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Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff, elected nine months ago, was named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2013, leaving whistleblower Edward Snowden in second place, the magazine revealed on Wednesday.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Some headphones come with crazy long cords, which makes managing them a pain. If you have any long cable that you use often, then consider braiding them as MrNurse on the Head-Fi forums does.

Loop the cord twice so that it looks like three parallel cables. The braids will start and end at each side that is looped.

Cross over the end of the cable and begin the 3-string braiding process. Make sure you don't braid too tightly, and keep untangling when it gets bunched up.

It's a method best seen than read, so check out the video above. The folks at the Head-Fi forum have some interesting tips too, like changing the desired length by the size of the loop.

How To Braid Headphone Cables (HFI-580) | Bj Tormon via Head-Fi and Reddit

Three people have been badly injured in clashes that erupted between rival fans at a key Brazilian league football match. A helicopter made a landing at the field to rush a victim to a hospital, while police stepped in to quell the violence.
Read Full Article at RT.com

KVM, the long a popular x86 Linux virtualization technology, will appear in IBM's Power architecture in 2014.

How does a power cord charge a cellphone? Magic, silly! According to a Pew poll, many of my fellow Americans are completely in the dark about how their world works, including the fact that carbon dioxide is a chemical responsible for some global warming.

Readers can take the interactive quiz here before reading more. Pew’s quiz is especially salient this week, after another round of International test scores confirmed, once again, that America’s poorly run education system is producing a deeply unequal and uninformed society.

Here are a few of the essential gems that participants couldn’t answer.

Less Than Half Of High School Graduates Know The Cause of Global Warming

Forty-nine percent could not identify “carbon” as the cause of climate change (as opposed to Hydrogen, Helium, or Radon). Note, this wasn’t about whether humans are causing global warming, just what, on Earth, is making it warmer outside.

Equally concerning to those who think Democracy rocks is the fact that about one-third didn’t know the basics of drug experimentation. About 33 percent of those without a diploma thought that researchers should give all the participants in a study the treatment drug, rather than half (the control group).

The graph below is not segmented by education level.

Nano Means Small

Nanorobots are not, in fact, robots that are very large, cold, or hot. Nano means tiny; it’s a prefix I’d like to know when an evil super-villain infects the water supply with mind-controlling robots. Or, less likely, when our government is debating pollution and crop spray regulations.

“The inability to communicate effectively the potential risks associated with nanotechnology could create an environment where appropriate regulation and confident private sector investment are threatened,” explained a research paper from Yale’s Cultural Cognition Lab [PDF].

Electrons Are Smaller Than Atoms And Lasers Are Not Made Of Sound

About 33 percent of those over 65 years of age didn’t know that an electron was smaller than an atom. One would think with the Cold War’s delightful history of nuclear propaganda, someone would have noticed that the objects orbiting the center ball were smaller. In total, less than half (47 percent) got that question correct.

Another fun fact: sound does not produce blinding light. Lasers are something we see. Despite this fact, less than half (47 percent) of Americans thought lasers were made of sound.

Bacteria Resistance Is A Thing

We might be slowly rumbling towards a global epidemic of drug-resistant bacteria. The more we inoculate Big Mac-destined cattle from disease, the worse our defenses become. Most people (77 percent) recognized that bacteria resistance was more of a problem than bacteria addiction (not a thing). Only 58 percent of those with a diploma or less could answer this question correctly.

Here’s the full breakdown of the quiz:

I really shouldn’t be shocked by this anymore, I’ve seen so many examples of how developers always manage to ignore a standard, or a common behaviour of the web resulting in a broken experience.

Today I came across three prime (and repetitive) examples of common mistsakes:

To www or not to www

I saw an ad for Lego Land at the streetcar stop this morning, so while waiting I figured I’d check it out, open my Chrome Mobile, type in legolanddiscoverycentre.ca and I get this:

Javing seen this before, (oh, so many times!) I tried www.legolanddiscoverycentre.ca and I get the correct website!

