Germs in your wallet can make you sick - tests prove it
GERMS on money may be making unwary Aussies sick - some notes are more than six times filthier than a public lavatory.
But don't think swapping it for plastic will magically make the germs disappear. A Public Defender investigation of 10 Melbourne shoppers' wallets found cash and credit cards could be potential hotbeds for bacteria.
Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Human user verification helping to digitize old books
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.
Each word of an old scanned book, or rather only the words that cannot be read correctly by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is used as a CAPTCHA. The system uses an aggregated response to determine what the OCR couldn't read
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle?
Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Goldman Sachs director quits 'morally bankrupt' Wall Street bank
Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has suffered a severe blow to its reputation after one of its bankers announced his resignation in the New York Times by declaring his employer "morally bankrupt".
The departing employee, Greg Smith, said the firm's superior staff described the firm's clients as "muppets" and he made reference to the Tourre affair of two years ago in which London-based banker, Fabrice Tourre, said Goldman Sachs was creating "Frankenstein" products that showed scant regard for the needs of clients.
Smith's public resignation letter also made reference to the infamous description of Goldman in Rolling Stone magazine as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity".
A UFO (bottom of frame) stalks formation of jets at a Chilean air force base
In the video - recorded near El Bosque Air Base in Santiago, Chile - a UFO flies in and out of the frame a number of times as air-force jets in formation fly by the photographer.
The object is difficult to see because it's moving so fast. It was flying at velocities estimated to be at least 5000kmh. Clearly under intelligent control, it zoomed toward each set of jets at about their altitude, circled around and zoomed out of frame.
Close up images show it as a dome-shaped, flat-bottomed object. The rounded top reflects the sun and appears metallic; the bottom is darker and flat. It appears to emit something which is visible in photo analysis. Infrared studies show the entire object is radiating heat.
For those of you living under a social media rock you may not be aware of the latest video conscious-raising video making the rounds. For you here’s the link (It is 30 minutes long, but it is important to see) http://vimeo.com/37119711. For those of you who have seen the video, you’ve also undoubtedly seen the debate around it as well and whether this form of awareness is useful, harmful, neither or both.
Another draft mental health bill, this time in Australia is mirroring global efforts in what is now an international and deliberate surge by government officials to remove parental consent. If passed, the shocking new law will allow children who are considered sufficiently mature, to be subjected to horrifying procedures including sterilization and electroshock.
