Writer Ryan North spoke with CBR News about teaming Squirrel Girl with past and present Thors in a battle against an evil Asgardian Squirrel God.

More people are watching the women’s FIFA World Cup on TV than ever before, with over one billion viewers expected to tune in worldwide over the course of the event. According to FIFA.com, “US broadcaster Fox Sports 1 attracted 3.3 million viewers to the game between the United States and Australia, more than three times higher than Team USA’s first group stage match in 2011.”

These record figures would suggest that there is a new level of parity with men when it comes to women in sports—not just in terms of women’s participation in competitive sports, thanks in large part to Title IX, but the ability to watch female athletes compete on television.

Yet, a new study by researchers Michael A. Messner and Michela Musto of USC, and Cheryl Cooky of Purdue University, suggests that the opposite is true. In data collected between the years 1989 and 2014, the researchers found that women athletes are actually covered less in media now than they were in 1989. In 2014, only 3.2% of network television coverage was given to women’s sports; SportsCenter only gave women 2% of coverage.

This decline in coverage has been disguised, according to the researchers, by the relegation of women’s sports to the now ubiquitous, if often irrelevant, scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. This ticker “functions as a kind of visual and textual ghetto for women’s sports, allowing the sports anchors to focus their main coverage almost entirely on men’s sports, while relegating women’s sports literally to the margins of the screen.”

Besides the general decrease in screen time, however, the USC analysis concludes that coverage of women is still too often sexist. Instead of female athletes being framed as sexual objects, they are now predominantly idealized for their ability to juggle athletics with roles as mothers or girlfriends—the socially suitable, fundamental roles for women in relation to men.

 The decline in “insulting and humorously sexualized stories about women athletes” is a byproduct of the coverage decrease, but has also caused the decline in coverage.  In an interview with Quartz, Messner admitted that these findings weren’t “terribly surprising,” as this latest iteration of the study is consistent with the past 25 years of research. However, he noted that the most puzzling aspect of the data was the disparity between the “huge growth of girls’ and women’s sports participation over the past 25 years” and the stagnant coverage of this growing body of athletes. Thanks to Title IX, millions more girls and women are playing sports than ever.

What is interesting about this decline is the way it seems to correlate with a kind of gender respectability politics. “In 1989,” the study notes, “TV news shows devoted only 5% of their time to women athletes. And when they did cover women, it often was commonly either in the role of comical object of the sports anchor’s joke or as sexual object.”

The study reports that the decline in “insulting and humorously sexualized stories about women athletes” is both a byproduct of the coverage decrease but has also caused the decline in coverage. Women have been covered less, it seems, because sports announcers are no longer allowed to turn them into sexual objects with impunity.

Messner attributed “the deepening silence about women’s sports in general” to the networks’ blatant inability to respect women as athletes alone. “It’s as though the producers and commentators are thinking, ‘If we can’t say something sexist, then we can’t say anything at all about women’s sports,’” he said.

It is not surprising, they add, that two of the three networks have the same male sports anchors now as they did in 1989.

Sexism in media manifests for female athletes in myriad ways—they are their most appealing when they can be idealized in the two roles men find most relatable: sex object and caregiver. While not proved by the study’s analysis, the results do suggest that the men who own and operate these networks still, in 2015, struggle to understand women outside of the stereotypes of their gender identity.

The everyday marginalization of women’s sports is perhaps most apparent during major international sporting events like the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Suddenly, Messner observed, US media “discovers” women’s sports all over again, only to have this level of coverage disappear when the international event ends. “The US media loves to get behind ‘our’ athletes—both men and women—when they are competing on a world stage, but ignores the myriad sports taking place every day within our national borders. I suspect what we have here is nationalism trumping sexism.”

