With about a dozen trucks an hour setting off from the avocado belt in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán for the U.S., armed robbers are zeroing in on the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar industry. The rise in avocado-related crime has turned parts of the state into no-go areas even for the police. […]

Until recently, Mexico’s organized crime groups’ main source of revenues from avocados centred around extortion — demands for protection money from farmers. But the sharp fall in the price of Mexican opium paste has forced them to diversify, according to analysts.

Increasingly they have started hijacking truckloads of fruit for export. […] The rise in avocado crime is thus indirectly linked to America’s opioid crisis. Americans’ increased use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid used for pain relief, pushed down the price of heroin, which in turn slashed the price of Mexican opium. […]

Demand for avocados jumps ahead of the Super Bowl, America’s biggest sporting event, with Mexico shipping a record 127,000 tonnes to the U.S. for the occasion. Overall production is rising, hitting 1.09 million tonnes in the 2018-19 season, up nearly 4 per cent from the 1.05 million produced in 2017-18. Exports last season rose 5.4 per cent. Sales to the U.S., the largest importer of Mexican avocados, bring in almost US$2 billion a year, much of it going to smallholders.

{ Financial Post | Continue reading }

art { Evan Roth, Landscapes, 2016-ongoing }

{ Google Maps utilizes GPS and location data from mobile devices to determine if there is traffic congestion on a particular street. The app will then redirect users to less trafficked streets to avoid traffic. Using a hand cart filled with 99 active cell phones connected to Google Maps, artist Simon Weckert showed how he could create fake traffic jams in Google Maps simply by walking around the streets of Berlin. | Bleeping Computer | Continue reading }

Visitors to the Kentucky capitol building are banned from entering with umbrellas or sticks that are used for protest signs because they can be “used as weapons,” but guns and rifles are permitted

‘Deaf’ genius Beethoven was able to hear his final symphony after all

CoronaVirus - FAQ, misconceptions, information, from a statistical perspective + An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

Several delivery apps add restaurants without their consent

Fingerprints can now be dated to within a day of when they were made

How a vegan diet could affect your intelligence

Researchers created a robot hand that can regulate its temperature through sweating

Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world

Not all graffiti are written by alienated teenagers, and not all vandalism constitutes wilful damage. Preventing graffiti and vandalism (1990)

we examine the long-run buy-and-hold performance of an actual portfolio, namely, the collection of John Maynard Keynes

On the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd street is perhaps the most famous subway grate in the world.

Alvin Taylor at a salon getting a perm in Los Angeles, Calif., 1974

Land Art sculpture built by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake only reemerges during drought

{ Khi Solar One, the first solar thermal tower power plant on the African continent }

Several delivery services, including Postmates, Seamless, Grubhub, and DoorDash, offer food from restaurants without their explicit permission. The delivery apps pull up restaurant menus listed online, from which customers make their selections, and couriers working for the apps place orders on their behalf. The process essentially inserts third-party apps as middlemen into a service many restaurants say they want control over, or wish to opt out of entirely.

{ Eater | Continue reading }

For China’s chronically underpaid physicians (the average starting salary for a junior physician was $730 a month in 2018), the best route is to avoid becoming a low-paid general practitioner, especially in the countryside, and opt for a career as a higher paid specialist. And if that career choice doesn’t work, pharmaceutical company kickbacks commonly do. And if kickbacks don’t suffice, many doctors simply accept “red envelopes” of cash to ensure basic services are rendered correctly.

These well-known practices deepen patient mistrust and cynicism, and have led to an epidemic of patient violence against Chinese doctors and nurses, including an attack on an opthamologist last week in Beijing (the weapon was a “vegetable chopper”). As far back as 2008, 48% of Chinese hospitals reported violent attacks against health workers. In a recent survey of general practitioners in Hubei Province, the source of the new coronavirus, 18.9% of respondents reported exposure to physical workplace violence in the preceding year.