HTTP vs HTTPS

Next on this shame list, is TransUnion, I typed in “TransUnion” in Google, clicked the first result and landed on the website at http://www.transunion.ca

At first glance, everything looks normal, then I quickly realized there is nothing to click on, and it seems some images are not showing!

Again, having seen this before, I quickly try https://www.transunion.ca and I get the proper page:

Not only was the page under HTTP broken, it’s also COMPLETELY different than the HTTPS page!

Being curious, I try: https://transunion.ca and of course they screwed that up as well:

I give up!

Please stop breaking the web!

The FDA has given personal genetics company 23andme 15 days to comply with health regulations, before the federal agency begins seizing the company's DNA testing kits. The FDA says 23andme is offering an untested "diagnostic" device in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

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You don’t have to be a superhero fan to have been touched by the saga of Batkid. The San Francisco Make-A-Wish Foundation organized an incredible day-long adventure for 5-year-old Miles Scott earlier this month, allowing him to travel across the city and fight crime as the Caped Crusader. Besides global news coverage, Batman actors such as Ben Affleck and Christian Bale talked about the event and even President Obama got into the act. Everyone loves Batkid.

The saga recently continued on Good Morning America where Miles appeared, in full Bat-gear, to defeat his greatest villain yet: the Joker. Check it out below.

Here’s the video from Good Morning America.

• Superhero Bits: BatKid, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Thor: The Dark World, Kick-Ass 2
• Christian Bale Created Bat-voice During ‘Batman Begins’ Audition to Justify Wearing the Hero’s Suit
• BatKid Takes Over San Francisco
• Make-A-Wish Will Turn San Francisco Into Gotham City So a Child Can Be Batman
• Quentin Tarantino Explains ‘The Lone Ranger’ Love, Dismisses Batman
• VOTD: Jay Leno Drives Batman’s Tumbler

Jason in Atlantis is not your typical mythic hero. Don't believe us? Check out the above gif, where his sword grip leaves a little bit to be desired. Poor guy.

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Vince Gilligan's flying pretty high after the finale of Breaking Bad, basking in critical acclaim and fan devotion. Does he want to gloat about it, "shove the show's success up everybody's ass?" asks GQ. "I don't know whose ass to shove it up," says Gilligan. "I'm trying to think if ... More »

Expanding on the tried-and-true historical miniseries that makes premium cable subscribers swoon, Variety reports that HBO is in talks to take on the story of Napoleon's life (not to be confused with a film on the same topic that's also in the works right now). Since this isn't just any ... More »

To promote the upcoming X-men: Days of Future Past, a new viral site takes the 50th anniversary of JFK's murder and spins a new conspiracy theory out of the historic tragedy. Called The Bent Bullet, the site delves into the widespread paranoia that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the American public's burgeoning fear of mutants. To that end, it co-opts the infamous Zapruder film to suggest that Magneto himself was at Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, and was instrumental in the murder of JFK by manipulating the "bent bullet" that first struck him.

The site — which builds on the Trask Industries viral site that preceded it — is a blend of Oliver Stone's JFK and classic Chris Claremont storytelling. The original Days of...

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[Ben], [David], [Drew], [Kayla], and [Peter] built a robotic artist as their senior design project. This mashes up a bunch of different project ideas, but the thing we like the most about it is that it works much like a photo booth that produces a painting. A Raspberry Pi uses a webcam to snap the picture, converts the image to three colors (plus the white background of the canvas) and sets the robot in motion. The team laments that initial testing of the completed project (seen in the clip below) worked out quite well but took hours to produce the painting. What do they expect? It’s art!

This is quite a bit different from the WaterColorBot (whose manufacturing process we just looked in on yesterday). WaterColorBot uses a flat canvas and a gantry system. This offering, which is called PICASSAU, uses an upright canvas with the paintbrush mounted in much the same way as a plotter robot. The biggest difference is that there is the ability to pivot the paint brush in order to pick up more paint, and for cleaning in between color changes.

Filed under: robots hacks

When I was little, I had a grey teddy bear. At least, I thought he was grey. One day my mother washed my best bear friend while I wasn’t looking (sneaky grown-ups). And when I found him in my toy box, he had turned white.