Follow Marcie on Twitter at @MarcieBianco. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Reader journovampire supplies a link to Music Business Worldwide (based on a re/code report) that says Apple's new Apple Music service, after a trial period during which the company has refused to pay royalties, is expected to pay a bit more than 70 percent of its subscription revenue out to the companies supplying it, rather than the 58 percent that some in the music industry had feared. Notes journovampire: "If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

surprisebitch:

now this is true friendship

Type Trumps Lion

"Publicis Worldwide is a global creative agency, with 89 years' experience providing change leadership for its clients. We believe that this era demands a combination of strategic, creative and digital ideas that help clients to Lead The Change in their own digital transformation. With over 13,000 employees in 84 countries, clients include Axa, BNP Paribas, Carrefour, Cartier, Citi, Coca-Cola, Haier, Hilton Honors, HP, l'Oréal, LG, Luxottica, Nestlé, Orange, P&G, Paypal, Pernod Ricard, RATP, Renault, Sanofi, Seb, Siemens, Telefonica, Total, and UBS. Publicis Worldwide is a part of Publicis Groupe."

Design by: Publicis North America (New York, NY)

Opinion/Notes: While I appreciate a nod to the past as much as any other nostalgic human being this doesn't feel quite right for a global ad agency. It's too much. Especially when paired with the iconic lion head which is already quite ornate and already worked great with the previous serif. The relationship between icon and wordmark was so good before and now it's been inverted with the lion being much smaller and the wordmark overpowering it. As a piece of lettering it's interesting and there are some cool things going on — the "P", with its swoosh, is NOT one of them — but as a logo in lock-up with the lion it doesn't click. And whatever they were thinking when doing that 3D extruded wireframe banner they need to stop whatever design process and strategic brainstorming that led to it.

Related Links: Publicis North America blog post

Select Quote: The new design pays homage to the original Publicis logo created by founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet in 1927. […] On the front door of Bleustein-Blanchet's first office, was a Publicis sign created in the Art Deco style of the era. In its time it was considered bold, sexy and modern. […] That logo and that approach is the inspiration for our direction. […] The new Publicis Worldwide identity borrows from the past but intentionally incorporates modern characteristics including symmetry and simplicity, while maintaining the iconic Lion head of Publicis Worldwide.

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Link

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Jeff Huang has been manufacturing and selling products using official team logos; he was recently caught by authorities who seized 130,000 items valued at $549,000. Also a crime: those shitty lamps.

The first video in a new series explores why love is revolutionary for black transgender and queer couples.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Previously only available to be seen at the MOMA exhibit on her work, Björk released her latest video for Black Lake recently. It’s beautiful and weird, of course, like all of Björk’s videos. Check out her website here for more info.

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The MakerBot team emailed us and their new CEO Jonathan Jaglom is hitting the road this summer to meet customers, partners and more (we no longer sell MakerBot but did awhile back) – and specially, he’s going to meet with Adafruit.

…Jonathan ought to meet you and/or and the team at Adafruit, so that he understands firsthand your experience with MakerBot and Thingiverse, what’s gone well and what could go better. This would also be an opportunity for you to learn more about our priorities, and about Jonathan’s view of our shared world.

No topics are off the table; your unvarnished account, along with what he hears from you and a handful of other customers, will inform decisions about the development of the MakerBot 3D Ecosystem and the Thingiverse community.

No topics are off the table; unvarnished account, OK! We requested a video interview like we usually do for ASK AN ENGINEER (last week we had the CEOs of OtherMachine and Particle) but MakerBot wanted to keep it a “introduction and listening meeting”. After corresponding with the Thingiverse Community and Audience Development Manager, MakerBot Executive Assistant, MakerBot Public Relations Manager at MakerBot and MakerBot’s Chief Marketing Officer we agreed to do a post here before the meeting and a follow up one after our meeting.

So! Here is your chance Adafruit community (and beyond!)! Post up in the comments of what is important to you, we’ll make sure they’re listening. We’ll even help get this started. We’re looking for constructive actionable requests and comments, be excellent.

MakerBot and Open-Source
There’s an opportunity to patch things up with the Open-source community, is MakerBot interested?

MakerBot and Material lock-in
Should people be able to use material in printers that they own? There is a concern that MakerBot is planning DRM and material lock-in. Does the new CEO think that people should be able to use material in printers that they own? We understand the benefits to users in knowing where their materials come from and that they are all going to perform as expected, however, what about the people out there like our customers who understand the tradeoffs using 3rd party filament? In a recent Copyright Office hearing MakerBot was mentioned, a lot. A majority of our customers and community believe they have the choice to use their printer as they see fit. Regardless, we’re concerned that using copyright as the legal mechanism to force material lock-in is a bad-scene for the 3D printing ecosystem. Stratasys owns MakerBot and currently chips materials.

