"Starbucks! This is what I'm talking about! Share it away! We can change the world!" King wrote as the caption. “I think more people need to know about what we’re doing because it moves customer service to a whole new level,”
Wyble said. “I hope it helps make more people aware of what they can to do serve others in their communities.” Source
VIDEO [CC] Deaf News: The phrase "deaf-mute" is problematic, and it is not an appropriate way to discuss a person.
Huffington Post by Lydia Callis - An unusual tale about a young Indian woman named Geeta has been making its way around the internet after a Bollywood film helped spark interest in her story. As a child, Geeta accidentally crossed the border into Pakistan all alone. She lived there in the care of a social welfare group for more than ten years years until last month, when she finally returned to India.
Geeta is Deaf and uses sign language to communicate, and the way the mainstream media has chosen to portray her is quite revealing. Major news outlets from CNN to CBS to Al Jazeera all decided to utilize the outdated terms "deaf" and "mute" in their stories about the woman.
For centuries, people with different abilities, intellectual skills or physical features were forced to live on the fringes of society. They were labeled "defective" or "freaks" by the mainstream, and their families were shamed by their existence.
These labels kept people isolated, and they opened the door for abuse and neglect. People who were Deaf were never even given the opportunity to learn or socialize. They were denied humanity just because they were a little bit different... Read More: http://huffingtonpost.com/lydia-l-callis/how-the-media-mutes-deaf-voices.html
VIDEO [CC] - Weird News - Residents of China were stunned when they saw what they thought to be towering sky scrapers appearing from the clouds.
FOSHAN, CHINA - The footage which was recorded by a local resident appears to show a huge mysterious city, including ‘skyscrapers’ floating in the clouds over the city of Foshan in in central Guangdong province, China on October 7, 2015.
The mysterious ‘city’ was reported to have giant skyscrapers and other smaller buildings which are clearly visible in the video.
According to reports, thousands of people spotted a giant ‘floating city’ over the city of Foshan in China. The mysterious ‘alien city’ or ‘heaven city’ as it has been called on social networks was photographed by shocked residents.
In the streets of Foshan, people watched in amazement as a giant city appeared out of nowhere which thousands of people stood still, watching the ‘ghostly city’ in what has been the second apparition of a flying city in China.
Only a couple of days after the city of Foshan almost came to a standstill as thousands of people watched the mysterious city appear in the sky, a similar phenomenon was reported in the province of Jiangxi, China.
Mysterious Floating City Mirage Appears Over China - A mysterious floating city appeared over China on October 7th, causing conspiracy theorists to speculate and meteorologists to weigh in on the subject.
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Mystery Solved:Metro - Conspiracy theorists are going nuts over this ‘city’ that appeared in the clouds in China. The weird-looking cloud formation was spotted over Foshang in Guangdong, and again a few days later in the Jiangxi province.
VIDEO: Deaf News - Deaf Albuquerque girl uses American Sign Language to communicate with pet dog.
KRQE ALBUQUERQUE -- A Deaf New Mexico girl is using sign language to communicate with her pet dog. “She does everything with him,” said Neeva’s mom Chelsea Goff. While Neeva, 4, eats, her dog Baxter cleans up her crumbs. When it’s time to go outside and play, he is by her side.
“He is just always with her. If she’s asleep in bed, we can guarantee that he is in her room with her,” said Goff. Neeva and Baxter aren’t your average pair.
“We found out right away after she was born that she didn’t have hearing,” said Goff. Neeva goes to the New Mexico School for the Deaf in Santa Fe. She communicates using sign language. “So really that is our primary language with her, therefore it’s her primary language with our animals,” said Goff.
Goff went to Animal Humane of New Mexico in August to find a dog that could fit in with her family, particularly one that had enough patience to care for Neeva.
“They had some animals that they thought would fit with our family and sure enough Baxter was one of them,” she said. “It was kind of that love at first sight kind of thing, so we brought him home and things have been great.”
Neeva has taught Baxter how to sit, stay and even go using sign language. Goff said Baxter listens most of the time especially if there is a treat involved.
“To watch them interact and really have active communication is really spectacular to watch,” said Goff. She also said the constant communication between the two has helped Neeva with her signing.
“In the Deaf community you get a sign name and it is usually assigned to you by another Deaf community member, so Neeva gave Baxter his sign name,” she said. Goff said the pair’s relationship is a silent one, yet powerful. Neeva’s family got Baxter for free from Animal Humane after another family who fell in love with him at the shelter, but couldn’t have him paid for his adoption fee. Source
VIDEO [CC] - One year later, Deaf mom teaches hearing son ASL.
A Deaf mother, Jasmine Garcia-Freeland's son, River is currently 22 months old and is a Children of Deaf Adults, often known by the acronym "CODA", is a person who was raised by Deaf parents. He started learning American Sign Language (ASL) since he was about 6 months old. ASL is his first language and it has been an amazing experience teaching him ASL.
