Home Blog Page 245

AEVE: Sí al Ministerio de Cultura, pero con una política pública

0
baile en Antón
AEVE

~ ~ ~

Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web

 

Dinero

 

Tweet

 

Tweet

 

FB esp

 

FB CCL

GECU: El traslado de DICINE a Ministerio de Cultura

0
govt
GECU

~ ~ ~

Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web

 

Dinero

 

Tweet

 

Tweet

 

FB esp

 

FB CCL

¿Wappin? This, too, is who Panama is

0
raices
Raices, al peso de toda la negación.

Leslie George in his context
Leslie George en su contexto

Leslie George – Baptism
https://youtu.be/bzJ9a2EQTOo

Joshue Ashby & C3 Project – Colón Surgirá
https://youtu.be/u4t_uOzc-84

Grandes del calispo panameño
https://youtu.be/JaZuMzNz2oM

Víctor Boa – Negrito
https://youtu.be/YawGVwcjIJk

Milagros Blades y Oscarito Cruz – Solos de Congas
https://youtu.be/hYUdoaueDxY

Monchi Luca – El Criticón
https://youtu.be/MQojxq6vaEY

Fausto con Los Rakas – Oye Oye
https://youtu.be/2Zr113F1f5w

Los Silvertones – Tamborito Swing
https://youtu.be/8hh5_EwhRUE

Ruben Blades – Blackaman
https://youtu.be/OtL0KLP7Pnc

Yomira John – Solita
https://youtu.be/9B4G7wppIuY

Lord Cobra – El Buhonero
https://youtu.be/8uIWyXNuPB8

Kafu Banton – Pa’ Lante y Pa’ Atrás
https://youtu.be/YWL_BQb6ZjQ

Los Mozambiques – El Presidiario
https://youtu.be/x8fccWljLHk

Barbara Wilson – No Te Voy a Olvidar
https://youtu.be/4c6ty1uISGQ

70s Calypso from Panama
https://youtu.be/XJdL8Uvk_pU

 
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
 

npp

 

FB CCL

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

 

Tweet

 

$$

 

vote final

 
Dinero

Panagringo cuisine: Star apple pie

0
yum

Star apple pie

Ingredients

  • 1 quart sliced ripe star apples (carambolas)
  • 1 cup light brown sugar (if on a diet, 1 cup sucralose and 1 teaspoon molasses)
  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 1/4 cup quick cooking tapioca
  • 2 Tablespoons butter
  • Cinnamon to taste
  • Pastry dough for two pie crusts (top and bottom of one pie)

Directions

  • Slice the fruit latitudinally into quarter-inch star-shaped slices
  • Combine tapioca, lime juice and sugar (or sucralose mix) and lightly mix with sliced fruit
  • Line a 9-inch pie pan with pie crust
  • Spread the fruit mix over the pastry
  • Dot with small pieces of butter
  • Sprinkle with cinnamon
  • Roll the top pie crust large enough to make a seal, cover and seal the pie
  • Slit the top of the crust to let the steam escape
  • Pre-heat oven to 425°F
  • Bake for about 35 minutes until pastry is golden brown

Option: use ground nutmeg instead of cinnamon

 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

Jackson, Medicare for All is playing for keeps

0
bernardo

Medicare for All is for keeps

by Eric Jackson

I’m a democratic socialist. Have been all of my adult life. It runs in the family, too.

I’m a Democrat. I worked for Democratic campaigns well before I could vote, and have fought in the intra-Democrat wars that have shifted folks in and out of the party and back over a very long time.

It often imparts a jaded point of view. What all factions need to bear in mind, especially but not only entrenched establishment types, is that you don’t play hardball and then complain about the pickoff play.

In the 2020 presidential election cycle, some ideas that Bernie Sanders popularized now have so much public support that candidates of the corporate wing are embracing them or saying that they do. What Americans call the liberals – the word has a different set of meanings here in Panama and in most of the rest of the world – are mostly on board with the left about Medicare for All.

Draw the fine distinctions, which are important, but the left should not get upset about other factions stealing our thunder. That The New York Times and The Washington Post churn out a steady stream of attacks on Medicare for All and vilification of Bernie Sanders and other prominent leaders of the left should only surprise the clueless. The world’s richest man’s paper, and the Gray Lady, are owned by and dependent on the support of people whose interest is not labor, nor the rights and conveniences of those who don’t have a lot of money. They’re corporate media promoting those interests. The Post in particular is the journal of people who may be for legal abortion but hardly ever see an opportunity for a foreign war that they don’t like.

