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This is a crazy story of a British surgeon that burnt his initials into the organs he transplanted between two patients. I decided to post this to highlight the trust we place in certain people in our societies; the trust that the will perform their duties in an ethical manner.

I am an engineering student. This is another profession that is trusted by the people they serve to practice in an ethical manner. This story is very thought provoking.

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Simon Bramhall, 53, admitted burning 'SB' onto a man and a woman's livers

The incidents are believed to have taken place in February and August 2013

He used argon gas in brandings, which is used to stop livers bleeding in surgery

A surgeon has admitted marking his initials on the livers of two patients during transplant operations.

Consultant Simon Bramhall, 53, pleaded guilty to a charge of assault by beating at Birmingham Crown Court after being accused of branding one man and one woman's livers with 'SB' during transplant surgery in 2013.

He also pleaded not guilty to alternative charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

After Bramhall's pleas were entered, prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC said the Crown accepted the medic's not guilty pleas in a case which was 'without legal precedent in criminal law'.

Bramhall, who appeared in the dock wearing a pink shirt and dark suit, was granted unconditional bail and will be sentenced on January 12.

The incidents took place while he worked at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where he was a liver, spleen and pancreatic surgeon for 12 years.

Liver surgeons use argon gas to stop livers bleeding during operations, but they can also be used to highlight the area of the organ due to be worked on.

It is not harmful and the marks usually disappear by themselves, but when the female patient had a follow up operation doctors saw they had not healed and the initials there instead.

Bramhall, of Redditch, Worcestershire, was accused of causing actual bodily harm against a female patient on February 9 2013 and a male patient four months later on August 21.

He was suspended by the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust after the allegations came to light.

A spokesman for the trust told MailOnline he no longer works there.

He resigned in 2014, with the trust commenting at the time: 'During the course of an internal disciplinary investigation into the conduct of Mr Simon Bramhall, the consultant liver surgeon has tendered his resignation which has been accepted by the trust.'

While he worked there he was also involved in tutoring and examining medical students and supervising postgraduate students.

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Surgeon admits branding his initials on patient's livers

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Simon Bramhall, 53, admitted burning 'SB' onto a man and a woman's livers The incidents are believed to have taken place in February and August 2013 He used argon gas in brandings, which is used to stop livers bleeding in surgery A surgeon has admitted marking his initials on the livers of two patients during transplant operations.

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This article is about a woman who holds no punches when plastering her twitter feed with anti-white hate. It is quite alarming, the magnitude of her divisive comments!

Other Twitter members are asking, "Should this be allowed?" "Does twitter allow white hate only?" and many other questions regarding the ethical use of the Twitter platform.

This is a huge issue in our country beyond just the confines of Twitter. There is hate, that is a fact, but do we only target certain demographics for their specific brand of hate, and turn a blind eye to others?

In this case, I feel Twitter doesn't necessarily have an obligation to censor it's users. That would compromise what they are about--freedom of speech. That said, it may be in their best interest as a company to ban such divisive content, regardless of the demographic. If they let this sort of hate overflow, it could backfire and turn Twitter into the enemy by association.

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Indiana Nurse Under Investigation for Tweets about Killing White Babies

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An Indiana University Health nurse is under fire for racist tweets about killing white babies. Online Redditors and Twitter users tracked nurse Taiyesha Baker to Riley Children's Health, an affiliate of Indiana University Health in Indianapolis. PJ Media reached out to the hospital and received ...

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AI for Surveillance...a Two-fold Ethics Issue

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AI for Surveillance...a Two-fold Ethics Issue

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This article covers some of the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence to monitor surveillance video feeds. That there are many advantages, I will not refute, but how ethical is this practice?

Already, Americans feel like our privacy is going the way of the Dodo. With cloud services, cellphone tracking, social media and targeted advertising, we are berated by companies trying to figure out what we are doing all the time. Now, add in the efficiency of using AI to monitor surveillance, and the efficiency of it will make having security systems on every corner a less labor intensive practice. This is only going to mean more cameras watching our every move.

The second issue with this, is having AI to begin with. There is no shortage of billionaire geniuses out there touting the end-of-days by way of AI. Is there really something to that? Does expanded applications for AI software only stem to increase the potential for an AI takeover?

