According to the FT, the database, known as MS Celeb, was first published in 2016. At the time, it was described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, containing more than 10 million images of nearly 100,000 individuals.
Those whose images were included in the database did not give their permission for the images to be used. Instead, their images were scraped off the web and off search engines.
Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT exposed how they were being used by the Chinese. They include: the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.
Going by professional citations, Microsoft’s MS Celeb has been used by a handful of corporations, including Sensetime and Megvii, two suppliers of the growing state security apparatus in China’s Northwestern Xinjiang province.
District officials voted to fire a Texas English teacher Tuesday, following tweets to President Donald Trump about illegal immigrants in the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD).
Unfortunately, school officials in major Texas cities are as Blue as in any coastal area.
“The Board approved her ‘proposed’ termination, in the words of the Board president, Jacinto Ramos, Jr., ‘…based both upon Ms. Clark’s conduct, and the fact that the public reaction to her conduct has been highly negative and, therefore compromised and diminished her effectiveness as a teacher within Fort Worth ISD,’” Bond said.
In other words, she’s a troublemaker and so she has to go. Apparently her effectiveness as a teacher is judged by how ‘woke’ she is.
I shouldn’t have to remind everyone not to send their kids to a government school.
Male trees are one of the most significant reasons why allergies have gotten so bad for citydwellers in recent decades. They’re indiscriminate, spewing their gametes in every direction. They can’t help it—it’s what evolution built them for. This is fine in the wild, where female trees trap pollen to fertilize their seeds. But urban forestry is dominated by male trees, so cities are coated in their pollen. Tom Ogren, horticulturalist and author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping, was the first to link exacerbated allergies with urban planting policy, which he calls “botanical sexism.”
The deadly pig virus that jumped from Africa to Europe is now ravaging China’s $128 billion pork industry and spreading to other Asian countries, an unprecedented disaster that has prompted Beijing to slaughter millions of pigs. But stopping African swine fever isn’t so easy.
Let’s see: It ‘jumped from Africa to Europe’ but the worry is about China’s pork industry? That’s a bigger jump than from Africa to Europe. Pardon me if I don’t seem concerned about China’s pork industry.
If we know anything about disease pandemics, it’s that not every victim will die. (Check the history of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) If China has 440 million pigs, a significant portion of them will prove resistant. Once all of the vulnerable pigs die off, China will use the resistant pigs to rebuild their port industry. Sucks to be China, of course, but it’s not the end of the world, or even the end of the pigs.
This is the kind of hair-on-fire ‘journalism’ that gives news organs like Bloomberg a bad name.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on African Swine Fever Is Spreading Fast and Eliminating It Will Take Decades
Though the tire has conventional treads, the middle layer is made of composite rubber and resin-embedded fiberglass spokes. The spokes provide support for the treads and remove the need for air.
I have seen a number of proposals for this sort of technology — basically, the tire rim is supported by a series of springs — but this appears to be close to production. The key will be how well it deals with stress not orthogonal to the treat surface, e.g. in cornering or side-skids.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Michelin’s Puncture-Proof Tire Prototype Could Make Flats a Thing of the Past
A veritable mini-industry of celebrity calls for Trump’s violent death or assassination is now old and boring—and getting dangerous.
As if on cue, actors, singers, comedians, and banal entertainers compete with each other to hope for the most gruesome manner of killing the president—and thereby insidiously lowering the bar for unhinged minds of what could be conceivable or even acceptable to big screen icons and popular culture’s cool crowd.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Tired, Boring—and Dangerous—Celebrity Death Wishing
James Freeman’s June 4 WSJ Best of the Web column is “Democrats vs. Nuns.” In the column he alerts us to this news: “More than two years after Barack Obama left the White House, there’s still no cease-fire in a legal war on women of faith. The non-profit law firm Becket said [on Tuesday] that a group of nuns will once again have to defend their beliefs in a San Francisco federal courthouse [on Thursday, June 6].”
New York City public school teachers recently revealed that they have been instructed to reject “objectivity,” “written documentation” and “perfectionism” by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, as part of his effort to “dismantle racism.” Carranza identified these values as tools of the “white-supremacy culture.”
Our cultural overlords are way ahead of Carranza. With lightning speed, we’ve abandoned old, hidebound, Anglo-Saxon facts-and-evidence standards in deference to new, fresh African folk tale standards. (According to J. Bekunuru Kubayanda, writing in the Afro-Hispanic Review, even Latin America and the Caribbean got their oral history traditions from Africa.)
I’m willing to believe it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Whole Folk Tale and Nothing But the Folk Tale
The one Antifa member who did show up did more than just sabotage the event. Wearing a black balaclava mask, he attempted to imprison the UW College Republicans in the room by locking the door with a master padlock and chain.
“About 45-50 minutes into the event, we heard rattling and we saw a masked guy trying to chain the doors shut,” Swanson explained. “We pushed on the door to force it open, hoping the chain hadn’t already been locked. It opened and the chain fell to the ground. The masked guy ran off and some of our people chased him and held him until police arrived.”
Every day roughly 126 million people hop on Twitter to participate in a near-instantaneous flow of information, and it’s making users more stupid according to a team of Italian researchers.
