Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
World’s biggest fleet of campus delivery robots now transporting student meals
The new delivery service, which costs just $1.99 per delivery, will transport Blaze Pizza, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts takeouts anywhere on campus. Additional retailers are set to be announced in the coming weeks. In total, 25 robots are included in the fleet, which represents a new benchmark in the size of a delivery robot rollout.
“Not only will this be the largest fleet of delivery robots on any university campus, but it is also the first delivery system to be compatible with students’ meal plans,” Jeff McKinley, Sodexo district manager for George Mason University, told Digital Trends. “That component itself elevates the value of the program tremendously, because meal plans at GMU are tax exempt, thus saving the students not only time but money by ordering via robot.”
The robots are described as being “99-percent autonomous” — capable of driving themselves around campus, including checking both ways before crossing a street, and even changing their own batteries. “It’s quite amazing, actually,” McKinley said.
To order their food, students and faculty use the Starship Deliveries app, select their items, and drop a pin on a map to show where the food should be sent. The app then allows them to track the robot’s progress. When it arrives, the customer receives an alert, after which they can obtain their food by unlocking the robot with an in-app command. The process takes an average of 15 minutes or less, depending on...
Nathan Phillips Is Not A Vietnam War Veteran But Does He Have A Richard Blumenthal Problem?
Let me pause here of a moment. I don’t have any huge objection to men who grew up in the 1960s using the system to avoid being drafted any more than I object to people using an accountant to minimize their tax liability. The government makes the rules and if they make stupid ones…and the draft law was chock to the gills with really stupid rules…then I don’t see where you are under a moral, legal, or ethical obligation to say, “hey, that rule is dumb but I’ll not take advantage of it and go ahead and screw myself so that I can show the world what kind of a righteous person I am.” Where my tolerance ends is when you say you served in combat.
That brings me to Nathan Phillips. Phillips is the guy who manufactured a controversy over the weekend (again). He and a group of his cronies participating in the alleged Indigenous Peoples March decided to walk into the middle of a group of Catholic high school students who were under verbal attack by another protest group. Phillips directly approached one of the students, got in his face, and proceed to bang his tom-tom right in the kid’s face. For a few hours, the left and NeverTrump engaged in an orgy of hate…the kid was wearing a MAGA hat so you know what that means…a kid was erroneously doxxed, the school was threatened, and, all in all, it was much as we’ve come to expect from the news media winding up an online lynch mob. And the headlines usually reflected that Phillips was a veteran or a Vietnam veteran (apparently that was supposed to authorize an extra dose of hate directed at the Kentucky students).
Here is my first story years ago regarding the contributions of Native American Vietnam Veteran Nathan Phillips ...
"American Indian veterans honored annually at Arlington National Cemetery"newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…
By @VinceSchilling
1,370 people are talking about this
A quick search found an lot more instances of the same.
Wikipedia: “Nathan Phillips (activist), Native American activist and Vietnam War veteran.”
UPI: “…laughing and chanting at Vietnam War veteran Nathan Phillips…
TMZ: “A mob of MAGA hat-wearing teenagers swarmed around a Native American Vietnam veteran…”
Slate: “…Nathan Phillips, a Vietnam War veteran…”
Washington Post*: “…Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War…”
*the Washington Post has since stealth edited this story but the original clip is below:
Huffington Post: “Phillips served in the Vietnam War and is the former director…”
GoFundMe: “…Native American Vietnam War Veteran Nathan Phillips was mocked and harassed…”
But the other thing that struck me was Phillip’s age.
The Washington Post: “…Phillips, 64,…”
The Omaha World Herald reprinted a profile it ran of Phillips in November 2000: “Now 45, Phillips has been sober for 16 years”
That struck me as curious because that places Phillips year of birth in 1955. At that point we can call bullsh** on Phillips having served as a Marine in Vietnam. According to the USMC official history of its involvement in Vietnam:
This Ain’t Hell blog, which hunts out Stolen Valor claims, points out that we aren’t all that sure what Phillips has said about himself. There is no direct quote of Phillips calling himself a Vietnam vet, but, being less charitable than them, I’d point out that several of those articles were undoubtedly run by Phillips to check for accuracy and it doesn’t appear that Phillips ever raised an alarm about being misrepresented. To the contrary, he seems to have know exactly what he was doing in using a variation of Department of Veterans Affairs terminology to...
