provinceorstate:new mexico

Inside America’s Dirty Wars
http://www.thenation.com/article/173980/inside-americas-dirty-wars?page=full

While the battle over leaks concerning the operation—as well as the various contradictory stories on how bin Laden was killed—raged in the media, the White House was deeply immersed in planning more lethal operations against so-called “High Value Targets.” Chief among these was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen of Yemeni descent born in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

#JSOC #exécutions #guerre

neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner.

http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-predict-which-criminals-are-more-likely-to-reoffend-1.12672

Why a Democratic Majority Is Not Demographic Inevitability (Part Two : The Politics of Immigration Reform) | The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173444/why-democratic-majority-not-demographic-inevitability-part-two-politics-i

Le nombre croissant d’Hispaniques aux Etats-Unis ne garantit pas forcement des lendemains qui chantent pour le parti Démocrate, dit Rick Perlstein.

...taking the long view (...) it has to be acknowledged: party identities aren’t passed on through the genes. Blocs of “natural Democrats” have become natural Republicans before. Indeed, in at least one instance, it happened with shocking rapidity. As I noted last time, in the 1960s, droves of white Democrat ethnics—Italians, Eastern Europeans, the Irish—started voting Republican in a backlash against the Democrats’ continued embrace of civil rights in the wake of a failed open housing bill and the urban riots. Only an eye-blink earlier, they had been considered the soul of the New Deal coalition.

...

Hispanics are more liberal than voters in general on all sorts of issues—for instance, 75 percent of Hispanics prefer “a bigger government providing more services” rather than “a smaller government providing fewer services,” compared to 41 percent for the general population. But what if they start becoming “Italian”? That is to say, what if Hispanics, less hobbled by official discrimination, follow the pattern of other immigrant groups before them, become increasingly upwardly mobile—and become increasingly identified, by themselves and others, as “white.” Is it not reasonable to assume that they might become more Republican? That would certainly be the historical precedent: more and more immigrant groups (excluding, of course, African-Americans), becoming “white.”

How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/middleeast/anwar-al-awlaki-a-us-citizen-in-americas-cross-hairs.html

A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Another was Samir Khan, another American citizen who had moved to Yemen from North Carolina and was the creative force behind Inspire, the militant group’s English-language Internet magazine.

Two of the Predator drones pointed lasers on the trucks to pinpoint the targets, while the larger Reapers took aim. The Reaper pilots, operating their planes from thousands of miles away, readied for the missile shots, and fired.

Zigouiller des étrangers, pourquoi pas, mais des citoyens américains, faut réfléchir ...
#drones #exécutions

Where life is tweet: Study ranks #happy places
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/20/happiest-cities-geotags-twitter/1933587

#:-) vs #:-(

Où trouve-t-on le bonheur et la tristesse (aux É.-U.)
Analyse du vocabulaire de 10 millions de tweets.

The study, from mathematicians at the University of Vermont, is the latest to tap Twitter’s 140-character, real-time posts to see how we’re feeling. Previous studies found that Twitter users are happiest on Sunday mornings, saddest on Thursday evenings and prone to perk up on Christmas and other holidays.

The new study used a list of 10,000 words rated on a 10-point scale as happy, sad or neutral to score tweets from 2011 that carried geographic tags. The researchers threw out neutral words (such as ‘the,’ “of” and ‘and’) and looked at how often the happy and sad words showed up in different cities and states, lead researcher Lewis Mitchell says.

Words such as ‘hate,’ “terrorist,” ‘earthquake’ and ‘greed’ were high on the sad list, he says. Happy words included ‘happy,’ “reunion,” ‘lol’ (laughing out loud) and nature terms, which helps explain how tweets from Maine, which mentioned lots of ‘forests’ and ‘rivers,’ came in only second to those from Hawaii on the happy list.

Other relatively happy states included Nevada, Utah and Vermont. After Louisiana, the least happy states were Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia.

http://www.uvm.edu/storylab/share/papers/mitchell2013a/AppendixB_files/states_2011.jpg
Figure 1: Choropleth showing average word happiness for geotagged tweets in all US states collected during the calendar year 2011. The happiest 5 states, in order, are: Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont. The saddest 5 states, in order, are: Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia.

Le papier sur arxiv : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.3299.pdf The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place, par 5 auteurs de l’Université du Vermont

Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA - World Socialist Web Site

le “head of drone asassination program” prend du grade "
►http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/08/bren-j08.html

Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA
By Barry Grey
8 January 2013

President Barack Obama on Monday named his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, to head the Central Intelligence Agency in his second term. In choosing Brennan to lead the spy agency, Obama gave a clear signal that he intends to expand the illegal program of drone assassinations that has already killed thousands of innocent civilians—men, women and children—and mutilated thousands more in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

#drone #états-unis #cIA

Among those murdered on the say-so of the president, without any charges or judicial process, are at least three US citizens, including the New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son, obliterated by drone-fired missiles in Yemen.

Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA - World Socialist Web Site

le “head of drone asassination program” prend du grade "
►http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/08/bren-j08.html

Obama names head of drone assassination program to lead CIA
By Barry Grey
8 January 2013

President Barack Obama on Monday named his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, to head the Central Intelligence Agency in his second term. In choosing Brennan to lead the spy agency, Obama gave a clear signal that he intends to expand the illegal program of drone assassinations that has already killed thousands of innocent civilians—men, women and children—and mutilated thousands more in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

#drone #états-unis #cIA

Among those murdered on the say-so of the president, without any charges or judicial process, are at least three US citizens, including the New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son, obliterated by drone-fired missiles in Yemen.

Google’s Schmidt to Visit North Korea - WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578218673429427706.html

Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson will be taking Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on a humanitarian visit to North Korea. The WSJ’s Evan Ramstad tells us why an Internet company would want to visit the most isolated country in the world.

Mr. Schmidt will visit Pyongyang with Bill Richardson, a Democratic politician who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration and was governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011, and his longtime aide Kun Namkung.

The group will go later this month, according to a person familiar with the plans. Precise details, such as when they will go and who they will see, weren’t available.

par http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Eric-Schmidt-plant-Nordkorea-Reise-1776163.html

Des rêves en infrarouge : les malheurs d’un pilote de drone

Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot - SPIEGEL ONLINE
►http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html

12/14/2012

Dreams in Infrared : The Woes of an American Drone Operator

By Nicola Abé

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can’t do it anymore.

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn’t be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It’s the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren’t flying through the air. They’re just sitting at the controls.

❞

The woes of an American drone operator (Spiegel online)
►http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can’t do it anymore. (...) Source: Spiegel online

’Did We Just Kill A Kid?’ — The Six Words That Ended A US Drone Pilot’s Career - Business Insider
http://www.businessinsider.com/did-we-just-kill-a-kid-nicola-abe-der-spiegel-brandon-bryant-2012-1

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs? (...)

From his mother’s couch in Missoula, Montana Bryant talks of his 6,000 Air Force flight hours and says he used to dream in infrared. "I saw men, women and children die during that time," he says. “I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.”

#drones #Etats-Unis #armements via @bravepatrie qui twitte

Drone crashes mount at civilian airports
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/drone-crashes-mount-at-civilian-airports-overseas/2012/11/30/e75a13e4-3a39-11e2-83f9-fb7ac9b29fad_story.html

He sent the unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drone off without permission from the control tower. A minute later, he yanked the wrong lever at his console, killing the engine without realizing why.

As he tried to make an emergency landing, he forgot to put down the wheels. The $8.9 million aircraft belly-flopped on the runway, bounced and plunged into the tropical waters at the airport’s edge, according to a previously undisclosed Air Force accident investigation report.

