firehose

atlanticinfocus:

From In Turkey, Renewed Anti-Government Protests, one of 38 photos. A young woman, held after she was wounded during clashes between riot police and protestors after the funeral of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy who died from injuries suffered during last year’s anti-government protests in Istanbul on March 12, 2014. Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons at protestors in the capital Ankara, while in Istanbul, crowds shouting anti-government slogans lit a huge fire as they made their way to a cemetery for the burial of Elvan. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

wabrandsma writes with this story from NewScientist: "Google may be a master at data wrangling, but one of its products has been making bogus data-driven predictions. A study of Google's much-hyped flu tracker has consistently overestimated flu cases in the US for years. It's a failure that highlights the danger of relying on big data technologies. Evan Selinger, a technology ethicist at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, says Google Flu's failures hint at a larger problem with the algorithmic approach taken by technology companies to deliver services we all want to use. The problem is with the assumption that either the data that is gathered about us, or the algorithms used to process it, are neutral. Google Flu Trends has been discussed at slashdot before: When Google Got Flu Wrong."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America has an unemployment problem, but specifically, it has a long-term unemployment problem.

While the number of Americans unemployed for a few weeks or a few months has almost returned to pre-recession levels, the number out of work for six months or more remains abnormally high, as you can see in this Kevin Drum-inspired chart:

That makes news that US lawmakers have reached a $10 billion compromise to protect unemployment benefits—and pay them to retroactively to people who lost them in December—pretty striking.

In addition to the 1.3 million people who lost benefits in December, another 850,000 are scheduled to lose them by the end of March. That means over half of the 3.8 million long-term unemployed would end up without the $300 a week, on average, that they receive while hunting for new jobs. That inspired an ultimately futile effort to extend the benefits at the end of 2013, and a debate over what would happen when they were cut. Some economists argued that it would force the unemployed to accept low-paying jobs rather than holding out for other opportunities, but the broader fear is that they will stop looking for work instead—hurting their futures and economic growth.

We may not have a chance to test those hypotheses if this bill is passed. But despite bipartisan agreement in the Senate between majority Democrats and moderate Republicans, it’s not clear it will get past conservative Republicans who control the House of Representatives. The Senate agreement, however, ups the pressure to take action on a painfully human economic problem during an election year.

What's it worth, in the sensitive economies of closed-door legal deals, to make disturbing sexual allegations against one of your long-time employees go away? A cool $75,000, according to a tentative settlement the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners approved this morning.

If things go as expected, that's the amount the county will pay a woman who alleges a juvenile probation officer forcibly grabbed her vagina in the summer of 2012, and told her: "I can tell you're clenching your pussy for me."

The allegations, first reported by the Mercury, are ugly, and raise questions about probation officer Leslie Taylor's fitness to work with troubled youth. According to police documents, Taylor acknowledges being the subject of past harassment complaints. And he was suspended from his $64,289-a-year position from November 2012 to April 2013 because of the plaintiff's claims. (We're not naming the woman—who works for a youth services agency that contracts with the county—because she's the victim of an alleged sexual assault.)

According to the suit, Taylor had subjected the woman to harassment for months. He'd comment on her hair, the suit said, and say things like: "You remind me of my ex-wife" and "I could stare into your eyes forever."

It got to the point, the woman said, that she asked two colleagues to intercede on her behalf. They did, and the behavior allegedly subsided. So the plaintiff said she thought it was safe to accompany Taylor on a visit to a mutual client in July 2012. It was during that outing the alleged groping occurred.

The woman reported the incident to the Portland Police Bureau, but declined to participate in a "pretext call," in which she'd phone Taylor and elicit a confession. No charges were filed.

She filed suit in August, claiming Taylor had a history of sexual harassment, and that the county should have known he posed a threat. Her suit asked for $633,300 in damages.

The county's response was curious. On one hand, attorneys contended the interaction had never occurred. On the other, they said the woman wanted the touching to happen.

"Plaintiff consented to all of the touching at issue in Plaintiff's claims," the filing said.

Taylor, according to a police report, claimed the woman forced him to touch her.

"Taylor told me that (the plaintiff) then grabbed his hand and placed it on her leg saying, 'Don't you want to touch my leg?'" says the report, written by Portland Officer David Hughes. "Taylor said he quickly pulled his hand back away and asked (plaintiff) what she was doing... I told Taylor that (plaintiff) alleged that he ran his hand up her thigh and touched her vagina through her underwear. Taylor emphatically said he did not do that."

Reached on the phone in September, Taylor told the Mercury: "I don't want to get into it. It's frustrating, man. My family's been going through the wringer with this stuff."

