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Gold Stocks Cognitive Dissonance & Denial - The Market Oracle  

The Market Oracle

Gold Stocks Cognitive Dissonance & Denial The Market Oracle Obviously if your NOT in denial, you know this cannot end well, no matter how much the so-called "Monetary Authorities" keep queering up the money supply, digitally, or thru debt issuance or otherwise. The question popped up " Is there an edict that ...

 
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r0B0t: Trump could become Mr. Brexit  

Early Thursday morning, Republican candidate for president Donald Trump wrote a cryptic tweet. 

It read, "They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!"

Almost immediately, the title began trending on Twitter and jokes flooded social media, each more confused than the last. But, there is a method to this that's one example of Twitter madness.

Trump is most definitely referring to the United Kingdom's June vote to leave the European Union, and most probably how the results surprised many because polls leading up to the referendum indicated the opposite result.

Clearly, unless he really has gotten into Mr. Robot, Trump sees himself in the same position as the UK residents who wanted to keep their country out of international economic affairs. Read more...

More about 2016 Election, Brexit, Mr. Brexit, Donald Trump, and World  
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r0B0t: The robots of war: AI and the future of combat - Engadget  

The robots of war: AI and the future of combat Engadget The 1983 film WarGames portrayed a young hacker tapping into NORAD's artificial-intelligence-driven nuclear weapons' system. When the hit movie was screened for President Reagan, it prompted the commander in chief to ask if it were possible for the ...

 
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r0B0t: Sex doll makers "putting finishing touches" to artificial intelligence app so they can love you back - Mirror.co.uk  

Mirror.co.uk

Sex doll makers "putting finishing touches" to artificial intelligence app so they can love you back Mirror.co.uk Matt McMullen, CEO of RealDoll, revealed the next step in making the high-end sex toys will be to give them AI to replicate humans more closely than ever. "We are building an AI system which can either be connected to a robotic doll OR experienced in a ... and more »

 
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Photos of the Day: Aug. 18, 2016  

Explore the news of the day with these images from around the world.  
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Sunset from London Bridge  

ekrubmj posted a photo:

 
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Whales Win Yet Again on Sonar: Why Do the Navy and NMFS Refuse to Get It Right?  
On social issues, the military has often seemed the last to know. Ending racial discrimination took decades. Outlawing discrimination based on sexual preference took just as long. This year, the role of women in combat is finally being recognized. In every case, the military's rationale for resisting change has been that military readiness would inevitably be compromised.

But significant progress has been made in recent years on all of these issues without adverse impact on our preparedness. By contrast, progress has been frustratingly elusive in persuading the U.S. Navy to care about the health of our oceans. After over two decades of adverse federal court orders - and over five decades since the "Save the Whales" movement focused widespread public attention on the plight of these magnificent animals - the Navy continues to resist the common sense proposition that needless infliction of harm to whales and other marine life in training with extraordinarily loud, high intensity sonar and heavy explosives is neither reasonable nor legal.

But as two recent court decisions make clear - issued in different cases by different courts -- the Navy's intransigence is based on more than its concern for national security. In fact, much of the blame lies with the government regulatory agency whose mandate it is to protect our oceans. It lies with the failure of the National Marine Fisheries Service to do its job.



For over 40 years, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Fisheries Service has been entrusted by Congress with lead responsibility for the protection of whales and other marine mammals from harassment, injury, and death. By law, the agency carries out this responsibility through permitting authority over a host of federal agency activities - including those of the U.S. Navy -- that may result in "take" of marine mammals. Among other requirements, Fisheries must deny a requested permit - even to the U.S. Navy - if the consequences of the proposed activity have not been reduced to "the least practicable adverse impact."

This statutory requirement is explicit. Court decisions interpreting it are unequivocal. And yet the Fisheries Service continues to violate it.

Just last month, for example, in a unanimous decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cited this requirement in holding that Fisheries had illegally issued a permit to the Navy for global deployment of its high-intensity long-range low frequency active sonar system - a submarine detection technology capable of ensonifying vast expanses of the world's oceans with dangerous levels of sound. Twice found to have acted illegally in issuing similar permits in 2002 and 2007, the Fisheries Service nevertheless permitted the system again in 2012, this time ignoring safeguards recommended by its own scientists despite, in the court's words, the resulting "systematic underprotection of marine mammals." The agency gave "mere lip service" to the legal standard and made "a policy choice not to protect areas . . . composing most of the world's oceans," leaving "a meaningful proportion of the world's marine mammal habitat underprotected."



