Pioneering Herald – Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

Pioneering Herald – Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

THE LEAD

  • Face recognition in European police forces

    Face recognition in European police forces – Algorithmwatch

    The majority of the police forces that answered questions by AlgorithmWatch said they use or plan to introduce face recognition. Use cases vary greatly across countries, but almost all have in common their lack of transparency.
    Police departments have long attempted to acquire, structure and store data on the populations they keep a watch on. Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the use of anthropometrics by the police in the 1870s, creating a collection of tens of thousands of cards containing the measurements of homeless people (thought to be more likely to engage in crime), including the famous mug shot. His work was the foundation on which biometrics grew over the 20th century.
    Current projects have far surpassed what Bertillon could have imagined. Face recognition is used to find missing children and to spot violent supporters in football stadiums. In Lyon, France, a man was caught stealing a car by a CCTV camera last October. His face matched a picture in a database. He was subsequently arrested and sentenced to one and a half year in jail.

  • ‘It Starts With a Cup, Ends With a Shooting’: 3 Putin Quotes on Human Rights

    ‘It Starts With a Cup, Ends With a Shooting’: 3 Putin Quotes on Human Rights – The Moscow Times

    On plastic cup-throwing protesters:
    — “So they throw a plastic cup at an authority, and that’s OK. Then a plastic bottle, that’s OK too. Then it’s a glass bottle, [then] a stone and then they start shooting and looting stores. We must prevent that.”
    — “There are also so-called arbitrary excesses, which are in fact gross violations of the law by various law enforcement agencies too. Of course, everything needs to be measured and certain boundaries can’t be crossed.”
    — “Can you punch a woman in the stomach? Can you beat a policeman? Of course you can’t punch a woman in the stomach. But if someone punches a woman in the stomach, it doesn’t grant someone the right to beat a police officer. These are subtle things.”

  • PSLV-C48/RISAT-2BR1: ISRO successfully launches Indian defense satellite RISAT-2BR1, 9 commercial payloads to orbit

    ISRO successfully launches Indian defense satellite RISAT-2BR1, 9 commercial payloads to orbit – FirstPost

    The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched India’s newest radar imaging earth observation satellite RISAT-2BR1 onboard PSLV-C48 from its spaceport of Sriharikota. There were a total of ten satellites – one Indian defense satellite, and nine commercial satellites, coordinated via a partnership with NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) – that were launched into space.
    The launch marked a significant milestone for the space agency – the 50th flight of the PSLV, as well as the 75th launch overall from ISRO’s First Launch Pad in SHAR, Sriharikota.

THE FEATURE

'World's first' fully-electric commercial flight takes off

‘World’s first’ fully-electric commercial flight takes off – BBC

An all-electric powered seaplane has taken flight in Vancouver, Canada, in what the operators describe as a “world first” for the aviation industry.
The short test flight by Harbour Air and magniX involved a six-passenger aircraft fitted with an electric motor…..
“This historic flight signifies the start of the third era in aviation – the electric age,” Harbour Air and magniX said in a statement.
The flight involved a six-passenger DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver with a 750-horsepower (560 kW) magni500 propulsion system.

TOP STORIES

  • New Quantum Tech is About to Bring a Major Boost to Gravitational Wave Detections

    New Quantum Tech is About to Bring a Major Boost to Gravitational Wave Detections – Discover Magazine

    Physicists have successfully developed a new instrument that significantly reduces quantum-level noise that has thus far limited experiments’ ability to spot gravitational waves. Collisions between massive black holes and stars are thought to generate these ripples in space-time that were first detected in 2015. In all, about 11 detections have been fully confirmed so far.
    The device marks a major improvement to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, increasing its detection range by 15 percent. Since the sky is a sphere, scientists expect to be able to detect about 50 percent more gravitational waves. They now predict that they will catch dozens of these rarely detected events during LIGO’s ongoing experiment run through April 2020, which could transform their understanding of the phenomena. The collaboration published their findings today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

  • Ankara threatens to close down U.S. Air Force base in Turkey – Defence-Blog

    Ankara threatens to close down U.S. Air Force base in Turkey – Defence-Blog

    A senior Turkish official said that Ankara threatening to close down the U.S. Air Force Incirlik Air Base.
    Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a statement that Ankara may insist that the U.S. leave Incirlik air base if Washington goes ahead with the sanctions it has threatened in response to Turkey’s purchase of S-400 air defense systems.
    “We will assess the worst-case scenario and make a decision. If the US imposes sanctions against Turkey, then the issue of the Incirlik and Kurecik bases may be on the agenda,” Cavusoglu said.