The United States has a two-party system, and within those parties there are forces that in most other countries would be on the ballot in their own right in a fragmented parliamentary system. On the GOP side, the religious right is not exactly the oligarchy, nor exactly the white supremacist movement – even if all of these forces shade into and mix with one another. Among Democrats Bernie and AOC are definitely not Joe Biden, but neither are they Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris. After the primary wars are over there will need to be some sincere negotiations, much like coalition talks in a multi-party system.

Democratic socialists may become the principal force within the Democratic Party but the party itself will not become “socialist” as such. The left might lead the coalition and pull the country in that direction. Any attempt by one faction to spit out or spit upon the others means a low turnout and probable loss to the Republicans. The sometimes forgotten name of the general election game is uniting the party, mobilizing the entire Democratic coalition and its constituencies to vote.

This is a new election cycle. Now there’s a new source of bitterness.

See, Medicare for All would be the enduring replacement for a compromise that fell short. Pass it as a meaningful program rather than a slogan emptied of its content and the private health insurance industry goes out of business forever. The pharmaceutical companies would lose their tight grip on the US economy too. Medicare for All is a death sentence for a way of doing business. If some complain about how unfair that would be, consider all of the individuals who have been sentenced to death by the for-profit health care business model.

If America gets Medicare for All, there will still be politics around expanding it, or on the GOP side chipping away at it. Once enacted there would be arguments about making it more efficient or just. However, it would never end as long as the USA doesn’t end.

Politically, Medicare for All would be like Social Security – a platform plank that less radical Democrats of an earlier time swiped from the Socialists. Social Security became a centerpiece of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program and has survived. Social Security is too popular, and too essential to the lives of too many people, for very many people to run for office on a platform of ending it and get elected. When the day comes that health care is a right for all Americans, woe to the candidate who runs on an argument that certain Americans don’t deserve it.

So, much of corporate America is searching high and low for a person or a method to stop not only Bernie Sanders, but more importantly his ideas.

(One of the nay sayers’ weaknesses? Not all of the corporate world is on board with them. Private health insurance is a burden on business too.)

Did Kamala Harris in an instant destroy Joe Biden’s pretense of inevitability by bringing up his record on race relations? We are likely to see as dramatic a moment or series of moments when the line is drawn between those who are for the private health insurance companies and those who would cut out that expensive and often brutal filter between doctors and patients.

Medicare for All is for keeps. A lot of money is being raised to stop it and some of it will be spent on candidates who say that they’re for it, “EXCEPT….” Look for all of this to come out in the ongoing candidates’ debates. Watch for cards like offers to people with no money of an opportunity to “buy in,” or enticements to the young, wealthy and healthy to “opt out.” Watch for contrived polls to “prove” that the huge American majority for Medicare for All really isn’t there if the question is posed in another way. Watch for all the usual consultants and ad agencies hired to deploy all the junk surveys and junk science and junk arguments — because Medicare for All is for keeps.

 

 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

Bernal, Reforms?

0
19
This Panagringo editor opines that one of Panama’s great legal controversies ought to be already settled as a matter of constitutional law. No discrimination on account of birth? That may be taken to mean, as it historically has, that there is no such thing as illegitimate birth in Panamanian law. But aren’t gay men and lesbians born that way? It’s not as if one day they decide to be attracted to people of their own gender. And it’s not the only congenital trait with behavioral manifestations — a baby doesn’t think about it and decide to pick up the rattle with her left hand and be a southpaw, either. So if gay men and lesbians are born that way, isn’t the denial of their right to marry a person of their same sex a form of discrimination on the basis of the circumstances of their birth, thus prohibited by Article 19 of the Panamanian constitution? The problem, of course, is that under the rule of a self-centered white oligarchy and a corrupt political caste Article 19 has largely become a dead letter. The political and legal systems need to be unrigged if already enumerated rights, and others that ought to be specifically added, are to have any meaning at all.

Reforms – what for?

by Miguel Antonio Bernal V.

Once more, the power brokers opt to keep the militarist 1972 constitution in effect. Once more, they decide to do this without any true participation of the citizenry. Once again, they turn their backs on the great strides of constitutionalism made in many places in order to shut themselves in with their idolatry of populist authoritarianism and autocracy.

It’s known, but worth recalling again, that constitutional law teaches us that to “reform” the constitution mean to alter something in its articles without changing its essential substance. The militarist constitution has been in effect for almost 47 years and has been reformed on four occasions, but its reforms have divested it of neither its authoritarian barracks origins nor its substantive opposition to citizen participation.