Low pay, low status and the threat of violence has predictably depressed interest in the caring professions. In 2018, China had two doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 2.6 in the United States, 2.8 in Canada, and a world-beating 5.2 in Austria. More alarming, the profession is aging. […]

For now, China can treat Wuhan’s shortage of doctors as a health crisis and mobilize qualified personnel from across China to work in the city. Indeed, 6,000 medical workers from across China have either arrived in the Wuhan area or will soon, and they will alleviate much of the pressure building up in hospital corridors.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

oil on painting { Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme (Dora Maar), 1938 }

The toilet manufacturer Toot Ltd. unveiled the “mobile toilet concept” at the CES tech show held in Las Vegas in early January. The company intends to develop an exclusive app that brings a portable restroom trailer to a spot near the location the call is made.

The concept envisions a small trailer converted into a “private bathroom” pulled by a car to a designated spot.

{ Asahi Shimbun | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore, New York, New York, September-October 1972 }

Now we learn that San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott gave the approval to General Electric to outfit 4,000 new “smart street lights” with cameras and microphones in 2017. […]

The City paid $30 million for the contract. But the larger issue is that General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street.

The City of San Diego gave what appears to be unrestricted rights to the private data, according to the contract. […]

San Diego is now home to the largest mass surveillance operation across the country.

General Electric and its subsidiaries* have access to all the processed data in perpetuity with no oversight.

{ California Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Brad Rimmer }

Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.

To: Leaders and citizens of the world
Re: Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
Date: January 23, 2020

{ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | Continue reading }

A man diagnosed with Wuhan coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot

This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important–and hitherto neglected–spillover effects on fatal car accidents.

over the past few years, even as the fatal accident rate for commercial flights fell dramatically, fatal chopper crashes have actually become more common.

Waze fixes app after police say it left drivers stranded 45 miles from destination

Streetsblog has a report out on a systematic pattern of racial and ethnic bias in who is ticketed for jaywalking in New York City.

The E-11A is used to link troops in the field to headquarters and has been previously described by Air Force pilots as “WiFi in the sky.”

Metropolitan Police has announced it will use live facial recognition cameras operationally for the first time on London streets.

An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

He left social media as a disgraced video star. Has he made a comeback with a whole new identity?

‘Podfasters’ listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. I tried listening to podcasts at 3x and broke my brain.

23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

Questions I would ask God about the game of go

Brazil saw nearly 60,000 murders in 2015, as many as the United States, China, all of Europe, Northern Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand combined

Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code

Big Bang May Have Created a Mirror Universe Where Time Runs Backwards (2014)

We amateurs typically achieve the blur effect by accident, with a thumb interrupting the smartphone’s lens. But these blurs in your newsfeed are purposeful. Rise of the Blur

“Other Orders” is a tool for sorting text and tweets

Maeklong Railway Market in Bangkok [Thanks Tim]

Igorrr - Very Noise [Thanks Tim] More: Ham

Even though it may come naturally, griping isn’t necessarily always a good thing. Ruminating on negative feelings, and reinforcing them through constant discussion with other people, can lead to catastrophizing, which “is something that can contribute to depression” […]

This can happen because “the more you do something, the more entrenched that path becomes in your brain and the more you continue to do it” […]

Constantly complaining can be an easy way to frustrate our confidantes, but there is research that shows it can also be a useful tool in bonding and helping us process emotions like stress and frustration.

“In short: Yes, it’s good to complain, yes, it’s bad to complain, and yes, there’s a right way to do it” […] The trick to doing it right starts with understanding how the word “complaining” is often misused to describe a variety of behaviors, with some being more harmful or helpful than others. […] there are roughly three categories: venting, problem solving and ruminating, otherwise known as dwelling. […]

Life isn’t perfect. That’s why expressing negative feelings is not only normal, but also healthy, Dr. Kowalski said, adding that the unrealistic expectation that we should always be happy can make us feel worse. […] Inhibiting the disclosure of our dissatisfaction “can produce a negative effect,” she said, because it not only stops us from naming our problem but also prevents us from getting to the root of it.