Asked if his accuser was lying, Taylor declined comment.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

The Guardian

Senate Reaches Deal to Pay for Jobless Aid New York Times WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday reached an agreement to pay for the unemployment assistance program that expired in December, leaving millions of Americans who have been out of work for a half-year or longer without support from the federal ... Senators announce deal on jobless aidUSA TODAY Senators reach compromise on unemployment insuranceCBS News UPDATE 1-Deal reached in US Senate to renew jobless benefitsReuters Daily Beast -Businessweek -NBCNews.com all 100 news articles »

Existential Comics imagines what would probably happen if several of the greatest German thinkers sat down to a game of Monopoly…

"I remember playing with my Boba Fett action figure as a little kid, and my mom saying 'Boba Fett could be a woman, you can’t tell with the armor and the helmet.' This was in the mid- 90s, before the prequel films revealed Boba Fett to be some lame clone kid," says Tumblr user aJRAWINGS. "I still think of Boba Fett being female to this day, and I still think that’s cooler than the 'official' explanation." Ditto. (thanks, anon tipster!)

The Department of Health and Human Services released their long-awaited report clarifying that nearly every death is directly linked to our Heavenly Lord needing our deceased love ones up in Heaven.

“The Mother of All Airports” is a mini documentary about the history and future of Berlin Tempelhof Airport. The airport was once Cold War-era West Berlin’s busiest air hub, but its aging facilities and competition from newer airports led to its closure in 2008. Plans are now underway to redevelop the airport as a public open space. At present, the 900 acre site is open to the public as a park, while the airport’s 3 million square feet of interior space are available to rent. The documentary short is part of the PBS Digital Studios series “Unusual Spaces.”

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Between 100 and 200 video game consoles have existed over the last several decades, depending who you ask. Michael Thomasson, a noted collector of vintage games, has 108 different systems, and says his lot would be complete but for maybe a dozen more.

Detectives say the five are fraternity brothers from a Houston area college. They spent their time in the park eating Dippin Dots and taking selfies with the animals. There are no reports of any vandalism or theft, other than the Dippin Dots.

A South Korean pro esports player is in the hospital after accusing his former team manager of match fixing and then leaping from a 12-story building.

Hal Douglas, a voice-over artist who narrated thousands of movie trailers in a gravelly baritone heard by “audiences everywhere,” as he might have put it, “thrilled by images never before seen ... until now!,” died on Friday at his home in Lovettsville, Va. He was 89.

Radical life extension would give humans the power to create an artificial hell for criminals. Should we?

As they do every year, Deadspin submitted a FOIA request to the FCC for all viewer complaints about the Super Bowl. What would this year bring? Anti-Coke bigots? Richard Sherman haters? Nah. But some folks were really upset about the Red Hot Chili Peppers' nipples.

In a public post on Thursday to users of the social network, Mr. Zuckerberg said, "The U.S. government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst."

The Distraction Lab has created DiceForge, a new dice-rolling app that allows you to create custom dice on your phone. Source From the release: The Distraction Lab is proud to announce the release of DiceForge – a unique dice rolling app which allows players to create their own custom dice. With DiceForge, you can carry [...]

For fifteen years now I've watched as phone and cable duopolies lobby to pass draft legislation designed to keep broadband uncompetitive. Specifically, in more than a dozen states these protectionist measures either hinder or outright ban a town or city's ability to wire itself for broadband (either alone or with a private industry partner) -- even in cases where nobody else will. If the laws don't ban such efforts outright, they force anyone looking to build a broadband network to jump through layers upon layers of bureaucratic hoops, during which the regional duopolies with limitless budgets harass the efforts with lawsuits and negative publicity campaigns (I've seen ISPs hire push pollsters to tell locals that a government-built network would ban their religious programming).

The worst part of these bills is that at their base they're simply duopolists buying laws that keep towns and cities from making regional infrastructure decisions for themselves, whether that's building their own core fiber network or developing a public/private network build partnership. Carriers get to have their cake and eat it too; they're not going to build you better broadband networks, but they're not going to let anybody else do it, either. Some of these projects work, some don't (it depends on the specific business model), but if the country is actually serious about improving broadband competition, these miserable bills are the very first thing that needs a long, hard look.

For many years these bills were quickly passed without much debate, public scrutiny and absolutely no tech-press attention. All too often, when they were noticed, they were defended using traditional partisan tropes. Locals simply trying to get connected by any means necessary are usually vilified and portrayed as supporting "government meddling with industry." It's a shame, given that, like so many technical issues, there should be nothing partisan about protecting your local rights. Fortunately, with Google Fiber's entry into the market I've seen a renewed flurry of attention on these bills, in large part because several would have impacted Google Fiber's expansion, and Google Fiber, as I've noted, appears to have captured the imagination of the public.

