firehose

People have been wondering why J.J. Abrams took the Episode VII screenwriting duties from Toy Story 3's Michael Arndt. According to Abrams, there's no insidious conspiracy and Arndt wasn't doing a bad job (at least that they're admitting to) — it's all about the scheduling.

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rocketumbl:

Robert McCall

Our Band Could Be Your Life author Michael Azerrad’s website The Talkhouse is the best place to find new album reviews written by actual recording artists. It’s how you get things like the late Lou Reed’s review of Kayne West’s Yeezus back in July, Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg on David Bowie’s The Next Day, and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig waxing philosophic on Drake’s Nothing Was The Same. The latest notable reviewer is Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, who takes on Arcade Fire’s latest record Reflektor. Instead of a straightforward review, Clark tracks her Google searches and related Internet exploration while listening to the record. She lists trying to find details on the similarities between the bass sound on “We Exist” and Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” how searching for “Porno” yields very few results related to the Arcade Fire song ...

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The Minnesota Timberwolves know what girls want. Or at least they think they know. The basketball team is doing a ladies night promotion for four upcoming games where, for a mere $18, women attendees will get a ticket to the game, a glass of wine, beer, or soda, and a DVD copy of season one of Girls. None of the aforementioned games include the Brooklyn Nets, but, hey, at least the team's not giving away Sex And The City. And doesn't strong center Nikola Petkovic kind of look like Adam Driver in the picture above? No? No.

The giveaway is being sponsored by a local spa and, weirdly, “the HBO hit series Girls,” meaning that someone, somewhere in the HBO or Girls marketing camps though that giving away DVDs of a racy, fairly edgy show at a poorly attended basketball game would be a good idea.

Good luck ...

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“We’re in the post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, the deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control, tells PBS. His agency just reported that at least 23,000 Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections, more than the 15,000 who die from AIDS, notes health researcher Bill Gardener. And we’re running out of options.

Since penicillin became the first widely-used drug to fight infections in the 1940s, the success of antibiotics in killing germs has had evolutionary consequences: Germs that are genetically predisposed to survive these drugs have grown more numerous, some even transmitting resistance to other germs. This has resulted in an arms race between nature and pharmaceutical researchers trying to develop new medicines to target germs like clostridum dificle, one of three strains the CDC has identified as urgent threats:

The problem is that today, we’re losing this arms race. The number of new antibiotics entering the market has fallen in recent years, as this chart from the CDC shows, and many of the newest antibiotics aren’t as effective as their ancestors. Which is really bad, and not just because people can pick up infections. A lot of sophisticated modern medicine depends on temporarily reducing the strength of a patient’s immune system—think of chemotherapy treatments for cancer, organ transplants, skin grafts, and kidney dialysis. Antibiotics make it possible to protect these patients while their body can’t do it themselves, but absent germ-killing drugs, more of these approaches may simply become ineffective.

So where are the pharmaceutical companies? Largely pulling out of antibiotic research, which they view as less profitable than blockbuster drugs for cancer or lifestyle drugs targeting the aging baby-boomer population. Pharmaceutical research spending has shrunk overall in the last three years, and many companies, including Pfizer, Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, just don’t bother with antibiotics that could kill enterobacteriaceae, another urgent threat:

Much basic drug research has fallen to the government, but budget negotiations in Washington aren’t likely to fund an effective response. Both the CDC and the National Institute of Health, which makes grants to medical researchers, face further spending cuts as lawmakers contemplate reducing the budget of their parent, the Department of Health and Human Services, as much as 18.6% from last year’s already-shrunk spending:

For the NIH, that means fewer grants to lab researchers, including those working on antibiotics. At the CDC, those cuts make it harder for public health officials to track and isolate the resistant germs and set best practices for treatment to help avoid over-prescription. This has had some success: MRSA, the poster-child for scary bacteria resistance, is still a major killer but the number of infections have shrunk thanks to initiatives to improve care during intravenous hospital procedures. Similar efforts could help reduce antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, one of the most awful things we can think of:

The US government is taking some action to solve this problem, giving a special grant of $40 million to one company, GlaxoSmithKline, that still maintains a robust antibiotic research program, and allowing companies that produce them five extra years of protection from generic competition. The US Food and Drug Administration, which determines whether medicine is safe for public consumption, is also planning to loosen rules around antibiotic approval so new drugs can make it to market faster, which has some worried that ugly side effects could be missed or even ignored. But with the antibiotic pipeline running dry, there may be few other options.

Robyn Irvine chased off a thief from her California home this week, presumably because the intruder did not know she was a competitive axe-thrower who keeps an axe at her bedside.

Top Shelf is publishing the comic that inspired Congressman John Lewis' civil rights memoir "March" as part of a digital bundle.

Limited edition Zelda 3DS & Earthbound labels for… NES controllers? ⊟

This is weird but neat (a common theme for our site): that gold/black design Nintendo used for its limited edition Zelda 3DS and Wii U systems can now be purchased as a skin for an NES controller. There’s also a Mother/Earthbound design — red buttons/pad presumably not included!

GamerGrafx says the peel and stick decals are “precision cut to the exact dimensions of the original NES controller” and feature “a weatherproof glodd polyester material.” The labels are $9.99 each.

PREORDER The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, upcoming games

What took so long? I'm not talking about a LEGO Marvel game. LEGO getting the Marvel license is a relatively new development, all things considered. They announced it in 2011, video game in 2013 — that's fairly quick turnaround for a game as massive in scope as LEGO Marvel Super Heroes.

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Sadly, dogs can't give you feedback on the stupid things you say to them.

Physics is full of paradoxes, but one of the most famous is the contradiction between quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity. At last, a new set of incredible experiments may reconcile the two systems.

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In October, the io9 book club read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Today from 12:00-1:00 PDT, Atwood is here to answer your questions! Ask her about the apocalypse series that begins with Oryx and Crake, or about her incredible writing career.

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Developer Martin Gingras has created FBomb, a real-time interactive map of tweets containing the word “fuck.” You can explore it for yourself at FBomb, and read more about how it was created at Gingras’ website.

image via FBomb

via The Washington Post

Michael Dilger's site claims, "When I'm elected, I'm there to do your will, the will to help every New Yorker realize their limitless beautiful talents and gifts to Flourish."

On matchdays, the Timbers Army lines up outside JELD-WEN Field to get wristbands that will let them into the stadium early to get the best seats. The endline is general admission so for the best seats, you need to get there early and get one of the first wristbands.

For their first ever home MLS playoff match, it becomes a multi-day affair.

Timbers fans started lining up for wristbands on Wednesday night and by the crack of dawn on Thursday, more than 300 Timbers fans were lined up early with the raincoats, umbrellas and even tents so they can be right up front for tonight's Western Conference semifinal second leg, which they enter with a 2-1 lead. That's what the Timbers' first ever home MLS playoff match will do to Portland. That and their hate for the Seattle Sounders.

As of 10 PM Wednesday aka 22 hours prior to kick, here is where the TA line was for the Timbers/Sounders match #rctid pic.twitter.com/73ZcuEVNaI

— Mike Donovan (@TheMikeDonovan) November 7, 2013

Campers outside JELD-WEN Field waiting for good seats to match between @TimbersFC & @SoundersFC #rctid #liveonk2 pic.twitter.com/GTgxiXp7f2

— Lincoln Graves (@LincolnGraves) November 7, 2013

The line got so long that it wrapped around the block. The campers couldn't even see JELD-WEN Field anymore.

All the way around the corner from JWF #LineCulture #rctid pic.twitter.com/QROrBOlO0U

— Casey Crebs (@Thunder1301) October 13, 2013

The Timbers and JELD-WEN Field did their part to help their hearty fans out in the rain, too, handing out hot chocolates to those sitting out in the rain. That it helps keep their voices ready for what should be an electric night in Portland is just a bonus.

Hard at work, keeping the TA warm. #RCTID #LineCulture pic.twitter.com/fGTeNDIQv2

— Lindsay Weber (@LindsayAdaire) November 7, 2013

You can see the Timbers win from anywhere in the stadium, but you can only see Sounders tears from the front row.

scifrey:

So I got a comment on my personal blog post on why I’m Happy To Skip Ender’s Game.

Here it is:

you’re a sci-fi author… you haven’t read Ender’s Game… weaksauce. very weaksauce.

it isn’t as bad as say, a fantasy author having never read Tolkien, but it’s in the ballpark.

in related topics, since you identify as queer, how would you feel about a large groundswell internet movement trying to get people to not purchase your books based upon your worldview as a queer author?

Because I feel like it’s worth stating again, here’s my reply:

 1) There is no required reading to becoming an author.

There is no university syllabus, no degree, no certificate. Many people come to it in many different ways. I simply did not come from a family of readers; what books and authors I discovered, I did so on my own with very little guidance beyond the odd less-than-apathetic teacher librarian. The back history of my reading list and what is or is not on it, and my individual personal taste in art, doesn’t make me a good or bad writer.

The only defining factor that makes me a good science fiction writer is if I write science fiction books, and they’re good. Period.

And no amount of disappointed headshaking, finger wagging, or muted tutting from people who think that they have the right to define what makes a good SF/F writer beyond the single above stipulation will change that.

 I could probably spend time reading all the great classics now, but there are so many books out there that I “should” be reading, and so many books out there that I want to be reading, and so many books that I want to write. And speaking honestly, the ones that I write will pay my rent.

So, when it comes to occupying my free time, I know where my choice lies.

2) I also haven’t read all of Tolkien. I found it dry. It was a fascinating series of text books with excellent wordcrafting and worldbuilding, but rather poor in terms of character identification and a compelling narrative.

You may disagree with me. There’s lots of people who do. Peter Jackson is one of them. (I would never have found my deep love for Middle Earth if it wasn’t for the film adaptations). But that’s the joy of personal taste. It’s personal.

Also, I believe I stated quite clearly that I DID begin to read Orson Scott Card’s work. And that I’m sorry my morals won’t allow me to read Ender’s Game, because I hear it’s quite good.

However, after really enjoying the first book of his I read and researching him to find more, I learned that he thought people like me. I therefore made a deliberate and conscious choice not to pursue anything else from his bibliography. Not because of his lack of talent, but because I couldn’t in good conscious support his career in any way, shape, or form once I read his personal thoughts on why I, a queer woman, am a shitstain on the panties of the world.

3) If at any point in my career I use the money awarded to me from my royalties to support organizations that strip any of my fellow human beings of their civil rights and their definition as persons under the law, I should damn well hope that there is a groundswell against me.

If there’s anything LEFT of me after my friends and family gets through chewing me out.

Look, the boycott isn’t because Card is a meanie-poo, or because he says bad things about people, or because he is a cisgendered heterosexual Mormon male.

The boycott is not about Card’s personal worldviews. They boycott is not about Card’s personal choices. The boycott is not about Card’s religion, or his marriage, or his gender.

The boycott is because Card takes the money he receives from his work (from books, from films, from speaking engagements, whatever,) and donates that money to charities that support legal actions to deny the queer people of America the right to marry whom they love, to have the same civil rights and liberties of their straight counterpoints.

And anyone who gives Card money is inadvertently funding those organizations.

The boycott is about being fully informed about where your money is going, and on what it is being spent.

If anyone wanted to know which charities I support, and therefore where a portion of the money they give me in royalties goes, they can ask. In fact, I’ll tell you – I donate to Sick Kids, because my brother’s friend died of cancer quite young and it was devastating to us; I donate to Little Geeks, because I feel that access to the internet and therefore information and education is a human right; and I donate both money and time to The Office of Letters and Light because I feel that the arts are important to the development of compassion and understanding of our fellow human beings and that NaNoWriMo is a positive influence on young people who would like to use writing as an art therapy or creative exercise.

I do NOT donate to the Salvation Army because of their policy on queerness. So why would I put money in Card’s pocket so he can spend it on similar charities and organizations? I don’t buy Tony Harris’ work anymore either, even though it pains me because I adore Brian K. Vaughn’s writing and want to know how Ex Machina ends.

Card can say that I was raped and beaten and shamed into being queer all he likes. THAT’S his personal opinion, and he can spend his hard-earned money however he wants. (I wasn’t, by the way. My family is wonderful, and intelligent, compassionate, supportive, and I was raised Presbyterian.)

So while I may not agree with how Card spends his money, I can’t force him to change his mind and change his stance on the definition of marriage. I can’t make him stop supporting organizations that would see me and people like me in the United States corrective-raped, stripped of my civil liberties, or sweep hate crimes under the legal rug.

What I CAN do is NOT put my money into his hands. THAT is what the boycott is about.

What I CAN do is tell people what he’s doing with their money and let them decide for themselves if giving him their money, (so he can donate it to causes that spread hate, slander, and such vitriolic lies about being queer,) is a choice they’d like to make. What I CAN do is encourage people to spend their money elsewhere so that other artists, other writers, who treat queer people like the human beings they are, get it instead of Card. What I CAN do is encourage people to donate to organizations that work towards helping change laws and pass bills in the USA that will allow people like me to live and love openly and fairly.

I am not American, I can’t vote on bills or lobby my elected officials to legalize my lifestyle, to grant people like me personhood with all the advantages and liberties that entails. But I can spread the word and hopefully change some minds, so that the people who DO have that kind of power understand what they are capable of doing with it.

As for the event itself: Skip Ender’s Game was about more than just NOT putting money in Card’s pocket. It was also about sending a message to creators in Hollywood – the rainbow dollar has power. We’re paying attention, and we’re being choosey.

It was also about providing alternatives; each SEG night featured LGBTQ and Ally artists and their work. It promoted them to whole audiences who might otherwise never have heard of them. It celebrated and exposed to the mainstream art and artists who are queer, or create work where queerness is represented and accepted.

So, in conclusion:

Your choice is your choice. If you want to judge me for failing to read what you, whomever you are, state that I have to have read in order to qualify by your personal definitions of what it means to be a good SF/F writer/geek/human being/whatever, then fine. Judge away.

It makes absolutely 0% of difference to me, my career, or my ability to write. But if it makes you feel better, go right ahead. Might as well call me a Fake Geek Girl while you’re at it. I’m super not interested in proving that I have all the right qualifiers to you. I don’t need to. I have science fiction books published, and people read them, and seem to think they’re good enough to awards so I guess that makes me a real SF/F writer. Your judge-y-ness is pretty superfluous.

And also, your super obvious attempt to shame me back into my place was lame, dude.

This blog post is about my choices, why I’ve chosen to support some causes and not others, and why I, personally, made them. If you don’t like my personal choices, or my work, or anything about me, then you have a really easy way to fix that:

Don’t read my work, don’t buy my books, and don’t see my films.

Oh, hey. That sounds familiar…

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

As technology companies like Twitter and Facebook seek to turn ideas into profits by going public and selling stock, they are also exploiting taxpayer subsidies for executive pay to avoid paying any taxes on billions of dollars of earnings.

Violating someone's privacy isn't exercising freedom of speech.

I made a mistake by publishing the column. I thought it would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights. I miscalculated, pure and simple. I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness.

One of the most frustrating things about the tech industry’s woman problem is the paucity of reliable data on the number of women working in technical roles. Now, thanks to a public Google spreadsheet created by Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest, we have data on how many women engineers work at 84 different tech companies. To collect the data, company employees have been performing internal head counts, and most contributors have identified themselves openly, though Chou invites anonymous submissions via email. Contributions have also come from people who are manually counting the number of women on companies’ team profile pages. Chou has focused her efforts on women engineers, defined as “women who are writing or architecting software, and are in full-time roles.” Until now, there have been little data on how many women are among the prestigious and well-compensated ranks of engineers, as opposed to the many less technical roles within the industry.

The numbers, while preliminary, are revealing: tech companies employ an average of 12.33% women engineers. This is consistent with what I’ve observed over the course of 16 years working in the industry (12 of which I spent running a web design and development firm) and what I’ve heard from others. The numbers also map neatly to current figures on women computer science grads, which suggests the “pipeline problem” argument is legitimate.

Among the companies listed, gender diversity varies. A handful are at parity or better: Levo League, Hackbright Academy, and Yellowsmith—all companies, incidentally, with women at the helm—boast 67% women on their engineering teams. The Muse sits at 75% and Kabinet and Spitfire Athlete both hit 100%, though both have two-person engineering teams. On the other hand, 15 companies on the list are without a single female engineer: Treehouse, 37signals, and Causes.com among them.

While some of the smallest teams have 50% or more women, the numbers drop significantly once you look at engineering teams of 10 or more. When I broke down the data by size of engineering team, the averages looked like this:

My segmentation is somewhat arbitrary, but on average it looks like bigger teams have a lower percentage of women. It’s easier to get your percentages up when you’ve got a four-person technical team than it is when you’re hiring by the dozen.

Companies that participate in the counting do so as a signal to prospective employees that they are committed to diversifying their teams. A spokesperson at Mozilla—the largest company on the list, with a 500-person engineering team but only 43 women—told me that the project is “a reminder to keep pushing for more diversity.”

Until now, those of us writing about tech and gender have been making do with broad, US-centric data from the National Center for Women and Computing and the Anita Borg Institute, along with other sources we collect piecemeal. These data are tricky because they don’t typically differentiate between departments and roles within organizations: A woman in the HR department at Cisco will typically be counted as a “woman in computing,” whereas a woman software engineer at an investment company won’t. NCWIT suggests that women hold more than 25% of “computing occupations,” whereas my personal experience in the sector, which I’ve heard echoed by many colleagues, is that the numbers are significantly lower among software coders.

Even federal regulations have not provided us with reliable information: In March, when CNN was looking for data on women in tech, it was stonewalled by Silicon Valley giants whose size requires that they report diversity stats to the Department of Labor. While the government has that data, it won’t release it publicly, and most of the big companies aren’t talking. It’s unfortunate since data from these companies could be particularly valuable for benchmarking purposes given that their engineering teams are big enough to be statistically significant. When I tweeted earlier this year about that CNN story, one commenter suggested that sharing the data would result in a PR nightmare for the companies in question.

@Avi_Gray Hear, hear. Hiding implies shame; if we can’t even face/admit the problem, how are we ever going to solve it?—
Lauren Bacon (@laurenbacon) March 19, 2013

Marc Hedlund, VP Engineering at Stripe, has a different perspective: “If the first step is admitting you have a problem, I think in this context you have to say that very publicly for it to matter. Every company has a problem; your willingness to face it and work on it is what matters.”

Chou describes what motivated her to collect her own data: “While companies talk about their initiatives to make the work environment more female-friendly, or to encourage more women to go into or stay in computing, there’s no way of judging whether they’re successful or worth mimicking, because there are no success metrics attached to any of them […] As an engineer and someone who’s had ‘data-driven design’ browbeaten into me by Silicon Valley, I can’t imagine trying to solve a problem where the real metrics, the ones we’re setting our goals against, are obfuscated.”

While Chou’s project is a good start, there’s still room for more granularity. She told me she’d love to gather data on the backgrounds and roles of both men and women engineers at each company in order to learn whether there are patterns around junior/senior positions or traditional versus non-traditional training. I’d like to look at the gender ratios for each company’s executive team and board, and see if there is any correlation with the company’s track record on hiring women engineers. It appears from the current data that many—though certainly not all—women-led and -focused startups have higher numbers of women in technical roles.

Another helpful way to expand this project would be to add temporal data, to chart how companies fare over time. This would be especially helpful in combination with data about companies’ policies and programs (if any) for recruiting and retaining women.

Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea said: “The best, and arguably only, approach to changing something is first to be able to measure it. You change, you measure, you change, you measure… It’s as important for organizational practice as software.”

A lot of people are about to make a boatload of money.

With 154 days to go before the actual event, PAX East 2014 is officially sold out. The annual expo is set for April 11-13, 2014, in Boston.

"Sunday passes are gone! We are now entirely out of badges for PAX East 2014," tweeted the official PAX twitter this morning.

So, that's it. We'll see you there if you're going. Actually, wait, did we get our tickets? Yikes! This is all so sudden.

PAX East 2014 sold out originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 07 Nov 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter just started trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a price of $45.10 a share, which is 73% above the IPO price of $26 that was set by the company last night.

That implies an astounding valuation of $31.34 billion.

To put that in perspective, Twitter’s valuation is nearly twice electric car manufacturer Tesla ($17.14 billion) and more than streaming video service Netflix ($19.42 billion). It’s about equal to food company General Mills ($32.32 billion). And as a multiple of sales, Twitter is significantly more expensive than rival Facebook.

Our valuation figure assumes Twitter will eventually have 694.8 million shares outstanding, including stock options and restricted stock. The number could rise by 10.5 million if Twitter’s bankers choose to sell more shares today.

Based on the number of shares currently trading, Twitter’s opening market capitalization is $24.57 billion.

Here’s what Twitter’s headquarters looked like this morning when the opening bell rang (at 6:30 a.m. local time):

Ringing of the bell! Congrats @Twitter! #NasdaqOpeningBell vine.co/v/hIJ2iBJQbK3—
David Suh (@DavidSuh) November 07, 2013

The Hindu

CIA Reportedly Paid AT&T Millions for International Customers' Phone Records ... Headlines & Global News The CIA has reportedly paid AT&T at least $10 million a year to hand over customers' phone records as part of multiple international counter-terrorism probes. According to a New York Times investigation, the mobile service provider has contributed ... AT&T Acknowledges Charging Governments for Information RequestsWall Street Journal CIA reportedly pays to collect foreign call data from AT&TEngadget CIA paid AT&T millions for phone call dataThe Hindu KRCC -The Globe and Mail -Lawfare (blog) all 72 news articles »