GRAND
JUNCTION, Colo., Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/
— Today Willow.ai,
an industry-leading next generation artificial intelligence firm with a
proprietary AI called Willow, announces that it is strategically partnering
with Qube, the leader in all-in-one IT as a System® infrastructure solutions,
to deliver an optimized enterprise ready end-to-end hardware plus artificial
intelligence solution that arrives ready to use immediately.
According to a recent Appen report, nearly 75% of
businesses now consider AI critical to their success yet over half of the
respondents feel that their company is behind on their AI journey, suggesting a
critical gap exists between the strategic need and the ability to execute. “This
partnership addresses this gap by combining WillowAI’s powerful proprietary
artificial intelligence solutions with Qube’s single integrated hardware
component that enables enterprises to utilize AI right out-of-the-box”,
explains Brian K. Kennedy, CEO, WillowAI. “We
are especially pleased to partner with Qube, our new combined offering will
provide rapid organizational transformation through the power of AI at an
affordable price.”
Qube delivers a complete pre-configured enterprise
technology infrastructure,” adds Robert
Mueller, CEO, Qube, “This partnership will help companies
recognize the benefits of AI right away. Businesses will now be able to
seamlessly roll out enterprise AI on a highly scalable infrastructure and be
one step closer to transforming into their organizations into fully functional
intelligent enterprises.”
About Willow.ai™Willow.ai provides the next generation of artificial intelligence solutions
by creating private customized business neural networks that sync people with
AI. Its proprietary pre-trained artificial intelligence solution called
Willow fuses advanced intelligence with subject matter experts to develop
end-to-end business solutions that empower organizations to rapidly scale
revenues, cut costs, automate operations, and optimized results. To learn more,
visit www.Willow.ai
About Qube®
Qube architects cloud ready industry-specific infrastructures that provide
long-term sustained value and ensure optimal synergy of an organization. The
company’s pre-configured scalable environments adapt to changing requirements
and automatically update with new capabilities to ensure secure centralized
management. The purpose-built architecture arrives plug and play,
dramatically reducing integration costs and implementation time. For
more information, please visit www.Qube.tech
MELBOURNE,
Australia, August 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― Following
communist China’s lead, Australian police are turning to drones to enforce
coronavirus lockdown regulations and control the population.
7News Melbourne reported Monday that the
Victoria state police are preparing to use drones to catch people who show
their faces in public uncovered by masks, to capture the license plates of
drivers who travel more than 5 kilometres (3.1 miles), and to make sure that
children’s skateboarding parks and playgrounds are empty.
These drones can fly to a height of 7 kilometres
(4.3 miles) and take a clear photograph of a license plate from 500m (.3 miles)
away.
Australian media has also reported
that Victoria
police had asked the Australian armed forces for military drones but were
refused.
The deputy police commissioner for the state of
Victoria defended the use of drones to spy on public spaces like beaches.
“We were getting reports … in that warmer weather
period of lots of people congregating on the beaches in these populated areas,”
said Rick Nugent.
“A drone provides that capability to actually provide that without deploying
all these police to all of the areas.”
Victoria is not the first place where police have
used drones to ensure compliance with state coronavirus measures. A chilling video posted
to Twitter in January by the Chinese government-controlled Global Times showed
an elderly lady in Inner Mongolia staring up in astonishment at a drone
outfitted with a loudspeaker. A voice speaking through the contraption shouted
at her to go home and to wash her hands, recording her reactions throughout. In
the United Kingdom, a police drone video was published in March
to shame hikers in England’s Peak District. Also in March, the Financial Times reported
that a California police department was also using drones to enforce the
lockdown.
Some privacy-minded citizens are fighting back
against lockdown enforcement by drones. The Peak District drone footage
infuriated many in the UK and led to accusations of “nanny
policing.” Big Brother Watch’s Silkie Carlo complained that
drones were an “extreme, militaristic” form of surveillance.
