Corvus.corax

The elusive London duo's debut is a surefire summer party-starter but comes with a subtle dark side

Chris Boh­jalian’s apocalyptic novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” got a rave review recently in The Washington Post. The story about a teenage girl fending for herself after a nuclear plant melts down in Vermont marks a dramatic new direction for Bohjalian.

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Alan Turing biopic will open 58th London Film Festival

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VAN EYCK

I lost it at the end.

Okay, I had to check out the Van Eyck thing. I was a bit in denial because, come on, every single person can’t look like President Putin!

There are no words to describe how wrong I was.

Reblogging this for my art history class this semester

buwhahaha

The art historian in me had to reblog this.

mrspoonsi sends this BBC report: Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, is suing Call of Duty's video games publisher. The ex-military ruler is seeking lost profits and damages after a character based on him featured in Activision's 2012 title Black Ops II. The 80-year-old is currently serving a jail sentence in Panama for crimes committed during his time in power, including the murder of critics. One lawyer said this was the latest in a growing trend of such lawsuits. "In the U.S., individuals have what's called the right to publicity, which gives them control over how their person is depicted in commerce including video games," explained Jas Purewal, an interactive entertainment lawyer. "There's also been a very well-known action by a whole series of college athletes against Electronic Arts, and the American band No Doubt took action against Activision over this issue among other cases. "It all focuses upon the American legal ability for an individual to be only depicted with their permission, which in practice means payment of a fee. "But Noriega isn't a US citizen or even a resident. This means that his legal claim becomes questionable, because it's unclear on what legal basis he can actually bring a case against Activision."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today marks the third wave of Weird Al Yankovic's eight-music-videos-in-eight-days onslaught and this streak is officially hot! If the lilt of Lorde has left you wanting something more from her music, but you just can't stop playing that insidious earworm "Royals," then "Foil"—about, yes, aluminum foil—is the jam for you.

Contrary to popular belief, sugar doesn't make kids hyper. The science is beyond settled on this issue.

The only types of studies that truly "settle" science are randomized controlled trials. Considered the gold standard in research, they do the best job of controlling for factors that could bias study results.

No fewer than twelve of these studies have been conducted to figure out whether sugar causes hyperactivity. "That's probably more randomized controlled trials than most drugs go through," says Aaron Carroll, director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at Indiana University School of Medicine and blogger at The Incidental Economist.

And in every case the trials show that sugar simply doesn't cause hyperactivity.

He lays out the evidence in this video:

"it's not the sugar, parents just believe it is."

In one study that Carroll highlights, a group of kids were all given something to drink, and parents were asked to rate their children's behavior. Parents who were told that their children were given a sugary drink were significantly more likely to report that their children were acting hyper than parents who were told their kid had been given something sugar-free to sip on.

The twist? The researchers had lied to the parents — every single child actually received a drink that was sugar-free.

"It is not the sugar, parents just believe it is," Carroll says. "This myth is entirely in their heads."

That means sugar "crashes" could be a myth, too, though there doesn't seem to be as much of a scientific literature on it. Insulin levels, which control glucose (blood sugar) in the body, would adjust quickly after a massive intake of sweets. If there's no "high" level of glucose in the body to start with, there shouldn't be a crash or withdrawal later.

"The body works hard to keep glucose levels pretty regular, Carroll said.

Terry Gilliam's sci-fi classic gets the small screen treatment

Kristen Stewart in Jenny Lewis’ One Of The Guys Music Video x

I had to notify my spouse that I was leaving him for KStew in this video and he said he understood.

The video for Weird Al Yankovic's new track "Word Crimes" breaks down all the worst grammar offenses known to man.

Rainbow blazer wearing, indie-rock darling Jenny Lewis released a music video this morning staring Kristen Stewart, Anne Hathaway, Brie Larson, and The Like's drummer Tennessee Thomas. While Jenny Lewis stands front-and-center strumming her guitar, the four women dance around her dressed in shiny track suits, wearing fake facial hair. Kristen Stewart looks moodily into the camera as she did for all of the Twilight movies. Anne Hathaway does a jump kick. All in all, it's very strange.

