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An op-ed on home birth vs. hospital birth demonstrates how the same data can be interpreted in wildly different ways, depending on what you already believe.

Public Citizen analyzes the new Obama 2014 National Trade Estimate Report, in which the US Trade Rep demands that: Japan abolish its privacy rules and its requirement that food be labelled with its ingredients; Canada abolish its rules limited pharmaceutical patents; Malaysia get rid of its tariffs on pork and booze; Mexico nuke its junk food taxes, and more. It's great reading, and leaves little room for doubt about the neoliberal future, in which anything that's bad for corporate profits -- even if it's good for society or reflects national values -- is killed in the name of free trade. Read the rest

 Monument Valley, an iOS game made by London-based app design studio ustwo, has launched on Android -- after racking up an impressive 500,000 downloads on the App Store in just over a month. Read More

More than 70 percent of the world’s population doesn’t own a car¹—a surprising fact for anyone who’s sat for what seems like hours on end in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Millions of people rely on public transit to get around. That’s why, since 2007, we’ve worked to include public transit routes and schedules in Google Maps. In fact, buses, trains, trams and subways included in Google Maps travel 200 million kilometers every day—that’s the equivalent of driving every single road in the world three times!²
Today, Google Maps is helping you get around on public transit even more easily with these additions:

• We’ve added every single transit route in Great Britain to Google Maps—making it easier to get anywhere from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
• On the other side of the globe, Vancouverites looking for sun can now get real-time updates on whether a bus to Kits is faster than one to Third Beach.
• In Chicago, Cubs fans can now zip to and from Wrigley Field, armed with the real-time information they need to hop on a bus and avoid congestion on Lake Shore Drive.
• And finally, just in time for the games, we’ve recently added transit information for every host city in Brazil. Can you say “GOOOAAALLLLL?!”

Our transit data spans six continents, 64 countries and more than 15,000 towns and cities worldwide. And we’re not done yet: Google Maps will continue to improve—serving people the information they need to get around town when and where they need it.
Posted by David Tattersall, Product Manager, Public Transit

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1 This estimate is based on the most recent World Bank data on the number of passenger cars per 1,000 people throughout 100 countries and territories. Passenger cars refer to road motor vehicles, other than two-wheelers, intended for the carriage of passengers and designed to seat no more than nine people (including the driver).
2 CIA World Factbook

 The battle to own the digital map continues -- with Google stepping up its game in the U.K. today by significantly expanding the transit data embedded within its mapping interface. It's now offering Google Maps users public transport options for routes across the U.K., not just driving or walking directions to get where they want to go. Read More

Just a month after letting anyone in the US buy Google Glass as part of a one day sale, Google's making it available to everyone once again. This time it doesn't appear to be a limited time offer, either. Google says it's built up its stock again, and wants to get the device in the hands of anyone who wants to buy it — as long as it's got the units on hand.

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Google has stopped providing RSS feeds for YouTube subscription pages. If you were previously subscribing to your subscriptions via RSS, you'll have to subscribe to each channel individually—or just head to your YouTube page. [Ars Technica]

In-app purchases are all the rage these days, and Amazon's take on the whole deal includes Coins – Amazon Coins. They're like a universal currency that can be used in many apps and games available in the Amazon ecosystem. Today more people get to know the joy of Amazon Coins – they're now available in France, Italy, and Spain.

Developers don't have to do anything to take advantage. Apps that are distributed by Amazon and available for sale in these countries have Coins enabled.

• Amazon Coins Virtual Currency Available Now, $5 Credit For Kindle Fire Owners Makes It Slightly Less Awful
• Amazon Coins Now Supported On All Android Devices In US, UK, And Germany
• [Deal Alert] Get A Free Voucher For $30 Off A Kindle Fire, Plus $5 Amazon Instant Video Credit
• [Deal Alert] Gameloft Offering 6 Games For $0.99 Each In The Amazon Appstore, Most For The Kindle Fire