I thought he was dead. I cried. I grieved. Between sobs I asked my mother, “What did you do to him?!” The world was ending.

Nothing my mother could say would make me believe that he actually started out white—that the layers of mottled grey had been added by years upon years of tree climbing, hide-and-seek, and bedtime stories. Apparently, my mother had quite the challenge even getting the bear away from me long enough to wash him in the first place. Fortunately, the scorn of a three year old is easily forgiven—but never forgotten.

In college, I was a nanny. The six children I watched had their own stuffed best friends: a bear, a bunny, a dinosaur, a kitty, an elephant,  and (another) bear, respectively. Each one of the well-loved plushies had accidents. Bunny’s ear needed surgery. Elephant’s nose got a busted seam. Dinosaur suffered from some loose scales.

Replacement wouldn’t do. They had to be repaired. Fortunately, my mother taught me how to sew. And I became the emergency bear surgeon. Each child would nervously hand over their stuffed animal. And then they sat, anxiously watching me patching up their best friend. Stitch by stitch each friend was restored, given a squeeze, and dragged off to another play-time.

Now that many of my friends have children, I make a lot of toys and puppets. I strive to give each character life. Each is a unique, one-of-a-kind creature. I want to make best friends, not just stuffed toys.

With each toy or puppet I make, I include a card that informs its new parent that I will happily repair any damage that happens throughout the years. Every now and again, I get a call. A hobby horse lost its reigns. Francus’ blue monster eyes popped out. The puppet show left Honk without a nose.

Faithful friends come back to me for a visit, a few stitches—a 20,000 hug check-up. In the eyes of a child, these repairs are life-and-death. To them, these creatures are real. No other animal, or toy, or treat can take their place.

As with any repair, there are environmental imperatives: extending the lifecycle of a consumer good and preventing environmental impact of the waste. These efforts are noble, but when a small child greets you with crocodile tears and an injured stuffie, those imperatives never cross your mind: It’s about the child.

My bear, which survived many days of intense love, is still sitting on my shelf. He has been restuffed, sewn, had his nose replaced, and is still a little pale. But he is my bear and no other bear will do.

We have a toy repair database on iFixit, but it could use more guides. So if you repair toys like me, grab a camera the next time your little one has a busted toy that needs repair. Share what you know! We guarantee, some child out there will be very glad you did.

Microsoft is reportedly looking for new ways to more securely encrypt its internet traffic, amid concerns that the National Security Agency (NSA) may have breached its network. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Washington Post reports that Microsoft executives are discussing possible encryption measures this week, and will determine how soon to implement them.

The move comes following revelations that the NSA has been secretly collecting user data from other tech giants. In October, the newspaper reported that the agency has been tapping into Google and Yahoo networks to obtain user information, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Two unreleased documents mention Microsoft's Hotmail...

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Hopes were high for warmer relations between the Russian Orthodox and Catholic churches as President Vladimir Putin flew Monday to Rome for his first audience with Pope Francis. Topping the agenda is likely help for Christians in the Middle East.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Pakistan launched its first domestically produced drones on Monday, as police cracked down on demonstrators protesting US drone strikes targeting Islamic militants on Pakistani territory.
Read Full Article at RT.com

A recent WHO report shows grim health implications from Europe’s economic crisis, including a trend in Greece in which citizens infect themselves with HIV to access the meager range of government benefits available.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Moscow’s Red Square has seen its share of strange stuff over the centuries, from medieval public executions to artistic self-mutilations. But a giant Louis Vuitton suitcase took many Muscovites completely by surprise.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Arnon Milchan, renowned producer of such Hollywood hits as "Pretty Woman," "Fight Club" and "LA Confidential", has come forth with perhaps his greatest story of all: he was an Israeli spy who helped boost the country’s nuclear program in the 70s and 80s.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Because it's a collection of photos of tiny animals on fingers. This is high-concept stuff, folks.

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A new biopic of J.R.R. Tolkien may be in the works! David Gleeson, who wrote and directed Cowboys and Angels in 2003, has written a script focusing on how Tolkien’s youth and service in World War I impacted his writing.

