Google Glass facial recognition app “NameTag”

http://www.slashgear.com/google-glass-real-time-facial-recognition-arrives-with-nametag-19309472/

Google Glass real-time facial recognition arrives with “NameTag”

By Chris Burns

Since the first demonstration of the plausible future abilities of Google Glass, instant facial recognition has been one of the most exciting ideas in the pipeline. According the the development group Facial Network, the time for real-time facial recognition through Google Glass is coming a lot sooner than we originally expected. This isn't an app developed by Google, it's a 3rd party developer group - they've gone and done it first!


What you'll be seeing here is a very simple demonstration of the Glassware called NameTag. This Glass App is not yet available to the public, but is ready for up-close viewing with Glass - as this demo video shows. This app works with a vast collection of pre-programmed faces and allows you to recognized based on its cloud-based archive.



With NameTag, Glass users will be drawing from an archive that delves into the library of faces from dating networks, the National Sex Offendery Registry, and a set of criminal databases (public, the lot of them, of course). You'll also see this app recognizing celebrities galore.


NOTE: This app is different from the MedRef solution we saw earlier this year.

"I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us. It’s much easier to meet interesting new people when we can simply look at someone, see their Facebook, review their LinkedIn page or maybe even see their dating site profile.
Often we were interacting with people blindly or not interacting at all. NameTag on Google Glass can change all that." - NameTag creator Kevin Alan Tussy

The folks behind NameTag have also suggested that being included in the NameTag archive will be an opt-out sort of situation. Sound like a plan that'll work right out the gate to you?

"People will soon be able to login to www.NameTag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others. It’s not about invading anyone’s privacy; it’s about connecting people that want to be connected.

We will even allow users to have one profile that is seen during business hours and another that is only seen in social situations. NameTag can make the big, anonymous world we live in as friendly as a small town." - NameTag creator Kevin Alan Tussy

Google's current stance on Facial Recognition Glassware is in flux. They're in a place where they're not approving any facial recognition apps until privacy issues have been addressed, but based on what the creators of NameTag suggest, they'll be pushing - hard - to make Google change its collective mind.

Story Timeline

• Google Glass invitations heading out to developers
• Google Glass scores official Play Music glassware
• Google Glass driver pleads not guilty to digital distraction
• Google Glass Explorers receiving invitations to swap for updated version
• Should I become a Google Glass Explorer?
• Duck Hunt inspired Glass Hunt game lands for Google Glass
• Google Glass MyGlass iPhone app appears [Update: Pulled]
• Google Glass Glassware apps stack up: Winkfeed, YouTube, Hangouts
• Should I be ashamed of wearing Google Glass?

Google Acquires Boston Dynamics: Concept robot maker for military

Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-its-menagerie-of-robots.html?_r=0

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie.

Boston Dynamics

A robot named BigDog, which can walk over rough terrain, can also stay upright in response to a well-placed human kick. 

Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans. 

It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year. Executives at the Internet giant are circumspect about what exactly they plan to do with their robot collection. But Boston Dynamics and its animal kingdom-themed machines bring significant cachet to Google’s robotic efforts, which are being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who spearheaded the development of Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software. 

The deal is also the clearest indication yet that Google is intent on building a new class of autonomous systems that might do anything from warehouse work to package delivery and even elder care. 

Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has not sold robots commercially, but has pushed the limits of mobile and off-road robotics technology, mostly for Pentagon clients like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Early on, the company also did consulting work for Sony on consumer robots like the Aibo robotic dog. 

Boston Dynamics’ walking robots have a reputation for being extraordinarily agile, able to walk over rough terrain and handle surfaces that in some cases are challenging even for humans.

A video of one of its robots named BigDog shows a noisy, gas-powered, four-legged, walking robot that climbs hills, travels through snow, skitters precariously on ice and even manages to stay upright in response to a well-placed human kick. BigDog development started in 2003 in partnership with the British robot maker Foster-Miller, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Harvard.

The video has been viewed more than 15 million times since it was posted on YouTube in 2008.

More recently, Boston Dynamics distributed a video of a four-legged robot named WildCat, galloping in high-speed circles in a parking lot. 

Although the videos frequently inspire comments that the robots will evolve into scary killing machines straight out of the “Terminator” movies, Dr. Raibert has said in the past that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor — it is merely trying to advance robotics technology. Google executives said the company would honor existing military contracts, but that it did not plan to move toward becoming a military contractor on its own. 

Under a $10.8 million contract, Boston Dynamics is currently supplying Darpa with a set of humanoid robots named Atlas to participate in the Darpa Robotics Challenge, a two-year contest with a $2 million prize. The contest’s goal is creating a class of robots that can operate in natural disasters and catastrophes like the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. 

“Competitions like the Darpa Robotics Challenge stretch participants to try to solve problems that matter and we hope to learn from the teams’ insights around disaster relief,” Mr. Rubin said in a statement released by Google. 

