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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 11, 2018 23:28:38 GMT
An extortionate price for very little return. Hi Thelmadonna, I suppose you could look at it like two outings for two to the movies. Say that three times fast. And at this point I would prefer they got the money rather than Hollywood. Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 12, 2018 11:51:53 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers
Nautilus
Should You Get an AI Nanny for Your Child?
Posted By Joel Frohlich on Sep 11, 2018
Mattel’s AI nanny, called Aristotle, recently gained the notorious distinction of being subject to a bipartisan protest in the US Congress. Plus, there was a petition against it with over 15,000 signatures. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which organized the petition, argued that Aristotle is a consumerist ploy. It “attempts to replace the care, judgment and companionship of loving family members with faux nurturing and conversation from a robot designed to sell products and build brand loyalty.”
Aristotle, designed to interact with kids, was based on the same technologies as virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa. It could teach lessons, and calm them. The Guardian suggested that it might “reinforce good manners in kids, and even help kids learn a foreign language.” But it could also watch and listen to them. Aristotle’s Bluetooth camera, embedded in a cylindrical speaker-body, was poised to gaze unblinkingly in novel territory: a child’s bedroom. The company eventually conceded that Aristotle “did not fully align with Mattel’s new technology strategy.” Aristotle soon became Socrates, as it were, forced to drink hemlock at the hands of an enraged mob.
Yet canning Aristotle has at least one unfortunate consequence: We close off one channel of learning how kids grow up interacting with an AI as it becomes increasingly integrated in both schools and homes. The fact is that children interact with AI quite differently than adults do. Recently, the MIT Media Lab began studying how children between the ages of three and ten interact with AI in a monitored setting. This included Amazon Alexa and Google Home, digital assistants in cylindrical speakers, Julie Chatbot, an Android phone app that tells jokes and plays games with its interlocutor, and Cozmo, a wheeled robot that recognizes faces while showing artificial emotions on its own face.
Last year at a conference at Stanford University, the researchers began sharing some interesting results. For instance, children seem to overestimate the intelligence of the AIs they interacted with. Surprisingly, most of the older children thought the AIs might be smarter than themselves, whereas the children younger than six weren’t as sure. The researchers also found that children judge the tone and prosody of an AI’s synthesized speech differently than adults do. One of the researchers, Randi Williams, discovered that children seem to prefer Alexa’s voice for its “energy,” while an adult like Williams might prefer Google Home’s voice for sounding more human-like. “In future work,” the researchers concluded, “we hope to design interactions where children are able to tinker with and program the agents and thus expand their perception of their own intelligence and different ways to develop it.”
But it may be negligent, given how impressionable children are, to leave them alone, unsupervised, with an AI. A recent study found that children ages seven to nine are more likely than adults to conform to the behavior of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The researchers—from the UK, Germany, and Belgium—found that children often fall in line with the judgements of robots tasked with matching one of several lines to a reference line of the same length, even when the robot judgements are clearly wrong. Another study found that robots can “influence children to change their judgments about moral transgressions,” like whether it is okay to tease or hit other kids. Without a supervising adult, children might learn inappropriate behaviors from AI, which is why Stefania Druga, a graduate student in the Personal Robots Group at MIT Media Lab, told The Globe and Mail that parents are crucial intermediaries between children and AI.
Parents can also rely on AIs as distractions from distractions. For example, Amy Blake, an Ontario parent of two young children, has seen a reduction in her children’s screen time thanks to Google Home. The virtual assistant plays music and reads stories like Rapunzel to her children, replacing hours of time that might otherwise be squandered staring at what a TED Talk called the “nightmare videos of children’s YouTube.”
Williams wants more from child-oriented AI—a personalized tutor, for starters. In June, on a Future of Life Institute podcast, she said, “We found educational research that says that your vocabulary at the age of five, is a direct predictor of your PSAT score in the 11th grade. And as we all know, your PSAT score is a predictor of your SAT score. Your SAT score is a predictor of your future income, and potential in life, and all these great things.” AI can not only help expose children to a richer vocabulary in engaging conversations, but also encourage curiosity. “We think about how the personality of the robot is shaping the child as a learner. So, how is the robot teaching the child to have a growth mindset, and teaching them to persevere, to continue learning better? Those are the kinds of things that we want to instill, and AI can do that.”