“We’ve seen too many examples of police using them
aggressively in place of measured public health communications,” she said.
“Police using drones to surveil and bark orders at
members of the public is usually excessive and counterproductive. Parliament
should introduce stronger safeguards to circumscribe their use.”
In May, a French High Court sided with civil rights
activists “La Quadrature du Net” and the Human Rights League against Paris
police when it ruled that the use of
drones to enforce coronavirus lockdown rules was a violation of privacy. The
ruling made it illegal for French police to use low-flying drones equipped with
cameras to identify people.
China expert Steven Mosher told LifeSiteNews that
although anyone can turn off personal devices that collect information,
no one has that power over drones.
“Drone surveillance from the sky cannot be turned
off,” he noted. “It strips away another level of privacy that people have
enjoyed since time immemorial. The pandemic is being used to justify
violations of privacy that people would never tolerate in normal times.”
In recent months, scientists have argued that
people are less likely to become infected with coronavirus outdoors. Currently
in Britain, people are allowed to stay outdoors as long as they like, and both
government and health authorities are focusing now on fighting obesity as
a method of combating COVID-19 related illness.
A Michigan college is requiring students to download a phone application that tracks their location and private health data at all times in an attempt to protect them from the coronavirus.
Albion College, located in Albion, Mich., is one of the first schools in the country to tackle contact tracing. The school is working to create a “COVID-bubble” on campus, and asking students stay within the school’s 4.5-mile perimeter for the entire semester; if a student leaves campus, the app will notify the administration, and the student could be temporarily suspended.
The move comes as universities grapple with how to reopen safely amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Several schools including Harvard University have shut down their campuses entirely, while the University of California system will provide the majority of classes online with a selection of hybrid options. Other schools, such as Boston University, are resuming in-person learning with masks and social distancing guidelines alongside virtual learning supplements for those who don’t feel comfortable returning.
Albion’s reopening plan has sparked blowback from students and parents who are expressing concern about what they view as an invasion of privacy. A father of an Albion student said that he is upset that he must choose between keeping his daughter home from school or signing off on a university-sanctioned “invasion of privacy.”
“The school wants my daughter to sign a form consenting to specimen collection and lab testing,” he told the Washington Free Beacon on condition of anonymity. “I have a ton of concern with that…. Why is the state of Michigan’s contact tracing not enough?”
Though students are required to remain on campus, professors and administrators are not. When asked about this potential loophole in its “COVID-bubble,” the school declined to comment.
Rising senior Andrew Arszulowicz said that he is upset with both the mandatory use of the app and the manner in which students are being treated. “I feel like I am being treated like a five-year-old that cannot be trusted to follow rules,” Arszulowicz told the Free Beacon. “If the school believes masks work … why are we not allowed to leave if they work? It does not make sense to me.”
Albion is planning to offer in-person learning only, and students who refuse to comply with the contact-tracing program will be forced to defer for a semester or a full school year.
Secret History of Khazarian Mafia and its evil plan to hijack the whole world now revealed for first time. By Preston
James, Ph.D – March 8, 2015
Note: The history of the Khazarians, specifically the Khazarian Mafia (KM), the World’s largest Organized Crime
Syndicate that the Khazarian oligarchy morphed into by their deployment of Babylonian Money-Magick, has been
nearly completely excised from the history books.
The present-day KM knows that it cannot operate or exist without abject secrecy, and therefore has spent a lot of
money having its history excised from the history books in order to prevent citizens of the World from learning about
its “Evil beyond imagination”, that empowers this World’s largest Organized Crime Cabal.
The authors of this article have done their best to resurrect this lost, secret history of the Khazarians and their large
International Organized Crime Syndicate, best referred to as the Khazarian Mafia (KM) and make this history
available to the World via the Internet, which is the new Gutenberg Press.
It has been exceedingly difficult to reconstruct this hidden secret history of the KM, so please excuse any minor
inaccuracies or errors which are unintentional and are due to the difficulty in digging out the true history of Khazaria
and its mafia. We have done the best we can to reconstruct it.
Rising COVID-19 infection rates pose a threat to global tourism.
A new app acts as a health passport for travellers who are virus-free.
Using blockchain technology, it provides an encrypted record of test results.
Its creators say it could allow healthy travellers to avoid quarantine.
The app could also allow sports and entertainment venues to reopen safely, as well as the global conference and exhibition industry.
Thousands of summer holidays are now up in the air, following a series of COVID-19 flare-ups around the world, with trips cancelled and travellers forced to quarantine when they return home.
Now, a new health passport app promises to restore confidence to the travel industry, which has been badly hit by the pandemic. Global tourism shrank by 97% in April, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
CovidPass is the brainchild of one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, Mustapha Mokass. It also involves other YGLs across 5 continents, including Muna AbuSulayman and Peggy Liu. CovidPass uses blockchain technology to store encrypted data from individual blood tests, allowing users to prove that they have tested negative for COVID-19.
Unlike contact tracing apps, CovidPass will not track users’ movements. Non-mandatory contact tracing apps have met with only limited success so far due to privacy concerns.
Germany, regarded as one of the most successful nations in rolling out a voluntary app, currently has only 16 million users out of 83 million citizens. Experts say at least half the population needs to use a contact tracing app to make it effective in fighting the virus.
Meanwhile, governments are faced with a variety of different testing regimes to validate the health of travellers. “This isn’t enough to reassure tourists or health authorities”, says Mokass.
Mokass hopes his app, which is launching in September, will become a standardized solution for airlines, airports and border agencies, and eliminate quarantine for healthy travellers. CovidPass could also allow hotels, cinemas, theatres, sporting and concert venues to reopen safely.
CovidPass commits to mandatory carbon offsetting for each flight passenger, to preserve the environmental benefits of reduced air travel during the crisis.
Tulsa
Innovation Labs Looking to Create the Nation’s Most Inclusive Tech Community –
July 30, 2020
Staci Aaenson-Fletcher, a Tulsan previously working
as an accountant, recently took a career turn. “I was working in an accounting
job with a large corporation — great benefits and culture,” she says, but there
was a catch. “With the work experience I had, I was pretty capped in my salary.
I was going to have to be a traveling regional manager,” Aaenson-Fletcher says,
if she wanted to earn more. “But I want to stay local and be with my family.”
Instead, in January of this year,
Aaenson-Fletcher joined the first cohort of students from the newly opened
Tulsa campus of the Holberton School, a San Francisco-based software
engineering academy. The Tulsa campus is one part of the Tulsa
Innovation Labs, an initiative that has set out to make Tulsa not
only the nation’s newest tech hub, but its most inclusive as well.
The lab is an initiative of the Tulsa-based George
Kaiser Family Foundation, which seeks to end intergenerational
poverty in its city. By working with McKinsey & Company to analyze the
areas of opportunity in the city, the initiative identified five focus areas
that will anchor its efforts: virtual health, energy technology, and drones, as
well as cybersecurity and data analytics.
“We landed on these five in particular because they
scored highly in terms of impact, feasibility, and inclusivity. Together they
represent an interconnected set of opportunities to transform Tulsa into a tech
hub,” says Nicholas Lalla, the co-founder and managing director of Tulsa Innovation
Labs.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation is investing
$50 million in Tulsa Innovation Labs to create local growth in these
specific areas and take a diversity-focused approach along the way.
One way the lab has set out to spark this growth is
through its partnership with Holberton. Once the school reaches its intended
scale, the
plan is for a diverse crop of 500 software students to graduate from it each
year.
Aaenson-Fletcher’s inaugural cohort is a group of 25 people between the ages of
19 and 55, with backgrounds ranging from welders and customer representatives
to rock climbers and musicians. Half of the group are women or people of color.