MakerBot Replicator 5th gen
The MakerBot replicator 5th Gen units had some challenges and mixed reviews at launch, we know you’ve been working to fix the issues such as the Smart Extruders, we decided not to stock them at this time. What’s being worked on now to address the previous issues, what type of testing and assurances will the customers and community have that if they trust MakerBot again that they will not be let down? For resellers, would we be able to throughly test units before launch as part of a private beta program for example?

Analytics on Thingivese
We’d like granular analytics on our designs.

Spam becoming an issue on Thingivese
Thingiverse has some spam issues… maybe a report spam button is necessary.

Promotion and celebration of designs on Thingiverse
Specific ways to get featured placement.

Reselling MakerBot products
Generally speaking, dealing with the MakerBot distributor(s) was not as easy or as profitable as when we were able to purchase directly from MakerBot. For Adafruit we need better margins if we’re going to resell 3D printers. The return policies were not reseller friendly. Over the years the price of MakerBots seems to have gone up, while the price of other 3D printers of good quality went down, this made it a challenge to stock. For the Digitizer, MakerBot was selling them below the cost we purchased them, that was really rough on us.

General questions and comments
Are there areas you feel you can make the most improvements in user experience and printer output? Do you see any major technological changes in the near future or small incremental changes? What Stratasys technologies do you see making it into the MakerBot lineup of products? We’d like to see more MakerBot blog posts, people from the company making and sharing things, MakerBot has a long history of not only making 3D printers, but content themselves – we’d like to see that again.

Testing products
And lastly, we would like to test out a Z18

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These are just some of what we will discuss, now it’s your turn – Post up in the comments, Tweet, Google+ and more…

Update: Hackaday has posted up and there are lots of comments, questions and more there too.

image via Google Maps

A Milwaukee man named Mark Gubin has maintained a “Welcome to Cleveland” sign painted on the roof of his building at 2893 South Delaware Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 1978. The sign can be seen by incoming aircraft landing at Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport and has been the cause of some confusion from travelers.

As for why Gubin painted “Welcome to Cleveland” on a roof near a Milwaukee airport, he told Jim Stingl of the Journal Sentinel, “It was all tongue-in-cheek, just for fun. Living in the world is not a dress rehearsal. You better have fun with it.”

photo via Journal Sentinel

via Journal Sentinel

LaNell Williams is hoping to raise $3,000 to get to the Fisk-Vanderbilt program this fall 

Historical Map: Polish Airlines LOT Route Map, 1939

An absolutely phenomenal airline route diagram from 1939, which is both map and schedule in one. 

The thicker route lines represent the routes that belong to Polish Airlines LOT – one of the oldest continually operating airlines in Europe; they still use the beautiful flying crane logo today – with thinner route lines representing partner or connecting airlines. Red lines show daily service, black lines show weekday or irregular service. The departure and arrival times for each flight are indicated within the circles at each city – for the most part, the bigger the circle, the more flights serve it, although Warsaw’s importance is overstated somewhat as LOT’s main hub. Red times show the different schedules for Sundays. The flight/route number for each flight is superimposed over each route line: you can see that some flights “hop” from city to city along the way.

Ominously, a legend at the bottom states: “The services on all lines passing through PRAHA (Prague) are suspended until a special notice is given.” Czechoslovakia had, by this time, been occupied by Nazi Germany, and WWII was about to break over Europe like a wave.

Our rating: Information-rich and weirdly beautiful in a very abstract way. I love this so much: five stars!

