WATCH: How Drones Are Saving Lives in Rural America; Government Technology, August 19, 2024

Nikki Davidson , Government Technology; WATCH: How Drones Are Saving Lives in Rural America

"Until recently, deputies in rural Manitowoc County, Wis., faced a challenge: responding to calls with limited visibility and resources. Traditional policing methods often left them at a disadvantage in vast, wooded areas. 

In June 2022, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office embarked on a mission to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into their law enforcement operations to give them an eye in the sky. Two lieutenants, Travis Aleff and Kyle Stotzheim, were tasked with spearheading the initiative, working “non-stop” for half a year to establish a fully operational drone team with 13 FAA-certified pilots.

Initially there were a lot of questions about the program’s cost-effectiveness and whether the investment in drones would yield tangible benefits...

To understand the real-world impact of drones in law enforcement, we requested examples from the sheriff’s office, complete with video footage. They provided three compelling cases, each demonstrating a different facet of how UAVs can revolutionize police work and enhance public safety.

DRONES AS A LIFELINE: ENHANCING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS RESPONSE

One example highlights the potential of drones to aid in mental health crisis response. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office received a call concerning a suicidal, armed individual who intended to harm themselves in a densely wooded county park. Watch the video below to see how the UAV was used as a tool to defuse and safely resolve the situation."

‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point; The Guardian, February 3, 2024

 Robin McKie, The Guardian; ‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

"Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud."

Two arrested after US storage facility emptied of $1bn in ‘massive amounts of knock-off designer goods’; The Guardian, November 16, 2023

 Jenna Amatulli, The Guardian; Two arrested after US storage facility emptied of $1bn in ‘massive amounts of knock-off designer goods’

"Federal prosecutors arrested two men on Wednesday and seized more than 200,000 counterfeit handbags, clothes and other luxury items worth $1.03bn, making it “the largest-ever seizure of counterfeit goods in US history”...

Ivan Arvelo, special agent in charge of homeland security investigations, praised the findings in a statement, claiming it “underscores the unwavering commitment of HSI New York in the fight against intellectual property theft and serves as a testament to the dedication of our team and partner agencies, who have tirelessly pursued justice, culminating in the largest-ever seizure of this kind”...

Hand added that the counterfeit market is a “significant problem not just for luxury fashion brands and the dilution of their trademarks’ values but also for consumers and society at large as many counterfeit products are produced in oppressive labor environments and without any adherence to ecological production methods (if implemented by brands)”."

How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads; The Washington Post, October 28, 2023

Trisha Thadani, The Washington Post , The Washington Post; How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads

"Here in California, the whiplash from approval to ban in just two months highlights the fragmented oversight governing the self-driving car industry — a system that allowed Cruise to operate on San Francisco’s roads for more than three weeks following the October collision, despite dragging a human pinned underneath the vehicle...

Ed Walters, who teaches autonomous vehicle law at Georgetown University, said that driverless technology is critical for a future with fewer road fatalities because robots don’t drive drunk or get distracted. But, he said, this accident shows that Cruise was not “quite ready for testing” in such a dense urban area...

Under the DMV’s autonomous vehicle program, companies are asked to publicly report collisions involving driverless cars only when they are in test mode. That means if an incident like the Oct. 2 crash occurs while the company is technically operating as a commercial service, the company does not have to publicly report it as an “Autonomous Vehicle Collision Report.”"

Cruise Stops All Driverless Taxi Operations in the United States; The New York Times, October 26, 2023

 Yiwen Lu, The New York Times; Cruise Stops All Driverless Taxi Operations in the United States

"Cruise said on Thursday evening that it would pause all driverless operations in the United States, two days after California regulators told the General Motors subsidiary to take its autonomous cars off the state’s roads. 

The decision affects Cruise’s robot taxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, where a limited number of public riders could hail paid rides. Noncommercial operations in Dallas, Houston and Miami were also paused.

