Dilma foi até Cuba {{com uma paradinha em Portugal}} inaugurar um porto, construído com financiamento brasileiro. E também participar da cúpula da Celac (Comunidade dos Estados Latino-Americanos e Caribenhos). O Estadão, sagaz que só ele, concluiu… QUE UM GOLPE COMUNA ESTÁ CHEGANDO!

TREMEI LIBERAIS!

 

Pois bem, eis a notícia:

Cuba inaugura porto financiado pelo Brasil

{{não acredite em mim – EBC}}

Cuba inaugurou um porto, financiado pelo BNDES {{e construído pela construtora – UAU, BELÍSSIMA CONSTRUÇÃO DE FRASE! – BRASILEIRA Odebrecht}}.

Daí vem o editorial do Estadão. Que começa de maneira brilhante, veja só:

Sem entrar no mérito das negociações diplomáticas e comerciais do governo brasileiro com o de Cuba, que resultam no momento em decisiva contribuição dos cofres públicos nacionais para a implantação da Zona de Desenvolvimento Especial do Porto de Mariel na ilha dos irmãos Castro…

{{não acredite em mim – Estadão}}

Ou seja, o comentário será feito sobre a construção do Porto, mas irá ignorar completamente as negociações comerciais. Mmmmm, algo de muito genial está por vir…

este mais recente afago à ditadura cubana reitera o carinho de Dilma Rousseff pelo dogmatismo ideológico que o lulopetismo compartilha com os Castros e só não logrou ainda consagrar plenamente entre nós por duas razões…

As duas razões são o ‘projeto de poder eterno do PT’ {{gente, fiquem tranquilos, o PT realmente quer se manter no poder para sempre. O PT e todos os outros partidos políticos… O problema é que vivemos numa democracia, etc…}} e o fato da nossa democracia estar estabelecida {{o Estadão ainda finge que o PT não assinou a carta magna de 88, fato que é mentiroso e já foi comprovado na Comissão de Constituição e Justiça. O PT fez sim, ressalvas à constituição que estava sendo aprovada por entender que não abrangia os direitos dos trabalhadores, mas assinou apesar disso.}}.

Mas a maluquice o editorial continua…

Derreteu-se em agradecimentos ao favor que Cuba presta ao Brasil ao fornecer, para o programa Mais Médicos, a um custo altíssimo só parcialmente repassado aos profissionais, os doutores que aqui desembarcam para suprir a deficiência de atendimento básico nos grotões que a incompetente política nacional de saúde não tem conseguido alcançar.

O que o Estadão não fala é que o custo altíssimo é estabelecido pela:

O Ministério da Saúde brasileiro firmou acordo com a Organização Pan-Americana da Saúde (Opas) para que a entidade internacional buscasse parcerias para a vinda de médicos para o país.

{{não acredite em mim – EBC}}

Também seria de bom tom lembrar que os médicos cubanos já vieram quando o candidato apoiado por este jornal era ministro da saúde:

O acerto com o governo cubano teria sido feito pessoalmente pelo ministro José Serra (Saúde) quando ele esteve em Cuba em 1999.

{{não acredite em mim – folha de São Paulo}}

Mas merda pouca é bobagem, segue o Estadão…

Para conferir maior brilho a esse tópico de sua agenda em Havana, Dilma levou a tiracolo o ministro da Saúde, Alexandre Padilha, que brevemente será o candidato do PT ao governo de São Paulo.

Entenderam, crianças? O Estadão está acusando a Presidenta de fazer campanha para governo do Estado de São Paulo em CUBA. Mas é muito malandra essa Dilma, não?! Agora o Padilha vai ser eleito, afinal, TODOS OS CUBANOS DE HAVANA VÃO QUERER VOTAR NELE!!

- Mas, seu Caipira, cubano vota para governador de São Paulo???
- Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

O editorial continua com as baboseiras mas é melhor irmos direto ao ponto, né? Então, vejamos o que diz a BBC:

Dilma inaugura porto em Cuba de olho em exportações para EUA

{{não acredite em mim – BBC}}

Uai, que estranho… Parece que a Dilma fez isso pensando no Brasil, não nos irmãos Castro… Mmmm melhor seguir a leitura…

Por isso, o Brasil vê o investimento no porto como uma aposta futura no fim do embargo.

