#the question was also raised of whether it was Luis in the video from the hotel which is for sure possible

[sacramentonewsjournal]

Klopps therapy of 1 Liverpool star is questioned

Jurgen Klopp has been instructed that he’s used Fabio Carvalho incorrectly in current weeks by Peterborough chairman Darragh MacAnthony. The 20-year-old arrived from Fulham earlier this summer season and began Liverpool’s 3-3 draw with Brighton final Saturday. The choice to begin the Portugal U21 worldwide raised just a few eyebrows and regardless of him displaying glimpses of what he’s able to, he was changed by Luis Diaz at half time. MacAnthony has questioned whether or not Klopp approached the sport in opposition to the Seagulls with a touch of vanity. “He [Klopp] must take a few of these gamers out the firing line,” MacAnthony stated on The Onerous Reality podcast (by way of talkSPORT). “I’m watching on Saturday and I’m a Carvalho fan, he’s going to be a terrific participant, however you’re enjoying Brighton. They’re no mugs, they’re workforce. READ MORE: (Video) Bizarre away fan behaviour noticed as Rangers fan seems to ‘shoot’ Liverpool gamers with imaginary gun “And also you choose a entrance three of Carvalho, Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah. On the bench Diogo Jota, Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez. £200 million value of strikers on the bench. “Did you arrogantly suppose that you just have been simply going to roll over Brighton? You didn’t want to try this with Carvalho, don’t kill the child. Take your time. Diaz ought to have been in, or Nunez needs to be in.” Carvalho truly confirmed confidence throughout the first half in opposition to Roberto De Zerbi’s aspect and was one of many only a few Liverpool gamers that tried to make issues occur. Though our first half displaying was lacklustre, Brighton deserve credit score for his or her efficiency and have been nicely well worth the level they earned. VOTE for Empire of the Kop as Greatest Membership Content material Creator (Premier League) right here: Soccer Content material Awards OR on Twitter with the FCA’s one-click Twitter hyperlink with: I’m voting for @Empireofthekop in @The_FCAs for #BestClubContentCreator (Premier League) The Fulham Academy graduate scored his first purpose for the membership within the 9-0 rout final month earlier than scoring an harm time winner in opposition to Newcastle just a few days later. It’s clear that the attacker has a lot capability and underneath the steerage of our German tactician we will’t wait to look at him develop alongside his former Craven Cottage teammate Harvey Elliott. We’d argue that Klopp has gone concerning the scenario of embedding Carvalho into the workforce the fitting manner – he’s earned minutes in all of our Premier League video games to date however is but to make his Champions League debut. Our No. 28 could have struggled to make the influence he would’ve favored in opposition to the south coast outfit not too long ago however that doesn’t imply it was the incorrect resolution to begin him – he’s younger and can study from video games like that. We’ve received religion in Klopp to get the lads acting at their greatest once more within the coming weeks and following our victory over Rangers on Tuesday, consideration now turns to Sunday’s large conflict with Arsenal on the Emirates. #Ep61 of The Empire of the Kop Podcast: Keita in a makeweight deal for Bellingham? Manic October… and extra! Originally published at Sacramento News Journal

#Sacramento News Journal

[1d-discourseoftheday]

Mon 11 Jan ‘21

Turns out there is no Zayn zoom call, it was faked by fans, but Zayn heard us all crying about just wanting to hear him talking and did one better anyway; he tweeted a phone number (1 323 991-ZAYN) for us ALL to call him! The number has a recording of Zayn (“yo Zayn heah!” yesss thank you) inviting us to press numbers between 1 and 9 to hear a preview of the 9 songs on the album that we have not yet heard so we can GET EXCITED and pick our faves. And then after you call it “he” sends you a fully skeezy text asking for your deets “so we can stay in touch” so if you ever dreamed about Zayn sliding into your DMs here's your chance to pretend (in a more wholesome way than faking it to make other fans feel bad.)

Spotify restored the “This is Louis Tomlinson” playlist (he finally got one when Walls came out and he had enough solo songs, but then it quickly disappeared, until now)- Spotify says “we made it! sorry this took so long to fix” which explains nothing but there ya go. An intrepid detective connected the dots between an old picture of Dianna Agron from Glee in the Pride tent at 2019 Glastonbury with the picture of Louis from Glasto that was found a year after the fact (on some guy's tinder)-- he was also in the big rainbow colored gay tent. And present day Louis (today!) liked a post that was both inspirational and about football, regular Louis catnip; “Really moving! Best of luck to him!” he said about the guy's story.

Lottie apparently felt like riling up the fandom today and ran a “favorite fruit” emoji poll which, I'm not saying Harry OWNS FRUIT now or anything but she sure wasn't steering away from people going there, least of all when she commented oooh gosh kiwis sure seem popular how about that, or when she then said her favorite 1D song was “I have loved you since we were 18” against a cherry backdrop, and Veeps pulled it back from a typo on a post about Liam singing a 1D fave with an excellent “cause you make me Trong” follow up post.

Meanwhile even the entertainment press, desperate to make sense of it all, are plaintively asking “So who should we believe?” in headlines about the Holivia timeline and posting whole articles about the contradictions; when Harry said “time is irrelevant” in his 2015 song 'Olivia' he was sending a message to the future about exactly this, clearly! Tragically the hilarious 'Harry turns detective to try to puzzle out who told the press about Holivia' angle seems to have been dropped, though presumably not for being too stupid to believe because, well...*gestures...*

#zayn #louis tomlinson #harry styles #liam payne #santiago receipts are flying which is all fun and games except I would like to join in with the chorus of voices once again reminding you #that Luis is Harry's PA and that is certainly who Luis Lime is in the fruit coded room assignments #(not that harry owns fruit) #the question was also raised of whether it was Luis in the video from the hotel which is for sure possible #(the fact that the person is actually carrying bags does mean it would be deep subterfuge if it was Louis lol) #but ultimately who cares? it seems like Louis was in Santiago even without that and even if he wasn't like... they're together #these little specifics don't really matter. that's anti logic that saying they are is based on things like videos #there's years worth of things piled on top of each other and of them TELLING US so coming right up to the present- THAT'S why #not because someone might or might not have slipped here or there #11 jan 21

[liunaticfringe]

(via Lucy Liu at the Napa Valley Museum: How did they get her? They asked. | Entertainment | napavalleyregister.com)

he team at the Napa Valley Museum Yountville gets asked one question more than any other these days:

“How did you ever get Lucy Liu to bring her first U.S. museum exhibition to you here in the Napa Valley?”

The answer, it turns out, is simple: “We asked.”

Museum executive director Laura Rafaty first approached Liu to be the keynote speaker at the Museum’s Feb. 25 “Phenomenal Women” fundraising luncheon.

“I began looking for someone who was an accomplished visual artist but who brought other aspects of life to her work, since I find that so many artists these days—and so many women—are involved in multiple creative endeavors. When I saw Lucy Liu’s art, as exhibited at the National Museum of Singapore, and considered it in the context of her accomplishments as an actor and director and work on behalf of children as an ambassador for UNICEF, I knew that I wanted our museum to present the first U.S. museum exhibition of her work.”

The result is: “Lucy Liu: One of these things is not like the others,” on exhibition at the Napa Valley Museum Yountville through April 26. It also brought Lucy Liu to Yountville last week, where she gave an inspiring keynote speech at the “Phenomenal Women” luncheon fundraiser, helping the museum raise more than $90,000 for the nonprofit. The Phenomenal Women event sold out quickly with a substantial waitlist of those wanting one of only 92 seats at tables tightly tucked inside the museum’s Main Gallery, surrounded by Liu’s artwork.

It helped that Liu, who has with millions of devoted social media followers (including a fan club of self-described “Liu-natics”), donated an original silkscreen valued at over $10,000 for auction at the luncheon, to benefit the Museum’s arts and education programs.

Speaking about her first U.S. museum exhibition, Liu said: “I’m so happy to collaborate with the Napa Valley Museum and to share my work with the community. Art has been an important part of my life and development since I was a child; it helps cultivate imagination and also fosters critical thinking skills. Supporting lifelong arts education is imperative and I am thrilled to be a part of this important endeavor.“

Liu’s visit to Yountville gave the museum team its first chance to meet Liu in person, and to discuss the inspiration behind her multi-faceted body of work. The exhibit was curated by Daniel Chen, director of Chambers Fine Art in New York, which represents Liu’s art, and who worked closely with Liu on the project.

Chen, an expert on modern Chinese art who helped curate Liu’s National Museum of Singapore exhibition, traveled from New York to Napa Valley to help the museum team with the installation and to attend the opening night on Feb. 1.

The exhibition is a survey of various aspects of Liu’s artwork. Included are Liu’s intricate wood sculptures, inspired by her travels, depicting individuals within a family. The most talked-about artworks are her oversized paintings inspired by Shunga, a form of erotic art based on the “ukiyo-e” or Japanese woodblock. These works are bold, provocative, and sexually explicit; a departure from the Museum’s typical exhibitions.

To put this work into larger context, the museum obtained an example of a traditional Japanese Shunga hand scroll from San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, which it displays at the entrance to the Shunga section.

In her artist statement for the exhibition, Liu describes the genesis of the Shunga series: “My works tend to be intimate and personal; I often try to dissect things that were not explored when I was growing up. During my adolescence, I was constantly questioning things that were considered ‘taboo’ and was never satisfied with the answers I was given. Curiosity is key, and looking into the crevices of these questions and answers is something that I can express and explore through my art.”

There are examples of her silkscreens (including the auctioned work), plus pieces from Liu’s “Lost & Found” series, in which found objects are incorporated into handmade, hand-tooled books that are works of art in themselves.

“Another ongoing concern in my artwork has been the notion of security and salvation,” Lui said. “There are long-term effects that result from personal relationships, reflected in both our physical and emotional selves, and I have always used art to address these ‘effects’ and ideas. This theme is sometimes realized by the appropriation of discarded objects, which I place into handmade constructions, where the objects are protected and given a new significance.”

The exhibition also showcases Liu’s “Totem” series, in which intricate embroidered “spines” are paired with bold designs fashioned from fabric, paper and thread. The series includes “41”: individual small panels depicting each of the first 41 years of the artist’s life. Patterns and cutouts in the “Lost and Found” books are repeated in the “41” series on the wall behind them, while the spinal patterns of the Totem series adorn the spines of the “Lost and Found” books.