Boston Dynamics has also designed robots that can climb walls and trees as well as other two- and four-legged walking robots, a neat match to Mr. Rubin’s notion that “computers are starting to sprout legs and move around in the environment.” 

A recent video shows a robot named Cheetah running on a treadmill. This year, the robot was clocked running 29 miles per hour, surpassing the previous legged robot land speed record of 13.1 m.p.h., set in 1999. That’s about one mile per hour faster than Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter dash. But it’s far short of a real cheetah, which can hit 65 m.p.h. 

Google’s other robotics acquisitions include companies in the United States and Japan that have pioneered a range of technologies including software for advanced robot arms, grasping technology and computer vision. Mr. Rubin has also said that he is interested in advancing sensor technology.

Mr. Rubin has called his robotics effort a “moonshot,” but has declined to describe specific products that might come from the project. He has, however, also said that he does not expect initial product development to go on for years, indicating that Google commercial robots of some nature could be available in the next several years. 

Google declined to say how much it paid for its newest robotics acquisition and said that it did not plan to release financial information on any of the other companies it has recently bought.

Dr. Raibert is known as the father of walking robots in the United States. He originally created the Leg Lab, a research laboratory to explore walking machines at Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He then moved the laboratory to M.I.T. before leaving academia to build engineering systems for the military and Sony. 

His research in walking robots began with a pogo-stick project called “the hopper,” which he used to test basic concepts. 

“I am excited by Andy and Google’s ability to think very, very big,” Dr. Raibert said, “with the resources to make it happen.”

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011

from the site:

We're excited to share Prime Air — something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.
The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.
Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.
Check out this footage from a recent test flight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this science fiction or is this real?

A: It looks like science fiction, but it's real. From a technology point of view, we'll be ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Q: One day we'll see a fleet of Prime Air vehicles in the sky?

A: Yes. One day, Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today.

Q: When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option?

A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time.

Q: How are you going to ensure public safety?

A: The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety. Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.

Western thoughts on Chinese Cinema

My friend has been living in China for years, and he translates Chinese and Japanese science texts.

Here are his thoughts on Chinese cinema:

I thought Shaolin Soccer was cute - think I saw it on a plane
flight and on cable. I thought Crouching Tiger was OK but quite liked
House of Flying Daggers. However, both of those two were co-
productions and Shaolin was a Hong Kong film.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/chinese-moviegoers-prefer-local-films-to-hollywoods

Almost all of the regular Chinese cinema is complete and utter shite.
Lots of period dramas with people flying about with swords, crap fables
about the Monkey King, Pig, and company with terrible special effects,
or laughably heroic Chinese Red Army forces defeating the eeevilll
Japanese invaders in WWII.

  As for the period dramas - EVERY drama is dubbed with the same 2 guys
and 1 or 2 girls doing all of the speaking, which I've heard is ostensibly to
standardize the spoken Chinese language. Whatever the reason, you hear
the same voices in tons of different dramas. Creepy.

As for the fables - I don't mind fables per se, but the SFX are on
part with Sid & Marty Krofft circa the 1970s. Can't be bothered to watch
such drivel in the 21st century.

As for the WWII movies - my boxing coach and I were discussing this
the other day. We agreed that there is one and only one movie, Assembly,
that is actually any good (below, press CC for subtitles):

As he mentioned, he even noticed one Chinese WWII flick where the
Chinese soldiers were carrying AK-47s. These movies are little more than
propaganda ads that make John Wayne WWII flicks look like bastions of
realism in comparison.

Anyway, that's my take on Chinese things cinematic...

カーチスベントリー

Assembly:

Gene therapy scores big wins against blood cancers

 http://www.sfgate.com/news/medical/article/Gene-therapy-scores-big-wins-against-blood-cancers-5044054.php#page-1

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Chief Medical Writer

In one of the biggest advances against leukemia and other blood cancers in many years, doctors are reporting unprecedented success by using gene therapy to transform patients' blood cells into soldiers that seek and destroy cancer.

A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.

"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janis Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."

In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.

These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.

Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pa., that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.

Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.
Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.

The treatment involves filtering patients' blood to remove millions of white blood cells called T-cells, altering them in the lab to contain a gene that targets cancer, and returning them to the patient in infusions over three days.

"What we are giving essentially is a living drug" — permanently altered cells that multiply in the body into an army to fight the cancer, said Dr. David Porter, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who led one study.

Several drug and biotech companies are developing these therapies. Penn has patented its method and licensed it to Switzerland-based Novartis AG. The company is building a research center on the Penn campus in Philadelphia and plans a clinical trial next year that could lead to federal approval of the treatment as soon as 2016.

Talking with the researchers, "there is a sense of making history ... a sense of doing something very unique," said Hervé Hoppenot, president of Novartis Oncology, the division leading the work.
Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, agreed.

