China’s millions of only children—known as “little emperors” for how they are doted upon by parents and grandparents—may turn out to be terrible soldiers. As much as 70% of the Chinese military (paywall) is made up of men and women who are the only children in their family, according to a professor at the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University—a figure that gives some military policymakers reason to worry.
“Soldiers from the one-child generations are wimps who have absolutely no fighting spirit,” warned the Study Times, an ideology-focused government publication.
Defense experts have been debating whether China’s expanding military is much weaker than it looks. For instance, Chinese troops haven’t been in combat since 1979 and officers spend almost 40% of their time in “political training.”
China’s only children generation, born after 1979 when the country’s “one child” policy went into effect, was once viewed as a boon to the People’s Liberation Army. Higher levels of education and ease with technology were supposed to make them “quick to understand modern warfare in a high-tech era.” In general, China’s recently relaxed population control policy was to create a generation of high-quality children with more resources at their disposal. But studies and anecdotes about the detrimental effects of raising Chinese children without siblings have led many to worry that they are too pampered, pessimistic, and risk-adverse to handle careers as entrepreneurs, cooperative coworkers, and especially soldiers.
Quartz has previously pointed out some of the holes in this argument. Other studies have shown that only Chinese children showed no personality differences from their peers with siblings and that many use classmates or other family members as surrogate siblings and playmates.
But whether or not there are meaningful differences between the fighting spirit of only children and those with siblings, Chinese military leaders seem to believe so. The PLA reportedly runs special training to toughen up ”spoiled” soldiers. Dean Cheng, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, attributed China’s focus on psychological warfare to the fact that many of its soldiers are only children. “He wrote in July, “because of the one-child policy, young people are pampered and may therefore be more psychologically brittle and less capable of handling stress. Defensive psychological measures are therefore seen as an essential means of limiting the impact of wartime pressures on them.”
Still, as US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “you go to war with the army you have,” and China has big military ambitions. Last year, it spent $131.7 billion (pdf) on its defense forces, almost 40% of total spending in the Asia Pacific region, according to estimates released by IHS Jane’s annual defense review this week. At least for the time being, as China continues expanding its military, it has little choice but to fill its military ranks with more little emperors.
I have some questions about this big-ass snowboarder-themed nesting doll on the Sochi slopestyle run:
1. Why?
2. Are snowboarders allowed to incorporate into tricks? Can you stall on it or grind over its head?
3. Does it, in fact, contain other, smaller dolls?
4. Will there be a nesting doll in the middle of every Olympic event? Will there be a huge doll just chilling at center ice during the hockey games? Will bobsledders have to navigate around one?
5. It's kinda attractive? Sochi's messing with my head.
“Victorian Blood Book; “To Amy Lester Garland–A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father”
“Garland, John Bingley; Waugh, Evelyn, 1903-1966, former owner.’
“Evelyn Waugh was a collector of things Victorian. The “Victorian Blood Book” is a book of decoupage assembled from engravings, many taken from books of etchings by William Blake, as well as other illustrations from early nineteenth-century books. Drops of red india ink and extensive religious commentary have been added to many of the images. The book bears an inscription by one John Bingley Garland to his daughter Amy and dated September 1, 1854: “A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father.” Shortly afterwards, she married the Reverend Richard Pyper, so the album was probably an early wedding present.”
When Jabba the Hutt wanted revenge on notorious smuggler Han Solo, he dispatched an entire team of bounty hunters to track him down. But if you'd rather have President Obama encased in a block of carbonite, you have a much simpler option: buying this full-sized carbonite block containing Obama.
Aston Martin is recalling 17,590 cars after discovering that they contain counterfeit parts. The recall affects around 75 percent of the cars produced by Aston Martin since November 2007, and stems from the discovery that a Chinese supplier allegedly used a counterfeit plastic to produce part of the cars' gas pedal.
It's feared that the counterfeit material may cause the pedal arm to break, although Aston Martin stresses that there have been no reports of accidents related to the fault. Should the pedal break, it's likely the engine would return to idle and the car would slow to a stop — a danger especially if driving on a highway. Only the new Vanquish coupe and Volante are entirely exempt from the recall. Replacing the faulty part will take less than an hour, and Aston Martin is urging owners to take their cars in for the necessary service as soon as possible.
Well, it’s not a “redraw” per se, but more a “how I’d draw this”. I know almost nothing about ancient egyptians’ clothes, but I googled it :I I hope it looks fine.
You know what I disliked so much about the original picture? I disliked how they slapped a sexy babe on the top of the background and fucked up a great opportunity to make a great and beautiful character with a great and beautiful story (and by “make” I mean “make in this cover” I haven’t read the comics so I dunno about her character, maybe it’s really good but I doubt it). I don’t mind sexy babes, sexy babes are great. But at least they could put her into a storytelling environment, not a boob and butt pose.