The script has been picked up by Chernin Entertainment (who also did The Heat and Rise of the Planet of the Apes) They’ve (tentatively!) titled the project Tolkien, but further details are scant. No word on whether or not the Tolkien estate will be involved in the film—they guard Tolkien’s legacy like a certain dragon, so their reaction to the film will be interesting.

The project currently has no director or actors attached—so let the dream casting begin! Who do you want to see playing Tolkien in Tolkien? Perhaps Ian McKellen, for full meta-effect? And who could play Tolkien’s fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis, or a young Christopher Lee? Screw it, since we want him in everything anyway, we can attest that Benedict Cumberbatch looks great in WWI regalia.

Read the full article

James Mangold and Hugh Jackman have been pretty vague so far about the “really cool ideas” they’re considering for the upcoming sequel to The Wolverine, especially because they haven’t settled on any one concept just yet. But one thing we now know for certain is that it’ll be based on an existing comic book storyline.

Mangold let the fact slip in a recent interview, during which he also discussed when, exactly, the movie might take place. Hit the jump to see what he had to day.

Asked by I Am Rogue whether the sequel would be based on a comic book arc, Mangold answered:

Absolutely. I can tell you that in determining where we are going I’m not solely relying on my own imagination but also the imaginations that have spun great stories about Wolverine in the comics.

Although Fox’s entire X-Men franchise is based on a comic book property, the movie plots have not always corresponded to specific comic book plots. But lately, they seem to be trending toward comic plotlines. Mangold’s The Wolverine was based on Chris Claremont and Frank Miller‘s miniseries from the ’80s, and the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past will be based on the iconic storyline of the same title.

Unsurprisingly, Mangold did not specify which story or stories he has in mind. For what it’s worth, though, he agreed with the interviewer that the two-year gap between The Wolverine and X-Men: Days of Future Past could be a good place in the timeline to set the story.

“I honestly have sketches and ideas, but there are many alternatives and that certainly is indeed a window that exists,” he said. Logan concludes his Japanese journey in The Wolverine by jetting off to destinations unknown with Yukio (Rila Fukushima), and is shown returning to the U.S. two years later in the post-credits sequence. It’s at the airport that Professor X and Magneto approach him, setting up X-Men: Days of Future Past.

What classic Wolverine comic book plots do you want to see Mangold bring to life?

• Blood and F-Bombs: ‘The Wolverine’ Extended Cut is the Most Explicit X-Men Movie to Date
• Sequel Bits: ‘Fast 7′, ‘Mission: Impossible 5′, ‘The Wolverine 2′, ‘Beetlejuice 2′
• Hugh Jackman Says There Are “Really Cool Ideas” for ‘The Wolverine’ Sequel
• ‘The Wolverine’ Deleted Scene Reveals Classic Costume
• Hugh Jackman and James Mangold Making Another Wolverine Movie
• ‘The Wolverine’ 4-Disc Blu-Ray Features Unrated Extended Cut

Top 5 most powerful supercomputers 2013, from top:

• TIANHE 2, Guangzhou Supercomputing Center
• TITAN SUPERCOMPUTER, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• SEQUOIA SUPERCOMPUTER, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• K SUPERCOMPUTER, RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS), Japan
• MIRA SUPERCOMPUTER, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois

via China’s Milkyway-2 Remains the World’s Top Supercomputer and Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated (June 2013) | Data Center Knowledge

Time to start going through your old Magic card collection. Or paying a little extra attention next time you're at a garage sale.

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That might be his last Facebook posting for some time.

Nos dias do Interaction South América 2013, tenho acompanhado casos de experiências interativas em ambientes urbanos.

Em 2011, Caio Vassão, presenteou-nos com sua palestra sobre Ecologia da Interação, e este ano, com Gustavo Requena, pudemos ver alguns exemplos de experiências emocionais em espaços urbanos.

A interação em espaços urbanos também foi tema de artigos acadêmicos – “Riscos: interações sociais urbanas” apresentado pela jovem e talentosa Isabela von Mühlen Brandalise, onde um jogo interativo proporciona uma experiência de descoberta de novos espaços urbanos, a partir da gamificação de mapas.