The song, "One of the Guys," is the first released single from Lewis's forthcoming album The Voyager, which is her first album in six years. Just in case you couldn't make it through the whole 4 minutes of this nonsense, here are some gifs to recap the experience.

1) Anne Hathaway Cries

2) Brie Larson flexes

3) Kristen Stewart can't play bass

4) Kristen Stewart points and thinks

5) Brie is very adamant that she is not the father

6) Kristen Stewart makes a weird face

7) Anne Hathaway is so *blessed*

GIFs by Alex Abad-Santos

The facts about economic inequality in America are pretty staggering. The top 1 percent of Americans brings home close to 20 percent of income. Income inequality is the highest it's been since 1928. And Pew found that by a 60 to 36 percent margin, Americans believe they live in a country with a system that unfairly favors the wealthy.

So the big question is: Why do Americans allow this to happen? Why do Americans ignore their own best interests?

The answer, in John Oliver's estimation, is the American sense of optimism.

He notes that a shocking percentage of Americans feel the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but still believe that they will be wealthy if they put in the hard work. "I can clearly see this game is rigged, which makes it so sweet when I win this thing," Oliver summarized the thinking.

"If American wealth is a lottery, we are increasingly playing two different games," Oliver said. And the optimism Americans have, Oliver says, doesn't allow them to see that they're getting played.

For the month of July, while it's on the Hugo shortlist for best novel, my British publisher Orbit have discounted the ebook edition of "Neptune's Brood" to £1.99. (UK Kindle store: for some reason Waterstones still list it at £4.99 but hopefully that'll be fixed shortly: Apple iBooks store.)

(Note that the book is published by a different company—Ace, an imprint of Penguin Random House—in North America; while the price dropped at the end of June, when the paperback was released, it still costs $6.83, or about £3.99 at today's exchange rate. The special offer is, alas, available to UK/EU folks only.)

MojoKid writes We've been around the block enough times to know that outside of shredding a storage medium, all data is recoverable. It's just matter of time, money, and effort. However, it was still sobering to find out exactly how much data security firm Avast was able to recover from Android devices it purchased from eBay, which included everything from naked selfies to even a completed loan application. Does this mean we shouldn't ever sell the old handset? Luckily, the answer is no. Avast's self-serving study was to promote its Anti-Theft app available on Google Play. The free app comes with a wipe feature that overwrites all files, thereby making them invisible to casual recovery methods. That's one approach. There's another solution that's incredibly easy and doesn't require downloading and installing anything. Before you sell your Android phone on eBay, Craigslist, or wherever, enable encryption and wait for it to encrypt the on board storage. After that, perform a wipe and reset as normal, which will obliterate the encryption key and ensure the data on your device can't be read. This may not work on certain devices, which will ask you to decrypt data before wiping but most should follow this convention just fine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can now watch acclaimed South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's slick, post-apocalyptic sci-fi film "Snowpiercer" right at home. That's an extremely rare move for a film such as this, which has a sizable budget, rave reviews and buzz at the theaters.

There’s a new US trailer for Terry Gilliam‘s latest film, The Zero Theorem, and some release info for the US, too. After months in limbo the movie finally has a Stateside release date of August 19th for digital and VOD, with a theatrical release set for September 19. Christoph Waltz stars as a troubled man tasked with a potentially impossible problem, and Mélanie Thierry, David Thewlis, Lucas Hedges, Ben Whishaw, Tilda Swinton and Matt Damon all play roles as well. Check out the new Zero Theorem US trailer below.Sure, the film has been dinged in overseas release, and there are things in this trailer (and in all of the trailers, really) that makes me feel some concern for the film. But still, I’m still going to give Gilliam a shot, as he’s one of the last true maverick weirdos working on a big scale. 

Trailer via Apple.

