The Rachel Dolezal fraud has led to mainstream scrutinizing about Andrea Smith, an icon of Native American feminism long accused of being a white woman passing as Cherokee. A look at the not-new, not-easy issues right beneath the surface.
Alison Bechdel's acclaimed 2006 graphic memoir grabbed the No. 2 spot on BookScan's list of graphic novels sold in bookstores in June. Are we witnessing a "Broadway bump"?
The National Low Income Housing Coalition released its annual housing report “Out of Reach” earlier this month. The organization calculated the hourly wage a resident would need to earn to afford a moderate, two-bedroom apartment – and the outlook is grim. The report found that a person earning minimum wage in each state cannot afford to spend only 30 percent of income on such an apartment in the U.S.
Darby joins Joel McHale as a supporting cast member in the revival, which started shooting earlier this summer in Vancouver. While McHale’s character has been described as a conservative news anchor who becomes an unlikely ally to Fox Mulder, details about Darby’s role remain unknown. But he did note that he’s “over the moon” about the news. Could that be a hint? Is the truth out there...on the moon?!
In 2009, the Heene family attracted national attention when their 9-year-old son was believed to be trapped aboard a helium balloon. After finding little Falcon Heene had simply fallen asleep in the attic, relief gave way to disgust when it was apparent that a hoax had been perpetrated by the family, which had already appeared on Wife Swap twice. Richard Heene was eventually sentenced to 90 days in jail for the stunt, which managed to temporarily shut down Denver International Airport.
Following the embarrassing event (and jail time), the Heenes moved to Florida, where Richard began marketing a number of strange and overpriced inventions. Meanwhile Falcon and his two brothers formed a metal band known as the Heene Boyz. In a CNN piece catching up on the family, the Heene Boyz talk about their their passion project, American Chilly, a “Rockestra” that tells the classic tale of a gas station ...
As any of our readers who fly frequently will know, the hub-and-spoke model of air transport can be a real pain. For one thing, you often end up traveling hundreds of miles further than necessary (Seattle to DC via Dallas, anyone?), merrily polluting the skies with carbon emissions as you go. And equipment trouble or bad weather can cause cascading delays, adding to passengers' stress. Could in-flight refueling be our salvation? Apparently it's a feasible alternative, according to a European research project highlighted in Aviation Week.
The RECREATE study—REsearch on a CRuiser Enabled Air Transport Environment—was funded by the European Union and conducted by researchers spread across Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, and Switzerland. It was meant to come up with novel ideas for air transport that would reduce the amount of fuel and CO2 that currently result from long-distance air travel.
According to the study, using shorter-range (2,500-3,000 mile (4000-4800km)) 250-passenger jets, a single in-flight refueling during a 6,000 mile (9,650km) long-haul journey could reduce the weight of fuel by 20 percent (versus a two-flight journey over the same distance). That's because a plane flying a longer distance in a single leg has to carry more fuel as a percentage of its overall weight. What's more, this calculation takes into account the fuel needed by the tanker.
Cam Newton is in Australia as part of a trip for Gatorade and he spent the day with the Richmond Tigers during training. After tossing around the ball for a little while they asked the Panthers quarterback to "throw a hard one," and they had NO clue just how hard that would be.
The AFL players are used to leaping into the air to catch soaring punts, but nothing could prepare them for an NFL fastball. Newton's throwing was a lot better than his kicking.
There are few things more frustrating for fans than knowing something excellent exists but having no way to (legally) see it. At least in the case of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Sentai Filmworks has good news.