Large beige “Totem” works that seem flat from a distance reveal multi-dimensional and colorful connections upon closer inspection. The result is to be immersed in the world of an artist seeking intellectual order from emotional chaos.

“Although it’s only in retrospect that I discover the threads that tie my various bodies of work together, I find that no matter which medium I am working with, I often focus on the connections between people who pass through our lives,” Liu said. “Perhaps I am subconsciously seeking a closer examination of the meaning behind our personal relationships. Whether positive or negative, each interaction in our life leaves a mark on our psyche, and sometimes can manifest itself in a surprising, physical manner. These ‘marks’ manifest themselves in my work.”

In addition to the artwork, the museum offers video presentations illustrating Liu’s influences and creative processes, and a “living” title wall featuring audio and video of Liu in her studio. It shows Liu creating the giant painting: “Hunger,” which at nearly 12 feet tall takes up the entire back wall of the Main gallery.

The reaction to Liu’s work has been overwhelmingly positive, Rafaty said. “Visitors enjoy learning more about Lucy, who reveals so much about her interior life through her art. People seem to connect to the vulnerability on display, and to the work’s essential humanity.“

Due to the adult themes in the exhibition, the museum recommends that a parent accompany visitors younger than age 18. Other exhibitions currently on display include “The Yates Collection” of masterworks by Picasso, Pissarro, Chagall, Matisse and others, on long-term loan to the Museum from the Yates Foundation, and the museum’s permanent Napa Valley History Gallery, with a new Veterans Home history display.

The Napa Valley Museum Yountville is at 55 Presidents Circle in Yountville and is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Regular admission is $15; $10 seniors 65 and older, $5 Youth 6-17. Admission to the museum is free for Napa Valley Museum members, children 5 and under, residents of the Veterans Home in Yountville, and active duty military. Admission is free for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch cardholders during the weekend of March 8-9 through the Museum’s on Us program.

For more information about the exhibition, visit the museum’s website at napavalleymuseum.org.

#Lucy Liu #artist #napa valley museum #hunger #liunatics

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chef José Andrés: A Bromance That Will Save Us All

Given all that’s going on in the world, a good old-fashioned bromance feels oddly reassuring — especially when it’s between two hermanos with heart: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Broadway megastar behind Hamilton and In the Heights, and José Andrés, the acclaimed chef and leader of World Central Kitchen, which has produced millions of meals over the past several weeks in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

They are fond of retweeting each other’s good works — whether it’s the sweatshirts Miranda curated to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS or Andrés’s hunger-relief efforts throughout New York City — and even vacation together with their families. Miranda and his father, Luis, co-wrote the foreword for Andrés’s book, We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time, about World Central Kitchen’s remarkable response to Hurricane Maria in 2017. And then there is #RecipesForThePeople — hilarious Instagram videos in which Andrés cooks with his daughters while singing along to the Hamilton soundtrack and enjoying a glass of wine. “Boom!” he yells at them. “Let’s go! It’s for today!”

Andrés himself has a life story worthy of a Miranda musical. In 1990, he was on board to work for his best friend (and future celebrity chef) Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, the gastronomic temple that would go on to garner three Michelin stars, on Spain’s Costa Brava. But after an ill-fated meeting with Adrià, Andrés was fired, and he moved to New York instead with just $50 in his pocket. Over the next 30 years, he built a restaurant empire that stretches from Washington, D.C., to Las Vegas to Disney World, then became the person everyone turns to during a crisis and found himself nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

How did this Spanish line cook, a son of two nurses, grow up to be a hero and a statesman? When posed with this question, Andrés, who can be very modest for someone with so much bravado, shrugs. “I only light the fire,” he says. “If anything, I give the push. Then it’s amazing men and women and — boom! — they are doing it. We’re all in this together, and everybody’s doing their part — everybody here, Lin, and so many others. And if we all do our part a little bit more, we’re going to take care of this. We will.”

...

JA: Coffee! Puerto Rican coffee, I’m having today. 

LMM: Well, I’m very proud of you. Speaking of Puerto Rico, we met actually during Hurricane Maria. We were both kind of signal-boosting from our respective departments in the world on Twitter. I just remember being struck by how you were getting to places that we hadn’t heard from. And you were filming these dispatches from where you were setting up places to serve food. And then I think I DM’d you, and you sent me a message about our friend Erin Schrode, who was on your team, because she knows all the words to In the Heights.

JA: She does.

LMM: It was such a crazy time, and you experienced it firsthand. 

JA: I still remember the day that you and many others landed in San Juan bringing hope, bringing a message of love. You also brought money and things that were needed, like water. I realized that every gesture in these situations matters in ways that we don’t even understand. I connected to you and all your amazing family through Hurricane Maria. And all of a sudden, my family was like, “Wow, you look like you’ve been friends forever.” And you sent us this kind of amazing message — your words, rapping and making up that song of hope, thanking the men and women at World Central Kitchen. And we were able to deliver this to everybody. I can tell you that, for me, this was even more important than any money we were receiving from donors because this gave hope to every single cook and every person delivering the food, all across the island, who was working with us. Long story short, we were able to open 26 kitchens. We delivered almost four million meals. And everything we did was bringing the same hope that you and all your friends brought to the island. Sometimes a moment of empathy becomes a very powerful weapon. 

This is such a wonderful chat.

#lin manuel miranda #jose andres #instyle #video #puerto rico #politics and advocacy

[geopolicraticus]

Bird Brains: Better than We Thought

Alternative Neural Architectures for Consciousness 

The issue of Science for 25 September 2020 features a crow on its cover with the headline “Avian Awareness: Carrion crows display sensory consciousness.” There are three articles in the journal on this theme, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain” by Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, and Onur Güntürkün, and “Birds do have a brain cortex—and think” by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Everyone who has watched crows carefully knows that they are intelligent birds. A friend once told me that if he went outside and pretended to target crows with a broom handle as though it were a gun, the birds would not move, but if he went outside with an actual gun, the birds would scatter. There is a video of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof, as well as another video of two crows sliding and rolling on a snow-covered car, which looks like the kind of intentional play behavior we associate with mammals (there are many similar videos of crows playing). I’m sure everyone has their own anecdotal account of avian intelligence.

Now we have something more than anecdotal evidence for corvid intelligence. The articles in Science report, respectively, an experiment that implies sensory consciousness and anatomical features of the corvid brain that are analogous, but not identical, to the mammalian brain. Herculano-Houzel notes that it has long been said that birds have no cerebral cortex, but she goes on to explain that the avian pallium derives from the same embryonic developmental structures from which the mammalian cerebral cortex derives. (She cites “A developmental ontology for the mammalian brain based on the prosomeric model” by Luis Puelles, Megan Harrison, George Paxinos, and Charles Watson, in which the authors argue, “Because genomic control of neural morphogenesis is remarkably conservative, this ontology should prove essentially valid for all vertebrates…” which would include both birds and mammals.)

Similarly, the conventional view has been that the limbic system is unique to mammals, but there may be structures in the avian brain that are homologous to the limbic system. A re-assessment of the avian brain is evident from papers such as Avian brains and a new understanding of vertebrate brain evolution by The Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, and Cell-type homologies and the origins of the neocortex by Jennifer Dugas-Ford, Joanna J. Rowell, and Clifton W. Ragsdale, and this re-assessment has been carried back to common ancestors of mammals and birds, as we find in the paper The Limbic System of Tetrapods: A Comparative Analysis of Cortical and Amygdalar Populations by Laura L. Bruce and Timothy J. Neary. All of this points to the increasing complexity and detailed articulation of evo-devo conceptions and the idea of deep homology, such that highly conserved genes produce similar structures—eyes, brains, and perhaps consciousness too—across many different species, even when there isn’t a direct line of descent; we should take this as a memo to similarly examine behavioral evolution from an evo-devo standpoint, but leave that aside for now.

Given the earlier research in the papers cited above, we would not be surprised to learn of further homologies being recognized to hold between avian and mammalian brains, but while there may be unrecognized neural homologies between birds and mammals, the bird brain is quite different from a mammalian brain. The Stacho, et al., paper addresses these different neuronal structures, but they conclude, “Our study reveals a hitherto unknown neuroarchitecture of the avian sensory forebrain that is composed of iteratively organized canonical circuits within tangentially organized lamina-like and orthogonally positioned column-like entities.” In other words, the avian pallium exhibits an architecture of layered neurons, and columns connecting the layers, which is a structure than has long been understood to characterize the mammalian cerebral cortex. The two structures are distinct in detail, but display overall similarities in the way in which iterated and interconnected neural circuits are arranged.

The Nieder, et al., paper approaches avian intelligence through behavioral research rather than through anatomy, although the stimulus response experiments are traced to a single neuron, so that there is an anatomical component to this research as well. The authors write:

“We trained two carrion crows (Corvus corone) to report the presence or absence of visual stimuli around perceptual threshold in a rule-based delayed detection task. At perceptual threshold, the internal state of the crows determined whether stimuli of identical intensity would be seen or not perceived. After a delay, a rule cue informed the crow about which motor action was required to report its percept. Thus, the crows could not prepare motor responses prior to the rule cues, which enabled the investigation of neuronal activity related to subjective sensory experience and its lasting accessibility.”

Nieder, et al., recognize the philosophical problems involved here by citing the famous paper by Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” They add, “…whether pure subjective experience itself (“phenomenal consciousness”) can and should be dissociated from its report (“access consciousness”) remains intensely debated.” And so it is.

The Nieder, et al., paper, though it appears in the same issue of Science as the Stacho, et al., paper, is entirely independent of the Stacho, et al., paper, and the former repeats many of the traditional assumptions about the absence of a cerebral cortext in the avian brain. However, knowing what is now shown in the Stacho, et al., paper, and its earlier anticipations, we should not be at all surprised to find both empirical evidence of consciousness and mechanisms of sensory consciousness in birds that are apparently parallel to those of mammals. Our common terrestrial ancestry, and the DNA all life in the terrestrial biosphere shares, seems to count quite significantly toward cognitive similarity, and points to the possibility of an evo-devo cognitive science.  

Both Nieder, et al, and Herculano-Houzel discuss the phylogenesis of consciousness: since mammals and birds have a common ancestor about 320 million years ago, this raises the question of whether the common ancestor to both birds and mammals had some rudimentary form of consciousness, or whether consciousness appeared later, independently emerging in both birds and mammals. (I just discussed what I call the phylogenesis of mind in my newsletter 101.)

