"Fort Greene’s Prison Ship Martyrs Monument is a memorial to American POWs who lost their lives during the Revolutionary War. We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies. It would be a dishonor to those memorialized here to not laud those who protect the ideals they fought for, as Edward Snowden has by bringing the NSA’s 4th-Amendment-violating surveillance programs to light. All too often, figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze. Our goal is to bring a renewed vitality to the space and prompt even more visitors to ponder the sacrifices made for their freedoms. We hope this inspires them to reflect upon the responsibility we all bear to ensure our liberties exist long into the future." Read More »

... any second now ...

(#RestartLHC)

ET calling?

Discrete steps in dispersion measures of Fast Radio Bursts
by Michael Hippke, Wilfried F. Domainko, John G. Learned
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.05245v2, 30 Mar 2015.

Fast Radios Bursts (FRBs) show large dispersion measures (DMs), suggesting an extragalactic location. We analyze the DMs of the 11 known FRBs in detail and identify steps as integer multiples of half the lowest DM found, 187.5cm^-3pc, so that DMs occur in groups centered at 375, 562, 750, 937, 1125cm^-3pc, with errors observed

The 1999 movie "Fight Club" was role model of the NSU.

Ontological Argument.

A Farewell to Falsifiability
by Douglas Scott, Ali Frolop, Ali Narimani, Andrei Frolov
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00108v1, submitted 1 Apr 2015

Some of the most obviously correct physical theories - namely string theory and the multiverse - make no testable predictions, leading many to question whether we should accept something as scientific even if it makes no testable predictions and hence is not refutable. However, some far-thinking physicists have proposed instead that we should give up on the notion of Falsifiability itself. We endorse this suggestion but think it does not go nearly far enough. We believe that we should also dispense with other outdated ideas, such as Fidelity, Frugality, Factuality and other "F" words. And we quote a lot of famous people to support this view.

Morieris.

(Hans Memling, c.1483, Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

Left: Quentin Massys. Ecce Homo-1520. Right: 2 Chainz.

(Highlighting an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century, by Cecilia Azcarate.)

The bigger the worse? A comparative study of the welfare state and employment commitment
by Kjetil A van der Wel and Knut Halvorsen
Work Employment & Society, February 2015, vol. 29/1, 99-118.
doi: 10.1177/0950017014542499

This article investigates how welfare generosity and active labour market policies relate to employment commitment. As social policy is increasingly directed towards stimulating employment in broader sections of society, this article particularly studies employment commitment among groups with traditionally weaker bonds to the labour market. This is also theoretically interesting because the employment commitment in these groups may be more affected by the welfare context than is the employment commitment of the core work force. A welfare scepticism view predicts that disincentive effects and norm erosion will lead to lower employment commitment in more generous and activating welfare states, while a welfare resources perspective holds the opposite view. Using multilevel data for individuals in 18 European countries, the article finds increasing employment commitment as social spending gets more generous and activating. This was also evident for weaker groups in the labour market, although the effect was less pronounced in some groups. Read More »

Statistical evidence suggests that the death of Melisa Marijanovic was premeditated murder via air embolism planned and executed by a group of c. 350 members.

Stefan Jellinek: Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern. Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1931.

Wayne Chisnall: "And When I’m a Man", 1998.

"Despite the uncertainties, air embolism has served as a reasonably dependable method of execution. After public outcry stopped Nazi gassing of mental patients in 1941, psychiatric institutions were ordered to continue so-called mercy killings by less conspicuous means. A program described as "wild euthanasia" began at the Meseritz-Obrawalde hospital in 1942, with doctors selecting the victims and nurses doing the deed. While most of the murders were carried out with overdoses of sedatives, some patients were injected with air, which usually killed them within minutes. Though thousands of patients died, at trial years after the war 14 nurses claimed they were just following orders and were acquitted. Decades later Germany saw another rash of murders-by-embolism when a nurse confessed to injecting an estimated 60 to 130 milliliters of air into the veins of 15 seriously ill elderly patients. All died." Read More »

Campaign for Public Participation in Naming Features on Pluto

In partnership with NASA’s New Horizons mission and the SETI Institute, the IAU is endorsing a campaign that will allow the public to participate in naming newly discovered features on Pluto and its satellites. It is expected that many new features will be discovered in the upcoming flyby of Pluto and will be available for naming. The public is invited to suggest names within the designated IAU themes for these celestial bodies.

Pluto retains a unique position in the hearts and minds of many. Pluto is a remote and enigmatic world that resides at the edge of the Solar System, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt, where it is one among many similar dwarf planets, although Pluto remains the largest discovered to date.

On 14 July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe will fly past Pluto, offering the first close-up look at this small, distant world and its largest satellite, Charon. These denizens of the outer Solar System will, at long last, be transformed from mysterious, hazy bodies into worlds with distinct features. Read More »

Save the Fluffy Snugglebunny (Ochotona iliensis)!

Dramatic decline of the threatened Ili pika Ochotona iliensis (Lagomorpha: Ochotonidae) in Xinjiang, China
by Li Wei-Dong and Andrew T. Smith
Oryx, Vol. 39/1 (2005), pp 30-34,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0030605305000062

The Vulnerable Ili pika Ochotona iliensis (Lagomorpha: Ochotonidae) is a poorly known mammal species that inhabits a restricted geographic range in the Tian Shan Mountains, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. It was discovered in 1983, described in 1986, and subsequently investigated over the following decade. As no studies were conducted on this pika during the next 10 years, a comprehensive census was undertaken in the summers of 2002 and 2003, including all sites where it had previously been observed. Evidence of the Ili pika was found at only 6 of 14 sites censused, and was extinct in two of six regions, including the type and paratype localities (Jilimalale Mountain). Ili pika populations appear to have declined in three of six regions, and in only one region did the population appear to be comparable to a decade earlier. Like all rock-dwelling pikas, the Ili pika has a low population density and rate of reproduction. Additionally, populations on its preferred habitat of cliff faces are highly fragmented. Increased temperatures, possibly due to global warming, and increased grazing pressure may have interacted with the normal population dynamics of the Ili pika to contribute to its recent dramatic decline. We recommend that the Ili pika's Red List status be changed from Vulnerable to Endangered. Read More »

New in the teapot.
(Nova Sagittarii 2015 No.2, 21 March 2015)

Meaningless to humans, these images are recognized by a computer wiith great certainty as common objects.

Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images
by Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune
http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of pattern-recognition tasks, most notably visual classification problems. Given that DNNs are now able to classify objects in images with near-human-level performance, questions naturally arise as to what differences remain between computer and human vision. A recent study revealed that changing an image (e.g. of a lion) in a way imperceptible to humans can cause a DNN to label the image as something else entirely (e.g. mislabeling a lion a library). Here we show a related result: it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the-art DNNs believe to be recognizable objects with 99.99% confidence (e.g. labeling with certainty that white noise static is a lion). Specifically, we take convolutional neural networks trained to perform well on either the ImageNet or MNIST datasets and then find images with evolutionary algorithms or gradient ascent that DNNs label with high confidence as belonging to each dataset class. It is possible to produce images totally unrecognizable to human eyes that DNNs believe with near certainty are familiar objects. Our results shed light on interesting differences between human vision and current DNNs, and raise questions about the generality of DNN computer vision. Read More »

Aschenputtel lost her shoe in the Mauerpark.