So, I wanted to draw Isis at that moment when she was teleported into modern world: “What the?-” kind of face, a little bit twisted body like something is pulling her, and sparkles! sparkles everywhere! Also I gave her wings. Because WINGS! And the sun disc.
I hope you like it.
This is a really nice redraw. I like what you did with it, and how you re-interpreted her (and you gave her dark skin!). :) Also, the idea that she’s in a state of transition matches up well with the two different backgrounds that indicate ancient Egypt and modern day America, and makes the cover look much more dynamic.
(Est. 1996) "The San Jose Earthquakes are an American professional soccer team based in San Jose, California, that participate in Major League Soccer (MLS). The team is one of the ten charter members of MLS which competed in the league's first season in 1996 (originally as the San Jose Clash) and took part in the first game in MLS history, defeating D.C. United 1-0. Following the conclusion of the 2005 MLS season, the franchise was officially put on hiatus and the players, head coach Dominic Kinnear and some of his coaching staff were moved to Houston, Texas, where they became the Houston Dynamo. After a two-year absence, the Earthquakes resumed play for the 2008 season. The Earthquakes have won two MLS Cup titles, in 2001 and 2003, and two MLS Supporters' Shields, in 2005 and 2012. The team currently plays home games at Buck Shaw Stadium on the Santa Clara University campus in Santa Clara, California, and is coached by former Canadian international player Mark Watson." (Source: Wikipedia)
Opinion/Notes: The overall typography is a little wonky — a cut here! A cut there! Tight tracking! — and the crest stuffers from too-much-itis but the identity has a good, overall energetic vibe.
Select Quote: One of the earliest challenges was how to visually communicate the idea of an earthquake. Unlike other team mascots that tend to be animals or even simple nouns like objects or forces of nature, an earthquake is the moving of tectonic plates against one another beneath the earth's surface. We took that abstract idea and created a pattern, which we call the "impact pattern", to visually encapsulate the idea of energy and movement, which became incorporated into the final logo as part of the field in which the ball rests.
Logo detail.Logo explanation.Principal unit of the "Impact Pattern".New jerseys.A poster wall.New logo introduction. Relevant stuff begins at the 3:00 mark.
First of all: Yes, there's an amazing hat. It's glorious.
The tale of this photo is the women -- hat dude is just running interference. It's blatantly obvious that the two women on the left are whispering between their teeth while their handler (over Lauer's right shoulder) wants in on the fun.
Obviously it's hard to tell what they're saying, but we have a few ideas:
Google is rolling out a new feature that pushes YouTube videos to the top of search results. Search for a song and you'll now see a Google Now-like card appear at the top of your results, containing a link to the video for the song as well as information on the artist, album, and release date. As Search Engine Watch reports, the cards look a lot like a playable videos, but they're actually just images that redirect to YouTube.
An example of Google's new search result style.
For the vast majority of searches, the tracks featured in the new card interface are official videos from artist pages or publishers' accounts, but there are occasions where an unlicensed video is linked to. 100 percent of the time, however the link points to a YouTube channel, which Google is no doubt hoping will drive even more people to its popular video site.
The Apple co-founder gave a wide-ranging interview, touching on everything from his preferred iPhone 5s color to the fictional operating system in the movie "Her." But his most interesting comment by far was a heretical recommendation for his former company.
Four women said publicly, in major media outlets, that Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them. This coverage was more recent and possibly more prominent that the coverage of the abuse allegations against Woody Allen.
And? Basically nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle. The original Philadelphia Magazine story set off his accusers' testimony in italicized interludes, between long sections about the more digestible controversies around Cosby's lecture tour denouncing black cultural pathology. The usually unflinching Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an otherwise comprehensive 2008 Atlantic essay on the context and politics of Cosby's performance as a public moral scold, dropped a sentence about the lawsuit settlement and its accompanying accusations into parentheses near the end.
Conceptually, it was the sensible way to deal with it. No one was talking about it anymore. The whole thing had been, and it remained, something walled off from our collective understanding of Bill Cosby.
With shocking speed, it was effectively forgotten. When the subject came up today, more than half the Gawker staff had no memory of any sexual allegations against Bill Cosby. In 2009, Cosby was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for his distinguished achievements in humor. In 2010, he was honored with the Marian Anderson Award, for "critically acclaimed artists who have impacted society in a positive way, either through their work or their support for an important cause." In 2011, the Marian Anderson Award went to Mia Farrow.
