Here’s Everything You Missed From Tesla’s Annual Shareholder Meeting – Futurism

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In BriefTesla's annual shareholders meeting took place yesterday, andfor many, the highlight of the event was CEO Elon Musk taking thestage. In addition to answering questions from Twitter, hedelivered updates on several forthcoming Tesla projects. An Annual Update

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is a showman, perhaps on par withApples Steve Jobs when it comes to big reveals during public appearances.

His usual platform is Teslas annual shareholder meeting, but yesterday, he didnt deliver much by way of reveals. Still, Musk didpaint the general direction Tesla would be taking in the next several months while addressing the shareholders and responding to questions from Twitter.

If you missed the livestream of the presentation, dont fret. Heres everythingyou need to know from it.

Musk mentioned three upcoming vehicles that Tesla has been working on: the Model 3, the Model Y, and an electric semi truck (that last ones so exciting it deserved an article all to itself).

The Model 3 is expected to be releasedby the end of the month, andMusk emphasized the vehicles relative simplicity. I should say that weve kept the initial configurations of the Model 3 very simple, said the CEO. A big mistake we made with the X, which is primarily my responsibility there was way too much complexity right at the beginning. That was very foolish.

Attendees were then treated toa first look at the Model Y, Teslas electric crossover SUV. Theimage is decidedly lacking in detail, so we still have very little to go on with this model, but we do know that its slated for a 2019 release and would be built on a completely new platform. In fact, Tesla would build an entirely new factory for its production.

Oh, and an electric plane somewhere down the road is also not inconceivable, according to Musk.

Musk also offered updates on Teslas Autopilot, claiming that the company will be rolling out improvements to the system for its Hardware 2 vehicles. Since its split with Mobileye the Israeli software maker responsible for the earlier versions of Teslas self-driving system Tesla has been developing its own semi-autonomous software. While some consumers have had some issues with the autonomous system in Teslas new vehicles, Musk said that its now almost better than the Mobileye version.

Usually, after Musk points out a problem, he shares a solution for it(see: traffic and the Boring Company). At yesterdays meeting, Musk shared his criticisms of todays music algorithms and playlist quality, and in typical Musk fashion, he plans to do something about it. He says Tesla will release a music service or feature later this year, and its gonna be the music you want to listen to.

After being asked about how he spends his time, Musk made reference to his late-night tweets. He admitted that he would sometimes go crazy on Twitter, but he blames it on music, wine, and a sedative. You know, [when] theres a little red wine, a vintage record player, some Ambien. Magic. Magic happens, he said, later echoing the sentiment (where else?) in a tweet.

Musk also explained that he generally spends 90 percent of his time working on Tesla and SpaceX, whiledividing therest betweenNeuralink (3 to 5 percent), the Boring Company (2 percent), and Open AI (less than 2 percent).

Like a true showman, Muskwas sure toinclude a cliffhanger in his presentation to keep the people wanting mroe. Theres a few other things I havent mentioned here. I just like, really recommend showing up for the semi truck unveiling, he said. Maybe theres a little more than were saying here. Maybe. Could be. Who knows?

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Here's Everything You Missed From Tesla's Annual Shareholder Meeting - Futurism

Mark Cuban Asserts That Bitcoin is Not Currency – Futurism

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In BriefMark Cuban has attacked Bitcoin on Twitter, claiming it is nota currency, it is a bubble, and that the whole system of valuationconcerning it is wrong. But is he right? Mark Cubans Twitterstorm

Mark Cuban has recently raised a series of criticisms of bitcoin on Twitter, which has resulted in the cryptocurrencys exchange rate dropping rapidly illustrating many of the issues with the currency that he discussed in the Tweet themselves.

Mark Cuban rose to wealth by selling his start-up businesses MicroSolutions (a PC company that he sold to CompuServe for $6 Million) and Broadcast.com (which transmitted sports games over the internet, and was subsequently sold to Yahoo for $5.7 Billion) in the 1990s, and rose to prominence by becoming owner of the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks.

Earlier today he took his opinions of Bitcoin toTwitter:

Cuban crucially differentiates between blockchain and Bitcoin: the former being a means of transaction that is more secure, transparent, and distributive, and the latter a cryptocurrency.

However, Cuban likens bitcoin to the religious worship of gold as an asset and describes it as a stock, which is fundamentally different from a currency currencies measure how much of an asset you have. This is why Cuban progresses to state I am not questioning value. Im questioning valuation.

Just because bitcoins exchange rate has reached thousands of dollars, this doesnt mean that anyone would be willing to give you thousands of dollars for your bitcoin. Currencies are universal measures of value in the country you operate which allows anyone to trade with anyone as part of a universal system of value. This is in contrast to assets which you can buy with that value system but not necessarily trade anywhere as easily.

Currencies, in order to operate in this way, need to be relatively stable which Cuban showed bitcoin was not due to the almost instant drop after his tweetstorm. To analogise: can you imagine the dollar, pound, or euro drastically dropping in a matter of hours just because of a few tweets?

On the surface, Bitcoin looks monumentally impressive: it has grown every year apart from 2014, has climbed 141 percent in value this year alone, even peaking at $2,900 this past week. However, the precise reason for this success is the reason for its potential failure it is too turbulent, too successful.

This means that while Bitcoin may seem extremely seductive it has been billed as, among other things, the ultimate investment and a universal currency we must be careful when investing in it (particularly because it is difficult to convert back into dollars), putting faith in it, and being overoptimistic about its potential.

Bitcoin is one particularly famous use of a potentially more promising and widely applicable system called blockchain, which has the potential to revolutionize everything from the music industry to sustainable development and even banking accountability.

According to many, it is blockchain, not bitcoin, that has the potential to revolutionize future transactions: If the internet bought us near instant digital communication, then the blockchain brings us near instant asset transfer, asset movement and security of data movement said Simon Taylor, the previous head of Barclays cryptocurrency division.

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Mark Cuban Asserts That Bitcoin is Not Currency - Futurism

New Research Shows That Cannabinoids Can Help Treat Leukemia – Futurism

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In Brief Researchers from St. George's, University of London have found that combining chemotherapy with cannabinoids can effectively treat leukemia. Though the tests were done in vitro, it showed that it could potentially lower the needed dose for chemo. Working in Tandem

Theres a growing literature of research showcasing the supposed health benefits of cannabis, specifically its active chemicals like cannabinoids. These have gone to cover various diseases, most notably brain-related ones such as epilepsy, Alzheimers, dementia, as well as heart problems and cancer. One study even claims that cannabis could potentially reverse aging. Now, researchers from St Georges, University of London have found cannabinoids to be effective in treating leukemia.

Specifically, the research involved using phytocannabinoids the naturally-occurring cannabinoids in the cannabis plant in tandem with chemotherapy. Phytocannabinoids possess anticancer activity when used alone, and a number have also been shown to combine favorably with each other in vitro in leukaemia cells to generate improved activity, according to a study published in the International Journal of Oncology.

Though the tests were done in the laboratory, the researchers are confident that combining phytocannabinoids with chemotherapy for leukemia patients could mean lower doses for the latter effectively lessening its side-effects.

As with most studies involving cannabis, its worth mentioning that its not possible to achieve the effects claimed by the study by recreational use of the drug. These extracts are highly concentrated and purified, so smoking marijuana will not have a similar effect, lead researcher Wai Liu said in a press release. But cannabinoids are a very exciting prospect in oncology, and studies such as ours serve to establish the best ways that they should be used to maximize a therapeutic effect.

With cancers continuing prevalence, research into potential treatments have become rather creative over the past years. Gene therapy is, perhaps, the most popular and other explore the use of nanoparticles. The strangest of these potential treatments is in an anti-cancer drug-delivery mechanism courtesy of sperm cells. At any rate, for a fight against one of the worlds deadliest diseases, we need all the help we could get.

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New Research Shows That Cannabinoids Can Help Treat Leukemia - Futurism

An AI Can Now Predict How Much Longer You’ll Live – Futurism

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In Brief Researchers at the University of Adelaide have developed an AI that can analyze CT scans to predict if a patient will die within five years with 69 percent accuracy. This system could eventually be used to save lives by providing doctors with a way to detect illnesses sooner. Predicting the Future

While many researchers are looking for ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) to extend human life, scientists at the University of Adelaidecreated an AI that could help them better understand death. The system they created predicts ifa person will die within five years after analyzingCT scans of their organs, and it was able to do sowith 69 percent accuracy a rate comparable to that of trained medical professionals.

The system makes use of thetechnique of deep learning, and it was tested using images taken from 48 patients, all over the age of 60. Its the first study to combine medical imaging and artificial intelligence, and the results have been published in Scientific Reports.

Instead of focusing on diagnosing diseases, the automated systems can predict medical outcomes in a way that doctors are not trained to do, by incorporating large volumes of data and detecting subtle patterns, explained lead authorLuke Oakden-Rayner in a university press release. This method of analysis can explore the combination of genetic and environmental risks better than genome testing alone,according to the researchers.

While the findings are only preliminary given the small sample size, the next stage will apply the AI to tens of thousands of cases.