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Washington (AFP) - Police in the US state of Delaware are poised to deploy "smart" cameras in cruisers to help authorities detect a vehicle carrying a fugitive, missing child or straying senior.

The video feeds will be analyzed using artificial intelligence to identify vehicles by license plate or other features and "give an extra set of eyes" to officers on patrol, says David Hinojosa of Coban Technologies, the company providing the equipment.

"We are helping officers keep their focus on their jobs," said Hinojosa, who touts the new technology as a "dashcam on steroids."

The program is part of a growing trend to use vision-based AI to thwart crime and improve public safety, a trend which has stirred concerns among privacy and civil liberties activists who fear the technology could lead to secret "profiling" and misuse of data.

US-based startup Deep Science is using the same technology to help retail stores detect in real time if an armed robbery is in progress, by identifying guns or masked assailants.

Deep Science has pilot projects with US retailers, enabling automatic alerts in the case of robberies, fire or other threats.

The technology can monitor for threats more efficiently and at a lower cost than human security guards, according to Deep Science co-founder Sean Huver, a former engineer for DARPA, the Pentagon's long-term research arm.

"A common problem is that security guards get bored," he said.

Until recently, most predictive analytics relied on inputting numbers and other data to interpret trends. But advances in visual recognition are now being used to detect firearms, specific vehicles or individuals to help law enforcement and private security.

- Recognize, interpret the environment -

Saurabh Jain is product manager for the computer graphics group Nvidia, which makes computer chips for such systems and which held a recent conference in Washington with its technology partners.

He says the same computer vision technologies are used for self-driving vehicles, drones and other autonomous systems, to recognize and interpret the surrounding environment.

Nvidia has some 50 partners who use its supercomputing module called Jetson or its Metropolis software for security and related applications, according to Jain.

One of those partners, California-based Umbo Computer Vision, has developed an AI-enhanced security monitoring system which can be used at schools, hotels or other locations, analyzing video to detect intrusions and threats in real-time, and sending alerts to a security guard's computer or phone.

Israeli startup Briefcam meanwhile uses similar technology to interpret video surveillance footage.

"Video is unstructured, it's not searchable," explained Amit Gavish, Briefcam's US general manager. Without artificial intelligence, he says, ''you had to go through hundreds of hours of video with fast forward and rewind."

"We detect, track, extract and classify each object in the video. So it becomes a database."

This can enable investigators to quickly find targets from video surveillance, a system already used by law enforcement in hundreds of cities around the world, including Paris, Boston and Chicago, Gavish said.

"It's not only saving time. In many cases they wouldn't be able to do it because people who watch video become ineffective after 10 to 20 minutes," he said.

- 'Huge privacy issues' -

Russia-based startup Vision Labs employs the Nvidia technology for facial recognition systems that can be used to identify potential shoplifters or problem customers in casinos or other locations.

Vadim Kilimnichenko, project manager at Vision Labs, said the company works with law enforcement in Russia as well as commercial clients.

"We can deploy this anywhere through the cloud," he said.

Customers of Vision labs include banks seeking to prevent fraud, which can use face recognition to determine if someone is using a false identity, Kilimnichenko said.

For Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the rapid growth in these technologies raises privacy risks and calls for regulatory scrutiny over how data is stored and applied.

"Some of these techniques can be helpful but there are huge privacy issues when systems are designed to capture identity and make a determination based on personal data," Rotenberg said.

"That's where issues of secret profiling, bias and accuracy enter the picture."

Rotenberg said the use of AI systems in criminal justice calls for scrutiny to ensure legal safeguards, transparency and procedural rights.

In a blog post earlier this year, Shelly Kramer of Futurum Research argued that AI holds great promise for law enforcement, be it for surveillance, scanning social media for threats, or using "bots" as lie detectors.

"With that encouraging promise, though, comes a host of risks and responsibilities."

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Privacy fears over artificial intelligence as crimestopper

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The video feeds will be analyzed using artificial intelligence to identify vehicles by license plate or other features and "give an extra set of eyes" to officers on patrol, says David Hinojosa of Coban Technologies, the company providing the equipment. The program is part of a growing trend

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Ryan McCoy- Mod 3 Strippers Fighting for their livelihoods.

