Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Barcroft Media )

Law enforcement agencies across the country are raising alarms about the increasing trend of finding heroin laced with an extremely lethal elephant tranquilizer, called carfentanil, the Washington Post reports.

The drug is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and 100 times stronger than fentanyl, just two milligrams of which is lethal—that’s about one toss of a salt shaker. Carfentanil can be absorbed through the skin and just a puff from re-sealing a plastic bag can be lethal, raising risks for first-responders. Just a whiff can kill a drug-sniffing dog.

Though authorities are struggling to identify it in overdose cases—and sometimes not trying due to the health risks—carfentanil has been linked to dramatic increases in overdoses, which were already at alarming levels amid the nationwide opioid epidemic.

Enlarge / China's first domestically-developed aircraft carrier at its launching ceremony at Dalian Port on April 26, 2017. (credit: Getty Images/ VCG)

On August 26, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) launched its first domestically constructed aircraft carrier from a shipyard in Dailan. The as-yet-unnamed carrier still requires much more additional work before it joins PLAN's fleet. But the ship's construction began less than five years ago (in November of 2012), and it only moved into full dry-dock construction in 2015. And China appears poised to churn out additional new aircraft carriers even faster based upon the experience acquired in this first homegrown carrier project.

In March, Zhu Chenghu, a professor at China's National Defense University, told China Daily, "China launching its first domestically designed aircraft carrier is a monumental step toward building a world-class navy. The valuable lessons learned from building a carrier from scratch will help China build more carriers faster in the future and enable them to reach combat readiness quicker."

For the sake of comparison, the US Navy's newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, began construction in 2009, and launched in 2013; it is still undergoing outfitting and no commissioning date has yet been set. While the Ford is certainly a more complicated and much larger vessel than the new Chinese carrier, the US has been building aircraft carriers since World War II. China's only previous experience with aircraft carriers comes from work on the PLAN's first carrier, the CNS Liaoning—the rebuilt former Soviet ship that China purchased from Ukraine in the mid-1990s. It took nearly 16 years to complete the Liaoning, which was purchased under somewhat shady circumstances.

Enlarge (credit: The IT Crowd / BBC)

Something disturbing has been happening to Google's advertising algorithms. These are the programs responsible for placing ads in appropriate contexts; serving up travel-related ads to people searching for hotels or music-related ads to people watching the latest Beyoncé video. But in the UK, government ads for the Royal Navy, the Home Office, and Transport for London recently ran before YouTube videos featuring Holocaust-denying pastor Steven Anderson, who enthusiastically endorsed the man who killed 49 people in Florida's gay nightclub Pulse. According to the UK government, its taxpayer-sponsored ads also ran on videos from "rape apologists" and on white supremacist speeches from David Duke.

Google's business immediately took a hit: prominent European ad agencies cut ties with the company, while AT&T and Verizon cut all video ad buys. Acknowledging the gravity of the problem, Google assured advertisers and users that it would make sure no ads ran alongside "upsetting-offensive" content. The company said it was unleashing its army of over 10,000 raters, people who work around the clock to make sure Google's algorithms don't return results that are unhelpful, offensive, or downright horrific.

Who are these raters? They're carefully trained and tested staff who can spend 40 hours per week logged into a system called Raterhub, which is owned and operated by Google. Every day, the raters complete dozens of short but exacting tasks that produce invaluable data about the usefulness of Google's ever-changing algorithms. They contribute significantly to several Google and Android projects, from search and voice recognition to photos and personalization features.