XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Scientists Baffled by Mass Sardine Die-Off on West Coast -

Scientists Baffled by Mass Sardine Die-Off on West Coast - 



Experts are baffled by a confirmed and unexpected die-off of the West Coast’s sardine population, a mystery adding to an already long list of devastating environmental mysteries taking place in the wake of the Fukushima radiological disaster.
One that follows not only the discovery of various radiation hot spots along the very same coast, such as a 1,400% increase as documented by Infowars‘ ongoing investigation into the subject, but anomalies such as seen with the conjoined gray whale calves that were found dying along the coast. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has once again failed to even mention the reality that Fukushima’s effects have already been documented within the United States. From studies proving the radioactive contamination of seafood, to the admission that 70 plus percent of the radioactive waste from the plant was dumped directly into the ocean.
Still, however, the media runs around without a clue:
Sardine population has taken a dive in recent years. Photo: Tanaka Juuyoh, Wikimedia Commons
Sardine population has taken a dive in recent years. Photo: Tanaka Juuyoh, Wikimedia Commons
“Scientists are uncertain of what is causing the biggest sardine crash in generations, which is expected to wreak havoc up the food chain and cause economic problems for those who fish,” a recent Los Angeles Times article states.
The steep decline of 74 percent of the sardine population is not the first that’s ever been documented, but it is the most drastic in the last 60 years, according to the Times.
At the start of 2011, the sardine population was absolutely booming. “In the last 100 years, the number of small fish – such as pilchards, herrings, anchovies sprats and sardines – has more than doubled, according to a study,” the Daily Mail reported in February 2011, mere months before a tsunami slammed into Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor.
The massive fish decline follows a spate of strange ocean occurrences that appear to have sprung up in synchronicity with the timing of the nuclear meltdown.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune carried the L.A. Times' article at a fishing port in Avila Beach, California.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune carried the L.A. Times’ article at a fishing port in Avila Beach, California. Click to enlarge.
For example, a recent study found 98 percent of the ocean floor is covered with dead sea life, a number that has increased 97 percent in the last two years alone. “In the 24 years of this study, the past two years have been the biggest amounts of this detritus by far,” a marine biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute told National Geographic last November.
Also, marine biologists are researching the cause of “melting” sea stars all along the West Coast, a mysterious illness scientists termed “sea star wasting disease.” During the Infowars team’s investigation of West Coast radiation, we also found the disease in Charleston, Oregon, an area previously thought to be unaffected.
The fact that fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been predicted to reach the US coast by 2014, in addition to the fact that scientists will soon begin monitoring California kelp for signs of Fukushima radiation leads many to speculate the radioactive plume has already hit the coast.
Indeed, readings taken up and down the West Coast appear to corroborate this. Ambient radiation readings taken at almost every location were consistently nearly double normal levels, a startling indicator that ionizing radiation may already be bombarding the people that live along the West Coast of North America.
The US government’s recent purchase of 14 million doses of potassium iodide also fuels concerns that radiation has already made its way to the West Coast.
Despite a growing body of evidence that something fishy is definitely going on in the Pacific, the federal government, along with the Japanese government and even some academic officialdom have refused to acknowledge a link to the crippled reactor.

Read more - 
http://www.infowars.com/scientists-baffled-by-mass-sardine-die-off-on-west-coast/

STUDY: More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled FACEBOOK Since 2011... -

STUDY: More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled FACEBOOK Since 2011... - 



Skeptics of Facebook’s business model have long pointed to anecdotal evidence that the social network is losing its luster with teens as evidence that the firm will ultimately be unable to justify its $140 billion valuation. Indeed, even Facebook itself admitted last fall that it had lost younger users. “”We did see a decrease in [teenage] daily users [during the quarter], especially younger teens,” Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman said during a call with analysts.

But it’s always been difficult to gauge exactly what the magnitude of this lost interest has been. On Wednesday, the digital consultancy iStrategy Labs released a study that draws from Facebook’s Social Advertising platform to glean exactly how many young users have left the social network in recent years. The resulting estimates are pretty staggering. According to iStrategy, Facebook has 4,292,080 fewer high-school aged users and 6,948,848 college-aged users than it did in 2011. Check out the data below:

istrategy study


Advertisers covet younger audiences because their taste in products are more malleable, so these data could have a significant effect on the ad rates Facebook can charge.

On the other hand, advertising on Facebook isn’t just about its massive reach with younger users. A big part of Facebook’s pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet.

Read more: - 

Hospital Treats Bicyclist for Injury That Caused 7-Week Erection... - 7-WEEKS...... -

Hospital Treats Bicyclist for Injury That Caused 7-Week Erection... - 7-WEEKS...... - 



A cyclist needed medical intervention at an Irish hospital because an injury he suffered caused his penis to remain erect for nearly two months.
The unnamed bicyclist sustained an injury on the crossbar of his mountain bike that interfered with the blood flow to his penis.
A medical report quoted in the Irish Examiner said the biker’s pain and bruising settled within days, but that he sustained ongoing “high-flow” priapism “with rigid erection”.
After suffering in silence for five weeks, he finally sought medical attention.
A hospital report said the initial examination “revealed no signs of injury, but penis was erect”.
Doctors first tried “manual compression” which would work for a short time, but then the penis would become erect again.
Then they applied a pressure dressing that was in place for two weeks. But once the pressure was removed there was an immediate return of the erection.
Finally doctors  inserted gel foam and four tiny platinum coils at an abnormal connection between an artery and a vein that supplied blood to the man’s penis.
This successfully reduced the blood supply to the penis, ending the erection.
One of the medical technicians said, “We were very happy with the outcome.”
The CDC notes that bicycle parts manufacturers are developing saddles that ease pressure on the genitals.

Read more - 

13,000 teens complete Hamas training camps to emulate ‘suicide martyrs’ -

13,000 teens complete Hamas training camps to emulate ‘suicide martyrs’ - 



The Hamas government in Gaza celebrated the graduation on Monday of paramilitary camps geared at training high-school children “to follow in the footsteps of the suicide martyrs.”

The camps, titled “the pioneers of liberation,” are run by Hamas’s ministries of education and interior. Some 13,000 students in grades 10-12 participated in the one-week training camps this year, compared to 5,000 last year when the program was launched, Israeli sources with knowledge of the program said.


The corps of instructors consists mainly of active members of Hamas’s security forces, and the curriculum includes weapons training, first aid, self defense, marching exercises and “security awareness” classes on identifying Israeli spies.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Interior Minister Fathi Hammad and Education Minister Usama Mzeini attended the graduation ceremony on Monday, each delivering fiery speeches stressing the importance of military training in developing a new generation of Palestinian combatants.

“Beware this generation,” Haniyeh said, addressing Israel. “This is a generation which knows no fear. It is the generation of the missile, the tunnel and the suicide operations.”

The Hamas prime minister added that female trainers are also on staff “to oversee the training of the young women to follow in the footsteps of the female suicide operatives.”

Hammad, the interior minister, said the training was in preparation for the coming war with Israel.

“This generation is a sapling from God on earth. It will harvest the enemies of God and be the pride of all nations,” he said.

Hamdi Shaqura, deputy director of program affairs at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based watchdog, said that his organization issued no statement on the training.

“To the best of my knowledge no other organization in Gaza issued a statement either,” he told The Times of Israel.

Read more: - 

N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers -

N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers - 



The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.

While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.

The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.

President Obama spoke to reporters before a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday morning. Mr. Obama’s speech on spying guidelines is scheduled for Friday.Obama to Place Some Restraints on SurveillanceJAN. 14, 2014
The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack. In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.

The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.

Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”

“What’s new here is the scale and the sophistication of the intelligence agency’s ability to get into computers and networks to which no one has ever had access before,” said James Andrew Lewis, the cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Some of these capabilities have been around for a while, but the combination of learning how to penetrate systems to insert software and learning how to do that using radio frequencies has given the U.S. a window it’s never had before.”

Read more -
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/nsa-effort-pries-open-computers-not-connected-to-internet.html?hp&_r=0

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

Superbugs found breeding and spreading in sewage plants -

Superbugs found breeding and spreading in sewage plants - 



Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been raising alarms for years, particularly in hospital environments where public health officials fear they can be transferred from patient to patient and are very difficult to treat. Bacteria harboring the encoding gene that makes them resistant have been found on every continent except for Antarctica. Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria —“superbugs” carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010 — were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. NDM-1 is able to make such common bacteria as E. coli, salmonella, and K. pneumonias resistant to even the strongest available antibiotics.

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo.

A Rice University release reports that joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai, and Tianjin universities found “superbugs” carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination. They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils.

The study, led by Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

“It’s scary,” Alvarez said. “There’s no antibiotic that can kill them. We only realized they exist just a little while ago when a Swedish man got infected in India, in New Delhi. Now, people are beginning to realize that more and more tourists trying to go to the upper waters of the Ganges River are getting these infections that cannot be treated.

Read more - 
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Superbugs_found_breeding%2C_spreading_in_sewage_plants/32024/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Google spends $3.2 Billion to control every object in the house of the future -

Google spends $3.2 Billion to control every object in the house of the future - 



Google dropped $3.2 billion IN CASH to purchase a company that has pioneered smart grid technology.  Nest Labs Inc. is a corporation that designs home appliances and objects that are connected to the internet, or at the very least transmit information in some kind of way.