On the one hand, accounting for consciousness by the deep homology of highly conserved genes closely ties consciousness to the terrestrial biosphere and its contingent processes; on the other hand, multiple distinct biological mechanisms that realize consciousness suggest that consciousness as an emergent complexity is not exclusively reliant upon the specific biological mechanisms and neuronal architecture of highly developed mammal brains, which is the way in which we ourselves are familiar with consciousness. This in turn suggests that other intelligence in the universe could also be conscious intelligence something like we know from our own experience, and a mind constrained by the reality of consciousness as we know it would be at least partially understandable by us—and we would be at least partially understandable by an alien conscious intelligence—in virtue of shared consciousness, even if the biological underpinnings of consciousness were distinct in each case.

We cannot communicate via (grammatically structured) language with other forms of life on Earth, but we can and do communicate with them in terms of conscious interaction with other conscious beings. Even a biological relationship as adversarial as predation, for example, is mediated by consciousness—both beings seeking to survive, while one listens and watches in order to detect a threat, while the other waits and watches for a moment to pounce. (I earlier made a similar point in A Sentience-Rich Biosphere.) This ecological relationship is mediated by a conscious relationship between predator and prey, i.e., the shared consciousness of both predator and prey. Similarly, communicative relationships between ourselves and other beings that evolved in other biospheres, such as is posulated as the basis of SETI, could have a similar communicative structure based in shared consciousness that mediates an ecological relationship (with “ecological” here understood in a cosmological sense), even if it should turn out to be the case that human and alien minds are incommensurable and communication in the sense of shared information content is not possible (i.e., if what Freeman Dyson criticized as the “philosophical discourse dogma” is, in fact, an unsupported dogma).  

These findings regarding avian consciousness should also be of great interest to artificial intelligence researchers, in so far as artificial intelligence can be conceived (even if it is not always conceived) as machine consciousness. Machine intelligence that is not conscious would be alien from human intelligence in a fundamental way (in the same way that an extraterrestrial intelligence what was not conscious would be more alien to us than a conscious mind). Artificial intelligence that was the result of machine consciousness, like an alien consciousness, would have at least something in common with us, increasing the possibility of our having aligned interests (i.e., the constructed AI more likely to be friendly AI).

Knowing that consciousness in both avian and mammalian brains may be associated with layered neural structures, engineers of computer hardware involved in artificial intelligence might consider constructing an iterated architecture of layered neural pathways—that is to say, layered neural networks—connected every so often by columns, and so producing a different kind of hardware more specifically suited to the emergence of consciousness.

The economic motive for artificial intelligence research is simply to extend automation beyond what automation has accomplished to date, and this is certainly where the most significant economic gains are likely to be found; this research will pay for itself. But the epochal breakthrough in computer science will not appear from the incremental improvement of increasingly “intelligent” expert systems, but from the appearance of machine consciousness, which is something entirely different from what is today understood by “artificial intelligence.” Since artificial intelligence researchers seem to be mostly content writing and re-writing software that runs on more or less the same hardware, artificial consciousness is not likely to emerge from these efforts; machine consciousness will probably require distinctive hardware that imitates the neuronal architecture of biological brains from which consciousness is an emergent.

But suppose that we can isolate the neuronal circuits of consciousness, and reproduce them in hardware form: once we can do this, we can do this at a larger and at a more complex scale than exists in any biological brain. If consciousness is an emergent from iterated layers and columns of neurons, hardware mimicking layers and columns of neurons could be constructed that also serves as an emergent basis for consciousness, and a consciousness that could be far more sophisticated than any biological consciousness, insofar as the technological basis of consciousness could be rapidly streamlined and miniaturized. From such a research program an optimized consciousness could emerge. And not only optimized consciousness, but it might also be possible to engineer qualitatively distinct forms of consciousness that are variously optimized for specific tasks.

Schematic drawings of a rat brain (left) and a pigeon brain (right) depict their overall pallial organization. The mammalian dorsal pallium harbors the six-layered neocortex with a granular input layer IV (purple) and supra- and infragranular layers II/III and V/VI, respectively (blue). The avian pallium comprises the Wulst and the DVR, which both, at first glance, display a nuclear organization. Their primary sensory input zones are shown in purple, comparable to layer IV. According to this study, both mammals and birds show an orthogonal fiber architecture constituted by radially (dark blue) and tangentially (white) oriented fibers. Tangential fibers associate distant pallial territories. Whereas this pattern dominates the whole mammalian neocortex, in birds, only the sensory DVR and the Wulst (light green) display such an architecture, and the associative and motor areas (dark green), as in the caudal DVR, are devoid of this cortex-like fiber architecture. NC, caudal nidopallium.

#birds #mammals #intelligence #SETI #evo-devo #neuroscience #consciousness #philosophy of mind #artificial intelligence #machine consciousness

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

‘Dirt’ reveals a failing of book industry

The establishment deemed it the great immigrant novel, yet it doesn’t reflect Latino experience

JEANINE CUMMINS said she was nervous to write a story of the plight of Mexican migrants and wished “someone slightly browner than me would write it.” (Joe Kennedy)

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ESMERALDA BERMUDEZ

By now, you’ve probably heard about the uproar that took place last week over a book.

“American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins was celebrated by critics as the great immigrant novel of our day.

“Masterful.”

“Pulse-pounding.”

“Soul-obliterating.”

“A ‘Grapes of Wrath’ for our times.”

Even Oprah Winfrey dove in early Tuesday morning, the day of the release, and anointed “American Dirt” with the holy grail of endorsements, selecting it for her book club.

“I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up,” Winfrey said in a promotional video. “I feel like everyone who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.”

It was a perfectly orchestrated mega-budget campaign that might have gone off without a hitch if weren’t for Latinos. Many who grew up in actual immigrant families unleashed a storm of criticism — unlike anything the book industry has seen in years.

I was among those who spoke up.

I’m an immigrant, after all. My family fled by foot and bus to the U.S. in the 1980s as right-wing death squads were killing and torturing thousands across El Salvador, including several of my relatives.

The trauma of those dark days shaped everything about me.

I figured I might recognize some part of my story in Cummins’ book, which follows an immigrant mother and son on their harrowing escape north from Mexico.

Then I read the book. My skin crawled after the first few chapters.

Not because of the suspense, though that’s probably the only thing this narrative does well, like a cheap-thrill narconovela.

What made me cringe was immediately realizing that this book was not written for people like me, for immigrants. It was written for everyone else — to enchant them, take them on a wild border-crossing ride, make them feel all fuzzy inside about the immigrant plight.

All, unfortunately, with the worst stereotypes, fixations and inaccuracies about Latinos.

Sure, I know it’s all fiction and I’m no literary critic. Cummins is not obligated to write a book that reflects my life. But it’s strange that a novel so many are praising for its humanity seems so far from all the real-life immigrant experiences I’ve covered.

Never in nearly two decades of writing about immigrants have I come across someone who resembles Cummins’ heroine, a Mexican woman named Lydia.

She’s a middle-class, bookstore-owning “Mami” who starts her treacherous journey with a small fortune: a stack of cash, thousands of dollars in inheritance money; also an ATM card to access thousands more from her mother’s life savings.

Why is she fleeing? Because while her husband, a journalist, was investigating a drug lord, Lydia was flirting with that same narco.

Moments after he walked into her bookshop, “She smiled at him, feeling slightly crazy. She ignored this feeling and plowed recklessly ahead.”

Later, when Lydia is running for her life, debating whether she and her 8-year-old son should jump on La Bestia, the perilous northbound freight train that’s cost many immigrants their limbs and lives, she has an identity crisis. She used to be “sensible,” “a devoted mother-and-wife.” Now she calls herself “deranged Lydia.”

Because hint, hint, reader: Any immigrant parent desperate enough to put their kids in such danger must be crazy, right?

It’s a book of villains and victims, the two most tired tropes about immigrants in the media, in which Cummins has an “excited fascination” with brown skin, as New York Times critic Parul Sehgal pointed out in one of the few negative reviews of the book. Her characters are “berry-brown” or “tan as childhood.” There is also a reference to “skinny brown children.”

When two of her leading characters, sisters migrating from Honduras named Rebeca and Soledad, hug, “Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin.”

When’s the last time you hugged your sister and stopped to contemplate the color of her skin?

All novelists offer vivid descriptions of their characters, but Cummins’ preoccupation with skin color is especially disturbing in a society that constantly measures the worth of Latinos by where they fall on the scale of brownness.

Soledad, by the way, is also “dangerously” beautiful. She’s a “vivid throb of color,” an “accident of biology.” Even in the “most minor animation of the girl’s body … danger rattles off her relentlessly.”

Of course. Everywhere we Latinas go, our bodies are radioactive with peligro.

Speaking of Spanish, you’ll pick up quite a few words in “American Dirt.” Cummins, in stiff sentences that sound like Dora the Explorer teaching a toddler, will introduce you to conchas, refrescos, “Ándale,” “Ay, Dios mío,” “¡Me gusta!”

All this, it pains me to say, was praised by nearly every U.S. critic who reviewed it as a great accomplishment.

It’s what the Washington Post’s critic “devoured” in a “dry-eyed adrenaline rush,” what kept the Los Angeles Times reviewer up until 3 a.m., what the New York Times initially said had all the “ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels.” (The latter paper later deleted the tweet, and an editor explained the line had been from an unpublished draft.)

The heart of the problem is the industry — the critics, agents, publicists, book dealers who were responsible for this project. They’ve shown just how little they know about the immigrant experience beyond the headlines.

So we are left with this flawed book as our model, these damaging depictions at a time when there’s already so much demonizing of immigrants.

Cummins said she questioned whether she was the right person to tell this story.

She was born in Spain and raised in Maryland. A few years ago she identified herself in the New York Times as “white,” though in the book she plays up her Latina side, making reference to a grandmother from Puerto Rico. Her publisher publicized the book by promoting Cummins as “the wife of a formerly undocumented immigrant.” She doesn’t mention that her husband is from Ireland.

“I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants,” she said in her author’s note.

“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”

Still, she saw herself as a “bridge,” so she plunged in.

I don’t take issue with an outsider coming into my community to write about us. But “American Dirt” so completely misrepresents the immigrant experience that it must be called out.