How did the Fisheries Service respond? Just this week, in astonishing disregard of the court of appeals' decision, the agency issued the Navy a Letter of Authorization to continue operating under the illegally-issued permit -- as if the court's adverse decision and the agency's own responsibility to protect marine mammals are irrelevant in the face of the Navy's request to continue business as usual.

Last year, in even harsher terms, the federal court in Hawaii rejected the issuance of a permit for Navy testing and training with deadly mid-range sonar in the marine mammal-rich coastal waters of Hawaii and southern California. Once again citing the "least practicable adverse impact" standard, Judge Susan Oki Mollway criticized the Fisheries Service for merely "parrot[ing] what the Navy says" and failing to "articulate a rational basis" for accepting it, "treat[ing] the standard as if it requires no effort at all." For the Navy's part, rubber-stamped by the Fisheries Service, Judge Mollway found a "total failure to clearly consider important information" and "flaws so fundamental that the [environmental planning] document needs to be totally rewritten." The court concluded that "the Navy's categorical and sweeping statements, which allow for no compromise at all as to space, time, species, or condition, do not constitute the 'hard look' required" by federal law.

In neither case was national security at risk, contrary to the Navy's claim. In fact, the court of appeals explicitly recognized that "the mitigation measures the MMPA requires do not infringe on the Navy's capacity to defend the United States during wartime or heightened threats to national security."

The essential failing in both cases -- and indeed in virtually every case in which NRDC has challenged the Navy's training with high intensity sonar and heavy explosives over the past two decades - has been the refusal of the Fisheries Service to regulate. Rather than exercising the oversight required by law, the Service has chosen in effect to join the Navy's team, acquiescing in the omission of common sense safeguards recommended even by its own scientific experts. However understandable this capitulation might be in the face of the Navy's unique political and fiscal influence, it is precisely this kind of "regulatory capture" that has undermined the integrity of our environmental laws and the recovery of whales and other depleted marine species.



This needs to change. Last June, at the urging of NRDC and others, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration - the parent agency of the Fisheries Service - released for public comment an "Ocean Noise Strategy" intended to expand and strengthen federal management of man-made noise sources in the oceans, including military sonar. An important step, the efficacy of this plan will depend on implementation and funding, neither of which has thus far been addressed by the agency.

But it will also depend on whether, in permitting significant noise-generating activities of the Navy and others, the Fisheries Service is prepared to step up to its regulatory responsibility under the Marine Mammal Protection Act - not as a "captured" member of the permit applicant's team but as a strong and honest enforcer of federal protections. Serial litigation over decades - however successful it may be in targeting the agency's failures on an individual permit - is ultimately an imperfect and unsustainable approach to protecting the long-term health of our oceans.

Unfortunately, although we depend on the Fisheries Service to get it right, its latest authorization to the Navy just this week, in the wake of the latest rebuke by the federal courts, is a telling indication that it won't.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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The Climate Post:Americans View of Climate Change Polarized; U.N. Targets May Be Tough to Achieve  
Surveys conducted by Yale University and George Mason University suggest that 17 percent of Americans view climate change as an alarming threat and that another 28 percent are concerned about climate change but view it as a distant threat.

The subject has become highly contentious since 1997, when then Vice President Gore helped broker an international treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas. The U.S. later withdrew from the treaty.

"And at that moment the two parties began to divide," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who was involved in the surveys. "They begin to split and go farther and farther and farther apart until we reach today's environment where climate change is now one of the most polarized issues in America."

Climate change will again be in the spotlight as a group of climate scientists gather in Switzerland to discuss a United Nation's report expected to detail the impacts of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. In Paris last year, some 190 countries pledged to hold the global average temperature increase to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But there are scientific questions not only about the costs and benefits of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but also about how to remain on a 1.5 C pathway. The Huffington Post shows what the Paris Climate Agreement is up against in a series of charts.