Acclaimed director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) returns with the visually stunning sci-fi epic The Zero Theorem, starring Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz as Qohen, an eccentric and reclusive computer genius. Living in isolation, Qohen is obsessively working on a mysterious project personally delegated to him by Management (Matt Damon) aimed at discovering the meaning of life – or the complete lack of one—once and for all. Increasingly disturbed by visits from people he doesn’t fully trust, including the flirtatious Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), his unpredictable supervisor Job (David Thewlis), and would-be digital therapist Dr. Shrink-Rom (Tilda Swinton), it’s only when he experiences the power of love and desire that he’s able to understand his own reason for being.

The post ‘The Zero Theorem’ US Trailer appeared first on /Film.

Moth Week: Not at all like Shark Week, actually. Get outside and participate!

Our techniques for measuring economic performance are obsolete. So we reach improper conclusions about the state of the economy.

The economic recovery is probably more robust than we realize. It is possible that the standard of living for many members of the middle class is improving while their incomes shrink. Many economists, policy makers, and politicians think otherwise, because they are using 20th-century methods to analyze our 21st-century economy. 

The problem is caused by the fact that we live in two worlds, physical and virtual.

The physical economy is anemic, struggling, biased toward inflation, and shrinking in many developed countries. Almost everything we do in the physical economy is paid for with money. We use dollars to measure most of the activity. If more dollars are spent or earned, we conclude that the economy is growing.

The virtual economy is robust, biased toward deflation, and growing at staggering rates, everywhere. A lot of the services provided to us in the virtual economy are free. If we paid dollars for those services, they would be counted as part of the GDP and would add to economic growth. But we don’t so they are not counted.

Using the virtual economy in place of the physical economy enables consumers to save lots of money. For example, consumers can substitute Google News for their newspaper. The cost of a USA Today subscription is $275. His earnings will look the same, but he has more money at his disposal and more or less the same consumption. Essentially, he is earning more, but neither his income nor GDP will show it.

For a very long time, economists have realized, understood, and debated this measurement problem. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has advocated an overhaul of our economic statistics. Others have advocated the use of a human development index to compensate for some of the problems associated with the use of GDP.

For numerous reasons, government scorekeepers have chosen to ignore many of the issues associated with free goods and declining costs. They are difficult to measure. Even more importantly, in the past, they did not appear to have an important effect so they could be safely disregarded. This is no longer the case.

The big change is the virtual economy. It has become very large and is having a broad impact. We must take it into account. Failure to do so will cause us to reach wrong conclusions, make policy errors, and feel unduly pessimistic about the state of things.

The current measurement systems ignore our virtual salaries. We earn these salaries by selling our privacy and attention for zero and spending hours deleting targeted emails. Using those salaries, we purchase services that are worth billions—searches on Google, residences on social networks, free email, information storage on Dropbox, phone calls on Skype, free text messages on WhatsApp, free music, reviews on Yelp, and free movies and viewing of TV series.

If advertisers paid us directly for the sale of our privacy and attention and we turned around and spent the money to purchase Google searches, music, and phone calls, the government would count both our pay as income and the sale of the services as part of the GDP.

There are no accurate numbers for the aggregate value of those services but a proxy for them would be the money advertisers spend to invade our privacy and capture our attention. Sales of digital ads are projected to be $114 billion in 2014, about twice what Americans spend on pets.

The forecasted GDP growth in 2014 is 2.8 percent and the annual historical growth rate of middle quintile incomes has averaged around 0.4 percent for the past 40 years. So if the government counted our virtual salaries based on the sale of our privacy and attention, it would have a big effect on the numbers.

The typical middle class family spends about four percent of their income on entertainment and publications or about $2,500 per year. If the consumer opts to entertain himself using free movies, YouTube videos, get his music from streaming services like Pandora, and get his news from Google, he can probably save half that expenditure—$1,250—or about two percent of his income. 

Frequently the virtual world intersects with the physical one. At those intersections, the cost of obtaining physical services often times drops precipitously. The sharing economy is one of those intersections. Consumers, for example, can achieve great economies by car- and ride-sharing.