Cummins said her goal was to help immigrants portrayed as a “faceless brown mass.” She said she wanted to give “these people a face.”

How’s that for a captivating book pitch?

The industry ate it up. In a rare three-day bidding war, Flatiron Books reportedly won Cummins’ book for a seven-figure sum.

The number astounded many writers. It fell with a blunt force on Latinos, who are constantly shut out of the book industry.

The overall industry is 80% white. Executives: 78% white. Publicists and marketing: 74% white. Agents: 80% white.

These numbers include 153 book publishers and agencies, including what’s known in the book world as the Big Five, which control nearly the entire market.

This diversity study, the most comprehensive in the industry, was launched by a small independent children’s book publisher in New York called Lee & Low Books. They’ve conducted it twice, in 2015 and in 2019. (Figures noted above are from the latest study, which will be released Tuesday.)

In those four years, the numbers showed no significant change.

“The power balance has been off for so long,” said Hannah Ehrlich, director of marketing and publicity for Lee & Low. “Even when a big mistake is brought to their attention, when there’s a sense of urgency, publishers don’t fix it — or they try, with good intentions, but they don’t know how.”

They don’t know how. (Insert emoji of head exploding.)

The solution is simple: Hire more Latinos. More people of color. Listen to them. Promote them. Treat them fairly so they don’t leave.

Ehrlich kindly walked me through the world of publishing, which of course is very similar to journalism, including in its glaring lack of racial diversity.

Often, Ehrlich said, what happens is gatekeepers go looking for good stories, stories that resonate with their view of the world. If they come across a compelling pitch about a person of color, the question becomes, “How do you sell this idea to a broader, mainstream audience?” Translation: white people.

By focusing on one audience, the industry makes it harder for writers of color to break through and also for publishers to build a more diverse customer base.

So it goes, in a long process that many writers of color know all too well, where the best of our stories are frequently sanitized, devalued, tropicalized, manipulated, shrunk down, hijacked.

All for sums that don’t come close to seven figures.

And for deals that don’t get the kind of superstar treatment of “American Dirt.” That includes books that Cummins studied closely to prepare for her novel, with real migrant stories like Oscar Martinez’s “The Beast,” Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The Devil’s Highway.”

Cummins has no regrets about reaping the benefits of the system. She already got a movie deal and will travel to the border with Oprah for more publicity.

“I was never going to turn down money that someone offered me for something that took me seven years to write,” she said in a recent interview.

When asked about the criticism, the author often keeps the focus on the question of appropriation, saying writers shouldn’t be silenced. I have no desire to silence her, but her book is a symptom of a larger problem.

Cummins said people should direct their attention to the publishing world, not individual writers like her.

She’s got a point. In the end, the real fight over “American Dirt” is not about this writer. It’s about an industry that favors her stories over ones written by immigrants and Latinos.

Still, it’s hard to let Cummins off the hook.

Not when she has posted photos on her Twitter account showing her celebrating “American Dirt” with floral centerpieces laced with barbed wire.

“That’s what I call attention to detail right?!” she wrote in a comment below the photo she posted of the party.

I can’t explain the gut punch I felt when I saw this image on the internet.

Growing up, my family spoke of this barbed wire. How it encircled them, how it tore their hands and legs in their treacherous trek north.

For us, the boogeyman that forced us to leave El Salvador was not some drug kingpin with a quivering mustache like La Lechuza.

It was a brutal 12-year war of terror waged on poor people by oligarchs, backed by the United States, which spent billions to train and equip Salvadoran death squads and the Salvadoran military; the U.S. helped pay for their weapons, bombs, jeeps, uniforms, gas masks. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died in the fighting.

Before my third birthday, I lost just about everyone: My grandfather, uncle and aunt were killed. My father was exiled. My mom was forced to leave me behind in El Salvador to come north.

It’s a story that repeats itself among the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who fled to the U.S. in the 1980s.

Because of greed, a thirst for power and government violence in Central America — a place where the United States has heavily intruded since the 1800s — thousands of families continue to run north. From Honduras. From Guatemala. From El Salvador.

This is the immigration story of our times.

Hopefully, soon, the book world will gather the nerve to let more of our own writers tell it. And give that story the same royal treatment it gave “American Dirt.”

[ladystylestores]

A Bitter Election. Accusations of Fraud. And Now Second Thoughts.

The election was the most tightly contested in decades: Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, was running for a fourth term, facing an opposition that saw him as authoritarian and unwilling to relinquish power.

As the preliminary vote count began, on Oct. 20, 2019, tensions ran high. When the tallying stopped — suddenly and without explanation — then resumed again a full day later, it showed Mr. Morales had just enough votes to eke out a victory.

Amid suspicions of fraud, protests broke out across the country, and the international community turned to the Organization of American States, which had been invited to observe the elections, for its assessment.

The organization’s statement, which cited “an inexplicable change” that “drastically modifies the fate of the election,” heightened doubts about the fairness of the vote and fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history. The opposition seized on the claim to escalate protests, gather international support, and push Mr. Morales from power with military support weeks later.

Now, a study by independent researchers, using data obtained by The New York Times from the Bolivian electoral authorities, has found that the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed.

The conclusion that Mr. Morales’s share of the vote jumped inexplicably in the final ballots relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques, the researchers found.

“We took a hard look at the O.A.S.’s statistical evidence and found problems with their methods,” said Francisco Rodríguez, an economist who teaches Latin American studies at Tulane University. “Once we correct those problems, the O.A.S.’s results go away, leaving no statistical evidence of fraud.”

Mr. Rodríguez conducted the study with Dorothy Kronick, an expert on Latin American politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nicolás Idrobo, a doctoral student at the same university who is the co-author of a textbook on advanced statistical methods. Their study is a working paper that has not yet been peer reviewed.

To be sure, the authors said their analysis focused only on the O.A.S.’s statistical analysis of the voting results, and does not prove that the election was free and fair. In fact, there were a lot of documented problems with the vote.

In an attempt to quell the protests set off when he claimed victory, Mr. Morales called on the O.A.S. to conduct a “binding” election audit.

The resulting 100-page report, published in December, contained evidence of errors, irregularities and “a series of malicious operations” aimed at altering the results. These included hidden data servers, manipulated voting receipts and forged signatures, which the organization said made it impossible for it to validate the election’s results.

The O.A.S. found evidence of tampering with at least 38,000 votes. Mr. Morales claimed outright victory by a margin of 35,000 votes.

“There was fraud — we just don’t know where and how much,” said Calla Hullum, a Bolivia expert at the University of Miami who witnessed the election and analyzed the O.A.S.’s findings.

“The issue with the O.A.S. report is that they did it very quickly,” Ms. Hullum said. That shaped the narrative of the election before data could be properly analyzed, she said.

That initial claim by the O.A.S. is specifically what the academics are disputing in their study.

Mr. Morales’s downfall paved the way to a staunchly right-wing caretaker government, led by Jeanine Añez, which has not yet fulfilled its mandate to oversee swift new elections. The new government has persecuted the former president’s supporters, stifled dissent and worked to cement its hold on power.

Seven months after Mr. Morales’s downfall, Bolivia has no elected government and no official election date.

The O.A.S. said it stood by its statistical analysis, because it successfully detected early initial indications of fraud.

“It’s a moot point,” the organization’s head of electoral observations, Gerardo De Icaza, said in response to questions raised by the new study. “Statistics don’t prove or disprove fraud. Hard evidence like falsified statements of polls and hidden I.T. structures do. And that is what we found.”

The organization’s initial accusation came right after Bolivia’s most disputed elections since the return of democracy in the 1980s. To run for a fourth term, Mr. Morales subverted laws, staffed the electoral council with loyalists, and ignored results of a referendum that banned him from seeking re-election.

Claiming the results of the October election could not be trusted, some opposition leaders said they would paralyze the country if Mr. Morales declared victory.

For their part, Mr. Morales’s largely Indigenous supporters, fearing a return of the conservative politicians of European descent who had been the rule in the country before Mr. Morales took office in 2006, vowed to defend their political gains at all cost.

The United States State Department quickly reacted to the O.A.S. statement, accusing electoral officials of trying to “subvert Bolivia’s democracy.” Carlos Mesa, the main opposition candidate, and Luis Fernando Camacho, a principal leader of the protests, both cited the organization’s claim to justify their calls for street action.

“The O.A.S., as observers, ratified the doubts that all Bolivians had and the worry that their vote has been violated,” Mr. Camacho said in a video address on Oct. 22.

As demonstrations intensified in the following weeks, Mr. Morales started to lose the support of security forces. A trickle of government defections turned into a flood.

A visibly haggard Mr. Morales went on national television to offer new elections, but by then it was too late. The same day, the military asked Mr. Morales to stand down. He fled into exile soon after.

“The O.A.S. ended up sinking any legitimacy the voting results might have had,” said Gonzalo Mendieta, a prominent Bolivian columnist.

In their audit of the elections, the organization said it found a “highly unlikely trend in the last 5 percent of the count” that pushed Mr. Morales above the threshold for outright victory, without a runoff.

The authors of the new study said they were unable to replicate the O.A.S.’s findings using its likely techniques. They said a sudden change in the trend appeared only when they excluded results from the manually processed, late-reporting polling booths.

This suggests that the organization used an incorrect data set to reach its conclusion, the researchers said. The difference is significant: the 1,500 excluded late-reporting booths account for the bulk of the final votes that the O.A.S. statistical analysis claims are suspicious.

Also, the academics said the organization used an inappropriate statistical method that artificially created the appearance of a break in the voting trend.

The O.A.S. consultant who conducted their statistical analysis, Professor Irfan Nooruddin of Georgetown University, said the new study misrepresented his work and was wrong. He did not provide details and did not share his methods or data with the authors of the study, despite repeated requests.

For his part, Mr. De Icaza, with the O.A.S., said that, broadly speaking, the data from Bolivia’s most recent elections was too flawed to draw any meaningful conclusions.

“You’re are doing a statistical exercise on documents that are falsified,” he said. “The question is not whether the false numbers add up. The question is whether they are false or not — and they are.”

Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.

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[cryptodictation]

Airlines face their most uncertain flight | Business

Iberia planes stopped at Madrid-Barajas Adolfo Suarez airport last Friday.JAVIER SORIANO (AFP)

These days, a video of just over eight and a half minutes (which is worth listening in its entirety) about a Bill Gates conference in 2015 where he assured that we are not ready for the next global outbreak, which will not be heard, on social networks It was going to go through a world war, but a virus. It was five years ago and the pandemic has surely come even earlier than the visionary American billionaire could imagine.