What we do know is this decade is the critical decade for action.

"The risks of future climate change--to our economy, society and environment--are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise," the Australian government's Climate Commission wrote in a report. "Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonize our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade."

And the Host City of the Summer 2084 Games Is . . .

A study published in The Lancet says that only three North American cities--San Francisco, Calgary, Vancouver--will have a climate sufficiently cool and stable to host the Summer Olympic games in 70 years. The authors, who considered only cities in the northern hemisphere, where 90 percent of the world's population lives, and only those with a population greater than 600,000 in 2012, the lower limit of host cities since World War II, said that climate change would make most of the 645 cities unsafe venues due to rising temperatures and humidity caused by climate change.

"You could take a risk, and plan your Olympics, and maybe not get the hot days you expect, but that would be a big risk when there are many billions of dollars at stake," said Kirk Smith, a researcher at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Public Health and the lead author of the study.

To measure the suitability of future Olympics sites, the researchers used climate change projections and a "wetbulb" globe temperature--a measurement reflecting the combination of humidity, heat radiation, temperature, and wind. They picked 2085 as a target date and as their target event what they considered the Olympics' most physically challenging outdoor endurance event: the marathon. They selected 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit as the "high-risk" temperature for marathoners.

"The findings indicate that by 2085, Istanbul, Madrid, Rome, Paris and Budapest--all cities that are or were in contention for either the 2020 or 2024 Summer Olympics--would be unfit to host the games," the authors said. "Tokyo, the city that has secured the 2020 summer Olympiad, would also be too hot to ensure athlete safety, should these projections come to pass."

Which cities would be viable hosts? None in Latin America or Africa, 25 in western Europe, 5 in eastern Europe and Asia, and 3 in North America.

"If the world's most elite athletes need to be protected from climate change, what about the rest of us?" the study concludes.

One of the most startling implications of the research is that temperatures will be too high for laboring outdoors, where half the world's population works.

Truck Emissions Limits Set

New emissions requirements affecting heavy- and medium-duty vehicles, which represent only about 5 percent of total highway traffic but account for 20 percent of transportation-related fuel consumption and carbon emissions, were announced this week. The requirements call for as much as a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions and fuel consumption in certain models by 2027. It also requires annual increases in efficiency of 2.5% from 2021-2027 for heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans.

"The standards promote a new generation of cleaner, more fuel-efficient trucks by encouraging the development and employment of new and advanced cost-effective technologies through model year 2027," said Gina McCarthy, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which developed the new rules in conjunction with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "These standards are ambitious and achievable, and they will help ensure the American trucking industry continues to drive our economy -- and at the same time protect our planet."

Official say the new requirements are expected to cut 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon emissions through the next decade and represent a global benchmark for reducing vehicle-exhaust pollutants linked to climate change.

The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Tim Profeta: The Climate Post:Americans View of Climate Change Polarized; U.N. Targets May Be Tough to Achieve  
Surveys conducted by Yale University and George Mason University suggest that 17 percent of Americans view climate change as an alarming threat and th...

Read more: Environment, Climate Change, Epa, Olympics, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Paris, Green News

 
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r0B0t: Watch Segway's personal robot in action  
What if you could have a personal robot helper that transforms into a self-balancing scooter? That's the appeal of the Segway robot, an adorable device which first debuted during CES. We were able to take a close look at it this week during Intel's D...  
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Rio 2016: Photos From Days 11 through 13 (40 photos)  

Hundreds of photographers have gathered in Rio to follow the action in the Olympic arenas, swimming pools, racetracks, and more. Over the two weeks of the games, I'll be featuring some amazing images from recent Olympic events. Today's entry encompasses gymnastics, BMX racing, water polo, diving, beach volleyball, taekwondo, decathlon, marathon swimming, kayaking, women's wrestling, and much more.

 
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Inside The World's Biggest Fish Market  
Every day, about 2,000 metric tons of seafood passes through the Tsukiji market in central Tokyo.  
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Synthetic supermicrobe will be resistant to all known viruses  
A bacterium with a different genetic code to every other living things is in the pipeline. It will be resistance to all known viruses - and its inventor wants to alter humans in the same way  
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Birds sing to their unborn chicks to warn them about hot weather  
Zebra finch parents prepare their chicks for the heat by giving them advice through the shell  
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r0B0t: The best budget robot vacuums you can buy  

These affordable robot vacuums clean just as well as expensive models.

