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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Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category nuclear war, publications

View the paper “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia”

Inadvertent nuclear war as defined in this paper occurs when one nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes to be a counterattack. A US-Russia nuclear war would be a major global catastrophe since these countries still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk remains. This paper develops a detailed mathematical “fault tree” …

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GCR News Summary April 2013

Post Date April 29, 2013
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You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent …

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January 2013 Newsletter

Post Date January 10, 2013
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Dear friends,

Happy new year. 2012 was GCRI’s first full year in existence. It was a great year for us. We grew from three people to ten, launched a new website, publications, resources for the GCR community, and more. Now, having survived the December 2012 apocalypse, we look forward to an even better 2013.

We’re sending out the January newsletter a few days late because we wanted to include two new papers that were recently accepted for publication – one on geoengineering and one on nuclear war. Each paper demonstrates a key theme that …

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New Paper: Inadvertent Nuclear War

Post Date January 09, 2013
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Category nuclear war, publications

GCRI has another new academic paper out. Analyzing and reducing the risks of inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and Russia, by Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, and Kelly Hostetler, has been accepted for publication in Science and Global Security.

The paper discusses the possibility of US-Russia nuclear war occurring when one country mistakenly concludes that a false alarm is real and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes is a counterattack. Inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war has come close to happening before, even since the end …

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Nuclear War Group Discusses Ongoing Risk Of US-Russia Nuclear War

Post Date December 30, 2012
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Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 29 November, GCRI hosted the fourth of a series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. This discussion focused on the ongoing risk of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, Benoit Pelopidas of Bristol, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Tony Barret, Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The reason for focusing on US-Russia nuclear war is simple: the US and Russia still …

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