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Ryan McCoy- Mod 3 Strippers Fighting for their livelihoods.

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This article ties in perfectly with the discussion about human trafficking and gender identification. This work highlights issues that NYC dancers are having with their tips being poached by model-like servers and bartenders.

The reason I chose this article was to highlight something we have discussed in the other discussion forum. These women want to dance. They want to make the money in this way. Most people in this world would have us all believe that women are forced into this life, and while some may be, this article shows another side of the story.

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It was a slow night last winter inside a strip club in Long Island City in Queens. Only a smattering of customers were still inside the club. One of them was throwing cash - hundreds of dollars - toward a dancer calling herself Panama as she performed on stage. Once the man stopped, she thanked him and started gathering her earned cash with the help of another dancer.

But the club, like many others now, has a relatively new breed of "bartender" - once called "bottle girls" - women almost as naked as the strippers, who are competing with them for the attention of the audience and their money. They are not your grandfather's or even your father's bartender. Like the strippers, they are not employees of the club but "private contractors." But they have mastered social media, using Instagram to build followings of men in the hope that these men will follow them into the clubs.

And in those clubs, they have the same goal as the strippers: They want to "make it rain" cash, on them.

Just as Panama says she was picking up her money, one of these bartenders also started to gather the cash - for herself. When Panama tried to retrieve the money from the bartender, a female bouncer picked up Panama and tried to restrain her. As she struggled to break free in her spiked heels, she twisted her ankle, she told The Washington Post.

One of the club's co-owners, who Panama has known for years, intervened, siding with the bartender. Once Panama got upstairs, management handed her a little bucket containing $200. Panama says she was distraught. It was her son's birthday and she planned on using that extra $600 for his party.

"The next day I had a swollen ankle during my son's birthday and all I could think about was how I got treated at work," Panama told The Washington Post. "When I went back to the club they said they looked at the cameras and said it was my money. But there was nothing they could do about it then."

Panama is a stage name and she declined to provide her real name. She is for real, though, said Mona Marie, the owner of a New York dance studio where many dancers train called Poletic Justice. And, she says, so are their mounting grievances, so much so that some of them have declared a stripper's strike. It's unclear how many dancers are participating and what the impact on the clubs has been. The strike is about a week old.

This isn't your normal labor dispute between employees and employers. It's between bartenders and strippers, on the one hand, and between strippers and club promoters on the other, who tend to side with the bartenders because, after all, it's the bartenders who they believe are bringing in the customers via social media.

And for the strippers, race and racism is definitely part of the mix. The aggrieved strippers tend to be black women and the bartenders white or Latina.

At bottom, however, the dispute stems from change in the business. Like all other industries, this one has been disrupted.

"It's a new day," wrote DJ Kay Slay, a well-known New York hip hop disc jockey, in an Instagram post on Oct. 24.

There's always been racism in the strip club business he agreed. But "we all have to face the fact that it's a new day. It was a time where bartenders were only allowed to serve drinks and didn't wear the same attire as the dancers. The ladies did not change that rule," he wrote, "the clubs did. And social media made it where some promoters (not all) will use popular ladies who have never bartended in their life, to bartend at their events," using their "IG celebrity to make their fans come out on their nights .... Personally I feel they should drop both titles 'Strippers and Bartenders' because it's all the same sh- now!"

A visitor to New York who blogs on the business under the name of Urban, described her surprise upon entering two of New York's best-known clubs, Aces (now shut down for various violations) and Starlets.

How both of these clubs are set up is that the stage is actually behind a bar that wraps around it. I found this really weird considering the dancers were pretty much inaccessible unless they came up to you personally for a lap dance. What blew my mind though is pretty much all night rather than serving drinks, the "bartenders" were shaking their asses to have the dudes sitting around throw money on them ....

During a radio interview, former N.Y.C. stripper turned best selling hip-hop star Cardi B., who is Dominican American, said, "People want to follow the trend. Even if its a bad- stripper, like the baddest of the baddest, people still wanna throw money at the bar tender because it's just like the trend."

As BET put it, "strippers are calling out the bottle girls for literally swiping the money that does get tossed on stage."

In years gone by, strippers at "Gentlemens Clubs" performed on stage and in VIP rooms. Bartenders, fully dressed, were certified and poured customers drinks. The dancers were the money makers and rarely moved around to different clubs.