 
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r0B0t: New 'Overwatch' short reveals the origin of Bastion  

Behold this tale of a robot and its bird friend. 

Blizzard Entertainment's new origin short for Overwatch hero Bastion shows how the robot went from evil mechanized overlord to a mossy, nature-loving force for good. It's adorable and touching, and offers a shining ray of hope to those who fear the eventual, inevitable robot uprising.

More about Esports, Entertainment, Gaming, Blizzard Entertainment, and Overwatch  
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r0B0t: The robots of war: AI and the future of combat  
The 1983 film WarGames portrayed a young hacker tapping into NORAD's artificial-intelligence-driven nuclear weapons' system. When the hit movie was screened for President Reagan, it prompted the commander in chief to ask if it were possible for the c...  
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Untitled  

movinonagroove posted a photo:

Taken from Westminster bridge.

 
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When Animals Teach, It's Special  

Can elephants teach? Credit: Carl Safina

Like toolmaking, teaching was once thought to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind. It's not, but teaching is rare, and teachers are an elite group.

"Teaching" requires this: one individual must take time from their own task to demonstrate and instruct and the student must learn a new skill. That's a tall order.

When a young chimpanzee watches a skilled adult and then imitates, that's learning, but the adult has not taken time specifically to instruct, so it is not teaching. In the honeybees' amazing waggle dance, the dancer takes time to indicate information about a source of food, but the other foragers learn no new skill. Same with certain ants; same with animals who alarm about the presence of a predator. They do take time to show, but they do not impart new skills to the learners.

Killer whales teach; they take time and impart skills. Around the Indian Ocean's sub-Antarctic Crozet Islands, killer whales catch fur seal and elephant seal pups by surging onto beaches. But it's dangerous. The whales risk stranding themselves and must thrash their bodies back into the rescuing surf.


Killer whales are just one species of teachers. Credit: Carl Safina

Adults teach the young how to do this. They teach in steps, giving lessons. First, they practice on beaches without seals. Mothers gently push their young onto steeply sloping beaches, from which youngsters can easily wriggle back into the sea. It's the killer whale equivalent of learning to operate an automobile in a parking lot before driving in traffic. This teaching builds skills in a safe environment, eliminating the very real risk of a fatal stranding.

Then the young learn hunting by watching their mothers' successful attacks. At five to six years old, young killer whales finally attempt to catch seal pups using the beach-surge technique. An adult female often helps them return to the water, creating a body wave if necessary. The time required for teaching means that mothers catch fewer seals for themselves.

This training may well be the absolute height in both teaching and long-range planning among non-humans. In Alaska, researchers saw two killer whales teaching a one-year-old to hunt by practicing on seabirds. Adults stunned an unsuspecting seabird with their flukes; the yearling whale came and practiced the fluke-slapping technique.


A pod of killer whales. Credit: Carl Safina

Atlantic spotted dolphin mothers sometimes release a prey fish in the presence of their youngsters and let their youngsters chase the fish, recapturing it if it's getting away. Atlantic spotted dolphin youngsters also position themselves alongside mothers who are scanning and prodding sandy bottoms for hidden fish. They can "eavesdrop" on her sonar echoes and imitate her technique, but the mother spends extra time demonstrating. Australian bottlenose dolphin mothers who wear sponges on their snout to protect against urchin spines and the searing sting of hidden scorpionfish while they're probing the sediment teach their children the sponge-wearing technique.

So yes, teachers are an elite group. Other teachers include: cheetahs and housecats (who bring back live prey and let their young learn to catch it), birds called pied babblers (who teach their young a call that means "I have food"), peregrine falcons (who lure their young away from nesting cliffs before dropping killed prey for them to catch in flight), otters (who drag their babies into and under water, teaching them how to swim and dive), and meerkats (who first bring to their growing young dead scorpions, then disabled ones, to demonstrate how to dismember the venomous stingers). Humans teach, of course. That's about it; we know of few other teachers, so far.