A ideia é instalar indústrias nacionais (brasileiras) na zona franca de Cuba para produzir aproveitando-se dos incentivos fiscais e flexibilidade para a contratação da mão de obra cubana altamente qualificada.

Dessa forma, o Brasil teria um posto avançado para exportar inicialmente para a América Central e depois eventualmente para os Estados Unidos, segundo Thomaz Zanotto, diretor do departamento de relações internacionais e comércio exterior da Federação das Indústrias do Estados de São Paulo (Fiesp).

Fiesp… Fiesp… Ah, lembrei!!! Fiesp é aquela associação cujo presidente é Skaf… Skaf… De onde me lembro desse nome? Ah, sim, porque SKAF VAI CONCORRER A GOVERNADOR DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO!

Mas, peraí… Quer dizer que o concorrente direto do Padilha {{que foi fazer uma campanha super-focada em Cuba}} diz que é um investimento para aumentar as exportações no Brasil? Rapaz… Mas que coisa, não?!

Ah seu Caipira, mas ainda falta explicar por que demônios fazer porto na ilha do capeta, digo, Castro e não investir em portos aqui mesmo!

Pois se acalme, dona leitora, que o colega do Skaf explica:

As principais críticas ao investimento no porto de Mariel partem de partidos opositores – como o PSDB, que se baseia no fato de que o governo brasileiro investe mais em Mariel do que nos portos nacionais.

Os opositores acusam o governo Dilma Rousseff de direcionar os investimentos a Cuba devido a um alinhamento ideológico com Havana.

Segundo Zanotto, a crítica “não procede”, pois “cada projeto é um projeto”. Ou seja, o eventual não investimento em Cuba não necessariamente levaria o dinheiro aos portos do Brasil, onde fatores como restrições ambientais estariam dificultando a agilização de projetos.

“O Brasil é gigantesco mas sofre com um apagão de projetos”, diz Zanotto.

Outra crítica parte do próprio empresariado. Eles desconfiam da capacidade do governo cubano de honrar sua divida com o Brasil. Contudo, segundo Zanotto, as garantias estariam relacionadas ao próprio faturamento do porto em dólares.

 

Ô Estadão… Fio… Chega mais… Tomou?

 

Colonel Sanders and Alice Cooper.

hit-it-into-the-sky:

capitalode:

damn gambit

this is perfect

The story behind NASA's brief embrace of extraterrestrial sherry is a curious one. In the early seventies, the agency's focus was shifting from short, Moon-focused missions to the possibility of longer-term inhabitation of space. A revamped menu was among the most pressing challenges: food on the Gemini and Apollo programs came in dehydrated cube form, or squeezed from a pouch, and was universally regarded as inedible.

Read more...

Fato: Carl Sagan foi e continuará sendo o maior divulgador científico da história. Dono de uma didática incomparável, ele falava de uma maneira simples e muito elucidativa sobre o universo, a ciência e nós mesmos de forma que qualquer um entendia. Para ele as maravilhas da ciência deveriam ser compartilhada com todos e não ficar restritas à laboratórios e teses acadêmicas. E mais importante, ele tinha paixão pelo que fazia, sentimento esse que contagiou gerações inteiras que leram seus livros, seus artigos ou viram a cultuada série Cosmos.

Tempos depois de sua partida rumo às estrelas em 1996, a biblioteca do Congresso dos Estados Unidos começou um projeto para coletar, catalogar e disponibilizar seus arquivos pessoais à consulta pública, de modo a entender como ele trabalhava, como foi sua formação e principalmente, descobrir rascunhos e originais de roteiros, artigos científicos e outras coisas.

Foi Seth MacFarlane, criador de Family Guy e fã de Sagan que mais colaborou, ao bancar parte dos custos e ter seu nome imortalizado ao lado do de Carl e sua viúva no nome da mostra: The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive. A coleção já está disponível para consulta física para quem visitar a biblioteca, entretanto nem todo mundo pode se deslocar facilmente para Washington; por isso o próximo passo seria digitalizar todo o acervo e colocá-lo online.