Amazon Appstore Coins Expand To France, Italy, And Spain was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Juha writes, "When the rest of the world decides to scrutinise and dial down mass surveillance of Internet users, New Zealand does the opposite. From now on, network operators will have to register with the cops, have staff with security clearance and ask the GCSB spy agency for permission to change their networks and buy gear. This is to make it easier for the government to intercept communications and to keep network secure. The new law applies to everyone, from small ISPs to Facebook, Google, Microsoft and telcos. Failure to comply could cost as much as NZ$500,000 in fines per day." Read the rest

Airbnb, the service that makes it easy for anyone to convert their extra space into an income-generating vacation rental, is experimenting with a new emphasis on short trips and last-minute bookings. The new features are available in San Francisco and Los Angeles and will be introduced in other cities if all goes well. But while the focus on convenience is likely to please users and investors, it’s an interesting choice for a startup that has traditionally touted uniqueness over utility.

Before the redesign, the Airbnb app opened on a stream of beautiful listings without taking into account location or user preferences. The app might show a cozy bed and breakfast in Ruch, France above a historic mansion in Oregon, followed by a link to...

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As a student growing up in France, I was always looking for ways to improve my English, often with a heavy French-to-English dictionary in tow. Since then, technology has opened up a world of new educational opportunities, from simple searches to Google Translate (and our backpacks have gotten a lot lighter). But it can be hard to find time and the means to practice a new language. So when the Web Speech API made it possible to speak to our phones, tablets and computers, I got curious about whether this technology could help people learn a language more easily.

That’s the idea behind Spell Up, a new word game and Chrome Experiment that helps you improve your English using your voice—and a modern browser, of course. It’s like a virtual spelling bee, with a twist.

We worked with game designers and teachers to make Spell Up both fun and educational. The goal of the game is to correctly spell the words you hear and stack them to build the highest word tower you can—letter by letter, word by word. The higher the tower gets, the more difficult the word challenges: You’ll be asked to pronounce words correctly, solve word jumbles and guess mystery words. You can earn bonuses and coins to level up faster.

Spell Up works best in Chrome on your computer and on Android phones and tablets. (It also works on iPhones and iPads, but you’ll need to type rather than talk.) Whether you’re just learning English or you’re already a pro, check it out! And if you’re a teacher, we encourage you to try it out in your classroom.

Posted by Xavier Barrade, Creative Lead and Polyglot, Creative Lab London

Google has lost a European court case that forces it to remove personal information hosted on third-party websites from its search engine results if asked by an individual. The landmark case, a test of citizens’ "right to be forgotten," sees the European Union Court of Justice rule that Google is responsible for content on its servers, and that the search giant must amend some search results when they might show outdated or irrelevant information hosted by a third-party. It’s a surprise ruling, and one that could have serious ramifications on how Google and other search providers operate in Europe.

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Christopher Columbus' flagship the Santa Maria may have been discovered off the north coast of Haiti. While nothing has been confirmed as of yet, underwater archaeological investigator Barry Clifford says that evidence "strongly suggests" his team has indeed located the wreckage of the largest ship used during Columbus' discovery of the New World.

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Every week we cover new Android apps with Fresh Meat on Wednesday, followed by Android Gaming on Thursday and Top 10 App Updates on Friday. When Monday rolls around, we look back to see which apps were the most appealing to our audience. Read on for the 10 most popular Android apps from last week.

1. wlpapR*

App info: wlpapR is a collection of wallpapers made for Android devices, all designed exclusively by user yackovsky. You can view and download them on the wlpapR website or with the app, which has Muzei support.

 

2. SoftKeyZ Root

App info: SoftKeyZ lets you customize your Softkeys / Navigation Buttons with over growing database of over 150+ icons.

 

3. LagFix (fstrim) Free

App info: LagFix is a user-friendly implementation of fstrim utility. It allows you to select which partitions to trim (you should leave defaults unless you know what you are doing) and run the process easily.

 

4. Amazon

App info: The official Amazon app was recently updated and now includes a new icon single sign-on capabilities.

 

5. Motorola Boot Services

App info: Motorola Boot Services is used to enhance your phone’s power-up experience. This application has been designed to work on Moto X and Moto G.

 

6. HabitBull

App info: HabitBull helps you keep on track whether you are trying to stop an old habit or develop new ones.

 

7. Today Calendar

App info: Today Calendar is a more modern version of the stock Android calendar. Grey colors have been replaced with a clean white interface.

