, with some groups comprising only people who liked choice information, some groups made up of only people who liked success information, and some mixed. These groups then played games in which cooperation benefited everyone, but a selfish strategy could elevate an individuals fortunes while hurting the group.

People who fixated on the success of their teammates were more likely to behave selfishly in these games, the researchers found. This finding shows that this strategy comparing others successes and failures prompts people to engage in behaviors focused on their own gain, the researchers said.

In contrast, people who focus on how the rest of the group is acting, regardless of individual successes, might be more prone to working together, the researchers said.

Both cooperation and selfishness may be important behaviors, meaning that species may be most successful if they have some individuals that exhibit each behavior, Weissing told Live Science. In follow-up experiments that have not yet been published, he and his colleagues have found that in some economic games, mixed groups perform far better than groups made up only of conformists or only of those who look out for themselves. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

Very fundamental physiological differences between people may be at the root of these different social strategies, Weissing said, including differences in hormone levels and organization of the central nervous system. However, he agreed that situational factors can subtly push people toward cooperation or self-interest. More realistic studies of cooperative and selfish behavior are needed, he said.

In real life, cooperation looks very, very different from these very, very simplified lab contexts, Weissing said. And the dominant factor is not really money, but something else. I think that makes quite a difference.

Original article on Live Science.

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Are Humans Inherently Selfish? | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post

The Donald Trump fan busted for scaling Trump Tower in a bid to see the then-presidential nominee up close took a plea deal Monday in Manhattan court for the wild stunt.

Stephen Rogata, 19, copped to misdemeanor reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct for climbing 21 floors of the Fifth Avenue skyscraper last August using giant suction cups and rope.

The human fly must continue mental health treatment, stay in college and abide by an order of protection in favor of the president.

If he complies with the conditions for one year, hell have no record and face no jail time, prosecutors said.

Weve spoken to the Trump Organization, and they have indicated they are comfortable with the peoples offer, said Assistant District Attorney Pierre Griffith.

Judge Joanne Watters warned Rogata that he was to have no contact with Donald J. Trump or the deal could be rescinded, and hed face up to one year in jail.

The Virginia resident told investigators that he made the daring Aug. 10 ascent to offer the real estate tycoon crucial advice on how to tackle his job as leader of the free world.

My intention was to get a meeting with Mr. Trump to give him secret information, he allegedly said.

The three-hour spectacle, which attracted hundreds of onlookers in the street below, ended when cops yanked the daredevil off the glass facade and dragged him inside the building.

Several items fell from his backpack during the climb, including a laptop, officials said.

Defense lawyer Paul Shechtman was satisfied with the resolution. Were very pleased that the district attorney handled the case in the way it did, and that it understood the mental health issues that underlie the case, he said.

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Human fly takes plea deal for climbing Trump Tower - New York Post

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02/27/2017 04:12 pm ET

Video-making mega force Super Deluxewants to raise awareness about the biology of alternative facts master Alex Jones, specifically the idea that he might not be fully human.

Alex Jones has made a name for himself by giving a voice to fringe journalism. But just so were clear, and as this video proves, Alex Jones is definitely human, and not a froth-snarling creature of reptilian origins.

Twitter Made The Oscars A Whole Hell Of A Lot Funnier 21

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Proof That Human Alex Jones Is Most Certainly Not Part Reptile

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JERUSALEM The Israeli government is refusing to allow an American investigator from Human Rights Watch into the country, saying Thursday that the group is systematically anti-Israel and works as a tool for pro-Palestinian propaganda.

Officials at Human Rights Watch one of the most prominent rights monitors in the world denounced the decision to deny entry to Omar Shakir, its recently named Israel and Palestine country director. Shakir is a U.S. citizen. His parents were from Iraq.

The New York-based group shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. One of the top backers of Human Rights Watch is financier and philanthropist George Soros.

Our staff cant work in Cuba, Egypt, North Korea, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. This is not a club that Israel wants to join, said Sari Bashi, Israel and Palestine advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. Bashi, an Israeli, is based in South Africa.