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Deaf Mom Teaches Hearing Son American Sign Language Part 2 One Year Later - River is currently 2 years and half old and is a Children of Deaf Adults. He learned American Sign Language since he was 6 months old. ASL is his first language and it has been amazing experience watching him grow and communicate more in ASL.
This video showed the same flashcards under playskool brand that I used last year and now River knows all vocabularies in both spoken language and ASL.
VIDEO [CC] - “First Democratic Debate Highlights: 2015” - Democratic hopefuls discuss the important issues of our day.
The YouTube channel “Bad Lip Reading,” famous for producing videos that substitute original sound with hilarious dubbing, released their version of the CNN News debate. The five-minute clip, which has already amassed over 2,800,000 views since Wednesday afternoon, offers a comical look at the event.
VIDEO [CC] - Exclusive: We all may be dead in 30 years, scientists are beginning to worry about AI and the danger it poses mankind: US report.
US News - The human race could vanish in the blink of an eye within our lifetimes. Or we could just as plausibly see our species become immortal by the middle of the 21 st century. That's the promise, and the threat, posed by the accelerating pace of research around Artificial Intelligence. It may be an either/or proposition.
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Most people have heard about Ray Kurzweil's immensely hopeful view, captured in his books and lectures about "singularity." In that view, AI progresses in helpful leaps, benefitting humankind at nearly every step of the way.
A good example of the early benefits of AI that nearly everyone uses now is Google Maps. The next stage of AI will be a supercomputer that recreates human intelligence. And the final evolution is artificial super-intelligence (ASI) that learns so quickly that it literally "soars" past ordinary human intelligence and solves every problem confronting mankind.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk fears that we are "summoning the demon" in our race to create an artificial super-intelligence.
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What all of them agree on is that we may very well approach a "tripwire" sometime in the next 30 years, where a powerful supercomputer finally replicates the human brain and mind, and crosses over nearly instantly into super-intelligence.
And then what happens next is anyone's guess.
"While most scientists I've come across acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI's abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to…species immortality," writes Tim Urban, the author of the popular "Wait, But Why?" blog.
Right now, drones use AI to navigate very complicated landscapes in order to deliver bombs in battlefield conditions. But they're still piloted remotely by human beings.
Should a stealth bomber be developed that can fly itself (not dissimilar to Google's self-driving cars that likewise use AI), and then make decisions about where to drop bombs in battlefield conditions without human input, it could create a situation where AI is in control (and not humans).
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Kurzweil believes we will hit this tripwire by 2045. Most of his scientific colleagues believe it is inevitable that we will hit it at some point in the 21 st century. Many of them are fearful of what happens when we cross it.
But why are they all so afraid of ASI? It's a good question - one that hasn't truly been explored all that much beyond a few boardrooms.
Much of what the public knows about the potential risks posed from AI applications comes from either science fiction movies such as "The Terminator," or from fears surrounding autonomous weapons with AI capabilities to target without human control. These are very real fears.
The truth is that AI is poised to do significant, irreparable harm right now, not just at some point in the future through the creation of a non-human super-intelligence, scientists have warned. AI combined with autonomous weapons could launch an era of indiscriminate killing the likes of which civilization has never seen before.
There have been two revolutions in warfare. With each revolution, humankind made a quantum leap in the ability to kill exponentially more people on the battlefield from a distance. We are on the cusp of the third revolution, engineered by AI. This one, though, may erase its inventor.
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For centuries, if you wanted to kill someone, you had to do it at close range. Gunpowder gave us the ability to fire projectiles at enemies from a distance, and changed the concept of war for good. Soldiers could kill their enemy without seeing the result at close range.
Nuclear weapons created the second revolution in warfare. While few nuclear weapons have been put to use, their invention taught us that we could create very large weapons, launch them from an even greater distance, and kill many people on the battlefield all at once. War hasn't been the same since then.
But it is the third revolution in warfare - autonomous weapons that can largely think for themselves and target enemies on the battlefield without human intervention - that we should all be worried about. Once such weapons are created, there may be no turning back.
"Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group," Musk, Hawking and others wrote in an open letter in July 2015. "Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control."
World leaders, to date, have ignored the scientists on the threats AI poses to our very existence, much as they've either ignored them (or moved slowly) on other existential future threats like climate change or nuclear proliferation.
But AI is different. Once a super-intelligent, big-data-crunching AI machine learns how to think and learn for itself, it may decide that carbon life forms are the obvious target in any threat scenario. At that point, it won't care what world leaders think.
So whether it's now, or later this century, it's time we took AI seriously (or at least understand Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics). Our lives most likely depend on it. If we are not careful, we are all going to be dead in 30 years because of artificial intelligence. Source: Copyright 2015 U.S. News & World Report
ST. AUGUSTINE, FL - A video of a new technology at one St Augustine, Florida Starbucks is going viral and it is awesome!