If you haven’t heard, an 80-year Democratic Party tradition is officially too hateful and racist to continue.
No, it’s not the tradition of defending, deflecting, and denying the Democrats’ history of supporting segregation. It’s the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the most prominent fundraiser for state and local Democratic organizations. Jefferson-Jackson Day events are hosted by all levels of the party throughout the nation. It’s as much an institution as the Democratic National Convention theme song that we hear every four years, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
The reasons why should be obvious. The Democrats of today live and die by virtue signaling. As an increasing number of prominent Democrats — including the rockstar of the moment, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigeig — are fond of telling us, one of the Democratic Party’s founders is just too shameful to mention these days, and therefore must be dropped down the memory hole as quickly as Joe Biden’s inappropriate touching habit disappears from CNN’s collective consciousness.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Unexpectedly, Trump’s Threats of Tariffs Against Mexico Spurs Mexico to Start Cracking Down on Illegal Migrants
The term “Gell-Man Amnesia effect” was coined by the late novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) in honor of the famous physicist who died last month. Murray Gell-Man had pointed out to Crichton that he had noticed that journalists aren’t very accurate at writing about his own specialty, physics, nor about Crichton’s, showbiz, so why do we trust them to write reliably about everything else?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Arguing Against Reality
The next step is for the US to occupy about 100 miles of the northern part of Mexico and clean house.
Mexico has had decades to clean its own house without success.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Mexico Admits That 80% of Its Well-Populated Territory Is Either Controlled by Cartels, Or “Disputed” in Control Between Cartels and Government Forces
Known as the delta-32 mutation after the allele it resides in, the mutation is quite famous, according to study author Rasmus Nielsen, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley. One reason, he says, is the evidence its geographic distribution provides of historic diseases in Europe; another is the fact that it makes those who have it either completely or partially immune to infection with the HIV virus; and the last, of course, is the fact that it was the mutation He Jiankui chose to tweak in Nana and Lulu.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The Gene Mutation That Protects Against HIV Could Also Shorten Lives
“I am sure that the snipers hit the spine on purpose,” he said this week after noticing the same gunshot wound “at this very same point” several times in the children he had treated.
At least five of the children were left partially or fully paralysed as a result of the injuries.
It has often been observed that progressives are re-segregating some areas of the country, especially college campuses. But Minnesota has never been segregated, so our progressives are boldly venturing to segregate our citizens by race for the first time.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Segregation Comes to Minnesota
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Blue State Blues: Rats at the Police Station, Filth on L.A. Streets — Scenes From the Collapse of a City That’s Lost Control
Tucker Carlson lit the New York Times ablaze Monday night after one of its own interview subjects was murdered in a racially motivated attack in South Africa.
Four men entered 62-year-old vineyard owner Stefan Smit’s Western Cape home and shot him dead as he was having Sunday dinner with his friends and family. Smit became the latest victim in the struggle between white landholders and black South Africans living in poverty who believe the land should be redistributed to them as reparations.
We saw this same scenario play out in Zimbabwe, with horrible results for both blacks and whites.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘Skin Color Is the Central Motivation’ for Brutal South African Killings
Because I teach kids robotics, I get to see the dexterity of kids and how long it takes to develop. While our robot kids were doing LEGO for several years, they were pretty good already but the transition to screws, nuts, plyers and screwdrivers was the hardest thing they had to tackle all year. One guy kept snapping the heads off screws, permanently ruining parts we couldn’t now get the screw body out from.
So what is happening to our kids? Well, this article goes over how we have removed shop, hobbies and other activities that develop good hand eye coordination, dexterity and three-dimensional thinking from our kids daily life. Parents would rather give babies an iPad that work with them and the frustration of LEGOs or heaven forbid, have them help them with tools.
This points up an increasing problem. It doesn’t just affect surgeons and dentists — it also spells problems finding carpenters, plumbers, electricians, machinists, welders … you name it, if it requires good hand/eye coordination, we are soon going to be running short. There are a lot of things robots still can’t do.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Hand Skills – Doctors of Sewing Needed
Before the emails roll in telling me that I “don’t science,” I’m well aware that the theory of natural selection was about genetic changes that occur over a series of generations. However, the point remains that once upon a time, being stupid got you killed. And no one got sued. The person who couldn’t figure out that some ill-conceived idea was a bad one faced the consequences. If the consequences didn’t kill them, they learned not to do the stupid thing again, making them just a teeny bit smarter and more equipped to deal with the world. Some who believe our planet is overpopulated might even argue that the obsolescence of natural selection is the root cause of the people boom.
But now, we are coddled, cautioned, and warned out of needing to think for ourselves. Another evolutionary theory says that when some trait or characteristic goes unused, it disappears after a few generations. Sort of like those cave fish that don’t have any eyes, After multiple generations deep underground in the pitch black, their eye sockets are now empty. Perhaps after multiple generations without the need for critical thought and common sense, those in “civilized societies” are going to evolve into creatures with their own empty spots where something useful was previously.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Darwin Weeps: Warning Labels and Technology Render the Survival Mindset Obsolete
