In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Southern California claimed representation in the Cabinet of President-elect Donald Trump with the announcement that fast-food executive Andrew Puzder has been tapped to be the next Labor secretary. He's head of the Carpinteria parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's -- and is known for employing scantily clad women to hawk oversized burgers. Nominations will be revealed in 25 categories aimed at honoring the best movies and TV shows of the year, as well as the best actors, directors and musical scores. Monday's announcements will begin at 5 a.m.

"The legal industry is ripe for innovation," says attorney and journalist Robert Ambrogi, who covers the role of technology in law. In an influential April 13 blog post, Ambrogi proclaimed a boom in legal tech startups based on a more than doubling of listings on startup directory AngelList. Ambrogi has since produced his own streamlined listing that currently has nearly 500 companies offering technologies to the legal industry. Several are courting attorneys who need better, cheaper ways to sort through the avalanche of legal filings, rulings, and spiderwebs of citations between cases, from the local to federal level. The innovation upsurge may in part be generational.

A new paper uses flawed methods to predict likely criminals based on their facial features. Earlier this month, researchers claimed to have found evidence that criminality can be predicted from facial features. In "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang describe how they trained classifiers using various machine learning techniques that were able to distinguish photos of criminals from photos of non-criminals with a high level of accuracy. The result these researchers found can be interpreted differently depending on what assumptions you bring to interpreting it, and what question you're interested in answering. The authors simply assume there's no bias in the criminal justice system, and thus that the criminals they have photos of are a representative sample of the criminals in the wider population (including those who have never been caught or convicted for their crimes).

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Human Rights Watch issued a report Friday urging a ban on the development of fully autonomous weapons. The 49-page report entitled "Making the Case: The Dangers of Killer Robots and the Need for a Preemptive Ban" detailed the various dangers of creating weapons that could think for themselves, including the concern that self-operating defense technology would remove the human element from warfare upon which most clauses of military law are bound. The organization argued machines would not be able to responsibly make the same complex tactical decisions involved in warfare and that existing laws did not adequately cover their use in combat. Human Rights Watch also contended that removing the human element of warfare raised serious moral issues, saying lack of empathy would exacerbate unlawful and unnecessary violence. The organization warned that such technology could be used by authoritarian leaders as a means of controlling and subjugating populations without fear of revolt.

Confidence interval is abbreviated as CI. In this new article (part of our series on robust techniques for automated data science) we describe an implementation both in Excel and Perl, and discuss our popular model-free confidence interval technique introduced in our original Analyticbridge article, as part of our (open source) intellectual property sharing. This is part of our series on data science techniques suitable for automation, usable by non-experts. The next one to be detailed (with source code) will be our Hidden Decision Trees. Figure 1 is based on simulated data that does not follow a normal distribution: see section 2 and Figure 2 in this article. Classical CI's are just based on 2 parameters: mean and variance.

You can hardly blame Michigan for trying to scarf down its piece of pie before someone swipes it off their plate. The Wolverine State just became one of the first in the country to formally give the thumbs-up to autonomous cars on public roads, with no driver in the front seat. Friday, Governor Rick Snyder put his signature on bills permitting automakers to operate networks of self-driving taxis in the state.1 The legislation reverses a 2013 law that required autonomous vehicles to have a backup driver aboard, and comes as the home teams move toward delivering the tech for real. Ford has pledged to deliver fleets of fully autonomous cars, without a steering wheel or pedals, by 2021.

Fast food executive Andrew Puzder, who President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap as labor secretary, has advocated replacing some human workers with machines as a way for businesses to reduce costs associated with rising wages and health-care expenses. While machines require regular maintenance and can sometimes malfunction, Puzder said, they are also easier to manage than humans and don't pose the same legal risks. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," Puzder told Business Insider in March. Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee's and Carl's Jr. The company counts 3,300 locations in 42 states and 28 countries, according to its website.

Amazon could be about to launch its own British bricks-and-mortar supermarket where shoppers pay with their phone because it has no cashiers. The internet giant's business idea, called'Amazon Go', allows customers to grab the items they need and walk out without going to a till. A special phone or tablet app uses a range of sensors detecting what shoppers take off shelves and bills it to their Amazon account if they don't put it back. Shoppers use the app to enter the shop through a turnstile - and do the same when leaving with their food later. Amazon has registered a British trademark, paving the way for a potential launch in the country - but it has already built one in Seattle now being tested by staff.