'I always read these NSA documents with an assumption that other countries are doing the same thing. The NSA is not made of magic, and XKEYSCORE is not some super-advanced NSA-only technology. It is the same sort of thing that every other country would use with its surveillance data. For example, Russia explicitly requires ISPs to install similar monitors as part of its SORM Internet surveillance system. As a home user, you can build your own XKEYSCORE using the public-domain Bro Security Monitor and the related Network Time Machine attached to a back-end data-storage system. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory uses this system to store three months' worth of Internet traffic for retrospective surveillance -- it used the data to study Heartbleed.) The primary advantage the NSA has is that it sees more of the Internet than anyone else, and spends more money to store the data it intercepts for longer than anyone else. And if these documents explain XKEYSCORE in 2009 and 2010, expect that it's much more powerful now.'
I've been reading through the 48 classifieddocuments about the NSA's XKEYSCORE system released by the Intercept last week. From the article:
The NSA's XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people's Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world's communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.
These servers store "full-take data" at the collection sites -- meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected -- and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. "It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world," an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. "At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage."
There seems to be no access controls at all restricting how analysts can use XKEYSCORE. Standing queries -- called "workflows" -- and new fingerprints have an approval process, presumably for load issues, but individual queries are not approved beforehand but may be audited after the fact. These are things which are supposed to be low latency, and you can't have an approval process for low latency analyst queries. Since a query can get at the recorded raw data, a single query is effectively a retrospective wiretap.
All this means that the Intercept is correct when it writes:
These facts bolster one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by The Guardian on June 9, 2013. "I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge to even the president, if I had a personal email."
You'll only get the data if it's in the NSA's databases, but if it is there you'll get it.
Honestly, there's not much in these documents that's a surprise to anyone who studied the 2013 XKEYSCORE leaks and knows what can be done with a highly customizable Intrusion Detection System. But it's always interesting to read the details.
Mujahedeen Secrets is an encryption program written by al Qaeda supporters. It has been around since 2007. Last year, Stuart Baker cited its increased use as evidence that Snowden harmed America. I thought the opposite, that the NSA benefits from al Qaeda using this program. I wrote: "There's nothing that screams 'hack me' more than using specially designed al Qaeda encryption software."
And now we see how it's done. In the document, we read about the specific XKEYSCORE queries an analyst can use to search for traffic encrypted by Mujahedeen Secrets. Here are some of the program's fingerprints (page 10):
So if you want to search for all iPhone users of Mujahedeen Secrets (page 33):
fingerprint('demo/scenario4')=
fingerprint('encryption/mojahdeen2' and fingerprint('browser/cellphone/iphone')
Or you can search for the program's use in the encrypted text, because (page 37): "...many of the CT Targets are now smart enough not to leave the Mojahedeen Secrets header in the E-mails they send. How can we detect that the E-mail (which looks like junk) is in fact Mojahedeen Secrets encrypted text." Summary of the answer: there are lots of ways to detect the use of this program that users can't detect. And you can combine the use of Mujahedeen Secrets with other identifiers to find targets. For example, you can specifically search for the program's use in extremist forums (page 9). (Note that the NSA wrote that comment about Mujahedeen Secrets users increasing their opsec in 2010, two years before Snowden supposedly told them that the NSA was listening on their communications. Honestly, I would not be surprised if the program turned out to have been a US operation to get Islamic radicals to make their traffic stand out more easily.)
It's not just Mujahedeen Secrets. Nicholas Weaver explains how you can use XKEYSCORE to identify co-conspirators who are all using PGP.
And these searches are just one example. Other examples from the documents include:
"Targets using mail.ru from a behind a large Iranian proxy" (here, page 7).
People in Pakistan visiting certain German-language message boards (here, page 1).
HTTP POST traffic from Russia in the middle of the night -- useful for finding people trying to steal our data (here, page 16).
People doing web searches on jihadist topics from Kabul (here).
E-mails, chats, web-browsing traffic, pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more: if you can figure out how to form the query, you can ask XKEYSCORE for it. For an example of how complex the searches can be, look at this XKEYSCORE query publishedin March, showing how New Zealand used the system to spy on the World Trade Organization: automatically track any email body with any particular WTO-related content for the upcoming election. (Good new documents to read include this, this, and this.)
I always read these NSA documents with an assumption that other countries are doing the same thing. The NSA is not made of magic, and XKEYSCORE is not some super-advanced NSA-only technology. It is the same sort of thing that every other country would use with its surveillance data. For example, Russia explicitly requires ISPs to install similar monitors as part of its SORM Internet surveillance system. As a home user, you can build your own XKEYSCORE using the public-domain Bro Security Monitor and the related Network Time Machine attached to a back-end data-storage system. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory uses this system to store three months' worth of Internet traffic for retrospective surveillance -- it used the data to study Heartbleed.) The primary advantage the NSA has is that it sees more of the Internet than anyone else, and spends more money to store the data it intercepts for longer than anyone else. And if these documents explain XKEYSCORE in 2009 and 2010, expect that it's much more powerful now.
Back to encryption and Mujahedeen Secrets. If you want to stay secure, whether you're trying to evade surveillance by Russia, China, the NSA, criminals intercepting large amounts of traffic, or anyone else, try not to stand out. Don't use some homemade specialized cryptography that can be easily identified by a system like this. Use reasonably strong encryption software on a reasonably secure device. If you trust Apple's claims (pages 35-6), use iMessage and FaceTime on your iPhone. I really like Moxie Marlinspike'sSignal for both text and voice, but worry that it's too obvious because it's still rare. Ubiquitous encryption is the bane of listeners worldwide, and it's the best thing we can deploy to make the world safer.
by Chris Mills on Gizmodo, shared by Katharine Trendacosta to io9
Every summer, the population of algae in the North Atlantic reaches a peak, with the blue-green color of the phytoplankton causing the ocean to visibly change, even from space.
by Chris Mills on Gizmodo, shared by Katharine Trendacosta to io9
Over the course of last winter, Boston’s snowplows moved thousands of tons of snow (and trash) into ‘snow farms’ around the city, where it sat waiting to melt in warmer weather. Well, the warmer weather’s still here, and so is the snow.
Ignoring history and legacy is a bad way to select an All-Star Game tradition that's built on history and legacy.
I had longstanding plans for my reaction to the announcement of All-Star reserves. It was supposed to be a simple reminder that your favorite snub was probably going to make it. There are always injuries, always pitchers who pitch the weekend before the game. Last year, 42 players made the National League All-Star team and 38 made the AL team. If you limit the pool to hitters with 300 plate appearances or more and pitchers with 40 innings pitched or more, about one out of every four players made the team last year.
No one cares about your snub. He will either make the team, or he probably isn't in that top 25 percent of regulars. There's your fiery All-Star opinion. Now if you'll excuse me, I was informed that a baseball player fell down while running, so I have to ...
And then the most obvious, hilarious snub comes through, and it happens. I care. It's a dumb snub, one of the dumbest. It celebrates an alternate history, unless it celebrates absolutely nothing to do with history. It ignores the 2015 season just as niftily as it ignores the decades before it.
Alex Rodriguez wasn't named to the All-Star team. Alex Rodriguez wasn't even one of the five candidates for the Final Vote. Suddenly, that theory up there is shot. When an outfielder goes down, an outfielder will take his place. When a third baseman gets hurt, a third baseman will take his place. The only chance that Rodriguez has is if a DH gets hurt or withdraws, and Ned Yost forgets that Kendrys Morales exists. Rodriguez has a higher OPS and adjusted OPS than he did the last two times he made the All-Star team, but he has virtually no chance now.
Let's try to make a rational case for keeping him off and a rational case for including him. All-caps accusations of cheating are always recommended in the comments -- so we can keep a better eye on the weirdos writing them -- but they shan't have a seat at this table.
The rational case for leaving A-Rod off
He's a designated hitter. By most metrics, it's a toss-up between him and Prince Fielder, except the latter is leading the AL in hits. Nelson Cruz was already voted in, and a fifth of the world's DHs don't need to make the All-Star team.
...
OK, that's at least rational.
