Vaccination Causes Autism – Here’s What They Know…

For many years, parents have believed that multiple vaccinations have caused their children to become autistic. Governments from around the world, however, have categorically denied this possibility.They continue to bury their heads in the sand and ignore what is happening. They refuse to carry out relevant studies and will not answer any questions that may uncover the truth about vaccines.

Their actions are clearly demonstrated in a video titled AutismOne & Generation Rescue 2013 Conference Congressional Panel, featuring Congressman Burton (R-IN), Congressman Weldon, MD (R-FL) and Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL), published on May 11, 2013.

The video highlights what has been going on behind closed doors over the years and gives parents the rare opportunity to witness first hand the lies that are being told and the sheer enormity of the vaccine deception. [1]

Vaccines, Lies, and Videotape

The video begins in the year 2000.

Representative Dan Burton, chairman of the 2000 House Government Reform Committee on Autism and Childhood Vaccines, opened the conference by stating that autism, once considered a rare disorder, has become a near epidemic. He said that it is a top priority to carry out as much research into the potential connection between vaccines and autism as possible. He finished his introduction to Congress by stating that we must stop burying our heads in the sand and ignoring this possibility.

Turning to Dr. Coleen Boyle, the Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), he asked:

We have been checking all the financial records of the FDA, the HHS, the CDC, do you believe that anybody who is getting funds from Merck or any of the other pharmaceutical companies should be on advisory panels that are making judgments about pharmaceuticals coming from those companies, or do you believe that is a conflict of interest?

Now, for many of us, this question would appear to be relatively simple for someone of Dr. Boyle’s standing to answer. However, it was not simple for Dr. Boyle; she appeared to be rendered speechless, before stating:

I think that is a difficult question to answer.

Congressman Burton then turned to Dr. Paul Offit and said:

You talk about collaboration, I guess with the Merck pharmaceutical company?

To which Offit stuttered:

Yes, I, um, as I, um, disclosed in my written report, I have been in collaboration with Merck and Company on the development of the Rotavirus vaccine since 1992.

To which Congressman Burton simply replied:

They produce the MMR, don’t they?

Looking back towards Dr. Boyle, Burton asked her why the CDC did not include the possibility that some of these vaccines may have caused the autism increase as one of the potential causes they were investigating, asking her to check out this matter. Despite replying that she would, it appears that once again this relatively simple task was too difficult for Dr. Boyle, because thirteen years later, we are still awaiting her answer.

After speaking to other members of Congress, Congressman Burton turned back to Dr. Doyle and stated very firmly:

Dr. Boyle, for your information, at a public meeting in Brick Township in January in 1997, and you should know this, with the CDC and others present, several of the audience members asked about the vaccines and the possible autism link and they asked for that to be checked.

He continued:

And I submit that maybe, just maybe, it’s because the pharmaceutical company that manufactures it had some influence on the people in that meeting and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t want to get into that,’ and if that’s the case, that is damn near criminal.

Concluding the 2000 clip, I feel that Dr. Bernard Rimland made the most honest response of the day, when he answered Dan Burton’s question as to whether, after listening to the comments made at the meeting and carrying out his own scientific research, there was any possibility that vaccines were contributing to the increase in autism.

Dr. Rimland answered:

There is not only the possibility, there is an extremely high likelihood, from all the evidence available.

Those are strong words, so why has he been ignored?

Government Agencies Continue to Ignore Pleas for Intervention

Moving on to 2002, it appeared as if nothing much had changed. Once again, Congressman Dan Burton can be seen chairing the panel meeting, opening with an extremely poignant and moving piece of film of a child suffering with severe autism to demonstrate what parents cope with on a daily basis.

This piece of film moved the audience to tears and Congressman Burton commented that his grandson, along with thousands of other children across the country, were perfectly normal until they received multiple vaccines and continued by adding this extremely strong statement:

So, we can’t let the pharmaceutical industries and our government cover this mess up today because it ain’t gonna go away and it’s going to cost the taxpayers trillions more if we wait around on it and for our FDA, the HHS and the health agencies to continue to hide behind this facade that there have been studies that conclusively prove otherwise, is just wrong, too!

In fact, the whole video from beginning to end clearly shows evidence that this heated debate has carried on for more than a decade. Each year the same issues and the same problems appear to be discussed, and yet the panel comes to the same conclusion that studies are not being carried out to investigate the link between vaccines and autism.

So, why is this happening and why is nothing being done?

Government Investigator Turned Fugitive

In 2012, we see Congressman Bill Posey has taken over the task of trying to question the elusive and now somewhat greying Dr. Boyle from the CDC, about vaccinations and autism.

Congressman Posey asks:

Dr. Boyle, my predecessor Congressman Welder was a well-respected, competent medical doctor and I glean from him with some certainty he felt thimerosal in vaccinations definitely was a contributory factor to autism and I wonder if the CDC has conducted or facilitated a study comparing vaccinated children with unvaccinated children yet? Have you done that?

