Scientists have long suspected that monkeys are capable of mental arithmetics and a new study is helping them prove it. A research team led by neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone trained three rhesus macaques to identify symbols representing the numbers zero to 25. They then taught the test subjects how to perform addition. To eliminate the possibility of rote learning, the team had the monkeys learn an entirely different set of symbols representing the numbers zero to 25. The monkeys were able to reapply their previous knowledge to the new set and continue performing basic mathematics.

The image above shows one of the monkeys preparing to choose the four and five combination on the panel. It has learned that the combined value is greater than eight and will therefore yield a larger number of liquid drops. According to the study, all three monkeys were on average capable of choosing the correct answer "well above" 50 percent of the time. This rules out the possibility of chance. What's also interesting is how the monkeys were routinely undervaluing the smaller number in a given equation. This challenges the idea that mammalian brains perceive numbers logarithmically and may help researchers better understand how human beings process numbers.

“yes, denny’s lost a $54 million law suit for being anti-black.”

-

here’s another source.

ETA: i’m going to affix my second post here, because this has gone a little viral, without the best sources. bear in mind, my initial discussion of this topic began as a response to props for the denny’s tweet about coachella and its implied wrongs of cultural appropriation.

i did ask everyone to complete further research. thus far, i’m seeing reblogs, but no further comments. c’mon, now. like certain agencies and news outlets, i withheld pertinent information about this case, hoping you jovenes would go find it. no? seriously? why not.

okay. did you find the fact that the head of the DOJ’s civil right’s division, deval l. patrick, remarked at the time, that this was the largest and broadest settlement ever paid under federal public accommodation laws? those were federal laws—not state statutes—enacted over 70 years ago, now, to end segregation in restaurants and other public places serving the public.

so, what actually happened, to bring denny’s to the attention of the DOJ’s civil rights division (and: did you know the DOJ has a civil rights division, with various branches, including housing?). 

a majority of the claims came from black customers. this included a black federal judge from houston, traveling with his wife, who was forced to wait nearly an hour—while white patrons were served, and white teens taunted the black couple with the word “n*****.” no one from the staff did a damned thing.

one of the first complaints came in 1991 from a group of 18 young black men, who were asked to pay before service, at a denny’s in san jose, california. the men complied—but they also filed a suit against denny’s.

in 1993 (some articles have the date wrong), 6 uniformed members of president clinton’s u.s. secret service were refused service in Annapolis, by a white waitress, because they were black; meanwhile their white secret service counterparts were seated and served. the black agents filed a complaint—and one denny’s corporate public relations offices obviously couldn’t ignore.

1997 saw the rabid beatings of 6 Asian American students from syracuse university. after the standard treatment of denny’s “wait while we serve the whites,” the students complained to the management and their server, so were forced to leave the restaurant by security called by the manager. the students stated a group of white men then emerged from the restaurant and attacked them while shouting racial slurs. several of the asian students were left unconscious. 

what denny’s paid was a class action lawsuit for racial discrimination. claims proven during that case were settled, by any person of color (called a “minority,” in the suit). the overwhelming majority of those who had proven claims were black customers. denny’s clearly had an overall agenda upholding white supremacy.

ironically (and sadly), after the $54.4 million settlement, the restaurant chain went all out to win back its percentage of people of color—especially its former 10% black customer base. their public relations department featured sherman hemsley and isabel sanford, in one television commercial. Fortune magazine selected denny’s as “best company for minorities” in 2001; Black Enterprise gave top space for the chain in their “best companies for diversity,” in 2006 and 2007. read more about the effects of denny’s “grand slam” advertising, by doing some research. seriously *s

now consider why denny’s has its public relations department sending out these bold "calling out" messages, that manage to "raise awareness" about cultural appropriation. even for some of us who are critical of the tweets, there’s the thought that, “it’s not a bad idea.” well, it worked, didn’t it? mm.

c/s

~canéla

(via floricanto-desnuda)

I called out their motives the other day, didn’t I? 

I said they was apologizing for not letting Black folks eat, lol.

SEE THROUGH.

