Latest news with #Records
Miami Herald
7 hours ago
- General
- Miami Herald
‘Large'-tongued creature found in water tank at India home. It's a new species
In a city of northeastern India, a 'large'-tongued creature with 'fluorescent green' sides perched inside a water tank, but its hiding spot wasn't quite hidden enough. Visiting scientists spotted the colorful animal — and discovered a new species. A team of researchers visited several sites in Meghalaya state between 2022 and 2024 as part of a project to 'document the amphibian diversity,' according to a study published May 30 in the peer-reviewed journal Records of the Zoological Survey of India. While in the city of Shillong, researchers found three 'cryptic'-looking frogs, the study said. Intrigued, they took a closer look at the frogs, analyzed their DNA and realized they'd discovered a new species: Amolops shillong, or the Shillong cascade frog. Shillong cascade frogs vary in size. Males are considered 'medium'-sized, reaching just over 2 inches long, while females are considered 'very large,' reaching over 3 inches long, the study said. Both have 'bluntly pointed' snouts, 'large' tongues, 'long' legs and 'weak' arms. Photos show the coloring of the new species. Although varying in intensity, the frogs generally have 'dark brown' bodies 'with mottled fluorescent green patterns' on their sides, researchers said. Two male Shillong cascade frogs were found at a 'homestead' and 'water tank located nearby' within 'a densely populated urban habitat,' the study said. 'Both specimens were collected over a year (apart) from the same location, indicating their adaptation to a (human-modified) habitat.' The female Shillong cascade frog was found near a stream 'resting on a rock,' researchers said. 'It exhibited remarkable jumping behaviour, showcasing exceptional agility. Its robust movements and quick reflexes made collecting it a challenging task. Even after capture, the frog remained highly active, persistently jumping inside the jar, and demonstrating strong stamina.' Researchers said they named the new species after the area where it was discovered and, so far, the only area where it has been found. Shillong is the capital city of Meghalaya state in northeastern India. Shillong cascade frogs are considered 'edible' and sometimes 'harvested from the wild for its meat,' which 'contributes to the increased threat to its population,' researchers said. The new species was identified by its size, snout shape, body proportions, coloring and other subtle physical features, the study said. DNA analysis found the new species had at least 2% genetic divergence from related species. The research team included Bhaskar Saikia, Bikramjit Sinha, A. Shabnam, Eugene Lyngkhoi, Damepaia S. M. Pdah and K. P. Dinesh.
Mint
20-05-2025
- Mint
Rahul Matthan: Don't let data privacy safeguards work against us
The first country to seriously address the issue of protecting digital personal data was the United States of America. In a report titled Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens issued in 1973, it set out a list of data protection principles called the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs). FIPPs required organizations to provide notice before collecting personal data and seek consent before processing it. Only as much personal data as was necessary to achieve the specified purpose could be collected, and it could only be used for the purpose specified. Organizations had to keep personal data accurate, complete and up to date, and give individuals the ability to access and amend it as required. If all this sounds familiar, it is because it is. These principles have been incorporated into all modern data protection laws—from Europe's General Data Protection Regulation to India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act. It is where concepts like notice and consent, purpose specification, use limitation, data minimization and retention restriction come from, and it is remarkable how 50 years after they were first conceptualized, they continue to be used to protect personal privacy. Or do they? Also Read: Use verifiable credentials to grant us agency over our digital data In the 1970s, our ability to process data was limited, constrained by computational power and storage capacity. As a result, very few organizations could afford to process personal information at a scale that would affect our privacy. Since companies had to be selective about what data they collected and used, it made sense to require them to constrain the uses to which they put the data and for how long they retained it. Today, these constraints are no longer relevant. All organizations, regardless of their size or sphere of activity, use data in all aspects of their operations. Global data creation grew from about two zettabytes in 2010 to over 160 zettabytes projected in 2024. As a result, concepts like notice and consent are becoming increasingly meaningless, as it is no longer feasible to provide notice of all the different types of data processed or the many uses to which it will be put. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have further complicated the issue. If we want to benefit from all that AI has to offer, we need to give these systems access to our personal data so that they can draw inferences from it. With the ability to analyse the cumulative record of all the data that our personal fitness trackers have recorded about us, for example, AI systems may be able to use that information to infer our likelihood of contracting a disease. Those who are currently unable to access credit because they lack the traditional indicators of creditworthiness may be able to provide other indicators of their ability to repay a loan if AI systems are allowed to analyse their personal information. Also Read: Biases aren't useless: Let's cut AI some slack on these If we use AI systems for these purposes today, we are likely to run afoul of one or more of the data protection principles. Take, for instance, purpose specification. Since most AI use cases may