Cruise did not say how long the halt will last. Testing of driverless vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel will continue, the company said."

Why is AMLO worried about an outsider? She’s funny, profane — and inspiring.; The Washington Post, August 20, 2023

 David Ignatius, The Washington Post; Why is AMLO worried about an outsider? She’s funny, profane — and inspiring.

"“Beware of what is happening in Mexico,” Gálvez warns me at the end of our conversation. “Our president is capable of anything. He has no limits.”

A chilling example of what frightens many Mexicans about López Obrador happened last Wednesday morning at the president’s office, a few miles from where I was talking to Gálvez.

At his regular morning news conference that day, reporters asked López Obrador about five young men from Jalisco who had disappeared a few days before. A horrific video had just surfaced that showed the five, friends since childhood, their bodies battered and bloody, with their mouths taped shut and their hands tied behind their backs. One victim was forced to bludgeon another with a brick and then decapitate him, before he was killed himself. Investigators later recovered their badly burned bodies. The governor of Jalisco said the murders were “clearly linked to organized crime.”

And what did the president say when reporters asked him to comment on this appalling crime? “Can’t hear,” said López Obrador, cupping his hand to his ear. He then told a crude joke about a poor Mexican man who pretended he couldn’t hear a question. And then he smiled and walked offstage."

May ‘Bad Spaniels’ Mock Jack Daniel’s? The Supreme Court Will Decide.; The New York Times, December 5, 2022

 Adam Liptak, The New York Times; May ‘Bad Spaniels’ Mock Jack Daniel’s? The Supreme Court Will Decide.

"The justices agreed last month to decide the fate of the Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker dog toy, which looks a lot like a bottle of Jack Daniel’s but with, as an appeals court judge put it, “lighthearted, dog-related alterations.”

The jokes are scatological. The words “Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” on the bottle are replaced on the toy by “the Old No. 2, on your Tennessee carpet.” Where Jack Daniel’s says its product is 40 percent alcohol by volume, Bad Spaniels’s is said to be “43 percent poo.”

A tag attached to the toy says it is “not affiliated with Jack Daniel Distillery.”

Trademark cases generally turn on whether the public is likely to be confused about a product’s source. In the Bad Spaniels case, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said the First Amendment requires a more demanding test when the challenged product is expressing an idea or point of view."

Can police use robots to kill? San Francisco voted yes.; The Washington Post, November 30, 2022

 Daniel Wu, The Washington Post; Can police use robots to kill? San Francisco voted yes.

"Adam Bercovici, a law enforcement expert and former Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant, told The Post that while policies for robotic lethal force must be carefully written, they could be useful in rare situations. He referenced an active-shooter scenario like the one Dallas officers encountered.

“If I was in charge, and I had that capability, it wouldn’t be the first on my menu,” he said. “But it would be an option if things were really bad.”

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, worried that San Francisco could instead end up setting a dangerous precedent.

“In my knowledge, this would be the first city to take this step of passing a law authorizing killer robots,” Cahn told The Post.

Cahn expressed concern that the legislation would lead other departments to push for similar provisions, or even to the development of more weaponized robots. In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., the police equipment company Axon announced plans to develop drones equipped with Tasers to incapacitate school shooters but canned the idea after nine members of the company’s artificial-intelligence ethics advisory board resigned in protest."

Libraries are reimagining what public safety and access to resources look like; Prism, May 5, 2022

 Tamar Sarai, Prism ; Libraries are reimagining what public safety and access to resources look like

"“People think libraries have changed so much, but really, we’re still doing the same things,” Fewell said. “We are making sure people have access to information and resources… connecting people [with what] they need: food, wound care, connecting to the WiFi because the only device they have to access the internet is their phone… We’re providing resources to get people the next thing that they’re looking for, and I love it.”

