Beaches are butt of joke

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Elisha Taylor and Matthew Ross, from Responsible Runners Gold Coast, collecting cigarette butts from Gold Coast beaches. Source: Supplied

STATE laws that ban smoking are a joke with volunteers removing thousands of cigarette butts from patrolled areas at the citys best beaches.

The Responsible Runners group earlier this year began organising a handful of members to spend 30 minutes each weekend collecting trash at Burleigh beach and the Spit. CLIVE PALMER AIDE IN ALLEGED KIDNAPPING PLOT MAGIC MILLIONS TO BECOME AUSTRALIAS RICHEST RACE DAY

At Burleigh on a Saturday and Sunday, runners collect between 200-300 butts in each session.

A data log for both beaches, which is being forwarded to a national marine protection foundation, reveals beachgoers have tossed out more than 16,000 cigarettes at Burleigh and the Spit since March this year.

Responsible Runners Gold coast spokesman Naomi Edwards, a Griffith University researcher, told the Bulletin: It is just constant. We dont want to be picking up these cigarettes. Smoking is bad for you, and this is horrific for the environment.

Cigarette butts dont break down.

You have this toxin and poison leeching into the waterways.

The council last month gave the foreshores a clean bill of health in terms of sand and safety but the beach litter log puts the spotlight of state health enforcement on the citys most important tourist asset.

A Queensland Health spokesman said smoking had been prohibited at Queensland beaches since 2005 with the ban in place between the flags during patrol times.

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Beaches are butt of joke

Stanford study shows ways to improve public health at beaches

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By Rob Jordan

Sign warning of contamination at Channel Islands Harbor, Ventura, Calif. New models could help public health officials better predict when water contaminants will harm beach goers.

A new Stanford study shows how to improve the public health at beaches where coastal contamination can be a problem.

The analysis by researchers from Stanford; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the nonprofit environmental group Heal the Bay shows that relatively easy-to-use predictive modeling systems offer an improvement over current monitoring methods.

If implemented, these predictions could give beachgoers a better chance to avoid waterborne ailments such as gastroenteritis, respiratory illness, skin rashes and ear, nose and throat infections.

Getting gastroenteritis the "stomach flu," which often comes with diarrhea, vomiting and fever is one of several ailments that can affect people infected by water polluted with fecal bacteria from sewage.

Alexandria Boehm, the Clare Booth Luce Associate Professor of Structural Engineering at Stanford, was a co-author of the research report. "The current approach warns the public of the potential health risks of swimming at polluted beaches based on yesterday's news," she said.

Co-author Amanda Griesbach, a beach water quality scientist with Heal the Bay, noted, "We wanted to find a way to better protect the public health of the more than 150 million people who visit California beaches every year."

Currently, for financial and logistical reasons, most beach managers analyze swimming waters only once a week. These tests, which involve analyzing water samples for fecal indicator bacteria, generally take 18 to 24 hours. The fastest sampling method available can take up to six hours. In the meantime, swimmers continue swimming and water conditions can change within a few hours, making lab results inaccurate.

"We know for sure that the method used now is not accurate," said Boehm, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

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Stanford study shows ways to improve public health at beaches

Welcome back! Pooles beaches restored thanks to 139,000 cubic metres of sand and nearly 2million

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POOLES golden beaches are back to where they were before last winters storms decimated them.

Weeks of work to restore the seafront has come to an end, aimed at protecting residential properties and infrastructure from coastal erosion.

The final load of recycled sand, dredged from the main shipping channel into Poole Harbour has been returned to the beach.

Over the last four weeks a total of 139,000 cubic metres of sand has built the beaches up to previous levels.

Shore Road in particular suffered during the storms, with 10-years worth of erosion occurring in just a couple of months.

DEFRA awarded Poole 750,000 funding to pump 40,000 cubic metres of sand onto the beach. Then an additional 1.2 million of government funding was secured to extend the sand replenishment scheme towards Branksome beach.

Cllr Xena Dion, cabinet portfolio holder for flood and coastal management, Borough of Poole, thanked all involved.

They have worked really hard to finish the project on schedule, despite losing several days to bad weather, she said.

By working closely with DEFRA and Poole Harbour Commissioners we estimate to have saved around 300,000 by extending the scheme as we already had the dredger, pipeline and heavy plant in place; a fine example of partnership working.

She also thanked residents for their patience while sections of the beach were closed.

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Welcome back! Pooles beaches restored thanks to 139,000 cubic metres of sand and nearly 2million

Daily Rant&Rave: Dogs aren't allowed on Seattle beaches

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RAVE To thetwo gentlemen who saw my car keys fly two floors down the outdoor staircase at REI at night, in the dark. The keys had landed in the mud, and the gentlemen pointed the spot out to me and offered to climb over the railing to retrieve them. It was my goof, so I climbed over and got the keys while they watched to make sure I did it safely. Thanks for your thoughtfulness!

RANT To all the dog owners who walk right past the numerous No Dogs Allowed on all Seattle Public Parks Beaches signs at Golden Gardens and elsewhere. This city ordinance applies to all dogs on all Seattle Parks beaches it doesnt matter if theyre leashed or not. You and your dog are not a special exception! I love dogs, but there are excellent reasons for the pups not to be on our lovely beaches.

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Daily Rant&Rave: Dogs aren't allowed on Seattle beaches

Dont Fear Artificial Intelligence

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TIME Ideas technology Dont Fear Artificial Intelligence Getty Images

Kurzweil is the author of five books on artificial intelligence, including the recent New York Times best seller "How to Create a Mind."

Stephen Hawking, the pre-eminent physicist, recently warned that artificial intelligence (AI), once it surpasses human intelligence, could pose a threat to the existence of human civilization. Elon Musk, the pioneer of digital money, private spaceflight and electric cars, has voiced similar concerns.

If AI becomes an existential threat, it wont be the first one. Humanity was introduced to existential risk when I was a child sitting under my desk during the civil-defense drills of the 1950s. Since then we have encountered comparable specters, like the possibility of a bioterrorist creating a new virus for which humankind has no defense. Technology has always been a double-edged sword, since fire kept us warm but also burned down our villages.

The typical dystopian futurist movie has one or two individuals or groups fighting for control of the AI. Or we see the AI battling the humans for world domination. But this is not how AI is being integrated into the world today. AI is not in one or two hands; its in 1 billion or 2 billion hands. A kid in Africa with a smartphone has more intelligent access to knowledge than the President of the United States had 20 years ago. As AI continues to get smarter, its use will only grow. Virtually everyones mental capabilities will be enhanced by it within a decade.

We will still have conflicts among groups of people, each enhanced by AI. That is already the case. But we can take some comfort from a profound, exponential decrease in violence, as documented in Steven Pinkers 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. According to Pinker, although the statistics vary somewhat from location to location, the rate of death in war is down hundredsfold compared with six centuries ago. Since that time, murders have declined tensfold. People are surprised by this. The impression that violence is on the rise results from another trend: exponentially better information about what is wrong with the worldanother development aided by AI.

There are strategies we can deploy to keep emerging technologies like AI safe. Consider biotechnology, which is perhaps a couple of decades ahead of AI. A meeting called the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA was organized in 1975 to assess its potential dangers and devise a strategy to keep the field safe. The resulting guidelines, which have been revised by the industry since then, have worked very well: there have been no significant problems, accidental or intentional, for the past 39 years. We are now seeing major advances in medical treatments reaching clinical practice and thus far none of the anticipated problems.

Consideration of ethical guidelines for AI goes back to Isaac Asimovs three laws of robotics, which appeared in his short story Runaround in 1942, eight years before Alan Turing introduced the field of AI in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The median view of AI practitioners today is that we are still several decades from achieving human-level AI. I am more optimistic and put the date at 2029, but either way, we do have time to devise ethical standards.

There are efforts at universities and companies to develop AI safety strategies and guidelines, some of which are already in place. Similar to the Asilomar guidelines, one idea is to clearly define the mission of each AI program and to build in encrypted safeguards to prevent unauthorized uses.

Ultimately, the most important approach we can take to keep AI safe is to work on our human governance and social institutions. We are already a human-machine civilization. The best way to avoid destructive conflict in the future is to continue the advance of our social ideals, which has already greatly reduced violence.

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Dont Fear Artificial Intelligence

Howard Gold's No-Nonsense Investing: Heres the biggest threat were ignoring: machines

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For decades, futurists have worried about computers getting human intelligence. Dystopian films from Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Terminator and Matrix movies showed smart machines wreaking havoc on humans.

Now serious thinkers have sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence, while robotics and automation already have caused profound social and economic dislocation.

Two weeks ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate, he warned. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete, and would be superseded.

And the brilliant entrepreneur Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla Motors TSLA, +0.47% and SpaceX, called AI our biggest existential threat.

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon, he said.

Meanwhile, two researchers from the University of Oxford have estimated that computerization will put nearly half the jobs in the United States in jeopardy, including some creative professions that were thought to be immune.

Occupations that require subtle judgment are also increasingly susceptible to computerization, wrote Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. To many such tasks, the unbiased decision making of an algorithm represents a comparative advantage over human operators.

Even for investing commentary? Just kidding I hope.

So, are the machines really taking over? I interviewed two leading researchers in AI and came away a little reassured, but not much. AI is progressing, but some technical barriers may delay immediate quantum leaps in machine intelligence.

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Howard Gold's No-Nonsense Investing: Heres the biggest threat were ignoring: machines

Will B/E Aerospace (BEAV) Stock be Affected Today by This Analyst Action?

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) --Deutsche Bank maintained its "buy" rating of the "new" B/E Aerospace (BEAV) with a price target of $66, down from $91, following the spin-off of the company's consumable management segment.

"We continue to see fundamentals of strong airline profitability and air traffic growth driving mid-to-high SD top-line growth alongside steady margin expansion," Deutsche Bank said.

Analysts said that the spin-off of KLX (KLXI) from the company makes for a much "cleaner story" for BEAV, as it becomes a pure-play to commercial aerospace with uniquely high exposure to commercial aerospace aftermarket, which comprises 40% of sales.

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Will B/E Aerospace (BEAV) Stock be Affected Today by This Analyst Action?

This holiday season, behavioral economics could be a gift that keeps giving

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Were getting to that time of the holiday season when people are scrambling a bit to lock down that special gift, often wondering what would make a good choice.

But what if behavioral economics and behavioral science could actually help determine more useful choices?

Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has been looking into that very question, part of his ongoing reporting on Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN: Demoing a favorite gadget coming out of Santas workshop in recent years, an ideal gift for the hard-to-rouse, a behavioral economics alarm clock.

Clocky is among numerous products based on insights from one of the newest and fastest growing branches of economics.

Harvards Sendhil Mullainathan is a pioneer.

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, Harvard University: Were used to biological science or semiconductors leading to new inventions. But now were starting to see how behavioral science, just not new technologies, but new understandings of the human mind, are leading to new inventions

PAUL SOLMAN: So, we asked Mullainathan and his team here at ideas42, a New York-based behavioral economics consultancy, to suggest some holiday gifts already on the market.

The first is a simple new take on an old invention, for the overeaters among us, a smaller plate.

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: This plate is actually the size of plates from the 1960s. So its not just our waistlines that have gotten bigger. Its our plates that have gotten bigger.

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This holiday season, behavioral economics could be a gift that keeps giving

Dermatologist Macrene Alexiades-Armenakas, Creator of 37 Extreme Actives, Shares Her Top Acne Treatment Tips

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San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) December 19, 2014

Ayla (aylabeauty.com), an online natural skincare boutique and San Francisco-based micro-shop, has released an exclusive video interview with Dr. Macrene Alexiades-Armenakas about the dermatologist's top acne treatment tips. This will be the first video in a series featuring Dr. Macrene speaking at Ayla headquarters in San Francisco.