not even have been conceivable when the data in question would have been collected, it is unlikely that our consent would have been obtained for it to be used in that manner. Deploying AI for these use cases would most likely require seeking fresh consent from data principals. The other concern is around retention. Since data is only permitted to be retained for as long as necessary to serve the purpose for which it was collected, organizations that comply with the mandates of global data protection regulations have set up systems to delete personal data once their purpose has been served. In the case of healthcare data, this is unfortunate because medical AI applications rely on access to health data records over as long a period of time as possible in order to establish trends for current parameters to be evaluated against baselines. If hospitals have to delete this data as soon as the immediate purpose is served, these opportunities will not be realized. Finally, there is the principle of data minimization, which requires us to only collect as much data as is strictly required to fulfil the specified purpose. Since AI systems perform better if they have more data on which they can be trained, the minimization obligation makes less data available for training and, as a result, limits the benefits that AI can bring. Also Read: India must forge its own AI path amid a foundational tug of war The approach taken by the US FIPPs to minimize the risk of privacy-harm limited the amount of personal data in the hands of the organizations that processed it. At the time, this was a reasonable approach as there was no additional benefit to be gained by allowing corporations to store our data. This is no longer the case. The more data that AI systems have, the better the outcomes they produce. As a result, any approach that simply limits the data these systems can use trades the benefits that could accrue from data analysis for the mitigation of privacy-related risks. I have, in previous columns, written about how new technological approaches—data anonymization and privacy-enhancing technologies—as well as institutional measures like data trusts can offer us a new approach. If we can deploy federated learnings and confidential compute systems, we should be able to use personal data without violating personal privacy. Our current approach to data protection is now more than half a century old. It is no longer fit for purpose. We need to learn to use personal data for our benefit without causing privacy harms. The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of 'The Third Way: India's Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance'. His X handle is @matthan.
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Indian Express
District Land Records Inspector send to four-day police remand in cheating case
Surat District Inspector of Land Records, Anant Patel, arrested by the Surat CID in connection with a case of alleged cheating, has been sent to police remand till Wednesday. Acting on a tip off, a team of Surat CID had left for Maharashtra's Pune and caught Patel who was evading arrest since January 2025. The team took one-day transit remand from Koregaon in Pune and reached Surat late Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, Patel was produced before Surat district court and a seven-day police remand was sought. The Surat court, however, granted remand till Wednesday. The case came to the fore following a police complaint lodged by Surat resident Azad Ramolia in January 2025. According to the FIR, Ramolia had lodged a complaint accusing Surat city survey office Deputy Director K D Gamit, Surat district Land Record Inspector Anant Patel, an unidentified computer operator, and proprietors of a ghost firm named Samruddhi Corporation of cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy. Based on Ramolia's complaint, a probe was launched into the matter. A real estate developer by profession, Ramolia, in his complaint alleged that he had purchased two agricultural plots at Dumas and Gavier (refers to areas within the Surat Urban Development Authority region) near Surat International Airport from one Rasik Lallubhai, a resident of nearby Magdalla village in 2016. According to the FIR, Ramolia completed the payment during the time period between October 18, 2016 to July 15, 2017, following which he got the plots registered in his name., 'Later, through a local land broker he came to know that his land at Gavier and Dumas is on sale in the market. He checked the documents and found that some Samruddhi Corporation had sold the plots to private persons and illegally entered their names on registration documents,' Ramoliya further added in his complaint. The estimated value of the land is around Rs 2,000 crore, said sources. After probing the matter, Ramoliya found about involvement of Deputy Director K D Gamit, Land Record Inspector Anant Patel, the computer operator and proprietor of Ghost Samruddhi Corporation in the fraud, said police quoting the FIR. The accused were absconding since the complaint had been registered, said police. Surat CID Crime Branch Deputy Superintendent of Police A M Captain said, 'We have made the first arrest in the case — of Inspector of DLR (District Land Record) with Surat city survey office — while others are still absconding. The accused is under four days of police remand. There are four proprietors of Samrudhhi corporation and they are Naresh Shah, Manhar Kakadiya, Jayprakash Aswani and Loknath Gambhir — all residents of Surat.' He further said, 'The complainant had alleged that the accused proprietor of Samrudhhi Corporation were hands in gloves with Surat city superintendent officials and made fake property cards and entered names of 357 people to whom the plots were sold. We are also looking for the other accused involved in this case. Accused Anant Patel had been staying in Koregaon since last four days.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Stitt's Oklahoma DOGE portal sought to find savings. People used it instead to troll Republicans.
