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Post by swamprat on May 24, 2018 16:11:49 GMT
Summer Has Come to the Swamp
The turtles have to share their log with the Anhinga...
Besties
I'm watching you....
Up close and personal...
Halt! Who goes there?!
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Post by Deleted on May 24, 2018 22:37:41 GMT
Those Alexa speakers Are so Awesome They can pick up your conversations and send to your contacts
Every room in her family home was wired with the Amazon devices to control her home's heat, lights and security system.
But Danielle said two weeks ago their love for Alexa changed with an alarming phone call. "The person on the other line said, 'unplug your Alexa devices right now,'" she said. "'You're being hacked.'"
That person was one of her husband's employees, calling from Seattle.
"We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house," she said. "At first, my husband was, like, 'no you didn't!' And the (recipient of the message) said 'You sat there talking about hardwood floors.' And we said, 'oh gosh, you really did hear us.'"
Danielle listened to the conversation when it was sent back to her, and she couldn't believe someone 176 miles away heard it too.
"I felt invaded," she said. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.'"
Danielle says she unplugged all the devices, and she repeatedly called Amazon. She says an Alexa engineer investigated.
"They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!"
But Danielle says the engineer did not provide specifics about why it happened, or if it's a widespread issue.
"He told us that the device just guessed what we were saying," she said. Danielle said the device did not audibly advise her it was preparing to send the recording, something it’s programmed to do.
When KIRO 7 asked Amazon questions, they sent this response:
“Amazon takes privacy very seriously. We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future."
Amazon offered to “de-provision” Danielle’s Alexa communications so she could keep using its Smart Home Features. But Danielle is hoping Amazon gives her a refund for her devices, which she said their representatives have been unwilling to do. She says she’s curious to find out if anyone else has experienced the same issue.
"A husband and wife in the privacy of their home have conversations that they're not expecting to be sent to someone (in) their address book," she said.
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 24, 2018 23:27:23 GMT
KSL.com
Courtesy of Utah UFO Festival
Alien aficionados to gather in Cedar City for Utah UFO Festival
By Jacob Klopfenstein, KSL.com
Posted May 24th, 2018 @ 3:00pm
CEDAR CITY — If you’re into the supernatural, you should know that UFO culture isn’t alien to Utah.
The third annual Utah UFO Festival takes place this Friday and Saturday at Main Street Park, which is at 200 North Main St. in Cedar City. The festivities start at 2:30 p.m. Friday and continue all day Friday, through 11:30 p.m. Saturday.
Admission is free for the event, which will feature speakers and panels relating to extraterrestrials, UFOs and the supernatural.
Nathan Cowlishaw, the festival’s founder, said he started the event to unify people.
“We’re trying to bring people together with something that’s fun, that’s imaginative, that brings together people to celebrate the culture of the American southwest,” he said.
The first year of the festival drew a few hundred spectators, while last year’s event had more than 1,000, Cowlishaw said.
A number of guest speakers and panelists will be at the festival, as well as a raffle, a costume contest for humans and pets, a car show and several other events, Cowlishaw said.
The lineup includes Travis Walton, a former logger who was allegedly abducted in northern Arizona in 1975. Appearing with him is Steve Pierce, a man who was working with Walton in 1975.
Walton’s disappearance is the subject of the 1993 film “Fire In The Sky.” He also spoke at the festival in its first year, but Cowlishaw said he’s happy to welcome Walton back.
Also at the festival will be former CIA employee Paul H. Smith, who will speak about remote viewing and military intelligence. Other guests include filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and representatives from the Phoenix chapter of MUFON, or Mutual UFO Network.
Corbell currently is working on a documentary about the Sherman Ranch site in Uintah County, which is also known as the Skinwalker Ranch, Cowlishaw said.
Festival organizers have arranged to donate 55 percent of the proceeds to Iron County Care and Share, Cowlishaw said. La Quinta and Clarion hotels, which are sponsoring the festival, came up with the idea, he said.
“To my knowledge, we are the only charitably-driven UFO festival,” he said.
A raffle held at the festival will benefit the charity, he said.
Cowlishaw said he hopes that Utah can become a top spot for extraterrestrial culture. He thinks Cedar City, which is just hours away from Area 51 in Nevada, can compete with New Mexico.
Southern Utah is a prime location, and with millions of tourists pouring in from across the globe each year to go to Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks, the area has a lot to offer, he said.
“There’s potential here,” Cowlishaw said. “It seems like a no-brainer. Nothing brings out the show business and the filmmakers and that culture like a good UFO fest.”
www.ksl.com/index.php?sid=46327135&nid=1205&title=alien-aficionados-to-gather-in-cedar-city-for-utah-ufo-festival
Crystal
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2018 6:50:24 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 25, 2018 13:18:04 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers
Science Alert
The US Military Has Released a Mysterious Report on 'Warp Drives'. Here's What Physicists Think About It
Could we really have faster-than-light travel?
DAVE MOSHER
25 MAY 2018
Sometime after August 2008, the US Department of Defence contracted dozens of researchers to look into some very, very out-there aerospace technologies, including never-before-seen methods of propulsion, lift, and stealth.
Two researchers came back with a 34-page report for the propulsion category, titled "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."
The document is dated April 2, 2010, though it was only recently released by the Defence Intelligence Agency. (Business Insider first learned about in a post by Paul Szoldra at Task & Purpose.)
The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or "dark energy," a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.
"Control of this higher dimensional space may bе а source of technological control оvеr the dark energy density and could ultimately play а role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, а warp drive," the report says, adding: "Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years."
However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report's optimism.
"It's bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn't," Carroll said.
"This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we're going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground – this is real physics. But this is not something that's going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever."
James Т. Lacatski, a DIA official listed as a contact on the report, did not immediately to respond a query from Business Insider.
Where the warp-drive study came from
The nature of this study is still making its way to the public.
What is known is that it's an "acquisition threat support" reference document, which helps the US military anticipate or describe new enemy technologies - apparently including (very, very) notional ones.
It was also one work in "а series of advanced technology reports" for something called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program.
That was a larger program that included the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program - an effort to investigate reports of UFO sightings by military personnel, according to a recent story by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas.
The New York Times and Politico revealed AATIP's existence in December. The outlets said Harry Reid, the former US senator from Nevada, helped organise it and secure millions in secret government funding - sometimes called "black money" - for the effort.
A large share of this money reportedly went to Robert Bigelow, a real-estate mogul who's working to build private space stations through Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow, a friend of Reid's, has for years funded his own UFO research.
The billionaire formed a separate entity, called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, to secure the government funding and hired 46 researchers and "dozens of other support personnel," KLAS-TV said.
An anonymous senior intelligence official told Politico that AATIP began mostly to root out the existence of unknown Chinese and Russian military technologies. But after a couple of years, "the consensus was we really couldn't find anything of substance," the official said.
"They produced reams of paperwork," he added. "After all of that, there was really nothing there that we could find."
AAWSAP and AATIP reportedly ran out of funding in 2011 or 2012.
Scientists are also sceptical of UFOs, even after viewing spooky videos obtained by AATIP, one of which shows an undated encounter with "an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura travelling at high speed and rotating as it moves," The Times wrote.
Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, previously told Business Insider that after 50 years of reported alien visits, "the really good evidence that we're being visited still has failed to surface."
"It is a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing," Shostak added.
The larger program that looked into the feasibility of warp drives, wormholes, and stargates is meeting similar scrutiny from established experts.
more after the jump:
www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-theoretical-physicists-think-of-the-us-military-s-warp-drive-research
Crystal
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Post by swamprat on May 25, 2018 14:31:47 GMT
Well, well! I see Photobucket finally gave up on me..... 
Uh?! And now they're back? I have no idea!
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Post by Deleted on May 26, 2018 1:09:35 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 26, 2018 11:25:39 GMT
Good Saturday to our lovely UFOCasebookers!
Crystal
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Post by swamprat on May 26, 2018 20:09:24 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 26, 2018 20:48:43 GMT
Wow! Thanks Swamprat.
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 26, 2018 20:50:05 GMT
r.i.p. Alan Bean
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Post by WingsofCrystal on May 27, 2018 12:48:17 GMT
Good Sunday morning all,
South China Morning Post
China’s schools are quietly using AI to mark students’ essays ... but do the robots make the grade?
Almost a quarter of the country’s schools are testing ‘thinking’ technology designed to assess everything from an essay’s style and structure to its logic and remove human error
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 27 May, 2018, 8:01pm
One in every four schools in China are quietly testing a powerful machine that uses artificial intelligence to mark pupils’ work, according to scientists involved in the government programme.
The technology is designed to understand the general logic and meaning of the text and make a reasonable, human-like judgment about the essay’s overall quality.
It then grades the work, adding recommended improvements in areas such as writing style, structure and theme.
The technology, which is being used in around 60,000 schools, is supposed to “think” more deeply and do more than a standard spellchecker.
For instance, if a paragraph starts trailing off topic, the computer would mark it down.
Scientists insist the technology is designed to assist, rather than replace, human teachers.
It could help to reduce the amount of time teachers spend on grading essays and help them avoid inconsistencies caused by human errors such as lapses in attention or unconscious bias.
It could also help more students, especially those in remote areas with limited access to resources, improve their writing skills more quickly.
The machine is similar to the e-rater, an automated system used by the Education Testing Service in the US to grade prospective postgraduate students’ essays.
But unlike the e-rater, it can read both Chinese and English.
Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly in China with strong support from the government and the technology is used in many areas of everyday life.
But the extensive tests of the essay grading machine – built by some of the leading language processing teams involved in the government and military’s internet surveillance programme – were carried out with unusual security measures in place.
In most of the schools taking part in the programme, parents were not informed, access to the system terminals was limited to authorised staff, test results were strictly classified, and in some classes even the pupils were unaware that their work had been read and scored by a machine.
Wang Jing, director of academic affairs office in the High School Affiliated to Renmin University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, said: “We are treating [the test] with extreme caution.
“What happens on campus stays on campus. The test results will not be revealed to the public,” he added, in line with the school’s agreement with the project organisers.
Most schools interviewed by the South China Morning Post – including the Baita Middle School in Nanchang, Sichuan province; the Fifth High School in Fuyang, Anhui and the 58th High School in Qingdao, Shandong – gave a similar assessment.
The schools said the AI grading machine was far from perfect, with teachers citing many examples where a brilliant piece of writing was given low marks.
For now the software is only being used to mark internal tests and none of the schools had plans to use the technology to grade essays in exams that would affect pupils’ official academic record.
“It’s still in its infancy,” Wang said.
But the developers say the machine is already 10 years old and they are increasingly confident about its potential.
A scientist involved in the project at the school of computer science and engineering at Beihang University in Beijing compared it to the AlphaGo, an AI Go player developed by Google which has defeated human world champions over the past couple of years.
The essay grading machine, embedded in a cluster of fast computers in Beijing, is improving its ability to understand human language by using deep learning algorithms to plough through essays written by Chinese students and “compare notes” with human teachers’ grading and comments.
It is also able to collect and build its own “knowledge base” with little or no human intervention.
“It has evolved continuously and become so complex, we no longer know for sure what it was thinking and how it made a judgment,” said the researcher, who requested not to be named due to the sensitivity of the project.
According to a government document seen by the South China Morning Post, the tests involved 60,000 schools with more than 120 million people involved.
The AI and human grader gave the same score 92 per cent of the time, but the document did not specify the content and scale of the tests.
The researcher confirmed the figures but declined to reveal more details.
“In the future it may be used to relieve the teacher’s burden but it will never replace teachers. The machine has no soul,” he added.
The essay grading machine project was led by professor Zhou Jianshe, director of the research centre for language intelligence in China in Capital Normal University.
Zhou and other senior members of the project have received government and military awards for their contributions to natural language processing and mining information from big data.
Zhou could not be reached for comment.
The machine can be accessed from various online portals but are only open to registered users.
One English portal, pigai.org, requires a user to register either as a teacher or student and provide information, such as school name and class number, to verify their identity.
Users gave a similarly mixed response to the machines. While some said they were useful and more accurate than similar essay grading systems overseas, others described them as rubbish.
Some users have argued the software cannot distinguish between academic essays and other forms of writing.
One users on Zhihu, the largest question-and-answer website in China, a user posted a screenshot showing how the machine had assessed an April 2015 Washington Post comment piece with the headline “Why is Obama sticking it to stay-at-home mom?” as if it was answering an essay question.
The piece got a score of 71.5 out of 100 and the machine said that while the vocabulary used was “rich and appropriate” it was “slightly short for academic language”.
It concluded: “The flow can be improved on smoothness; and please improve the focus of the article, the paragraphs and sentences should be related to the topic.”
www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2147833/chinas-schools-are-quietly-using-ai-mark-students-essays-do
Crystal
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Post by HAL on May 27, 2018 21:22:43 GMT
This can't be much worse than the way some tutors mark papers.
Let me give you a real life example.
Many years ago I was a undergrad at a local poly tech' (now a university). I was studying for my B Eng(Electronics and Systems Control).
One day we were given a short test paper by a tutor who we had only met once before in the year.
It was an easy paper.
So it came as some surprise to me when the course math lecturer read out the class results. And I had scored an 'E'. 'Not good enough. HAL. not good enough'. I was gobsmacked. I had the paper in my briefcase and immediately checked it.
I couldn't understand this at all.
As my name was pretty close to the top of the list alphabetically I had time to check the paper.
There were 38 questions. I had missed two (ran out of time) and got two errors.
So I had 34 correct answers.
that is 89% correct.
That is an 'A' or 'B+' at least.
So I questioned our lectured as to why I had been marked down. He went away to confer with the man who had marked the papers.
On his return he began by saying 'As you can all see, I am very angry. Does anyone else have problems with this paper ?.
He was angry ? How did he think I felt after being humiliated in front of my fellows.
When I asked about it I was told that it was 'something else, not the quality of the answers I had given'.
I never did find out what that 'something else' was. And have to admit that it depressed me somewhat. I reasoned that if this kind of thing was going to happen then there was no point in carrying on. So I dropped out.
I would have liked that degree though. 'HAL (B Eng)' has a nice ring to it.
HAL
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Post by moksha on May 28, 2018 0:11:37 GMT
I couldn't understand this at all. I never did find out what that 'something else' was. And have to admit that it depressed me somewhat. I reasoned that if this kind of thing was going to happen then there was no point in carrying on. So I dropped out. I would have liked that degree though. 'HAL (B Eng)' has a nice ring to it. HAL From my view HAL, it sounds like they were looking for programs and not users, in other words
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
I could be wrong, though.
From the 5th H.S. Fuyang & 58th H.S. Qingdao
HE # 5 THAT OBEYING CONSIDER I FORSAKE ACCORDING LET
HE# 58 O HAND ME FLEE THERE I FAR
to be young wild and free, MAGIC IN ME
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Post by GhostofEd on May 28, 2018 0:39:12 GMT
There were 38 questions. I had missed two (ran out of time) and got two errors. So I had 34 correct answers. that is 89% correct. That is an 'A' or 'B+' at least. |
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