(via tashabilities)

Every time a person or institution appears to be too generous, you have to stop and ask “what are they getting out of this.” Because they are getting something. And shame on Denny’s for thinking PoC can’t see through it.

A god game where you lead hell before the end of the world. A tycoon game where you train monsters to make money. A sim game where you make timelines ad nauseam.

It's the Game Generator, a word randomizer that spits out video game concepts, can sound reasonable, especially if its "sanity" option is checked. It's the work of Orteil, who is perhaps best known as the creator of Cookie Clicker, an avant garde "non-game" that caught the attention of many in the games development community late last summer.

But even with the sanity filter engaged, Game Generator can still go off the rails, if not come up with something completely derivative, like:

Play with Game Generator either by refreshing the browser or changing the seed at the top of the page. The sanity filter defaults to on. Who knows, maybe you'll come up with a winning pitch.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

For many crypto-minded libertarians, Bitcoin is the future of money. But that dream hasn't been helped much by the numerous high-profile legal cases involving the currency in recent years: The Bitcoin Savings and Trust hedge fund collapsed; uncertainty fueled the implosion of Mt. Gox, the currency's largest exchange; and the high-profile Silk Road takedown is a treacherous story combining Bitcoin, drugs, and alleged murders.

For now, though, one company sits above all others when it comes to cultivating a new level of direct customer mistrust in the Bitcoin community: Butterfly Labs.

For the past year, the Kansas-based Bitcoin miner maker has been embroiled in numerous accusations of fraud. Customer orders, totaling millions of dollars, were significantly delayed or never fulfilled. Through it all, the company insisted that mere manufacturing delays were to blame. However, suspicion never died down. In fact, it's getting worse after it came to light that Butterfly Labs' largest shareholder—a man who is a company co-founder, current "Innovation Officer," and member of the board of directors—pled guilty in 2010 to one count of mail fraud (PDF) for his involvement in an international, multi-million dollar lottery scam.

In HateSong, we ask our favorite musicians, writers, comedians, actors, and so forth to expound on the one song they hate most in the world.

The hater: After veering toward the dramatic with the Oscar-nominated Philomena this past year, veteran British comedian-actor Steve Coogan steps back into his comfort zone with Alan Partridge, an absurd feature-length culmination of the character he first portrayed nearly 25 years ago on the groundbreaking BBC radio show On The Hour. The ambitious if inept Partridge has gone from local sports reporter to national television broadcaster and back again in a span of mediums that include radio, TV, and now film. It’s a crisis movie of sorts that tests how self-absorbed Partridge can remain in a hostage situation.

The hated: Chris De Burgh, “The Lady In Red” (1986)

Source

The A.V. Club: What is it about “The Lady In Red” that makes you ...

AT&T could get a lot more serious about rivaling Google Fiber. The service provider is beginning to investigate the potential for expanding its GigaPower internet service into up to 21 new major metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. The announcement does not mean that all of these cities will definitely be seeing AT&T's one-gigabit-per-second fiber service in the near future though — instead, AT&T is only announcing that it will begin discussions with city leaders in each of these areas about a possible launch.

AT&T is looking for communities with "solid investment cases and policies"

"We’re interested in working with communities that appreciate the value of the most advanced technologies and are willing to encourage investment by offering solid investment cases and policies," Lori Lee, an AT&T home solutions executive, says in a statement.

In total, AT&T says that it's now looking at up to 100 potential cities and municipalities, with the remaining major new names including Atlanta, Augusta, Charlotte, Cleveland, Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis, and San Jose. The service is currently available only in Austin.

Maps showing cities where AT&T (left) and Google (right) offer and are exploring offering gigabit internet service.

The expansion appears designed to continue GigaPower's chase of Google Fiber, exploring many of the same cities that Google too is investigating, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and San Jose. Though Google Fiber is currently available in more cities, AT&T has now announced that it's exploring some big locations where Google hasn't yet thrown its hat in the ring. None of that will make a difference if neither service provider actually makes it into these big new cities, but the race is clearly on to expand gigabit internet service — and both AT&T and Google are putting even their most tentative plans out there for us to follow along.