And it happens that the effects have spread so quickly that far from the world wars (in this case, mainly trade wars) that were being waged at this time between some great powers have given way to the contrary, to international agreements and more or fewer coordinates to deal with the virus and, above all, the strong impact it is having on economies and companies around the world. For example, the rate cuts in the US or the injection of 750,000 million euros approved by the ECB after a nightly emergency council.

That is the panorama that surrounds the world. Most industries and business organizations have generally applauded the decisions of the governments of the countries, as has happened in Spain. However, there are sectors that request specific measures. This is especially the case with airlines, undoubtedly the group most affected by the crisis. As the data offered on Thursday by the vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, and the Minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, at a press conference: drop between 70% and 80% of kerosene consumption (fuel that used in aviation) and 50% of flights.

A dramatic situation that is also palpable on the stock market, where airlines have lost enormous amounts of their value (the IAG group, to which Iberia belongs, has left 67% so far this year). In the face of so much adversity, the air groups find themselves with the rope around their necks and asking for aid, just when a few dates ago they were talking about taxes and fees being raised. The calculation places between 150,000 and 200,000 million dollars (between 130,000 and 175,000 million euros) of contribution of public money to survive, according to the international association of airlines IATA.

At the moment, they have to resort to regulatory files, such as the case of Iberia, which has sent 13,900 employees home temporarily, 80% of the workforce. In Italy, the Government had to come to the rescue of Alitalia, something that is not ruled out in other countries. And in the United States, airlines asked for more than $ 50 billion in government assistance.

In that country, Congress begins to consider an aid package, with long-term strategies and objectives linked to measures to reduce the carbon footprint and transparent information because it is questioned whether public money is granted, because in its opinion it would not help the industry of aviation to prepare for other price or public health crises.

In other words, the companies know that, in exchange for these sums, they will be required to accept stricter regulations on decarbonization. Also that they return the aid via taxes when they come better given and using low emission fuel. It already happened when President Obama in 2009 demanded that automakers comply with new fuel efficiency standards after giving an industry bailout. The decision was successful: the car companies returned the money and reduced emissions.

In the case of aviation the presumption is the same. The industry has gone through crises of various kinds from which it has recovered and is currently living in one of its best stages, with a prodigious decade that has stopped in its tracks a virus like the one Gates predicted. But, as a consequence of the increase in flights and airlines, emissions grew much higher than expected. This year it is very likely that emissions will decrease precisely due to reduced demand. The sector is said to be responsible for around 5% of global warming when its non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases are included.

THE CORROS

Defense of strategic sectors.

The increase in the presence of JP Morgan to 6.8% in Repsol is a sign of the weakness in which some companies may be due to the fall in the Stock Market. For this reason, the Government “will facilitate a protection system in strategic sectors” in the face of the possibility of unwanted inflows into its capital, according to Vice President Teresa Ribera. These companies “own critical infrastructures for the proper functioning of the economy,” added the minister, who assured that it will try to prevent “we find ourselves in undesirable situations” and that it will carry out daily monitoring to prevent any risky situation.

Garamendi: “We serve for something”.

As dramatic as the pandemic crisis is, the social partners have shown their satisfaction because they have been taken into account when drafting the economic measures to fight. His managers highlighted it and reported that “the Government has put its batteries.” The employer leader Antonio Garamendi, president of the CEOE, summed it up in a resounding phrase: “This shows that we are good for something.” Those who did not agree so much were some associations of the self-employed, who see the measures as incomplete.

Disturbances in the financial system.

After the surprise and urgent decision of the ECB last Wednesday to buy debt worth 750,000 million euros to deal with the crisis, the heads of the central banks of the countries of the euro zone have come out to support the measure. In the Spanish case, the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Pablo Hernández de Cos, member of the board of the institution chaired by Christine Lagarde, stressed that fighting is a necessity, not an option, after stressing that the disruptions are unprecedented.

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[shirlleycoyle]

There Are UFO Lobbyists in DC, and Lawmakers Are Apparently Listening

How do you make the government take UFOs seriously? With a UFO lobbyist, of course.

In December 2017, the New York Times wrote about a de-funded secret Pentagon UFO program called AATIP, and revealed that several Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 engaged in bizarre encounters with anomalous aerial objects off the coast of California and Florida. Eventually, three videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” were released and have since been confirmed by the Navy as real.

For years, Steven Bassett was Capitol Hill’s lone UFO lobbyist. He became a registered lobbyist in 1996 and set up an advocacy organization, the Paradigm Research Group (PRG), which has the goal of using “all means possible to confront the United States government regarding its policy of a truth embargo on the events and evidence demonstrating an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and the formal acknowledgement of that presence,” according to Bassett’s website.

“It's not about UFOs. The term is a product of government propaganda in service to the truth embargo and no longer of value,” Bassett told Motherboard. “It's about extraterrestrials and the Disclosure process.”

For those not fully immersed in Ufological culture, “Disclosure” is the total and final admission by the government that extraterrestrials are not only visiting Earth, but that there is a massive government cover-up to hide the truth from the public. The UFO community has even taken to Twitter to raise awareness of the Disclosure process for the 2020 election with the hashtag #askthequestion.

“A significant percentage of all people on Capitol Hill are convinced there is an ET presence. They are just not able to speak to it—publicly,” Bassett said.

Bassett’s PRG organization has recently hired Teresa Tindal, another registered lobbyist who is now also fighting for greater transparency about UFOs. Like Bassett, Tindal is convinced that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth and interacting with humans. She believes that the government is complicit in a massive cover-up.

“The cat’s out of the bag and politicians will be looking to control the issue,” Tindal told Motherboard. “It is, after all, the most powerful political initiative as it affects absolutely every aspect of life. Polls show most people believe in ET life.”

Bassett and Tindal are like the Mulders of the UFO political process, but there is always a Scully. Not everyone who pushes lawmakers to deal with the UFO issue in DC is convinced that aliens should be on the agenda.

“At no time do we or have we mentioned extraterrestrials. We are simply ensuring our government does not fall victim to ‘strategic surprise’ by the technology being displayed by [Unknown Aerial Phenomena],” Luis Elizondo, a former intelligence officer who was involved in the Pentagon’s UFO hunting Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, told Motherboard. “Whether it be from Russia, China, allies, or little green men. Our efforts focus on the national security and technology aspect; not ET.”

Elizondo explained that he is not a registered lobbyist, nor does he consider himself to be a lobbyist of any sort.

"Our efforts in Washington are focused on facilitating the flow of information from where it resides to those individuals in key leadership positions in order that they can make a well informed decision. Whether it be one focused on national security, defense, science and technology, or diplomacy, ensuring our elected leaders and those assigned to key positions have the latest and most complete picture is something we believe is critically important," Elizondo said.

Elizondo currently works for former Blink-182 lead singer Tom DeLonge, and his company To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. He also appeared on the History Channel’s newest UFO hunting show, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

“We simply don't know at this point if non-human technology is even part of the equation,” Elizondo stated. “It is a nonsensical assertion at this point in time because we simply need more data to even make that initial assessment.”

Elizondo’s boss, To the Star’s founder Tom DeLonge, has made his personal beliefs clear on the issue. In his book, Sekret Machines: Gods, co-written with Peter Levenda, DeLonge sums it all up by arguing that humanity was visited by aliens in its distant past, and that all human culture is one big “cargo cult.”

While the official party line of the To the Stars’ political lobby may be devoid of the extraterrestrial narrative, Bassett doesn’t buy it.

“The ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ team are operating under certain conditions laid down by those still inside who are providing cover. No classified content released. Non-disclosure agreements must be honored. Do not talk ‘extraterrestrial.’ Why? There are factions inside the [military industrial complex] opposed to the TTSA project and would stop it if they could. Therefore restraint is required—for now,” Basset told Motherboard.

TV personality and UFO researcher Chase Kloetzke also works in Washington as a lobbyist meeting with lawmakers about ‘the phenomenon.’ The issue all of the lobbyists face, Kloetzke explains, is that UFOs are considered sensitive information.

“This topic is now in the hands of the Pentagon, military strategists and intelligence agencies. It’s all classified. To be part of ANY discussion in DC about UAPs, you need a security clearance,” Kloetzke said in an email. According to Kloetzke, she has “spoken to senior staff for seven lawmakers and two Senators.” While she is unsure as to how much progress she has personally made, she is convinced that To the Stars is a key player in all this and that the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program is “still in play.”

“I realized years ago that any kind of Disclosure or Confirmation will only be ‘Official,’ if it comes from DC. I do this because of the evidence and facts that we can now present to start the process of public information,” Kloetzke said. “We have unknown objects in our skies. Confirmed! The question now, and the only questions right now are ‘What are these objects?’ and ‘Who are the pilots controlling them?’”

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[thesouthendproject]

True crime: the women making art out of murder

t soon became clear to Sejla Kamerić how big her work, Ab Uno Disce Omne (From One, Learn All), would become. Commissioned by the Wellcome Collection for its new exhibition Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, the Bosnian artist – whose previous work has tried to make sense of the war that started when she was a teenager and killed her father – took on something huge. She describes it as a monument, but one made of data, not stone, and just as permanent. “I found out how the information about what happened is becoming lost,” she says. “Because of the political vacuum, even the scientific facts are being erased and the one thing which is very much needed is to have the collective narrative of what actually happened. The lack of, for example, a list of missing persons 20 years after the war is horrific, or the means of how to get the information on the location of mass graves or execution sites or concentration camps.”

More than 30,000 people are thought to have gone missing during the conflict, and around 9,000 are still unaccounted for. Kamerić’s work, a mortuary fridge with a screen that flashes up random images from her search – around 30,000 photographs, documents, records, satellite images and hours of video, provokes a feeling not only of her unfolding mission but the vast scale of the crimes. “I knew that we had to collect as much as possible,” says Kamerić, who worked with a team of researchers and spent months visiting families, mortuaries, sites of mass graves. “When you think about 34,000 missing, it’s just a number, but if you start counting it you understand – each single person had their own lives, families. One big wish for me is to show through this work how we are all connected, how each of us is just one knot in a huge web.”