That makes a lot of sense, actually.
I believe the positional rationale, too. Ned Yost's Rodriguez-free roster isn't some conspiracy, an edict from the new commissioner and the lurking shadow people. Yost said he was putting a premium on versatility with the roster, and he proved he was serious about it by taking Brock Holt over Dustin Pedroia, Xander Bogaerts and Mookie Betts. All of those last three have good cases -- at the very least, in an every-team-gets-a-rep kind of way -- and Pedroia is about a good season or two away from being a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Yost took Holt because he wanted versatility in a game that'll be filled with dozens of substitutions. Or he took Holt because he wanted to make Arrested Development references in the dugout all game. Either explanation is valid.
There are 36 hitters in the American League this season with two wins above replacement or more. Rodriguez is one of them, and he just squeaks in. He's a DH, and there have been two comparable, if not better, players at the same position in the league. They're already on the team. It's possible to make a very good case that Rodriguez doesn't belong.
If you ignore who he is, what he's done and what he represents, it's easy.
The emotional case for putting A-Rod on
I think we, as a nation, need to get together and remember just how good Rodriguez has been for his career. You too, Canada: Get over here, and let's huddle. Alex Rodriguez has played 2,645 games in his 21-year career. He's hit 670 homers. He's driven in more than 2,000 runs, and he'll probably have scored 2,000 runs by the end of this season. He's over 3,000 hits now. There are inner-circle Hall of Famers, and then there are secret passageways within the inner circle that lead you to the pie room. Rodriguez is in the pie room of the inner circle.
That should absolutely matter when it comes to selecting All-Star rosters, especially when a player like that is having a great season in his twilight years. An All-Star selection for an all-time great having a season like A-Rod's is automatic. When Willie Mays made the 1972 All-Star team, he was hitting like a blurred copy of what he was in his prime. Hank Aaron was hitting .230 with limited power when he made his final All-Star Game. They got Gold Club Lifetime Membership passes, and they should have. They were Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.
That's when they're struggling, mind you. When a player like A-Rod is having a huge year, he makes the All-Star Game automatically. It's not even a question. Albert Pujols this year is a fine example. If the legend doesn't complement the roster like a multi-position guy might, and the manager leaves him off because he's worried about the this-time-it-counts tomfoolery, that's an indictment of the system. In the past, managers weren't worried about leaving Mays or Aaron off because the game was a must-win, and that's how it should be.
And, again, we're talking about someone who has been murdering baseballs all season. He wouldn't be a liability as a pinch hitter.
The arguments against Rodriguez can't stand up to the established precedent for legends having a great season. The Biogenesis scandal? Come on, there were two prominent players from Biogenesis voted into the starting lineup. If everyone cared about steroids so much, Jhonny Peralta and Nelson Cruz would have received 1,000,000 combined votes, possibly from very clicky relatives. Instead, the calculus was simple: "Say, they're having a good year! click." No one cares about steroids after, like, a week.
Except when it comes to Rodriguez, apparently. The fans had a chance to vote him in, and they didn't, partly because Cruz was having such a great year, partly because they just don't like him. The players had a chance to vote A-Rod in, and they didn't, partly because Prince Fielder is having a great year, partly because they just don't like him. Every time Rodriguez scored a run, drove in a run, got a hit and walloped a dinger, he enabled the sweet, sweet chemicals that keep people coming back for baseball, but people just don't like him.
The established precedent is there, though. All-time greats get into the All-Star Game when they're having outstanding seasons. It's almost a physical law, and that shouldn't be trumped because the player in question is kind of a dullard. And weird. Don't forget weird.
The conspiracy comes into the picture not with Yost, who was looking for versatility, and not the fans and players, who just sorta don't like the guy, but with the Final Vote process. How did baseball not put A-Rod in the Final Vote? Sure, Xander Bogaerts,Yoenis Cespedes, Brian Dozier, Brett Gardner and Mike Moustakas are all having more valuable seasons than Rodriguez, technically -- well OK, that doesn't help, but the precedent, man. The precedent. Also, I wanted to have a chance to join some sort of semi-ironic, middle-fingery ballot-stuffing movement to get Rodriguez in. That was stripped from all of us.