The so-called “good government” has quickly embraced the reform proposal made by the “Concertación” – which represents nothing. They had sought approval by two legislatures, and will seek, once the proposal is approved by the cabinet council, to bring it before the National Assembly for “their” deputies to approve it and send to a referendum.

}The reforms, taken together, are in no way innovative, modernizing, explicative or corrective. What they do contain is the expression of those who have hijacked democracy: they want to maintain absolute control of the government structure in order to impose their private benefits, perquisites and privileges. It’s a precise restatement that they seek to reproduce the oligarchy dominated by kleptomaniacs, that they don’t have the slightest disposition to cede the control that they have over political power, that they are even less interested in us having a democratic constitutional state that’s understood as such and seen to flow from the power of a popular constituent assembly.

No doubt they will use all of the propaganda and advertising paraphernalia. There will be media manipulation. The Electoral Tribunal magistrates’ muscle will put money on the yes campaign’s referendum platter. Even with all that they will not be able to convince.

The constitution needs to be reborn. There’s no way to rationally think about that other than by way of a participatory constitutional process that allows for the full exercise of civic power, the power of a constituent assembly.

 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

Cutting edge farming in a Coronado casita

0
TN

To get SUSTAINABLY spaced out, know about this technology

article and photos by Eric Jackson

What to do when our planet has a much larger population that’s jammed into mega-cities and needs to be fed? Especially if, due to climate change, mobile evolving blights and rising seas, a lot of once-arable land is no longer available for food production?

Or what do to if you have a hyper-advanced case of a certain sort of gringo culture and what used to be white flight to the suburbs leads you beyond gated expat enclaves to a colony on Mars or the Moon?

For that matter, in a shorter term, what if you are a Panamanian development planner and find the country with all of these money laundering towers, hardly anyone willing to stash and wash their ill-gotten funds here anymore and few of the theoretical foreign millionaires willing to to buy one of the many vacant condos?

You might try to convert the empty condo towers, or certain floors or units in them, into farms. Dr. Gary Stutte, who was a lead research for NASA in developing zero gravity farming techniques on the International Space Station, has in recent years turned his gaze downward to apply what was learned to Planet Earth. He foresees some apocalyptic changes in population and climate that might make it not just convenient, but necessary. In November he will be in Panama as the keynote speaker for a gathering of the International Congress on Controlled Environment Agriculture. See http://icceapanama.org/en/about-2/

Don’t go to the gathering decked out as a Trekkie. It will be a serious gathering, with business, government and academic sponsors from several nations and small-time devotees like Tom Norcross, who invested about $30,000 to turn the casita next to his house into a working leaf lettuce farm. At the conference they will discuss such mundane matters as:

  • Understanding Nutrients used in Hydroponics
  • Understanding Technology Used in Producing Greenhouse and
  • Vertically Farmed Produce
  • Learning the latest research available on controlled environment crops
  • How LED Grow Lights impact photosynthesis and plant growth
  • Learning new production techniques
  • Managing Business
  • Automation and Robotics
  • Blockchain

It’s a part-time gig for Norcross at the moment. If it’s to grow into something big, more likely he will be franchising small-scale systems like the one he runs now, or consulting with others, perhaps those involved in production on grand scales. For now, his main expense is the electric bill but he expects that in the large operations to come in Latin America and the world the main costs will be for labor.

Some of you old burnouts may remember the grow light and marijuana plants in the closet. The heat and electric bills were what would clue the narcs in about what you were doing if you got to scales brazen enough. That was before LED grow lights made both of those factors more manageable. But still, mold and pests could and often did take their tolls.

Norcross runs as totally controlled an environment as he can – non-toxic, and aseptic as possible. You enter the casita through a door protected by a blower to keep insects or mold spored from coming in with you. You are then in a little vestibule before another door, with another layer of that defense. The hydroponic grow room is kept sealed off with hand-washing and a hair net before entering it. The water, nutrient solution and computerized monitors of what’s going on in the grow room are in a separate room. Norcross carries a little cellular device that lets him keep tabs wherever he goes, making sure that the temperature is appropriately cool, the carbon dioxide level is elevated just a bit from what it is outdoors, the constantly spraying and recycling solution doesn’t get too acidic or alkaline and so on.

The romaine and baby greens that are the end product? They are hydroponic, grown in a water and fertilizer solution, so not by the standard definitions “organically grown.” But they are the good stuff, unlike most Panamanian produce not sprayed with herbicides, anti-fungal chemicals or insecticides. You don’t need to rinse this stuff off before eating it and Norcross recommends that you don’t.

  

set the controls for the heart of the sun
The computerized controls, perhaps the most expensive piece other than the casita itself.

 

The root system -– no soil substrate here.