What was the hardest thing for her? “There were so many situations where I felt I was breaking. Going through the evidence of atrocities and seeing so much pain is very difficult, but somehow you find a way to accept it. What is difficult is to accept is the present in which the truth is constantly hidden, and in which the survivors don’t have the space to share their stories.”

It wasn’t deliberate, but the curator Lucy Shanahan found that many of the most powerful pieces dealing with crime and its aftermath in the exhibition were by female artists, and perhaps the most moving works are all by women. “It struck me in the course of the research that I seemed to be coming across a lot of women on both sides,” she says (not only artists feature, but people involved directly in the field, such as Dr Angela Gallop, one of the UK’s most experienced forensic scientists, also appear in videos talking about their work). Why does she think that is? She remembers reading an article about the forensic botanist Patricia Wiltshire: “She suggests women have a higher tolerance for gore. Maybe it’s oddly to do with the fact that we are thought to be more empathetic. She certainly observed that women tended to cope better in these situations. Whether that’s true, I don’t know. But I think there must be a certain element of empathy.”She had originally thought there would be a coldness, a detachment to their work, but found the opposite. “All of them have a very close relationship with the subject matter. It’s not a voyeuristic interpretation, and for me it was about getting to the real lives and real human stories, and making sure we didn’t lose sight of that.”

Angela Strassheim’s beautiful, eerie photograph, Evidence No 1, is from her series revisiting homes where murders had taken place. On walls that had been cleaned and repainted, the application of Luminol still revealed the proteins of blood spatters (anyone who has watched CSI will know it gives off a blue glow). It’s a hidden trace, a memory embedded in the walls of the house of a life violently cut short, and raises questions of how the people living there now must feel. Sally Mann’s photograph of a body looking peaceful in the forest, being reclaimed by nature, brings a strange beauty to the otherwise gruesome idea of the “body farm” as the University of Tennessee’s forensic-anthropology unit is known, where she shot the decomposing corpses.

There are three pieces by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. One is the 313 front pages of a newspaper, collected during 2010, showing graphic photographs of the people murdered in Mexico’s drugs war, underlining its everyday occurrence. Another is a sound recording of a double autopsy of two murder victims. With no visuals to distract you, every sawing sound and fleshy squelch is magnified, contrasting with the mundane noise of a car passing outside, a reminder of life going on in the streets beyond.

In 2006, 18 months after the murder of her friend, the young Mexican artist Luis Miguel Suro, Margolles lifted a section of the tiled floor taken from the studio where he was shot and killed. In this setting it is, notes the exhibition’s curator Lucy Shanahan, a literal transplanting of the crime scene.

“I am from Sinaloa, a very violent part of Mexico,” says Margolles through a translator. Violence and crime has been “part of my life”. She trained in forensics and worked in a morgue for years. “I started to realise the kind of cases that were coming in, and how violence was increasing. I realised the morgue was some kind of social thermometer. The dead body … is telling you what is going on. I work with murder to have a public discussion about the murdered body.”

She wanted to mark the death of her friend because many of her contemporaries had questioned why so much of her work was informed by crime and violence. “But the death of an artist, in their own environment, signified that violence was getting closer and closer to the educated, artistic community. Before that, it was assumed it was something that only happened to the poor, the violent, the ones involved in crime and drug dealing.”

How does the work affect her? “It’s not for me. It’s for the students who are being killed,” she says, referring to the 43 students who went missing last year and who are believed to have been killed, their bodies burned, by a drug cartel. “It’s for the women being killed, the people who have to deal with this. It’s to help us, the audience, understand for a minute what these people are subject to on a daily basis.”

Next to Kamerić’s mortuary fridge are two skulls and two bronze heads showing what these people would have looked like, made by the artist Christine Borland with the help of a forensic anthropologist and facial reconstruction expert. There is great beauty and dignity in them – two individuals who have been given some form of identity back, in contrast to Kamerić’s missing persons whose body parts are still scattered, degraded, in unidentified graves.

In the early 1990s, she had come across an osteological catalogue which offered human bones for sale to medical students and researchers. She was, she says, “completely blown away that you could put a price on a human spine or a human anything”. Later, when the company was winding down its offering of natural bones – plastics were becoming more widespread, and the Human Tissue Act would make it illegal to trade in human remains – Borland asked them to tell her when they were down to their last male and female skulls, and she would buy them. The company said they would probably be “second-class” (that the better specimens would be more sought-after and would go). “They were talking about it in a strictly classification way – if teeth were missing, or there was what they would consider to be abnormalities – but to me that had different connotations. That added another layer of pathos, which made me even more keen to dignify these last two commercial skulls.”

They arrived in the post, in an innocuous cardboard box, “just commodities, being delivered like any other parcel”. Although little is still known about them, she was able to recreate their faces, using modern techniques used in forensic science.

What is it about forensics that interests her? “It’s the crossover between the rigorous scientific methods and the magic of the trace being able to lead you to construct a picture, or a scene,” she says. “I like the idea of something very small, whether it be dust or a mark, something seemingly unspectacular in many situations, and then being able to build a narrative from that. It’s a scientific discipline, but it also speaks of imagination and art.”

• Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime is at the Wellcome Collection, from tomorrow until 21 June. Details: wellcomecollection.org

[tiozambia]

Griezmann exit leaves Atletico lost just as rivals get set to strengthen

Antoine Griezmann's decision to leave Atletico Madrid has plunged the club into chaos and fired the starting gun for a summer scramble among Europe's elite. Top scorer in each of his five seasons, Griezmann was the stardust of Atleti, offering spontaneity and craft in a team renowned for discipline and grit. But he grafted too, which is why he was the perfect fit. Griezmann would run and chase as much as he passed and shot, his willingness perhaps exceptional for one of the world's premium attackers, a class in which he now deservedly belongs. "I said it last season and I'll say it again - Griezmann is the best player in the world," coach Diego Simeone said in October. In a team that creates more chances and gives him a greater chance of converting them, Griezmann is likely to deliver an even better return than his 129 goals for Atletico in 256 games. One more against Levante on Saturday will edge the Frenchman clear of Fernando Torres but Torres left a hero. Griezmann's exit will leave a bitter taste. "The truth is it has been difficult to take this route but it's what I feel I need," Griezmann said in a video for the fans. He will be too late for a last outing in front of them at the Wanda Metropolitano, perhaps out of respect for Diego Godin, the godfather to his daughter, who was given a rousing farewell on Sunday after the club's final home game of the season. Perhaps Griezmann was wary too, unsure if he waved to the stands whether it would be waving hands he saw coming back. The hope was he would be playing there in the Champions League final on June 1, the dream of hoisting a European trophy on home turf a key factor in his decision to reject Barcelona last year. Godin would have led them out but, at 33, with his best years behind him, he goes with the blessing of the fans, a La Liga title, two Champions League finals, two Europa Leagues, three Super Cups and a Copa del Rey under his arm. Griezmann, five years younger, should be entering his prime, and departs with only one Europa League and a Super Cup. Worse, most suspect he is about to strengthen Barcelona. BEST STILL TO COME "I think my best time is still to come," Griezmann said in December. "I know I can get even better." But his choice is a reflection on Atletico too, raising questions about their future under Simeone, who was there on Tuesday with chief executive Miguel Angel Gil Marin and sporting director Andrea Berta, when his star player said he needed something new. Two of Atletico's three outstanding players - Griezmann, Godin and Jan Oblak - are about to move. Oblak signed a new deal last month but it contains a release clause, reportedly set at 120 million euros, hardly an obstructive price for arguably the world's No 1 goalkeeper. Lucas Hernandez has already agreed to join Bayern Munich. Juanfran, Filipe Luis or Rodrigo could be next. Admiration for Simeone is unwavering among supporters but frustration simmers too over style and progress. Atletico sit 11 points behind Barcelona in La Liga, one year after the gap finished at 14. Griezmann's early decision at least allows time for what is Simeone's biggest rebuild since he took charge in 2011. He also begins it in a summer when Atletico's rivals are expected to respond to the success of the Premier League with spending sprees of their own. Neither Griezmann's rejection of Barcelona, nor the fans whistling him at Camp Nou, will deter the club from a fresh approach. There have been whistles there as well for their own Philippe Coutinho, whose future would become even more uncertain with Griezmann's arrival. A reduction in Griezmann's release clause from 200 million euros to 120 on July 1, means there is alo time for others to enter the bidding. Paris Saint-Germain are likely to offer the fiercest competition, particularly if they lay down a financial package Barca cannot match. Griezmann at PSG could in turn give encouragement to Real Madrid, whose president Florentino Perez retains a strong interest in both Kylian Mbappe and Neymar, each seen as the sort of statement signing to launch a glorious new era under Zinedine Zidane. Another is Paul Pogba, who Madrid might find easier to lure if United framed Griezmann as his replacement. For Atletico, the knocks could keep on coming. Read the full article

#AntoineGriezmann

[bountyofbeads]

Could 1st tangible signs of shutdown progress be emerging?

https://apnews.com/9bbaddf680d24b5788c5777d12096645

Could 1st tangible signs of shutdown progress be emerging?

By JILL COLVIN, LISA MASCARO, ZEKE MILLER and CATHERINE LUCEY | Published January 20, 2019

25 mins ago | Associated Press | Posted January 20, 2019 |

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first tangible signs of movement may be emerging in the impasse that has shut down the government for weeks: President Donald Trump is promising a "major announcement" about the closure and the U.S.-Mexico border and Democrats are pledging more money for border security.

It was unclear whether the developments, following days of clashes between Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., might represent serious steps toward resolving the partisan fight or instead may simply be political posturing as the partial shutdown reached a record 29th day. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have gone without paychecks, enduring financial hardship. Many public services are unavailable to Americans during the closure.

The White House has declined to provide details about what the president would announce midafternoon Saturday. Trump was not expected to sign a national emergency declaration he has said was an option to circumvent Congress, according to two people familiar with the planning.

Instead, he was expected to propose the outlines of a deal that the administration believes could have the potential to pave the way for a shutdown end, according to one of the people. They were not authorized to publicly discuss details about the impending announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"I think it'll be an important statement," Trump told reporters Saturday before traveling to an air base in Delaware to honor four Americans killed in a suicide bomb attack in Syria this week.

Democrats are now proposing hundreds of millions of dollars for new immigration judges and improvements to ports of entry from Mexico but nothing for the wall, a House aide said, as the party begins fleshing out its vision of improving border security.