Após um grande período de espera, os primeiros documentos já foram escaneados/digitalizados e podem ser apreciados. São ao todo 110 itens sendo cinco fotos ou desenhos, cinco arquivos de áudio, um filme com registros de sua infância, três jornais e noventa e seis manuscritos, rascunhos e cartas, entre elas um Curriculum Vitae de 1961, uma carta de 1986 parabenizando Chuck Berry por seu aniversário e outra de 1976 escrita por um jovem que admirava o prof. Sagan, decidiu entrar em Harvard e esperava se encontrar com ele. Confira de quem se trata.

A biblioteca também catalogou uma coleção maior, contendo alguns documentos de Sagan com outros históricos para comparação, chamada Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: From Galileo to Sagan and Beyond. Claro, esses documentos são uma pequena parcela das 1.705 caixas pertencentes à Sagan e Druyan que compõem a coleção, mas já é um começo. Assim como é obrigação visitar a Biblioteca se você estiver passeando por Washington, da mesma forma é imperativo conferir esse material online, que só tende a aumentar com o tempo e que caso fosse vivo, Sagan faria questão de compartilhar, tanto quanto seu amor pela ciência e o universo.

P.S.: saiu um novo promo de Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, confira:

Fonte: LoC.

The post Comemore: arquivos de Carl Sagan começam a ser disponibilizados online appeared first on Meio Bit.

Strike Vector, you had my curiosity at last year's E3. Now you have my attention.

Read more...

Volleyball goes to war: "Volley ball is a very suitable game for keeping women physically fit during this world crisis, when women are expected to play an important part and vital part in defense." [USA Volleyball]

Read more...

If you've ever wondered what Fight Club would have looked like to everyone else in the movie, visual effects artist Richard Trammell has you covered. He's digitally removed Brad Pitt from one of the movie's key scenes, so that we can all see how crazy Ed Norton really was.

Read more...

Uma mensagem do cineasta Andrei Tarkovsky para os jovens:

I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

When my wife and I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, we made a vow to each other. After seeing the stunningly blue waters off Greece, the paragliders sailing through the Austrian Alps, the idyllic countryside of Slovenia, we said, “Never will we take our children to Disney World. Why would you need something so manufactured when you have the real world?”

It’s 10 years later. And I left for Disney World on Thursday. The thing I didn’t understand, which, now that I have three boys, I know in my bones is this: You can’t see Buzz Lightyear while backpacking.

Oh well, Walt! You win.

But as a data scientist at a tech company, I have to admit, I’m geeking out over the technology. Disney World is like a petri dish for advanced analytic techniques because the hotels and parks are all tied together in one large, heavily controlled environment. If you ever wanted to star in The Truman Show, a trip to Disney is the next best thing — it feels like a centrally planned North Korea only with more fun, less torture and the same amount of artifice.

From the mundane to the magical, the fact is there’s probably an engineer behind the scenes at Disney who has thought through it. Disney has industrial engineers that work on everything from optimal food-and-beverage pricing and laundry facility optimization, to attraction performance and wait-time minimization (the vaunted FASTPASS system).

MagicBands: like magic beans, except they grow data

But those tried-and-true efforts at optimization were just the appetizer. Earlier this week, there was a knock on my door and there on my doorstep sat a little bit of hand-delivered magic. I opened the package with the sweaty palms of anticipation because, to me, this package represented a billion-dollar investment by Disney in big data analytics.

That investment is called MagicBands. They’re a new technology for the park, and the program officially opened up about a month ago. Disney has thought of everything.

The box in which the bands arrived rivaled Apple in its Incredibles-themed design. Each magic band was tucked in a slot, standing up straight, ready to be put on by the vacationer like some fabled amulet. Each rubber wristband was smartly colored with a soft-touch matte.

But under all that visual appeal, beneath the surface of the band, was the reason for Disney’s huge investment: a sophisticated RFID tag. These bands, which are individually coded to each visitor, allow Disney to track individuals wherever they go in the parks and resorts with long-range RFID readers. You check into FASTPASS rides with your band, you purchase food by swiping your band and you use it as a key to your hotel room.

The bands are even uniquely colored and monogrammed with your family members’ names so that they won’t get switched up. Why? Because they don’t want their database to get confused and think that you, a 45-year-old man, rode the teacups instead of your little son Timmy. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of physical design (e.g., monogramming and coloring) for the sake of digital data purity.

If ever there was a testimony to the importance big data has achieved in business it’s this: We will now shape our physical world to create better streams of digital information.

Mickey thinks you need some Buzz Lightyear time

Stop a moment and dream of the MagicBand possibilities.

The pitch that Disney is making is personalization. For each band, for example, Disney asks for the name and birthday of the person who’ll be wearing it. So if your kid is having a birthday in the park and there’s a character wandering nearby, that character can be notified to sneak up on your kid and creepily wish them a happy birthday individually.

Now, let’s dig a little deeper.

What does Disney get out of the deal? In short, it tracks everything you do, everything you buy, everything you eat, everything you ride, everywhere you go in the park. If the goal is to keep you in the park longer so you’ll spend more money, it can build AI models on itineraries, show schedules, line length, weather, etc., to figure out what influences stay length and cash expenditure. Perhaps there are a few levers they can pull to get money out of you.

Or perhaps its models know that your family is staying in a high-dollar luxury Disney resort and that this morning you forked over lots of money at the Cinderella character breakfast. But right now your high-dollar family is stuck in a long line at an attraction. If your family gets too tuckered out or frustrated, you might be inclined to call it a day.

So, a model marks you as a candidate for “encouragement.” Within the park, a character is notified to make its way over to your children and entertain them until they can get on the ride. This increases enjoyment, decreases perceived exhaustion, and hopefully keeps you around for more meals, more trinkets and more arcade games.

The research questions that might be answered with this type of tracking data are endless:

• What menu items served at breakfast at the resort hotel restaurants will result in the longest stay at the park?
• Do we detect an influx of park-goers into the bathrooms for long stays on the toilet? Perhaps they all ate at the same place, and we can cut off a foodborne illness problem before it gets worse.
• Is there a roller coaster that’s correlated with early park departure or a high incidence of bathroom visits? That means less money in the park’s pockets. How might that coaster be altered?
• Is there a particular ride and food fingerprint for the type of park visitor that’s likely to buy in-park high-dollar merchandise? If so, can we actively get vendors in front of this attendee’s eye by moving hawkers to them at just the right time?

The allusion of freedom and agency still exist within the park, but with these bands, you are giving up much of your privacy and freedom to experience something “untailored” in exchange for a better time. Even if that better time is achieved by spending more money.

The future of big data is in meat space

“Meat space” (coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer) is a term for the physical world where our bodies (meat) move around and do meat-like things (for example, eat, jog or go clubbin’). The interesting thing about the term is it’s a play on “cyber space” — meat space is an internet-first way of viewing the world.

And that internet-first way of seeing the world is what’s driving these changes at Disney, casinos, insurance companies, etc. We’ve been “cookie-ing” people online and tracking their browsing habits for years, and in that contained environment, businesses have seen the value of acting on personal transactional data. But now businesses are taking this approach and applying it to meat space.

Why? Because cyber space is small, it starts and stops at internet-connected devices. Think of the transactions and interactions that are carried out each day in meat space. Think of the money spent in meat space (on your caramel macchiato, for instance).

While not everyone is online all day long, we’re all implicitly offline. Wouldn’t it be great it we could gather meat space data and use that to tailor the offline experience much like companies now tailor your online experience? “Personalizing your meat space experience” is a gross way of saying “pretty much control your life.”

Which is frightening. But that’s exactly what companies want to do.

It’s not new. It’s one of the fundamental goals of marketing. For example, a discount pricing model implemented on airline seats wants to control your booking decisions by adjusting prices. The control is targeted and specific, so you feel pretty good about it.