BRIEFS

  • Serial Biotech Entrepreneur Kevin Ness Has Raised $260 Million To Get His Genome-Engineering Device Into The Hands Of Every Scientist Who Wants One – Forbes

    Kevin Ness has made a career of building tools for biologists. Now, with the burgeoning field of synthetic biology booming, he’s ramping up his latest venture, Inscripta, which wants to get a genome-engineering device into the hands of every scientist who wants one. The company has been operating largely under the radar, but with the announcement today that it had raised $125 million in a round led by Paladin Capital Group, for total funding of $260 million, it’s ready to make its mark.
    “Our instrument is the early Apple. It’s the first personal computer for biology,” Ness told Forbes during a recent meeting in New York City.

  • Netizen Voices: “Misogyny With Chinese Characteristics on the Diplomatic Stage” – China Digital Times

    The literary figure may not have been the most appropriate analogy for Hua to use in her attack on Secretary Pompeo. Due to the obscurity of the reference and the lack of any follow-up questions from the press pool, at Quartz Jane Li provides literary context, and explains why some Chinese may have found offense in the reference:
    […[ Hua made the comments in response to a question raised by an unidentified journalist, who cited a Politico article that quoted Pompeo as saying European countries should not give control of their critical infrastructure to Chinese tech giants because of their close ties to Beijing, according to a transcript published by the foreign ministry. As one of the most hawkish US politicians on China, Pompeo often criticizes China on a range of issues including Hong Kong and Xinjiang, comparing China’s suppression of the Uyghur Muslims to East Germany for example.
    By invoking Aunt Xianglin, Hua was resorting to deep-rooted tropes that are offensive to both women and mentally challenged people in order to denigrate Pompeo. “There is already lots of mockery of Aunt Xianglin in daily life. But somehow I feel sad to see her being made fun of like this on a national level,” said one user (link in Chinese) on social network Weibo. [Source]

  • Greenland Losing Ice 7 Times Faster Than in 1990s – Lost 3.8 Trillion Metric Tons of Ice Since 1992 – Scitech Daily

    Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than in the 1990s and is tracking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end climate warming scenario, which would see 40 million more people exposed to coastal flooding by 2100.
    A team of 96 polar scientists from 50 international organizations has produced the most complete picture of Greenland ice loss to date. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) Team combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992 and 2018. Altogether, data from 11 different satellite missions were used, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow, and gravity.
    The findings, published today (December 10, 2019) in Nature, show that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion metric tons of ice since 1992 — enough to push global sea levels up by 10.6 millimeters. The rate of ice loss has risen from 33 billion metric tons per year in the 1990s to 254 billion metric tons per year in the last decade — a seven-fold increase within three decades.

  • Russia, Ukraine Leaders Agree on Ceasefire Following Four-Way Talks in Paris – Small Wars Journal

    Russian and Ukrainian leaders agreed to implement a ceasefire and a prisoners’ swap by years end, following four-way talks in Paris on Monday that also included France and Germany.
    The four heads of state said they had made progress and that just talking was a key step forward. They are to meet again in four months.
    Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was confident of the ceasefire would take place this month. He outlined both steps forward and progress still to be made during a late night press conference, echoing similar remarks made by other leaders there.

  • UK economy at its lowest point since 2009 – New Europe

    The British economy had its worst quarter since 2009, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported on Tuesday.
    The economy flatlined month-on-month in October, after two months of decline.
    Services expanded by 0.2% from August-to-October, offsetting a 0.7% contraction in manufacturing and 0.3% in construction.
    Reflecting a drop in manufacturing exports, Britain’s goods trade deficit widened to £14.5bn in October, up from £11.5bn in September.

  • Rats replay memories forward and backwards to make decisions – Futurity

    The researchers found that specific patterns of brain cell firings in rats correspond to individual memories. As a result, the researchers could tell what the rodents were remembering during an experiment. They also found a way to predict what the animals would do next.
    During sleep, the brain replays each memory from the day in a unique pattern of brain cell firings. The activation of a pattern essentially creates a recording of the memory so it can be stored for the long term. This process, called memory consolidation, occurs while we’re awake, too.
    In the long term, the researchers hope that a greater understanding of how the brain processes memories will lead to treatments for diseases where memory is impaired, such as Alzheimer’s disease or other kinds of dementia.

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