"From our vantage point, this looks like a major advance," he said. "We are seeing powerful responses ... and time will tell how enduring these remissions turn out to be."

The group has given $15 million to various researchers testing this approach. Nearly 49,000 new cases of leukemia, 70,000 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 22,000 cases of myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013.

Many patients are successfully treated with chemotherapy or bone marrow or stem cell transplants, but transplants are risky and donors can't always be found. So far, gene therapy has been tried on people who were in danger of dying because other treatments failed.

The gene therapy must be made individually for each patient, and lab costs now are about $25,000, without a profit margin. That's still less than many drugs to treat these diseases and far less than a transplant.

The treatment can cause severe flu-like symptoms and other side effects, but these have been reversible and temporary, doctors say.

Penn doctors have treated the most cases so far — 59. Of the first 14 patients with CLL, four had complete remissions, four had partial ones and the rest did not respond. However, some partial responders continue to see their cancer shrink a year after treatment.

"That's very unique to this kind of therapy" and gives hope the treatment may still purge the cancer, said Porter. Another 18 CLL patients were treated and half have responded so far.

Penn doctors also treated 27 ALL patients. All five adults and 19 of the 22 children had complete remissions, an "extraordinarily high" success rate, said Dr. Stephan Grupp at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Six have since relapsed, though, and doctors are pondering a second gene therapy attempt.
At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. James Kochenderfer and others have treated 11 patients with lymphoma and four with CLL, starting roughly two years ago. Six had complete remissions, six had partial ones, one has stable disease and it's too soon to tell for the rest.

Ten other patients were given gene therapy to try to kill leukemia or lymphoma remaining after bone marrow transplants. These patients got infusions of gene-treated blood cells from their transplant donors instead of using their own blood cells. One had a complete remission and three others had significant reduction of their disease.

"They've had every treatment known to man. To get any responses is really encouraging," Kochenderfer said. The cancer institute is working with a Los Angeles biotech firm, Kite Pharma Inc., on its gene therapy approach.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will report on 13 patients with ALL; the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will report about two-dozen patients with ALL or lymphoma, and Baylor College of Medicine will give results on 10 patients with lymphoma or myeloma.

Patients are encouraged that relatively few have relapsed.

"We're still nervous every day because they can't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow," said Tom Whitehead, 8-year-old Emily's father.

Doug Olson, 67, a scientist for a medical device maker, shows no sign of cancer since gene therapy in September 2010 for CLL he had had since 1996.

"Within one month he was in complete remission. That was just completely unexpected," said Porter, his doctor at Penn.

Olson ran his first half-marathon in January and no longer worries about how long his remission will last.

"I decided I'm cured. I'm not going to let that hang over my head anymore," he said.
___
Online:
Emily Whitehead's story: http://bit.ly/VxB0dL
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Killing Cancer By Retraining the Patient's Immune System

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/cohen-cancer-study/

By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent

(CNN) -- Nick Wilkins was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 4 years old, and when the cancer kept bouncing back, impervious to all the different treatments the doctors tried, his father sat him down for a talk.

John Wilkins explained to Nick, who was by then 14, that doctors had tried chemotherapy, radiation, even a bone marrow transplant from his sister.

"I explained to him that we're running out of options," Wilkins remembers telling his son.

There was one possible treatment they could try: an experimental therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

He asked his son if he understood what it would mean if this treatment didn't work.

"He understood he could die," Wilkins says. "He was very stoic."

A few months later, Nick traveled from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia to become a part of the experiment.

This new therapy was decidedly different from the treatments he'd received before: Instead of attacking his cancer with poisons like chemotherapy and radiation, the Philadelphia doctors taught Nick's own immune cells to become more adept at killing the cancer.

Two months later, he emerged cancer-free. It's been six months since Nick, now 15, received the personalized cell therapy, and doctors still can find no trace of leukemia in his system.

Trusting her intuition led to two cancer diagnoses

Twenty-one other young people received the same treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and 18 of them, like Nick, went into complete remission -- one of them has been disease-free for 20 months. The Penn doctors released their findings this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

"It gives us hope that this is a cure," Nick's father says. "They're really close. I think they're really onto something."

'A whole new realm of medicine '

At the conference, two other cancer centers -- Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and the National Cancer Institute -- will be announcing results with immunotherapies like the one Nick received. The results are promising, especially considering that the patients had no success with practically every other therapy.

"This is absolutely one of the more exciting advances I've seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years," said Dr. David Porter, a hematologist and oncologist at Penn. "We've entered into a whole new realm of medicine."

In the therapy, doctors first remove the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These "hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's body.

Essentially, researchers are trying to train Nick's body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight off the common cold.