Just what you wanted for Easter: a re-gifted backdoor from Christmas.

http://www.synacktiv.com/ressources/TCP32764_backdoor_again.pdf

First, DSL router owners got an unwelcome Christmas present. Now, the same gift is back as an Easter egg. The same security researcher who originally discovered a backdoor in 24 models of wireless DSL routers has found that a patch intended to fix that problem doesn’t actually get rid of the backdoor—it just conceals it. And the nature of the “fix” suggests that the backdoor, which is part of the firmware for wireless DSL routers based on technology from the Taiwanese manufacturer Sercomm, was an intentional feature to begin with.

Back in December, Eloi Vanderbeken of Synacktiv Digital Security was visiting his family for the Christmas holiday, and for various reasons he had the need to gain administrative access to their Linksys WAG200G DSL gateway over Wi-Fi. He discovered that the device was listening on an undocumented Internet Protocol port number, and after analyzing the code in the firmware, he found that the port could be used to send administrative commands to the router without a password.

After Vanderbeken published his results, others confirmed that the same backdoor existed on other systems based on the same Sercomm modem, including home routers from Netgear, Cisco (both under the Cisco and Linksys brands), and Diamond. In January, Netgear and other vendors published a new version of the firmware that was supposed to close the back door.

By Christopher Livingston on April 21st, 2014 at 9:00 pm.

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, space station sanitation in Viscera Cleanup Detail.

I’ve been picking internal organs off the floor, mopping blood off the walls, cramming severed limbs and heads into an incinerator, and I’ve only just now noticed the shell casings, dozens of them, scattered around the room. In every other game, spent shell casings vanish when you’re not looking. If you ever wondered where they end up, it’s here, in Viscera Cleanup Detail, where they wait to be picked up, one by one. It makes me desperately wish for that Bioshock Infinite vigor that lets you collect bullets into a big hovering mass. Of course, vigors like that tend to lead to scenes of carnage like this. A simple magnet on a stick might be a better idea.

The gag of early-access game Viscera Cleanup Detail is a good one — you’re a janitor mopping up after the rampage of a violent space marine — but as we recently witnessed with Goat Simulator, gags need an actual game to go along with the joke. Is there more to the VCD than just the clever setup? Could cleaning up a bloodbath be fun for more than a few minutes? Most importantly: why am I asking you? I’m the one who played it.

I knew there was blood and gore in Viscera Cleanup Detail, but walking into the game for the first time, it’s far worse than I ever imagined it would be. Limbs and torsos, blood and goop, and plenty of other bits of trash, scattered and smeared from one end of the map to the other. It’s like characters from Mortal Kombat and Manhunt fought to the death inside Hotline Miami. The levels are bigger than I expected, too. Nothing a space marine couldn’t rampage through in a minute or two, but for a lowly janitor, going inch-by-inch? It’s going to be an undertaking in both senses of the word.

Well, best get started then! I’m armed with a mop, and I find a dispenser that produces buckets of water which I can pick up and carry around. There’s also an incinerator to dispose of objects like bodies and trash, and I also find a laser cutter, probably discarded by the space marine who found something slightly deadlier to carry around with him. I can use it to melt down body parts into smaller chunks, which is handy — bulging body bags are tough to shove in the incinerator in one piece — but the cutter also has a habit of setting the entire room on fire, which means cleaning up soot in addition to all the blood and gore. I decide to drop the weapon and stick to the mop and bucket.

I start in the medical center, where there’s an elevated patient room containing a bed and some body parts. It’s not too messy and seems like a good place to begin. I dunk the mop in the bucket and start scrubbing. The blood is wiped up easily with a few jabs of the mop and soon I’ve got a clean spot on the floor. A few more swipes of the mop and… the blood starts to leak back out of it, erasing my clean spot with a fresh red smear.

It turns out a clean mop will only last a few swipes before it needs to be rinsed in the bucket. Knowing this, I rinse it regularly, but soon after I seem to once again be slathering the floor with fresh blood. It’s the bucket water this time, which grows progressively filthier as I work and needs to be replaced.