 

plants
Just sprouted and transplanted into porous little cups in the foreground, almost ready to harvest behind.

 

lunch
Ready to be the vegetable course in your tuna on pan de queso sandwich.
 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

Editorials: Panama’s maritime neutrality; and Thugs make things worse

0
ship from Biomuseo
Is Panamanian independence getting to be as antiquated as this ship?

A neutral maritime nation? Or whose vassal?

One of the last things that the Varela administration did was cancel the Panamanian registry of a tanker ship that the United States condemned as “terrorist” because it allegedly was used to transport Iranian oil to Syria. This, it was said, in furtherance of the US embargo against Iran and international anti-terrorist agreements. The vessel was later seized by the British as it attempted to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar.

This de-flagging at US insistence was preceded by the Varela policy of banning the Panamanian registry of ships that rescue migrants on the Mediterranean Sea, this at the request of the right-wing Italian government.

Now we have a new administration and a new head of the Maritime Authority, who will have cabinet rank in the Cortizo administration. It is announced that Panama will make sure that in the maritime ambit we follow all international agreements.

Which ones, and under whose interpretation?

One of the most important sets of international agreements that Panama has provides that the canal is a neutral waterway which ships of all nations may use. Is that now called off whenever Uncle Sam calls some other country “terrorist?”

And what about another great maritime dispute of our times, China’s claims of the South China Sea as its territorial waters, against the claims of several other nations, and its aggravation of that dispute by creating landfill islands on places that would be underwater at high tide, militarizing those and claiming territorial seas and exclusive economic zones around those. Are we to condone those practices, which arguably violate the applicable international agreements about the law of the sea, because China is a great power and important economic partner?

Now it will be up to Nito Cortizo. Is Panama aligned with a foreign master or independent? If Panama is aligned, with whom? You would expect that no sensible leader of little Panama would go hurling bombastic defiance at either the United States or China, that diplomacy will have to be more subtle. But there are still some decisions to make about what Panama is and intends to be, and however these are made there will be powerful people and nations who don’t like them.

 

 

He / she / it / they broke the lock on the back gate and reached in through the work station window.

Maleante weekend

July 4 through 7 was not a long weekend for Panamanians like in the USA. But here the thugs made it seem that way, with several days of homicides and assaults more befitting of a long weekend in the most heavily armed and crime-afflicted areas of the United States.

Was THAT all over? Late Monday morning your hard-working editor began this editorial page, then, already on short July rations – this is the month when the biggest bills come in — went into Anton for basic cat food, rice and coffee staples.

Returning, it was discovered that some local hoodlum – let’s not guess who – broke the lock on one of the back gates, couldn’t or didn’t break any other locks, reached in through the back window to the computer station where The Panama News is produced, and stole. He – pretty sure it was a he, but perhaps not – stole the wireless modem and stick. Stole the mouse. Stole the cable used for the modem. Stole the editor’s cell phone and charger, which wasn’t working anyway due to an apparent dead battery. Stole an old iPad which only works for a few things, but could not reach the charger cable for this. The laptop itself was kept out of the reach of burglars, as it habitually is.

About $100 would replace those stolen items used to produce The Panama News, not counting the cell phone and chip, the editor’s time or travel expenses to and from places where replacements might be found.

This is written offline, and posted and uploaded at a place with free WiFi. Production of The Panama News is disrupted for at least a few days. How many or few days depends on the generosity of readers. We were already in a hole for our annual web hosting and anti-hacking program rentals, and now this. Sorry about that.

To lend a hand via PayPal, which generally takes a few days, click on https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=N9GEGY9C3VSH8

To donate to The Panama News if PayPal does not work you can send money by wire, in the full name of the editor, “Eric Lea Jackson Malo,” who lives near Antón and Penonomé, via Western Union, MoneyGram, Super 99, Correos, etc. We need to know if you sent money and the routing number. Let us know at fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com.

The complications with this are that there is no phone connection and Internet connections are only brief and sporadic, when the editor is at a place with free WiFi. Ah, well. Many a cause has rebound from far worse a setback.

 

 

MS

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley                

Bear in mind…

 

The two most powerful nations of the world had been squared off against each other, each with its finger on the button. You’d have thought that war was inevitable. But both sides showed that if the desire to avoid war is strong enough, even the most pressing dispute can be solved by compromise. And a compromise over Cuba was indeed found.

