The Places You're Most Likely to Get Kidnapped There are lots of reasons people avoid high-profile travel destinations—the flights are too long, the hotels are overpriced, the beaches are overrun with German men in skimpy swimwear. But there’s another, sometimes overlooked criteria that you probably won’t find in your copy of Frommer’s or the Rough Guide: The likelihood of getting kidnapped at gunpoint. Unless you’re the kind of person who heads to the swamps of Nigeria for a little R&R, it’s unlikely you’ve given much thought to the threat of kidnapping when planning your trips. But kidnapping has boomed over the past decade, thanks to the growing socioeconomic divide around the globe and the spread of radical groups. What's My Motivation? An overwhelming majority of kidnappings today are motivated by aims that are chiefly financial in nature. Our list focuses, instead, on countries that are first and foremost popular travel destinations—and that also happen to have a high rate of abductions. Safe travels. How We Know Now Read This
The Dumbass Haunted World – When Propaganda Masquerades as Science Because last week’s reblogging of Robert Anton Wilson’s rather harsh critique of Carl Sagan resulted in a rather spirited dialogue on my Facebook page (friend me), I did something weird. I decided to take some of my fans advice and actually read a bit of Sagan’s work, which I admitted in the post that I’d never truly done. Sadly, since I spend half my life working a soulless day job, I don’t normally have much time to commit to researching things I intentionally avoid for impromptu rants. First off, what’s compelling from a psychological perspective is that part of the reason that post resonated with peeps had to do with a lot of them growing up a huge fan of both R.A.W. and Sagan. Moving on. For those not in the know, what you’re running into with alien contactee phenomenon is that it seems directly tied to UFO anomalies in some fashion. “The form of the supposed aliens is marked by the failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Adorable right? And again:
Why is democracy faltering? Jair Bolsonaro, the frontrunner for the Brazilian presidency, is a far-right, gun-loving, media-baiting hyper-nationalist. The fact that he would be right at home among many of today’s global leaders—including the leaders of some of the world’s major democracies—should worry us all. This compels us to address the question: Why is democracy faltering? We are at a historical turning point. Rapid technological progress, particularly the rise of digital technology and artificial intelligence, is transforming how our economies and societies function. One consequence of recent technological progress has been a decline in the relative share of wages in GDP. Gone are the days when one could count on a steady factory job to pay the bills indefinitely. These developments have contributed to growing disparities in education and opportunity. Against this background, the ongoing transformation of politics should not be surprising. Even becoming a sports fan is similar.
Half of This Bar Is in Slovenia, the Other Half Is in Croatia The commander of NATO is insisting that the West do more to protect Ukraine from a possible Russian invasion. But the Obama administration has other plans. Late last month, as the world was still reeling from Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO was warning Congress that Moscow was preparing to make another move. During classified briefings on March 26 and March 27, Gen. Breedlove, a four star Air Force general, was careful not to tell members of Congress anything that directly undermined the authority of the Commander-in-Chief during his March briefings. The quiet protests from one of Obama’s most important generals at the moment reveal an important policy rift inside the administration. In a statement for The Daily Beast, Breedlove acknowledged that he met with members of both parties in Congress in the last week in March. “It was clear Breedlove wanted to be doing more to help Ukraine, and he is still not getting the authorization.” U.S. Rep.
Scientist searching Twitter for time travelers tells Raw Story why he’s looking for Pope Francis By Scott KaufmanFriday, January 3, 2014 17:49 EDT If time travelers from the future are living among us, is there a way we can detect their presence in a reliable, scientific way? Raw Story talked to Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University who attempted to answer that question by searching for time travelers using the Internet. As Nemiroff and one of his graduate students, Teresa Wilson, note in “Searching the Internet for evidence of time travel,” travel into the future is a commonplace occurrence — you are doing it as you read these words. Time travel to the past is “controversial, at best, and impossible according to conventional views of the laws of physics.” Nemiroff and Wilson set out to search “for digital signatures that time travelers potentially left on the Internet.” In the end, the database they chose to use was Twitter. Raw Story asked Dr. “Besides,” he continued, “it wouldn’t have to be the traveler himself who used Twitter. [Image via BBC One]
The Milky Way's Monster, Unveiled Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have delivered the best-yet view of a real-life cosmic monster—Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. Or, rather, a view of hot clumps of gas that orbit it, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The results reveal new, previously unknown properties of our galaxy’s largest black hole and point the way toward a deeper understanding of gravity. Black holes, like all truly terrifying monsters, can scarcely be comprehended, let alone seen. Now, an international team of scientists has studied the Milky Way’s monster using an instrument called GRAVITY to combine the infrared light from four eight-meter telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. These hot spots are thought to be “magnetic thunderstorms” that occur when intense magnetic fields form filaments that snap apart and reconnect, releasing copious energy to heat nearby gas within a black hole’s accretion disk.