Authorities in Egypt in 2014 barred two senior executives of Human Rights Watch from entering the country as the pair were about to release a year-long investigation ofmass killings of anti-government demonstrators at the hands of security forces.

In a letter dated Monday, Israels immigration service, which approves visas for foreign workers, said it based its rejection on an advisory from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which noted that for some time now, this organizations public activities and reports have engaged in politics in the service of Palestinian propaganda, while falsely raising the banner of human rights. It did not cite specifics in the letter.

Emmanuel Nahshon, a top spokesman for Israels Foreign Ministry, confirmed that Israel rejected the visa request for Shakir, basing its decision not on the individual but on its low opinion of Human Rights Watch.

We said no. Its very simple. We consider the group to be biased, systemically hostile toward Israel. In a way, we consider them absolutely hopeless, Nahshon said.

He said the refusal to allow the Human Rights Watch investigator into the country does not signal a new get-tough policy against nongovernmental organizations, as its critics charge.

This doesnt mean that Israel will not allow human rights organizations to work in Israel. On the contrary, were keen to work with them, Nahshon said. He added that decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

This decision and the spurious rationale should worry anyone concerned about Israels commitment to basic democratic values, Iain Levine, program director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Bashi said that in the past year, Human Rights Watch has not only reported on alleged violations by the Israeli government but also investigated and condemned the arbitrary detention of journalists and activists by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and executions by Hamas authorities in Gaza. It also probed and denounced a Jerusalem bus bombing claimed by a suspected affiliate of Hamas, the Islamist militant organization that runs the Gaza Strip and has been designated a terrorist group by the United States and Israel.

Homegrown rights groups here, such asBTselem and Peace Now, and global organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have long been accused by Israelis of unfair treatment. The Israel-based groupNGO Monitor, which provides information to the Israeli government on Palestinian incitement, charges that Human Rights Watch disproportionately focuses on condemnations of Israel and promotes an agenda based solely on the Palestinian narrative of victimization and Israeli aggression.

On its website, NGO Monitor features a short video clip of Shakir speaking at the University of California at Irvine in 2010 in favor of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which supporters say is designed to force Israel to end its almost 50-year military occupation and practices it compares to apartheid against Palestinians. Shakir was not working for Human Rights Watch then.

Israelis say the BDS movement seeks to delegitimize Israel. A number of U.S. governors and state houses have come out with executive orders and billsagainst the boycotts.

Israels right-wing government has recently targeted Israeli human rights groups for extra scrutiny and warned European governments to stop funding them. Members of anti-occupation groups, such as Breaking the Silence, which is composed of Israeli army veterans,have been called traitors.

The Israeli parliament in July passed a bill to increase transparency for Israeli NGOs that get most of their funding from abroad. Leaders of the nongovernmental organizations, who make up the core of Israels peace camp and are stalwarts of the dwindling left wing in Israel, said the law was written by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus governmentto muzzle opposition to the military occupation of the West Bank.

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Federico Antoni is managing partner at ALLVP, an early-stage VC based in Mexico. He is a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Over the last couple of years, a billion new people have joined the super-connected world. Billions more around the developing world, now, walk with a high-speed computer in their pockets. And yet, they dont have a bank account, a formal education or access to most of the services we take for granted in the U.S. Imagine the possibilities imagine how you can change the lives of billions of people.

This is how I closed the Stanford class about venture opportunities in emerging ecosystems three years ago. Looking back, when I first began teaching the course, I could only count on the brilliant and spontaneous minds seated in front of me to help me foresee the possibilities.

I recognized that it was hard to imagine them from the trenches. So, I mostly stuck to describing the macro opportunities and the barriers that had prevented local entrepreneurs from making it big (leaving the majority of the world unable to unlock the benefits of their ideas): material, cultural and adoption walls.