But many more must be hiding in a spread as diverse as that. Like toolmaking and teaching, imitation--considered to reflect high intelligence--is also rare in the animal kingdom. Some researchers believe that only apes and dolphins imitate, but it's a little more common. Our parrots' habit of dunking hard bread crusts in water was probably in vented by one and copied by the other. Young dogs imitate older dogs.


Dogs Jude (left) and Chula playing in the water. Credit: Carl Safina

And dogs imitate people in their way. When I am "doing" firewood by cutting, hauling, and stacking it, our dog Chula "does" wood by finding a suitably sized piece and lying down nearby to chew it. When I am "doing" paper-sorting for recycling or burning in the stove, Chula might find an envelope and very inconspicuously lie down with it. Chewing envelopes is usually not allowed, but at these times we both understand that we have paperwork to do.

In South Africa, a captive bottlenose dolphin named Daan had watched divers cleaning algae off his pool's windows. He found a gull feather and started cleaning the window, using the same long strokes. He positioned himself vertically, with one flipper touching the glass--like the divers, who'd steadied themselves by holding on to the window frame--and made sounds almost identical to the diver's breathing apparatus, and released a similar-looking stream of bubbles.

When a window-cleaning diver left his vacuum-cleaning apparatus in an exhibit, he returned the next morning to discover a dolphin named Haig clasping the hose with her flippers, her snout on the scraper. When the diver took back his equipment, the dolphin found a broken piece of tile and started scraping seaweed off the bottom of the pool. Who couldn't use a roommate like Haig?

In a South African aquarium lived a baby Indo-Pacific bottlenose named Dolly. One day while she was just six months old, Dolly was watching a trainer standing at the window smoking a cigarette, blowing puffs of smoke. Dolly swam to her mother, briefly suckled, then returned to the window and released a cloud of milk that engulfed her head. The trainer was "absolutely astonished." Somehow Dolly came up with the idea of using milk to represent smoke. Using one thing to represent something else isn't just imitation. It is art.


Dolphins, like dogs, are exceptionally intelligent imitators. Credit: Carl Safina

Carl Safina's most recent book, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel, is newly out in paperback.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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NASA to begin first asteroid sample mission: Seeks 'pristine' specimen  

Bennu.... no, not a scientology overlord

NASA is preparing for its first mission that will see a spacecraft retrieve a “pristine sample” of an asteroid so that it can be studied on Earth.…

 
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Technology that Could Turn the Tide on Climate Change: Carbon Dioxide Removal  
New technology is required to make meaningful progress on climate change. This column will focus on one of those options: decreasing the CO2 already in our atmosphere.

Despite robust efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, current technology does nothing about the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and therefore some climate experts argue that carbon dioxide removal efforts will be needed.

One carbon dioxide removal process is called "direct air capture." CO2 is captured from ambient air in a filter using a chemical process. The CO2 would then be removed from the filter and stored. Other technologies capture the carbon dioxide from the air using a liquid instead of a solid sorbent.

One process called "enhanced weathering" involves spreading crushed rock in areas that receive large amounts of rain. Rainwater includes some atmospheric carbon. The chemistry between the rain and silicate rock can form a new hard substance with the carbon locked inside.

Carbon dioxide removal is not without controversy. Skeptics argue that even the most efficient projects can't remove sufficient CO2 to be meaningful globally. Current projects are too expensive to deploy on a large scale. Some opponents are concerned about the unintended consequences of tampering with the chemistry of the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, this area of research will continue to get attention and resources given the strong interest in seeking solutions to climate change.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

 
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Ripples by Matilde Aamodt  

Ripples by Matilde Aamodt

Matilde Aamodt: Photos

 
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Thinking big thoughts  
Vlatko Vedral is wowed by cosmologist Sean Carroll's paean to "poetic naturalism" and the ability of science to bring meaning to the world  
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Thinking big thoughts  
Vlatko Vedral is wowed by cosmologist Sean Carroll's paean to "poetic naturalism" and the ability of science to bring meaning to the world  
science  

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Between the lines  
A book of mathematical detective stories (yes, really) and a graphics-heavy guide to "science, but not as we know it", reviewed by Margaret Harris  
science