The annual cost of a Honda Civic used for, say, 75,00 miles per year, is around $6,500 per year, or 85 cents per mile. Using a Zipcar for 500 hours a year, approximately the same amount of driving, would cost only $4,250, a saving of $2500—equal to about 4 percent of a middle class families’ income.

While Zipcar only affects a small portion of the economy, the next turn of the screw, the self-driving car will undoubtedly have far-reaching effects. It has been estimated that an “instant” on demand driving service, more convenient than Zipcar, will carry consumers a mile for only 50 cents. At that rate, many city dwellers will decide to give up a car and many two-car families will be able to get by with one automobile.

These are just a few of many examples but they amount to real savings for many Americans.

It is important to realize, the effects of the virtual economy do not fall evenly across the economic spectrum. The lower your income, the more likely it is that you are paying a greater portion of your salary for essentials such as food and healthcare in the physical economy. The cost of these items has been rising. Unfortunately, the average incomes of the least-well-off have been falling fastest. According to Pew Research the incomes for the highest quintile of the middle class fell by 2 percent from 2007 to 2012, the middle quintile by 8 percent. 

But even though the effects of the virtual economy may not be evenly distributed, they are nevertheless too large to be ignored. Forecasts about our ability to pay entitlement benefits and deal with the national debt are based obsolete measurement techniques. We have to figure out how to incorporate the impact of the virtual economy in our economic models. We have to start making policy decisions based on the new metrics. Failure to do so will lead to many serious mistakes.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a resolution to amend the US Constitution to allow greater regulation of political spending, on a 10-8 party line vote. This clears the way for a vote by the full Senate later this year.

The amendment rolls back the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling

The proposal, sponsored by Senator Tom Udall (D-NM), is intended to reverse recent Supreme Court rulings that have deregulated the campaign finance system, such as Citizens United and McCutcheon v. FEC. It states that both Congress and the states would "have power to regulate the raising and spending of money" on elections. Specifically, it would allow limits on outside spending in support of candidates, which the Court has struck down. You can read the amendment's full text here.

Republicans on the committee were harshly critical of the measure, and emphasized that it was the first time the Bill of Rights would ever have been amended. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) called the proposal "surreal and hysteric," and Ted Cruz (R-TX) called it "a proposal that would allow Congress to ban books, to ban movies, and to ban the NAACP."

The proposal remains 20 votes short in the Senate, and is sure to fail in the House

But Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) scoffed at his analysis, saying, "Since we banned child pornography — which I imagine my colleagues support — a limitation on the First Amendment, has free speech been hampered in any way? Absolutely not." And he said the measure would limit spending from both liberal and conservative funders: "The Soroses and the Steyers will be just as banned as the Kochs and the others. And they should be."

It's the first constitutional amendment approved by a Senate committee in recent years. In 2004, when Republicans controlled the chamber, they pushed a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage nationwide — but could not win committee approval for it, and sent it directly to the Senate floor instead (where it fell far short of passage).

Activists have taken to the states instead

But the amendment's prospects look dim. If every Senate Democrat supports the amendment — so far, 8 haven't signed on — it would still need 12 GOP votes to reach the 67 needed for passage. And so far, Republicans have been unanimously opposed. Furthermore, the measure has no support in the House. The approval of both chambers is needed to send the proposal to the states. 38 states would then need to ratify it to put it into effect.

So instead, some activists have focused on amending the Constitution through another route — by getting state legislatures to call for a Constitutional convention. Two legislatures have done this so far. For more information about how this process works, click here.

samzenpus writes We recently had a chance to sit down with Edward Stone, Former Director of JPL, and ask him about his time as a project scientist for the Voyager program and the future of space exploration. In addition to our questions, we asked him a number of yours. Read below to see what professor Stone had to say.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This error in judgment would be less worrisome in a presumptive presidential candidate if she seemed to have learned foreign-policy lessons from it. But Clinton's remarks on Monday provide the latest evidence that she remains prone to military interventions of choice even when the likely outcome of intervening is unclear. 