While this study does focus on death, the most obvious and exciting consequence of it is how it could help preserve life. Our research opens new avenues for the application of artificial intelligence technology in medical image analysis, and could offer new hope for the early detection of serious illness, requiring specific medical interventions, said Oakden-Rayner. Because it encourages more precise treatment using firmer foundational data, the system has the potential to save many lives and provide patients with less intrusive healthcare.

An added benefit of this AI is its wide array of potential uses. Because medical imaging of internal organs is a fairly routine part of modern healthcare, the data is already plentiful. The system could be used to predict medical outcomes beyond just death, such as the potential for treatment complications, and it could work with any number of images, such as MRIs or X-rays, not just CT scans. Researchers will just need to adjustthe AItotheir specifications, andtheyll be able to obtain predictions quickly and cheaply.

AIsystems are becoming more and more prevalentin the healthcare industry.Deepmind is being usedto fight blindness in the United Kingdom, and IBM Watson is already as competent as human doctors at detecting cancer. It is in medicine, perhaps more than any other field, that we see AIs huge potential to help the human race.

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An AI Can Now Predict How Much Longer You'll Live - Futurism

President Trump Tells Evangelical Supporters: ‘We’re Under Siege’ – TIME

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Conference June 8, 2017 in Washington, DC. Alex WongGetty Images

(WASHINGTON) President Donald Trump sought comfort in the figurative embrace of his evangelical supporters Thursday as the FBI director he recently fired told Congress about their conversations. The president told a religious gathering that "we're under siege" but will emerge "bigger and better and stronger than ever."

Trump made no reference to James Comey in his remarks to the Faith and Freedom Coalition's annual gathering. But hours before the president's first public comments of the day, Comey told the Senate intelligence committee that Trump tried to get him to pledge loyalty and drop an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump abruptly fired Comey last month. Trump's attorney said the president never asked Comey to stop investigating anyone.

In his remarks to the conference, Trump pledged to always support the right of evangelicals to follow their faith, which some conservatives believe is under attack by government.

"We will always support our evangelical community and defend your right and the right of all Americans to follow and to live by the teachings of their faith," the president told more than 1,000 activists meeting at a hotel across town from Capitol Hill, the scene of Comey's nationally televised testimony.

"And as you know, we're under siege, you understand that. But we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever. You watch," Trump said. "You fought hard for me and now I'm fighting hard for all of you."

Trump spoke about his actions to safeguard religious freedom and continued, for the second straight day, to label congressional Democrats as "obstructionists" who are blocking his agenda. Yet it is differences of opinion among Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, that are standing in the way of what Trump wants to do on health care and other issues.

Trump mentioned his nomination of federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which pleased Christian conservatives. He also has directed the IRS to ease up on using a rarely enforced rule barring partisan political activity by churches and tax-exempt organizations.

"As long as I'm president, no one is going to stop you from practicing your faith or preaching what is in your heart," he said.

Trump won an overwhelming 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in the November election. A recent Pew Research Center survey marking his first 100 days in office found three-fourths of white evangelicals approved of his performance as president. Thirty-nine percent of the general public held the same view.

Trump said restoring freedom also meant repealing and replacing the health care law enacted in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama, saying high deductibles and premiums have turned it into a "catastrophe." But a replacement health care bill has yet to clear Congress despite seven years of pledges by Republicans to scrap the law and start over, and despite the fact that the GOP has full control of the White House and Congress.

The Republican-controlled House passed a bill with the bare minimum of GOP votes and none from Democrats. Senate Republicans are working on their version of the bill, but are divided about the approach.

Trump overlooked the intraparty squabbles and blamed Democrats. He said Democrats have gone so far to the left in terms of opposing him that "they're bad right now for the country." Democrats oppose dismantling Obama's health law.

The president urged the audience to help send more Republicans to Congress in next year's midterm elections, noting the GOP has just a 52-48 edge in the Senate and a slim advantage in the House.

"We have to build those numbers up because we're just not going to get votes" from Democrats, he said. "Sadly, we're going to have to do it as Republicans because we're not going to get any Democrat votes and that's a very, very sad, sad thing."

Trump ignored the fact that three Democratic senators voted to put Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

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President Trump Tells Evangelical Supporters: 'We're Under Siege' - TIME

Myanmar protest for journalistic freedom underway – Christian Science Monitor

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June 8, 2017 Yangon, MyanmarMyanmar journalists sporting "Freedom of the Press" armbands gathered on Thursday to campaign against a law they say curbs free speech, at the start of a trial of two journalists who the Army is suing for defamation over a satirical article.

The rally by more than 100 reporters in the rain outside a court in Yangon was the first significant show of opposition to the telecommunications law, introduced in 2013, that bans the use of the telecoms network to "extort, threaten, obstruct, defame, disturb, inappropriately influence, or intimidate."

Despite pressure from human rights monitors and Western diplomats, the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, which took power amid high hopes for democratic reform in 2016, after decades of hardline military rule, has retained the law.

The journalists said they were dismayed by the recent arrests of social media users whose posts were deemed distasteful, as well as of journalists critical of the military.

"At first, they were suing people over news articles and now they are suing even over a satirical article, showing how they are restricting the media," said A Hla Lay Thuzar, one of the founders of the Protection Committee for Myanmar Journalists, which organized the rally.

She said that rather than staging a one-off protest, her group wants to launch a movement to raise public awareness of the issue and press the government to abolish the law.

The journalists on trial are the chief editor and a columnist of the Voice, one of Myanmar's largest dailies.

They were denied bail on the first day of their trial, meaning they may have to remain in custody.

"Obtaining bail is our right so we will keep fighting for it during next court dates until we get it," said Khing Maung Myint, who is representing the two journalists.

The telecommunications law was a main piece of legislation introduced by a semi-civilian administration of former generals which navigated Myanmar's transition from full military rule to the coming to power of Ms. Suu Kyi's government, from 2011 to 2016.

The protesting journalists said they would wear the armbands for the next 10 days to raise awareness about what they see as the threat to freedom of the press.

They are also planning to gather signatures for a petition to abolish the law, to be sent to Suu Kyi's office, the Army chief and parliament.

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Myanmar protest for journalistic freedom underway - Christian Science Monitor

It’s not the ‘Freedom Caucus.’ It’s the Billionaires’ Caucus. – The Hill (blog)

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The answer is simple: the Freedom Caucus is made up of 31 ultra-conservative members of Congress whose primary purpose is to defend the interests of the super-rich.

And they deserve a new name: the Billionaires Caucus.

The evidence for this new nomenclature spans the key issues up for debate in Washington this summer.

On TrumpCare, the Freedom Caucus forced amendments to eliminate protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions and requirements that made sure families who pay their insurance premiums actually get a basic package of services and care.They slashed funding to state governments and jacked up premiums for seniors.But they gave the green light to billions in tax breaks for the wealthiest members of our society.

Who benefitted? Only the billionaires.

The same is true for tax policy and the budget more broadly.

President Trump has major corporations and their CEOs salivating over a proposed tax overhaul that would dramatically reduce taxes for corporations and billionaires and actually increase taxes on working-class families.And when President Trump vowed in his budget proposal to cut safety net programs including food stamps, Medicaid, and public benefits by over $1 trillion, it was geared precisely at appeasing these legislators and their base.

The outcome of these tax and budget proposals is obvious: it would redistribute income from poor and working-class Americans up to the ultra-wealthy.On taxes and budgets, this caucus is putting points on the board -- for the billionaires.

And while these "freedom-loving" legislators claim to oppose virtually all forms of government regulation, theyre quite happy to support renewed discrimination and enormous government investments in controversial immigration policies and Trumps proposed border wall.

Aside from being a symbol of intolerance and division, Trumps wall is really a symbol of government largesse and waste.True libertarians would oppose it on these grounds, but these legislators support it.

Similarly, their legislation to make voting harder for communities of color, young people, and low-income people is an example of big government cutting off the rights of regular people.

Its clear that Caucus members need to deliver government policies that satisfy racialized anti-immigrant sentiments among the Republican base, in order to provide a smokescreen for their pro-billionaire tax and budget policies that hit working-class voters hard.

Nicknames in politics sometimes come from politicians themselves, but the more accurate ones come from savvy observers.

The Freedom Caucus is Orwellian double-speak.

From now on, lets call them these lapdogs of the ultra-rich what they are: the Billionaires Caucus.

The views expressed by this author are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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It's not the 'Freedom Caucus.' It's the Billionaires' Caucus. - The Hill (blog)

News poem: Greg Abbott can smell freedom – Houston Chronicle

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, "Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different. And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, "Once you cross the Travis County...

Earlier this week, Gov. Greg Abbott said to a group of rural Republicans, "Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different. And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It's the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas."

There's a lot that Abbott doesn't like about Austin, but one of his main complaints is that it's a sanctuary city, which is the inspiration for this poem. He and I have different ideas of what freedom means.

I have lived with an anxiety disorder for decades. It comes and goes, it has changed some, but it will always be a defining part of my personality and the way I experience life. I know it when I see it, and a lot of people are experiencing anxiety this year in this political climate.

I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of immigrant families -- citizens or undocumented -- who are anxious right now in Texas. Think about the children who know something is wrong, but don't fully understand what it is. I feel for them. I wish Greg Abbott could do the same.