'I'm stunned that anyone familiar with HTML would consider jQuery a hack.'
motherfucker that is all jQuery IS
An anonymous reader writes "I have been working on an HTML5 app for Panasonic VIERA TVs, specifically a client for the Plex Media Server. After paying $129 for the developer program, version 1.0 was submitted for inclusion in their VIERA Connect marketplace several weeks ago. After a few requested tweaks, they inquired about how the client communicated with the Plex Server. As many/most web developers do, I used jQuery and its $.ajax call (which is just a wrapper for XMLHttpRequest()). They insisted this was not standard Javascript, and after several communications with them, they replied back with "A workaround like this is considered a hack.". I'm stunned that anyone familiar with HTML would consider jQuery a hack. I've been patient in attempting to explain how jQuery works, but I am getting nowhere. Any thoughts on how I can better explain jQuery to an app reviewer? Yes, I know I can write my app without any Javascript library, but I am really hoping avoid that."
“You always have to question when a director says, ‘Let’s go handheld.’” At Poland’s Camerimage International Film Festival a few weeks back, d.p. Sean Bobbitt gave an ARRI workshop keynote on the role of handheld cinematography in filmmaking. Far too often, directors, according to Bobbitt, resort to the use of handheld simply because they have no other ideas: “If we do handheld, it will feel kinetic!” and the like. But a knee-jerk instinct is not good enough — Bobbitt believes you should be able to justify every technical decision in the script: “The first and most important consideration is, does it help tell the story?”
Bobbitt notes that the rise of DIY filmmaking has played a role in the proliferation of unnecessary handheld shots, as there are “younger directors coming up who haven’t had the experience of working with a dolly…and are worried they aren’t going to have enough time.” News flash: there’s never enough time, no matter if you’re working with a $250 million budget or less than $1 million. Still, Bobbitt acknowledges the benefits of handheld, when it’s applied correctly, pointing to the “freedom that [it] gives the actors to move around…It can be incredibly creative.” With respect to the audience, it can be all the more immersive: “Because it’s one shot and because there’s no edit, at no point are you subconsciously reminded that you’re watching a film…[It] can actually magnify the emotional content of the scene.” In the highly informative video, Bobbitt also covers collaborating with camera operators, different rigs and techniques and exercises to assuage the physical duress of handheld camera work.
With last month's court decision to kill net neutrality, Internet users are on the lookout for signs of preferential handling of network traffic. Doing the rounds today is a blog post by David Raphael.
Raphael's boss had noticed slow Internet performance at work. Raphael had noticed the same thing at home, and both he and his office were using Verizon's FiOS service. So he performed some testing. His work used Amazon's AWS for hosting, so he used AWS for his testing. He put a file on the S3 storage service and downloaded it at home. The transfer rate was a positively feeble 40 kilobytes per second.
He then connected to his office and downloaded the same file again. This time? 5,000 kilobytes per second.
Transform ordinary spirits into your favorite flavored liquors - free of unwanted dyes, chemicals or unnecessary amounts of sugar.
Do you fancy yourself a mixology aficionado?
Have you ever wanted to create your own flavored liquor legally at home?
We have just the thing for you!
When you make up your own rules, you can always win the game—and no one is better at making up rules than Ken Ham. In the course of constructing his now-crumbling creationist empire, Ham has created an alternate reality in which humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction a few thousand years ago after peacefully using them for transport and companionship. Anyone who says otherwise—that is, anyone who accepts basic science—is just spreading the devil’s lies.
enjoying this trend of just escalating flops into utter whimsy
OH NO WHAT HAPPENED TO RAJON RONDO?
Rajon Rondo fell down. There was little hope. Nobody knew if he'd ever stand up again. Fortunately, his teammates were there to bring him back to life. They revived him and he's fine. Phew.
July 31, 1922. Laurel, Maryland. "Two B&O freights wrecked in head-on crash at Laurel switch." Details here. National Photo glass negative. View full size.
Comcast customer Ronaldo Boschulte didn't know exactly what he was getting when the company swapped his malfunctioning modem for a new one. The cable modem doubles as a Wi-Fi router—that much he was expecting. But he didn't realize the router would, by default, broadcast a public Wi-Fi network that anyone with a Comcast account could connect to.
“I didn't know it had a hotspot," Boschulte told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota.
Comcast started adding the public hotspot to its modems by default in mid-2013, as we reported at the time. Customers can turn the second signal off if they choose, but it's definitely an opt-out program rather than opt-in.In an FAQ, Comcast doesn't provide instructions for turning it off manually. You have to call Comcast for that. "You will always have the ability to disable the XFINITY Wi-Fi feature on your Wireless Gateway by calling 1-800-XFINITY," the company says. Presumably, a customer service representative will try to talk you out of disabling it.
Reggie Watts is a star in so many fields — comedy, music, funny voices — but who knew teaching science to high school students (in the '70s, apparently?) would be one of them? So take a few to minutes learn with these kids about the wonders of single-celled organisms, protons, dimensional space, and day drinking.
An example of Google's new search result style.
