feed on feeds - 2014/10/05 - items 0 to 15

Något tusental demonstranter blockerar fortfarande motorvägen utanför regeringskvarteren i Hongkong, timmar innan en arbetsdag då regeringen krävt att de ska vara borta.

Trycket på den psykiatriska slutenvården har ökat kraftigt sedan 2007, skriver Svenska Dagbladet. I Jämtland är ökningen allra störst, hela 62 procent, visar siffror som Socialstyrelsen har sammanställt för nyhetsbyrån Sirén.

Folkpartisten Allan Widman blir ny ordförande i riksdagens försvarsutskott, uppger Svenska Dagbladet. Det blir första gången en folkpartist håller i ordförandeklubban, som traditionellt varit inmutad av Socialdemokraterna eller Moderaterna. Men Widman är ingen nykomling i utskottet.

HughPickens.com writes "Jeremy Hsu reports that the US Navy has been testing a large-scale swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. In the test, large ship that the Navy sometimes calls a high-value unit, HVU, is making its way down the river's thalweg, escorted by 13 small guard boats. Between them, they carry a variety of payloads, loud speakers and flashing lights, a .50-caliber machine gun and a microwave direct energy weapon or heat ray. Detecting the enemy vessel with radar and infrared sensors, they perform a series of maneuvers to encircle the craft, coming close enough to the boat to engage it and near enough to one another to seal off any potential escape or access to the ship they are guarding. They blast warnings via loudspeaker and flash their lights. The HVU is now free to safely move away. Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), points out that a maneuver that required 40 people had just dropped down to just one. "Think about it as replicating the functions that a human boat pilot would do. We've taken that capability and extended it to multiple [unmanned surface vehicles] operating together within that, we've designed team behaviors," says Robert Brizzolara. The timing of the briefing happens to coincide with the 14-year anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 sailors. It's an anniversary that Klunder observes with a unique sense of responsibility. "If we had this capability there on that day. We could have saved that ship. I never want to see the USS Cole happen again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1995 was the year the internet went mainstream. That’s the year when it seemed like everybody got email accounts and web browsers.

It was funny watching TV back then, because the announcers always said "aitch tea tea pea colon forward-slash forward-slash double-you double-you double-you period…” (These days you just get a hashtag. One day we’ll look back on that and laugh.)

In 1995 I was 27 years old. Nobody had ever tried to scam me (at least, not that I noticed). Here’s the thing: though TV and movies made it seem otherwise, most people didn’t run into actual con men. Cons were rare.

And now, by my estimation, people have tried to scam me 693,500 times via email. (Assume an average of 100 scams a day for the last 19 years. These days it’s closer to 200 a day.)

Grifters used to have to work hard for a living. I miss that.

* * *

The immorality that inflames me is when people prey on vulnerable people.

“Vulnerable” could mean desperate, overly-trusting, poorly educated, forgetful, less-abled physically, less-privileged, less-well-connected, and so on.

And it’s my extreme good fortune to be less vulnerable than most everybody else on the planet in the history of the world.

But I know two things: that position could change on any very bad day, and that position will change in the future. (The problems of aging get to everybody lucky enough to make it that far.)

Knowing that one day I will be more vulnerable to predators than I am now doesn’t make me any more sympathetic to the people who are already more vulnerable than I am. I’m very sympathetic.

But it’s not a bad reminder, either. Sometimes I look at a piece of email and wonder how I’ll figure out if it’s really my bank when I’m 80 years old. And I’m not sure I’ll succeed 100% of the time, and it really needs to be 100% of the time.

Which reminds me that there are people all over having a hell of a time right now. Today.

Det ebolaliknande viruset marburg har krävt en människas liv i den ugandiska huvudstaden Kampala, meddelar landets regering.

I Syrien föds barn in i krigets kaos, ser sina drömmar krossas av terrorgruppen IS och tvingas leva med dödsfruktan och förlorat framtidshopp. Men livet går också vidare. SvD har träffat barn som leker och kiknar av skratt mitt i infernot.

Det ebolaliknande viruset marburg har krävt en människas liv i den ugandiska huvudstaden Kampala, meddelar landets regering.

Israels ambassadör i Stockholm anklagar Socialdemokraterna för att vara ”anti-Israel”, enligt Times of Israel . Ambassadören menar också att muslimska invandrare i Sverige bidragit till beslutet att erkänna staten Israel, som statsminister Stefan Löfven avslöjade under fredagens regeringsförklaring.

En kraftig brand härjade en lägenhet i ett flerbostadshus i Borås på söndagskvällen. En kvinna fördes i ambulans till sjukhus med svåra skador, rapporterar lokala medier.

KentuckyFC writes The human visual system has evolved to recognize people in almost any pose under a vast range of lighting conditions. But abstract art pushes this ability to its limits by distorting the human form. In particular, Cubism seeks to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane by juxtaposing snapshots from different angles. The result is that a Cubist picture contains many 'fragments of perception' of the same object. That's why it is often hard for people to recognize the human figures that these pictures contain. Now a group of computer scientists have tested how computer vision algorithms fare at the task of spotting human figures in Cubist art. They compared a variety of different algorithms against humans in trying to spot human figures in 218 Cubist paintings by Picasso. Humans easily outperform all the algorithms at this task. But some algorithms were much better than others. The most successful were based on so-called "deformable parts models" that recognize human figures by looking for body parts rather than the entire form. Interestingly, the team says this backs up various studies by neuroscientists suggesting that the human brain works in a similar way.