On Iraq, she told the audience, "I really believe that I made the best choice I could at the time given what I thought would ensue if we passed the authorization." It's hard to say if Clinton was capable of making a better choice. But lots of Americans did make a better choice. And it is clear that Clinton herself had access to information that called the competence and trustworthiness of the Bush administration, the existence of WMDs, and the possibility of a successful occupation into question. So it is worrisome that she continues to insist that she made the best choice that she could at the time, especially given the way that Clinton speaks about American intervention in Syria today.

Syria presents "a wicked problem," she said. And she sensibly acknowledged that such problems are inevitably addressed by "imperfect people making decisions based on imperfect information."

In hopes of solving the problem, she explained, she got together at her house one Saturday with David Petraeus "to figure out how we could vet the moderates." She favored arming them, she explained, out of a belief that "if the moderates were quickly diminished and defeated, there would be a vacuum opening up for extreme groups."

What would happen if a subset of anti-government fighters were armed? "There was no guarantee that we were right," Clinton said. "We were making what we thought of as a very careful calculation of the odds .... There was no clear line where, if you do what we say this is what will follow." Shouldn't more confidence be required to intervene?

It would be striking that uncertainty didn't cause Clinton to err on the side of not intervening, save for the fact that it's hard to think of any instance where humility caused her to take a dovish position. As president, she would likely be a reflexive hawk.

What would I have her say instead?

The Iraq War taught me my own limits, and the limits of all foreign-policy decision-makers, to accurately foresee the future. Even after studying decisions about war and peace from inside the White House during my husband's two terms, I didn't even come close to correctly forecasting the Iraq War. I underestimated the costs of the war in Iraq. I overestimated the benefits. I cannot promise that will be the last mistake that I'll make, but I've learned from it. I'll never make the same mistake. I've learned that a war of choice gone wrong does more damage to the United States than any other mistaken policy. So while the United States may well be forced to wage a war of necessity  in the future, whether to defend the nation after an attack or to prevent an imminent one, I'll never again favor a war if choice.

If the consequences of foreign intervention are so unclear that experts are deeply divided, I will err on the side of nonintervention after that wise physicians' guidepost: "First do no harm." There are a lot of very smart people working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. So in a country like Syria, it's tempting to imagine that we can funnel weapons to the particular rebels that are most aligned with the values and interests of the United States. It's tempting to think that we can know the consequences and the possible unintended consequences of intervening in Syria. But Iraq taught me that of course we can't.

First time accepted submitter Franz Struwig writes "MAKE Magazine has a great review of a bicycle radar product — showing off some of the early prototype innards: "The latest version features a 24 GHz radar antenna — high enough to resolve more targets and small enough to fit on a bike — an ARM processor, and Bluetooth LE to communicate with the front unit. The radar creates a doppler map, and recognizes not only the vehicle, but how far away it is and how quickly it’s approaching. It communicates this to the cyclist by a system of LEDs, and to the car by increasing the rate at which the tail light blinks as the car gets closer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In early June, I visited my hometown of Glendale Heights, about 25 miles west of Chicago. Making my way through the old avenues that had marked my childhood, I noticed something curious: The churches that had dominated the street corners of my suburban youth—from magnificent stone structures with ornate stained glass windows to homey, unmarked brick buildings—were either getting demolished or being sold to become Hindu temples.

As strange as it may be to see "Gayatri Gyan Mandir" on the outside of a building that could be the dictionary entry for what a suburban church "should" look like, it's part of a larger story of the changing demographics of American society. It’s not just in Chicago, and it’s not a unidirectional trend. Synagogues are becoming mosques, Baptists are changing hands with Korean congregations, pagodas are moving into office buildings.