#drone

The Dust Bowl (Plog Photo Blog)
►http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2012/11/19/dust-bowl/5794

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to prairie lands in the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought combined with farming methods that did not include crop rotation or other techniques such as soil terracing and wind-breaking trees to prevent wind erosion. During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away with the prevailing winds. At times, the clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Millions of acres of farmland were damaged, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families migrated to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better during the Great Depression than those they had left. Filmmaker Ken Burns has produced a new documentary on the Dust Bowl airing on PBS stations this month. (...) Source: Plog Photo Blog

Photos : The Dust Bowl
►http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2012/11/19/dust-bowl/5794

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to prairie lands in the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by severe drought combined with farming methods that did not include crop rotation or other techniques such as soil terracing and wind-breaking trees to prevent wind erosion.

http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-365539/cache/dustbowl16.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.JPG
#photographie

Hydraulic fracturing: Two-thirds of frack disclosures omit ’secrets’ — eenews
http://www.eenews.net/public/energywire/2012/09/26/1

At least one chemical was kept secret in 65 percent of fracking disclosures by companies that said they needed to protect confidential business information

#gaz_de_schistes #secret

Decreasing atmospheric oxygen concentrations was only the beginning of the end for giant insects - new research shows that birds are the main reason they are no longer among us: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/25/1204026109.abstract?sid=4018399d-fda9-43e4-b280-752d1752d784

The troubled history of #PIP's #implants man in America | Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/11/us-implants-idUSTRE8090XI20120111

When the French firm at the center of a breast implant scandal sought to expand its U.S. business a decade ago, it turned to Donald McGhan, a pioneer in the implant industry with a history of legal troubles.

#cancer

ArXiv at 20 (Nature)
►http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7359/full/476145a.html

Configuring scholarly communication infrastructure for the next generation of researchers requires getting into the heads of current undergraduates and graduate students. Their life experience is of immediate online availability and global search engines, and they arrive imbued with the social-network mentality of sharing links, photos, videos and status updates. Yet, my own informal survey of graduate students reveals information-gathering techniques familiar to most older scientists. Students still follow citation trees, search by keywords and consult with peers and mentors, with the latter as important as ever for weeding out unreliable sources. Students also say that they search preferentially for open-access resources when working from home, because accessing subscription-based journals, even when available through an institutional proxy, can be frustratingly painful. (...) Source: Nature

ArXiv at 20 : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
►http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7359/full/476145a.html

L’histoire des dépôts d’articles scientifiques. J’avais envie de tout citer. Un must indispensable.

Twenty years ago this month, I launched an electronic bulletin board intended to serve a few hundred friends and colleagues working in a subfield of theoretical high-energy physics.

Even today, fields vary hugely in how they recognize intellectual precedence. It baffles me that scientists in some fields can announce a result in a public forum, such as a meeting, while another group can reproduce the results, publish first in a journal, and be given complete intellectual precedence, as though the information did not exist until vetted by the referee process. Journal editors and referees should make more effort to ensure proper attribution is given to publicly accessible materials in a stable resource, such as arXiv.

Again, because of cost and labour overheads, arXiv would not be able to implement conventional peer review. Even the minimal filtering of incoming preprints to maintain basic quality control involves significant daily administrative activity. Incoming abstracts are given a cursory glance by volunteer external moderators for appropriateness to their subject areas; and various automated filters, including a text classifier, flag problem submissions. Although the overall rate of such submissions is well below 1%, they tend to cluster in specific areas (such as general relativity, quantum mechanics and unified theories in physics; proofs of the Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach’s conjecture and new proofs of Fermat’s last theorem in mathematics; P versus NP problem in computer science).

Moderators, tasked with determining what is of potential interest to their communities, are sometimes forced to ascertain ’what is science?’ At this point arXiv unintentionally becomes an accrediting agency for researchers, much as the Science Citation Index became an accrediting agency for journals, by formulating criteria for their inclusion. Although decisions are biased towards permissiveness, inevitably some authors object that it is never permissive enough.

Configuring scholarly communication infrastructure for the next generation of researchers requires getting into the heads of current undergraduates and graduate students. Their life experience is of immediate online availability and global search engines, and they arrive imbued with the social-network mentality of sharing links, photos, videos and status updates.

Students also say that they search preferentially for open-access resources when working from home, because accessing subscription-based journals, even when available through an institutional proxy, can be frustratingly painful.

On arXiv, we have seen some of the unintended effects of an entire global research community ingesting the same information from the same interface on a daily basis. The order in which new preprint submissions are displayed in the daily alert, if only for a single day, strongly affects the readership on that day and leaves a measurable trace in the citation record fully six years later2, 3. Some researchers, wise to this, time their submissions to arrive just after the daily afternoon deadline to maximize their prominence in the next day’s mailing.