Macrene Alexiades-Armenakas holds a BA, MD, and PhD from Harvard University and has a thriving dermatology practice on Park Avenue in New York City. She is known for her cult favorite anti-aging cream, 37 Extreme Actives, which is a highly effective anti-aging skin care solution that can be used by all skin types, even acne prone. 37 Extreme Actives contains natural actives that have been clinically proven to significantly reduce wrinkles, diminish brown spots and redness, and repair sun damage while providing skin with powerful antioxidants, collagen boosters, barrier fortifiers, and moisturizers.

Here are Dr. Macrenes top tips for acne prone skin: 1)Those with acne prone complexions should avoid applying cosmetic powders as they can clog pores and contribute to breakouts. 2)Use your cleanser as a step to deliver medicine. Look for cleansers that contain niacinamide, an anti-acne ingredient, such as 37 Extreme Actives Cleansing Treatment which is an excellent acne skin care product as well as an anti-aging cleansing treatment. 3)Choose a non-comedogenic anti-aging cream, and avoid treatments that contain oils and petrolatum, which can be clogging. Additionally, look for ingredients that will help soothe the skin to help decrease acne-related inflammation. 4)Be cautious with prescription choices, including Accutane. While these prescription products may be effective, in some cases they may also leave scars and cause further inflammation. Dr. Macrene is also on Aylas panel of expert skincare advisors and shares exclusive anti-aging skincare tips on aylabeauty.com along with other top dermatologists. For more natural skincare tips and to learn more about Dr. Macrene, please visit aylabeauty.com.

About Ayla Ayla is an online beauty retailer that offers consumers personal guidance for skin care that works. To ensure its customers get healthy, great-looking skin from the inside out, Ayla combines the best natural, organic, and non-toxic products with expert recommendations and holistic skin care advice. Since 2011, aylabeauty.com has built a loyal following for its highly personalized and convenient experience. Ayla is a privately held company with headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Visit Ayla on the web and like us on Facebook.

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Dermatologist Macrene Alexiades-Armenakas, Creator of 37 Extreme Actives, Shares Her Top Acne Treatment Tips

NATO turns its gaze to the Baltic region

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Sweden should make wise use of NATO's benevolent attitude to establish closer relations, writes Anna Wieslander.

Anna Wieslander is Deputy Director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

For the first time ever, Sweden and Finland will be meeting with NATO a few weeks from now to discuss security in the Baltic region. The discussion will be the opening shot for a new kind of strategic dialogue.

The ascendance of Jens Stoltenberg to the post of Secretary-General portends a greater focus on the region as one strategic playing field. NATOs involvement in the area has generally been limited to the crises that pop up every now and then. The new approach has the potential to greatly benefit Sweden and Finland, as well as the other Nordic and Baltic countries.

New preparedness plan is of the essence

Russias annexation of Crimea in March took NATO by surprise. All eyes are again on deterrence and military preparedness as NATO recalibrates to its primary taskcollective defence in view of more urgent security concerns on both its southern and eastern borders.

After several decades of focusing on international, out-of-area, initiatives, cobbling together the details of the Readiness Action Plan (RAP) adopted by the Cardiff Summit in September is an immediate priority ahead of the meeting of NATO defence ministers this coming February.

The summit also offered Sweden the chance to participate in an Enhanced Opportunities Program (EOP). However, the specific design of the program may be put on the back burner as NATO shifts its attention to setting up a new spearhead force, command structure and cost allocation scheme.

The organisation has a good deal of ground to make up in that respect. As a senior NATO official put it after the summit, This organization has muscle memory and we are back in the gym.

For a number of years, NATO members have been taking advantage of the opportunity to cut defence spending while it has restructured in favour of multilateral peacekeeping forces around the world.

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NATO turns its gaze to the Baltic region

Volokh Conspiracy: Two district courts adopt the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment

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Regular readers will recall the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment introduced by the DC Circuit in United States v. Maynard, by which law enforcement steps that arent searches in isolation can become searches when aggregated over time. For the most part, judges have been pretty skeptical of the mosaic theory. For example, in the recent oral argument in the Fourth Circuit in United States v. Graham, on whether the Fourth Amendment protects historical cell-site data, the mosaic arguments didnt gain a lot of traction for the defense.