GoFundMe: “…Native American Vietnam War Veteran Nathan Phillips was mocked and harassed…”
But the other thing that struck me was Phillip’s age.
The Washington Post: “…Phillips, 64,…”
The Omaha World Herald reprinted a profile it ran of Phillips in November 2000: “Now 45, Phillips has been sober for 16 years”
That struck me as curious because that places Phillips year of birth in 1955. At that point we can call bullsh** on Phillips having served as a Marine in Vietnam. According to the USMC official history of its involvement in Vietnam:
But by the end of 1970, more Marines were leaving than arriving as replacements. On 14 April 1971, III MAF redeployed to Okinawa, and two months later the last ground troops, the 13,000 men of the 3d MAB, flew out from Da Nang.
In 1971, Phillips was 16 years old. The earliest he could have enlisted, either as an emancipated minor or with parental consent, was 1972. And Phillips does claim to have enlisted at 17. Junior enlisted guys and junior officers weren’t sent as advisers to Vietnam in the last days of the war, after US ground involvement had essentially halted. A Marine infantry private was not going to go to Vietnam a year after the last Marines left Vietnam.
Although Marine combat units were no longer in Vietnam, Marine advisors remained to assist the South Vietnamese.
This Ain’t Hell blog, which hunts out Stolen Valor claims, points out that we aren’t all that sure what Phillips has said about himself. There is no direct quote of Phillips calling himself a Vietnam vet, but, being less charitable than them, I’d point out that several of those articles were undoubtedly run by Phillips to check for accuracy and it doesn’t appear that Phillips ever raised an alarm about being misrepresented. To the contrary, he seems to have know exactly what he was doing in using a variation of Department of Veterans Affairs terminology to...
New IRS spy software is ultimate Big Brother…
A river of data
In 2019, there will be about 152 million individual tax returns filed with the IRS. There will be roughly another 100 million business tax returns filed. There will be millions more miscellaneous tax returns, including trust, estate and gift tax returns. On top of that, over 3.6 BILLION information returns (Forms W-2, 1099, etc.) will be filed. There is quite literally a river of data flowing into the agency. The flow cannot be stopped, and as far as the IRS is concerned, they need even more.
For example, one of the six “Strategic Goals” presented in the IRS’ 2018-2022 Strategic Plan is to increase its access to data, and use that data more effectively to drive its agency-wide decision making, as well as case evaluations and selections for enforcement purposes. See: IRS Publication 3744 (4-2018). This is consistent with the IRS goal of becoming a “data driven agency.”
The IRS is awash in data. The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan boasts that the IRS’ volume of data was 100 times larger in 2017 than it was 10 years prior. In 2018, the IRS Criminal Investigation unit alone collected 1.67 terabytes of data from various sources. A terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1,024 gigabytes of data. I’m told that approximately 900,000 plain text files can fit into a single gigabyte. The number of users in the IRS with access to that data has increased 23 times (Strategic Plan, p. 19) in the past 10 years.
Managing massive data
How do you manage, process and assimilate such a massive amount of data to the point where it becomes usable? The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan expresses the goal to “invest in analytics and visualization software and tools, and develop processes to support analytics in IRS operations” (p. 20). The end game is presented in these words:
Advancements in how data is collected, stored, accessed and analyzed will allow us to deploy data better. We’ll standardize our data processes and protocols and encourage collaboration among all IRS business units. Increased interoperability of data systems and sources will enhance the secure and seamless flow of data to enable greater authorized access to information. We’ll invest in training to develop more advanced analytics skill sets across the IRS, and use data to improve our business processes. (Strategic Plan, p. 19.)
The investment in analytics was recently undertaken – in a big way.
Big Government, meet Big Data
On Sept. 27, 2018, the IRS entered into a contract with Palantir Technologies of Palo Alto, California, to handle the task of data assimilation. The contract calls for Palantir to...
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