The handover in houses of worship across the country is not a straightforward case of an increase in non-Christian immigrants in the United States. In fact, many church sales can be attributed to shifts among Christian denominations. Roman Catholic weekly service attendance has slid from 75 percent in 1955 to 45 percent in the mid-2000s, while Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches have seen big drops in attendance, partially due to a split within the Protestant church between mainline Protestantism and Evangelicals. Meanwhile, Pentecostal churches have seen spikes in attendance.

Much of this shift can be attributed to a growing Latino population. Historically Roman Catholic, nearly one in three Latinos today identify as former Catholics. Ex-Catholics tend to veer in one of two directions: they either become Pentecostals or Evangelical Protestants, or they identify themselves as agnostic or atheist. According to Pew Research Center’s 2013 National Survey of Latinos and Religion, only 40 percent of Hispanic Catholics attend weekly services; comparatively, 71 percent of Hispanic Evangelical Protestant Catholics do so.

Beyond the Christian faith, immigration is shaping the religious landscape of America and influencing the church purchasing process. A recent map from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies of the second most popular religions in states across the country showed that Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism were represented strongly across the country. Though Christianity remains the overwhelmingly dominant religion of choice in the U.S., other faiths are quickly growing, such as Hinduism in Arizona and Delaware and the Baha'i faith in South Carolina.

Mary Raphael, co-owner along with her husband Dave of Raphael Realty, knows this. Their southern California realty firm has dealt solely with sales of religious properties for 35 years.

Raphael traces the most recent upswing in church sales to the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. While parishioners were struggling with making mortgage payments and impending foreclosures, churches too dipped into their reserves to pay off refinanced properties. But this method sometimes backfired.

“So many people were losing their jobs and churches can’t continue for years on their reserves,” Raphael said. “Tithings to churches had declined so much for such a long period that a number of churches used up reserves and refinanced properties. We had foreclosures on churches.” Raphael's observation matches statistics: Giving USA released a recent report noting that donations to smaller churches had fallen by 10 percent during the past year and hadn't yet recovered from pre-recession era donation rates.

What made finances more complicated for churches is that banks often don’t like to be associated with lending to religious institutions, fearing it might isolate their consumer base who might not agree with being associated with a religious organization views, says Raphael.

“It makes it very difficult,” Raphael said of the banking process for churches. “It’s hard to document income for churches since they keep their own records and [finances] must be verified by an outsider. Lenders avoid [churches] since it’s bad PR.”

This puts churches in a bind: They can’t maintain their properties, and despite wanting to stay open—sometimes very desperately—they end up stumbling into foreclosure. Churches have the added obstacle of legally being nonprofits and requiring a very different legal system than businesses or individuals buying and selling property.

In the Raphaels' home base of California, for example, “You have to verify with the Secretary of State in southern California that the church is capable of holding a title, is a legal entity, and is incorporated as a nonprofit. Otherwise, you can’t get a title insurance, and you can’t do the transaction by the laws and articles of incorporation. Then you have to adopt a resolution.”

And finances are a difficult subject for churches, too, as many rely on tithings, fundraising, and private donations to keep their places of worship afloat. Money becomes even more of an hurdle for religious organizations seeking to either start anew or re-establish themselves in a brand new space. “Some of these groups have their own financials,” Raphael said. “Some are ready with a 30 to 40 percent down payment, but it’s hard for groups to have that in cash. Different religious groups also have credit unions.”

The recession fundamentally changed the way the Raphaels engage in business with churches.

“The first 32 years or so, we never thought about asking if your loan is current or in default,” Raphael said. “Now if a church calls, that’s the first thing we ask.”

Though sales of churches has picked up during the recent recession, it's not a new phenomenon. Look to synagogues, says Ellen Levitt, author of The Lost Synagogues, a series of books and tours exploring the changing of hands of the Jewish place of worship to churches, community centers, and schools.

Levitt pinpoints the trend of selling houses of worship to other groups to the late 1800s, when Jews were restricted to tenements and built congregations as a way to stimulate community in a foreign land.