Experiências multidisciplinares estão cada vez mais evidentes no perfil dos designers de interação.

Um expectador do evento comentou “no futuro, os designers poderão não fazer produtos”, inspirado pela palestra de Guto Requena, mas são responsáveis pelo desenho estratégico e prototipável do conceito criativo, para a realização dos projetos.

Comparando esse pensamento ao processo de Lean UX, que agiliza o processo de desenvolvimento de um produto criativo, apresentado por Josh Seiden, vem-me a seguinte questão:

Ao passo que a “softwarização” de produtos e serviços exige cada vez mais processos rápidos de prototipação e resposta dos usuários, o design de interação também caminha para o desenho de espaços interativos mais complexos, no sentido que exigem ferramentas simples de prototipagem, mas o ambiente de teste pode ser espaços tão complexos quanto os espaços urbanos.

As formas de pesquisa em URLs, também ganharam agilidade, e se tornaram complexos a medida que somos cada vez mais responsáveis pela compreensão do comportamento humano, o sistema mais complexo de todos.

Cabe a nós, designers de interação, a análise crítica e seletiva de processos que se adéquam melhor aos objetivos de cada projeto. A princípio, devo concordar com meu colega expectador: estamos cada vez mais desenhando novos conceitos de interação do que efetivamente, desenhando produtos.

Nos vemos na próxima rodada de palestras. [Webinsider]

…………………………

Leia também:

• Design thinking para ver e entender
• A união da experiência do usuário com o Design Thinking
• Design de experiência do cliente: vá muito além do produto

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Conheça os cursos patrocinadores do Webinsider

• TreinaWeb – Cursos de Tecnologia da Informação – treinaweb.com.br/cursos-online

Two Saudis have been detained in the country’s capital for offering free hugs to passers-by. The local police arrested them for ‘indulging in exotic practices’ and offending public order.
Read Full Article at RT.com

This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature.  It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly.

As a long time user of RSS and Google Reader, I’ve long appreciated the benefits of the technology.  Like many people, my use of Google Reader faded a bit as social media platforms took hold.  But, I’d always go back to Google Reader when I wanted to cut through the noise of social networks and focus on things I’m really passionate about.  Google Reader wasn’t my “second screen” application where I’d go to take a break from work.  It filled a much more essential need for me by providing these three features:

1.  Unread items are kept in a queue.  I don’t miss things.  No algorithm chooses what to show me or not show me.

2.  It’s an archive of blogs that I value and posts that I’ve read.

3.  I can follow whatever I want from anywhere on the web.  It embodies the open web.

For my professional career in web research and development, I can’t really live without these features.  I can follow twitter feeds or like Facebook pages, but I’m certain to miss important content from people who I highly value.  I need those items queued, archived, and I need to be able to subscribe to anybody on the entire open web.  I can’t be limited to those authors who choose to enter into private social networks and I don’t want to have to constantly check my accounts for updates.

So this leads me to how we got involved in The Old Reader.  When Google Reader shut it’s doors, my business partner Jim did some research and tried several services and suggested I’d like The Old Reader the best.  So we both moved on over.  I read some articles trying to understand why Google Reader would shut down and one really stuck with me.  It hypothesized that Google had been following the lead of companies like Facebook and Twitter by turning their backs on the open web and trying to build their own private/closed social networks.  It’s frankly hard to argue against this theory.

However, we see this trend of migrating from the open web to private networks as cyclical.  How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.  So we jumped at the opportunity to get involved with developing and managing The Old Reader.  We believe in it.

As we’ve been looking to grow our engineering team at Levee Labs and The Old Reader we’ve met with a number of bright young people that are surprisingly unaware of RSS.  They say “I recognize the RSS icon, but haven’t really ever used it.”  Is it possible that there is a lost generation of internet users that are completely unfamiliar with RSS?  Are they unfamiliar with the idea of the open web too?  We believe that’s the case and we’ve been working hard to come up with ideas that’ll expose that generation to RSS, The Old Reader, and the open web.  It’s what made the internet great to begin with and it’s coming back.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!