Joel Frohlich is a postdoctoral researcher studying consciousness in the laboratory of Martin Monti at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in neuroscience in the laboratory of Shafali Jeste at UCLA while studying biomarkers of neurodevelopmental disorders. He is the editor in chief of the science-communication website “Knowing Neurons.”
nautil.us/blog/should-you-get-an-ai-nanny-for-your-child
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 12, 2018 12:02:01 GMT
Den of Geek
The X-Files: The Real UFO History Behind The Iconic Series
The X-Files took believers seriously and mined UFO myths to play off our fears and suspicions.
Matt Allair Sep 11, 2018
Anyone driving across a barren interstate freeway at night has likely looked up into the sky and wondered about the possibility of witnessing the unexpected. For people who have held beliefs in extra-terrestrials or alien craft, the entire history of the UFO phenomenon is an obsession that goes beyond mere fascination.
Books, movies, and television help alien seekers conceptualize what an encounter could potentially look like. Perhaps no show has flown as close to the sun with depicting real-life accounts of the UFO phenomenon than The X-Files, the seminal sci-fi series from Fox and Chris Carter.
When Carter’s series made its return to Fox for a revival in 2016, it honed in on a new extra-terrestrial threat for the digital age. Ever since they successfully blurred the line between fiction and real world events when the pilot debuted in 1993, The X-Files has depicted triangle-shaped crafts, or disc shaped crafts of various sizes, or even more recently in the new episodes, ARV’s - Alien Reproduction Vehicle’s. But the series drew from real world belief in the phenomenon, as well as the belief in global conspiracies. The Basis for The X-Files
Chris Carter’s pre-pilot research revealed something startling. He read a Roper Organization survey stated that three percent of the U.S. population believes they have been abducted by aliens. When Carter would later direct the “Duane Barry” episode, a fill-in crew member revealed his brother-in-law believed he had been abducted. Carter’s persistent mantra in the early years was that the show had to be “scientifically plausible.” This meant that a lot of the research was pulled from real UFOlogy archives.
One key plot element in the series has been the Roswell incident, which the Deep Throat character first mentioned in season one’s final episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” when he comments that “Roswell was a smokescreen.” It was a comment that would be mirrored by the old man in “My Struggle I” from the new event series.
The Roswell incident from 1947 in New Mexico has remained the holy-grail source for the subject, touching on most of people’s concerns. As The X-Files heavily played up in the first episode of season 10, “My Struggle,” they showed the military retrieving wreckage from an unidentified craft, and using intimidation, misdirection, deniability, or direct threats to hide from the public secret military technology, or the existence of extra-terrestrials. What is known about the incident is that an event took place in July of 1947. The public might not have known about it had it not been for a military press release on Tuesday, July 8th that confirmed a disc-shaped object that “landed” on a Ranch, just outside of Roswell Army Air Field. "Are They Really A Hoax?"
The Roswell story caused a sensation for hours in the press before a second story was released that the wreckage of a weather balloon was recovered. Major Jesse A. Marcel was the head of 509th Bomb group intelligence office at the time of the incident. But the story of a landing wouldn’t jive with one of the eyewitness accounts of a foreman named William Brazel, who was working for rancher J.B. Foster at the time.
William and his son Vernon claimed to have come across an area strewn with unfamiliar material that was part of some collected wreckage. In a matter of days, Major Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter-Intelligence Corps contacted them and took the materials. In spite of residential eye witness accounts by the Wilmonts, the flying saucer story was debunked by the Roswell Dispatch by July 9th. Interest in the story was revived by the late ‘70s, but most of the eyewitnesses had passed away by then.
Many UFO believers regard the incident as a key moment, pointing fingers at segments of the military, whom they say created smokescreens to cover up alien technology, or secret military aircrafts. Original witnesses had offered conflicting stories; some had described a crashed disc, with two hundred yards in diameter that formed a long, thin strip some three quarters of a mile long, between two hundred to three hundred feet wide, and at one end was a deep gouge in the ground, ten feet wide, and five hundred feet long. That account would have indicated a significant amount of debris.
Some of the wreckage recovered had “I-beams” which Marcel’s son described as having hieroglyphic-type characters. These first accounts would describe something fairly mundane, and likely a crashed experimental craft in development near Roswell Army Air Field, or a shot down foreign craft.