The deal is the second largest in Google's history, second only to the $12.5 billion purchase of cell phone producer Motorola in 2012.

In a statement on their website Nest Labs Inc. said that "Google will help us fully realize our vision of the conscious home and allow us to change the world faster than we ever could if we continued to go it alone. We’ve had great momentum, but this is a rocket ship."

While the company is currently focused on smoke alarms and simple house hold devices, experts say that Google plans to create "home automation" and an "internet of things".

"Nest Labs appears to be focused on thermostats and smoke alarms, but it's not far-fetched to see Google expanding this technology into other devices over time," said Shyam Patil, an analyst at Wedbush.

"Home automation is one of the bigger opportunities when you talk about the Internet of everything and connecting everything. This acquisition furthers their strategy around that," he said.

"This is a new area for Google, representing a desire to take advantage of all devices," said Ben Bajarin, director of consumer technology at Creative Strategies, a market intelligence and research firm. "Google wants its own platform for this world of connected things."

The internet of things may sound innocent enough, but it has very significant potential of being tied to the RFID agenda.

According to Wikipedia

"The Internet of Things (or IoT for short) refers to uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. The term Internet of Things was proposed by Kevin Ashton in 2009. The concept of the Internet of Things first became popular through the Auto-ID Center at MIT and related market analysis publications. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) was seen as a prerequisite for the Internet of Things in the early days. If all objects and people in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be managed and inventoried by computers.  Besides using RFID, the tagging of things may be achieved through such technologies as near field communication, barcodes, QR codes and digital watermarking."

Shares of Google were up 0.5 percent at $1,128.49 in extended trading on Monday, and their move into your living room received very positive feedback from the mainstream media.  The internet of things and smart home appliances are going to be something to keep a close eye on, now more than ever before.

Read more - 
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Google_Spends_%243.2_Billion_To_Control_Every_Object_In_The_House_Of_The_Future/32002/0/0/0/Y/M.html

Iranian news service posts - "Snowden Documents Proving 'US-ALIEN-Hitler' Link Stun Russia" - Nazi space aliens? -

Iranian news service posts - "Snowden Documents Proving 'US-ALIEN-Hitler' Link Stun Russia" - Nazi space aliens? - 



The state-run Iranian news service FARS has reported that mass NSA surveillance made public by Edward Snowden was actually an effort by the American-Nazi space aliens to hide their nature to a human world they hoped to dominate. 

In a serious news report called, "Snowden Documents Proving 'US-Alien-Hitler' Link Stun Russia" published on the FARS English site this Sunday, the Iranian government-controlled site contends the United States has been secretly run by a shadow government of Nazi space aliens since 1945. It also contends that Snowden offered Russian intelligence officials "incontrovertible proof" to support the claims, and that Russia considers the report to be "accurate":

A stunning Federal Security Services (FSB) [the Russian spy agency] report on the nearly two million highly classified top-secret documents obtained from the United States Department of Defense (DOD) run National Security Agency-Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) by the American ex-patriot Edward Snowden states that this information is providing “incontrovertible proof” that an “alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda” is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, Whatdoesitmean.com reported.

Read more - 

Greyhound puppy blew up his owners’ house after he chewed through a can of deodorant -

Greyhound puppy blew up his owners’ house after he chewed through a can of deodorant - 



Greyhound cross Zeus was left alone for just ten minutes before he sparked an explosion so powerful it shattered double-glazed windows, blew through floorboards and set a sofa on fire.

The six-month-old pup had chewed through a can of Lynx deodorant and, as it contents sprayed out, they were ignited by the heat from a lamp.

The blast caused £2,000 of damage but Zeus, along with five other pets in the house, escaped uninjured.

Owner Kerry Leech said: ‘He’s just a pup and at the moment he’ll chew anything.’

Miss Leech, 20, and her partner, Mathew Heckler, 22, were on their way to the shops on Saturday when they were alerted to the explosion by a text from a neighbour in Goldthorpe, in South Yorkshire.

She said: ‘I was panicking about our pets and rushed back. We saw flashing lights, two fire engines were outside the house and the street was blocked off.

‘We thought someone had put something through the letter-box or there had been a gas explosion.’

At first, firefighters thought the blast was caused by a leaky gas pipe but an investigation later concluded ‘a dog caused the explosion’.

Mr Heckler said: ‘I didn’t even know we had a can of Lynx in the living room. It was a Christmas present from Kerry’s parents and was in a gift box right next to the fire and back boiler.’

Prof Tom Welton, head of the chemistry department at Imperial College London, said the butane contained in deodorant was highly flammable.