 

8. Maps

App info: Maps is a great app to help you navigate around an unfamiliar area or to find a local pizza joint.

 

9. 1849

App info: 1849 is a city building game set in the California Gold Rush time period.

 

10. Banded Icons DEMO

App info: These Icons are uniformed with an extraordinarily etched outline taking the Superellipse to the next level. Uniquely crafted in a monochrome tone for a design that looks fresh, crisp, and minimal.

 

Note:  To ensure that all apps receive a fair chance to make the list, we will retire any app that has made the list for 3 consecutive weeks and will place it in our Android and Me App Hall of Fame. We will post this Hall of Fame list in a dedicated series. Any app with * next to the title indicates it will now be added to our Hall of Fame list and will no longer be listed in this article.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Featured App

Medieval Wars:Strategy&Tactics

Today's roundup is presented by Medieval Wars: Strategy & Tactics from Herocraft.

• Gamevil Releases 'Cartoon Wars 2: Heroes' To The Play Store
• [Bonus Round] Galactic Heroes, 9 Lives: Casey And Sphynx, And Ending
• Marvel War Of Heroes Arrives On Android, Superpowered Card-Based Strategy In Tow
• [New Game] Maya Brings Gorgeous DotA / Warcraft 3 Style Game Play To Android With Legendary Heroes

29 Best (And 2 WTF) New Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (4/29/14 - 5/12/14) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Michael Abberton, a Green Party activist in Cambridgeshire, was visited by two police officers on Saturday who had been sent by a local councilor from Ukip (a party that lets you express your xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia by cloaking it in a respectable "concern about immigration") who objected to a tweet that enumerated some of Ukip's most extreme positions. The police told him that they he wasn't legally obliged to follow their command, and also told him he wasn't allowed to tweet about their visit, but that he wasn't legally obliged to obey that command either. After the police left, a Ukip supporter sent Abberton a threatening tweet that implied that he knew that he'd been visited by the police.

10 Great Reasons to vote #UKIP. I don't know who made it - so I referenced it from official #UKIP websites pic.twitter.com/GXnikZ3Blg

— Michael Abberton (@MichaelAbberton) May 5, 2014

Ukip, standing up for traditional British values, like censorship. Read the rest

Alien designer dies aged 74

Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who contributed design work to one of the most iconic creatures in cinema history for Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Alien, has died at the age of 74.

Giger is best known for his biomechanical horror work, inspired, he said, by night terrors. Born in Switzerland in 1940, his father initially encouraged him to become a pharmacist, worrying that art was a “breadless profession.” But Giger was dedicated to design, and moved to Zurich in 1962 to study architecture and industrial design, where he developed his technique. After a period working as an interior designer, he switched to art full time, working on small ink drawings before moving to oil paintings and then to airbrushed work which owes a debt to Lovecraft and Giger’s friendship with Salvador Dali. Early books of his paintings bear the Lovecraft influence out, named for the Necronomicon.

But it was Necronom IV that would lead to his most famous design – that, and a fateful meeting with Alien co-writer Dan O’Bannon, who prior to his work with Ridley Scott had been hired to help Alejandro Jodorowsky on his adaptation of Dune. While that never came to pass, O’Bannon was struck by Giger’s design plans for Dune, and recommended him to Scott for Alien. Despite Fox executives’ worries that his work would be too disturbing for audiences, Scott was sold and hired Carlo Rambaldi to bring Giger’s vision to life. The result scored the effects team an Oscar and is forever etched on to our minds.

In addition to that memorable collaboration, Giger has gone on to become one of the most influential artists in the world. He’s also directed several films, including Swiss Made, Tagtarum, and Giger’s Necronomicon. His fingerprints can be found on the likes of Species and Poltergeist II: The Other Side. He’s also contributed designs for a wealth of albums and other projects.

He died on Monday afternoon in hospital from injuries sustained in a fall. Our thoughts are with his wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, who runs the museum dedicated to his work.