“After World War II, certain neighborhoods became less desirable for Jews,” Levitt explained, pointing to Queens, a classically Jewish borough, that had become more Latino, black, and Asian over the years. “They [Jews] would move [to the suburbs]. ‘I want a house, I don’t want to live in a tiny apartment in the city anymore.’ In the early 1950s, it escalated. Some synagogues in Brooklyn held out 'til the ‘80s, but most of them moved to neighborhoods. You know Flatbush? It’s all trendy now, but there aren’t many Jews left in Flatbush anymore.”

Today, old synagogues in former Jewish neighborhoods have second lives as many other things, mostly churches—Baptist, Adventist, Pentecostal, nondenominational—though in Queens, for example, they often host non-Christian congregations, too.

“There is a former synagogue that is now a mosque,” Levitt said. “At least two former synagogues are now Asian churches, and at least one former synagogue is now a Hindu temple.” Also common: synagogues not becoming a religious establishment at all, instead reinventing themselves as “private residences, non-profit organizations, schools, medical facilities, restaurants or bars… even a museum (the Bronx) and an art gallery (Manhattan)," said Levitt.

A similar pattern holds true today in southern California.

“Neighborhoods have changed quite a bit,” Raphael noted. “There are certain cultures, groups of people that live in certain areas. Koreans now want to be in Orange County, and Indians want to be in the LA County area. They used to have churches there that are moving out.”

It’s not just because of immigration patterns—religions are also changing, creating ripples in the church sales market. Christian Science groups, for example, have reported declining attendance. Korean-based Christian congregations have reported spikes in worshipers, while Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in America.

But finding a new place to worship presents a dual problem: getting a brand new building for many groups is out of reach, while the smaller churches that are being sold are just too small for growing congregations. Most state rules require that a building be established as a church for fire code reasons, which means buying a house and turning it into a church is off. And parking, particularly in space crunched California, is precious.

So what’s a group to do when they want to continue worshiping but can’t afford to have their own space? A popular solution is to share space.

“We have lots of people who want to rent or share buildings,” Raphael said. “They allow someone to use it Sunday afternoon when they’re not using it, or weekdays or evenings. They might also rent out to AA groups or counseling groups.”

An overlooked part of the religious property market is interior design, which plays a surprisingly key role in how religious groups use their space and what types of buildings they’re looking into.

“A lot of these [declining or smaller] groups are merging their buildings,” Raphael said. “The style of building is also changing. Chapel groups generally don’t want kitchens but they want to be close to the freeway so people can come in, go to service, grab a coffee, and leave. For other types of congregations, kitchens and fellowships are really important, so you need fully equipped kitchens and halls.”

Technology has also entered the spiritual sphere, bringing modern worship to the digital age. The latest trend is to have iPad capabilities in seating areas instead of the Bible folder that’s commonly found in pews.

The cultural clash that may be expected in selling a building of one religion to another crop up quite often, Raphael says. She recalled an incident where her being a woman was told not only to not shake hands with the priest of the religion but also to remain in the parked car while her husband showed the property.

The utmost tenet, however, is to respect the diverse cultures involved in the process.

“We try to respect the groups traditions and beliefs and cultures,” she emphasized. “Some churches think they are being discriminated against because their offer isn’t accepted. [But] I don’t see that much. I think everyone gets a fair chance.”

It’s been said (and said and said) that poetry’s influence is on the wane. Nonsense. Americans are mad for poetry. They call it rap… more»

An anonymous reader writes In a post published Monday, Symantec writes that western countries including the U.S., Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland are currently the victims of an ongoing cyberespionage campaign. The group behind the operation, called Dragonfly by Symantec, originally targeted aviation and defense companies as early as 2011, but in early 2013, they shifted their focus to energy firms. They use a variety of malware tools, including remote access trojans (RATs) and operate during Eastern European business hours. Symantec compares them to Stuxnet except that "Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• codec (88, 48)
• solenoid (87, 54)
• golem (89, 56)
• mach (93, 63)
• humvee (88, 58)
• claymore (87, 589
• scimitar (86, 58)
• kevlar (93, 65)
• paladin (93, 66)
• bolshevism (85, 60)
• biped (86, 61)
• dreadnought (90, 66)

That is from Christina Sterbenz.  Here are the words women are most likely to recognize over men:

• taffeta (48, 87)
• tresses (61, 93)
• bottlebrush (58, 89)
• flouncy (55, 86)
• mascarpone (60, 90)
• decoupage (56, 86)
• progesterone (63, 92)
• wisteria (61, 89)
• taupe (66, 93)
• flouncing (67, 94)
• peony (70, 96)
• bodice (71, 96)

…The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.

