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The Department of Justice is drafting a legal memo recommending that no civil rights charges be brought against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this past August, reports The New York Times. After a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson on criminal charges this past November, the DOJ’s decision to drop the case would mean an end to any official investigation into the shooting itself.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman reported at the time, the grand jury decision was an extreme outlier in one regard, and not particularly surprising in another: Grand juries, at least federal ones, almost always vote to indict — except when it’s a police officer facing indictment.

But what about this DOJ decision? Is the decision not to bring civil rights charges against Wilson unusual?

In a word, no. The burden of proof for successfully prosecuting civil rights charges is so high that the vast majority of investigations taken up by the DOJ Civil Rights Division end up being dismissed, almost in inverse proportion to the rest of the investigations undertaken by the federal government.

To bring charges, prosecutors would not only have to prove that Darren Wilson used excessive force, but that he did so intentionally to deprive Michael Brown of his civil rights, or did so because of his race in particular. Without a track record of violations or records of explicit intentions, that’s an almost impossible task.

In 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 85.3 percent of civil rights investigations ended in dismissal, while 84.1 percent of all federal investigations either led to a trial or were brought before a magistrate judge, for either preliminary hearings or, in the case of minor charges, a decision.

And the 15 percent follow-through rate for civil rights cases is higher than it was in previous years, especially under the Bush administration. In 2002 and 2005, investigators declined to pursue 95.6 and 93.5 percent of civil rights cases, respectively, the high-water marks for the 2000s.

At the same time, the number of cases investigated has declined nearly every year, from 1,712 in 2000 to just 777 in 2010.

The Ferguson police department as a whole is still under a civil rights investigation for possible discriminatory traffic stop policies and general use of excessive force. It’s unclear what kinds of charges that might lead to, but the history and documents of an entire police department offers a lot more potential evidence of wrongdoing.

Parents want the best for their kids. This, no doubt, extends to the board game closet. But Mom and Dad may not be aware of the drudgery and fickle chance to which they’re subjecting the family. In a recent piece, I found that some of the most beloved childhood games — think Candy Land, Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly — just aren’t very good. The data emphatically says so. But where there’s data, there’s also hope.

But first, let’s pause for a useful qualitative take. The agony of playing Monopoly with children is well described by comedian Louis C.K. (fret not, this is safe for work).

Clearly, Monopoly can teach kids some bracing lessons about the risk of personal financial ruin. But we can do much better.

What makes a good game? Good games keep players, however young, engaged — and you’re not engaged in Monopoly if you’re bankrupt. Good games also require meaningful action and decision-making — something lacking from Candy Land or Snakes and Ladders — rather than merely blind luck. Games are fun, games engage and games teach. So, which ones do it best?

As before, I’ll rely on data from the popular gaming site BoardGameGeek.⁹ The site hosts a huge database of nearly 75,000 games. Users log on and rate them on a scale from 1 (unplayable) to 10 (always itching to play). It’s a sort of TripAdvisor for board games. In addition to the user ratings, the data set also includes an entry for the recommended minimum age. Combining those, we can set our children down a fruitful board gaming path.

In this data, one observation quickly becomes clear: According to the users of BoardGameGeek, games get better as children get older. Games for a 3-year-old average a rating of just above 5, whereas games for a 10-year-old average a rating above 6, for example. This isn’t surprising — games get more intricate, strategies more complex, play more engrossing. But there are quality games to be played at any age. To consider games that are fairly tried and true, I’ll restrict this analysis to those with at least 100 user ratings. This leaves us with 2,849 games recommended for children ages 3 to 10.

Here are the site’s average ratings vs. minimum suggested age of games that could get a child a pretty long way — from preschool to fifth grade.

The highest-rated games for each age are diverse. Coconuts, for example, is a dexterity game — players fling tiny toy coconuts into cups. Dixit is a creative storytelling game — a sort of artsy Apples to Apples. Mus is a Basque card game. Hive Pocket — a version of the game Hive — is an abstract, tile-placing strategy game. But they all have features of a good game — they engage players, and they require action. There’s something more to these games than just rolling the dice.

Variety is the spice of board-gaming life, so here, by age, are three highest-rated games — gold, silver and bronze for each year of a child’s life.¹⁰

Again, it’s a remarkably motley group of games. Mijnlieff (pronounced “mine-leaf”) is a sort of advanced tic-tac-toe, first published in 2010. Schafkopf is a traditional German card game dating to the late-18th century. Zopp is soccer, in board game form. And Loopin’ Louie involves a battery-powered airplane.

A few of these games stand out with a bunch of user ratings — Loopin’ Louie, Dixit, Mice and Mystics, and Summoner Wars are the most vouched for on the list. Dixit is the 2010 winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres prize — game of the year. As such, it’s in the elite company of quality gaming flagships like Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and The Settlers of Catan. Mice and Mystics — though I’ve never played — sounds like a scream. From the publisher, “In Mice & Mystics players take on the roles of those still loyal to the king — but to escape the clutches of Vanestra, they have been turned into mice! Play as cunning field mice who must race through a castle.” What could beat that? And Summoner Wars — from the same publisher, Plaid Hat Games — is a tactical card game. “Call your forces forth and send them in a surging wave against your enemy. Cast spells that bolster your forces and cut down those who would oppose you.” Every kid’s dream!

And I’m nearly 30, and I’d play Loopin’ Louie in a second!