The NSA systematically sabotaged US-made network routers as they were exported, equipping them with secret backdoors, according to Edward Snowden leaks newly released by Glenn Greenward in the Guardian. The devices were tampered with prior to leaving the USA and resealed with factory seals. Ironically, this is exactly what grandstanding US politicians have been accusing the Chinese government and Huawei of doing for years. Takes one to know one? Or just honi soit qui mal y pense? Read the rest

The Gmail app for Android has broken a new record on the Play Store. It has reached a monumental 1 billion downloads, and is the first app on the Play Store to do so, not counting Google Play Services. That’s a pretty big deal. It shows just how many Android users are out there, especially compared to the competition.

To get to this number, Google counted unique accounts downloading this update, not individual downloads (which probably number far higher). Though this doesn’t mean that a billion people are using the app, it means that a billion accounts have downloaded it at some point.

Next up is 5 billion downloads, according to Google Play’s bracket for the number of installs. While we probably won’t make it there very soon, we hope Android will keep growing until that number is a possibility. When do you think we’ll hit that target? Leave a comment!

Watch the city of London and its network of roads grow from Roman times to today, in a video that also plots all the city's protected building and archaeological sites.

Square has decided to throw in the towel on the Square Wallet app it introduced in 2011. Originally designed to help customers quickly pay for items at local merchants using only a smartphone, Square Wallet ultimately failed to catch on. Even support from coffee giant Starbucks wasn't enough to bring the app mainstream adoption. Many people were trapped in their routines and kept paying for their morning lattes with the regular Starbucks app, never even noticing there was an alternative.

With Wallet failing to match the momentum of Square's credit card reader — a proven hit with small businesses —  the company is revising its consumer strategy. Today it's pulled Square Wallet from the App Store and Google Play and quickly replaced it...

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It's a good day to be an NVIDIA SHIELD owner. Valve's Android ports of PC shooter classics Portal and Half-Life 2 just dropped in the Play Store for $10 a pop. They're only for the SHIELD (even other devices with the Tegra 4 chipset aren't invited to the party), which is a bit of a mixed blessing - these games really require a full controller to play.

 

Valve teased an Android release for the 2007 classic Portal way back in March, but we only heard about the Half-Life 2 port last week (via crowbar).

• Valve's Shooter Classic Half-Life 2 Is Coming To The NVIDIA SHIELD, According To This Informative Crowbar
• [This Was A Triumph] Nvidia Has Ported The Original Portal To Android Exclusively For The Nvidia Shield, Release Details Still A Mystery
• Portal For Nvidia Shield Review: This Was A Triumph
• NVIDIA SHIELD Is On Sale For $199 From Today Until The End Of April

[New Games] NVIDIA Releases The SHIELD Versions Of Portal And Half-Life 2 At The Same Time was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

In Analyzing Forged SSL Certificates in the Wild [PDF] a paper authored by researchers at CMU and Facebook, we learn that "a small but significant percentage" of HTTPS connections are made using forged certificates generated by adware and malware. Disturbingly, some of this malware may be working by attacking anti-virus software and stealing its keys, and the authors also speculate that anti-virus authors may be giving their keys out to governments in order to allow police to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks.

The researchers used a technique to detect forged-cert connections that has post-Heartbleed applications, since it would allow sites to discover whether their visitors are being man-in-the-middled through keys stolen before Heartbleed was widely known. This all points to a larger problem with HTTPS, which has been under increased scrutiny since Heartbleed, but whose defects were well understood within the security community for a long time. I co-wrote this editorial for Nature with Ben Laurie in 2012 describing a system called "Certificate Transparency" that makes it easier to audit and remediate problems with SSL certificates, which Google is now adding to Chrome. Read the rest

Netflix is continuing its push into exclusive documentaries with three new titles for this summer and fall, according to Deadline. The first, The Battered Bastards of Baseball, tells the story of Oregon's short-lived team, the Portland Mavericks; it'll be released on July 11th. The following month, on August 15th, Netflix will release Mission Blue, a look at marine biologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Sylvia Earle and her work toward protecting ocean habitats. The final of the three, E-Team, follows four members of a human rights abuse team as they investigate reports across the globe; it'll be released this fall.

Two of the films premiered at Sundance this year, and all three have received warm reviews from their...

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The 100 Best “B Movies” of All Time 

Link via mental_floss.