Tumor Paint: Changing the way surgeons fight cancer

In addition to the pediatric patients, Penn scientists tried the therapy out in 37 adults with leukemia, and 12 went into complete remission. Eight more patients went into partial remission and saw some improvements in their disease.

The treatment does make patients have flulike symptoms for a short period of time -- Nick got so sick he ended up in the intensive care unit for a day -- but patients are spared some of the more severe and long-lasting side effects of extensive chemotherapy.

Penn will now work with other medical centers to test the therapy in more patients, and they plan to try the therapy out in other types of blood cancers and later in solid tumors.

A university press release says it has a licensing relationship with the pharmaceutical company Novartis and "received significant financial benefit" from the trial, and Porter and other inventors of the technology "have benefited financially and/or may benefit financially in the future."

Searching for one-in-a-million cancer cells 

The big question is whether Nick's leukemia will come back.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. The studies have only been going on since 2010, but so far relapse rates have been relatively low: of the 18 other pediatric patients who went into complete remission, only five have relapsed and of the 12 adults who went into complete remission, only one relapsed. Some of the adult patients have been cancer-free and without a relapse for more than three years and counting.

Relapses after this personalized cell therapy may be more promising than relapses after chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant, Porter explained.

First, doctors have been delighted to find the reengineered T-cells -- the ones that know how to hunt down and attack cancer -- are still alive in the patients' bodies after more than three years.

Stigma lingers for deadliest cancer

"The genetically modified T-cells have survived," Porter said. "They're still present and functional and have the ability to protect against recurrence."

Second, before declaring patients in remission, Penn doctors scoured especially hard for errant leukemia cells.

Traditionally, for the kind of leukemia Nick has, doctors can find one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 cancer cells. But Penn's technology could find one in 100,000 to one in a million cancer cells, and didn't find any in Nick or any of the patients who went into complete remission.

 

'It's not a fluke'

One of the best aspects of this new treatment is that it won't be terribly difficult to reproduce at other medical centers, Porter said, and one day, instead of being used only experimentally, it could be available to anyone who needed it.

"Our hope is that this can progress really quite quickly," he said. "It won't be available to everyone next year, but I don't think it would take a decade, either."

Right now patients can only get this therapy if they're in a study, but Dr. Renier Brentjens, director for cellular therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, says he thinks it could become available to all patients in just three to five years.

"When you have three centers all with a substantial number of patients seeing the same thing -- that these cells work in this disease - you know it's not a fluke," he said.

Two days ago, Brentjens became the co-founder of Juno Therapeutics, a for-profit biotech start-up company that's working on immunotherapies.

"Fifteen years ago I was in the lab looking at these cells kill tumor cells in a petri dish and then I saw them kill tumor cells in mice, and then finally in humans," Brentjens said.

He says he'll never forget the first patient he treated, who initially had an enormous amount of cancer cells in his bone marrow. Then after the therapy, Brentjens looked under the microscope and, in awe, realized he couldn't find a single cancer cell.

"I can't describe what that's like," he said. "It's fantastic."

CNN's John Bonifield contributed to this report.

Mysterious China-themed 'city' proposed in New York’s Catskills

Official site with news updates:
http://www.chinacityofamerica.com

Jan. 2014

Skepticism surrounds China City plan for upstate New York

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/skepticism-surrounds-china-city-plan-for-upstate-new-york/2014/01/19/dac079de-816e-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

By George M. Walsh January 19

 

ALBANY, N.Y. — It is an audacious plan that seems out of place for the Catskills: a $6 billion China-themed cultural, business and amusement park to be built on 2,200 acres of forest and former farmland nearly two hours from New York City.

China City of America has been pitched as a showcase for the country’s traditions, a boon for the distressed former Borscht Belt region and an opportunity for prosperous Chinese to invest $500,000 each through an immigration program that would grant them U.S. visas and a path to citizenship.
Local reaction was a mix of puzzlement and anger in the Sullivan County towns of Thompson and Mamakating.

“The take was, ‘Really?’ People were dumbfounded,” said Bill Rieber, the Thompson town supervisor. “It immediately generated a lot of opposition.”
Details of the project first appeared on a Web site in late 2011, and it was formally announced in 2012. As recently as mid-May, the full project, including homes for 1,000 families and the possibility of a casino to be built over several years, was still on the table at a meeting of Thompson’s municipal boards.

The people behind China City have since dialed back the pace of their plans, now proposing to start with a college, dorms and faculty housing on 575 acres solely in Thompson after strong opposition surfaced in Mamakating. And the original Web site touting the project appears to have been taken down.

But Sherry Li, the chief executive of China City of America, told the Associated Press that the goal is still to pursue the entire project, concentrating more in Thompson, a town of 15,000.

“We haven’t cut back our sizes,” she said. “We’re going to be doing it step by step.”
Li said the school, known as the Thompson Education Center, would be a tax-paying, for-profit college enrolling 900 students at first, with a curriculum concentrated on business, art and entertainment majors. The college would grow to 3,000 students, many of whom Li expects would come from China. A second phase of construction would include guest lodging and a conference center.