Indeed, starting a tech company in emerging economies is an enormous feat that faces innumerable roadblocks due to poor access to capital, lack of support networks and an inadequate talent pool. Even if a founder is able to gain traction against these odds, scaling is hard because of poor infrastructure, an ill-suited financial sector and uncertainty in the legal and political contexts.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is accessing local markets. Potential client bases lack purchasing power, a reliable internet connection and sufficient education levels to operate in the digital world; some lack the motivation to climb out of poverty. Consequently, smartphone penetration alone did not really prepare developing economies for the new Uber of X or the Airbnb for X. However, it did create the most propitious environment to build thousands of X + AI solutions, setting the stage for the upcoming revolutionaries: homegrown AI-first innovators.

The best indicator of why machine learning technologies will shape the world more deeply than anybody predicted is how fast the open source movement in the field is moving. Companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google are opening parts of their most advanced algorithms. Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingstone and other visionaries launched the OpenAI initiative to foster collaboration and democratize access for founders: Deep learning is an empirical science, and the quality of a groups infrastructure is a multiplier on progress. Fortunately, todays open-source ecosystem makes it possible for anyone to build great deep learning infrastructure.

Anyone, anywhere, any time! Indeed, over the last couple of years, AI research reached a tipping point precipitated by a combination of low-cost ultra powerful computing, progress in algorithm design and access to large sources of data. OpenAI believes accessing AI capabilities should be as easy as launching a website.

By now, you must be convinced that the world will be eaten by intelligent software literally in the scariest scenarios. If you are a technologist, you can almost touch the future. You can feel a car stop automatically as it arrives at your destination. You can hear the door open automatically. Without looking, you see yourself jumping off and heading directly to a highlighted table. A 165-degree personalized latte, perfectly flavored to your morning palette, is already waiting for you. You virtually wave a quick see ya to your gaming pals before you drop your Oculus Rift 6 and start your real-life day. You know the future will be awesome in the Valley. Facebook and Tesla are poised to own whats next

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, automation will transform billions of lives in simpler but more profound ways: from getting a decent primary education to providing spot prices for crops, as well as access to fair credit and personally matched job opportunities. Billions of smartphones, the best sensors on earth, are already widely deployed. I believe local entrepreneurs will own that part of the future. They will lead this revolution because local problems will be finally solved at a cost that the majority will be able to afford.

Most of the traditional barriers founders face will be eradicated as most tech solutions will be detached of local infrastructure and local non-market environments think of local currencies, for example. This, in turn, will attract part of the whopping $10 billion in financing already backing some 1,500 AI startups from 70 countries (Venture Scanner). And this is projected to rise more than fourfold in 2017 (Forrester Research). Technical teams around the world will be connected to the global AI community for collaboration and support. These local idealists will be empowered to lead a new wave of innovation by leveraging their proximity to local problems, by accessing unique local data and by better understanding the humans they want to serve.

One spring morning in 2017, a 40-year-old mother of three living on the outskirts of Bangalore feels a small lump in her right breast. She immediately called her mother, who urges her to visit the local clinic that recently acquired a state of the art mammography scanner. When she got there, as she stood in line, she could see the white artifact, the size of a vending machine, in an empty room. The lights were off.

Is that the machine?, she asked. Why do I need to wait three months for my consultation? No one is using it!The man behind the desk responded, Well, we have the scanner, but our only radiologist moved to another city and we havent been able to find a replacement.

Medical equipment is often useless without the manpower i.e. experience and intelligence of a specialist, and three months is overly sufficient breeding time for cancer. Waiting three months could be the difference between life and death. India, like most developing economies, faces a chronic shortage of medical doctors. India has 0.7 doctors per 1,000 people lower than Chinas 1.5 or the United States more than 2 and Frances 3.5, according to WHO. Thankfully, in India and other countries with similar challenges, nurses and paramedics have become the cornerstone of their healthcare systems. Unfortunately, even if they could be taught to operate a mammography scanner, they can seldom detect masses or micro calcifications.

Rohit Kumar Pandey, Tathagato Rai Dastidar and Apurv Anand want to solve the problem caused by the chronic shortage of trained medical practitioners. They are part of the team that founded SigTuple, an Indian startup that is building a platform to provide healthcare solutions by detecting different diseases using machine learning software. It promises to automatically analyze medical images and data to aid diagnosis.

A Computer Science PhD, former director of Amexs Big Data labs and now SigTuples Chief Scientist Officer, Tathagato believes the only way healthcare services can reach more people and take advantage of infrastructure is to make doctors more efficient. In the future, lack of specialists or lack of local infrastructure should not be a barrier for better womens health. Long distances and translation issues in a country with more than 100 different spoken languages will no longer prevent the unprivileged from gaining access to basic services wherever they live.

Nurses will be enhanced by AI to heal anyone, teachers will be empowered to teach at a personalized pace and local journalists will be liberated of language constraints to give citizens more sources of information. It has long been established that solving local problems, as opposed to importing global solutions from rich countries, should be the calling of native entrepreneurs.

Still, today, many founders choose to launch and scale copycats that can only cater to the upper classes in emerging markets. They are going after technology early adopters who have decent purchasing power. Automation will soon make services in poor countries cheaper than they have ever been. Solving local problems at scale will now become economically feasible. So these founders have the advantage of being on the ground and living first-hand the problems they will solve.

Even the best Stanford storytelling techniques will never be as powerful as living the real and deep frustration caused by a problem hurting your own on a daily basis.

I have an investor friend who loves drones. He often flies his latest addition in front of his office, where he questionably experiments attaching objects on top of the lenient quadrupeds. The difference between this investor and any other gadget-obsessed VC is that Mbwanas office is not on Sand Hill Road or SOMA, but in front of the African Savannah.

Until now, I had never understood his fascination for overpriced flying toys. Today, computer vision and image processing will be able to monitor land use or deforestation programs, drastically improve efficiency for farming and even check for flood risk. He bets governments and development agencies will start using them more and more. Mbwana knows better than any other VC, because he knows the local terrain. And local terrain is data.

Admit it: Do you still have that idealized view of a Masai holding a feature phone checking market prices, popularized by the media?, writes Mbwana on his Savannah Fundsblog.

Knowing the land and the local organization to get data may very well make the Masai farmer fantasy become a reality. And Mbwana will be there to help founders do exactly that. He knows that successfully integrating the power of drones and computer vision technologies to solve problems in Africa is only half the challenge. Partnering with governments and corporates will be a necessity not only to reach the consumer but to get access to data.

Negotiating with multiple entities across sub-Saharan Africa is not easy, and local entrepreneurs and hands-on investors have a clear advantage. Moreover, as innovation in business models and tech accelerates, the outdated or sometimes total lack of regulation in developing economies can play in ones favor, albeit riskily. While the FAA has already regulated drone flying, curtailing innovation in a nascent industry in the U.S., most emerging markets have yet to address it. So Mbwana will have the chance to support founders pushing the envelope in unregulated countries and maybe bring solutions to the U.S. once local regulations approve.

In the early hours of a cold night in 2012, a young Mexican artist, Pia Camil, and architect, Mateo Riestra, welcomed their first son. They gave him what must be the most Mexican name of all: Guadalupe.

Having his first baby touched Mateo profoundly. That year, the young father launched a Kickstarter campaign for a project that had become urgent. He knew Disney and Mattel would entertain and distract Lupe, but he felt his son needed a different type of toy that would better equip him with more important skills to get a head start in the world.

After a successful campaign, Mateo decided to drop his design studio and start a toy company called Lupe Toys with the mission of leveraging natures intelligence to develop gamesome educational experiences. Wanting to have more impact, he joined NUMA Mexico,Mexicos affiliate of a French global accelerator, to transform his indie toy company into an edtech startup. After months of exploration, the focus turned on the development of an IoT-based gaming system running on a machine learning platform that could measure and increase childrens creativity.

Creativity is a better predictor of lifetime accomplishments than IQ or school performance. Imagine a generation of kids around the world benefiting from a personalized learning experience powered by machine learning to become more creative and, in turn, more successful.

Mateos ambitious journey to transform education did not come from a stay at Singularity or from a lab in Israel. Love sparked it. Explain to a social media wizard with no kids how it feels to see your baby marvel when her creativity is empowered. Its impossible to understand that feeling even if you provide the best analytical tool to analyze millions of Facebook timelines. Try to explain a Mexican Albur, a vulgar ironic Mexican joke, to the wittiest British data scientist. To borrow from Shakespeare, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In short, you need to understand words beyond Googles search gold mine you need cultural context and the experience of hearing the tone that often precedes the joke. Teaching to understand deep feelings or cultural references will require entrepreneurs who understand local humans. Life can only teach life, and not a successive jumbo round of financing. Beyond simply eliminating repetitive tasks and outsourcing entire professions to software, AI will put people at the center of software development. AI can empower entrepreneurs to create, imagine and innovate at entirely new levels to drive not only growth, but happiness.

The fourth industrial revolution is here. While large tech companies will focus on cutting-edge solutions, and corporates in developing economies will miss yet another wave of innovation, AI-first entrepreneurs in emerging markets will bring a revolution to address the problems brought by a hot, flat and crowded world.

I believe the only true barrier for these entrepreneurs is doubting that only they can make these things happen. Will Tathagatos software save lives in India? Will Mbwana back the next drone unicorn? Will Mateo educate new, more-creative minds? I dont know. What I do know is that these transforming applications of deep learning will come from developing economies.

Now that youve reached the end of your quick diagonal read, this may feel just like any other post about AI paraphrasing The Economist or a16z. But, its not about artificial neural networks or about training machines to think. Its about human will. Its an outcry for battle written for every founder working hard from emerging ecosystems around our planet. Even if they still feel the odds are against them and see walls being built, AI may very well be the tool they needed to truly make it big. Maybe now they can start a company built to solve a local problem and scale to change the world for the better.

This post is about a better world brought by human ingenuity. Its about a human opportunity, an invitation to founders and investors in advanced economies to come and help us change the lives of billions of humans. Come join the movement to help mankind move forward for a better, fairer future. Its time!

Read the original post:
Not another AI post - TechCrunch

Last week a grim Facebook post by 19-year-old Ashley Hardacre went viral with a warning to other women: Beware of items left on your car's windshieldthey could cost you your safety.

According to Women in the World, Hardacre detailed a strange anecdote regarding her own car's windshield. She had just left the mall where she works in Flint, Michigan, and when she arrived at her car, she found a flannel shirt on her windshield.

Next to her, however, were two other carsone of them runningand Hardacre said she immediately felt uneasy and didn't want to get out of her car. She thought it might have just been a mistake, the shirt left by accident, so she tried to remove the shirt with her wipers. It didn't workthe shirt had been completely wrapped around one of the blades.

"Luckily I knew better than to remove the shirt with cars around me so I drove over to a place where I was safe and quickly rolled down my window and got the shirt off," Hardacre wrote.

She had recalled hearing about this tactic before, however, being used by human traffickers to abduct young women. Traffickers would make targets get out of their cars to remove the item from their windshields, and then take women when they were distracted.

Hardacre reported her story to Flint police, who said they had never seen anything like her situation before. Though her Facebook post has since been taken down, it was shared more than100,000 times.

"There have been no other incidences like this. Its kind of unknown as to what or why or who [did this]," Brad Wangler, a Flint Township police detective sergeant, told CBS News earlier this week.

But as it turns out, Hardacre wasn't being targeted by traffickers. No, she wasn't in danger that nightat least not because of the flannel shirt itself. According to MLive, the mysterious shirt was courtesy of dumb, not funny pranksters.

According to Flint police they were able to identify the description of a car as well as two men with the help of the mall where Hardacre works.

"As a result of these interviews, they admitted to putting the shirt on the vehicle as a random prank," a statement from police read. "Also, interior video surveillance at the Genesee Valley Center corroborated their presence at the mall."

The police said the men had no idea that putting the flannel on the car could have been interpreted as a human trafficking tactic, and that they left the parking lot more than an hour before Hardacre left work. They've also apologized to her, because "their actions caused her to feel scared that night."

So, don't worry folks, there is no spiking trend of shirts on cars being used to lure human trafficking victimsjust jerks trying to think up of idiotic ways to scare people.

Read more:
Viral Facebook post alleging human trafficking tactic was just a poorly attempted prank - The Daily Dot