Gov. Kevin Stitt announced DOGE-OK during the State of the State Address on Feb. 3. (Photo by Kyle Phillips/For Oklahoma Voice) OKLAHOMA CITY — Dozens of people suggested that state government could be made more efficient without state Superintendent Ryan Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt, according to submissions made to a statewide portal that asks the public for ideas about how to save money. In all, of the 90 submissions made to the Oklahoma Division of Government Efficiency portal around half targeted Walters, Stitt, and other Republicans leaders, including those serving in state's congressional delegation, according to Oklahoma Voice's analysis of portal submissions, which were released in response to an Open Records request. Submitters were particularly critical of Republicans' policies, including spending public money to pay for private school education, attempts to incorporate 'religion in schools and government,' and for removing options for state employees to work from home. Better known as 'DOGE-OK,' the Stitt-led initiative is modeled after President Donald Trump's federal Department of Government Efficiency. It requested submissions from the public in what a spokesperson for Stitt said is intended to be a 'jumping off point' to find savings within the state government. Stitt's office did not return a request for comment on if any submissions have been used to inform savings yet. DOGE-OK has reported finding over $51 million in savings in state government spending since its launch in February, though none of the existing savings appeared to align with the public suggestions in the portal. Stitt's DOGE effort is separate from the Oklahoma House portal launched in December. House lawmakers said submissions to that portal informed budget conversations, but also included 'spam' targeted at a statewide elected official legislators refused to name. Some submissions to Stitt's portal though appeared to be legitimate attempts at pointing out perceived inefficiencies. These included complaints about the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority, too many public relations contracts at state agencies and recommendations to consolidate some of the state's law enforcement agencies. At least two individuals identified themselves as current or former state employees. They critiqued inefficiencies in the current process for purchasing orders and asked that the state revert to a previous process. One submitter suggested using artificial intelligence to gather public records for those requesting them from the state. Another recommended providing Department of Corrections officers with tablets to scan inmate IDs to 'allow for quicker, safer, and more accurate completion of counts.' Another suggested that the Oklahoma Tax Commission unnecessarily spends 'a lot of time and money going after tax balances that may not be collectable from many years ago.' But around half of the submissions targeted Walters, Stitt, or other Republican leaders, including U.S. senators James Lankford and Markwayne Mullin, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice and anyone who is serving on the DOGE-OK team. One person suggested Walters and Stitt not be paid a salary. At least one called for the increased deportation of undocumented immigrants though didn't include any specifics. Some submissions contained expletives or were left blank. Another commenter questioned the need for an 'entire new agency' to tell existing ones to be more efficient and criticized the creation of DOGE-OK as duplicating efforts and 'inventing a whole bureaucracy.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
The Hindu
30-04-2025
- The Hindu
Police zero in on kingpins behind recent drug trafficking cases in Kozhikode
Strengthening the crackdown on drug trafficking, the police have started zeroing in on the kingpins behind a series of recently exposed synthetic drug trafficking cases in Kozhikode district where they reportedly maintained a discreet network of local drug pushers and carriers to remotely control the trade. Sources with the anti-narcotics squad say they have reasons to suspect the involvement of more foreign nationals in some of the recent incidents. Inter-State coordination between police forces has helped the ant-narcotics squad here make headway in identifying smugglers' networks and their modus operandi. Station House Officers are now in the process of revisiting major drug trafficking cases within their limits to check the possibility of identifying their real source. 'Whatever be the quantity of the seized synthetic drug, the police will take it up seriously for follow-up investigations based on the latest instructions from higher-ups. The arrest of three foreigners in a local drug trafficking case recently registered at Kunnamangalam police station is a case in point,' said a senior police officer associated with the investigation of major synthetic drug smuggling cases in Kozhikode city. A Sub Inspector with the anti-narcotics squad said the suspected involvement of some of the foreign students pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in other States would be a major area of attention in the ongoing investigation. He said the Call Detail Records and the bank accounts managed by such suspected persons had already been gathered by various enforcement agencies. A senior officer with the District Anti-Narcotics Special Action Force said the Call Detail Records of the previously arrested local drug pushers and carriers had already helped the local police zero in on more suspected persons, including foreigners. He also said the effective data analysis helped various enforcement squads track online investment frauds operated by drug traffickers from other States. Last year, the police were able to arrest 1,985 suspects in various narcotic smuggling cases in Kozhikode city limits alone as per the latest figures of the District Crime Records Bureau (Kozhikode city). The total number of cases was 1,835. Police sources confirmed that follow-up investigations would be carried out into some of those cases also apart from covering the newly exposed ones under the recently held Operation D Hunt special drive.
