Mark Zuckerberg is suing hundreds of Hawaiians to protect his 700-acre Kauai estate

Mark Zuckerberg paid close to $100 million for 700 acres of beachfront property on the island of Kauai in 2014.

Now the Facebook billionaire is suing a few hundred Hawaiians who still have legal-ownership claims to parts of his vacation estate through their ancestors, as first reported by the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

Three holding companies controlled by Zuckerberg filed eight lawsuits in local court on December 30 against families who collectively inherited 14 parcels of land through the Kuleana Act, a Hawaiian law established in 1850 that for the first time gave natives the right to own the land that they lived on.

The 14 parcels total just 8.04 of the 700 acres Zuckerberg owns, but the law gives any direct family member of a parcel’s original owner the right to enter the otherwise private compound. Only one of the parcels is being used, by a retired professor named Carlos Andrade, who has joined Zuckerberg as a coplaintiff in the lawsuits.

The quiet-title suits filed are designed to identify all property owners and give them the ability to sell their ownership stakes at auction, according to Keoni Shultz, an attorney representing Zuckerberg. Because the ownership stakes are passed down and divided among family descendants by the state, many people don’t realize they have a claim until action is taken against them in court.

“It is common in Hawaii to have small parcels of land within the boundaries of a larger tract, and for the title to these smaller parcels to have become broken or clouded over time,” Shultz told Business Insider in a statement. “In some cases, co-owners may not even be aware of their interests. Quiet title actions are the standard and prescribed process to identify all potential co-owners, determine ownership, and ensure that, if there are other co-owners, each receives appropriate value for their ownership share.”

This isn’t the first time that Zuckerberg has taken steps to fortify his Kauai property. Last year he angered neighbors by constructing a rock wall that blocked their views of the ocean.

This article originally appeared at: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-suing-hundreds-hawaiians-161842458.html.

Google’s AI software is learning to make AI software

Progress in artificial intelligence causes some people to worry that software will take jobs such as driving trucks away from humans. Now leading researchers are finding that they can make software that can learn to do one of the trickiest parts of their own jobs—the task of designing machine-learning software.

In one experiment, researchers at the Google Brain artificial intelligence research group had software design a machine-learning system to take a test used to benchmark software that processes language. What it came up with surpassed previously published results from software designed by humans.

In recent months several other groups have also reported progress on getting learning software to make learning software. They include researchers at the nonprofit research institute OpenAI (which was cofounded by Elon Musk), MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, and Google’s other artificial intelligence research group, DeepMind.

If self-starting AI techniques become practical, they could increase the pace at which machine-learning software is implemented across the economy. Companies must currently pay a premium for machine-learning experts, who are in short supply.

Jeff Dean, who leads the Google Brain research group, mused last week that some of the work of such workers could be supplanted by software. He described what he termed “automated machine learning” as one of the most promising research avenues his team was exploring.

“Currently the way you solve problems is you have expertise and data and computation,” said Dean, at the AI Frontiers conference in Santa Clara, California. “Can we eliminate the need for a lot of machine-learning expertise?”

One set of experiments from Google’s DeepMind group suggests that what researchers are terming “learning to learn” could also help lessen the problem of machine-learning software needing to consume vast amounts of data on a specific task in order to perform it well.

The researchers challenged their software to create learning systems for collections of multiple different, but related, problems, such as navigating mazes. It came up with designs that showed an ability to generalize, and pick up new tasks with less additional training than would be usual.

The idea of creating software that learns to learn has been around for a while, but previous experiments didn’t produce results that rivaled what humans could come up with. “It’s exciting,” says Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, who previously explored the idea in the 1990s.

Bengio says the more potent computing power now available, and the advent of a technique called deep learning, which has sparked recent excitement about AI, are what’s making the approach work. But he notes that so far it requires such extreme computing power that it’s not yet practical to think about lightening the load, or partially replacing, machine-learning experts.

Google Brain’s researchers describe using 800 high-powered graphics processors to power software that came up with designs for image recognition systems that rivaled the best designed by humans.

Otkrist Gupta, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, believes that will change. He and MIT colleagues plan to open-source the software behind their own experiments, in which learning software designed deep-learning systems that matched human-crafted ones on standard tests for object recognition.

Gupta was inspired to work on the project by frustrating hours spent designing and testing machine-learning models. He thinks companies and researchers are well motivated to find ways to make automated machine learning practical.

