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Thursday, August 06, 2020

US and Beirut Tragedies - AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All

He Predicted Trump’s Win in 2016. Now He’s Ready to Call 2020.

Most historians just study the past. But Allan Lichtman has successfully predicted the future.


The deadly Beirut blast that killed more than 100 peoplehas driven fresh calls for a large ammonium nitrate stockpile and plant in Newcastle, storing up to four times the amount reportedly detonated in the blast, to be relocated away from residents.




Hezbollah kept three metric tons of ammonium nitrate, the explosive thought to be behind the mega blast in Beirut this week, in a storehouse in London, until MI5 and the London Metropolitan Police found it in 2015.

Hezbollah stockpiled chemical behind Beirut blast  ...
· The Beirut explosion took place at a warehouse that held 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate ...

The authorities were fully aware of the risk: they had been writing to each other over the years, discussing various options. But nothing was done, the condition of the material in warehouse “hangar 12” continued to deteriorate, and then came the devastating explosion killing more than a hundred people and injuring 4,000 – a blast so powerful that it was felt in Cyprus 120 miles away.

Beirut explosion: the disaster was exceptional but events leading up to it were not – researchers

HOMICIDAL NEGLIGENCE: Part of preventing disasters such as what has happened in Beirut means strengthening port management and addressing smuggling and corruption.

UGH:  Beirut explosion: at least 78 dead and 4,000 wounded, says Lebanon health ministry.

UPDATE:  What just blew up in Beirut?


Four legs good two legs bad, private good public bad

By Noel Turnbull | On 3 August 2020
For decades there has been a relentless chorus – rather like Orwell’s four legs good two legs bad – conditioning us to believe that private is good and public is bad.

Like the pigs in Animal Farm we have been subjected to a messaging campaign which promoted what true believers and beneficiaries claimed was a deep economic reality while actually justifying de-regulation and the devastation of public sector staffing and expertise.

Three recent examples – aged care homes and vocational educational training and the outsourcing of security staff at Victorian quarantine hotels – illustrate what is actually an economy wide problem.


A similar pattern to the aged care situation emerged with vocational training as an August 2018 paper – VET FEE- HELP: What went wrong? – by University of Melbourne’s Francesco Saccaro and Robyn Wright shows.


The Australian Federal Police raided the house of a Labor MP's staffer because it believed he was collaborating with the Chinese government's leading spy agency to influence NSW politics.

Documents filed in the High Court reveal for the first time the basis for the raids on the home and business of John Zhang, a part-time staffer to suspended state Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane.


Povidone‐iodine gargle as a prophylactic intervention to interrupt the transmission of SARS‐CoV‐2 Oral Diseases



Graphic Trends 






AMONG the most vexing questions to arise in public service disciplinary proceedings is whether or not out of hours behaviour can constitute a breach of the APS Code of Conduct.


Wired: “When pundits and researchers tried to guess what sort of manipulation campaigns might threaten the 2018 and 2020 elections, misleading AI-generated videos often topped the list. Though the tech was still emerging, its potential for abuse was so alarming that tech companies and academic labs prioritized working on, and funding, methods of detection. Social platforms developed special policies for posts containing “synthetic and manipulated media,” in hopes of striking the right balance between preserving free expression and deterring viral lies. But now, with about three months to go until Nov. 3, that wave of deepfaked moving images seems never to have broken. Instead, another form of AI-generated media is making headlines, one that is harder to detect and yet much more likely to become a pervasive force on the internet: Deepfake text. Last month brought the introduction of GPT-3, the next frontier of generative writing: an AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences. As its output becomes ever more difficult to distinguish from text produced by humans, one can imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content we see on the internet is produced by machines. If this were to happen, how would it change the way that we react to the content that surrounds us?…

New report calls for creation of public bank through Australia Post

RESET: It has examples of banking services offered through postal networks in other countries, and suggests business models and funding options for creating a PostBank in Australia.

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