The shift began about five years ago, which is when the Instagram "models" with large social media followings calling themselves "startenders" started to be hired in the urban clubs primarily in Queens and Brooklyn. Club promoters stopped seeking out the best mixologists and started hiring from Instagram, based on a particular kind of look and followings. Bartenders started to resemble the strippers except they reaped a lot more benefits.

Strippers have always paid a "house fee" to the club. They must pay at a minimum $50 a night to strip. During big events the fee increases to $150-$250. Bartenders don't pay house fees.

Since this new type of bartender has entered the industry there's been a "drastic difference in dancers' wages," said Panama. She used to make thousands in a night but now usually averages $400 a night. "No dancer in New York City is making $1,000 a night anymore."

Dancers rarely stay in one club anymore. Many travel to Connecticut, Atlanta and Miami where the money is better.

A dancer named Gizelle Marie is one of the strike organizers. "The [New York City] bartenders tell the customers not to tip us. They block us from the customers while we dance or they are sweeping our money off the stage while we dance," she told The Post.

Several videos taken from inside different clubs posted on Instagram appear to support her claim.

Gizelle Marie says most customers can't tell bartenders apart from strippers anymore because they all basically dress the same and "the club promoters and owners encourage the behavior."

Gizelle Marie got the idea to mobilize the NYC Strippers Strike after she traveled to Washington last month to dance at a club during Howard University's homecoming. "I made a lot of money. It made me think to myself that a lot of the great dancers aren't dancing in New York anymore. They moved away to other cities to work or they just completely stopped," Gizelle said.

Within a couple days, she posted the word out on Instagram and 30 strippers gathered last week at Poletic Justice in the Bronx for a meeting.

Panama said, "The dancers used to be the most respected in the club and now it's like the dancers are at the bottom of the barrel. And the dark-skinned dancers are all the way at the bottom of the barrel."

Labor disputes in these clubs face a number of obstacles, the main one being that everyone who works in them is an independent contractor. There's no labor law to cover them.

As the owner of Poletic Justice, Mona Marie, told The Post, "There's no union or HR but at the end of the day it's still a job and they just want to be respected."

And there are risks for the women. Before the strike, Gizelle Marie said she danced in the clubs almost daily, but since organizing the movement she's been blacklisted. "I've received a lot of backlash from the promoters so I'm not allowed to work in these clubs," she said.

In the past, the dancers have mostly been silent about their issues out of fear, she said. "People were in fear of losing their jobs if they spoke out. A lot of these women have other careers, are parents, are putting themselves through school so that fear factor absolutely played a part in it."

They want their house fees reduced. They want bartenders to pay house fees, too. The black dancers want the opportunity to be hired as bartenders. And they want the bartenders to stop stealing their money.

They wish as well that management would stop pitting the strippers and bartenders against each other. The dancers believe everyone can work together harmoniously if rules are established.

"All we want is respect at the end of the day," Gizelle Marie said. "If it doesn't change by us going to the owners we'll take further matters legally."

Thank you for your support @feministripper #nycstripperstrike

A post shared by NYCstripperstrike (@nycstripperstrike) on

Club promoters are not sympathetic to the strippers' demands. Sean Simmons, promotional director for Aces New York, said the strike is "nonsense." He said there is no racism in the nightclubs and that he employed "all ethnicities" as dancers and bartenders at his club before it was shut down a couple months ago.

"The whole industry itself has changed," Simmons told The Post in a brief phone interview. "Some clubs are bartender driven but that's just because the bartenders are beautiful women." Simmons said that there should be rules and regulations between dancers and bartenders but said, "Nothing will come from the strike."

But the women have vowed to keep fighting.

As Panama said, "No matter how people may perceive your work environment, a work environment is a work environment and everyone needs to be respected and treated equally. If there's something you can do to help or change your establishment, you should do it."

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N.Y.C. strippers strike: Dancers say nearly-naked 'bottle girls' are grabbing their cash, cite racism

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It was a slow night last winter inside a strip club in Long Island City in Queens. Only a smattering of customers were still inside the club. One of them was throwing cash - hundreds of dollars - toward a dancer calling herself Panama as she performed on stage.