“Easing the burden on the data scientist is a big payoff,” he says. “It could make you more productive, make you better models, and make you free to explore higher-level ideas.”

Patients can benefit from a bottle cap with a clock

TimerCaps is a new product from a company in California proposing to help patients with a little nudge

✔    Monitor of last dosage – Disoriented and cognitively impaired patients need a tool to know last dose to know when it safe to take another or resume driving. 

✔    Managing medication in the bottles they are dispensed – Medication and labeling should be together for the highest level of patient safety 

✔    Lift Adherence (Taking medication as prescribed) – Proven to lift adherence by up to 33%

✔    Detection of household diversion –  Child Safety packaging does not address the at-risk children from 6 – 16 

✔    Deterrent of unwanted openings  –   A greater likelihood of being caught reduces the attempts of diversion

✔    Habituation for long-term adherence  – Per the CVS Study the first 60 days determines long term adherence patterns. 

As doctors and pharmacies are being scrutinized, restrictions and unifying databases are being mandated, the main culprit is not being addressed. The patients that are mentally impaired by the opioids need tools for monitoring their last drug intake. What gets measured gets done, making the patient’s part of the solution from the beginning by giving them the right tools to be responsible with their drug intake. What we know for sure is that patients disorientated on opioids in traditional packaging and forced to find external means of tracking are not working. 

Cognitively impaired patients need automatic timers that count up since last opened to let’s patient and caregivers truly monitor usage to prevent unintended abuse, household diversion detection, and to know when it is safe again to operate a motor vehicle.  Opioid need to stay in containers they are dispensed in for maximum safety with all vital information such as: patient, medication name, pill descriptions, dosage, and side effects in case of an emergency.   

Traditional dispensing in bottles with generic cap is analogues of giving a person an automobile without a speedometer. Sure they can read the posted speed signs but without a speedometer they have no way of knowing how fast or slow they are going so they can appropriately self-correct.  They can only guess or find out when pulled over by enforcement, this is what is happening to opioid patients they are already impaired and have no way to track their last usage.

The TimerCap is a cap with a built-in stopwatch, it resets every time you close the container and begins to count up to display time passed since last closed.  This means the cap is not competing with labeling instructions, foolproof as it starts and resets every time its opened, simple enough for anyone to use without instructions and inexpensive.

TimerCaps are inexpensive and have been proven to help patients take their medication as prescribed and is the perfect tool for opioid tracking and diversion detection.  This keep medication and labeling in the container  its dispensed in for maximum safety, keeping all vital information such as: patient, medication name, pill descriptions, dosage, side effects, warnings, prescribing doctor, pharmacy, and refill information.  This makes it simple for easy identification of medications and time of last dosage in case of emergency.

PIPER – PIXAR’s New Animated Short, Watch the Full Video Here

The American movie studio Pixar has released a new short film called Piper. It tells the story of a chick facing the challenge of growing up and feeding itself.

This is no easy task for any living creature, but a little resourcefulness will go a long way. A truly beautiful film!

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1w_JANPACc.

Robert Downey Jr. Wins People’s Choice Awards 2017 Favorite Action Movie Actor

Congratulations, fans! It looks like the People’s Choice Awards came through for you this year. Not long ago, it was announced that Robert Downey Jr. won Favorite Action Movie Actor at the 43rd annual People’s Choice Awards.

Robert Downey Jr.  faced intense competition to win this year’s coveted award. Here’s a full list of nominees in the category:

Chris Evans

Robert Downey Jr.

Chris Hemsworth

Ryan Reynolds

Will Smith

If you want to learn more about the People’s Choice Awards, you can read about it below:

“PeoplesChoice.com is a year-round entertainment destination dedicated to covering the biggest stories in movies, music, TV, and style. An extension of the People’s Choice Awards, the daily news entity offers breakdowns of major moments in pop culture, exclusive interviews with celebrities, and original video series (including the popular Against the Clock franchise). The site also hosts polls, brackets and discussions, giving fans a platform to voice their opinions until the annual award show, when they can vote for their favorites to win in various categories.”

This article originally appeared at: http://comicbook.com/2017/01/19/peoples-choice-awards-2017-favorite-action-movie-actor-is-robert-downey-jr/.

The author of The Martian is writing a NASA TV pilot for CBS

The Martian was a huge success in both bookstores and movie theaters, and it catapulted author Andy Weir into a rarified atmosphere when it comes to science fiction authors. Now, he’s setting his sights on a new medium: television.