'The Smell of Freedom'

When I was small, I was afraid. A square peg wedged into darkness, nothing clicked: No hand fit my hand, no calm could reach my timorous skin. So I hit myself nightly, giving myself bruises, soothing buttons to press the next day.

Children are eaten away by mystery. Shadows that aren't quite monsters look like people, smile like people, but have a secret plan to crack them open, send their yolk away.

And you would have them running like stray dogs as you sniff the air, shoot the sky, claim another star for your hat. But that smell is not freedom. It is fear burning hot in pockets. It is the sweat-drenched uniforms of people trying just to pass. It is a fire that you set as you burn your name across the state.

Gov. Abbott: Austin stinks and so does 'Sanctuary Sally' Austin American-Statesman

Sara Cress (@saracress) is a writer in Houston. For her poems and to buy her books see her website, Breaking Poems.

Bookmark Gray Matters and claim another star for your hat.

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

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News poem: Greg Abbott can smell freedom - Houston Chronicle

Gianforte to give $50000 to press freedom group after assaulting reporter – Politico (blog)

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Last month, Greg Gianforte was charged for assault by police in Montana after he allegedly "body-slammed" reporter Ben Jacobs. | AP Photo

Greg Gianforte, who was recently elected to fill a vacant Montana congressional seat, has agreed to donate $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists and issued a formal apology as part of a civil settlement with Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs.

Last month, Gianforte was charged for assault by police in Montana after he allegedly 'body slammed' Jacobs, who was attempting to ask Gianforte questions about the health care bill at a campaign event the day before the election.

I write to express my sincere apology for my conduct on the evening of May 24. My physical response to your legitimate question was unprofessional, unacceptable, and unlawful, Gianforte (R-Mont.) wrote in a letter. As both a candidate for office and a public official, I should be held to a high standard in my interactions with the press and the public. My treatment of you did not meet that standard.

Initially, Gianforte's spokesperson blamed Jacobs for the incident, calling him a "liberal journalist" who "aggressively shoved a recorder" in Gianforte's face and asking badgering questions.

"After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Greg's wrist, and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground. It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ," the spokesperson said at the time.

But soon Gianforte was charged with assault, won his election and publicly apologized. His letter on Wednesday makes clear that it was he, not Jacobs, who initiated the physical altercation.

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"Notwithstanding anyone's statements to the contrary, you did not initiate any physical contact with me, and I had no right to assault you," Gianforte wrote. "I am sorry for what I did and the unwanted notoriety this has created for you. I take full responsibility."

The altercation was one of a string of physical incidents recently between reporters and politicians or government officials, leading some to wonder whether statements from politicians (such as President Donald Trump) about the media had led to an acceptance of violence against journalists.

Gianforte said he understands "the critical role that journalists and the media play in our society" and that Jacobs' questions about healthcare policy were legitimate.

"You were doing your job," Gianforte wrote.

In a statement, Jacobs said he has accepted Gianforte's apology "and his willingness to take responsibility for his actions and statements."

"I hope the constructive resolution of this incident reinforces for all the importance of respecting the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and encourages more civil and thoughtful discourse in our country," he wrote.

Gianforte still faces criminal charges and is expected to appear in court later this month. If found guilty, he could be fined up to $500 or face a jail sentence of up to six months.

Hadas Gold is a reporter atPolitico.

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Gianforte to give $50000 to press freedom group after assaulting reporter - Politico (blog)

Israel’s commitment to press freedom questioned after journalist shot – The Jerusalem Post

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The Jerusalem Post
Israel's commitment to press freedom questioned after journalist shot
The Jerusalem Post
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel on Wednesday called into question Israel's commitment to protecting civilians and ensuring freedom of the press. The FPA's statement follows the wounding of an Associated Press photographer by an Israeli ...

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Israel's commitment to press freedom questioned after journalist shot - The Jerusalem Post

Insane 80s Star Wars Theory Claimed Obi-Wan Is a Jesus Clone – MovieWeb

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There's no shortage of fan theories when it comes to Star Wars, and it seems like today we are exposed to them more than ever thanks to various fan generated websites and blogs. But these fan theories are nothing new. And in fact, they're as old as the Star Wars universe. Who is Snoke, is he a wrinkled up Jar Jar Binks? Who are Rey's parents? Would all of the Ewoks and half of Endor been destroyed during the Ewok Holocaust when the Death Star was blown to smithereens? Lucasfilm Story Book creative executive Pablo Hidlago decided to share an old theory from 1980 to show just how absurd these conspiracy theories look through the lens of time.

Hidalgo started a thread on his own official Star Wars Twitter, sharing a bonkers Star Wars fan theory from a 1980 Fantastic Collectors Edition magazine that bravely proclaimed that Jedis are clones of Jesus. Luke and Darth Vader are clones created by the Jedi, aka the "Jesus Eugenics Development Institute" and Boba Fett is Luke's true father "Roberta." Apparently "Roberta" Fett was the other one that Yoda refers to in The Empire Strikes Back, which we know to be untrue thanks to The Return of the Jedi. Obi-Wan is a clone of Jesus Christ, did you know that?

The magazine attempts to answer the Who, What, Why, and Where about The Empire Strikes Back to set up Return of the Jedi and it pays particular attention to Boba Fett. Boba Fett has always been a fan favorite, but did you know that he was originally a she? Darth Vader lied to Luke about being his father and Boba Fett is the real father, check out the paternity test again, Maury. "Roberta" Fett was thought to be the "last survivor of a group of Commandoes the Jedis exterminated during the Clone Wars, so she could rightfully hold a grudge against all Jedis, including Skywalker. Removing her armor, she tricked Luke's father into falling in love with her, and led him to Vader's trap." Hopefully one day in about 20 years we can look back on all of conspiracies raised and see if they hold up as well as this one.

Star Wars has even gone on to earn its own religion, Jedism. Followers of Jedism use the Force as a guide to live life and have even tried to get Jedism to become an officially recognized religion. Jedism followers believe in peace, justice, love, learning, and benevolence. J.J. Abrams has even proclaimed that Star Wars is more than a movie franchise, that it's an actual religion because of how seriously people love it. But this theory from 1980 is just straight up hilarious. Sure the Force alludes to spirituality and a way of living life, but that's all. It's the classic hero's tale that's as old as storytelling itself.

I can't believe that I didn't know that Jedi is an actual acronym that stands for Jesus Eugenics Development Institute. That's some real imagination right there. Hidalgo's commentary comes at just the right time for Star Wars fans waiting for any type of information about The Last Jedi. It's fun to speculate and think about the theories, but take them with a grain of salt and try to have fun with it. Check out Hidalgo's thread below.

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Lost ecosystem found buried in mud of southern California coastal … – Phys.Org

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June 8, 2017 by Steve Koppes Shells from muddy sediment collected on the western Palos Verdes shelf off the coast of southern California. The shells are from the scallop Chlamys hastata. Credit: Prof. Susan Kidwell

Paleontologists investigating the sea bed off the coast of southern California have discovered a lost ecosystem that for thousands of years had nurtured communities of scallops and shelled marine organisms called brachiopods.

These brachiopods and scallops had thrived along a section of coast stretching approximately 250 miles from San Diego to Santa Barbara for at least 4,000 years. But they had died off by the early 20th century, replaced by the mud-dwellling burrowing clams that inhabit this seabed today. Paleontologists Adam Tomaovch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Susan Kidwell of the University of Chicago examine the lost ecosystem in a study published online June 7 in the Royal Society Proceedings B.

Evidence indicates that the brachiopod and scallop die-off occurred in less than a century. Because this community disappeared before biologists started sampling the seafloor, its existence was unknown and unsuspected. Only dead shells remain, permitting analysis by paleontologists.

"This loss unfolded during the 19th century, thus well before urbanization and climate warming," said Kidwell, the William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences. "The disappearance of these abundant filter-feeding animals coincided with the rise of lifestock and cultivation in coastal lands, which increased silt deposition on the continental shelf, far beyond the lake and nearshore settings where we would expect this stress to have an impact."

Continental shelves, the submerged shoulders of the continents, are a worldwide phenomenon. They form a distinct environment separated by a steep slope from the much deeper and vaster expanse of ocean floor beyond, and provide key habitats for biodiversity and fisheries.

Seabed studies

The seabed off southern California is one of the most thoroughly studied in the world, but in applying geologic methods to modern biological samples of the sea floor, Kidwell and Tomaovch encountered unsuspected results. Today that seabed consists of soft sediments, where creatures such as segmented worms, crustaceans, molluscs, crabs and urchins feed on organic matter.

This is a fundamentally different ecosystem than the one that preceded it not so long ago, said Tomaovch, who heads the Department of Paleoecology and Organismal Evolution at the Slovak Academy.

"The methods applied here provide crucial information on ecosystem response to natural and human pressures over otherwise inaccessible timescales," he said.

In pioneering these methods since the 2000s, Kidwell and her associates have fostered the field of conservation paleobiology. Their work has shown that misfits between live populations and the shells they leave behind on modern sea floors do not signal poor preservation. The differences instead indicate a recent ecological shiftone usually driven by human activities such as pollution or sea-floor dredging.

