firehose

For providers of kidnap and ransom insurance (K&R in the lingo), the past few years have been good.

	Courtney shared this story from fuck yeah, hard femme!:
	<3

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thearcanetheory:

bloglikeanegyptian:

an evening of reading the most awful misogynistic articles on dumb islamic websites has lead me to this:

i’ve always kind of wanted to do a webcomic starring a badass muslim superhero who defends women against the kind of stupid idiocy we have to put up with every day whilst shutting up all the white feminists who try to co-opt the struggle.

i actually sincerely want to develop this because do you REALIZE the potential behind a hijabi/niqabi superhero like her outfit comes with a ready-made abaya-cape and a mask so i’m really into it but yeah this is sort of a quick brain storming comic for the entire concept lemme know if you like it.

OMG DEENA

	Courtney shared this story from fuck yeah, hard femme!:
	I need this shirt, obviously.

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alibuttons:

Like my shirt? You can get yours here! Designed by the amazing Max Heron! 

20-Week Abortion Ban has Near-Majority Support Utah Policy A new National Journal poll finds 48% of Americans favor the ban while 44% oppose it. Recently, House Republicans (with the help of a few Democrats) passed a bill to do just that. The Texas Legislature's attempt to pass a similar measure failed after ... and more »

Megablast (Taito - arcade - 1989)

PROS:

• SEARCH! Very limited in depth (item titles only) but not scope (all feeds, no apparent time limit).
• FIRST-PARTY SHARING AND SOCIAL COMMENTING! RSS feeds on shared item pages.
• First-party auth with third-party options (Facebook, Google).
• OPML import and export.
• Responsive design on mobile and desktop.
• Widely localized UI (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, two types of Russian, Ukranian, Catalan, Magyar, Swedish, Turkish, Slavic, Polish, Greek, Czech, Norwegian Bokmål).
• UI customization options (toggle date order, toggle read/unread visibility, toggle mark-as-read while scrolling).
• Pocket integration.
• Rudimentary API; Feeddler for iOS already implemented it.
• GReader/vim-style standard keyboard shortcuts, including / for search.
• Friendfinding with username search, Facebook and Google connectors.
• Trending/popular items feed based on likes.

CONS:

• NO PRIVACY OPTIONS.
• Ugly. Small font, tight leading, inconsistent padding in rendered items. No font customization abilities.
• Frequently down for maintenance.
• UI is fast on reading but slow on liking and sharing.
• Unintuitive UI for feed organization. To create a new folder, drag a feed to the bottom of the list of folders; to rename a feed or folder, double-click it. Dragging feeds between folders doesn’t always work.
• No comment view; difficult to find commented items.
• No support for some embeds. YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud work, but everything else is a cointoss.
• Few third-party sharing or read-it-later options. Only Facebook and Pocket.
• Infrequently updates feeds. Manual feed refresh is instant, though.
• Reshared items don’t credit previous sharers, limiting discovery.
• Likes are counted, but only two likers are shown on an item, limiting discovery.
• No HTTPS login.
• API doesn’t support social features yet.
• No way to save items for later without Pocket.
• UI’s touch targets are finicky on mobile.

PICKING NITS:

• Mark-as-read is inflexible (all or nothing).
• Unread counts are frequently off by one.
• Some commented items stick in the commented items queue.
• No statistics.

PROS:

• Read-it-later support (Pocket, Readability, Instapaper)
• A little third-party sharing (Facebook, Twitter)
• Decently readable design
• Uses digg data to indicate how popular a story is (1-3 red dots in list view)
• Digging, saving, and sharing are all separate actions (sharing, saving isn’t endorsement)
• Suggested feeds (Click Add, then Browse Categories)

CONS:

• NO OPML IMPORT OR EXPORT. Imports from Google Account only. No word yet on what they’re going to do when GReader shuts down.
• REQUIRES THIRD-PARTY AUTH. (FB, Twitter, Google)
• NO SOCIAL, NO COMMENTS, NO FIRST-PARTY SHARING
• NO “ONLY UNREAD ITEMS" VIEW
• Not really responsive; list view gets unreadable in portrait orientation
• No mark-as-read keyboard shortcut
• Email sharing is just a mailto: trigger

PICKING NITS:

• Gobs of wasted white space when reading items on desktop
• Takes after New GReader’s tendency to pad things vertically a little too much
• 15/22 Georgia isn’t great on longreads; no font customization options, though it uses browser zoom well (icons and logo scale very well)
• Table rendering is pretty bad
• Mark as Read isn’t flexible (all or nothing)

yesterdaydream:

This is a horrible day.

Goodbye, Reader.

Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the application verbally, spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told Reuters.

With Google Reader closing in just a few days, it may be time to export your data. Services like Feedly are already building migration tools, but if you just want to look at the data, this tiny webapp has you covered.

Read more...

“Sid’s never had to write a design document, because instead of debating with you about some new feature he wants to implement, he’ll just go home and at night he’ll implement it,” Solomon said. “And then tomorrow when he comes in he’ll say, ‘Okay, now play this new feature.’ And you’ll play, and then you can have a real conversation about the game, instead of looking at some design document.”

July 1st marks the start of the Gromit Unleashed charity art exhibition in Bristol. Eighty statues of Wallace & Gromit's beloved stop-motion pooch are appearing all over the city, each custom designed by a different artist.

Read more...

… After.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

“Get more ew,” indeed

but thanks to Movies.com, we now know what would have happened in it if the studio hadn’t changed directions:

Instead of heading to Wales, Brad Pitt’s plane deposits him in Moscow, where he joins a military squad devoted to ridding the world of the undead. Meanwhile, his family hides out in a Florida refugee camp, where his wife (Mireille Enos) trades her body (!) to a soldier played by Matthew Fox (!!) in exchange for his protection.

GET MORE EW

Original Source

Modern operating systems may seem baroque in their complexity, but nearly every one of them  - except for Windows, natch – are based on the idea of simplicity and modularity. This is the lesson that UNIX taught us, explained perfectly in a little film from Bell Labs in 1982 starring giants of computation, [Dennis Ritchie], [Ken Thompson], [Brian Kernighan], and others.

At the time this film was made, UNIX had been around for about 10 years. In that time, it had moved far from an OS cloistered in giant mainframes attached to teletypes to slightly smaller minicomputers wired up to video terminals. Yes, smallish computers like the Apple II and the VIC-20 were around by this time, but they were toys compared to the hulking racks inside Bell Labs.

The film explains the core concept of UNIX by demonstrating modularity with a great example by [Brian Kernighan]. He took a short passage from a paper he wrote and found spelling errors by piping his paper though different commands from the shell. First the words in the paper were separated line by line, made lowercase, and sorted alphabetically. All the unique words were extracted from this list, and compared to a dictionary. A spell checker in one line of code, brought to you by the power of UNIX.

Filed under: Software Development, software hacks

Mark Ruffalo on terror advisory list:

Actor Mark Ruffalo has been placed on a terror advisory list by U.S. officials after organizing screenings for a new documentary about natural gas drilling.
…
The “Zodiac” actor arranged showings for “GasLand” earlier this year and voiced his concerns about the practice in relation to the national water supplies.

popular shared this story from collision detection.

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Do you have one of these sig-file apologies at the end of your phone mail?

You probably should. A recent study suggests that it'll improve your image -- because when recipients see that you wrote the email on your phone, they're more likely to forgive your crappy grammar and spelling. And therein lies some fascinating psychology of our machine age!

In the experiment, Caleb T. Carr and Chad Stefaniak took 111 undergraduates and had them assess an email that was purportedly written by the "HR director of a large accounting firm". The students were split randomly into four groups, and each group was shown a slightly different version of the message. One group saw a version of the message with correct spelling, punctuation and grammar, and it looked like it came from someone who'd written it on a computer: i.e. the signature line just listed the HR person's name and organization. The second group saw the same message, but with several sloppy errors introduced. (It's below.) The third group and fourth groups saw the same respective messages -- one correct, one incorrect -- except this time the signature included the line ‘‘Sent from my iPhone’’.

After reading the message, the students in each group were asked to rate how credible they found the sender, on a scale of 1 to 5, from low to high.

The results? When the message had correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, the sender was rated as being very credible -- and there was little difference between whether the email seemed to have been composed on a computer or a phone. But when the message had errors in it, things changed: Students attributed higher credibility to the person who'd written the lousy message on a phone. They were more forgiving of errors, as this chart of the results shows:

Now, note that Y axis on that chart has been truncated to emphasize the spread, so it's not as dramatic as it seems. But it's still a pretty significant effect.

In one sense, this finding confirms what I'd already expected: We're aware that our machines introduce quirks in how others communicate with us, and we account for them. This is an old behavior, of course. We engage in linguistic code-switching all the time, accepting as natural that our friends will use language more casual or even coarse when we're hanging out alone as compared to when we're with their parents or employers. But it's intriguing to see evidence that we're now intuiting the code-shift brokered by this particular machine environment: A tiny glass screen with an intangible keyboard, upon which it's super easy to make mistakes. (I wonder what we'd have found if we'd done this research back in the 19th century, when manual typewriters were the hot new tech?)

As the authors note, one could sneakily hack this effect to appear more credible ... even while at the computer:

Unfortunately, less scrupulous professionals could go so far as to alter their desktop’s e-mail client to automatically include a signature block imitating a mobile device to take strategic advantage of the error forgiveness that accompanies mobile e-mail.

Heh.

I'm also wondering how autocorrect plays into this. I'd be interested to see this study repeated not with errors of punctuation, spelling and grammar, but errors of substitution -- i.e. sentences where a wrong word has been inserted into an otherwise correct sentence. When it comes to our compositional style on mobile phones, the main algorithmic error du jour is autocorrect: The machine mistakenly predicting which word we're intending to type. I bet that autocorrect errors are now so common, and their source so well understood, that we're similarly forgiving of mobile messages that contain weird, misplaced words.

Indeed, the existence of pop-culture sites like Damn You Autocorrect! indicate that we're developing a pretty good literacy, and sense of humor, about this particular form of inadvertent cyborg utterance. Given the fact that the majority of stuff on Damn You Autocorrect revolves around Iphones accidentally creating sexually inappropriate substitutions of absolutely epic dimensions, you could say that autocorrect is the Freudian slip of the digital psyche. Of course, a lot of the particularly racy errors submitted to Damn You Autocorrect are probably faked, but frankly that might make them even more awesome: We're sufficiently aware of autocorrect problems that we've created a literary form out of them.

(The full paper -- "Sent from My iPhone: The Medium and Message as Cues of Sender Professionalism in Mobile Telephony" -- is here, but alas is paywalled. It was so awesome I wanted to write about it anyway.)

rubyvroom:

I just learned that Vin Diesel taught Judi Dench how to play Dungeons and Dragons and now she DMs for her grandchildren and I feel better about the world in general.

On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media.

My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I'll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn't duplicate.

Anyone can post fake photos and acquire lots of friends who are actually acquaintances. But I'll bet there are so many patterns and tendencies of "normal" use on Facebook that a terrorist wouldn't be able to successfully fake it.

Okay, but so what? Imagine you had such an amazingly accurate test...then what? Do we investigate those who test positive, even though there's no suspicion that they've actually done anything? Do we follow them around? Subject them to additional screening at airports? Throw them in jail because we know the streets will be safer because of it? Do we want to live in a Minority Report world?

The problem isn't just that such a system is wrong, it's that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It's called the "base rate fallacy." Suppose you have a test that's 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy -- only a 1% false positive rate -- even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath.

This fallacy isn't new. It's the same thinking that caused us to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, stop people in their cars because they're black, and frisk them at airports because they're Muslim. It's the same thinking behind massive NSA surveillance programs like PRISM. It's one of the things that scares me about police DNA databases.

Many authors have written stories about thoughtcrime. Who has written about genecrime?

BTW, if you want to meet an actual sociopath, I recommend this book (review here) and this blog.

It’s time to bury the term “Foodie.” I suggest we replace it with “Food Asshole”

As Google Reader gets put to rest, we talked with Andrew McLaughlin, CEO of the relaunched Digg, about the way we consume media now and how to make sense of content overload.

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There's buzz going around right now about how Pacific Rim, Legendary Entertainment's $200 million, Guillermo del Toro-directed summer tentpole of a hopefully-blockbuster. Specifically, that it's not trending so hot in audience interest and that folks are showing more attachment to Grown Ups 2, a situation that has a lot of film critics weeping into their pillows, I am sure. It's certainly worrying for folks who like to see extravagantly funded original science fiction films come out of Hollywood, though it doesn't necessarily appear to be a death knell for the movie (knock on wood). Certainly not to Legendary Entertainment's president and chief creative officer, Jon Jashni,who says that appealing to the nerds first, and then widening the scope of their marketing was all in the plan. What I'm most interested in, however, is who he considers to be in the "nerd" audience.

“I think Boomers are somewhat disappointed in the way things have turned out in recent years,” he says, “and I think they have a right to feel that something unfair has taken place.”

The popular "Terminator" film franchise will be resurrected in a new stand-alone trilogy, with the first installment slated to open in theaters on June 26, 2015, Hollywood studio Paramount Pictures said on Thursday.