As libraries and library staff begin embracing new ways to serve their patrons and in doing so, promote alternative conceptions of public safety, pushback has followed. Local police have decried the initiatives as eroding relationships with law enforcement, and other patrons have argued that their libraries are becoming less safe and that their own needs are being neglected as marginalized community members find themselves increasingly welcome into the library’s branches. However, while providing more social services and even connecting with currently incarcerated people might expand the work of libraries, staff engaging in these initiatives argue that the work is simply a fulfillment of the library’s long-standing purpose to provide information and foster community."

"The Longest Time"; Phoenix Chamber Choir, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 24, 2020

YouTube, Phoenix Chamber Choir, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; "The Longest Time"

"Wishing everyone the best of health from Vancouver, Canada! Stay home, stay safe, and keep singing!"

Narcan or No?; American Libraries, June 1, 2020

Anne Ford, American Libraries; Narcan or No?

Several years into the opioid crisis, public librarians reflect on whether to stock free naloxone

"“I think some libraries are concerned about liability, even though most states have Good Samaritan laws around naloxone,” Duddy says. “And I think some people feel there’s not an [opioid overdose] issue where their library is located.”

The libraries to which American Libraries spoke cited different reasons for not seeking the free Narcan."

Silicon Valley needs a new approach to studying ethics now more than ever; TechCrunch, April 24, 2020

Lisa Wehden, TechCrunch; Silicon Valley needs a new approach to studying ethics now more than ever

"These are fresh concerns in familiar debates about tech’s ethics. How should technologists think about the trade-off between the immediate need for public health surveillance and individual privacy? And misformation and free speech? Facebook and other platforms are playing a much more active role than ever in assessing the quality of information: promoting official information sources prominently and removing some posts from users defying social distancing.

As the pandemic spreads and, along with it, the race to develop new technologies accelerates, it’s more critical than ever that technology finds a way to fully examine these questions. Technologists today are ill-equipped for this challenge: striking healthy balances between competing concerns — like privacy and safety — while explaining their approach to the public...

If the only students are future technologists, though, solutions will lag. If we want a more ethically knowledgeable tech industry today, we need ethical study for tech practitioners, not just university students...

Over half of the class came from a STEM background and had missed much explicit education in ethical frameworks. Our class discussed principles from other fields, like medical ethics, including the physician’s guiding maxim (“first, do no harm”) in the context of designing new algorithms. Texts from the world of science fiction, like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, also offered ways to grapple with issues, leading students to evaluate how to collect and use data responsibly."

Trump says his comments on injecting disinfectants were “sarcastic.” Let’s review the tape.; Vox, April 24, 2020

Aaron Rupar, Vox; Trump says his comments on injecting disinfectants were “sarcastic.” Let’s review the tape.

Spoiler alert: He’s lying.

"President Donald Trump now claims he was being “sarcastic” when he mused on Thursday about disinfectant injections being a possible miracle cure for the coronavirus.

Unfortunately for him, there’s video.

Asked during a White House bill-signing ceremony on Friday to explain his comments — which were widely mocked for being ridiculous and more than a little irresponsible, became the top trending topic on Twitter, and prompted warnings from health agencies that it’s actually a bad idea to inject or consume bleach — Trump tried to rewrite history.

“I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic question, to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump lied. In reality, he was looking at White House officialswhen he earnestly asked them to investigate whether there’s “a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

Notably, even as he tried to distance himself from his remarks, Trump illustrated his fundamental inability to ever admit a mistake by continuing to defend his premise.

Disinfectant “does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands, and that would make things much better,” Trump said.

Watch the two clips back to back for yourself:"

‘Stable genius’ or dangerous ignoramus?'; The Washington Post, April 24, 2020

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post; ‘Stable genius’ or dangerous ignoramus?