Tomaovch and Kidwell based their new study on the analysis of samples and data collected from multiple sources. They have conducted their own research on the sea floor off southern California, but they've also benefited from samples and monitoring data that other scientists have collected from the area since 1954.

Brachiopods and scallops, which prefer cold waters and a gravelly environment, range from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Gulf of Alaska. Tomaovch and Kidwell eliminated climate warming as a likely culprit in their ecosystem collapse, given that large populations of brachiopods persist near Catalina Island, where water temperatures are similar to those of southern California's mainland coastal waters.

The paleontologists instead pointed to the dramatic changes that southern California's watersheds have undergone since 1769, after Spanish missionaries introduced cattle, horses and sheep to the area.

Unmanaged grazing

The researchers established the age of the brachiopods using a molecular dating technique called amino acid racemization. All of the 190 shells analyzed were more than 100 years old, and most were older than 200 years, indicating that the start of the population die-off coincided with the rise of livestock and cultivation on the nearby mainland.

Brachiopods and scallops have low tolerance for high levels of suspended sediment, leaving them vulnerable to the side effects of a regional economy that focused on cattle production from 1769 to the 1860s. During this time, much of modern-day Los Angeles and Orange counties were subject to unmanaged, open-range grazing. The economy shifted to agriculture in the late 19th century, but in the absence of soil conservation methods, the side effects on the coastal ocean would have continued unabated into the early 20th century.

The researchers concluded that siltation associated with this prolonged period of unmanaged land use probably drove the collapse of the brachiopod-scallop populations.

"Extirpation was complete by the start of 21st-century urbanization, warming, bottom fishing and scientific surveys," Tomaovch and Kidwell reported, emphasizing the value of combining many lines of historical evidence, especially the application of paleobiological methods to present-day ecosystems, to gain a fuller picture of recent biotic changes.

They further concluded that siltation derived from coastal land-use practices is an under-recognized ecological factor on continental shelves around the globe.

Explore further: Dead clams tell many tales

More information: Adam Tomaovch et al. Nineteenth-century collapse of a benthic marine ecosystem on the open continental shelf, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0328

Inventories of living and dead organisms could serve as a relatively fast, simple and inexpensive preliminary means of assessing human impact on ecosystems. The University of Chicago's Susan Kidwell explains how measuring ...

Paleontologists agree that it's difficult to observe behavior in fossil specimens that are dead even extinct and petrified. One method is to find a modern, living, species that has some similarities to the ancient ...

The scallop is one of the largest edible molluscs, and gourmets consider it to be a great delicacy. To meet this demand, the fishing industry cultivates these shellfish in coastal aquafarms. In a new analysis, behavioural ...

A University of Florida study shows that mollusk fossils provide a reliable measure of human-driven changes in marine ecosystems and shifts in ocean biodiversity across time and space.

The best way to avoid becoming a fossil is to be small and live in deep, tropical waters. So say four paleontologists who have published a detailed, global study of clam preservation. Their work is intended to enhance evolutionary ...

King crabs may soon become high-level predators in Antarctic marine ecosystems where they haven't played a role in tens of millions of years, according to a new study led by Florida Institute of Technology.

Sex-changing fish exhibit differences in androgen receptor (AR) expression in muscles that are highly sensitive to androgens (male sex hormones) and essential for male courtship behavior, according to a Georgia State University ...

It's well known that young babies are more interested in faces than other objects. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on June 8 have the first evidence that this preference for faces develops in the womb. By projecting ...

(Phys.org)A small team of researchers from Austria and Sweden has found that ravens are able to remember people who trick them for at least two months. In their paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, the group ...

A Cornell study, published May 26 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, describes how shifts in diets in Europeans after the introduction of farming 10,000 years ago led to genetic adaptations that favored the dietary ...

Paleontologists investigating the sea bed off the coast of southern California have discovered a lost ecosystem that for thousands of years had nurtured communities of scallops and shelled marine organisms called brachiopods.

Wild capuchin monkeys readily learn skills from each otherbut that social learning is driven home by the payoff of learning a useful new skill. It's the first demonstration of "payoff bias" learning in a wild animal, and ...

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Lost ecosystem found buried in mud of southern California coastal ... - Phys.Org

Podcast: Rick Fox And Stratton Sclavos Are Building The Sports Ecosystem Of The Future – Forbes

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Forbes
Podcast: Rick Fox And Stratton Sclavos Are Building The Sports Ecosystem Of The Future
Forbes
Listen to the full episode: Three-time NBA champion and movie star Rick Fox has joined forces with successful venture capitalist Stratton Sclavos to form private equity firm, Vision Venture Partners. The new group is making moves by investing in ...

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Podcast: Rick Fox And Stratton Sclavos Are Building The Sports Ecosystem Of The Future - Forbes

Container ecosystem needs to expand its persistence of vision – TechTarget

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As originally conceived, containers were intended to be stateless homes for microservices. The agility and flexibility...

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of the container ecosystem, coupled with their small resource footprints, fits the microservices concept well. As a result, containers resonated with the DevOps movement in IT to become the hottest technology of the decade and gave containers a rocket-assisted growth rate.

Inevitably, the issue of "stateless" came to be questioned. It turns out that, no surprise, real applications fit the container ecosystem model too. But real applications aren't typically stateless. Most apps have two forms of storage. The first is networked storage in its many forms, used for data interchange and information history. The second is transient, instance storage, used for scratchpads as the app instance runs.

Running an app in a stateless container, as opposed to a virtual machine, means that instance storage isn't a real option, which hinders recovery if the instance fails for any reason. It is possible to access local storage on a container host, though this may create security issues unless the container is resident inside a virtual machine. This isn't the issue. Virtual machine orchestration can rapidly restart an instance on another server if the current host fails, and this is a facility that containers software needs to support if containers are to move to mainstream IT.

Effective microservice and applet architectures require data to move between containers -- or perhaps have the containerized service instantiate where the data is; it's often much quicker. For real agility and flexibility, a vehicle for easy portability between containers is needed to fit the bill.

Containers storage is still a messy, embryonic field of IT.

Current apps build storage on top of a wide variety of platforms, from object to block and from SAN to hyper-converged. For containers to supplant hypervisors completely, the container ecosystem has to cater to this wide breadth of storage options, too.

Here, there are some philosophy differences among the various players. Hypervisor supporters want stateless containers, since a full storage portfolio for containers probably dooms the hypervisor. Even some containers fans want to keep the purity of stateless containers, though this may just be a holdover from the early days of the container ecosystem, when a clear differentiation in purpose from hypervisors was essential to survival of the concept.

Most containers users are very enthusiastic about the agility and ease-of-use that containers bring. Couple those factors with the ability to put three to five times the instance count in a server and DevOps supporters see a home run. Adding persistent data to container options is thus a major roadmap must-have, and the industry is falling in line with that need.

Containers storage is still a messy, embryonic field of IT. Rather than a single point of convergence, or even a few points, the storage and containers vendors are rolling out their own solutions. The good news that we are seeing solutions is somewhat mitigated by the bad news that there are rather a lot of them, and they have different APIs and functions. This situation, though, reflects the enthusiasm around containers and is a healthy sign for the segment.

Let's look at the spectrum of offerings in the container ecosystem. Portworx PWX allows a container to mount shareable elastic block storage. StorageOS takes this further and mounts a variety of external storage protocols and types, also providing compression, etc. Rancher Labs aims at local storage, while supporting data migration across servers. Microsoft Windows Server offers solutions for OS kernel-level sharing and also within Hyper-V instances.

The list goes on. ClusterHQ used Flocker, an open source product that allows creation of a space out of a pool of shared block storage that can move with a container, even across hosts. Flocker is supported by VMware and can interface with EMC and NetApp storage, among many others. But ClusterHQ folded tents, leaving Flocker without its main cheerleader.

There is activity within the core containers software. Kubernetes 1.6 and later allow storage on demand and multiple storage types, with StorageClass objects for all of the major cloud stacks, including OpenStack and vSphere as well as the Big Three public cloud service providers. Hyper-converged systems require their own secret sauce for containers storage, and vendors such as Nutanix are expected to step up to the plate in the near future.

It's interesting that containers insiders talk to "persistent data" not "storage." I've long felt that the movement of the industry toward object storage, software-defined storage microservices and a fine-grained containers virtualization all make traditional views of large files obsolete. Take a database. It really consists of thousands of record-sized objects. Moving to a fine granularity in storage may be the consequence of all of this technology evolution.

When you add nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) into the equation, this gets more pressing. Within a couple of years, NVDIMMs will persist at the word level, as opposed to using a 4 KB block storage model. Handling containers storage may thus be a poor model for the future, and persistent data may turn out to be a profound choice.

Docker persistent storage given away by vendor

Docker container storage on vendors' minds

StorageOS releases persistent container storage

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Container ecosystem needs to expand its persistence of vision - TechTarget

How Achievement First is Creating an Interoperable Ecosystem – EdSurge

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This case study was originally published onGetting Smart

Achievement First operates a network of 32 high-performing college-preparatory, K-12 public charter schools in Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York City. In keeping with its name, the network is centered on a goal of outstanding student achievement. Its rigorous standards, high-quality curriculum and ongoing professional development for teachers serve to support this goal. Teachers regularly analyze student data to drive daily instruction and long-term planning, and an emphasis is placed on building strong relationships with students, parents and guardians.