A Long Island resident who came to the United States 23 years ago when she was 19, Li said her background is in development and finance and she’s confident about raising the $150 million for the first phase. She said $60 million will come from 120 families applying through the federal Immigrant Investor Program, or EB-5. The program established in 1990 allows foreign investors who create or preserve a certain number of jobs to apply for citizenship after five years. An additional $30 million would come from private equity investment and $60 million through borrowing.

Environmentalists say the project can’t be developed on the scale proposed by China City without damaging sensitive wetlands vital to the health of the 2,200-acre Basha Kill Wildlife Management Area, one of New York’s largest freshwater marshes. State regulators are closely watching the project.
“It’s pretty much untouched. It’s not just any podunk wetlands,” said Paula Medley, president of the Basha Kill Area Association and a leader of the environmental movement against China City.
Li insisted that her land-use and other experts have a plan that will meet local zoning and include “green” technology in the construction and operations.

Another controversy arose in December when the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tighter immigration restrictions, posted an article criticizing the project and its use of the EB-5 program and reporting speculation Chinese government money is behind it.
David North, the author and a fellow at the center, said the EB-5 element is “based on a broad part of the immigration law for people with nothing else to recommend them but money to get visas ahead of everyone else.”

China City immigration lawyer Larry Behar lashed back in a news release that said the center was “spreading xenophobia that smacks of classic McCarthy-era behavior.”
North denied any racist agenda. “It doesn’t matter to me if this is all Chinese or all Swedish. This is a bad project,” he said.

Li said no Chinese government money is invested in her project.

After seeing a series of big proposed developments come and go, including pitches for Indian casino resorts, Rieber said his town has a “believe-it-when-you-see-it” attitude.
He said the town, which also is considered a likely place for one of the Las Vegas-style casinos voters have approved for upstate, still hasn’t been given a site plan by China City. He expects officials to have a lot of questions for Li and her experts at a meeting Wednesday.
“We’re used to grand plans,” Rieber said. “Most people don’t think they’re going to happen.”


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/04/massive-china-themed-city-proposed-in-new-yorks-catskills/

By Cristina Corbin

U.S. immigration officials are considering a proposal from Chinese investors to create a multibillion-dollar development in New York’s Catskills called "China City" -- raising concerns among critics about the potential cost to U.S. taxpayers and, according to one analyst, the possibility it could be a "stalking horse" for the Beijing government.

A spokesman from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told FoxNews.com that the proposal for Thompson, N.Y., has not been approved but is under consideration.

The mysterious proposed development appears to be a step beyond the types of ethnic enclaves scattered throughout U.S. cities, like the Chinatown sections of New York City or San Francisco. The 600-acre "China City of America" is located far outside New York City in upstate New York's wetlands and is a meticulously planned project, calling for family housing, a college and student residences, among other structures. In addition to needing federal approval, it would likely need a host of state and local permits before ground could be broken.

"It's a perfect storm of problems."

- David North, Center for Immigration Studies

If approved, every province in China would have an office there and foreign investors funding the development would receive green cards for their $500,000 checks under the EB-5 program designed to lure foreign investment, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative organization staunchly opposed to the project.

A detailed report authored by David North, a fellow with the Washington-based group, claimed there is "a charge from within the Chinese community that China City is a stalking horse for the Chinese communist government in Beijing." He claimed he was told one group raised objections with the USCIS.

"It's a perfect storm of problems," North told FoxNews.com, citing what he called dubious job creation claims by the promoters as well as national security concerns. North noted that the developers claim 20 percent of the funding would come from U.S. taxpayers, which he said was a "pipe dream."

A review by FoxNews.com of the the China City Regional Center's website could not confirm such a claim involving U.S. taxpayer money, though there is little English on the site, which is affiliated with a Florida law firm. No one at the law firm could be reached for comment.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Wednesday it does not disclose details of pending applications.

"The [China City] Regional Center is not approved. An application has been filed and it's still pending. A decision has not been made on it yet," Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for USCIS, told FoxNews.com.

"With all cases of a request for an immigrations service or benefit, we rely on the information provided and the law to reach a decision on whether it can or cannot be approved," Bentley said.

Local officials did not respond to requests for comment. But a videotape of a public meeting held in Thompson in May, available on YouTube, addressed the proposal and underscored the controversy surrounding the development. Supporters of the project, in an economically depressed area of Sullivan County, say they believe it would offer both a financial and cultural boon to the region.

"Families who invest in EB-5 program are normally influential and wealthy families from China. A lot of them are successful business owners or enterprisers. Most of those investors are highly educated and skilled in different fields," wrote one poster.