That’s why “complaining is, ideally, totally solutions focused,” Ms. Gilbertson said. Though venting is not as focused on solving problems, “there are also really positive benefits,” Dr. Grice said, because it allows us “to get things out in the open and get our feelings heard so they don’t build up and cause stress.” […]

You want to avoid what Dr. Grice calls wearing “muddy glasses,” where no matter what’s going on you always find something to complain about. The same goes with rehashing a problem over and over again, whether with friends or in the echo chamber of the internet.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Old emails, photos and files from years past sit undisturbed, awaiting a search […] The problem is that all those messages require energy to preserve them. […]

Right now, data centers consume about 2 percent of the world’s electricity, but that is expected to reach 8 percent by 2030. Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data ever created is in active use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast “landfill” with a massive carbon footprint.

“It’s costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don’t even use”

{ Japan Times | Continue reading }

[W]hile time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang.

{ PBS (2014) | Continue reading }

The latest research, published on Friday by two psychology professors, combs through about 40 studies that have examined the link between social media use and both depression and anxiety among adolescents. That link, according to the professors, is small and inconsistent. […]

In most cases, [most researchers] say, the phone is just a mirror that reveals the problems a child would have even without the phone. […]

“The current dominant discourse around phones and well-being is a lot of hype and a lot of fear,” Mr. Hancock said. “But if you compare the effects of your phone to eating properly or sleeping or smoking, it’s not even close.”

Mr. Hancock’s analysis of about 226 studies on the well-being of phone users concluded that “when you look at all these different kinds of well-being, the net effect size is essentially zero.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

image { Diagram from a 1923 Japanese typewriting manual }

{ Sergei Eisenstein, On Disney )

ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic—which is made from oil and gas, and their byproducts—to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels, analysts say. Petrochemicals, the category that includes plastic, now account for 14 percent of oil use and are expected to drive half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.

{ Wired | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

previously { The missing 99%: why can’t we find the vast majority of ocean plastic? }

photo { Kate Ballis }

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants. […]

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes. […]

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Sheep facial recognition: Funding helps bring software one step closer

3D-printed living skin with blood vessels created by scientists

Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death

Police platform patrols create ‘phantom effect’ that cuts crime in London Underground

We study the effects that two of the largest gangs in Latin America, MS-13 and 18th Street, have on economic development in El Salvador.

MRI scanners built for two push limits of neuroimaging

women who reported to have sex weekly during the study period were 28% less likely to experience menopause than women who had sex less than monthly.

Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans

We aim to determine whether shoes are a systematic form of self-expression [PDF]

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques.

We conclude that researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training is empirically unjustified

Insecurities are a result of market forces that prioritize costs over security and of governments, including the United States, that want to preserve the option of surveillance in 5G networks. To be sure, there are significant security improvements in 5G over 4G­in encryption, authentication, integrity protection, privacy, and network availability. But the enhancements aren’t enough.

The Case Against Huawei

Valuations of the major labels are currently at an all-time high — they generated $14 billion in 2019 alone. Now private equity firms, institutional investors, and high-profile managers want in on it, too. In recent years, billions of dollars have flooded the music business to invest in the catalogs of songwriters.

Through its partnerships with health care providers, Google can view tens of millions of patient records in at least three-quarters of states

Google researchers used neural networks to make weather forecasts

How the Navy SEALs wound up buying 450 counterfeit radio antennas

the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth

A guitar made out of 106 iPhones and one iPod Touch

Air was collected from 8 different locations associated with death in Texas. A balloon artist was then hired to make 35 balloon hats using the air saved in the compressor.

Army researchers have developed an artificial intelligence and machine learning technique that produces a visible face image from a thermal image of a person’s face captured in low-light or nighttime conditions. This development could lead to enhanced real-time biometrics and post-mission forensic analysis for covert nighttime operations.

{ DSIAC | Continue reading }