“Having diverse backgrounds and experiences in the
workplace makes for better business decisions, more responsive products, and a
more inclusive ecosystem,” Libby Wuller, executive director of Holberton
School in Tulsa, said in a press release.
To help foster that diverse workforce, Holberton
offers a living assistance program so students can afford to go to school full
time and also pay their bills. Holberton also offers a deferred tuition model,
meaning that graduates don’t have to pay for the program until they graduate
and earn at least $40,000, at which point they’ll start making monthly payments
to the school. The intention of these programs is “to create pathways to the
software engineering profession regardless of an individual’s circumstances,”
Wuller added.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation is currently
offering assistance with tuition repayment, as well. “If I get a job after
graduation, GKFF will pay a portion of that monthly payment as long as I stay
in Tulsa,”
says Aaenson-Fletcher.
In terms of inclusivity, “it’s obviously the right
thing to do and it’s mission-aligned to GKFF,” says Lalla. “Especially during
the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, we recognize that not all Tulsa
neighborhoods have had access to the same opportunities. We’ve built
inclusivity in through research and analytics. We prioritized looking at what
share of jobs are accessible with associate degrees or certifications and built
that in to land on our top five [focus areas.]”
Clay Holk, the senior policy advisor for small
business, entrepreneurship and economic innovation for the City of Tulsa, sees
Tulsa Innovation Labs as being a big piece of the economic diversification
puzzle the city is trying to piece together.
“We’ve had an interesting experience here, not just
with COVID but longer-term declines in energy prices given how much of our
local economy is tied to the oil and gas industry,” he says. “Tulsa has been
through a lot of booms and busts. When we’re building out these [tech]
ecosystems, the idea is that some things are booming while others are busting, but altogether
we’re continually rising.”
Holk is already impressed with Tulsa Innovation
Labs simply for their sharing of the results of the McKinsey analysis — a
source of subject matter information that is “hard to replicate [in] the public
sector” — but he realizes that the city has to be accountable to all of its
nearly 400,000 residents.
“Something we have to think about a lot actually
[are]
the distributional consequences of taking part in something like this,”
he says. “We have to be thinking about the second and third order effects… You
can look at housing prices in [larger] cities and see those second and third
order effects,” while adding that those problems are a long way off for Tulsa
at the moment.
Right now, he sees opportunities for the city’s low
cost of living as a draw for the remote workforce that has grown in the wake of
COVID-19. “People can be wherever they want to be and that’s a very interesting
opportunity for us.”
While
the world awaits the results of large clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccines,
experts say the data so far suggest one important possibility: The vaccines may
carry a bit of a kick.
In vaccine parlance, they appear to be “reactogenic,”
meaning they have induced short-term discomfort in a percentage of the people
who have received them in clinical trials. This kind of discomfort includes
headache, sore arms, fatigue, chills, and fever.
As long as the side effects of eventual Covid-19
vaccines are transient and not severe, these would not be sources of alarm
— in fact, they may be signals of an immune system lurching into gear.
It’s a simple fact that some vaccines are more unpleasant to take than others.
Think about the pain of a tetanus shot, for instance.
But experts say it makes sense to prepare people
now for the possibility that Covid-19 vaccines may be reactogenic.
“I think one of the things we’re going to have to
realize is that all of these vaccines are going to be reactogenic…. They’re all
going to be associated with reactions,” said Kathryn Edwards, scientific
director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program in Nashville, Tenn.
“I think if you were to point out that, look, this
is going to be a little bit painful, but there’s an end to it, and there’s a
greater good to be gained here, I think that that’s probably worthwhile,”
agreed Brian Southwell, senior director of the science in the public sphere
program at the Center for Communication Science at RTI International, a think tank
located in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
At least two manufacturers, Cambridge, Mass.-based
Moderna and CanSino, a Chinese vaccine maker, stopped testing the highest doses
of their Covid-19 vaccines because of the number of severe adverse events
recorded among participants in their clinical trials.