Also not helping things: dunking the mop in the bucket is done with the same violent motion you might use to plunge a bayonet into the chest of a Nazi soldier, meaning I tip the bucket over half the time, making even more of a mess. In fact, I knock a lot of things over. Body parts bounce on the floor, spreading blood as they tumble. Lanterns can break, setting fire to the area, leaving you with a huge sooty mess. And there’s some sort of beakers filled with green science-fluid that shatter when dropped and get smeared all over everything. The bed that was lightly spattered with blood earlier is now absolutely slathered in green glop. Sigh.

Not to mention, my own footprints — in blood, soot, and green goo — are tracking blood all over the spare few places that aren’t already splattered. I’ve barely started cleaning and I’ve somehow made things worse. What was a slightly messy area is now a complete disaster, and I’ve got more work to do than ever, meaning I try working faster, meaning I work sloppier, making the situation I’ve already made worse, worse. Exasperated, I load up some of the game’s other levels just to see if there’s something smaller, some more manageable starter level, where you just clean one small chamber someone had a nosebleed in. Nope, the maps are all big. Huge. Absolutely splatted with gore. One even makes you clean in zero gravity.

Okay, then. Fine. I return to the original map and get my game face on. I can do this, I decide. I’m going to do this. I just need to come up with a plan. It’s like that old question: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Start by cleaning one little thing, take your time, do a good job, and maybe it will make the entire task seem less insurmountable. I choose a small alcove of the incinerator room, and decide to focus on that, and only that.

And I do it. It takes a while, lots of trips with lots of buckets, but finally, my little alcove is spotless. It’s just one teeny tiny section of the facility that is otherwise caked in gore, but you know what? It feels outstanding. It’s clean. It’s so damn clean. I even place a little “wet floor” sign in the area. Of course, just doing that gives me another bloody footprint to clean up, but it’s worth it.

Riding my high, I work on the adjacent area. It’s harder. There are more body parts to collect, plus those damn shell casings, and it takes much, much longer than the alcove did. But now I’ve got another clean area adjoining the original alcove. The middle of the room is still covered in my bloody footprints, and there’s no point in cleaning around the incinerator since I’ll be constantly running to it, tracking in more mess, but again, I feel good to have actually done some proper cleaning! I feel refreshed and optimistic, and am actually starting to enjoy myself.

At this point, I’m mostly left with long corridors and expansive rooms, but I still want to tackle something small to keep my spirits up, to keep eating around the edges of this big bloody steak. I head back to the tiny raised medical room I started in and take another look at it. I notice there’s more junk in it than I thought: bottles, cups, limbs, intestines, boxes, medical equipment. A lot of clutter, and mopping amidst clutter knocks clutter into clutter and if any of the clutter is bloody, everything gets bloody. I’m not too keen on making dozens of trips to the incinerator on the other side of the map at the moment, so i just start dropping stuff off the side and into the larger chamber below. I’ll deal with it once this little room is clean.

And long, careful minutes later it’s spotless! It looks absolutely lovely! I even replaced the empty healthkit station so it’ll be ready for the next grizzled, grunting space marine who passes through. Proud, happy, I turn and take a look down, down into the main chamber I’ve been dropping stuff — body parts, crates, lanterns, science tubes, other trash — into. I stare at it a long time.

Hm. Okay. Hm. Hey. Okay. You know what? Fuck. This. I’ve just come up with a better idea of what to do with this mess. Consider it my resignation.

Todd Stashwick, actor and co-writer for Visceral Games' upcoming Star Wars title, has been removed from Naughty Dog's next Uncharted title, IGN reports.

Stashwick is known for his roles on TV shows such as The Riches and Justified. The actor, who was slated to play a villain in the game, told IGN that Naughty Dog "chose to recast my role." His voice work appeared in a teaser trailer for the title, currently expected for release on the PlayStation 4.

Recently, Stashwick signed on to work alongside former Naughty Dog creative director Amy Hennig for the Star Wars game. Hennig left Naughty Dog earlier this year, where she was working on the new Uncharted game.

Earlier today, Naughty Dog lead artist Nate Wells announced that he left the company in early April to join The Unfinished Swan developer Giant Sparrow. In addition to Hennig and Uncharted 4 game director Justin Richmond, Wells is the third high profile departure from the company in the past two months.