"I believe this is a big projects that can creates thousands of job opportunities," wrote another. "Such a precious opportunity to learn more about Chinese culture and beauty."

Epson Moverio-Goggles

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/Moverio/Home.do

Price at $700:



Transcript below video at this link - the opening ad is very long:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/03/1951213/epson-tries-to-one-up-google-glass-with-moverio-goggles-video

Marc-Antoine: So this is the Epson Moverio BT-100, which is a binocular see-through display. So here we have a dark shade, but actually the display, as you can see, is totally transparent. So the principle is that we have two projectors in this side of the unit that projects an image _____00:19 that you can find in the transparent parts and this image is reflected to the user eyes via these two semi-reflective mirrors that we have just in front of the eyes.
So basically this mirror is going to reflect the image creatively on this side of the device. But you can still see through the mirror, so ambient light can go through the display and this is why you can still see through the see-through display of the product. So when you wear Moverio, you will see a huge 80-inch display floating right in front of your eyes. So the display resolution is quarter of HD, so 960 x 540.

Tim: One in each eye?

Marc-Antoine: Sorry?

Tim: In each eye, it’s the same as this one?

Marc-Antoine: Any?

Tim: In each eye?

Interviewer: Oh yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, totally, because basically we are going to project three images that is in front of you is going to be only one screen, so one huge screen. And so on this display, it is powered by the pocket-held controller here that is running Android. So basically inside you have the battery and the CPU. This is where you have the Wi-Fi module. So this is how you operate the unit as well. So you have a check pad here for tactile control. So basically it is a really familiar user interface. Basically if you know to use a smartphone or a tablet, you will know how to use this product.

Tim: It is very different from using a typical tablet?

Marc-Antoine: Yeah, but this form factor is really different and this is where the innovation is. So the good thing is that basically this product is totally hands-free because when you wear it, so you have this display fitting here and you don’t have to hold your device to see what is going on. So this is really, really interesting for many applications.
So first this product, it’s a really a good entertainment device. So the good thing versus smartphone and tablet is that the display is really bigger. It’s like a smartphone is between 5 inch now; a tablet is around 7 inch to 10 inch; here you see an 80-inch screen from 5 meters, and the farther you look, the bigger the image looks. So basically if you look at 20 meters away, the display will look like 320-inch screen. So like a cinema screen. It is really amazing. And the good thing as well is that since you have your hands free, like I was saying, you can really enjoy your content in any position, like for instance, watching a movie, playing video game and watching on the roof.

Tim: What sort of input devices are there actually integrated with the device? Is there camera?

Marc-Antoine: No, no, no. The product doesn’t have a camera.

Tim: But it does have motion sensors?

Marc-Antoine: Neither. No, no, no. The _____03:20 version of the Moverio BT-100 doesn’t fit your camera or motion sensors. But we are offering a NavBot for developers if they are interested to start evaluating this kind of features, so they can easily connect that development platform and add a camera to this product to see where the technology is going because this device is very interesting for entertainment, but the magic comes from the application which can be for the device. So basically this is a standout Android device, developers can use the classic Android SDK to build application, so it is really easy for them to develop the application but they can take advantage of the amazing see-through display we have created with the product.

Tim: Can you talk about why it is running in Android 2.2?

Marc-Antoine: Yeah, because the product was launched in late 2011, so Epson has been really innovative with the technology because it is quite a long time ago now already while variable displays and variable technology _____04:20 all around but we have been really one of the first mover on the market and this is a very complex technology, so we are working out to make it smaller, lighter and to improve its features. But it takes time. So at the moment, it is still running Android 2.2, but like I said, developers can still really start developing application easily and also they can use this video input ball to see what they could do with the device.

Tim: There are a lot of applications that run on 2.2.

Marc-Antoine: Yeah, exactly.

Tim: Pretty big library.

Marc-Antoine: Exactly. Exactly. Really we have some people that have been doing already some great things. So for instance _____05:02 we are showcasing a museum application running directly on Android 2.2 and showing a little bit how this kind of product and especially ours can really disrupt all the industries that we know today talking about that might have already been disrupted by smartphones and tablets, because of the form factor and the fact that it is hands-free and you have this display. You can really imagine many, many applications, so whatever it’s for, entertainment, gaming, museums, education, architecture, whatever you think of, you can really find an application. But it’s really more suited for this kind of display which is much more natural way to consume information and content.

Tim: By putting the battery and the CPU, I guess, in a box like this, that means you have more space to put energy storage, how long can you actually be able to use the device?

Marc-Antoine: So we have a really good battery life of six hours. So we can really support in terms of usage and it is really important for this kind of product whose aim is really to remain wireless and to allow you to enjoy your content anytime anywhere and also really important to have this big battery life, especially also because people come up with really great idea about augmented reality thanks to the see-through display that we are offering, which is really a natural platform for this technology because we have this big display just in front of your eyes. And you can make it transparent. So basically you can just see the wall through the transparent lenses of the product and just overlay this additional information, this additional _____06:43 really a good platform for augmented reality and as it is really the next wave in apps development, so we are waiting for developers to really start thinking of how they can port the application on this kind of product and especially on ours.