Deadline reported that CBS has given a pilot order for Mission Control, a NASA-themed drama that “revolves around the next generation of NASA astronauts and scientists who juggle their personal and professional lives” during a critical mission.

There’s nothing beyond that, but Weir’s involvement is exciting. The Martian was an intriguing novel because of its studious attention to realism (with some liberties) as astronaut Mark Watney struggled to survive on the surface of Mars. The novel is a love letter to NASA and the work that it does, and Weir is the ideal writer to put together such a project. It’s still very early in the game: the pilot will have to impress the network in order to be greenlit for a series. In the meantime, Weir is hard at work on another hard-science novel, as well as another film with Simon Kinberg and Ridley Scott.

There are plenty of workplace dramas and comedies out there, including some about space. The short-lived 2009 series Defying Gravity was about a group of astronauts embarking on a six-year mission around the Solar System, and the 2015 show The Astronaut Wives Clubwas a period drama about the wives of the Mercury Seven astronauts.

Both shows earned mixed reviews and didn’t last beyond a season. Not to mention, where police procedurals and hospital dramas are a dime a dozen, there’s still plenty of room for a show about space scientists and engineers — and Mission Control presents a good opportunity to tap into the enthusiasm for space travel that’s come with NASA’s recent missions to Ceres and Pluto.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14309282/andrew-weir-nasa-mission-control-tv-show.

Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria from New Delhi Kills Nevada Woman

On August 25, 2016, the Washoe County Health District in Reno, Nevada, was notified of a patient at an acute care hospital with carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) that was resistant to all available antimicrobial drugs. The specific CRE, Klebsiella pneumoniae, was isolated from a wound specimen collected on August 19, 2016. After CRE was identified, the patient was placed in a single room under contact precautions. The patient had a history of recent hospitalization outside the United States. Therefore, based on CDC guidance (1), the isolate was sent to CDC for testing to determine the mechanism of antimicrobial resistance, which confirmed the presence of New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM).

The patient was a female Washoe County resident in her 70s who arrived in the United States in early August 2016 after an extended visit to India. She was admitted to the acute care hospital on August 18 with a primary diagnosis of systemic inflammatory response syndrome, likely resulting from an infected right hip seroma. The patient developed septic shock and died in early September. During the 2 years preceding this U.S. hospitalization, the patient had multiple hospitalizations in India related to a right femur fracture and subsequent osteomyelitis of the right femur and hip; the most recent hospitalization in India had been in June 2016.

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing in the United States indicated that the isolate was resistant to 26 antibiotics, including all aminoglycosides and polymyxins tested, and intermediately resistant to tigecycline (a tetracycline derivative developed in response to emerging antibiotic resistance). Because of a high minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) to colistin, the isolate was tested at CDC for the mcr-1 gene, which confers plasma-mediated resistance to colistin; the results were negative. The isolate had a relatively low fosfomycin MIC of 16 μg/mL by ETEST.* However, fosfomycin is approved in the United States only as an oral treatment of uncomplicated cystitis; an intravenous formulation is available in other countries.

A point prevalence survey, using rectal swab specimens and conducted among patients currently admitted to the same unit as the patient, did not identify additional CRE. Active surveillance for multidrug-resistant bacilli including CRE has been conducted in Washoe County since 2010 and is ongoing; no additional NDM CRE have been identified.

This report highlights three important issues in the control of CRE. First, although CRE are commonly sent to CDC as part of surveillance programs or for reference testing, isolates that are resistant to all antimicrobials are very uncommon. Among >250 CRE isolate reports collected as part of the Emerging Infections Program, approximately 80% remained susceptible to at least one aminoglycoside and nearly 90% were susceptible to tigecycline (2). Second, to slow the spread of bacteria with resistance mechanisms of greatest concern (e.g., gene encoding NDM or mcr-1) or with pan-resistance to all drug classes, CDC recommends that when these bacteria are identified, facilities ensure that appropriate infection control contact precautions are instituted to prevent transmission and that health care contacts are evaluated for evidence of transmission (3). Third, the patient in this report had inpatient health care exposure in India before receiving care in the United States. Health care facilities should obtain a history of health care exposures outside their region upon admission and consider screening for CRE when patients report recent exposure outside the United States or in regions of the United States known to have a higher incidence of CRE (1).