Legends having great years get in.
Legends having great years get in.
Legends having great years get in, dammit.
am i the only one here who cares about the rules come on people what is going on
When I made the only correct All-Star roster, I left Clayton Kershaw off. I already regret that, and I should have fake taken one fewer closer to get him on. Except Kershaw has been a superstar for just a few years now. Rodriguez was Kershaw for well over a decade. Just weirder. And cheatier. The point from the first paragraph still stands, though. Kershaw is going to make the team, whether by final vote or because of an injury. He'll be there.
Rodriguez won't, though. He's become baseball's mascot, the embodiment of everything good and bad about the sport, an oblivious Rorschach test, and it's made us forget the part about him being a verifiable baseball legend. It's like his stats are on page 32 of the Enquirer, and like hell are we flipping through 31 pages of Suri Cruise stories and Blue Dots to get to the part where we remember just how good he's been in his career, much less this season.
In a couple of decades, we'll look back at this roster and wonder where Rodriguez was. We won't remember a handful of other players at all, with vague memories of some of the rest. Rodriguez has been one of baseball's best for two decades, and he climbed out of the suck swamp of the news cycle and a retaliatory, CBA-bending suspension to have one of his best seasons in years. He's a legend having a great year, and the precedent has been ignored.
Maybe the problem is that we've forgotten just how great he's been. If that's the case, our problems go beyond a simple All-Star snub. We've started to believe the version of history that Major League Baseball desperately wants us to believe. Steroids never happened. The offenders, if they exist, have been punished. They will always be punished. Don't worry, we'll take care of this.
And that's the kind of narrow vision that leads to fans voting Nelson Cruz over Alex Rodriguez. That kind of vote takes a short memory. That's a shame, considering that All-Star Games have always been about long memories.
SB Nation presents: A-Rod's 3,000 hits taught us to love ourselves
'On Sunday, we told you about Micronesia's 38-0 loss to Fiji in soccer, the largest loss in international soccer history. We also warned you that because of the format of the competition, the third team to play Micronesia, Vanuatu, would be forced to try to score at least 38 goals in hopes of advancing out of its group and qualifying for the Olympics.
...
Sadly, the whooping was for naught. Tahiti tied Fiji in the last game of the tournament, giving them seven and five points, meaning that although Vanuatu had the best goal differential of anybody in the group, their four points weren't enough.'
Journalist Kevin Darling was at the game, chronicling the sadness as Vanuatu whipped Micronesia, a nation playing in their first-ever tournament who couldn't field a full 23-man roster:
There's outright laughter from the Vanuatu bench about some of Micronesia's play. FSM coach Stan Foster shouts "Oh no" as 8th goal flies in.
Sadly, the whooping was for naught. Tahiti tied Fiji in the last game of the tournament, giving them seven and five points, meaning that although Vanuatu had the best goal differential of anybody in the group, their four points weren't enough.
Micronesia isn't affiliated with FIFA, so the record for the largest win in a FIFA match belongs to Australia for their 31-0 victory over American Samoa.
'The Pan African Credit Union, says Diallo, will serve seven communities in The Bronx, New York, where 96 percent of the residents have low and moderate incomes and 98 percent are non-white.
Via a random survey necessary to creating the credit union, Diallo and his team have secured about 430 people who have expressed interest in the venture. Next, Diallo is planning to raise $300,000 through donations from charitable foundations, individual philanthropists and everyday donors.
Part of what stands out about Diallo is how he understands the fear that some poor people and recent U.S. immigrants of color have about banks. Saddled with high-interest check-cashing and, for some migrants, memories of bank runs back home, many underserved people hold the belief that storing their money under a mattress is the best option. But Diallo says he dreams of a place that can keep members’ money safe, provide low-rate loans and cut fees for the vital remittances they send home.'