In Kansas, for example, cable operators recently ran into a bit of a chainsaw when they attempted to ban towns and cities in the state from running their own fiber or working with partners like Google Fiber (operating in Kansas City). SB304 claimed to allow such efforts if they targeted unserved customers, but then sneakily defined unserved as someone unable to even get satellite or a cellular dial tone, ensuring that nobody would get that designation (a pretty common trick to make the bills seem more reasonable). In Utah, SB190, one such bill pushed in part by regional incumbent CenturyLink, also won't be surviving this year thanks in part to the new attention Google Fiber (who purchased a network in Provo) has brought to the issue.

A few years ago, these bills would have flown through state legislatures with nary a mention. Not only are new bills starting to fail more regularly under heightened public awareness, I'm starting to see -- for the first time in my many years covering the industry -- pushes to roll back some of these ridiculous protectionist measures. In Tennessee, for example, there's four different bills in process that would roll back such incumbent-friendly bills, and they're coming from both sides of the political aisle. Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica, who has been doing an absolutely fantastic job lately making these important issues interesting for readers, notes how local ISPs quickly complained about the sea change:

"We are particularly concerned about four bills that have been introduced this session," Tennessee Telecommunications Associations chief Levoy Knowles said in an announcement. The TTA claimed to be presenting "concerns of rural consumers" but are more worried about the potential of losing customers. "These bills would allow municipalities to expand beyond their current footprint and offer broadband in our service areas. If this were to happen, municipalities could cherry-pick our more populated areas, leaving the more remote, rural consumers to bear the high cost of delivering broadband to these less populated regions," Knowles said."

Yes, god forbid you'd have to face a new competitor and adjust your business model accordingly; you might even have to work with a local government to determine what works best in each region! Meanwhile, Google Fiber's recent announcement to help 34 cities in nine regional markets examine local fiber needs should bring greater attention to the issue. Google intentionally targeted regions like North and South Carolina, where regional incumbent Time Warner Cable passed protectionist bills a few years ago (on their fourth try). It only took fifteen years, but we're only just starting to see people realize that perhaps letting your regional duopolists write laws dictating what you can and can't do for your own community might not be the best idea.

Original Source

submitted by jsquared2kim [link] [132 comments]

submitted by scrodd
[link] [55 comments]

Men are spending more money on clothing than ever before.

RoboCop Versus The Terminator #1 to #4 by Frank Miller & Walt Simonson.

colsmi:

Alex Toth designs for the 1967 Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon show; The Skrulls & The Super-Skrull,  The Watcher, Doctor Doom, Diablo & The Red Ghost. (From 1996’s Alex Toth: By Design, by the artist & Darrell McNeil.)

Alex Toth!

A few years ago, reporter Sean Cole was working on a radio story and needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes.

Sean was living in Boston at the time, so he did a Google search for “Busta Rhymes” and “Boston” to see if Busta had any upcoming shows that Sean could stake out.

Google didn’t return any relevant tour dates. But it did give Sean a map, centering on a tiny speck of land in a neighboring suburb called Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.

The tiny speck of land was labeled Busta Rhymes Island.

 

The Boston Globe confirmed that, yes, Busta Rhymes Island Is For Real.

The Google Maps listing gives a phone number to call the island. So Sean called. A guy named Kevin O’Brien answered. Kevin is a guy in his early 30s who works in tech support and DJ’s weddings on weekends.

Kevin started canoeing out to the island when he and his wife moved to Shrewsbury about ten years ago . The island, a forty-by-forty speck of land,  is practically in their front yard. Kevin planted blueberry bushes on the island, and there’s a rope swing hanging from one of the trees. He doesn’t just visit the island a bunch, he takes care of the island– he cleans up after the teenagers who leave beer cans lying around. He drinks beer himself on the island, with his wife and their friends.

And when you love a place the way Kevin loves this place, you don’t want to refer to it generically. You want to give it a a name.

Kevin and a friend decided on Busta Rhymes Island.

(Credit: TopStreetwear)

All Kevin had to do was go on Google Maps and apply a geotag to it. But Kevin wanted the name to stick, so he didn’t stop there.  He wanted Busta Rhymes Island to become the island’s official name.

Kevin submitted a formal proposal to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which decides what the federal government is going to call a piece of land. The Board turned Kevin down– but not for the reasons you might think. 

For any body of land to be named after a celebrity in a commemorative fashion, that person has to have been deceased for  five years. The thinking is that, when someone passes away–especially someone high-profile– it’s an emotional time. Close relatives, friends, and fans want to honor the person. And so the U.S. Board on Geographic Names instituted a five year cooling-off period, figuring that if someone is still beloved five years after his or her death to the extent that people still want a place named for him or her then, then and only then, should naming be considered.

Also, a living celebrity can do something heinous. Like that time Busta Rhymes allegedly used a gay slur in a Miami cheeseburger restaurant.

 Then how do you explain Mark Sandman Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Mark Sandman was the lead singer of the Boston-based band Morphine. He died in 1999 after  collapsing on stage during a concert in Italy. And then just a year later, a sign honoring him went up on the corner of Brookline Street and Massachusetts Avenue.

(Credit: lizstless)

It turns out that the five-year rule applies only to geographic features. Public spaces in cities are a different matter entirely. Those are decided by local municipalities, not the Board on Geographic Names.

It turns out that Cambridge loves naming places after people. There’s a John T. “Johnny” Collins Square and a Commander Francis X. “Buddy” Foster Square. Robert E. Goodman Road.

In fact, some intersections in Cambridge have a different commemorativeblack sign  on each corner.

(Morphine live at The Middle East bar in Cambridge, MA.)

As for Busta Rhymes island, it might be a while before it can be officially recognized. But you can help. If you find yourself in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and you ask for directions to Busta Rhymes Island, that counts as “local usage”– one factor that the U.S. Board of Geographic Names looks for when considering a naming proposal.

Producer Sean Cole visited Busta Rhymes Island, where he spoke with namer Kevin O’Brien. Sean also talked with Lou Yost from the U.S. Board of Geographic Names; Joseph Sater, co-owner of the MIddle East nightclub; and Charlie Sullivan, with the Cambridge Historical Commission.

Unfortunately, Sean was not able to speak with Busta.

Squarespace site of the week: Cartozia Tales

Tiny Letter of the week: 5 Intriguing Things by Alexis Madrigal

Music: “Life Is Good 90′s (Instrumental)” – Busta Rhymes;  “Gimme Some More”- Busta Rhymes; “I Know You Pt. 1″ – Morphine; “Dawna” – Morphine; “Here and Now” – RJD2

 

 

Nick Offerman’s Rules for Being a Man [video/via]

houghtonlib:

Gobin, Robert. Les loups rauissans, ca. 1505.

Typ 515.05.431

Houghton Library, Harvard University

This year, the sakura cherry blossoms are scheduled to start appearing in Japan as early as March 20 and will slowly move their way north as the country begins to thaw after a particularly snowy winter. Just one day after the appearance of the actual blossoms, McDonald’s will release a spring-inspired burger that takes a cue from the very sakura that Japan is so famous for. But with a pink-colored bun and sakura mayonnaise sauce, it’s unclear if the odd combination will be as well received as cherry blossoms and beer.

Officially called “Sakura Teritama,” the burger is filled with a fried egg, ginger teriyaki pork patty, lettuce and sakura daikon radish mayonnaise sauce. Oh, and don’t forget the pink bun!

McDonald’s Japan will also be selling a Sakura Cherry soda or float and will decorate each store with cherry blossom decorations.

So if winter in Japan has got you down, turn to your local McDonald’s for a bit of a spring pick-me-up!

Source: NariNari
Images: McDonald’s Japan (1, 2)

Related Stories

• Teriyaki Egg Burger Set to Make a Comeback at McDonald’s Japan
• Cherry Blossom + a Sprinkling of Snow = Incredible Beauty 【Photos】
• Volkswagen celebrates Girls’ Day with Beetle sushi
• We combine McDonald’s and MOS Burger for forbidden deliciousness
• Starbucks Japan SAKURA 2012 Collection in Full Bloom, Koreans Crazy for Color-Changing Tumbler

Origin: Celebrate spring with pink buns at McDonald’s Japan
Copyright© RocketNews24 / SOCIO CORPORATION. All rights reserved.

An Oklahoma City Fox station ran a teaser for its nightly newscast during the premiere of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's reboot of Cosmos. No big deal, except that it interrupted Tyson's only mention of evolution in the entire episode.

Read more...

policymic:

7 ways our parents can be total hypocrites when it comes to politics

Baby Boomers entered the workforce during one of the greatest economic miracles in modern history: U.S. real GDP per capita decreased only two years between 1950 and 1970, and the resulting bounty was distributed rather equitably. We, meanwhile, have borne the brunt of the largest economic disaster since the Great Depression and watched middle-class real wages stagnate throughout our lives.

These class differences have predictably resulted in conflict. The older set has taken to newspapers, radio and print books to denounce their underemployed descendants as narcissistic, lazy and clueless: a “Generation Me” uninterested in hard work. We have responded from our own turf, in our own language, with a new Internet meme. Here are seven popular examples of the striking ways that our parents, or grandparents for some, just don’t get what we go through.

Read more | Follow policymic