He added: ‘The lowest temperature it can be ignited is minus 60C, so it is very dangerous stuff. These cans do come with warnings but obviously a puppy can’t read those.

Read more - 
http://metro.co.uk/2014/01/09/scooby-doom-puppy-blows-up-owners-house-after-chewing-through-can-of-deodorant-4257259/

Monday, 13 January 2014

Call center uses 'artificial empathy' bot to assess humans' moods and personalities... -

Call center uses 'artificial empathy' bot to assess humans' moods and personalities... - 



Are you the kind of person who prefers to be chatty on customer service calls, or do you like to get right to the point? Do you prefer to be led through an explanation every step of the way, or do you prefer that the person on the other end just shut up and "do what they need to do"? Do you prefer person-centered explanations, or technical explanations? Are you outgoing, or are you shy?

Believe it or not, there is a computer system out there that can figure out the details of your personality and interaction style after listening to mere seconds of your phone calls. In fact, this may have already happened the last time you called a customer service line. There is no way you would ever know.

Mattersight is an extremely sophisticated data analysis system that listens to the way you respond on the telephone. It listens to you in the background, and breaks down hundreds of micro-features of your voice: Volume, tone, pauses, speed of response, and so on. It uses mathematical algorithms to interpret these features, compare them to data in its databases, and come up with a personality profile for you.

All of this happens, by the way, during the first few seconds that you are on the phone. It could even be happening while you are working your way through a voice-activated menu system.

Then, when you are finally connected to a sales representative or customer service professional, Mattersight takes its analysis of your personality, compares it to the personality profiles of the call center employees that it has on file, and automatically connects you with the service agent that you are most compatible with.

As a result, you will have a better customer experience. If you like brusque and professional, you will be connected with someone who is brusque and professional; on the other hand, if you like friendly and chatty, you will be connected with someone who asks how your day is going.

You will never even know that Mattersight was behind the scenes, manipulating the whole thing. In some cases, even the customer service representative may not know. But the end result is that both parties come away from the experience knowing that they were talking to someone who was "easy to get along with."

How much of your personality is private?

How much information do you give away about yourself when you are on the phone with a call center? Exactly how much of a "deep dive," psychologically, can an analytics system like Mattersight really do? In reality, nobody knows the ultimate answer to this question.

Over time, if you are a repeat caller to a company's help line or sales department, the Mattersight analytics system could potentially build up a detailed profile of you. Every single second of every phone interaction that you have with another human being can yield hundreds of new micro-features of data. Each of these micro-features can then go into the system, be passed through complex algorithms, and refine the company's "personality profile" of you.

Over time, this means a better customer experience for you, because the system will become better at pairing you with people that you "just click with" on the other end of the call.

But how far can this profiling go? By gathering data about your vocal distress level, incorrect responses, or dialect, can Mattersight detect whether you might be someone who is trying to commit fraud? Can it be used to predict the chances that you might miss payments, or skip out on a debt?

Can it be used to detect psychopathy? As the raw amount of data that we can extract from vocal interaction increases, and as the mathematical systems for examining those data improve, we will be able to make increasingly better predictions about nearly all aspects of a caller's personality, even those that one might normally think of as being "private."

How comfortable do you feel that Mattersight can use "big data" techniques to find out more about you than your therapist can find out by laying you on a couch once a week?

Although Mattersight does not advertise its system as "artificial intelligence," its data mining techniques are reminiscent of many of the artificial intelligence techniques that have been discovered and refined over the last several decades. Traditional "artificial intelligence" is usually associated with, for example, taking voice commands and extracting the meanings of words and sentences.

Mattersight's system, on the other hand, is more like "artificial empathy": It takes the same stream of verbal input, and it extracts information about the speaker's mood, personality, and interaction style. This is basically the same thing that people do intuitively when listening to one another: Assessing mood, feelings, and personality.

A truly insightful person can "read" people very effectively. Empaths sometimes bill themselves as "psychics" and impress audiences by doing "cold reads" on strangers with amazing accuracy. In fact, however, such people are using the same types of subtle cues that Mattersight uses to recognize patterns and divine personality traits.

Yet it seems so much more creepy when a machine does it during a customer service call.

The deep, dark secrets of your personality are only "private" in the sense that most people cannot figure them out easily, most of the time. But computers are improving, and mathematical analysis is improving. Mattersight is right on the cutting edge, and is ready to turn your phone call into a personality test.

Mattersight will get to know you better than you know yourself, and it will only take seconds. While it listens in on your phone conversation, quietly and in the background, it will examine your personality, your level of empathy, your attention, and your interaction style. You won't even realize that it's there: All you will know is that you enjoyed the phone call.

Read more -