Tim: How much does it cost to get started?

Marc-Antoine: So, the product goes for £429 or €499 depending on where you live. So it is a really competitive price because we are the only company in the world that are offering this bigger clarity display at this price. You can try other products but they cost €1000. So it is really amazing what our engineers did with the product.

Tim: And for being binocularly colored and adaptable to lot of circumstances, it seems like it is a pretty good price for the device.

Marc-Antoine: Yeah, yeah, it is. We really think it’s really interesting, so many people can afford it and many people can benefit from these features, so we are really excited by this product. As we said, we are working on the future, so we expect really to see some really cool things from Epson and this is really an amazing product.

Liberal Cartoonist, Ted Rawl: If Hillary Is Nominee in 2016 ‘Sexism Will Be The New Racism’

Here's Ted Rawl's commentary on his own site:
http://rall.com/2013/11/29/i-have-been-censored-by-daily-kos

...and here's the 'questionable' cartoon:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/12/03/liberal-cartoonist-if-hillary-nominee-2016-sexism-will-be-new-racism

By Noel Sheppard

As NewsBusters reported Sunday, liberal cartoonist Ted Rall was recently banned from the progressive website Daily Kos for publishing a comic strip with Barack Obama in it that was deemed to be racist.

On Monday, Rall spoke with Newsmax TV’s Steve Malzberg about the incident, and warned that if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, “sexism will be the new racism” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

“They have a section where anybody can post, and I started about I guess it was about two months ago, and from day one, everything I posted that was critical of the President I got this huge amount of hatred,” Rall said.

“They had this system where you can vote that you like or dislike something, and it gets hidden or censored if you don’t like it. Well, most of the people there are Democrats," he continued. "So anybody who criticizes Democrats or Obama is just banished. They’re like a Soviet un-person, you know, like in '1984.' They’re just gone."

"If you look at the vast majority of people who came down on me, these are white Democrats, white guy Democrats who are just using this as an excuse," Rall added. "Get ready, because in 2016, if Hillary is the nominee, it’s just going to be sexism will be the new racism...It’s what you use when you don’t have anything."

  Indeed it is, but Rall's right.

Just as anyone that criticized Obama the past six-plus years was accused of racism, in the coming years, anyone that criticizes Hillary if she runs will be depicted as sexist.

The so-called "Republican War on Women" will be dusted off again, and every utterance by an opponent or commentator that isn't flattering will be due to Clinton's lack of a Y-chromosome and not because of her views.

So we got that going for us.

About the Author

Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters. Click here to follow Noel Sheppard on Twitter.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/12/03/liberal-cartoonist-if-hillary-nominee-2016-sexism-will-be-new-racism#ixzz2mRLjRqY6

Pro Life : End of Life and Eugenics

Being physicians, I understand that Ron and Rand Paul have a different perspective, but I struggled to understand why they would take a pro-life stance - it seems counter to the Libertarian values of freedom to choose, and opposition to government coercion. At first, I wondered whether Rand was embracing a pro-life stance as a way of appealing to the far right, running as a Republican, despite the damage it might do to his candidacy.

I searched for more about Rand's pro-life stance, and found a conversation in which Rand made a brief reference to end of life considerations, and I immediately wondered whether he was concerned about eugenics.

Here's Rand Paul's delivery at Liberty University, and he specifically speaks about eugenics and alludes to the film Gattaca. I've since heard more discussion of "death panels" surrounding Obamacare. The speech was followed by lots of buzz about plagiarism from wiki, which not only misses the point, but perhaps underscores the tendency for this administration to attack anyone with a threatening point of view.

Mexican drug cartels now make money exporting ore

http://www.myfoxny.com/story/24094105/mexican-drug-cartels-now-make-money-exporting-ore

By MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican drug cartels looking to diversify their businesses long ago moved into oil theft, pirated goods, extortion and kidnapping, consuming an ever larger swath of the country's economy. This month, federal officials confirmed the cartels have even entered the country's lucrative mining industry, exporting iron ore to Chinese mills.

Such large-scale illegal mining operations were long thought to be wild rumor, but federal officials confirmed they had known about the cartels' involvement in mining since 2010, and that the Nov. 4 military takeover of Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's second-largest port, was aimed at cutting off the cartels' export trade.

That news served as a wake-up call to Mexicans that drug traffickers have penetrated the country's economy at unheard-of levels, becoming true Mafia-style organizations, ready to defend their mines at gun point.