Source: histmag.org (in Polish)

Nicola Hahn writes: As American lawmakers run a victory lap after passing the USA Freedom Act of 2015, Edward Snowden has published an op-ed piece which congratulates Washington on its "historic" reform. He also identifies Apple Inc. as a champion of user privacy. Snowden states: "Basic technical safeguards such as encryption — once considered esoteric and unnecessary — are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private." This sort of talking point encourages the perception that Apple has sided with users in the battle against mass surveillance. But there are those who question Snowden's public endorsement of high-tech monoliths. Given their behavior in the past is it wise to assume that corporate interests have turned over a new leaf and won't secretly collaborate with government spies?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CHICAGO—In an effort to expand its congested facilities to better meet the department’s staffing needs, the Chicago Police Department announced Tuesday the construction of a new addition to its headquarters that will allow it to accommodate officers who have been placed on desk duty due to allegations of misconduct. “As an increasing number of our patrolmen are reassigned to administrative tasks pending the resolution of their internal investigations, we have found it necessary to expand our floor plan,” police chief Garry McCarthy told reporters, saying that the new annex includes ample space for officers removed from active duty and relegated to clerical tasks such as filing reports and categorizing evidence. “We were simply running out of places to put officers who had been taken off the streets for disciplinary reasons. This extension should allow us to accommodate the overflow for the foreseeable future.” At press time, the new ...

What does the length of your fingers say about you?

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There is a free preview of The Princess and the Pony on Amazon, if you’d like to see!  Click on the link.

itwbennett writes: The problem isn't new, but a report released Tuesday by Sonatype, the company that manages one of the largest repositories of open-source Java components, sheds some light on poor inventory practices that are all-too-common in software development. To wit: 'Sonatype has determined that over 6 percent of the download requests from the Central Repository in 2014 were for component versions that included known vulnerabilities and the company's review of over 1,500 applications showed that by the time they were developed and released each of them had an average of 24 severe or critical flaws inherited from their components.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An encyclical authored by Pope Francis was leaked to the media this week, confirming reports that the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics will say that climate change is caused by humans and that science must guide the world’s response.

But, in keeping with Catholic economic doctrines, he comes out strongly against the carbon trading schemes that have been among the most popular solutions to the problem. The following section was translated from the original Italian document by Quartz:

The strategy of buying and selling emissions credits can give rise to a new form of speculation and would not serve to reduce the global emission of polluting gas. This system seems to be a quick and easy solution with the appearance of a certain commitment to the environment, which however does not imply by any means a radical change in the scale of circumstances. Thus, it may become an expedient that supports continued excessive consumption by certain countries and sectors.

There are lots of tools for policymakers to limit emissions in an effort to prevent global warming’s harshest consequences, but most of them will rely on creating incentives not to use the remaining cheap oil left in the ground. The simplest way to do that, economically speaking, is to tax carbon use, but that can be difficult to enact and execute. (No doubt the world’s Catholics, including US Speaker of the House John Boehner, will give serious thought to it nonetheless.)

Instead, many countries turn to the idea of carbon-trading markets, an idea in the US known as “cap and trade”—and in Europe a reality called the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. Broadly, these schemes rely on a steadily lowering cap on carbon emissions, but they allow companies to trade away the gap between what they emit and their cap. This creates a market where you can buy the right to pollute as long as someone else is clean. Hypothetically, this market will ease the transition toward a low-emission future by allocating remaining resources to those with the most need.

But the Pope, like other critics of these schemes, fear they will disadvantage those who cannot afford to pay the price set by the market, whether the poor in wealthy countries, or the poorer countries of the world. The Catholic church has long criticized capitalism and markets as exploitative, speculative, and idolatrous of money, from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 to Pope Francis’s attention-getting exhortation in 2013. Just don’t tell the Vatican Bank.

Despite critics’ claims that the Church’s new antagonism to climate change is motivated by expediency, it seems Pope Francis is insisting that a Roman Catholic stand against global warming will be as unique as its economic rhetoric. That, however, may indicate that the new teaching’s influence in the temporal world may be as limited.

Hyrule Warriors Legends coming early 2016 ⊟ 

This didn’t make as big a splash as Tri Force Heroes, thanks to that Japanese trailer someone accidentally posted a week ago, but we now know this 3DS port is coming to the States in “Q1 of 2016″.

Nintendo says the portable game adds “new story elements and playable characters inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. New features allow players to enhance their tactics and switch between different characters on the fly as they explore and battle in Hyrule’s most famous locales.”

BUY Majora's Mask 3D, Link Wind Waker Nendoroid

submitted by invno1
[link] [86 comments]

Adobe is releasing a wide range of updates to its Creative Cloud apps this morning, but the biggest release isn't an update — it isn't even an app — it's an entirely new service. Today marks the launch of Adobe Stock, a stock image service that Adobe hopes will quickly become the dominant place to go when you need a photo. Adobe has good reason to believe that that can happen: it claims that 85 percent of people who buy stock images use its apps, and Stock is going to increasingly be built right into them.

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Stock starts with 40 million photos, illustrations, and graphics

Adobe is also offering Creative Cloud subscribers a discounted stock image plan, which should encourage them to choose Stock over similar services, like Getty or Shutterstock. Of course, that all depends on the quality of Adobe Stock's photos, but Adobe has taken a shortcut to give itself a strong start: it purchased the stock photo service Fotolia earlier this year, so it'll include 40 million pieces of content — photos, illustrations, and graphics (with videos arriving "soon") — that were up on Fotolia to start. (Fotolia will continue to operate on its own as well. Adobe says that its name is strong in Europe.)

Stock is starting out with integration into the Adobe "library." That means you won't have to download images to your computer and then import them into an Adobe app, you'll just select the images on Stock and then they'll appear in the little library window within Adobe's apps. You'll also be able to work on low-res versions of an image before committing to purchasing the full version, and Adobe will automatically apply all edits once you upgrade.

Images can be purchased from Stock for $9.99 a piece, or you can subscribe to one of two plans: 10 images per month for $49.99 or 750 images per month for $199.99. If you're a Creative Cloud subscriber (even to the cheaper photography plan), you can get the 10 image per month plan at a discount, for $29.99. Adobe thinks that its aggressive pricing will help Stock rise to the top, but its model relies on people regularly needing images — other popular services focus more on per-image purchases. Unused images on smaller plan will rollover for an entire year, however, which should help subscribers make use of what they're paying for.

Creative Cloud apps are coming to Android

Adobe is also renewing its focus on Android today, with the release of its first Creative Cloud-integrated apps for the platform. That includes Photoshop Mix, Color CC, Brush CC, and Shape CC, all of which have been on iOS for a little while now. An additional mobile app, Hue CC, is also being introduced on the iPhone — it's able to detect colors in a photo and turn them into a video filter that can then be used in Premiere, which is pretty cool.

That ties into Adobe's other big series of releases today. Premiere Pro is getting those wonderful color correction tools that Adobe previewed in April. Photoshop is also getting new features, including a photo haze reduction tool, improved blur effects, and content-aware fill for panoramas. And other major apps, like Illustrator, Lightroom, and After Effects, are also getting updates. With them, Adobe is bringing the name of its CC apps up to CC 2015. That alone doesn't have a meaningful impact for most subscribers — Adobe releases updates throughout the year, not just when it updates the version number — but the name update is meant to help people using old files or apps keep track of compatibility across the years.

In our effort to provide more meta-data about RSS feeds on the web, today, we’re adding popularity. The popularity of a feed is a good indication of the impact of its stories. When dealing with an information overload it can be interesting to provide hints to your customers about how popular a feed is.

Computation

Our popularity rank is a positive float value. It starts at 0 and the greater it is, the more popular a feed is. We compute it using many different signals which include:

• Number of subscribers
• Impact on social networks
• Popularity of the web pages which link to the feed
• … etc

It is refreshed every couple days for each feed, but you should expect its value to stay relatively stable over short periods of time. Of course, we’re still adding more signals to improve its accuracy.

The distribution of the popularity accross the Superfeedr feeds is pretty aggressive and very popular feeds (>=10) are orders of magnitude less frequent than feeds with a pretty good popularity (>=5) ¹.

Popularity2	0	1	2	3	4	5
Percentile	85.5%	4.38%	3.50%	2.84%	1.96%	1.06%

Popularity	6	7	8	9	10	11
Percentile	0.51%	0.184%	0.028%	0.004%	0.0006%	0.0001%

Accessing the popularity

It’s part of our schema, which means that you’ll find the popularity in every item which has the feed’s status.