The article is here, hat tip Yana.

An anonymous reader writes with this news from The Independent: An American driver is facing a $48,000 fine after using a mobile signal jammer in his car to block motorists around him from using their phones on the road. Jason Humphreys reportedly used the jammer from the back seat of his Toyota Highlander for around two years before being caught by Florida police. The 60-year-old said that he used the jammer – which transmits radio signals that interfere with mobile phones – because he was 'fed up' with watching others use their phones on the road. A story from late April (before the fine was levied) gives more detail: The case along I-4 started on April 29, 2013, when the cellular company Metro PCS contacted the Federal Communications Commission because a transmission tower along I-4 would suffer in the morning and evening. A week later, agents from the FCC's enforcement division in Tampa staked out the freeway on May 7, 8, and 9 and pinpointed a “strong wideband emission” in the cellphone wireless range “emanating from a blue Toyota Highlander sport utility vehicle,” with Florida license plates, according to a complaint issued by the FCC on Tuesday. Another clue: When Hillsborough County Sheriffs deputies stopped the SUV, their own two-way radios were jammed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

International mergers and acquisitions may not be your thing, but if you drink whiskey (and especially if you drink whisky) Diageo's successful bid on June 18 to purchase a majority share in the Indian company United Spirits is a huge deal. Not so much because you are likely to start drinking Indian spirits in the near future, as because your favorite brands may be getting more expensive as they are introduced to the gigantic Indian market.

The key to understanding this deal is that as Roberto Ferdman pointed out in January, India is about half the world's whiskey market by volume:

But even though Indians are drinking all this whiskey, they aren't a big factor in the whiskey market outside the United States. That's because Indian whiskey consumption is overwhelmingly derived from domestic brands — with United Spirits brands leading the way — that are not popular internationally.

One reason Indian whiskeys aren't a big deal in the global marketplace is that by American or European standards they're not even whiskey at all. Typical Indian whiskies are produced with methods that involve molasses, neutral alcohol, and limited aging. Which is to say they're more like what we would call rum, even though the brands are often given Scotland-themed names like the popular McDowell's No. 1 Reserve.

The big advantage of this rum-esque production process is that it's a lot cheaper, and as India is a lot poorer than the United States or Scotland a cheaper beverage is more suited to the market than a proper bourbon or Scotch. But as India gets richer, it seems very likely that its growing middle class that's already accustomed to drinking something called "whiskey" will have a growing interest in higher-quality global whiskies. And yet many international firms find it challenging to distribute products in the Indian market.

This is where buying United Spirits comes in.

Diageo's brands

Diageo has a large portfolio of Scotch whiskies plus Bulleit, Bushmills, and Crown Royal. Meanwhile, United Spirits has enormous expertise in distributing bottles of liquor to Indian people. A combined entity will be extremely well-positioned to start marketing more upscale brands to the growing Indian market — a classic case of business synergies. It's much easier for Diageo to buy an existing company that build a brand new distribution network, and much easier for United Spirits to team up with a high-end distillery than to develop expertise in making whole new product categories.

The problem for those of us who aren't Indian, is that the nature of the aged whiskey market is that supply is rather inelastic. Diageo can't travel back in time and increase the volume of alcohol they started aging in the past. So when distillers find new markets to exploit, the impact is felt almost exclusively through higher prices (and profit margins) rather than large quantities.

In other words, better drinks for the Indian market means more expensive drinks for the United States and Europe.