In this post, however, I want to focus on two recent federal district court decisions that cut against this trend and adopted the mosaic theory. The first case is United States v. White (E.D.Mich. Nov. 24, 2014) (Lawson, J.), which held that the Fourth Amendment was violated when the government obtained a warrant to track a drug dealers cell phone continuously over 30 days. The second case is United States v. Vargas (W.D.Wash. Dec. 15, 2014) (Shea, J.), which suppressed video evidence from a camera set up on a public utility pole 100 yards away from the targets rural house that showed what was happening on the targets front lawn continuously for six weeks.

1. United States v. White

In United States v. White, agents were conducting a wide-scale investigation into a known narcotics trafficker, Jimmie White. Agents obtained two search warrants to track Whites cell phone in real time for 30 days each, with the goal of understanding the scope of Whites activities and to show his involvement in narcotics crimes. When charges were brought, White moved to suppress the location information obtained from the cell phone location warrants. The case was heard before Judge David Lawson (who, allow me to add, I have had the pleasure of working with on the Criminal Rules Committee). Judge Lawson recognized that the Sixth Circuit had held in United States v. Skinner that monitoring a suspects cell phone location in real-time was not a Fourth Amendment search. But Judge Lawson held that the facts of Whites case were distinguishable:

[T]he surveillance in this case took place over an extended time period continuously for 30 days on two (or three) separate occasions and followed White into both public and private spaces. Justice Alitos concurring opinion in Jones, which drew support from a fifth justice, see Jones, 132 S. Ct. at 954-57 (Sotomayor, J., concurring), suggested that the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. Id. at 964 (Alito, J., concurring). The 4-week tracking in that case was well over the line of reasonableness, in his view. Ibid. (We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark.). And the Skinner majority acknowledged Justice Alitos concerns, allowing that [t]here may be situations where police, using otherwise legal methods, so comprehensively track a persons activities that the very comprehensiveness of the tracking is unreasonable for Fourth Amendment purposes. Skinner, 690 F.3d at 780. Skinner does not control the present case, because the length and breadth of the tracking here extends well beyond what any reasonable person might anticipate.

Judge Lawson then offered three reasons why 30 days of monitoring Whites cell phone location violated his reasonable expectation of privacy. First, it included Whites location when he was at home. Second, Congress has enacted statutory privacy protections for cell-site location. And third, 30 days of monitoring allows the government to obtain a detailed picture of a persons life. As a result, it is safe to say that society would recognize that an interest in keeping these movements private is reasonable.

Judge Lawson recognized that his approach raised a difficult question of line-drawing: How long is long enough for monitoring to constitute a search? He answers:

[C]ourts have confronted similar problems in the past. For instance, how long may law enforcement detain property waiting for a drug detection dog to arrive for a sniff before the intrusion matures into a seizure? To find an answer, courts must balance the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individuals Fourth Amendment interests against the importance of the governmental interests alleged to justify the intrusion. United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 703 (1983).

Under that rationale, it may be appropriate to track an individual for a short time on public streets based on a level of suspicion that is less than probable cause. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 22 (1968) . . . Longer surveillances may require more justification, and a case might be made that the governments reasons underlying the need for tracking in the case of domestic terrorism, for example may call for less. The present case involves a garden-variety drug trafficking crime, nothing more. The blanket surveillance of an individual for thirty days at a time cannot equate to a brief detention, however. The nature and quality of an intrusion of that magnitude (in excess of the the 4-week mark) tips the balance in favor of the individual; it constitutes a breach of ones reasonable expectation of privacy that requires the state to demonstrate probable cause as a justification for the intrusion. Jones, 132 S. Ct. at 964 (Alito, J., concurring).

This passage is interesting because it relies on caselaw concerning reasonableness, not what is a search. If I understand Judge Lawson correctly, he would say that even short-term monitoring on public streets is a search, but one that may be allowed based on only the Terry standard, at least depending on the crime under investigation. Here Judge Lawson goes significantly beyond Justice Alitos Jones concurrence, which had adhered to Knotts and indicated that short-term location monitoring is not a search at all.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Two district courts adopt the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment