firehose

From 2011, accounting for a portion of Massachusetts that is home to America’s biggest witch-hunt, a history of savage wife mobs, the occasional 400 percent increase of unlucky pregnancies, and the world’s largest deposits of black crystals.

Meshach writes "A study in the journal Computers & Education found that students who took notes on a laptop got lower marks then student who took notes the traditional way with pen and paper. The study's author hypothesized that using a laptop leads to multitasking (i.e. surfing the net or checking email), which reduces concentration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did Jack in the Box know that marketing its “Chipotle Chicken Club Combo”—a meal with a “Chipotload of flavor”—would get it into trouble with Chipotle Mexican Grill? Because it did!

The most anticipated game on the planet may not even be in production, if you believe the words of a longtime Valve actor who has made appearances in games like Half-Life 2 and Dota 2.

“To boldly er… spatula.”

The Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise Spatula from ThinkGeek is a handy piece of kitchenware designed to look just like a certain fictional spacecraft from the Star Trek franchise. The metal handle even extends to “keep you safe from the heat.” It is available to purchase online. This would go great with their Star Trek Spock Oven Mitt.

While we can’t hop on a ship and explore the galaxy with Kirk, Spock, and friends, we do a good amount of exploration in our kitchens. In the warm months, our CSA drops off a box of mystery vegetation every week. What do you do with a kohlrabi the size of a basketball? How many ways can you prepare cauliflower? What does one do with garlic scapes or squash blossoms? These are questions that excite us as culinary explorers.

images and video via ThinkGeek

There was a Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting yesterday where more features of Fedora 20 were approved...

San Francisco Chronicle

Dow falls as much as 200 points as Wal-Mart warns USA TODAY SHARE 229 CONNECT 63 TWEET 53 COMMENTEMAILMORE. NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average initially fell more than 200 points Thursday morning as investors reacted to a weak outlook from retail giant Wal-Mart and a spike in the yield on ... Markets Tumble on Wal-Mart Earnings and Fed UncertaintyNew York Times Wall Street drops, weighed by Wal-Mart, CiscoReuters Dow down 200 as Cisco and Wal-Mart disappointkdvr.com The Denver Channel -Forbes all 75 news articles »

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is once again available to buy through the App Store and distributor Beamdog's site, two months after its removal from those locations at Atari's request. Producer Phillip Daigle confirmed the RPG remake's return.

An email apparently sent out by Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, posted on Reddit and sent to us by a reader, says "all outstanding issues with our publishing partner have been resolved." Oster had previously identified the issue-having "publishing partner" as Atari, who requested the game's removal because of contract matters, a month before Atari Inc. auctioned its assets.

The email also mentions a "major" BG:EE patch, as well as details on the unreleased Android version of BG:EE. We've reached out to Beamdog to confirm.

In our deja review, we said Enhanced Edition was a careful, if not colossal, rework of the BioWare classic: "BG:EE's tune-ups, additions, and even its graphical tweaks aren't there to dazzle, but simply to enhance. If Baldur's Gate is the seminal face of BioWare's RPG beginnings, then Enhanced Edition is its graceful make-up, and Overhaul the doting stylist straining to make sure it all blends in."

[Thanks Jochem, Jason!]

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition returns following Atari contract issues originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 15 Aug 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Archie gang cancels fictional trip to Russia! A look at the Dark Horse Originals line! The expanding digital comics landscape! Kent State promotes Heisman bid with weekly comic strip! Plus much more!

I just added a couple season 1 episodes (S01E02 and S01E03) in addition to S02E01 that it’s already doing. It’s still picking at random, but from now on there’s a 2/3 chance there will be content from season 1. At least until I add more episodes.

Posts will now be tagged with “#wiresXXeXX” for the season/episode.

Some people have asked why I started with S02E01: um, well, it was the only episode I had a full video of at hand when I started making this.

You may also want to ask why I’ve added the 2nd and 3rd episodes of Season 1, and not the 1st. The reason is: the video file corrupted while it was transferring to my USB stick. ☆☆ GLAMOROUS ☆☆

“Steve, you’re an asshole,” someone says early in Jobs, a point the film reinforces repeatedly over the course of its 122 minutes, as if to counter the inspirational music and dramatic monologues that riddle it. For (nearly) every yin of Ashton Kutcher’s Steve Jobs flashing a moment of brilliance, there’s a yang of someone saying he’s changed or is his own worst enemy. The unwritten, but understood, full title of Joshua Michael Stern’s film is Jobs: Brilliant Asshole.

Stern (Swing Vote) had his work cut out for him. Although his movie hits theaters first, it does so under the shadow of another, more anticipated biopic penned by Aaron Sorkin and based on Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Steve Jobs. Isaacson had Jobs’ full cooperation for the book, and Jobs professed to being a fan of Sorkin’s. On the other hand, Ashton Kutcher resembles ...

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Since last month, scores of dolphins have washing up on Atlantic Ocean beaches, dying or already dead. Marine biologists are alarmed. Looking at the historical trend, you can see why:

The federal government has classified the situation as an “unusual mortality event” (UME), defined as a “a significant die-off of any marine mammal population” that “demands immediate response.”

UMEs happen a lot, it turns out. So far this year, we’ve had 600 manatee dies in Florida and more than 400 sea lion pups in California. But there’s something more tragic about dolphins. Perhaps it’s their mammalian familiarity—they name each other, have “the longest pure memory” of any animal (paywall), are self-aware, imitate humans, and the list goes on.

But there’s a better reason than empathy to care about mass dolphin-death: It may telling us some scary things about the state of the ocean.

“Dolphins are at the front lines of ocean health,” says Matt Huelsenbeck, a marine scientist at the non-profit Oceana. Dolphis are “the top predators—everything trickles [through them] … They’re more important than a lot of research buoys in terms of what’s going on.”

Factors that might cause bottlenose dolphins to croak in such high volumes include disease, toxin exposure, ocean acidification, and malnutrition. With this summer’s extraordinary death toll, disease tops the list of likely causes—specifically morbilivirus, a sea mammal version of the measles that killed between 740 and 1,200 bottlenose dolphins in the mid-Atlantic in 1987. So far, one dolphin has tested positive for the virus, which dolphins spread when they come up for air.

Even if it does turn out to be an epidemic, though, climate change and pollution can play a role. Diseases have been shown to spread more rapidly in higher water temperature in other species. Plus, toxins like mercury weaken dolphins, making them more susceptible to pathogens by suppressing their immune systems.

There are signs that the recent dolphin die-off is caused directly by pollution, not disease. Charles Potter, a marine mammal expert with the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, points to an unusually high number of males and calves are turning up dead.

“Males don’t have a mechanism for shedding contaminants,” Potter told the Smithsonian Magazine’s blog. “The females shed significant amounts of their lipid-soluble contaminants through lactation, so the calf gets a hell of a dose early on in life, and some of the most outrageous levels of contaminants we’ve seen have been in calves.”

Regardless of the cause, the pace of death is picking up; in Virginia, 35 died in the last week alone, compared with 48 in July. Distressing numbers of dolphins are dying in Florida and Texas too. In fact, similar deaths occurred earlier this year in Italy and Australia and may be happening now in Norway. Though a couple of bottlenose UMEs every few years isn’t necessarily cause for worry, the rising incidence is troubling:

A “rock star teacher” in South Korea earns $4 million a year, most of it from online tutoring in English. Kim Ki-hoon’s success story showed up in the Wall Street Journal recently as a window into how much Koreans value their teachers.

But they’re hardly alone in that sentiment, multimillion-dollar outliers aside. Quartz examined OECD data for the most experienced high school and upper secondary instructors across the globe and found wide discrepancies in teacher pay globally, and, often, within countries too.

Indonesia or the Slovak Republic are among the lowest paid among any countries tracked by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development. In Indonesia, teachers earn $2,849 on average a year, while in the Slovak Republic, it’s $13,864 for top teachers with many years experience.

The highest paid teachers are found in Luxembourg at $125,962 annually. Meanwhile, Switzerland pays an average $94,038 a year for the most experienced teachers. In the millionaire tutor’s home of Korea, secondary teachers earn a top wage of $76,423, the fourth highest on the OECD list. In the US, they earn $56,303, just above the average for all OECD countries of $50,119. Elementary school teachers earn less and some schools in high cost areas pay much more, or offer housing assistance. By some accounts, Long Island, NY, has the highest average salaries for US high school teachers at $82,500, and some math and science teachers there earn far more.

Yet does high pay and pay for performance really improve student education?

Students in Korea and Finland have the highest reading scores among OECD countries, but Chinese students are higher still. (China is not measured in the OECD teacher-pay data, but a separate gauge shows its university professors are among the lowest paid, earning the equivalent of $259 a month.) Another measure of success is how many students go on to college or other advanced education. In the US, some 43% of 18- year-olds are in advanced or so-called tertiary programs, while in Belgium it’s 36%, and in Korean 65%, according to OECD data.

Test scores are higher in schools that offer individual performance incentives, several research reports indicate, but this could be because better schools can afford them. Other researchers suggest that recruiting higher ability people into teaching and providing faster salary increases will help student outcomes.

“Student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it,” wrote professor Ludger Woessman in a paper published in July 2010 (pdf).

Other research shows performance-based pay works when it is coupled with other initiatives (pdf) that gives teachers both respect and power to change the educational system.

That might help explain Kim Ki-hoon. As an entrepreneur-teacher, his empire includes 30 workers and a publishing company for his textbooks, according to the Journal piece. He doesn’t really have to answer to anybody—except his students. Or customers.

Follow writer-entrepreneur Vickie Elmer on Twitter @WorkingKind. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Chemists have calculated that chains of double or triple-bonded carbon atoms, known as carbyne, should be stronger and stiffer than any known material.

The United States and United Kingdom are home to virtually all of the world’s top universities, and schools in Asia and continental Europe are barely worth a passing glance—at least in the eyes of an influential China ranking.

Harvard once again claimed the top spot in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s list of the world’s top institutions of higher learning, followed by Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, University of Chicago and Oxford. No Asian universities and only one from continental Europe—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich—cracked the top 20.

The University of Tokyo was the sole Asian school in the top 100, and there were only three from mainland China in the top 200, as Shanghai’s Fudan University moved ahead of Peking University—in the absolute rankings, Fudan was sandwiched between the US universities Florida State and George Mason. Jiao Tong ranked itself third in mainland China, and #167 overall.

As Quartz has reported, by the end of this decade, three out of every 10 college students in the world will come from China. But the country hasn’t been able to build enough world-class educational facilities to meet domestic demand, prompting the country’s wealthy elite to send their progeny abroad for higher education.

The Jiao Tong rankings are calculated in part by measuring the number of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, the number of “highly cited” researchers, and the number of articles by faculty published in the magazines Nature and Science. Those measures tend to favor schools that are strong in math, science, and economics, and to work against schools that emphasize the humanities. The methodology also tends to make the rankings quite static: The top 10 barely shifted this time around, other than Berkeley and MIT changing places.

Here’s the top 50 (and the full list):

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. University of California, Berkeley
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
5. University of Cambridge
6. California Institute of Technology
7. Princeton University
8. Columbia University
9. University of Chicago
10. University of Oxford
11. Yale University
12. University of California, Los Angeles
13. Cornell University
14. University of California, San Diego
15. University of Pennsylvania
16. University of Washington
17. The Johns Hopkins University
18. University of California, San Francisco
19. University of Wisconsin – Madison
20. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
21. The University of Tokyo
22. University College London
23. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
24. The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
25. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
26. Kyoto University
27. New York University
28. University of Toronto
29. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
30. Northwestern University
31. Duke University
32. Washington University in St. Louis
33. University of Colorado at Boulder
34. Rockefeller University
35. University of California, Santa Barbara
36. The University of Texas at Austin
37. Pierre and Marie Curie University – Paris 6
38. University of Maryland, College Park
39. University of Paris Sud (Paris 11)
40. University of British Columbia
41. The University of Manchester
42. University of Copenhagen
43. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
44. Karolinska Institute
45. University of California, Irvine
46. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
47. University of California, Davis
47. University of Southern California
49. Vanderbilt University
50. Technical University Munich

Egypt says 525 people were killed on Wednesday when security forces stormed Islamist protest camps in Cairo after a stand-off lasting weeks.

The numbers: Disappointing. Total revenue rose just 2.3% to $116.9 billion during Wal-Mart’s second quarter, shy of Wall Street expectations. Profit at the world’s largest retailer increased 1.3% to $4.07 billion. Total US same-store sales—the US accounted for 60% of the company’s sales in the quarter—were flat. Wal-Mart cut its full-year profit forecast; shares fell in pre-market trading.

The takeaway: Wal-Mart’s results in recent quarters have suggested that the payroll tax increases that went into effect earlier this year are pinching less-affluent consumers. Company executives said that was also the case in the second quarter. “The two percent payroll tax increase continues to impact our customer,” said Bill Simon, Walmart US president and CEO.

What’s interesting: As the Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart notes (paywall), Wal-Mart’s growth prospects are not what they used to be, in part because so many of the smaller stores it once took share from have closed. Now Wal-Mart’s main competitors for spending by less-affluent consumers are dollar stores such as Family Dollar and Dollar General, who are every bit as competitive on price.

cynehild:

My incredibly overdue CarolCon gift for Aporeticelenchus. Captain Marvel in the style of the Manesse Codex (c. 1304-40, Germany) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse. Gouache and leaf on pergamenata.

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WinCo is a midwestern midwestern chain of worker-owned stores that consistently underprice WalMart, while still paying a living wage to their staff and decent prices to their suppliers. Their secret appears to be a smaller selection of goods, sourced directly from factories -- but surely the fact that they're not extracting billions in profits for a family of rapacious plutocrats also helps keep prices low.

Burt Flickinger III, a reputable grocery store analyst, called them "Walmart's worst nightmare." They provide health benefits to all employees who work 24 hours per week or more, as well as pensions. They are expanding into Texas, and Time's Brad Tuttle predicts that they'll double in size every five to seven years.

Prices are kept low through a variety of strategies, the main one being that it often cuts out distributors and other middle men and buys many goods directly from farms and factories. WinCo also trims costs by not accepting credit cards and by asking customers to bag their own groceries. Similarly to warehouse membership stores like Sam’s Club and Costco, and also to successful discount grocers with small stores like Trader Joe’s and Aldi, WinCo stores are organized and minimalist, without many frills, and without the tremendous variety of merchandise that’s become standard at most supermarkets. “Everything is neat and clean, but basic,” Hauptman told Supermarket News. “Though the stores are very large, with a lot of categories, they lack depth or breadth of variety.”

While all of these factors help WinCo compete with Walmart on price, what really might scare the world’s largest retailer is how WinCo treats its employees. In sharp contrast to Walmart, which regularly comes under fire for practices like understaffing stores to keep costs down and hiring tons of temporary workers as a means to avoid paying full-time worker benefits, WinCo has a reputation for doing right by employees. It provides health benefits to all staffers who work at least 24 hours per week. The company also has a pension, with employees getting an amount equal to 20% of their annual salary put in a plan that’s paid for by WinCo; a company spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman that more than 400 nonexecutive workers (cashiers, produce clerks, and such) currently have pensions worth over $1 million apiece. Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/08/07/meet-the-low-key-low-cost-grocery-chain-being-called-wal-marts-worst-nightmare/#ixzz2bjdwYQC9

Meet the Low-Key, Low-Cost Grocery Chain Being Called ‘Walmart’s Worst Nightmare’ [Brad Tuttle/Time]

(via Kottke)

(Image: The Bulk Bin Area at Winco, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from alishav's photostream)

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Back in 2012, the major US banks settled a federal mortgage-fraud lawsuit for $95,000,000. $1B. The suit was filed by Lynn Szymoniak, a white-collar fraud specialist, whose own house had been fraudulently foreclosed-upon. When the feds settled with the banks, the evidence detailing the scope of their fraud was sealed, but as of last week, those docs are unsealed, and Szymoniak is shouting them from the hills. The banks precipitated the subprime crash by "securitizing" mortgages -- turning mortgages into bonds that could be sold to people looking for investment income -- and the securitization process involved transferring title for homes several times over. This title-transfer has a formal legal procedure, and in the absence of that procedure, no sale had taken place. See where this is going?

The banks screwed up the title transfers. A lot. They sold bonds backed by houses they didn't own. When it came time to foreclose on those homes, they realized that they didn't actually own them, and so they committed felony after felony, forging the necessary documentation. They stole houses, by the neighborhood-load, and got away with it. The $1B settlement sounded like a big deal, back when the evidence was sealed. Now that Szymoniak's gotten it into the public eye, it's clear that $1B was a tiny slap on the wrist: the banks stole trillions of dollars' worth of houses from you and people like you, paid less than one percent in fines, and got to keep the homes.

Now that it’s unsealed, Szymoniak, as the named plaintiff, can go forward and prove the case. Along with her legal team (which includes the law firm of Grant & Eisenhoffer, which has recovered more money under the False Claims Act than any firm in the country), Szymoniak can pursue discovery and go to trial against the rest of the named defendants, including HSBC, the Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank and US Bank.

The expenses of the case, previously borne by the government, now are borne by Szymoniak and her team, but the percentages of recovery funds are also higher. “I’m really glad I was part of collecting this money for the government, and I’m looking forward to going through discovery and collecting the rest of it,” Szymoniak told Salon.

It’s good that the case remains active, because the $95 million $1 billion settlement was a pittance compared to the enormity of the crime. By the end of 2009, private mortgage-backed securities trusts held one-third of all residential mortgages in the U.S. That means that tens of millions of home mortgages worth trillions of dollars have no legitimate underlying owner that can establish the right to foreclose. This hasn’t stopped banks from foreclosing anyway with false documents, and they are often successful, a testament to the breakdown of law in the judicial system. But to this day, the resulting chaos in disentangling ownership harms homeowners trying to sell these properties, as well as those trying to purchase them. And it renders some properties impossible to sell.

To this day, banks foreclose on borrowers using fraudulent mortgage assignments, a legacy of failing to prosecute this conduct and instead letting banks pay a fine to settle it. This disappoints Szymoniak, who told Salon the owner of these loans is now essentially “whoever lies the most convincingly and whoever gets the benefit of doubt from the judge.” Szymoniak used her share of the settlement to start the Housing Justice Foundation, a non-profit that attempts to raise awareness of the continuing corruption of the nation’s courts and land title system.

Your mortgage documents are fake! [David Dayen/Salon]

(Image: Foreclosure, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from andrewbain's photostream)

MADISON — During recent renovations of the Science Building at Fairleigh Dickinson University's College at Florham, workers found an 81-year-old time capsule; a can with a note inside listing workers involved in a bathroom remodeling project back in 1932. The note was written during Prohibition, when the sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal per the 18th Amendment, and it makes a special appeal to the finder of the note. The following is the text as it was written: These Bathrooms was Remodled in 1932 E.J. Parsons of Morristown N.J. did the Plumbing work and Edw F Daniker of 70 Britten St Madison did the Tile work other men worked on the Job are J. T. Steating Madison Peter Moore " Joe Gero " Tom Skelly Morristown Chas. Clements " It was during Probition and it was a very dry Job. The finder of this note if the 18 Amendment has bin changed have a good Drink on us. E. Daniker

Well, it's done. [ more › ]

Inmates at Guantanamo Bay are hunger striking in an attempt to make their suffering visible while children at a camp in Florida are using the fantasy of hunger as entertainment.

You've seen John B. Spark's Histomap of world empires, but he also made versions charting religions, "from primitive cults to modern philosophies," and the evolutionary tree. These are very hard to find, now, but pop up on eBay now and again: the lone current offering there, of the religion map, is already at $155, with thirty bids and more than 5 days left on the clock. A photo of the top half is in the auction gallery.

Embedded below, however, is a great big 5MB JPG of the evolutionary map, spotted by Slate's Rebecca Onion at Samphan Sittiwantana's Pinterest page.

We're loving these gorgeous, rotated-reality window displays designed by Coroflotter Marlene Mazieres. The Paris-based Mazieres, formerly a designer of visual merchandising at Christian Dior, whipped these windows up for her new employer, men's luxury brand Berluti as part of their display at Harrods.

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