We now know this is Google’s end game. Self-driving cars, Google Glass and the purchase of Nest — Google is dying to get out of your computer and all up in your life. With Nest, Google won’t just know how you like your air to feel. It’ll know when you’re at work and when you’re at home. It gets pieces in a data puzzle that is your entire observable life.

Loyalty cards (those things you swipe at the grocery store) were the first salvos into this real-world data gathering. Now, department stores are doing a lo-fi version of MagicBands by tracking the hardware ID on your cell phone’s Wi-Fi card as you wander the store.

Hey, look! That’s the same Wi-Fi ID as the person who bought a necklace from us last week. Maybe a sales associate should propose a pair of earrings to them?

This is where data science is headed, and it’s part of the reason why there aren’t enough qualified data analysts to meet demand. The reach of the discipline is moving out of the browser and into every business that can gather data on your life.

But I’d like to keep my meat private, thanks.

At this point, I’m sure a lot of you are freaked out by the privacy implications of where all this is headed. Indeed, one journalist just compared what Disney is doing to the recent disclosures about the NSA’s own tracking programs. But at the end of that article there’s a big glaring difference between the NSA and Disney: “Disney fanatics, for their part, can’t wait to get their hands on the [MagicBands].”

We want MagicBands!

We don’t want the NSA tracking us, because we get nothing in return. It tries to sell us on “terrorism prevention,” but most people don’t experience that benefit in a visceral way. But this is not to say Americans won’t give up privacy for anything.

On the contrary, Americans are very, very cheap dates. For just a modicum of convenience, entertainment and comfort, I’m happy to give you a list of everyone I call and everywhere I go. That’s more than I’m sure the NSA has on me. And despite your privacy concerns, most of you are exactly the same way.

Don’t believe me? I recently installed a flashlight app on my phone. In exchange for this app that does no more than turn on my phone’s camera flash, I give it my geolocation all day long. Who owns this app? No idea. Probably some Ukranians. What I do know is that this app is worth like $5 to me, and yet that was enough to give these strangers all my info.

Same with Angry Birds (tracks location). Same with LinkedIn (can read AND WRITE my phone call data, can read my “calendar events plus confidential information”, etc.). Same with the freaking Shazam app that let’s me identify that song playing in the mall. Have you heard of Stylitics? You get your wardrobe mirrored back at you in a virtual closet –whatever that is — and Stylitics gets to sell your clothing data to retailers to better understand where else you shop beside their stores.

We’re all wringing our hands over the NSA, and meanwhile we’re handing our data as fast as we can to other entities for next to nothing. If the NSA were smart, it would buy Candy Crush Saga, change the permissions, and be done with it.

If we’re honest, we give privacy lip service, but we vote with our keypresses and our dollars, and the bands we strap to our wrists.

Expect your future meat space world to feel very much like your cyber space one. The next time your RFID tag lets Mickey know you’ve got diarrhea, maybe the stall door can make suggestions to you: “Customers who got funnel cake diarrhea also bought Maalox.”

John Foreman is chief data scientist at MailChimp.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Big Data 2011 Preview

_{Chimamanda Adichie - The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talks 2009)}

An anonymous reader writes "Kazakh news site BNews.kz reports that Mukhtarbay Otelbaev, Director of the Eurasian Mathematical Institute of the Eurasian National University, is claiming to have found the solution to another Millennium Prize Problems. His paper, which is called 'Existence of a strong solution of the Navier-Stokes equations' and is freely available online (PDF in Russian), may present a solution to the fundamental partial differentials equations that describe the flow of incompressible fluids for which, until now, only a subset of specific solutions have been found. So far, only one of the seven Millennium problems was solved — the Poincaré conjecture, by Grigori Perelman in 2003. If Otelbaev's solution is confirmed, not only it might be the first time that the $1 million offered by the Clay Millennium Prize will find a home (Perelman refused the prize in 2010), but also engineering libraries will soon have to update their Fluid Mechanic books."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Good news, gays and lesbians planning to go to the Sochi Olympics! Russian President Vladimir Putin says you won't be arrested and thrown into prison as long as you keep your gay away from the children.

Read more...

Share the fail:

Stan Lee posing with the Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk comic book, 1983.