Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

New Artificial Intelligence System Enables Machines That See the World More Like Humans Do

A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

To overcome these errors, MIT researchers have developed a framework that helps machines see the world more like humans do. Their new artificial intelligence system for analyzing scenes learns to perceive real-world objects from just a few images, and perceives scenes in terms of these learned objects.

The researchers built the framework using probabilistic programming, an AI approach that enables the system to cross-check detected objects against input data, to see if the images recorded from a camera are a likely match to any candidate scene. Probabilistic inference allows the system to infer whether mismatches are likely due to noise or to errors in the scene interpretation that need to be corrected by further processing.

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Cop Fired for Savagely Beating Handcuffed Pregnant Woman on Video, Hired at New Dept.

Officer Elizabeth Montoya is the latest roaming bad cop to receive a spotlight for her gypsy cop status and every bit of this light it is well deserved. Montoya was fired from the San Antonio police department in 2019 after she savagely beat the hell out of a handcuffed pregnant woman.

The incident was captured on body camera footage and it showed Montoya punch the woman in the breasts before delivering a fury of punches to the handcuffed pregnant woman’s head and face.

That woman, Kimberly Esparza, was six months pregnant when Montoya beat the hell out of her, threw her to the ground on her stomach, dragged her down the pavement and left her sitting in the rain, battered and bruised.

To justify this gross use of force against the pregnant woman, Montoya would charge her with assault of a public servant, resisting arrest and possession of a controlled substance – penalty group III, typically used to charge someone who illegally possesses prescription drugs with common medical uses, according to KSAT.

When the evidence was presented, however, Esparza was innocent and all charges were dropped.

For savagely beating a woman who was simply accused of possessing a controlled substance, who was handcuffed and pregnant, Montoya was never charged with a crime. In fact, it would take the department a year to get her fired and that was for muting her body camera — not for brutally beating a pregnant woman in handcuffs.

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‘Crashed Flying Saucer’ Spotted On Mars

A South African researcher discovered what appears to be an image of a crashed flying saucer on the surface of Mars, according to re-analyzed NASA footage from 2006.

Jean Ward, an anomaly hunter, was searching through NASA images for noteworthy aberrations when he discovered the image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite the image being 15 years old, Ward’s discovery of what appears to be the flying saucer is not.

The image comes from the bottom of Candor Chasma, which is a large canyon in the Valles Marineris system on Mars. The canyon is referred to as “The Grand Canyon of Mars,” and spans the equivalent of the U.S. It is the largest known canyon in the solar system.

This footage from NASA captures the canyon’s many swirling patterns of layers, created by sand and dust-sized particles from the forces of either wind or water.

“We see a strange trench and at the end of it, a perfect disk,” Ward says of the anomaly amid the dune-filled landscape. “Mostly covered in sand and debris, and behind it, we have random dunes,” he continued.

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Psaki: It’s OK to let children eat lunch in the cold ‘to keep kids safe’

White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested Friday that it is OK for kids to eat their lunches outside in cold temperatures in an effort to maintain safety amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asked whether the White House wanted school children to “get back to a more normal school experience,” Psaki insisted schools are having children practice social distancing measures, mask up, and eat their snacks and lunch in frigid outdoor temperatures in an effort to “keep their kids safe and keep students safe.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks to reporters in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on December 10, 2021 in Washington, DC.

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California Schools Drop ‘D’ and ‘F’ Grades in a Shift to ‘Competency-Based’ Learning 

Some of the largest school districts in California are dropping “D” and “F” grades, moving towards what they call “competency-based” learning.

Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, and other school districts across the state are limiting the use of “D” grades and phasing out “Fs” entirely.

Instead of failing an assignment or exam, students now have the option to retake a test and have additional time to complete an assignment.

Proponents of the move hope it will encourage students to learn and not worry about the fear of a low grade pushing them off the pathway to university.

Nidya Baez, assistant principal at an Oakland Unified high school, said:

Our hope is that students begin to see school as a place of learning, where they can take risks and learn from mistakes, instead of a place of compliance. Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.

Others also criticized the traditional grading method for its subjectivity and its psychological impact on school-aged children.

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CNN Staffer Charged with Enticing Women and Their Underage Daughters to Engage in Sexual Activity

A CNN employee was charged Friday on three counts that he used a facility of interstate commerce to abuse underage girls.

Officials said a grand jury in Vermont indicted 44-year-old Stamford, Connecticut resident John Griffin of attempting to entice the girls to engage in sexual activity. He appeared in New Haven federal court via Zoom, where Judge Robert Spector said he would file an order requesting his transfer to Connecticut.

“According to the indictment, from April to July of 2020, Griffin utilized the messaging applications Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with people purporting to be parents of minor daughters, conveying to them, among other ideas, that a ‘woman is a woman regardless of her age,’ and that women should be sexually subservient and inferior to men,” according to the Department of Justice statement on the case.

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