As expected, instead of answering the question asked of her, Dr. Boyle avoids his question completely and answers by stating:

We have done a number of studies looking at the relationship between thimerosal vaccines and autism and other developmental disabilities.

Not to give up on his line of questioning, Congressman Posey rephrased his question in the hope that he may have gotten a direct answer, asking:

So, clearly, definitely, unequivocally, you have studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated?

To which she replied:

We have not studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

Just as she tried to continue with yet more waffle, Congressman Posey stopped her in her tracks, saying:

Never mind, that was the meaning of my question, you have wasted two minutes of my time.

He then asked:

What steps has the CDC undertaken to ensure the integrity of the research that was performed by Dr. Thorsen, who, as you know, has been indicted for misconduct in the misallocation of resources?

Once again Boyle can be seen avoiding his question. Instead of answering Congressman Posey directly, she tried to palm him off with incorrect data, stating that Dr. Thorsen was a co-investigator in just two of the studies carried out. This was immediately refuted by Posey, who asked if he would be allowed to submit, for the record, information proving that Dr. Thorsen was in fact involved in 21 of the 24 studies undertaken.

At no time in any part of the video did Dr. Boyle answer any question without evading the issue put before her, even when Posey asked:

Have you gone back to validate the variety of studies he participated in? I mean, you know this guy is a humongous scumbag, one of the most wanted men on earth, and you relied on him for data to determine whether thimerosal had a negative effect?

Rather than admit to Dr. Thorsen’s failings, Dr. Boyle immediately jumped to Thorsen’s defense, even though this is a man who tops the federal most wanted list for 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering, facing a total of 260 years in jail for his crimes. [2]

Conclusion

It is obvious from listening to the video that not one person whom Congressman Burton or the panel questioned had any conclusive evidence that vaccines did not cause autism. Instead, leading figures gave false information and avoided all of the questions being asked of them. Many had conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry manufacturing the vaccines and saw no problem with this.

Members of the CDC, the FDA and other organizations sanctioning vaccinations are supposed to be independent. If, like Paul Offit, they hold patents to vaccines or are in collaboration with the companies manufacturing the vaccines, they are not independent and therefore not impartial.

Surely, parents trusting those officials with their children’s lives deserve better than this. It is time for change. For parents to have faith in the vaccine programs, they need to see concrete evidence proving that the vaccines are safe. Instead of bringing out more and more vaccines and trying to mandate vaccinations, governments and their representatives need to answer the questions being asked of them. This video is conclusive evidence that this is not happening.

Miniature, Freaky Fast Quadruped Robots

One of the longstanding goals in robotics is the mastery of motion, such that balance, precision, and control provide the same kind of  all-terrain navigation seen in biological quadruped counterparts. Another goal? Make robots fast…like so freaky fast that NASCAR fans are left with mouths gaping.

Fortunately, researchers seem happy to provide robot enthusiasts with blazingly fast bots. In a recent video with the unfortunately underwhelming title of “Efficiency and Effectiveness Analysis of a New Direct Drive Miniature Quadruped Robot,” researchers from the University of Maryland and John Hopkins have constructed a miniature robot with independent drive motors propelling its four whegs, which are hybrid-wheel-legs that offer the best of both.

The bot can travel up to 30 body lengths a second (2.2 m/s or around 5 MPH). As IEEE Spectrum points out, a human traveling the equivalent relative distance in the same time would be going approximately 120 MPH.

The research was recently presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Germany.

As the video shows, the bots just aren’t fast, but able to climb up objects and have a zero turning radius. Future modifications to the design are predicted to make the little bots travel even faster. There are also plans to replace the multispoked whegs with single spokes, thereby more closely resembling a true quadruped.

Though cuteness doesn’t appear to have been one of the project goals for the team, it’s hard not to want to make up cutesy names for this little guy motoring around.

Co-author Christopher Brown stated in the IEEE Spectrum comments to “Keep following our research and you’re bound to see a real quadruped doing many different gaits (walk/trot/canter/gallop/jump) in the future!”

With other robotics groups actively pushing the speed envelope for their own creations, it’s clear that the race for highly mobile, speedy bots is just getting started.

Source: Singularity HUb

Using a Smartphone’s Eyes and Ears to Log Your Every Move

New tricks will enable a life-logging app called Saga to figure out not only where you are, but what you’re doing.

Many of us already record the places we go and things we do by using our smartphone to diligently snap photos and videos, and to update social media accounts. A company called ARO is building technology that automatically collects a more comprehensive, automatic record of your life.

ARO is behind an app called Saga that automatically records every place that a person goes. Now ARO’s engineers are testing ways to use the barometer, cameras, and microphones in a device, along with a phone’s location sensors, to figure out where someone is and what they are up to. That approach should debut in the Saga app in late summer or early fall.

The current version of Saga, available for Apple and Android phones, automatically logs the places a person visits; it can also collect data on daily activity from other services, including the exercise-tracking apps FitBit and RunKeeper, and can pull in updates from social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Once the app has been running on a person’s phone for a little while, it produces infographics about his or her life; for example, charting the variation in times when they leave for work in the morning.