"We can laugh (uproariously) about Trump’s ignorance and inanity, but like his hawking of hydroxychloroquine — which induced hoarding of medication needed by patients with other diseases (and perhaps others to harm themselves) — this is one more instance in which concern for public safety should spur news networks to discontinue live coverage of the daily briefings. Like a con man peddling patent medicine, Trump dispenses false hope and crackpot remedies, thereby promoting disdain for scientific inquiry and valid research. Once more, one is compelled not only to shudder that such an intellectually unfit man could be president but that legions of right-wing hucksters and sycophants could regularly contort themselves not merely to defend his blabbering but also to lionize him.

It is little wonder that only 23 percent of Americans, according to the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, have a high level of trust in what Trump says. (Some of us find it disturbing the number is that high, although the poll was taken before his latest quackery.)"

COVID-19 and the Ethical Questions It Poses; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, April 22, 2020

University of Nevada, Las Vegas; COVID-19 and the Ethical Questions It Poses

UNLV business ethics expert Wonyong Oh on the coronavirus pandemic and the ethical dilemmas facing health care workers, corporations, and government

"What are some ethical questions that businesses are wrestling with in light of COVID-19?

Let’s think about one controversial example. Real-time personal location information to track and manage the path of infection has been tried all over the world, especially actively in Asian countries like China, Korea, and Hong Kong. IT companies can track location information using smartphones to prevent virus spread. This raises ethical and legal issues surrounding access to personal information.

If you follow utilitarian ethics, tracking this kind of personal information can be allowed with the “maximum benefits for the greatest number” principle. It’s for keeping society safe from infection by sacrificing personal privacy. It seems that, recently, the views on tracking personal information in the U.S. and Europe began to change. In a few European countries, telecommunication companies began to use mobile phone data to fight COVID-19. In the U.S., Apple and Google are working together to track COVID-19 with Bluetooth. IT companies can help governments reduce the spread of the virus with their technologies. At the same time, high-tech companies need to balance that with protecting individual privacy, which is a new challenge.

Everything about the coronavirus pandemic, however, is unprecedented. The reality is that the virus threatens even ordinary freedoms, like the freedom of movement, with stay-at-home orders."

Hospital Technicians Ignore Copyright Law to Fight COVID-19; Reason, April 13, 2020

Paul Detrick, Reason; Hospital Technicians Ignore Copyright Law to Fight COVID-19

"A right-to-repair movement has been fighting to change federal copyright law—or to pass state-level laws that let people fix their own devices. But medical device companies fought back with letters to lawmakers, saying right-to-repair laws could endanger the lives of patients if devices were fixed improperly by untrained personnel."

Putin’s Long War Against American Science; The New York Times, April 13, 2020

William J. Broad, The New York Times; Putin’s Long War Against American Science

A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.

"As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

The House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Mr. Putin’s long campaign. But the repercussions are wider. An investigation by The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.

His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.

Moscow’s aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.

“It’s all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions,” Peter Pomerantsev, author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview.

The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight."

Food delivery robots from Starship Technologies are coming to Pitt’s Oakland campus; Nextpittsburgh, September 3, 2019

Bill O'Toole, Nextpittsburgh; Food delivery robots from Starship Technologies are coming to Pitt’s Oakland campus

"Stakeholders got their first look at the project last week when the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation (OPDC) held a public meeting where Starship gave a presentation on the project.

The university has confirmed to us that Starship’s service is due to launch later this fall, but the company declined to offer further specifics about the project to NEXTpittsburgh. According to the minutes of the meeting, they plan to begin a staged rollout in mid-September. The fleet will eventually have 25 autonomous rovers carting goods (presumably to hungry students) from campus food vendors such as Forbes Street Market...

The food delivery service poses obvious practical challenges for the flow of traffic and people throughout the bustling neighborhood. According to the minutes of the public meeting, several attendees expressed concerns over the potential for traffic and bicycle accidents.

“It’ll be interesting to see how they interface with people there in the public right of ways,” says Georgia Petropoulos, executive director of the Oakland Business Improvement District, which has no formal role in the project."