Three Michoacan state detectives were wounded in an ambush earlier this week when they were traveling to investigate a mine taken over by criminals. When reinforcements arrived, those officers were also ambushed, part of a string of attacks on police in Michoacan on Wednesday and Thursday that left two officers dead and about a dozen wounded.

The Knights Templar cartel and its predecessor, the La Familia drug gang, have been stealing or extorting shipments of iron ore, or illegally extracting the mineral themselves and selling it through Pacific coast ports, said Michoacan residents, mining companies and current and former federal officials. The cartel had already imposed demands for "protection payments" on many in the state, including shopkeepers, ranchers and farmers.

But so deeply entrenched was the cartel connection to mines, mills, ports, export firms and land holders that it took authorities three years to confront the phenomenon head-on. Federal officials said they are looking to crack down on other ports where drug gangs are operating.

"This is the terrible thing about this process of (the cartel's) taking control of and reconfiguring the state," said Guillermo Valdes Castellanos, the former head of the country's top domestic intelligence agency. "They managed to impose a Mafia-style control of organized crime, and the different social groups like port authorities, transnational companies and local landowners, had to get in line."

Valdez Castellanos said that even back in 2010, the La Familia cartel would take ore from areas that were under concession to private mining companies, sometimes with the aid or complicity of local farmers and land owners, then sell the ore to processors, distributors and even, apparently, foreign firms.

Mexico's Economy Department said the problem was so severe that it prompted the government to quietly toughen rules on exporters in 2011 and 2012 and make them prove they received their ore from established, recognized sources.

Many exporters couldn't. In 2012, the department denied export applications from 13 companies, because they didn't meet the new rules. And the problem wasn't just limited to Michoacan, or the Knights Templar cartel.

"Since 2010, evidence surfaced of irregular mining of iron in the states of Jalisco, Michoacan and Colima," the department said in a statement to The Associated Press.

"That illegal activity was encouraged by the great demand for iron by countries such as China, to develop their industries," according to the department. "Many trading companies began to build up big stockpiles of legally and illegally obtained iron (ore), that was later shipped out for export."

A Mexican federal official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the cartels would use a combination of threats and outright theft to get the ore from mines. He said the nexus between the cartels and export companies was key.

"They extort the merchandise from mining companies and then export it through legal companies, or they rob trucks full (of ore) that later turn up in a legal manner," the official said.

Ofelia Alcala, a resident of the Michoacan mining village of Aquila, said that since 2012, the Knights Templar cartel has demanded residents hand over part of the royalty payments from a local iron ore mine operated by Ternium, a Luxembourg-based consortium. Alcala, a member of a self-defense group that rose up in arms in Aquila this summer to kick the cartel out, said the cartel also had been hiring people to extract the ore without permits, and then exporting it through another Pacific coast port, Manzanillo.

"They weren't content with getting our money and robbing our trucks, so they began secretly extracting our minerals," said Alcala.

Ternium said in a statement that it has received reports of irregular mining near its operations in Aquila.

"Those have been passed on to the appropriate authorities," the company said in a statement.

Government figures show the amount of iron ore being exported to China quadrupled between 2008 and the first half of 2013, rising to 4.6 million tons per year, precisely during the period the La Familia cartel and later the Knights Templar cemented their control over Michoacan.
In 2008, Lazaro Cardenas handled only 1.5 percent of Mexico's iron ore exports to China; by mid-2013, the seaport was shipping out nearly half.

In 2010, the attorney general's office estimated the cartels shipped 1.1 million tons of illegally extracted iron ore abroad that year.

Officials said the export scheme may have involved other sea ports, and that more military takeovers may be necessary.

The cartel mining issue also resurfaced last year in the coal-mining state of Coahuila bordering Texas. The former governor, Humberto Moreira, called a press conference to claim that Heriberto Lazcano, leader of the Zetas cartel, was running illegal coal mining ventures and partnering with legitimate ones. So far, none of the accusations have been proven.

The only known arrests related to cartel mining operations occurred in Michoacan in 2010, when Ignacio Lopez Medina, an alleged member of La Familia, was accused of selling ore illegally to China, the federal Attorney General's Office said at the time.

But the arrest apparently came to little; the Attorney General's Office could not say whether Lopez Medina had been tried or convicted of that crime, nor could The Associated Press determine if he is represented by a lawyer or is still in custody.

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce did not immediately respond to requests for information on companies that have been involved in buying ore from cartels, knowingly or otherwise.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry declined to comment on whether China had any measures in place to ensure the legal provenance of such imports.

The iron ore, meanwhile, has both swelled the cartels' bankrolls, giving them more money to buy guns and bribe officials, and fed the hunger of Asian steel mills.
And it may be a two-way trade: Precursor chemicals the cartel uses to make methamphetamines often arrive from China at both the Lazaro Cardenas and Manzanillo ports.
___
Associated Press writer E. Eduardo Castillo contributed to this report.