Photos : The Color Landscape of the Depression Era (Plog)
►http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/11/03/captured-the-color-landscape-of-the-depression-era/5064

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small towns. The color digital photographs, scans of color transparencies, show the places of Depression Era America – the industry, the homes, the landmarks and the landscapes of a country emerging from the Great Depression and into World War II. All the caption information is taken from the original photographers and, where noted, was added to by the Library of Congress staff. (...) Source: Plog

Captured: The Color Landscape of the Depression Era
►http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/11/03/captured-the-color-landscape-of-the-depression-era/5064
http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-278168/cache/1a34361u.tif.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.JPG

Tout sur txteagle, une société qui fait travailler des millions d’Africains via leur téléphone mobile.

Virtual outsourcing : Mobile work | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/17366137

A way to earn money by texting
Oct 28th 2010

THE idea came to Nathan Eagle, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he was doing a teaching stint in rural Kenya. He realised that, as three-quarters of the 4.6 billion mobile-phone users worldwide live in developing countries, a useful piece of technology is now being placed in the hands of a large number of people who might be keen to use their devices to make some money. To help them do so, he came up with a service called txteagle which distributes small jobs via text messaging in return for small payments.

Only 18% of people in the developing world have access to the internet, but more than 50% owned a mobile-phone handset at the end of 2009 (a number which has more than doubled since 2005), according to the International Telecommunication Union. One study shows that adding ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points.

Crowd-Sourcing the World - Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/21983/page1

How Txteagle Distributes Microtasks Worldwide
http://www.workingknowledge.com/blog/workforce-innovation-how-txteagle-distributes-microtasks-worldwide

The types of tasks Txteagle’s African workers have done are:
enter details of local road signs for creating satellite navigation systems
translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 62 African dialects (for Nokia)
collect address data for business directories
fill out surveys for international agencies

Txteagle seems similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, except that workers only need a simple mobile phone – no computer or Internet access is needed. TxtEagle now has partnerships with 220 mobile operators in more than 80 countries.  This expands Txteagle’s reach to 2.1 billion cellphone users in sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil and India, who can all participate as workers. Currently, the firm earns revenues 49 countries.

Une vidéo du fondateur, Nathan Eagle, à une conf. O’Reilly :
http://blip.tv/oreilly-emerging-technology-conference/etech-09-nathan-eagle-txteagle-crowd-sourcing-on-mobile-phones-in-the-developin
et l’article correspondant :
http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/623
Eagle a fondé un cours d’informatique dédié dans plusieurs universités africaines :

I moved to East Africa over three years ago, where I have been working with mobile phone operators and launching Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM - eprom.mit.edu) programs, an initiative I began in 2006 to teach mobile phone programming within local computer science departments in order to develop applications specifically for local users. Despite the incredible growth of mobile phone usage, these applications are rare. Furthermore, the computer science curricula of universities across the continent still focus on traditional desktop computer programming.

As a result, African computer science graduates are poorly equipped to address the computing needs of African people. To date, EPROM courses are being taught in over a dozen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, empowering thousands of African computer science students with the skills needed to program phones, leading to hundreds of applications designed specifically for the African market, as well as several start-up ventures based in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and beyond.

Le système de transfert d’argent via mobile M.PESA :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

#téléphone #mobile #internet #afrique #kenya

Des photos sur l’incendie près du laboratoire #nucléaire de Los Alamos

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/07/wildfire_threatens_nuclear_fac.html

tous les #murs/#frontières de la planète en #photographie

No Border Wall Eyeball
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/border-wall/border-wall.htm
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/border-wall/pict77.jpg

Spiders in Pakistan encase whole trees in webs | MNN - Mother Nature Network
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/spiders-in-pakistan-encase-whole-trees-in-webs
http://www.mnn.com/sites/default/files/user-2983/tree3.jpg
http://www.mnn.com/sites/default/files/user-2983/tree1.jpg

En 2007 au Texas le même genre de colonie d’araignée est apparu
http://texasento.net/Social_Spider.htm
http://texasento.net/Social_Sp_lrg.jpg

#animaux #Pakistan #araignees #Texas