The mythology of Roswell became evident here. There were no initial reports of an intact craft or alien bodies recovered. In 1974, TV researcher Robert Carr put out comments about a craft, and frozen alien bodies being held in Wright-Patterson AFB, related to a crash in 1948 that was later debunked.
Despite the falsehood, it triggered interest in the UFO research community, and the Roswell case started to be taken seriously. Other figures have elaborated the story with greater claims, such as Frank J. Kaufman, Glenn Dennis, Jim Ragsdale, “Pappy” Henderson, Mr. Rowe, and Major Edwin Easley. Several figures even claiming there were two crash sites, which has only complicated the narrative about what was found.
Some theories suggest that a Japanese Balloon bomb from World War II was recovered, or a V-2 rocket that veered off course, as part of the MOGUL project, a project developed with sensitive instruments and high altitude balloons to monitor soviet nuclear test activity.
Roswell’s Rumble is Chris Carter’s Treasure
What The X-Files did do well was add fragments from the known history to create an unsettling agenda in the series’ mythology. Carter and Co. borrowed much of the tone of the 1960s ABC sci-fi series The Invaders, which starred Roy Thinnes, a future X-Files acting alumnus who played the character of Jeremiah Smith.
In The Invaders, Thinnes played David Vincent, a man who witnesses a flying saucer land with alien beings intent on taking over the Earth. Over the course of the series, Vincent manages to gather a small circle of people who believe him, and eventually the invaders change their plans.
The series had an obvious parallel to the plight of the X-Files iconic villain. “We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race,” The Cigarette Smoking Man ominously intoned in The X-Files season six episode, "One Son"; “Aliens who were coming to reclaim the planet and destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion. To create for them a race of human-alien hybrids. They were good plans, right plans. Kept secret for over fifty years, ever since the crash at Roswell.”
Some of the events in the series that speak of a clandestine meeting between the Colonists and the Syndicate in 1973 revealed in “One Son” mirror a rumored alleged clandestine meeting in February 1954 at Muroc, now Edwards, air force base, with on-going contact between Extra-Terrestrials and eminent people, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Which has also lead to the argument with some UFOologists that recovered technology from Roswell was “reversed-engineered,” and lead to developments like the current laser, transistors, microchips, Velcro, and microwave ovens. It has also been argued that such "reverse-engineering" gave the United States leverage with such contact. Deep Throat certainly suggested the Military use of “reverse-engineering” in season one’s second episode.
In The X-Files season five episode “Redux,” Michael Kritschgau offered up an counter explanation regarding Roswell as a cover, a red herring for other agendas.
“The Military saw a good thing in ’47 when the Roswell story broke. The more we denied it, the more people believed it was true. Aliens had landed – a made-to-order cover story for generals looking to develop the national war chest.”
Kritschgau further noted that such official investigations as Grudge, Twinkle, Project Blue Book, and Majestic 12 fed into the belief in UFOs, Kritschgau also noted that the first supersonic flight was in 1947, after which, every experimental flight was considered a U.F.O. All of these points are part of the historical lore.
The new X-Files episode, “My Struggle” depicted a version of the Roswell Crash, while also citing several other events, including the Kenneth Arnold sightings from June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington.Other events noted were the Maury Island sighing from June 21, 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, as well as the 1952 UFO flap over Washington D.C.
The Arnold sighting is notable. A pilot was commanding his own light aircraft to Pendleton Oregon from a job at Chehalis Air Service, Washington State, when he found himself near a location where an aircraft had vanished. At an altitude of 9,200 feet (2,760 m), he saw a bright flash, which he described as a “screwy formation… a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft” flying north to south at approximately 9,000 feet (2,790 m) elevation and going in a definite direction at an angle of 170 degrees.
The objects approached Mount Rainier at a very high speed, some of them changing or dipping direction. He realized they were moving much too fast to be a flock of birds. Upon landing in Yakima, Arnold described what he had witnessed to his fellow pilots. He would later describe them as half-moon-shaped oval in front and convex in the rear. At first, the news of his sighting was treated as a hoax, but Arnold’s impeccable record and integrity prompted people to take him more seriously. Arnold had assumed it was some sort of secret weapon or Soviet aircraft invading US airspace, an idea that was reinforced in private by a former USAF officer, that it was some rocket-powered jet, skeptics have suggested he witnessed a flock of pelicans, but this ignores the little known fact that Arnold had another sighting in the same area five days later at La Grande Airfield, Oregon.
