“CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to the subcontractor’s company network,” said an agency statement. The breach comes weeks after a report said Perceptics, a government contractor, which claims to be the “sole provider” of license plate readers at U.S. land borders, was breached and its data was dumped on the dark web. It remains unclear exactly what kind of photos were taken, such as if the images were collected directly from CBP officers by visitors entering the U.S. or part of the agency’s rollout of facial recognition technology at U.S. airports.

The primary industries mentioned in these Chinese articles are linked to the defense industry, but rare earths are used in many other critical sectors including energy (think oil refining, electric vehicles and wind turbines). These issues of supply threats, international relations, security and the related analysis is has been intensely analyzed and addressed in in energy policy—especially in relation to oil. What has become clear over decades of energy security analysis is that a reliance solely on import dependence does not account for the economic impacts of energy supply, nor many other factors, and thus is only one of many elements that need be considered for robust decision making in energy security and resilience.

Hadley Wickham
(Courtesy of Hadley Wickham)

I help teach a data science class at Stanford, and I was just looking through this dataset on emergency room visits in the United States. Wickham: Learn a little bit of R and basic data analysis skills. Wickham: One of the challenges of data is that if you can quantify something precisely, people interpret it as being more “truthy.”

A program may optionally contain constant inputs, so a full program has the form:

An alchemist program contains of the rules and a universe containing simple atoms. Then that rule is not applicable because it requires the universe to contain no atom of type . The original implementation allows multiple and rules, the evaluation of these happens as follows:

A simple example shall illustrate this:

After matching the first rule there will be one -atom and two -atom, then the next rule will be applied:

So the above program will output

The following code will output to stdout:

Using the implicit -atom, we can rewrite the above program as:

The following is a truth-machine:

The following program illustrates how more complicated control-flow with 0-rules can be achieved.

ZeroCater has successfully launched our core product, Managed Catering, into 6 markets and are excited to offer Snacks + Beverages to clients in San Francisco. With our $12M in Series B funding, we plan to expand Snacks and Catering nationally to new enterprise and Fortune 500 clients. ZeroCater is changing a $169 billion industry and continues to sustain year over year growth.

Out there is a whole world of possibilities, not only in editorial cartooning, still or animated, but also in new fields like on-stage illustrated presentations and long-form comics reportage – of which I have been a proponent for the last 25 years. (I’m happy, by the way, to have opened the door for the genre at the NYT with the “Inside Death Row“ series in 2016. The following year, another series about Syrian refugees by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan got the NYT a Pulitzer prize.)

A subcontractor with the US Customs and Border Protection agency has suffered a data breach that has exposed the photos of travelers and vehicles traveling in and out of the United States. The database of identifying photos had been transferred to a CBP subcontractor’s company network without the US agency’s authorization or knowledge, CBP explained. Read CBP’s full statement below:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Statement
Unauthorized Access of CBP Data
June 10, 2019

On May 31, 2019, CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to the subcontractor’s company network.

Records from the time throughout the world were checked but nothing appeared viable until the summer of 2014, when PhD student Alvaro Guevara-Murua and Dr Caroline Williams of the University of Bristol discovered an account of atmospheric events consistent with such an event by Colombian scientist Francisco José de Caldas. Apart from the occasional sighting by European explorers, most of the reporting on volcanic activity, such as that in the Rabaul area, which has had VEI 6 eruptions, went back only to the mid-19th century. It is known that the Chilean Putana volcano also had a major eruption around this time with an approximate date of 1810 (with a 10-year margin of error).

The world’s seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of nearly 3 species a year since 1900 ― which is up to 500 times higher than would be expected as a result of natural forces alone, according to the largest survey yet of plant extinctions. Some plant species are “functionally extinct”, he notes, and are present only in botanical gardens or in such small numbers in the wild that researchers don’t expect the population to survive. And few researchers have the money or time to launch a comprehensive effort to find a plant species that they think might have gone extinct.

In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs — WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow — with a single, grandiose mission: “to elevate the world’s consciousness.” As Neumann recently told a person close to the company, he believes that WeWork’s size and scale could put it in a position to help deal with some of the world’s largest problems, like the refugee crisis, saying, “I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me.” Neumann and McKelvey didn’t invent the idea of “co-working” — the New York Times had already devoted an entire article to the concept and the many such spaces that had opened in recent years — but the pair realized there was money to be made from the recession.