Ian Haydon, one
of the volunteers who received the highest dose in the Moderna Phase 1 clinical
trial, ended up seeking medical care after he spiked a fever of 103 Fahrenheit
12 hours after getting a second dose of the vaccine. (Most Covid-19 vaccines
will likely require two doses to work.)
The side effects are being seen across a number of
different vaccines, made in different ways. This does not appear to be a
problem linked to a specific type of Covid-19 vaccine.
The Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine, which
uses a harmless-to-humans virus that infects chimpanzees as its backbone, saw
adverse events reported by 60% of recipients
in its early phase trial, reported last week in the journal The Lancet. Half of
patients who got the highest dose of
the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — which like Moderna’s is a messenger RNA vaccine
— reported side effects.
Even after abandoning study of its highest dose,
CanSino saw nearly three-quarters of the people in the vaccine arms in its
Phase 2 trial report side effects, though none was severe. The CanSino vaccine
uses a human adenovirus as its backbone.
Getting people prepared for the fact that the
Covid-19 vaccines may be reactogenic lets them know what to expect when vaccine
becomes available, said Kathleen Neuzil, director of the Center for Vaccine
Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“As with many vaccines, we have found that if we
let people know what to expect, then they have fewer concerns if side effects
happen,” Neuzil said.
There’s plenty of evidence that people will accept
reactogenic vaccines — will virtually rush to get them — if they are concerned
enough about the condition the vaccine is designed to prevent.
Edwards said GSK’s shingles vaccine, Shingrix,
which reportedly makes people feel pretty miserable for a short period after
injection, is a perfect example. Despite the possibility of discomfort, from the
moment the vaccine was brought to market, the company could not keep up with
the crush of demand for it. (GSK recently announced the vaccine was no longer
in short supply.)
Most people know someone who has had shingles;
they’ve heard how painful the condition — a reactivation of latent varicella
virus, a late side-effect of chickenpox infection — is for people who develop
it.
But the behavior of many Americans suggests they
don’t see Covid-19 as a particular threat, with many resisting wearing masks
and following the social distancing recommendations that have successfully
driven down transmission in a number of other parts of the world.
A variety of polls suggest between half and 70% of
Americans plan to be vaccinated when Covid-19 vaccines become available,
figures that raise concerns in some quarters about the ability of vaccines to
trigger herd immunity in the U.S. population.
Noel Brewer, a professor of health behavior at the
University of North Carolina, isn’t worried at this point about those polling
numbers. At present, it’s not even clear if vaccines will work, he said, which
means pollsters are asking people about hypothetical decisions they may have to
make at some unknown point in the future.
“It’s all just a bunch of question marks,” said
Brewer, who actually thinks the polling numbers look pretty good under the
circumstances. “Once folks are faced with a specific vaccine and a particular
effectiveness profile and so on, they can then make a decision based on a
thing, as opposed to an idea of a thing.”
For most people right now, Covid-19 is invisible
“unless you are in an ICU,” he said. “For most of us every day, we don’t see
people who are really sick.”
Brewer, who is on a World Health Organization
subcommittee on Covid-19 vaccine safety, said people do expect some discomfort
from getting vaccinated.
“The real question is: How much discomfort compared
to what other things they may be facing? So, if you’re 70 years old and you
can’t leave your house at all, you’re going to have one calculus as compared to
if you’re someone who’s 20 years old,” he said.
Conditions at the time vaccine becomes ready for
use will be a big influencing factor when the public is offered vaccines, said
Southwell. In the meantime, though, he thinks it is critical to communicate
with the public about issues like how vaccines are made and that the Covid-19
vaccines may be reactogenic.
People are paying attention to these issues, he
said, arguing that members of public has a greater capacity to understand than
they are generally given credit for.
“There might be a much greater case for acceptance
if we do our work in building trust now and laying the groundwork now,” said
Southwell. “But we’re not necessarily as focused on that as we could be.”