Trump's refusal to sign spending bills that lack $5.7 billion he wants to start constructing that wall, which Democrats oppose, has prompted the shutdown. "We need the help and the backup of a wall," the president said Saturday.

Whatever the White House proposed would be the first major overture by the president since Jan. 8, when he gave an Oval Office address trying to make the public case for the border wall. Democrats have said they will not negotiate until the government reopens, raising questions about how Trump might move the ball forward.

Democrats were proposing $563 million to hire 75 more immigration judges, who currently face large backlogs processing cases, and $524 million to improve ports of entry in Calexico, California, and San Luis, Arizona, the Democratic House aide said. The money is to be added to spending bills, largely negotiated between the House and Senate, that the House plans to vote on next week.

In addition, Democrats were working toward adding money for more border security personnel and for sensors and other technology to a separate bill financing the Department of Homeland Security, but no funds for a wall or other physical barriers, the aide said.

It was possible Democrats would introduce that measure next week as the cornerstone of their border security alternative to Trump's wall, the aide said. Earlier Friday, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., who leads the House Appropriations Committee's homeland security subcommittee, said in an interview that some Democrats were asking leaders, "What is our plan?"

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the details publicly.

In a video posted on his Twitter feed late Friday, Trump said both sides should "take the politics out of it" and "get to work" to "make a deal." But he also repeated his warnings, saying: "We have to secure our southern border. If we don't do that, we're a very, very sad and foolish lot."

Few would argue that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the demand for entry by migrants and the Trump administration's hard-line response overwhelm border resources. But critics say Trump has dramatically exaggerated the security risks and they argue that a wall would do little to solve existing problems.

Trump's Friday evening tweeted announcement came after Pelosi on Friday canceled her plans to travel by commercial plane to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying Trump had caused a security risk by talking about the trip. The White House said there was no such leak.

It was the latest turn in the high-stakes brinkmanship between Trump and Pelosi that has played out against the stalled negotiations.

Pelosi had suggested Trump postpone the annual State of the Union address, a Washington tradition and a platform for his border wall fight with Democrats. It is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 29.

Trump never responded directly. Instead, he abruptly canceled Pelosi's military flight on Thursday, hours before she and a congressional delegation were to depart for Afghanistan on the previously undisclosed visit to U.S. troops. He asserted on Saturday that Pelosi is "under total control of the radical left."

___

#donald trump #u.s. news #politics #trump administration #republican politics #immigration #president donald trump #trump #republican party #politics and government #white house #borderwall #national security #trumpshutdown

[party-hard-or-die]

Hundreds of Apps Can Empower Stalkers to Track Their Victims

KidGuard is a phone app that markets itself as a tool for keeping tabs on children. But it has also promoted its surveillance for other purposes and run blog posts with headlines like “How to Read Deleted Texts on Your Lover’s Phone.”

A similar app, mSpy, offered advice to a woman on secretly monitoring her husband. Still another, Spyzie, ran ads on Google alongside results for search terms like “catch cheating girlfriend iPhone.”

As digital tools that gather cellphone data for tracking children, friends or lost phones have multiplied in recent years, so have the options for people who abuse the technology to track others without consent.

More than 200 apps and services offer would-be stalkers a variety of capabilities, from basic location tracking to harvesting texts and even secretly recording video, according to a new academic study. More than two dozen services were promoted as surveillance tools for spying on romantic partners, according to the researchers and reporting by The New York Times. Most of the spying services required access to victims’ phones or knowledge of their passwords — both common in domestic relationships.

Digital monitoring of a spouse or partner can constitute illegal stalking, wiretapping or hacking. But laws and law enforcement have struggled to keep up with technological changes, even though stalking is a top warning sign for attempted homicide in domestic violence cases.

“We misunderstand and minimize this abuse,” said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “People think that if there’s not an immediate physical proximity to the victim, there might not be as much danger.”

Statistics on electronic stalking are hard to find because victims may not know they are being watched, or they may not report it. Even if they believe they are being tracked, hidden software can make confirmation difficult.

But data breaches at two surveillance companies last year — revealing accounts of more than 100,000 users, according to the technology site Motherboard — gave some sense of the scale. The tracking app company mSpy told The New York Times that it sold subscriptions to more than 27,000 users in the United States in the first quarter of this year.

According to data published last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 percent of women and 11 percent of men in the United States at some point endure stalking or sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner that has significant effects. While comprehensive numbers aren’t available on domestic abuse cases involving digital stalking in the United States, a small survey published in Australia in 2016 found that 17 percent of victims were tracked via GPS, including through such apps.

In a Florida case involving abusive surveillance, a man named Luis Toledo installed an app called SMS Tracker on his wife’s phone in 2013 because he suspected she was having an affair. “He said he was able to see text messages and photos his wife was sending and receiving from others,” Sgt. A. J. Pagliari of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office recalled.

This January, Mr. Toledo was sentenced to three consecutive life terms after being convicted of killing his wife, Yessenia Suarez, and her two children. Sergeant Pagliari said Mr. Toledo told him he installed the app several days before her death. “With the use of the app, Toledo was able to confirm his suspicion,” the sergeant said.

Representatives for SMS Tracker, made by the Dallas-based Gizmoquip, did not respond to requests for comment about the app’s role in the case. A recent review on the Google Play store for SMS Tracker tells potential users: “I would recommend if you think your partner is cheating.”

An Opening for Abuse

There is no federal law against location tracking, but such monitoring can violate state laws on stalking. Spying on communications can break statutes on wiretapping or computer crime. And knowingly selling illegal wiretapping tools is a federal crime.

But it’s not illegal to sell or use an app for tracking your children or your own phone. And it can be difficult to tell whether the person being surveilled has given consent, because abusers frequently coerce victims into using such apps.

In Everson, Wash., for example, Brooks Owen Laughlin is accused of beating his wife and using an app typically used for benign purposes, Find My iPhone, to control her movements.

“If she would turn it off, he would instantly call her or text her and say, ‘Why did you turn that off? What are you doing?’ That was pretty much 24-7,” Chief Daniel MacPhee of the Everson Police Department, said in an interview. Mr. Laughlin pleaded not guilty in April to charges of assault, harassment and stalking.

Such technical and legal ambiguity has created an environment in which tools are marketed for both legal and illegal uses, without apparent repercussion.

“There are definitely app makers that are complicit, seeking out these customers and advertising this use,” said Periwinkle Doerfler, a doctoral student at New York University and an author of the study on apps, which will be presented in the coming days. “They’re a little bit under the radar about it, but they’re still doing it.”

The researchers, from N.Y.U., Cornell University and Cornell Tech, contacted customer support for nine companies with tracking services. The researchers claimed to be women who wanted to secretly track their husbands, and only one company, TeenSafe, refused to assist.

KidGuard, the app largely aimed at parents, also bought ads alongside Google results for searches like “catch cheating spouse app.” A spokesman for the business, based in Los Angeles, said in an email that the company worked with third-party marketers and customer service reps who had been “testing new strategies.” It deleted blog posts about tracking romantic partners and said it did not support that activity.

Spyzie, another app that ran such ads, did not respond to requests for comment.

On YouTube, dozens of videos provide tutorials on using several of the apps to catch cheating lovers. The videos frequently link back to the app makers’ sites using a special code that ensures the promoter will get a cut of the sale — a type of deal known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing also appeared on multiple websites that discussed using surveillance apps to track romantic partners. One site, spyblog.ml, had posts about spying on “loved ones” and linked to mSpy. The app company said that its terms of service prohibited illegal activity and that it would block the site from its affiliate program.

Reviews and online discussions about the apps suggest the market for spying on spouses has been important to the businesses. FlexiSPY, an app company, posted survey results on its site showing that 52 percent of potential customers were interested because they thought their partners might be cheating. Asked about the results, the company said the data was five years old and “no longer relevant.”

Different Phones, Different Abilities

The proliferation of such tracking apps raises questions about the role of businesses like Google and Apple in policing their services.

The two companies, which run nearly all smartphones in the United States, have long taken different approaches to regulating apps.

Apple makes it difficult for iPhone users to download apps from outside the company’s App Store, and has many restrictions on what apps in its store can do. After testing several programs available in the stores on both platforms, the researchers found that Apple’s strict rules resulted in more limited surveillance capabilities on those apps than those running Google’s software.

Many App Store apps offered location tracking for phones. But for more intrusive surveillance, spying companies had to work around Apple’s restrictions by using the victim’s name and password to get data. To combat misuse by predators, an Apple spokesman said, the company urges people to use a tool called two-factor authentication to help protect their accounts even if their passwords are stolen.

Google prides itself on being more open. Its smartphone software, Android, allows people to install apps from anywhere, and the most invasive ones were found outside the company’s app store, Play.

The researchers found two apps in the Google Play store that allowed the app icon to be hidden from victims and the camera to run without notifications, as well as a handful of others that tracked users’ locations without telling them, all apparent violations of Google’s rules.

“They’re not enforcing their own policies,” Ms. Doerfler, the N.Y.U. researcher, said. “If someone reports it then they’ll take it down, but it’s not something they are checking within their operating system.”

In response to the researchers’ findings, Google tightened several policies “to further restrict the promotion and distribution” of surveillance apps, a company spokesman said. The company provides funding to the N.Y.U. team that helped conduct the study.

Google removed many spying and tracking apps and blocked advertising on search results about spying on spouses and romantic partners. YouTube, owned by Google, took down some videos about spying services, although the company determined that others didn’t violate its policies because the services could be used with consent.

Enforcing the Law

Many law enforcement agencies don’t have the computer skills to quickly help survivors, or they don’t devote forensic resources to domestic abuse and stalking cases, which in many states are misdemeanors.

One sheriff’s department, in Dakota County, Minn., is trying to tackle the problem of abusive digital surveillance, and has used Justice Department grants to hire a forensic specialist for the task.

The sheriff, Tim Leslie, said that from 2015 to 2017, the department went to court in 198 cases involving technology and stalking or domestic abuse, on par with earlier years. Its conviction rate rose to 94 percent from 50 percent, with many more suspects pleading guilty instead of contesting the charges, he said.

In one case, the specialist analyzed a woman’s phone and found it had a program on it called Mobile Spy, bought using her then-husband’s email address. The specialist could see that it had been launched 122 times. The effect of the stalking was “profound,” the woman said.

