GCR News Summary November 2013

Post Date December 02, 2013
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Iranian Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei image courtesy of the Foundation for Holy Defence Values, Archives and Publications

Iran reached a deal with China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US to temporarily limit the amount of uranium it enriches. Iran agreed for the next six months to stop production and dilute its stock of highly-enriched uranium, to stop installing new centrifuges, to stop work on a heavy-water reactor capable of producing plutonium, and to allow greater oversight from the International …

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GCR News Summary October 2013

Post Date October 31, 2013
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Indian flying fox image courtesy of Fritz Geller-Grimm under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The US federal government shut down for 16 days when Congress failed to authorize funds for the 2014 fiscal year. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) furloughed two-thirds of its employees, which left it without enough staff to monitor safety procedures at high-security biolabs, watch for outbreaks of potential pandemics, or respond to a major public health emergency. During the shutdown 338 people in 18 …

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GCR News Summary September 2013

Post Date September 27, 2013
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The Earth and the Moon as seen from Voyager 1 image courtesy of NASA.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report concluded after reviewing 9,200 peer-reviewed studies that there’s at least a 95% chance that global warming is primarily caused by human activities. The IPCC said in its 2007 report that there was a 90% chance global warming was caused by humans, but alternate explanations for climate change have been ruled out since then. The IPCC found that the global …

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GCR News Summary August 2013

Post Date August 31, 2013
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California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number …

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GCR News Summary July 2013

Post Date July 28, 2013
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Artificially-colored MERS virus image courtesy of CSIRO.

ConceptNet, an artificial intelligence program developed by a team led by Catherine Havasi at the MIT Media Lab, performed as well as an average four-year-old on the information, vocabulary, and word reasoning portions of standard intelligence test. The program uses a crowdsourced semantic network—a database of statements of basic facts—to answer questions. Miles Brundage explained in Slate that the program did well on “precisely the parts of the test that one would expect computers to excel …

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June 2013 Newsletter

Post Date June 05, 2013
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Dear friends,

We took the opportunity over the past month to jumpstart our online lectures, which previously hadn’t gotten the attention they deserve. We’re now announcing six new lectures over the next three months, with more in the works. It’s a wonderful mix of topics, ranging from chemical pollution to pandemics to artificial intelligence, and including original natural and social science, legal and policy analysis, and more. This breadth is what makes global catastrophic risk so challenging and exciting. We hope you’ll join us for some of …

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April 2013 Newsletter

Post Date April 08, 2013
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Dear friends,

Ongoing headline news discusses possible global catastrophes. In February, it was a close call with an asteroid. Now, there’s the threat of nuclear war with North Korea. What I’m most worried about is the H7N9 flu virus – see Laurie Garrett’s excellent article Is This a Pandemic Being Born? It can be a lot to keep track of, and so this month GCRI is announcing a new GCR news summary initiative.

We’re also announcing a new research paper focusing on the survivors of global catastrophe. …

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