Alpha Amadou Diallo, a 30-something Bronx-based Guinea native, is trying to set up a credit union for folks who big banks ignore—poor, migrant and often-criminalized people of color. A by-the-numbers look into what that takes.
Google’s image recognition software, which uses artificial neural networks to simulate an actual human brain, is very capable of dreaming. When Google engineers fed photos of random objects to a network taught to identify images of animals, the network “dreamed” of disturbingly distorted dogs and other hybrid creatures, set against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of clouds and mountains.
Trippy.(Google)
Creepy. But it’s about to get a whole lot creepier. Shortly after publishing the outcome of their experiments, Google developers made the code for the “DeepDream” software public, enabling anyone to feed images into the machine and see what comes out. The results were both funny:
And then, someone made a set of instructions for DeepDream on GitHub, using the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as an example of something you could instruct the neural network to ingest.
Fear and Loathing, which stars Johnny Depp as a drug-using hedonist, is basically just one long acid trip. Here’s what Google’s AI made of it:
An ESPNW article on the American dual-citizens playing for other women's national soccer teams sheds light on the bizarre practices surrounding the predominantly-white U.S. team.
Racial imbalances do not always disfavor minorities. At various times in history, “racial or ethnic minorities . . . have owned or directed more than half of whole industries in particular nations.” Sowell 8. These minorities “have included the Chinese in Malaysia, the Lebanese in West Africa, Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Britons in Argentina, Belgians in Russia, Jews in Poland, and Spaniards in Chile—among many others.” Ibid. (footnotes omitted). “In the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire,” this phenomenon was seen in the palace itself, where the “medical staff consisted of 41 Jews and 21 Muslims.” Ibid. And in our own country, for roughly a quarter-century now, over 70 percent of National Basketball Association players have been black. ... To presume that these and all other measurable disparities are products of racial discrimination is to ignore the complexities of human existence.
According to local NBC affiliate WTHR News, Jared Fogle, the cherubic face of Subway, is currently waiting with investigators while federal agents raid his Indiana home for child pornography.
According to local Fox affiliate FOX 59, the raid began on his Zionsville home around 6:30 a.m., led by FBI investigators and Indiana State Police officers. Reporters on the scene say an evidence truck is parked in the driveway.
The raid appears to be part of a long-term investigation—in April cops arrested Russell Taylor, the executive director of Fogle’s The Jared Foundation, for child exploitation, possession of child pornography, and voyeurism. Investigators say they found as many as 500 images in his home.
Looks like Bill Cosby’s admission that he purchased Quaaludes to “use” on women was enough to convince even his staunchest defender that Hey,this guy might be guilty. http://defamer.gawker.com/report-bill-co...
Singer Jill Scott didn’t always think so—in November, as dozens of women came forward accusing Cosby of drugging and raping them, she took to Twitter in his defense.
@SimplyBerry u know Bill Cosby? I do child and this is insane. Proof. Period.
But that’s all changed—Scott reversed course Monday, saying all she needed to believe Cosby might be guilty was for Cosby to literally admit to it. A defense attorney’s dream juror, to be sure, but maybe not the most reliable character witness:
Reasoning with the angry & unreasonable? No. I'm not sorry for standing by my mentor. I'm sorry the accusations Rtrue pic.twitter.com/8oHD9u12em
Most of these terms come from the fields of syntax and semantics rather than, say, phonetics or sociolinguistics. It is certainly my impression that syntacticians and semanticians are the linguists most likely to spend an entire day listening to Phish and arguing about what “or” means.
remember that time they legit tried to have a gritty loony tunes reboot
this can’t be real
it is
dont forget bootsy collins not only did the second season theme song but also shows up as himself as a villain in the show for all the kids who were parliament fans
Super Opinionated.