Since the opening of its initial school, Amistad Academy, in 1999, the network has grown to three states, opening elementary, middle and high schools centered on its REACH core values: Respect, Enthusiasm, Achievement, Citizenship and Hard Work. Students are admitted on a lottery basis, with an average of 10 applications received for each seat.

Schools are staffed with operations, logistics and technology teams that enable teaching and learning staff to focus on curriculum development and delivery, assessment, and professional learning. Three years ago, the network launched Greenfield, a new school model that emphasizes self-motivated learning with greater access to technology, smaller group instruction, and a variety of enrichment activities. (By the 201718 academic year, three network schools will follow this model.)

Archana Parab, Database Architect, leads a small and mighty team of developers and database staff who build and refine data connections and design solutions to meet the entire networks technical needs. She explained that Achievement First employs a variety of assessment platforms: Illuminate is in place for benchmark assessments, while STAR assessments, along with a whole host of other digital reading platforms, are used for reading. The network also piloted and uses Cortex, a next-generation learning platform developed by InnovateEDU.

Our team believes very strongly in being able to build and maintain your own toolsand it has created a massive competitive advantage for us, as that kind of internal capability is still unusual among charter schools.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the networks Greenfield program, which demonstrates how schools can be built from scratch. For example, through Illuminate, Greenfield teachers are disseminating weekly quizzes, which offer a variety of benchmark assessments. Lisa Minott, Senior Director of Greenfield Technology, noted that it enables her team to intervene before an issue becomes a crisis, and we can also subdivide into a week-by-week basis, focusing on two to three items for mastery. Those assessments feed into Cortex. This interoperability between systems means that interventions are structured and meaningful, and address key gap areas while giving teachers actionable data.

You take something huge like moving a kid across a couple of grade levels in a year, and turn that into a feasible accomplishment, Nevico added.

While Achievement Firsts existing assessment tools currently do not adapt to students responses in real time, they offer varied assessments in which each student can move at his or her own pace.

We do a lot of reporting for various blocks throughout the day: science, humanities, math, etc.and from that we gather a suite of reports on a specific trend line, Minott said. This enables us to set rigorous yet appropriate goals for every student in terms of proficiency. The ability to pull data together in an interoperable way means that this trend line deeply informs the core work of the team.

While overall student growth is charted by analytics obtained from weekly assessments, teachers in the Greenfield model also rely upon the Cortex platform to drive personalized learning.

With our 1:1 model, all Greenfield students have access to a Chromebook, and specific times when theyre learning science, English, and other topics, Minott explained. They log into Cortex, where weve laid out core content and several go deeper modules, which enable fast-moving students to explore a given topic further. Each student encounters a playlist of digital content and activitieswhether those involve text, multimedia or simulationsthat have been curated alongside a study guide with questions and prompts. If they pass, they can move onto the other playlist. Students see their progress in real time, driving engagement in the content and exploration of passion-driven and interest-driven deeper dives. Teachers can understand through the data, not only if a student is learning, but how.

Students needs are met at all ends of the spectrum. For those reading below grade level, we can customize down to the students level, so that on the surface it looks the sametheyre covering the same topic as their peersyet its a way to reach students with challenges where they are, Minott said. The module then serves as a benefit rather than a roadblock.

Many school leaders talk about an unwavering commitment to their students. What that means and how it can be put into practice varies widely, of course. Just what would happen if every adult staff member was committed to student success on a daily basis?

Our Greenfield model schools are set up so that students have goal coaches and goal teams; for example, every teacher in the building is assigned somewhere between 10 and 16 students for whom they are a goal coach, Minott said. This means that they work with this particular cohort of kids both academically and personally. They share experiences, personal histories, and stories. Its enabled us to build a real, tangible community around each student. They meet every day for 15 minutes. This goal team data is able to live side-by-side with the interoperable assessment data in Cortex, allowing teachers and staff to get a holistic picture of the students academic performance.

The Greenfield model uses a dream team concept. Instead of a typical report card, students are asked to select a group of adults such as parents, grandparents, guardians, clergy members or coaches who are important role models to them. Students as young as five (kindergarten students) then present to their dream teams.

Students in the Greenfield model also receive weekly progress reports, stating their proficiencies and how far they may be from an academic target. In the networks other schools, traditional report cards and a report card night held in the schools pull a childs support team into the conversation. The ability to have an interoperable solution in Cortex, which captures data from disparate systems into one view, allows for more real-time weekly updates for students, teachers, parents and the goal team to assess where a student is and how far he or she has to go. This inherently shifts the dynamic from teacher-led to student-led, and leads to more informed decision making.

Whether in the networks classic schools or in its Greenfield model, innovation continues to be rolled out at Achievement First. This year, we launched a platform called Curriculum Hub. Its a custom piece of software that provides daily lesson resources that create scope, sequence and scaffolding for teachers. Instead of spending time figuring out the basics (how to write a lesson and bring the content alive with certain nuances), the software allows teachers to go a lot deeper and drive mastery of content.

The answer doesnt lie in a single solution, Nevico said.

Theres no secret sauce in terms of platform, reports or software; its about creating an interoperable ecosystem, developing the right habits and empowering teachers to accomplish lofty goals.

Read the full Achievement First case studyhere.

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How Achievement First is Creating an Interoperable Ecosystem - EdSurge

River Ecosystem Expands Leadership Team with Key Hires – Marketwired (press release)

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 8, 2017) - River Ecosystem, a consulting firm that provides services to frontier technology startups and hosts the annual River Accelerator program, today announced veteran Bay Area entrepreneur Jimmy Ku, and Techstars and River Accelerator alumnus Nick Canafax, as partners.

Ku brings over a decade of entrepreneurial experience and networking expertise to River Ecosystem. His new role at River Ecosystem draws upon his experience as a three-time founder -- Loup, Mobiley and GoPlanit, which was selected as a finalist for the TechCrunch 50 Conference -- and his passion for connecting people through immersive and insightful programs and events.

"River Ecosystem and its accelerator program have a stellar track record helping innovative companies push the boundaries of frontier technology," said Ku. "Like any early stage entrepreneur, I understand the importance of connecting with the right people to bring big ideas to life. As a new partner at River Ecosystem, my key role is to infuse fresh thinking and energy into our members business plans, and help them address the tough questions so that they're able to flourish."

Canafax has worked behind the scenes as the president of River Ecosystem since September 2016, while continuing to serve in an advisory capacity with VR company Rival Theory, where he is also a founding member. As a partner with River Ecosystem, Canafax will assume greater responsibilities interfacing directly with its class participants. Prior to joining River Ecosystem, Canafax graduated from the second River Accelerator class, and graduated from the Techstars accelerator program before that.

"As a River Accelerator alumnus, I know first-hand what the program can offer to budding frontier technology entrepreneurs, including unparalleled visibility and networking opportunities with investors and industry luminaries, and access to developmental resources during the critical first year," said Canafax. "Having worked with dozens of inspiring founders and entreprenuers, River Ecosystem is one of the most dynamic and creative startup consulting firms in the world. It's through this experience we'll help the next generation startups achieve their vision -- turning dreamers into doers."

Ku and Canafax take on their respective leadership roles at a busy time for the firm. Both will oversee the selection process for the Fall 2017 class of River Accelerator, an innovative startup incubation program focused on indentifying and fostering frontier technologies such as VR/AR, AI, machine learning, computer vision, drones, 3D printing, and more. The River Accelerator provides startups with mentorship from top frontier tech leaders through the River Network, creative space in the River Lounge in SOMA, and the opportunity to present at the River Accelerator Demo Day and Founder Field Day at AT&T Park.River Ecosystem partners with Rothenberg Ventures to provide $100,000+ of investment to startups in the River Accelerator.

This fourth River Accelerator program, set to launch September 12, will ultimately join the prestigious River Accelerator alumni network of over 40 companies, including Fove, Emblematic, Roqovan, Psious, Boom Supersonic, and EmergentVR, that collectively have gone on to raise over $100M in funding from investors including Accel, Google Ventures, Samsung NEXT Ventures, and Colopl VR Fund.

Following the kick-off of the new River Accelerator program, River Ecosystem will host the fourth-annual Founder Field Day at AT&T Park on November 13. Ku and Canafax will be an intergral part of the team bringing together sponsorship partners, investors, and founders within the River Network to facilitate valuable connection between frontier technology entrepreneurs, startups, and investors.

"When given the opportunity to bring Jimmy and Nick into River Ecosystem as new partners, I immediately knew I was bringing together the dream team to foster a new phase of growth," said Mike Rothenberg, chairman and founder of River Ecosystem. "Between their shared experience as founders of previous startups, combined with their extensive networks and accelerator backgrounds, we're poised to take the firm, its programs and community experience to the next level."

To learn more about River Ecosytem and the application process for the Fall 2017 River Accelerator program, visit the website at: http://riverecosystem.com/riveraccelerator/

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River Ecosystem Expands Leadership Team with Key Hires - Marketwired (press release)

You Are Cyborg | WIRED

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For Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated.

The monster opens the curtains of Victor Frankenstein's bed. Schwarzenegger tears back the skin of his forearm to display a gleaming skeleton of chrome and steel. Tetsuo's skin bubbles as wire and cable burst to the surface. These science fiction fevered dreams stem from our deepest concerns about science, technology, and society. With advances in medicine, robotics, and AI, they're moving inexorably closer to reality. When technology works on the body, our horror always mingles with intense fascination. But exactly how does technology do this work? And how far has it penetrated the membrane of our skin?

The answers may lie in Sonoma County, California. It's not the most futuristic place in the world; quite the opposite. The little clusters of wooden houses dotted up and down the Russian River seem to belong to some timeless America of station wagons and soda pop. Outside the town of Healdsburg (population 9,978), acres of vineyards stretch away from the road, their signs proudly proclaiming the dates of their foundation. The vines themselves, transplants from Europe, carry a genetic heritage far older. Yet this sleepy place is where visions of a technological future are being defined. Tucked away off the main highway is a beautiful redwood valley. Here, in a small wooden house, lives someone who says she knows what's really happening with bodies and machines. She ought to - she's a cyborg.

Meet Donna Haraway and you get a sense of disconnection. She certainly doesn't look like a cyborg. Soft-spoken, fiftyish, with an infectious laugh and a house full of cats and dogs, she's more like a favorite aunt than a billion-dollar product of the US military-industrial complex. Beneath the surface she says she has the same internal organs as everyone else - though it's not exactly the sort of thing you can ask her to prove in an interview. Yet Donna Haraway has proclaimed herself a cyborg, a quintessential technological body. (See "The Cyborg Ancestry.")

Sociologists and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the "world" to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era.

As professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Haraway is a leading thinker about people's love/hate relationship with machines. Her ideas have sparked an explosion of debate in areas as diverse as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. To boho twentysomethings, her name has the kind of cachet usually reserved for techno acts or new phenethylamines. Her latest book, the baroquely titled Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (1997, Routledge), is her first in five years and has been as eagerly awaited as any academic text of recent times. In the book, Haraway concentrates on biological networks and takes a critical look at the way biotechnology is constructing our bodies. She tackles masculine bias in scientific culture and sees herself as the troubled "modest witness" of the ethical maelstrom of genetic engineering. Haraway scrupulously observes and records - unable to be silent about what she sees. She's also become a heroine to a generation of women who are starting to call themselves cyberfeminists.

Cyberfeminism, says Sadie Plant, director of the Centre for Research into Cybernetic Culture at Warwick University in England, is "an alliance between women, machinery, and new technology. There's a long-standing relationship between information technology and women's liberation." It's a view that is resonating with feminist thinkers. Academics like Katherine Hayles have taken Haraway's ideas into literary theory, while male-to-female transgendered theorist and performer Allucqure Rosanne Stone has shocked traditional academia with her eccentric accounts of the technological transformation of her own body. Haraway's most famous essay, "The Cyborg Manifesto," first published in 1985, has become part of the undergraduate curriculum at countless universities.

__ The Left Coast leaning__

Haraway herself is a veteran of '60s counterculture, not a scene known for its faith in technological transformation. She has that aura of slightly cynical wisdom you get if you spend long enough fighting for left-wing causes. So it's startling how opposed her ideas are to the back-to-nature platitudes that dominate the old West Coast stereotype. This is a woman who has no interest in being an earth mother or harking back to some mythical pretechnological past. She once famously declared, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess," flying in the face of received feminist wisdom that science and technology are patriarchal blights on the face of nature. As a cyborg, Haraway is a product of science and technology, and she doesn't see much point in the so-called goddess feminism, which preaches that women can find freedom by sloughing off the modern world and discovering their supposed spiritual connection to Mother Earth. When Donna Haraway says she's a cyborg, she's not claiming to be different or special. For Haraway, the realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it's no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin. In fact, she's not the only cyborg in Healdsburg. There are 9,978 of them.

Sitting on the porch, listening to Haraway explain her ideas over a background of singing birds and buzzing insects, it's hard not to feel she's talking about some parallel world, some chrome-and-neon settlement in a cyberpunk novel. "We're talking about whole new forms of subjectivity here. We're talking seriously mutated worlds that never existed on this planet before. And it's not just ideas. It's new flesh."

But she is not talking about some putative future or a technologically advanced corner of the present. The cyborg age is here and now, everywhere there's a car or a phone or a VCR. Being a cyborg isn't about how many bits of silicon you have under your skin or how many prosthetics your body contains. It's about Donna Haraway going to the gym, looking at a shelf of carbo-loaded bodybuilding foods, checking out the Nautilus machines, and realizing that she's in a place that wouldn't exist without the idea of the body as high-performance machine. It's about athletic shoes.

"Think about the technology of sports footwear," she says. "Before the Civil War, right and left feet weren't even differentiated in shoe manufacture. Now we have a shoe for every activity." Winning the Olympics in the cyborg era isn't just about running fast. It's about "the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping." When the furor about the cyborgization of athletes through performance-enhancing drugs reached fever pitch last summer, Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a node in an international technocultural network just as "artificial" as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak.

If this sounds complicated, that's because it is. Haraway's world is one of tangled networks - part human, part machine; complex hybrids of meat and metal that relegate old-fashioned concepts like natural and artificial to the archives. These hybrid networks are the cyborgs, and they don't just surround us - they incorporate us. An automated production line in a factory, an office computer network, a club's dancers, lights, and sound systems - all are cyborg constructions of people and machines.

Networks are also inside us. Our bodies, fed on the products of agribusiness, kept healthy - or damaged - by pharmaceuticals, and altered by medical procedures, aren't as natural as The Body Shop would like us to believe. Truth is, we're constructing ourselves, just like we construct chip sets or political systems - and that brings with it a few responsibilities. Haraway has no doubt that to survive we need to get up to speed on the complex realities of technoculture. To any of the usual good/bad, nature/nurture, right/wrong, biology/society arguments, she smiles, breaks into her infectious, ironic laugh, and reminds us that the world is "messier than that." It might well become the quintessential 21st-century catchphrase.

__ The ironic political myth__

"The Cyborg Manifesto" is a strange document, a mixture of passionate polemic, abstruse theory, and technological musing. Haraway calls it "an ironic political myth." It pulls off the not inconsiderable trick of turning the cyborg from an icon of Cold War power into a symbol of feminist liberation - not bad for the first thing she wrote on her newly acquired computer.

In the manifesto, Haraway argues that the cyborg - a fusion of animal and machine - trashes the big oppositions between nature and culture, self and world that run through so much of our thought. Why is this important? In conversation, when people describe something as natural, they're saying that it's just how the world is; we can't change it.

Women for generations were told that they were "naturally" weak, submissive, overemotional, and incapable of abstract thought. That it was "in their nature" to be mothers rather than corporate raiders, to prefer parlor games to particle physics. If all these things are natural, they're unchangeable. End of story. Return to the kitchen. Do not pass Go.

On the other hand, if women (and men) aren't natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed .Everything is up for grabs, from who does the dishes to who frames the constitution. Basic assumptions suddenly come into question, such as whether it's natural to have a society based on violence and the domination of one group by another. Maybe humans are biologically destined to fight wars and trash the environment. Maybe we're not.

Feminists around the world have seized on this possibility. Cyberfeminism - not a term Haraway uses - is based on the idea that, in conjunction with technology, it's possible to construct your identity, your sexuality, even your gender, just as you please. In contrast to the prohibition-based feminism of the so-called political correctness movement, which

concentrates on trying to police sexuality and legislate against "inappropriate" behavior, the cyberfeminists revel in polymorphous perversity. They form a broad church (after all, everything is permitted),

its expressions ranging from sober historical analyses of women as technologists to the assertions of Australian art group VNS Matrix that the clitoris is a tool for jacking into a higher-order cyberspace. Haraway is no happy-clappy technology groupie - she's harshly critical of techno-utopians, including some of those found between the covers of this magazine. But she's also no fan of what she calls the "knee-jerk technophobia" of most feminist politics. As the cyberfeminists of the webzine *geekgirl *put it, girls need modems.

In a way, modems are at the center of cyborg politics. Being a cyborg isn't just about the freedom to construct yourself. It's about networks. Ever since Descartes announced, "I think, therefore I am," the Western world has had an unhealthy obsession with selfhood. From the individual consumer to the misunderstood loner, modern citizens are taught to think of themselves as beings who exist inside their heads and only secondarily come into contact with everything else. Draw a circle. Inside: me. Outside: the world. Philosophers agonize about whether the reality outside that circle even exists. They have a technical term for their neuroses - skepticism - and perform intellectual acrobatics to make it go away. In a world of doubt, getting across that boundary, let alone to other people, becomes a real problem.

Unless, that is, you're a collection of networks, constantly feeding information back and forth across the line to the millions of networks that make up your "world." A cyborg perspective seems rather sensible, compared with the weirdness of the doubting Cartesian world. As Haraway puts it, "Human beings are always already immersed in the world, in producing what it means to be human in relationships with each other and with objects." Human beings in the '90s show a surprising willingness to understand themselves as creatures networked together. "If you start talking to people about how they cook their dinner or what kind of language they use to describe trouble in a marriage, you're very likely to get notions of tape loops, communication breakdown, noise and signal - amazing stuff." Even while we mistake ourselves for humans, the way we talk shows that we know we're really cyborgs.

But isn't this just rhetoric? It's all very well talking about cyborgs, but is there any need to seriously believe in the idea? Yes, says Haraway. "Feminist concerns," she argues vehemently, "are inside of technology, not a rhetorical overlay. We're talking about cohabitation: between different sciences and forms of culture, between organisms and machines. I think the issues that really matter - who lives, who dies, and at what price - these political questions are embodied in technoculture. They can't be got at in any other way." For Haraway and many others, there's no longer any such thing as the abstract.

To illustrate the point, Haraway begins to talk about rice.

"Imagine you're a rice plant. What do you want? You want to grow up and make babies before the insects who are your predators grow up and make babies to eat your tender shoots. So you divide your energy between growing as quickly as you can and producing toxins in your leaves to repel pests. Now let's say you're a researcher trying to wean the Californian farmer off pesticides. You're breeding rice plants that produce more alkaloid toxins in their leaves. If the pesticides are applied externally, they count as chemicals - and large amounts of them find their way into the bodies of illegal immigrants from Mexico who are hired to pick the crop. If they're inside the plant, they count as natural, but they may find their way into the bodies of the consumers who eat the rice."

International border controls, the question of natural versus artificial, the ethics of agribusiness, and even the politics of labor regulation are networked together with the biology of rice plants and pests. Who lives? Who dies? That's what Haraway means when she talks about politics being inside technoculture. We can't escape it. It's just that sometimes it's hard to see.

__ The religion of biology__

Maybe it was inevitable that Haraway would wind up blending science and politics and thus breaking one of the big taboos. While studying for a biology doctorate at Yale in the late '60s, Haraway realized "what I was really interested in was not so much biology as a research science, but the way it was a part of politics, religion, and culture in general." Part of a commune active in gay liberation, women's rights, and civil rights; part of a graduate biology program "up to its ears in anti-Vietnam War work centering around chemical herbicides"; and part of a university integral to the military-industrial complex prosecuting the war, she could hardly help being political. Her doctoral work in cell biology ("nothing bigger than a microbe") dragged on, and she found herself in Hawaii, teaching general science to kids destined to be hotel staffers and tour guides. She had gone there with her husband, Jaye Miller, who was actively gay and a fellow commune member. "We figured out ultimately that we wanted to do a little brother-sister incest, but at the time we didn't have any other model than getting married." A few years later, they "stopped being married" but continued to live as part of the same household, along with their respective partners, until Miller's death from an AIDS-related illness in 1991.

The immune system has since figured frequently in Haraway's work - as an information system; as something that wasn't even clearly understood as a single entity until the 1960s; as she says in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women , a "potent and polymorphous object of belief, knowledge, and practice." The immune system is a perfect example of the networked consciousness of the cyborg age. It's also a good example of what Haraway means when she denies there's any such thing as the abstract. In the end, her work and her life, her friend's death, and theoretical biology are all tangled together: a messy web of personal pain, politics, and science.

By the late '70s, Haraway was at Johns Hopkins teaching the history of science and thinking about apes and the people who study them. "At that time," she remembers, "primate behavior was a matrix for all kinds of debates about aggression, sexual violence, dominance, and hierarchy." As she wrote in Primate Visions (1989, Routledge), the book that came out of her academic work at the university, "The commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as animal lives."

Primatologists, she argues, are working in the "borderlands," where the differences between animals and humans are defined - differences that are messier than people think. If apes are not fundamentally different from people, then our feeling of righteous superiority over animals may be based on thin air. And since primates are our close evolutionary cousins, their behavior may contain significant clues to the development of our own - or serve to mirror our view of it.

Often, primatologists' pictures of ape society contain covert justifications of a particular human, social, or political model. Male primatologists often showed these societies run by powerful males with female harems; a later generation of female primatologists found very different forces at work. As always, politics is threaded through the most objective science. "Primates," Haraway remarks, "are a way into thinking about the world as a whole."

__ The state of people__

Haraway finally wound up teaching at UC Santa Cruz. After the conservatism of Baltimore and Johns Hopkins, California came as a relief. "It was like coming home," she laughs, recounting a bizarre story about a radical birthing group and a placenta-eating ceremony. "I understood I was in my community. These were folks who would understand the craziness of it all." It's an oddly moving thing to say. Haraway is faced with a world of warring factions, colliding ideologies, clashing oppositions: the state and the people, gay and straight, capitalism and communism, human and animal, people and machines. It is all, of course, completely crazy. She has a habit of describing the unlikeliest people as "folks," so you get "the folks at the Pentagon" and "the folks fighting the Vietnam War." The cyborg idea may in the end be Donna Haraway's way of showing us how to let folks be folks, rather than carving them up into cruel, arbitrary divisions. And with that, Healdsburg suddenly seems the perfect vantage point from which to observe the madness of the modern world.

So Donna Haraway sits on the porch, sips a beer, and pets her elderly cat, which recently had a run-in with a raccoon. She's as complicated, as messy in her allegiances and interests as we could wish for in a witness to the cyborg age. If we're going to build a humane technoculture, instead of a Kafkaesque nightmare, we would do well to listen to what she has to say.

"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade."

The Cyborg Ancestry

Cyborg. The word has a whiff of the implausible about it that leads many people to discount it as mere fantasy. Yet cyborgs, real ones, have been among us for almost 50 years. The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering various of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine.

The Rockland rat is one of the stars of a paper called "Cyborgs and Space," written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. This engineer/psychiatrist double act invented the term cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") to describe the vision of an "augmented man," better adapted than ordinary humans to the rigors of space travel. Clynes and Kline imagined a future astronaut whose heart would be controlled by injections of amphetamines and whose lungs would be replaced by a nuclear-powered "inverse fuel cell."

From the start, the cyborg was more than just another technical project; it was a kind of scientific and military daydream. The possibility of escaping its annoying bodily limitations led a generation that grew up on Superman and Captain America to throw the full weight of its grown-up R&D budget into achieving a real-life superpower. By the mid-1960s, cyborgs were big business, with millions of US Air Force dollars finding their way into projects to build exoskeletons, master-slave robot arms, biofeedback devices, and expert systems. For all the big bucks and high seriousness, the prevailing impression left by old cyborg technical papers is of a rather expensive kind of science fiction. Time and again, scientific reasoning melts into metaphysical speculation about evolution, human boundaries, and even the possibility of what Clynes and Kline call "a new and larger dimension for man's spirit." The cyborg was always as much a creature of scientific imagination as of scientific fact.

It wasn't only the military that was captivated by the possibilities of the cyborg. The dream of improving human capabilities through selective breeding had long been a staple of the darker side of Western medical literature. Now there was the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial devices. Insulin drips had been used to regulate the metabolisms of diabetics since the 1920s. A heart-lung machine was used to control the blood circulation of an 18-year-old girl during an operation in 1953. A 43-year-old man received the first heart pacemaker implant in 1958.

By the 1970s, the idea of an augmented human had entered the mainstream. Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, and his cohort Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman (with bionic limbs and a super-sensitive bionic ear), were popular heroes, their custom superpowers bought off the shelf like a digital watch. The cyborg had grown from a lecture-room fantasy into the stuff of prime-time TV.

Of course robots, automata, and artificial people have been part of the Western imagination since at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Legendary automaton builder Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing tin Turk and became the toast of Napoleonic Europe. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein built a monster out of body parts and activated it with electricity. Even the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata, composed about 300 BC, features a lion automaton.

One thing makes today's cyborg fundamentally different from its mechanical ancestors - information. Cyborgs, Haraway explains, "are information machines. They're embedded with circular causal systems, autonomous control mechanisms, information processing - automatons with built-in autonomy."

All of which winds the story back to one man's personal science and the beginnings of the Cold War.

Norbert Wiener wrote Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine in 1948. The book was nothing if not ambitious. Wiener, an MIT mathematician, saw amazing similarities between a vast group of different phenomena. Catching a ball, guiding a missile, running a company, pumping blood around a body - all seemed to him to depend on the transmission of "information," a concept floated by Bell Laboratories' Claude Shannon in his founding work on information theory. More specifically, these processes seemed to depend on what the engineers had begun to call "feedback."

Wiener took the name cybernetics from the Greek kubernetes , meaning "steersman," and the image of a classical helmsman, hand on the rudder of a sailing ship, perfectly captures the essence of his idea. Palinurus, approaching the rocks, gets visual information about the ship's position and adjusts course accordingly. This isn't a single event but a constant flow of information.

Palinurus is part of a feedback loop, his brain getting input from the environment about wind speed, weather, and current, then sending signals to his arms to nudge the ship out of danger. Wiener saw that the same model could be applied to any problem that involved trying to manage a complex system and proposed that scientists use the same framework for everything.

Wiener's followers saw cybernetics as a science that would explain the world as a set of feedback systems, allowing rational control of bodies, machines, factories, communities, and just about anything else. Cybernetics promised to reduce "messy" problems such as economics, politics, and perhaps even morality to the status of simple engineering tasks: stuff you could solve with pencil and paper, or, at worst, one of MIT's supercomputers.

