Presto Vivace shares a report from The Intercept: Officials at the Lockport, New York, school district have purchased face recognition technology as part of a purported effort to prevent school shootings. Starting in September, all 10 of Lockport District’s school buildings, just north of Buffalo, will be outfitted with a surveillance system that can identify faces and objects. The software, known as Aegis, was developed by SN Technologies Corp., a Canadian biometrics firm that specifically advertises to schools. It can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school’s “blacklist” enters the premises. Aegis also sends alerts any time one of the “top 10” most popular guns used in school shootings appears in view of a camera. The district is spending most of its recent $4 million state “Smart School” grant on these and other enhancements to its security systems, including bullet-proof greeter windows and a mass notification system, according to the Niagra Gazette. Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: “This is why municipal elections are so important. Just because this stuff is on the market, does not mean your local school system has to buy it.”
The report notes that “all the major school shootings in the last five years in the U.S. have been carried out by current students or alumnae of the school in question.” These students wouldn’t have their face entered into the face recognition system’s blacklist. Furthermore, “Most shooters don’t brandish their guns before opening fire; and by the time they do, an object-detection algorithm that could specify the exact type of weapon they’re firing would not be of much use,” reports The Intercept. “… the technology would give a school, at best, only a few extra seconds in response time to a shooting.”

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Source: Slashdot – Face Recognition Is Now Being Used In Schools

schwit1 quotes a report from Newsweek: You may well have heard that Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef is dying as warmer and more acidic waters bleach the system’s vibrant coral reefs. In fact, a heat wave killed nearly a third of the system’s corals in 2016. Now, scientists writing in the journal Nature Geoscience have discovered the reef has bounced back from near-extinction five times in the last 30,000 years. The current stresses, however, are probably far more intense than those felt in the past.

Low sea levels 30,000 and 22,000 years ago killed coral by air exposure. The remaining reef shifted seaward and eventually bounced back. Rising sea levels — like those we see today — killed off the coral twice between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago. This time, coral inched close to land to survive. The reef system, the scientists think, migrated up to 60 inches a year in the face of a changing environment. The last of the five great die-offs occurred about 10,000 years ago, and was likely caused by a huge influx of sediment, a reduction in water quality and a general sea level rise. The reef system may be due for another die-off sometime in the next few thousand years “if it follows its past geological pattern,” study author Jody Webster told AFP. “But whether human-induced climate change will hasten that death remains to be seen.”

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Source: Slashdot – Great Barrier Reef Has Died Five Times In Last 30,000 Years, Study Says