Software running on ARO’s servers creates and maintains a model of each user’s typical movements. Those models power Saga’s life-summarizing features, and help the app to track a person all day without requiring sensors to be always on, which would burn too much battery life.

“If I know that you’re going to be sitting at work for nine hours, we can power down our collection policy to draw as little power as possible,” says Andy Hickl, CEO of ARO. Saga will wake up and check a person’s location if, for example, a phone’s accelerometer suggests he or she is on the move; and there may be confirmation from other clues, such as the mix of Wi-Fi networks in range of the phone. Hickl says that Saga typically consumes around 1 percent of a device’s battery, significantly less than many popular apps for e-mail, mapping, or social networking.

That consumption is low enough, says Hickl, that Saga can afford to ramp up the information it collects by accessing additional phone sensors. He says that occasionally sampling data from a phone’s barometer, cameras, and microphones will enable logging of details like when a person walked into a conference room for a meeting, or when they visit Starbucks, either alone or with company.

The Android version of Saga recently began using the barometer present in many smartphones to distinguish locations close to one another. “Pressure changes can be used to better distinguish similar places,” says Ian Clifton, who leads development of the Android version of ARO. “That might be first floor versus third floor in the same building, but also inside a vehicle versus outside it, even in the same physical space.”

ARO is internally testing versions of Saga that sample light and sound from a person’s environment. Clifton says that using a phone’s microphone to collect short acoustic fingerprints of different places can be a valuable additional signal of location, and allow inferences about what a person is doing. “Sometimes we’re not sure if you’re in Starbucks or the bar next door,” says Clifton. “With acoustic fingerprints, even if the [location] sensor readings are similar, we can distinguish that.”

Occasionally sampling the light around a phone using its camera provides another kind of extra signal of a person’s activity. “If you go from ambient light to natural light, that would say to us your context has changed,” says Hickl, and it should be possible for Saga to learn the difference between, say, the different areas of an office.

The end result of sampling light, sound, and pressure data will be Saga’s machine learning models being able to fill in more details of a users’ life, says Hickl. “[When] I go home today and spend 12 hours there, to Saga that looks like a wall of nothing,” he says, noting that Saga could use sound or light cues to infer when during that time at home he was, say, watching TV, playing with his kids, or eating dinner.

Andrew Campbell, who leads research into smartphone sensing at Dartmouth College, says that adding more detailed, automatic life-logging features is crucial for Saga or any similar app to have a widespread impact. “Automatic sensing relieves the user of the burden of inputting lots of data,” he says. “Automatic and continuous sensing apps that minimize user interaction are likely to win out.”

Campbell says that automatic logging coupled with machine learning should allow apps to learn more about users’ health and welfare, too. He recently started analyzing data from a trial in which 60 students used a life-logging app that Campbell developed called Biorhythm. It uses various data collection tricks, including listening for nearby voices to determine when a student is in a conversation. “We can see many interesting patterns related to class performance, personality, stress, sociability, and health,” says Campbell. “This could translate into any workplace performance situation, such as a startup, hospital, large company, or the home.”

Campbell’s project may shape how he runs his courses, but it doesn’t have to make money. ARO, funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, ultimately needs to make life-logging pay. Hickl says that he has already begun to rent out some of ARO’s technology to other companies that want to be able to identify their users’ location or activities. Aggregate data from Saga users should also be valuable, he says.

“Now we’re getting a critical mass of users in some areas and we’re able to do some trend-spotting,” he says. “The U.S. national soccer team was in Seattle, and we were able to see where activity was heating up around the city.” Hickl says the data from that event could help city authorities or businesses plan for future soccer events in Seattle or elsewhere. He adds that Saga could provide similar insights into many other otherwise invisible patterns of daily life.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Commercials to be Broadcast Directly Into Consumers’ Heads

Xbox One to feature biometric targeted advertisements

Now that both Microsoft and Sony have announced new platform offerings, details are starting to slowly emerge, and biometrics have come up in conversations more than once –most recently, in regards to the Xbox One and its use of facial recognition ad-targeting.

According to an interview in SickTwiddlers, through the system’s Kinect camera, ads can be targeted based on who is seen sitting in front of the console and is something the company has considered very seriously.  Dashboard advertisements are a core part of the Xbox experience.

Though the company says it receives minimal data through its Kinect camera, ads can be targeted based on age, gender and other demographics. According to an Xbox LIVE Advertising Developer quoted in the SickTwiddlers interview, the company doesn’t receive much biometric information collected by the Kinect, in order to preserve user privacy.

In the past few months it has also been reported that the new Xbox console can measure heart rate based on a user’s skin color and transparency, though how this will be used by the system has yet to be seen.

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, Microsoft filed a patent last year for the Xbox, which also makes use of facial recognition. In the filing, facial recognition is used to facilitate a system in which players can join a game already in progress, just by entering the room.

Also last year, Microsoft filed a separate patent which outlined a biometric controller, which could be used for user authentication. 

Source: Biometric Update