Another key sighting that was visually referenced in the “My Struggle” teaser was the Maury Island incident. Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman at Tacoma, was on his boat with his fifteen-year-old son, his dog, and two crewman on the 21st at around 2 p.m. when they saw five doughnut-shaped objects with rows of portholes circling around a sixth object. They estimated it was about 2,000 feet (600 m) above the water at the Puget Sound. They estimated that the objects were about 100 feet wide with a 25-foot hole in the middle.
While landing on the beach of Maury Island, Dahl took several photographs. One of the ships appeared to be trying to repair the other ship. There was a thunderous explosion, and the entire object emitted dark, almost molten, rock-like material and sheets of an extremely light metallic substance. Being directly under the shower, Dahl’s dog was killed, his son’s arm was injured, and the boat was damaged. After the UFOs headed out to sea, Dahl tried to get help via his radio, but it was dead. Dahl and others collected sample evidence and took it back to Tacoma to his boss, Fred Crissman. Soon, Kenneth Arnold was investigating the incident, and within days had his own encounter.
Lastly, there was the incident in Washington from 1952. As the nuclear age developed through the ‘50s, the ratio of UFO activity seemed to increase. In June of 1952, there were reports of UFOs over the skies of the east coast of the United States. Starting in Quantico, Virginia, there were various accounts of witnesses from Pan American Airline and National Airline crews spotting crafts through July, seen on radar at the Air Route Traffic Control. At Washington’s National Airport, the sightings near the capital reached such a degree that B-52s and F-94s were dispatched to intercept but to no avail.
These cases would evolve and become more complicated, and many themes were cited and explored on The X-Files. UFO abductions, the alien-human hybrid hypothesis as first cited in “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” UFO cults cited in episodes like “Red Museum,” or Ancient Astronaut Theory first cited in “Biogenesis,” or animal experimentation as cited in “Fearful Symmetry.”
Such real life incidents fed into the story arc’s of The X-Files, and often acted as a starting off point for the writers imagination. What is also to be noted is the point that writers would attend conventions about the UFO phenomenon in the early years, which would lead to the invention of characters like The Lone Gunmen, or other UFO investigators, there’s even accounts of the series writers enjoying cooperation from some government agencies. This cross pollination helped to shape the science and speculation that detailed the series.
Chris Carter and The X-Files took subjects that had been discussed in whispers and brought them into the mainstream, hence the popularity of Ancient Aliens for the History channel, or NASA’s Unexplained Files for the Discovery channel. Indeed, The truth is often stranger than fiction.
www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/the-x-files/260005/the-x-files-the-real-ufo-history-behind-the-iconic-series
Crystal
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2018 12:41:46 GMT
Looking forward to the new Blue Book series!
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Post by swamprat on Sept 12, 2018 20:21:27 GMT
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Post by HAL on Sept 12, 2018 22:58:35 GMT
Anyone here going to be effected by Hurricane Florence.
What about you,Swamp, Don't you live in one of the Carolinas ?
HAL
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Post by swamprat on Sept 13, 2018 0:28:18 GMT
Nope, Florida.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2018 5:01:51 GMT
Anyone here going to be effected by Hurricane Florence. What about you,Swamp, Don't you live in one of the Carolinas ? HAL Yes..13 miles inland from strike Zone..weather was beautiful yesterday (wednesday) today thursday some scattered very light sprinkles..barely enuff to wet windshield..
I made ample prep for my cats (10) and forgot to get cash ..in case power goes out longer than 3 days..plastic is useless at these times.. So Im crossing fingers we dont get super saturated with rain..lots of very big trees behind me....
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 13, 2018 11:53:48 GMT
Looking forward to the new Blue Book series! Good morning Mr. Gort,
I'm also looking forward to that series.
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 13, 2018 12:00:28 GMT
Anyone here going to be effected by Hurricane Florence. What about you,Swamp, Don't you live in one of the Carolinas ? HAL Yes..13 miles inland from strike Zone..weather was beautiful yesterday (wednesday) today thursday some scattered very light sprinkles..barely enuff to wet windshield..
I made ample prep for my cats (10) and forgot to get cash ..in case power goes out longer than 3 days..plastic is useless at these times.. So Im crossing fingers we dont get super saturated with rain..lots of very big trees behind me....
Sending up prayers for you and yours Kat. Angels at your elbows.
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 13, 2018 12:05:13 GMT
Good morning lovely people,
KELO Media, Sioux Falls
Devil's Tower UFO Rendezvous Begins Thursday
By: Al Van Zee Posted: Sep 12, 2018 10:15 PM CDT
Above our heads at night are millions of stars with millions of planets that scientists now say stand a good chance of containing life. There may even be intelligent life.
But the important question is: has it paid us a visit?
It's a subject that will be reviewed in depth at the Devils Town UFO Rendezvous. That location was chosen because of a movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind which was filmed there 41 years ago.
The storyline is that an alien civilization chose to make contact with the human race at this formation in the northwestern Black Hills.
That's fiction of course. But people have been seeing strange sights in the sky for a very long time. And some UFO investigators such as David Marler think there is compelling evidence that they are real.
"And it goes beyond just eyewitness testimony. Many of these cases including military cases, involve radar and I mean multiple radar; ground-based radar, airborne radar, airborne visual sightings, ground-based visual sightings," Author and UFO Investigator David Marler said.
Several astronauts have also reported airborne objects they couldn't identify.
"When you have much corroborative testimony, you have to look at this in a serious light and try to figure out what we're dealing with," Marler said.
While we still don't have material evidence, we do have thousands of pictures. Some of which are just a hoax.
Digital photography has made the task of judging UFO photos much more complicated. Astronomer Marc D'Antonio, says it's difficult but it can be done.
"You actually could see the artifacts created by the process of rendering. And you could see that in the shadows," Astronomer and Photoanalyst Marc D'Antonio said.
D'Antonio says most photos of UFOs are either faked, or of ordinary objects such as birds, balloons, or drones.
All of these mysteries will be discussed at the UFO rendezvous in the coming days. It may be one of the most compelling mysteries of our time, the question of what are those strange things some of us are seeing in the skies?
The Devil's Tower UFO Rendezvous begins Thursday at 10 a.m. at the Best Western Hotel in Hulett, WY and runs through Saturday.
www.keloland.com/news/local-news/devil-s-tower-ufo-rendezvous-begins-thursday/1438504203
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Sept 13, 2018 12:11:52 GMT
Atlas Obscura
A Pair of WWII Bunkers in New Orleans Contains 7 Million Fish
Meet the Royal D. Suttkus Collection.
by Kayla Smith September 12, 2018
Hidden in a bend of the Mississippi River just south of New Orleans, 29 concrete bunkers lie on a grid of dirt and grass roads. Some hold remnants from the past—40-year-old gas masks and biohazard signs still hang on a wall. Most of them have been abandoned for decades. But inside two of those bunkers, 15 million fish eyes stare at the walls through the glass of their jars. This is the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, the largest collection of preserved fish in the world, and almost no one knows it exists.
In the Type Room, Dr. Henry Bart—curator of the collection and director of the Tulane Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI, which houses the collection)—shows me the rare fish.
It is a small room, maybe the size of a car, but it is the most important room of the institution because it’s where the holotypes and paratypes are kept. “These are the most important specimens because they bear the names, so if there’s any doubt about what a species is, these are what you consult,” Bart says. Here is the famous pocket shark, a small deep-water marine shark found just a few years ago in the Gulf of Mexico—only the second one known to exist in the world. Here is a harelip sucker collected in 1893. It’s been extinct since that year. The tail fins have eroded off, and I can see its brain. Here is the oldest fish in the collection—a shiny minnow collected in Italy in 1838.
As Bart picks up jars of fish, the species’ names roll off his tongue as if he grew up fluent in Latin. “We keep these specimens here because we’re trying to protect them from fire…We have to keep a lot of protections in place,” he says. We are surrounded by cinder block—a fortified vault in a hurricane-proof, tornado-proof, bomb-proof, and camouflaged mausoleum. In the main room down the hall, rows and rows of sea-green shelves hold over seven million other fish.
more after the jump:
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-orleans-fish-collection
Crystal
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