Nikita Khrushchev

 

The Republican Party can lead any person to believe that their promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line — no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

John F. Kennedy

 

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

Simone de Beauvoir

 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet

Águila Arpía hurtada

0
rawk

La búsqueda de una águila robada de
Parque Summit incluye recompensa

text
reward

~ ~ ~

Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web

 

Dinero

 

Tweet

 

Tweet

 

FB esp

 

FB CCL

Detecting deepfake videos

0

Detecting deepfakes by looking closely reveals a way to protect against them

by Siwei Lyu, University at Albany, State University of New York
 
Are any of these faces real? meyer_solutions/Shutterstock.com
 

Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat to the longstanding idea that “seeing is believing.” Not anymore.

Most deepfakes are made by showing a computer algorithm many images of a person, and then having it use what it saw to generate new face images. At the same time, their voice is synthesized, so it both looks and sounds like the person has said something new.

One of the most famous deepfakes sounds a warning.
 

Some of my research group’s earlier work allowed us to detect deepfake videos that did not include a person’s normal amount of eye blinking – but the latest generation of deepfakes has adapted, so our research has continued to advance.

Now, our research can identify the manipulation of a video by looking closely at the pixels of specific frames. Taking one step further, we also developed an active measure to protect individuals from becoming victims of deepfakes.

Finding flaws

In two recent research papers, we described ways to detect deepfakes with flaws that can’t be fixed easily by the fakers.

When a deepfake video synthesis algorithm generates new facial expressions, the new images don’t always match the exact positioning of the person’s head, or the lighting conditions, or the distance to the camera. To make the fake faces blend into the surroundings, they have to be geometrically transformed – rotated, resized or otherwise distorted. This process leaves digital artifacts in the resulting image.

You may have noticed some artifacts from particularly severe transformations. These can make a photo look obviously doctored, like blurry borders and artificially smooth skin. More subtle transformations still leave evidence, and we have taught an algorithm to detect it, even when people can’t see the differences.

A real video of Mark Zuckerberg.
 
An algorithm detects that this purported video of Mark Zuckerberg is a fake.
 

These artifacts can change if a deepfake video has a person who is not looking directly at the camera. Video that captures a real person shows their face moving in three dimensions, but deepfake algorithms are not yet able to fabricate faces in 3D. Instead, they generate a regular two-dimensional image of the face and then try to rotate, resize and distort that image to fit the direction the person is meant to be looking.

They don’t yet do this very well, which provides an opportunity for detection. We designed an algorithm that calculates which way the person’s nose is pointing in an image. It also measures which way the head is pointing, calculated using the contour of the face. In a real video of an actual person’s head, those should all line up quite predictably. In deepfakes, though, they’re often misaligned.

 
When a computer puts Nicolas Cage’s face on Elon Musk’s head, it may not line up the face and the head correctly. Siwei Lyu, CC BY-ND
 

Defending against deepfakes

The science of detecting deepfakes is, effectively, an arms race -– fakers will get better at making their fictions, and so our research always has to try to keep up, and even get a bit ahead.

If there were a way to influence the algorithms that create deepfakes to be worse at their task, it would make our method better at detecting the fakes. My group has recently found a way to do just that.

At left, a face is easily detected in an image before our processing. In the middle, we’ve added perturbations that cause an algorithm to detect other faces, but not the real one. At right are the changes we added to the image, enhanced 30 times to be visible. Siwei Lyu, CC BY-ND
 

Image libraries of faces are assembled by algorithms that process thousands of online photos and videos and use machine learning to detect and extract faces. A computer might look at a class photo and detect the faces of all the students and the teacher, and add just those faces to the library. When the resulting library has lots of high-quality face images, the resulting deepfake is more likely to succeed at deceiving its audience.

We have found a way to add specially designed noise to digital photographs or videos that are not visible to human eyes but can fool the face detection algorithms. It can conceal the pixel patterns that face detectors use to locate a face, and creates decoys that suggest there is a face where there is not one, like in a piece of the background or a square of a person’s clothing.

Subtle alterations to images can throw face detection algorithms way off.
 

With fewer real faces and more nonfaces polluting the training data, a deepfake algorithm will be worse at generating a fake face. That not only slows down the process of making a deepfake, but also makes the resulting deepfake more flawed and easier to detect.

As we develop this algorithm, we hope to be able to apply it to any images that someone is uploading to social media or another online site. During the upload process, perhaps, they might be asked, “Do you want to protect the faces in this video or image against being used in deepfakes?” If the user chooses yes, then the algorithm could add the digital noise, letting people online see the faces but effectively hiding them from algorithms that might seek to impersonate them.The Conversation

 

Siwei Lyu, Professor of Computer Science; Director, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Lab, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

These links are interactive — click on the boxes

 

npp

 

npp

 

vote final

 

npp

 

FB_2

 

Tweet