Category Archives: Post Human

President Michael D Higgins and Dr Jim Browne, President of NUI Galway, at The Human Right to Health meeting at NUIG on Friday. Photograph: Joe OShaughnessy

President Michael D Higgins has called for a deepening of the discourse between economics and human rights, particularly the human right to health.

It is long past time that we moved the human rights discourse out of the legal and academic area, Mr Higgins told a meeting hosted under the presidents ethics initiative at NUI Galway (NUIG) on Friday.

On his recent visit to South Africa, Mr Higgins said he had observed how judicial protection of the right to health has been used to engage with complex issues such as healthcare, budgeting and the provision of retroviral care.

Formal legal protection of the right to health will not, in itself, resolve profound poverty and structural inequality, and the right to health remains essentially a political matterMr Higgins said.

Mr Higgins noted the gap between the revolution in economics and its disconnect from the human rights discourse, and explained that his focus on ethics was influenced by the Bangladeshi-Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.

He called for greater progress in taking the bold political decision to address these issues.

This year in particular we cannot have more of the same,he said, and 2015 had been regarded as perhaps the most important year for the future of humanity in a generation, with the Post-2015 Development Conference in September in New York and the Climate Change Conference in December in Paris.

These blocking mechanisms of the powerful and the countries that were representing the powerful and representing unaccountable multinationals cannot destroy these important conferences,he said.

Keynote speaker Prof Sofia Gruskin praised Ireland for being one of 163 signatories to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which serves as the main foundational document for the legal obligations stemming from the right to health, but noted that her own country, the US, had not signed up.

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President calls for discourse between economics and human rights

An intelligence sharing regime between UK and US security services was unlawful, a surveillance watchdog has ruled.

Judges on the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which deals with complaints against GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, found intercepted communications were provided to Britain's listening post GCHQ under a programme that up until December breached human rights laws.

However, during the legal proceedings leading up to the judgment, the Government revealed previously-secret details of the legal framework that governs the bulk interception and intelligence sharing regime - and by doing so made it compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The complicated ruling in essence means that prior to December the programme was unlawful because the public were unaware of the safeguards in place - but since they were revealed by the hearings the human rights violation has been addressed.

Human rights groups Liberty, Privacy International and Amnesty, brought a legal challenge against GCHQ following disclosures made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about mass surveillance programmes known as Prism and Upstream.

Today's ruling has been broadly welcomed by the groups, however, they disagree that the safeguards revealed in the course of the proceedings are sufficient to make GCHQ's intelligence-sharing activities lawful and will challenge the decision at the European Court of Human Rights.

It is the first time the tribunal has found against the intelligence agencies in its 15-year history.

GCHQ said the the judges had shown that the legal frameworks governing both the bulk interception and intelligence-sharing regime were compatible with human rights and the ruling against them was in "one small respect in relation to the historic intelligence-sharing regime".

A GCHQ spokesman said: "We are pleased that the court has once again ruled that the UK's bulk interception regime is fully lawful. It follows the court's clear rejection of accusations of 'mass surveillance' in their December judgment.

"The IPT has, however, found against the Government in one small respect in relation to the historic intelligence-sharing legal regime.

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Mass internet spying was unlawful

What do you call a practice that most data scientists have heard of, few have tried, and even fewer know how to do well? It turns out, no one is quite certain what to call it. In our latest free report Real-World Active Learning: Applications and Strategies for Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning, we examine the relatively new field of active learning also referred to as human computation, human-machine hybrid systems, and human-in-the-loop machine learning. Whatever you call it, the field is exploding with practical applications that are proving the efficiency of combining human and machine intelligence.

Find out:

This report gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how human-in-the-loop machine learning has helped improve the accuracy of Google Maps, match business listings at GoDaddy, rank top search results at Yahoo!, refer relevant job postings to people on LinkedIn, identify expert-level contributors using the Quizz recruitment method, and recommend womens clothing based on customer and product data at Stitch Fix.

As explained by Stitch Fixs chief algorithms and analytics officer, Eric Colson:

Stitch Fixs expert merchandisers evaluate each new piece of clothing and encode its attributes, both subjective and objective, into structured data, such as color, fit, style, material, pattern, silhouette, brand, price, and trendiness. These attributes are then compared with a customer profile, and the machine produces recommendations based on the model.

But when the time comes to recommend merchandise to the customer, the machine cant possibly make the final call. This is where Stitch Fix stylists step in. Stitch Fix hands off a final selection of recommendations to one of roughly 1,000 human stylists, each of whom serves a set of customers.

In the report, Cuzzillo takes us from fashion recommendations to mapping off-road locations at Google:

The algorithms collect data from satellite, aerial, and Googles Street View images, extracting such data as street numbers, speed limits, and points of interest. Yet even at Google, algorithms only get you to a certain point, and then humans need to step in to manually check and correct the data. Google also takes advantage of help from citizens a different take on crowdsourcing who give input using Googles Map Maker program to contribute data for off-road locations where Street View cars cant drive.

The report also dives into the closely related trend of crowdsourcing a critical way to quickly label hundreds or even thousands of items that ultimately feed back into an algorithm to improve its performance.

Download the free report here.

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Human-in-the-loop machine learning

Post Human Era - Artifact One - Forest Activities
uploaded in HD at http://www.TunesToTube.com.

By: Daniel Finfer

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Post Human Era - Artifact One - Forest Activities - Video

A single stroke doubles a person's risk of developing dementia over the following decade, even when that person's mental ability is initially unaffected. Why this delayed deterioration occurs has been a mystery. Now, Stanford University School of Medicine investigators think they have discovered a major reason for it.

In experiments using both mouse models of stroke and brain-tissue samples from humans, they linked the delayed onset of post-stroke dementia to the persistent presence, in the brain, of specialized immune cells that shouldn't be there at all.

The discovery could potentially translate into ways of identifying people at risk for dementia, allowing physicians time to try to stave off the disease. Drugs that can disable these immune cells are already available.

At roughly 800,000 new cases per year, stroke is the second-biggest cause of serious long-term disability in the United States, generating $74 billion annually in treatment and caretaking costs. Of the 7 million living stroke survivors nationwide, one-third either suffers from dementia, or will.

In a study to be published Feb. 4 in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team directed by Marion Buckwalter, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery and of neurology and neurosciences, examined several mouse models of stroke, as well as human brain-tissue samples, and found strong evidence that antibody-producing cells called B cells play a key role in the delayed onset of dementia. Buckwalter is the study's senior author. The lead author is former postdoctoral scholar Kristian Doyle, PhD.

B cells help, usually

The antibodies that B cells produce are normally of great value to us. They circulate throughout blood and lymph, and bind to microbial invaders, gumming up the pathogens' nefarious schemes and marking them for destruction by other immune cells. Occasionally, B cells wrongly begin generating antibodies that bind to the body's own healthy tissues, causing certain forms of autoimmune disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis. Rituxan, a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this condition, is actually an antibody itself: Its target is a protein found on the surface of every B cell. Use of this drug depletes B cells in the body, relieving the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and other B-cell-mediated disorders.

Like almost all other types of immune cells, B cells are virtually nonexistent in the brains of healthy people, whose outermost ramparts are mostly impervious to the cells and large molecules (like antibodies) freely circulating elsewhere. But the blood-brain barrier is not entirely unbreachable and is rendered much more permeable upon brain damage.

Two small reports from the last decade mentioned the puzzling presence of substantial numbers of immune cells in about 50 percent of the autopsied brains of people who had suffered strokes. This led Buckwalter to look more closely at the phenomenon.

Buckwalter is a team leader of Stanford's Stroke Collaborative Action Network, which is part of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute and coordinates stroke research efforts throughout the university. She was intrigued by those reports. So she and her colleagues embarked on a series of experiments in mouse models of stroke. Buckwalter's group fine-tuned their experimental procedures so that brain structures central to cognition in the mice would initially be left intact after a stroke.

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Stanford study ties immune cells to delayed onset of post-stroke dementia

Post Human Era - Artifact One - Dear Internet Friend
uploaded in HD at http://www.TunesToTube.com.

By: Daniel Finfer

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Post Human Era - Artifact One - Dear Internet Friend - Video

The landscape of interaction design is a mess. But messes have a way of also bringing about opportunities, dont they?

Examples abound of inappropriate and unnecessary technology masquerading as innovation. Look at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show from last month; it featured a bewildering array of innovation box-checking, ranging from touchscreen fridges to dashboards that take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road. But any modern innovation manager can slap a touchscreen on a product and tell you what it adds over its analog counterpart. I believe its just as important to consider what is being lost.

Consumers have grown weary of novelty. People crave meaning in their products and humanness in their interactions. From unnecessarily curved screens, to cups that tell you what you know you just poured into them, we interaction designers are as culpable as anyone in the marketing chain in proposing solutions in search of problems. And admitting that we have a problem is just the first step: The future of interaction design will be about making it human (again).

I want interaction designers to remember where we came from in order to stay mindful of where were going. In the early 20th century, interaction design wasnt much of a career because there simply wasnt any need for it. Mechanical devices were controlled physically and directly, period. A lathe handle turned a gear that turned the lathe in the same direction. You could design the handle to fit the human hand a bit better, but otherwise you didnt have to solve any deep cognitive interaction problems such as, How will this interface be understood, and valued by the user? What role does metaphor play? What does this interaction say about our brand?

An early example of interaction design that resembles what we do today is the typewriter. You remember those, dont you? They were like a word processor and a printer all in one, but with infinite battery life.

Though strictly mechanical, typewriters do, after all, have a one-to-one relationship between buttons (aka keys) and their actions. Nonetheless, somebody thought to layout those buttons in a very specific non-linear way and in an abstract order according to letter frequency in the English languageitself an abstract concept. The layout also took into consideration tactile human factors such as physical reach of average fingers and the distance between each button. Theres a reason Q and Z are so awkward to get to and ASDF are not.

This innovation was further humanized with the introduction of a patented key curvature that subtly mirrors your finger shape. Here we have an early example of human interaction, and one whose near-perfect design has barely changed in 140 years. Even though a typewriter is quite an abstract device, weve come to see it as natural, human, primitive, and even emotive.

Human interaction is so basic and natural and yet as our tools have evolved, weve struggled with the conversation between abstract and tangiblebetween digital and analog. I cant think of a more abstract invention or one that highlights this dialog better than the personal computer. Computers of the mid-century could compute anything todays machines can, just more slowly. But, in hindsight, speed wasnt the barrier to mass adoption. The real problem was that humankind had invented the most powerful machine in the history of history and yet almost nobody knew how to use it, or really even cared.

The breakthrough moment for the digital age wasnt just the addition of monitors and keyboards, nor was it the miniaturization that semiconductors introduced, astounding though that was. As I see it, the real coming-of-age moment was an idea alone. An idea born in the 1970s and which would humanize this beast and turn it into everyones current superpower. The Graphic User Interface; the greatest idea in interaction design. Ever.

The first GUI came from Xeroxs astonishingly overlooked Palo Alto Research Center, where I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall (or beanbag chair). The history of PARC and how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appropriated everything of value away from Xerox is by now well known (and if not, watch Triumph of the Nerds immediately). Suffice it to say that everything we now know as modern computing: the networked office, tablets, icons, menus, email (and this list goes on) was hatched then and there. But at the top of that list is the GUI and the deceptively simple introduction of the Desktop Metaphor.

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To Make Tech Design Human Again, Look to the Past

11 yr aged Dunhill 965! - Post Human Piper
Thank you so much Jason! Post Human Piper - follow this link and go sub him!! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD8ZRpJLeHl860UZbZ5QhFQ.

By: OREGONPIPER

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11 yr aged Dunhill 965! - Post Human Piper - Video

The family of Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter who has been detained in Iran for more than half a year, issued the following statement Sunday in response to the naming of Judge Abolghassem Salavati to hear the case in Revolutionary Court:

February 1, 2015

We can confirm the recent reports that Judge Salavati has been assigned to Jason and Yeganehs case in Irans Revolutionary Court. We find it very disturbing that the judiciary would select a judge to oversee the case who has been sanctioned by (and barred from entering) the European Union due to what it calls gross human rights violations.

Jason has dedicated the past decade of his life to informing the world of the true nature of Iran, the Iranian people, and their culture. In stark contrast, the Iranian government has spent the past six months displaying to the world a disregard for its own laws and the international human rights agreements that it has pledged to follow.

What Iran expects to gain from the prolonged and unjust detention of Jason is unclear to us. What is evident to us, though, is that this trial has nothing to do with Jason or Yeganehs actual actions, and may simply be a pretense to distract the world from some other motive the government may have.

We remain hopeful that the proper authorities will ensure that the court will quickly convene and that the judge, despite his reputation, will even more quickly discover no basis for a finding other than not guilty and will order Jason released immediately.

Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.

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Family of Post reporter held in Iran issues statement

LINCOLN Gov. Pete Ricketts has announced the three finalists for the chief executive officer of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.

Ricketts has been conducting a national search to fill the position. The candidates were identified with the help of Ford Webb Associates, a national firm with expertise in public and governmental sectors who previously assisted then-Gov. Bob Kerrey in a search for a director's position in his cabinet.

The finalist are:

Clarence Carter of Scottsdale, Arizona, recently served as director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security under Gov. Jan Brewer.

David Newell of Omaha currently serves as president and CEO of Nebraska Families Collaborative, a nonprofit child welfare corporation.

Courtney Phillips of Prairieville, Louisiana, currently serves as deputy secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals under Gov. Bobby Jindal.

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Ricketts names 3 finalists for Health and Human Services CEO post