For months, Bea Watts waited as the Los Angeles County child protection agency failed to pay her more than $4,500 for taking care of two children in her foster care. As bills piled up, she issued an ultimatum: The Department of Children and Family Services would have to take the children back, she said, unless it paid her by March 1. DCFS finally paid Watts, a Simi Valley resident, but her experience wasn't unique. Thousands of regular assistance checks from DCFS failed to reach recipients like Watts after the agency implemented a new computer system in October. Because of glitches in the conversion, the department for several months failed to pay foster care parents, young people living on extended foster care assistance, group homes and others.

A warning about a massive earthquake off the coast of California has been sent 92 years late. A computer error caused the US Geological Survey (USGS) to issue the false alarm about the magnitude 6.8 quake. The quake actually took place in 1925 when it laid waste to the city of Santa Barbara and caused 13 deaths. In a statement, the USGS said its computers had "misinterpreted" data causing the alarm to be wrongly issued. News organisations across the US received the emailed alert about the quake which, if it had been real, would have been one of the largest ever recorded in California.

He said that he grew up in a poor neighbourhood in east Los Angeles and could relate to youngsters today trying to make living.

Since Trump's election on an "American First" platform, U.S. and Indian officials have sought to play down any contradiction between his stated desire to protect American jobs and Modi's "Make in India" policy, arguing, for example, that deals in which components made in the United States are shipped to India for assembly benefit workers in both countries.

Gunmakers of the world's most deadly firearm has unveiled its first ever spy-in-the-sky drone and is planning on rolling it out for public sale. The Kalashnikov Group famous for the AK-47 will officially reveal what it is describing as a noiseless unmanned reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft at next month's MAKS international air show near Moscow. It has a four hour flying time and can be launched by hand as Vladimir Putin's biggest weapons maker takes a step back from its AK-47 - a rifle that has killed more people than any other firearm on the planet. The Kalashnikov Group's state-of-the-art drone which is said to be completely noiseless The drone weighs 7.5 kilograms and also boasts vertical takeoff capability. Reportedly, three types of noiseless drone to be released onto the market by the weapon manufacturing giant.

A mysterious circular rock formation on the surface of Mars has been captured by one of NASA's Orbiters. The formation was photographed by the Curiosity Rover this week and has excited alien hunters who invited speculation over how it came to be online. They suggested that the rocks were'arranged', laid out by another form of life, or that it was part of a larger, buried structure which has never before been seen. NASA's Curiosity Rover has captured a mysterious circular formation on rocks on the surface of Mars Alien hunters were excited by the images (above, after color enhancement) and suggested that the rocks had been'arranged' or could even be evidence of a larger, buried structure'Whatever we're seeing here, it's in a perfect circle and it's much different from the craters that we normally see on Mars and the moon and throughout the other planets in the solar system. This almost looks like these rocks were arranged in this circular formation.

Which one is the real Donald Trump? The American elections have been a hot topic in the office as we contemplate expanding our presence to the US. Since its debut in March, we have been entertained by the senseless tweets of DeepDrumpf, a Twitter bot created by Bradley Hayes, a postdoc at MIT. DeepDrumpf was trained on a few hours worth of transcripts of victory speeches and debates from the president elect using deep learning techniques. The tweets were constructed character by character and inspired by recurrent neural network models that had been previously employed to mimic Shakespearean speech. Although not the most sophisticated use of deep learning that we've seen, we must hand it to him for originality and capturing the zeitgeist. Original Post can be found here.

The time is coming when AIs will have better judgment than most politicians." Imagine that you were given two choices for the next president. The first choice is a person from a different political party with a set of policies or beliefs that you strongly disagree with. The second choice is an AI designed by a party with the sole purpose of achieving the policies you like. Eventually, says Joshua Davis at WIRED, AIs will also prove themselves superior when it comes to human governance. This idea may sound a little too sci-fi for many right now, but "the time is coming," he says. We spoke to him recently on our podcast (see Man vs. Machine – Who Will Govern Us Better?) about this radical idea, what it might look like to have an AI as President of the United States, and whether this is even possible from a constitutional standpoint. First, it wasn't the current political climate that spurred Davis to raise this idea, he noted. Rather, it came from examining the nature of our current political system in relation to how AI is evolving. "We vote for people, more often than not, based on the way they look, their hairstyle, or the way they talk," Davis said. "These are not really at the heart of the issues." To Davis, human personality--particularly our tendency to be drawn into scandals--has gotten in the way of governance. History, he says, shows that we're not very good at governing ourselves. At the heart of Davis' argument is the fact that artificial intelligence has been outperforming humans at specific tasks for a long time. For example, in 1996 the program Deep Blue beat then-world-champion Garry Kasparov at chess. More recently, AI created by Google beat the world's leading Go players. Go is considered by many to be even more complex than chess, and many top Go players were astounded with how quickly the program was able to master the game and win 60 games in a row. "It was doubly remarkable because of the way that it won," Davis said. "It won by doing things that Go players had never seen before.

A U.S. Air Force drone the size of a small airliner has crashed in a remote section of California near Mt. Edwards Air Force Base said in a statement that the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance aircraft, was making a routine trip Wednesday afternoon from Edwards to its usual home at Beale Air Force Base when it crashed for unknown reasons. The Inyo County Sheriff's Department said the crash caused a small wildfire that was quickly brought under control. The aircraft, which has a 130-foot wingspan, is designed to fly at high altitudes for long distances. It is slowly replacing the manned U-2 spy planes used for decades by the Air Force.

FILE - In a Monday, June 30, 2008, file photo, Beale Air Force Base Airmen work on an RQ-4 Global Hawk into its hangar at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, Calif. An RQ-4 Global Hawk crashed in a remote section of eastern California near Mt. Edwards Air Force Base said in a statement that the unmanned surveillance aircraft was making a routine trip Wednesday, June 21, 2017, from Edwards to its usual home at Beale Air Force Base when it crashed for unknown reasons.