Time To Sell The Product >WHAT 5 NEW DRONES TELL US ABOUT THE FUTURE OF UNMANNED FLYING || WARTHOG...

Published on Jul 9, 2017

5 New Drones, and The Future Technology

Eyes Wide Open > Expanding Surveillance Scooped-Up In Public

Excerpts from The Intercept

“Show Me Your Papers” Becomes “Open Your Eyes” as Border Sheriffs Expand Iris Surveillance

By George Joseph 08 July 2017 6:10 a.m. 

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has found little funding for his “big, beautiful wall.” In the meantime, however, another acquisition promised to deter unauthorized immigrants is coming to the border: iris recognition devices.

Biometric Identification
BI2 Technologies™ - Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies - is a worldwide leader in the development and implementation of innovative and affordable iris, fingerprint and facial biometric identification and recognition technologies and solutions.

Thirty-one sheriffs, representing every county along the U.S.-Mexico border, voted unanimously on April 3 to adopt tools that will capture, catalogue, and compare individuals’ iris data, for use both in jails and out on patrol.

Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, the company behind the push, has offered the sheriffs a free three-year trial, citing law enforcement’s difficulties in identifying unauthorized immigrants . . . for Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, which frequently goes by BI2, rapid border expansion means its existing national iris database will receive a huge influx of biometric information on unauthorized immigrants, boosting its product’s capabilities to potential law enforcement clients across the country. . .

Here's a Testimonial on http://www.bi2technologies.com/

Testimonials

"From an officer-safety perspective, to find out who we are dealing with, this literally leapfrogged us ahead in the ability of law enforcement to best protect our community"
- Sheriff Paul Babeu, Pinal County Arizona
America’s 2011 “Sheriff of the Year 

In the coming months, BI2’s iris recognition devices will be installed in every sheriff’s department along the U.S.-Mexico border. Each department will receive both a stationary iris capture device for inmate intake facilities and, eventually, a mobile version, . .

HOW IT WORKS: The technology works by taking a high-resolution image of a person’s iris with a special infrared illumination camera, and then creating an individualized iris template based on that image. The templates exploit nearly 240 unique characteristic elements in the iris, compared to the 40 to 60 used for fingerprints, resulting in far fewer false matches. To make an identification, BI2’s iris recognition program compares an individual’s iris against the over 987,000 iris scans held in its private database, which collects images from over 180 law enforcement jurisdictions nationwide.

CAUTION: Giving law enforcement the ability to check and collect people’s irises for criminal history and, in effect, their citizenship information during stops could lead to racial profiling, said Nathan Wessler, staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “In this country, we’ve long resisted being a ‘show me your papers’ society, but this moves us to that because you increasingly can’t avoid your identity being scooped up in public,”

Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties team, said local law enforcement should not be collecting biometric data to help federal immigration agencies, like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Just because you are walking in a border town and a cop says, ‘Hey, can I talk to you?’ you have no diminished expectations of privacy, and your biometrics should not be collected,” Schwartz told The Intercept. “Whatever legitimate interest police have in capturing biometrics to do ordinary law enforcement jobs, it is not proper to share that information with ICE.” Currently, ICE has direct access to many law enforcement databases.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, an associate professor in the University of California, Los Angeles’s history department, argues the legal consequences of this development tie in to a much larger story about the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s particularly interesting that this technology is being sold as a way to identify ‘chronic offenders’ of unauthorized re-entry, a crime that was invented in 1929 by Coleman Livingston Blease, a white supremacist senator from South Carolina who wanted to control the in-flow of Mexicans,” Hernandez said in an interview. “Any technology promising to ratchet up unauthorized re-entry charges is obviously wrapped up in that history.”

Schwartz, the EFF lawyer, worries that law enforcement agencies are not doing enough to ensure residents’ sensitive data is protected. “If the government is saying we just capture the data, push a button, and vendor takes care of it, that is wholly inadequate,” he said. “Every time the data is stored or transmitted there is a risk of breach. And, unlike an address or social security number, you can’t change your iris. So if the government is going to purchase tools from vendors that amass biometric data, it is necessary that they employ privacy officers who know how to prevent security breaches and move the data securely

“The argument that there are extraordinarily violent individuals living within these populations has always been a part of immigrant exclusion projects,” Hernandez said. “Especially for Mexican-Americans, there was a clear shift in the middle of the 1950s, after Operation Wetback” — a 1950s crackdown on immigration rife with civil rights violations — “which was supposed to have solved the problem of immigration but didn’t actually stop it. So to rationalize the ongoing immigration, authorities explicitly no longer spoke about immigrants as workers, but as criminals. We’ve been stuck with that discourse ever since.”
BI2’s iris surveillance expansion on the border is moving ahead full steam despite these concerns

 

Mall Guts! | Retail Archaeology Dead Mall Documentary

Published on Jul 7, 2017
Views: 1,138
In this episode we check out the guts of Fiesta Mall, a dead mall in Mesa, AZ!

What? Cross-Asset Quants Take A Dive > What does it mean??

From Bloomberg

Cross-Asset Quants Are Facing Their Worst Losses in a Decade

By Dani Burger @daniburgrMore stories by Dani Burger Bloomberg.com |Hawkish signals from central bankers have punished stocks and bonds alike in the past week.

Also punished: investors who make a living operating in several asset classes at once. They’ve been stung by the concerted selloff that lifted 10-year Treasury yields by 25 basis points and sent tech stocks to the biggest losses in 16 months. Among the hardest-hit were systematic funds who -- either to diversify or maximize gains -- dip their toes in a hodgepodge of different markets all at the same time.

Losses stand out in two of the best-known quant strategies:

1. Trend-following traders known as commodity trading advisers, and

2. Risk parity funds.

 

CTAs dropped 5.1 percent over the past two weeks, their worst stretch since 2007, according to a Societe General SA database of the 20 largest managers. The Salient Risk Parity Index dropped 1.8 percent, the most in four months.

To a category of critics, it’s an environment where the potential for snowballing losses becomes greater, as the overseers of such funds take steps to reduce risk. So many face losses at once, the theory goes, that a chain reaction of selling ensues with the potential to whack markets further... On the surface, it’s strange that both strategies suffered over the past week since they’re supposed to behave differently.

 

May 2017 REAL DATA/REAL FACTS: Goods & Services Deficit=$46.5 Billion$$$$$$$$$

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AT 8:30 A.M. EDT, Thursday, July 6, 2017
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release today:

BEA News: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, May 2017

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $46.5 billion in May, down $1.1 billion from $47.6 billion in April, revised. May exports were $192.0 billion, $0.9 billion more than April exports. May imports were $238.5 billion, $0.2 billion less than April imports.
The full text of the release and data tables in this release on BEA's Web site can be found at www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/tradnewsrelease.htm 

These data are not in the BEA press release

NOTES:
All statistics referenced are seasonally adjusted; statistics are on a balance of payments basis unless otherwise specified. Additional statistics, including not seasonally-adjusted statistics and details for goods on a Census basis, are available in Exhibits 1-20b of this release.
For information on data sources, definitions, revision procedures, and scheduled release dates through December 2017, see the information section on page A-1 of this release. The next release is August 4, 2017.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce,announced today that the goods and services deficit was $46.5 billion in May, down $1.1 billionfrom $47.6 billion in April, revised. May exports were $192.0 billion, $0.9 billion more than Aprilexports. May imports were $238.5 billion, $0.2 billion less than April imports.
The May decrease in the goods and services deficit reflected a decrease in the goods deficit of$0.9 billion to $67.5 billion and an increase in the services surplus of $0.2 billion to $21.0
billion.
Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $27.0 billion, or 13.1 percent, from the same period in 2016. Exports increased $54.3 billion or 6.0 percent. Imports increased $81.4 billion or 7.3 percent.
Goods by Selected Countries and Areas: Monthly – Census Basis (Exhibit 19)
The May figures show surpluses, in billions of dollars, with South and Central America ($2.4),Hong Kong ($2.3), Singapore ($0.8), Brazil ($0.8), and United Kingdom ($0.7). Deficits were recorded, in billions of dollars, with China ($30.1), European Union ($10.7), Mexico ($6.8), Japan ($6.4),Germany ($4.7), Italy ($2.4), Canada ($2.2), India ($2.0), Taiwan ($1.7), France ($1.7), OPEC ($1.1), South Korea ($0.8), and Saudi Arabia ($0.2).

Climate Change > Policy + Prepare For Consequences

This Map Shows Which Parts of the U.S. Will Suffer The Most From Climate Change ...1/7 A new map shows the projected county-by-county damages for the last two decades of the century, with the counties facing the heaviest burden shown in dark red. [Image: Hsiang, Kopp, Jina, Rising, et al. (2017)] 

By Adele Peters   A 4-minute Read

If you live in Texas or Louisiana, your community will be harder hit by climate change than cities in New Hampshire or Oregon. By the end of the century, if emissions continue unchecked, some parts of the U.S. will see far greater economic damage from climate than others–and because the communities that will be affected most tend to be poorer, the shift will also widen income inequality.

A new map shows the projected county-by-county damages for the last two decades of the century, with the counties facing the heaviest burden shown in dark red. Those in green are likely to see some economic benefit, though as temperatures continue to warm, those benefits may be temporary. The impacts are highest in the South, where temperatures are already hotter.
The new analysis could be used in two key ways:
First, to help people better understand the consequences of decisions made on climate policy now, and second, to begin to better prepare for local impacts. In a 2016 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, most Americans agreed that global warming was happening, but few thought it would harm them personally. Opinions on whether it would ever harm people in the U.S. were mixed, particularly in some of the counties that will be most affected. (It’s worth noting that climate change has already been linked to impacts in the U.S., and though the map shown here focuses on the end of the century, more damage will occur earlier).

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435889/this-map-shows-which-parts-of-the-u-s-will-suffer-most-from-climate-change   

 

Monkey Business Here In Mesa? Here's What U Like To Watch

Are Homo sapiens losing their minds here in Mesa? According to scientific nomenclature we humans are called "Intelligent Apes" . . . sometimes ya gotta wonder, huh?

What do people living here pay attention to?
Obviously the public is NOT interested, involved, informed, or engaged in what City Hall and the Mesa Council are doing day-after-day, week-after-week and year-and-year . . .
For more than two years this local independent online blogsite has been writing and publishing features-of-interest that are both hyper-local and global, macroeconomic and micro-economic issues put into page views right in front of your eyes - thank you for the 145,000 views. 
Months ago there was a post with a YouTube video [you can look it up in a searchbox at the upper right] about what was called 'a monkey farm' - curious enough so that some people got interested and looked into it. . . it took some time to gather enough momentum but finally it hit the news again with over 24,000 views with a  new upload that it is a primate research facility. [see below]
The point your MesaZona blogger wants to make is in this streaming video from Mesa Channel 11 uploaded to YouTube, published on Mon 03 July 2017 of a meeting of the Mesa City Council - your government at work. Notice all the empty seats, the number of views, and the proceedings: 3 out of 6 councilmembers are not present.
Any idea what's on the agenda? What's been reported?

Compare this to the all the people who viewed this one about the monkey farm
Mesa Arizona Monkey Farm

Published on Jul 2, 2017
Views: 25,559

It has been reported this facility is closed and has been abandoned but as you can clearly see its still open and housing monkeys as of July 1,2017