World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together Americans tell themselves that anything is possible when it comes to self-improvement, obscuring the truth that the privileged benefit from parental investment, strategic behavior, and simple capture of the institutions, like corporate boards, that hand out the money. This country needs some good class treason. Our meritocracy is doing more harm than good, and its members—and everyone else—need to start questioning it. I am a product of that meritocracy. It’s a meritocratic age. So I pulled up hard last week reading economist Thomas Piketty’s ground-breaking study of inequality, Capital in the 21st Century. We need a foundation of political equality and social guarantees: education, personal security, health care for those who need it, and the expectation of a fair retirement. Why do Americans tolerate staggering executive pay when almost everyone else’s income is stagnating? The way we pick “winners” in this country is a hybrid. Again, our meritocracy is a hybrid.
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 August 16, 1964 By ISAAC ASIMOV he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future. What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. 17 striking findings for 2017 Pew Research Center studies a wide array of topics both in the U.S. and around the world, and every year we are struck by particular findings. Sometimes they mark a new milestone in public opinion; other times a sudden about-face. From an increase in Americans living without a spouse or partner to the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency, here are 17 findings that stood out to us in 2017: 1 Partisan divides dwarf demographic differences on key political values. 2 Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. 3 About four-in-ten Americans say they live in a gun-owning household, while three-in-ten say they personally own a gun. Gun owners and non-owners have starkly different views on gun violence in America. 4 Democrats and Republicans disagree now more than ever on the news media’s “watchdog” role. 5 Muslims are projected to be the world’s fastest-growing major religious group in the decades ahead.
What if we are really in a “Matrix”-like simulation? By Adam L. Penenberg On December 30, 2013 Even in a “lost year for tech” there have been great gains, as John Gruber at Daring Fireball points out. For one, smartphones have become commodities, and more than 1.5 billion people worldwide tote full-on miniature computers in their pockets. The fact that one out of every five people on the planet have access to real-time information and can communicate with virtually anyone around the world at any time and from anywhere indicates we are entering a period of great change. But, as technology marches on, it’s important to consider that the ability to stop is as important as speeding up. As we head into a new year, John Markoff of the New York Times reports that “computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.” Further, he writes: What will this mean? Three-Dimensional holograms in virtual reality? I wrote: We’ve all heard that ‘Life is a game.’
How far should we trust scientific models? – Jon Turney Here’s a simple recipe for doing science. Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally. If the results fit the predictions, then the theory might describe what’s really going on. Now, however, there is a new ingredient. As computer modelling has become essential to more and more areas of science, it has also become at least a partial guide to headline-grabbing policy issues, from flood control and the conserving of fish stocks, to climate change and — heaven help us — the economy. Modelling is an old word in science, and the old uses remain. Computer models are different. In this new world of computer modelling, an oft-quoted remark made in the 1970s by the statistician George Box remains a useful rule of thumb: ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’. It would be harder to model a totally new disease, but we would know the factors likely to influence its spread. Generalisations about modelling remain hard to make.
DARPA wants to build an AI to find the patterns hidden in global chaos That most famous characterization of the complexity causality, a butterfly beating its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, is thought-provoking but ultimately not helpful. What we really need is to look at a hurricane and figure out which butterfly caused it — or perhaps stop it before it takes flight in the first place. DARPA thinks AI should be able to do just that. A new program at the research agency is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. “Schema” in this case has a very specific meaning. Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they’re surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. How?
<b>FBI's Scientology investigation: Balancing the First Amendment with charges of abuse and forced labor</b><br /><br /> John Brousseau hadn't been seen for hours, not at the afternoon muster and not at the dinner break. That's when they got concerned. At 6 a.m. he had driven his black Ford Excursion out of the Church of Scientology's huge compound east of Los Angeles, guards at the gate waving as usual. A 32-year member of the church's religious order, the Sea Org, and a master craftsman, Brousseau often did special jobs for Scientology's leader, David Miscavige. Two Scientology staffers found a note in his room. By now you've noticed I'm gone. Where had he gone? Within days, church private investigators spotted him in south Texas. Four church officers flew there from California in a charter jet. Two days later, Scientology's newest runaway was singing to the FBI. Isolated work sites. The Church of Scientology imposes a raft of restrictions and mental controls on its religious workers, who grind on, abiding 100-hour workweeks. The FBI won't confirm it investigated the church. So did the church. It worked.