BoardGameGeek caters to adult games, of course. Not many 3-year-olds, if any, are rating games online. But many of the elements that make a quality adult game make a quality children’s game, too — strategic thinking, engagement, an engrossing theme and so on. And the users of BoardGameGeek tend to be attuned to these positive qualities. Plus, they surely want their children to continue in their discerning gaming footsteps. The judgment of adults is a proxy here for that of children.

Most of the games listed here are probably not familiar to many casual gamers, or many budding gamers’ parents. But maybe that’s the point. We seem stuck with some pretty bad games. For whatever reason, these board game chestnuts fly off the shelves apace. As of this writing, the first page of Amazon’s top sellers includes Monopoly, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Candy Land Disney Princess Edition, Clue and Sorry. But there’s a wide world beyond these stalwarts. We’re in the midst of a golden age of board games! Trust the data — better games await. Your kids will thank you.

A pair of scientists at the University of Rochester have transformed average metal into something amazing — a metal with a surface so resistant to water that droplets actually bounce across its surface, shown in the photo to the right.

While everyday objects like nonstick Teflon cooking pans repel water — a property called hydrophobicity — they don't hold a torch to the metal that Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev cooked up in their lab.

Teflon pans get their hydrophobic properties from a water-repelling chemical mixture coating the surface, not the metal itself. That means this coating — and it's water-repelling power — wears away over time. The high-powered lasers that Guo and Vorobyez used to forge this super-special metal in their lab alters the metal, rendering the metal itself hydrophobic, ensuring it's water resistant nature won't wear away with time.

The two scientists took regular sheets of platinum, titanium, and brass metals and then fired a high-powered laser at the surface. Each laser pulse lasted for a quadrillionth of a second and contained the same power capacity as the entire power grid of North America.

With this much power, the lasers actually engrave micro- and nanoscale structures onto the metals' surfaces that transforms them into super-hydrophobic materials.

Super-hydrophobic means that water will roll or bounce off the surface without any help. If you try to get water to roll off a Teflon surface, you have to tip the pan at a steep angle before the water will move due to gravity, like in the clip below taken from a video explaining the metal's properties:

On the other hand, this new material "is so strongly water-repellent, the water actually gets bounced off. Then it lands on the surface again, gets bounced off again, and then it will just roll off from the surface," Guo said in a statement.

Super-hydrophobic materials have a number of important applications. Since liquids don't stick to them, they are self-cleaning. When water contacts the surface, like in the clip below, it traps bits of dirt and dust in side. In one experiment Guo and Vorobyev dumped dust from a vacuum cleaner over the metal's surface and after a dozen drops, the surface was spotless and completely dry.

Super-hydrophobic metals would also be great to use on planes, so water drops don't stick and freeze on the wings.

These water-repelling properties have particularly important applications in developing countries.

"In these regions, collecting rain water is vital and using super-hydrophobic materials could increase the efficiency without the need to use large funnels with high-pitched angles to prevent water from ticking to the surface," Guo said. "A second application could be creating latrines that are cleaner and healthier to use."

For these reasons, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are supporting the scientists' research.

The manufacturing process is not ready for large-scale manufacturing — it takes an hour to etch a one-inch-square piece of metal.

The researchers published their latest results in the Journal of Applied Physics. Check out the magical metal in action in this video, uploaded to YouTube by the University Of Rochester:

NOW WATCH:

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READ MORE: Amazing Footage Of Lava Blobs Dropping Into The Ocean

SEE ALSO: SpaceX Releases Incredible Vine Of The Rocket's Explosive Near-Landing

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They probably don’t even bother to ask to see his “medical” marijuana card.

Arizona

The post Puff, Puff, Pass appeared first on People Of Walmart.

Innovative Tesla Man ponders to himself, "hm, how can I combine as many hip startup tech ideas together as possible at the same time? What about AirBnB... Tesla????"

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Glitches, man. Glitches be crazy.

Take, for example, this one in Super Mario World, as executed by YouTuber SethBling. Thanks to what can only be described as witchcraft, the magician man manages to warp to the game's end credits in six minutes. And then he did it again in under five. Boy howdy!

The exploit was discovered and first executed by Twitch streamer Jeffw356, though SethBling is allegedly the first to pull it off on actual SNES hardware, rather than via the magic of emulation.

It's no doubt impressive, and my imaginary hat is off to both gents, but one has to wonder if it really qualifies as "beating" the game. Dunno. Guess you can yell about it in the comments.

Super Mario World -- Credits Warp [SethBling via Kotaku]

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This isn't what I would have expected to see from the developer of Double Hitler, but consider me pleasantly surprised. Slasher's Keep is a first-person dungeon-crawler up on Steam Greenlight for user feedback and voting. I'm tentatively interested. Some of you will be too.

The art style, described by designer Damian Schloter as a mix of "cel-shaded models, hand-drawn sprites, and even some procedural animation," stood out to me most. But I also like that combat occurs in real time and is detailed enough to allow different types of swings and thrusts, as well as parrying. Parrying is good, except when you're bad at it. Then it's the worst.

Randomized levels, item crafting, and permadeath are also confirmed, though the latter is optional.

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Author: Osias Jota Source: Buffer

RT @HistoricalPics: The difference that 25 years makes. http://t.co/Kq9vtUyU82

The head of Conan O'Brien's IT department, Chris Hayes, is a Taco Bell superfan who eats at the Mexican-inspired fast food restaurant multiple times a week. So, Conan decided to make Chris' dreams come true by taking him to visit Taco Bell's headquarters in Irvine, California.

Previously: Conan O'Brien Takes Jordan Schlansky Coffee Tasting

[sent by teamcoco]