The cyborgmakers were in the business of making Wiener's ideas flesh. For them, the body was just a meat computer running a collection of information systems that adjusted themselves in response to each other and their environment. If you wanted to make a better body, all you had to do was improve the feedback mechanisms, or plug in another system - an artificial heart, an all-seeing bionic eye. It's no accident that this strangely abstract picture of the body as a collection of networks sounds rather like that other network of networks, the Internet; both came out of the same hothouse of Cold War military research.

Wiener's dream of a universal science of communication and control has faded with the years. Cybernetics has given rise to new areas like cognitive science and stimulated valuable research in numerous other fields. But almost no one today calls themselves a cyberneticist. Some believe that Wiener's project fell victim to scientific fashion, its funding sucked away by flashy but ultimately pointless AI research. Others think cybernetics was killed by the basic problem that the nuts-and-bolts mechanisms of control and communication in machines are significantly different from those in animals, and neither are very like control and communication in society. So cybernetics, which was based on an inspired generalization, fell victim to its inability to deal with details. Whichever perspective is true (and as with most such stories, the truth is likely to be a mixture of both), cybernetics has left two important cultural residues behind. The first is its picture of the world as a collection of networks. The second is its intuition that there's not as much clear blue water between people and machines as some would like to believe. These still-controversial concepts are at the bionic heart of the cyborg, which is alive and well, and constructing itself in a laboratory near you.

The '90s cyborg is both a more sophisticated creature than its '50s ancestor - and a more domestic one. Artificial hip joints, cochlear implants for the deaf, retinal implants for the blind, and all kinds of cosmetic surgery are part of the medical repertoire. Online information retrieval systems are used as prosthetics for limited human memories. In the closed world of advanced warfare, cyborg assemblages of humans and machines are used to pilot fighter aircraft - the response times and sensory apparatus of unaided humans are inadequate for the demands of supersonic air combat. These eerie military cyborgs may be harbingers of a new world stranger than any we have yet experienced.

Hari Kunzru

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You Are Cyborg | WIRED

Top Schools for Behavioral Science – Study.com

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Read about behavioral science programs, which help students prepare for careers in psychology, psychiatry, public health, and medical research. Find information about the degree options at four high-ranking universities, as well as a list of other schools in the U.S. that offer studies in behavioral science.

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Graduate students who are interested in behavioral science can find degree programs at highly ranked schools such as Johns Hopkins University, the University of California in Irvine and Yale University, an Ivy League school. Successful completion of a program can lead to a Master or Doctor of Public Health, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) or Doctor of Science (Sc.D.).

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) ranked #12 on U.S. News & World Report's list of national universities for 2015. The university offers 50 major areas of study through nine schools, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Students can earn a Doctor of Public Health in Social & Behavioral Sciences (Ph.D.) and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Social and Behavioral Sciences with research in Health Education & Communication and Social & Psychological Influences on Health.

U.S. News & World Report ranked the University of California in Irvine #42 among national universities in 2015. The university offers a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. Students in the programs use mathematical models to study human behavior.

Yale University ranked third on the U.S. News & World Report list of national universities for 2015. Graduate programs include a Master of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Ph.D. candidates pursuing a degree in the social and behavioral sciences can study psychosocial and behavioral epidemiology.

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Maritz Improves Business Performance with Innovative Behavioral Science – EQ – Entrepreneur Quarterly (press release) (subscription) (blog)

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At its core, Maritz is a people-centered company. As a St. Louis-based business solutions company that offers incentives, rewards, customer experience, loyalty, employee engagement and events, Maritz makes clear itsfocus on understanding, enabling and motivating people and behavior with its signature statement, The science and art of people and potential.

With more than100 years of leadership in the motivation industry, Maritz has continued to innovate and invest in the understanding of behavioral science. The companyhas honed and developed itsexpertise in the science of human behavior, and now Maritz isinnovating even further with the appointment of Charlotte Blank to the position of chief behavioral officer (CBO). Blanks primary role will be to lead the companys thought leadership and application of the latest insights in applied behavioral science, primarily through extensive partnerships with leading academic experts pioneering the field.

In appointing a CBO, Maritz joins a growing trend in companies hiring a top executive to focus on behavioral science in business. According to the websiteRecode, the recent rise of the CBO has developed because companies are becoming more committed to putting the customer first. The article states, In the modern economy, companies that anticipate pain points and bring certainty and reliable information to the customer experience are rewarded with loyal customers. It should be no surprise, then, that companies that put customer experiences at the center of their products and services are often industry leaders.

Behavioral research plays a critical role in creating those customer experiences. While behavioral science is at the heart of Maritz work, the hiring of a C-suite executive shows itscommitment to this science and the research that backs it up, helping it and itscustomers make more strategic business decisions.

Blank explains, Our goal is to elevate the concept that behavioral science is foundational to everything we do at Maritz. Everything in the company is touched by and grounded in behavioral science. We are helping to power and infuse the latest discoveries in behavioral science throughout the organization and beyond.

The beyond that Blank refers to applies not only to the business applications of behavioral science for Maritz own clients but expands to the field of applied behavioral science itself.

Behavioral science is, in essence, the study of human behavior, says Blank. The evolving fields of behavioral economics and social psychology have tremendous potential for application to business solutions in the real world. How do these insights come to light in our evolving business context? What makes the sales leader, the employee or the customer tick? What motivates and engages them? These are the insights were looking for.

Field research is the new focus.

Many of the existing principles that are currently used in behavioral science today come from lab studies or lean more toward the theoretical. But Blank believes, There is a lot of opportunity to see how these insights come about in real-world application. The Maritz Field Research Collaborative connects our robust networks on both the academic side as well as our clients across a diverse set of stakeholders. Were bringing this platform together to conduct field research, and testing insights from the lab in the real worldwhich is a huge benefit to our clients, and an opportunity for us to learn. From a personal standpoint, I like that were contributing to the collective body of knowledge, helping to evolve the field itself of applied behavioral science. There is so much opportunity for real world application, and its nice to be a part of that.

Many of the experiments that Maritz has planned center around determining how to optimize rewards. The research is ongoing, and publishable results will follow once the studies are complete, but Blank offers a couple of examples of the incentives theyre exploring, like giving people the gift of time back in their personal lives or creating social experiences in the workplace and meeting environment. We are looking at these innovative rewards concepts and measuring how they affect people. Another interesting project were working on looks at technology design and the interface of mobile devices and how that influences the way people answer survey questions. The psychological mindset is different when people are on a mobile device versus a desktop, and that has implications for how they answer customer feedback surveys.

Applying Behavioral Science as a Startup

Blank seems to have found that elusive balance where her personal passions have blended with her professional endeavors. When asked what incentivizes and motivates her, she responded by saying, I am motivated by learning and intellectual curiosity. Im a behavioral science nerd. My idea of a beach read is Daniel Kahnemans Thinking Fast and Slow. Im re-reading it on vacation next week. So, to read and apply this type of material as my job is a really great alignment for me both personally and professionally.

Maritz has been around for more than120 years, yet began as a startup and still continues to innovate and stay at the cutting edge of its industry. When asked what advice she would give to startups applying behavior science, Blank offered several nuggets of wisdom. Take a people-centered point of view. Anchor whatever it is youre offering to a higher purpose tie it to a personal goal for your employees. Create a tribe so that there is a sense of belonging and cohesion. And keeping with the theme of field research, she suggests, Embrace the scientific method. Conduct experiments, do pilot testing and controlled trials to see what really works. Startups have an advantage because theyre small and nimble in the beginning. The can get real data very easily. She adds one last piece of advice. Test and Learn. A.B.T. Always Be Testing.

Startups and large corporations alike are invited to participate in field experiments with the Maritz Field Research Collaborative. To begin exploring behavioral insights of your stakeholders, contact fieldresearch@maritz.com.

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Brown Water at Coronado Beaches Caused by Algae Bloom: Lifeguards – NBC 7 San Diego

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The beach water in Coronado is brown.

But lifeguards told NBC 7, it's not a cause for concern.

The color is part of a seasonal cycle caused by algae bloom often referred to as Red Tide.

Its perfectly normal. We see it just about every spring and its completely safe for people, said Coronado Lifeguard Captain Sean Carey.

Carey said the bloom is typically caused by a change in water temperature and is usually smaller.

But as of Wednesday, the brownish tint could be seen in the water as far as the eye could see from the Hotel Del Coronado.

There was a concern the brown water could be caused by sewage problems south in Imperial Beach.

That is not the case, and lifeguards in Coronado said there are no water quality issues.

According to the County of San Diego Department of Environmental Health, water samples taken Monday in Imperial Beach indicate bacteria levels are undetectable.

All beach closures have been lifted.

In Coronado, the brown water did not keep tourists from swimming.

I like knowing that its not a sewage problem. I think that nature has its way of handling things, and if its an algae bloom, then I would assume thats what nature wants to have happen, said Las Vegas resident Kelly Schwarz.

Published at 4:30 PM PDT on Jun 7, 2017 | Updated at 11:43 PM PDT on Jun 7, 2017

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Brown Water at Coronado Beaches Caused by Algae Bloom: Lifeguards - NBC 7 San Diego