In the notifications

The notifications do include the popularity, whether they’re ATOM or Json:

{
  "status": {
    "code": 200,
    "http": "Fetched (ping) 200 43200 and parsed 1/20 entries",
    "nextFetch": 1434490007,
    "entriesCountSinceLastMaintenance": 7,
    "velocity": 1.1,
    "popularity": 3,
    "period": 43200,
    "lastFetch": 1434446807,
    "lastParse": 1434446807,
    "lastMaintenanceAt": 1434400440,
    "feed": "http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed"
  },
  // ...
}

When retrieving

It’s also available when retrieving a feed’s past entries and status:

curl -G https://push.superfeedr.com/
  -d 'hub.mode=retrieve' 
  -d 'hub.topic=http://blog.superfeedr.com/atom.xml' 
  -d 'format=json'

200 Success
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "status": {
    "entriesCountSinceLastMaintenance": 0,
    "velocity": 0.5,
    "popularity": 5.23,
    "pornRank": 0,
    "bozoRank": 0,
    "lastParse": 1434444387000,
    "period": 43200,
    "lastMaintenanceAt": 1434444388000,
    "feed": "http://blog.superfeedr.com/atom.xml",
    "lastFetch": 1434444387000,
    "code": 200,
    "title": "Superfeedr Blog : Real-time cloudy thoughts from a super-hero",
    "nextFetch": 1434487587000,
    "http": "Fetched (ring) 200 43200 and parsed 0/10 entries"
  },
  // ..
}

When searching

Finally, it’s also available when searching for feeds, which means you can easily list the most popular feeds to which you’re subscribed. You can of course use a range syntax (>, <, <=, >=) to identify feeds whose popularity is greater or smaller than a given value:

curl -G https://push.superfeedr.com/ 
  -d 'hub.mode=list' 
  -d 'page=1' 
  -d 'by_page=20' 
  -d 'detailed=true' 
  -d 'search[feed.popularity]=>5'

This will yield all feed’s to which you are subscribed for which the popularity is greater than 5.

Stuffed Hipster Emblems is an experiment in media and meta-narratives — soft sculpture replicas of iconic goods using the very levers that invoke such fetishism among their artisanal, small-batch enthusiasts (scarcity, tactile materials, hand-made processes).

StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, the Philae lander reawakened after seven dormant months, the best outcome that mission scientists could've hoped for with the way the mission unfolded. But the first probe to softly land on a comet ever would never have needed to hibernate at all if we had simply built it with the nuclear power capabilities it should've had. The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A blind calico cat named Stevie recently climbed a mountain in the Comeragh Range located near County Tipperary, Ireland alongside her doting human Patrick. While Stevie wasn’t able to see the beautiful scenery around her, she used her keen sense of smell (and Patrick) to help guide her along the way.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Late at night in the fall of 2009, Spencer Gaffney, a sophomore at Princeton University, was wandering the aisles of the university store searching for a late night snack when he noticed something interesting: At 210 calories, an unfrosted strawberry Pop-Tart had 10 more calories per serving than its frosted counterpart.

Gaffney wrote up a blog post to share his confusion. “It’s one of those things that when you find out about it, you want to tell everybody about it,” Gaffney, who now works in finance but was then a member of the University Press Club, told Quartz.

Four years later, the post about the Pop-Tart discovery went viral on Reddit and to this day, it still brings readers to the club’s blog The Ink, as the second most-viewed post in its history. But Gaffney never got an answer from Kellogg’s about why the disparity exists.

Now, after contacting Kellogg’s ourselves, Quartz finally has solved the mystery of the unfrosted Pop-Tarts.

“Unfrosted Pop-Tarts have a slightly thicker crust to compensate for the lack of frosting, resulting in a few more calories per serving,” a Kellogg’s representative told Quartz in an email. It compensates for its sad lack of frosting in several ways, the representative said: “the overall composition of the food, including weight, breakability, toastabilty.”

The lesson: Never underestimate the power of a direct question (and a PR rep’s email address).