Even though it had been more than a year since the app was last used, the man was charged with misdemeanor stalking and pleaded guilty in 2015.

“We go after the misdemeanor stuff pretty hard, in the theory that if you stop that, it doesn’t escalate,” Sheriff Leslie said.

Federal cases involving such spying are rare. The Justice Department in 2014 charged the maker of a spying program called StealthGenie under a wiretap law that prohibits advertising and selling a device for “surreptitious interception.” The developer paid a $500,000 fine, shut down StealthGenie and was sentenced to time served.

Victims’ advocates said they noticed after the case that makers of surveillance tools changed their tactics, sometimes moving computer servers overseas or scrubbing explicit language about spousal spying from their websites. “As soon as these companies caught wind that they shouldn’t be doing it, they just changed their marketing,” Ms. Olsen said.

One app maker told The Times that he hired a legal team after the StealthGenie case to help him avoid running afoul of the law. “There were a few modifications we had to make,” said Patrick Hinchy, the founder of New York-based ILF Mobile Apps, which makes Highster Mobile and other services. Several apps, he said, removed call recording and delayed the the availability of the data by 10 to 15 minutes. Mr. Hinchy said the company only provided assistance to customers that it believed was legal.

When a researcher recently contacted the company and asked, “If I use this app to track my husband, will he know that I am tracking him?” the representative responded: “Our software is undetectable from the home screen.”

The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1−800−799−7233.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How a Stalker Can Be Hiding In Your Pocket. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post Hundreds of Apps Can Empower Stalkers to Track Their Victims appeared first on World The News.

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[touristguidebuzz]

Trivago Turns a Profit and 11 Other Digital Trends This Week

If these employees seem happy now, wait 'til they see the fancy new Düsseldorf offices that are being built. Trivago

Skift Take: These are the digital trends we were talking about this week.

— Sarah Enelow

Throughout the week we post dozens of original stories, connecting the dots across the travel industry, and every weekend we sum it all up. This weekend roundup examines digital trends.

For all of our weekend roundups, go here.

>>In his first interview with Skift, Amadeus’s chief executive Luis Maroto makes a persuasive case that his $24.8 billion company is successfully navigating industry changes: Travel Tech CEO Series: Amadeus Is Evolving Despite Airline Distribution Pressures

>>There ain’t no such thing as a free booking: How Do Hotels and Online Travel Agencies Really Define a Direct Booking?

>>The German hotel search site predicts that its revenue will grow by 50 percent this year. It will also spend about 85 percent of that revenue on marketing. That’s a path to either dominance — or disaster: Trivago Turns a Profit and Excites Some Investors Despite Its Risky Math

>>Skift Research subscribers now get most Skift news stories first: Announcing Early Access to Skift Daily Stories for Research Subscribers Only

>>This Dutch startup is growing by focusing on the problem of mobile ticketing and solving it with a product that requires almost no technical savvy from museums and other attraction operators. But it may need to be acquired to scale up quickly: Tiqets Secures $17 Million in Funding for Tours and Activities Ticketing

>>Machine-based translation still makes significant errors. But new techniques from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are much better, as shown by a new Hostelworld chat tool: Google’s New Translation Tech Takes a Great Leap Forward

>>Limitations remain, but there’s a goldmine of data available that can help with sales, marketing, and production: How Smart Event Organizers Are Using Big Data to Create Better Events

>>The “travel agent in your pocket” approach was never going to be big for the average consumer and targeting businesses seems much more sensible: Lola Travel App Will Pivot to Target Business Travelers

>>The meetings industry is getting a lot better at leveraging data to inform event design and strategy, but there’s still a long way to go to personalize the experience on a mass scale: Event Technology Is Showing Progress — Meetings Innovation Report

>>Whether to feature a Trivago Guy or Trivago Woman, or both, on TV commercials is a serious strategy and business question for the hotel-search site. For now, it is opting for two actors in the U.S., as it has done elsewhere, for targeting and other purposes: Trivago Says It Needs to Be the Star of Its Advertising, Not Some Guy

>>Startups like Sweet Inn increasingly blur the lines between the hotel and Airbnb business models by offering hotel-style service in short-term rentals that they own and manage: Sweet Inn Raises $22 Million for Serviced Vacation Rentals: Travel Startup Funding This Week

>>It doesn’t surprise any soul who knows the travel industry that Google Hotel Ads is the breadwinner and Google Flights takes a back seat revenue-wise, but it’s nice to hear Google finally say it: Video: Google Exec Says Hotel Ads Are the Big Moneymaker in Europe

[cubaverdad]

At 55, Cuba’s Young Communist Union Loses Relevance But Does Not Want To Retire

At 55, Cuba's Young Communist Union Loses Relevance But Does Not Want To Retire 14ymedio, Zunilda Mata, 4 April 2017 — There was a time when its red card was a source of pride and most teenagers dreamed of entering its ranks. But those days have been left behind for the Young Communists Union (UJC), an organization that turns 55 this Tuesday, with an aging image and a noticeable decrease in its membership. Founded in 1962, the UJC was a copycat of the Soviet Komsomols, creating a youth front that served as a quarry for the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). In the midst of the enthusiasm of those years there were massive "processes of growth," with the signing up of numerous members, but today many evade or reject this opportunity. "I never questioned whether or not to enter the UJC, it was what all my classmates did and I joined," recalls Gladys Marrero, a retired nurse who worked with the organization for more than a decade. "In those years everything was different, people believed much more what was said in the meetings," she says. Marrero was sanctioned in her local committee in 1980 for not participating in acts of repudiation* against those who emigrated during the Mariel Boatlift. "In the polyclinic where I worked a lab technician asked to step down to be able to leave [the country] and the UJC prepared a rally to 'say goodbye' to her," she remembers. She didn't want to participate in "those antics" and turned in her card. Of the nearly three million young people living in Cuba, according to the most recent Population and Housing Census of 2012, only 300,752 are affiliated with the UJC, which operates through 33,000 base committees across the island. The figure is much lower than almost 600,000 members who were on the rolls in 2007, when the country was in the midst of the effervescence of the Battle of Ideas. Yosvani, 25 years old and resident of Aguada de Pasajeros in Cienfuegos, was one of the young people who enrolled in the UJC during those years. "Several municipal leaders came to our high school and said they were going to undertake massive growth throughout the country, with more than 10,000 new militants," he tells this newspaper. Over time, the young man lost interest because "there were too many meetings" and "they summoned us for anything." One day he pretended that he had a serious health problem and asked for his discharge. In his local committee alone "more than half of the militants left," he says. Some alleged family complications, but Yosvani believes they actually did it out of "lack of interest." In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, several young people waiting to enter the United States also once had the organization's red membership card in their pockets. Richard, a fictitious name to avoid retaliation, has been stranded for two months at the US border after the cancellation of the wet foot/dry foot policy that allowed Cubans who stepped foot on American soil to stay. Although he calls himself a "revolutionary" he does not plan to mention his affiliation to US immigration officials should they "reverse Obama's decision and let the Cubans in." The migrant, who spoke with 14ymedio through videoconferencing, served as general secretary of his local committee and believes that "the UJC helped many young people not to fall into delinquency and to direct their lives." However, he believes that the organization "fell into a rut" although "it still has a large presence in schools and workplaces, so it could take advantage of that structure." In the middle of last year a young Cuban migrant was declared "inadmissible" by the US authorities because she confessed to having belonged to the Young Communists Union between 2010 and 2013. The absence of leadership has also hampered the activity of these komsomols. Of the UJC's dozen first secretaries since its creation, more than half ended up being ousted while they leading the UJC or in later positions. The most famous cases were Luis Orlando Domínguez (1972-1982), Carlos Lage (1982-1986) and Roberto Robaina (1986-1993). The fear of ending up like them slows down many who would like to present themselves as more active and creative. Charisma is paid for dearly in these types of responsibilities. "People do not want to take positions inside the UJC to avoid getting into trouble," says Yosvani. "That's a tremendous burning," he quips. The young man criticizes the "lack of power of the militants who go along with many things in the meetings but they do not have ability to influence decision making." In 2015 and during meetings of the organization before the 10th Congress, the militants expressed their concern about the UJC's stagnation. "It needs to be a living organism that has diversity, is truly transformed and represents young people," said Han García, a student at the Victoria de Giron [Bay of Pigs Victory] Faculty of Medical Sciences. In an attempt to revitalize the organization and during an extraordinary meeting of the UJC in the middle of last year, the psychologist Susely Morfa González was named first secretary of the organization, replacing Yuniasky Crespo Baquero. Shortly afterwards, her meteoric rise continued when she was chosen as a deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power and made a member of the Council of State. The young woman had turned in a combative performance at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April 2015, starring in several acts of repudiation in which she labeled activists and exiles who participated in a parallel event with civil society as "lackeys, mercenaries, self-financed, underpaid by imperialism." On Tuesday, in an interview with the official press, Morfa stated as a purpose of the UJC "to add to it so that it is an organization for everyone, so that each young person feels ever closer to it." The secretary general estimates that among young Cubans "the vast majority is revolutionary," although she acknowledged that "some people are questioning whether the new generations are aware of their social role." But the functional paralysis and the diminution of its ranks are not the only concerns for the leaders of the UJC. The growth of the private sector has widened the phenomenon of young people who are outside the organization's control and who work in a system governed by the laws of supply and demand. Of the more than half a million self-employed workers on the island, 159,563 are young. The UJC has set out to capture young entrepreneurs at any cost but does not seem to have found much enthusiasm. "What I like about my work is that there are no meetings, no union, and I do not have to donate part of my salary to the Territorial Troop Militias, much less go to UJC meetings," says Roland, a worker in a restaurant in Chinatown, in Havana. "Provincial and national leaders have come to talk to the young people here to raise awareness and make them militants, but people just aren't up for that," he reflects. "Now life is harder than when my parents were in the UJC, you have to earn money with a lot of effort and there is no time for so many meetings," he finishes. *Translator's note: This video – "Gusano" (Worm) – is about a current day repudiation rally and the opening scenes show video from the Mariel Boatlift repudiation rallies. Source: At 55, Cuba's Young Communist Union Loses Relevance But Does Not Want To Retire – Translating Cuba - http://ift.tt/2nZjjwu via Blogger http://ift.tt/2nGOXfT