Wolfrum's Morning: My Humps

By Hunter Walker, TPM Muckraker, May 20, 2013

In a scathing new report Monday, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General accused onetime Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis K. Burke of leaking confidential documents to a reporter in a politically-motivated attempt to “undermine” a whistleblower who helped spark the investigation into the “Fast and Furious” operation.

Burke, a former aide to Janet Napolitano while she was Arizona governor and then secretary of Homeland Security, was appointed as U.S. attorney by President Obama in 2009. He resigned as he was initially being questioned about the leak in 2011.

The Inspector General...

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain—from synapses to hemispheres—and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted...