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The U.S. Park Police Can't Keep Track Of All Its Useless Guns
NFL Arrests Per Team, Charted
Facebook to pull ads from all Groups and Pages with violent, graphic, or sexual content
Facebook is taking new steps to assure advertisers that their valued brands won't be associated with controversial Pages and Groups hosted on the social network. The company says it already enforces a stringent removal policy for terms of service violations, but readily admits there's more that can be done to prevent advertisers from being linked to unwanted or inappropriate content. "We recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action," the company said in a statement today. And it's not waiting long to get started; beginning Monday, Facebook will implement a new review process for determining which Pages and Groups are a good match for advertising placement. "This process will expand the scope of Pages and Groups that should be ad-restricted," reads the statement.
Facebook can be confident of that since it now intends to pull ads from pages containing any violent, graphic or sexual content. The company says this new review process will be handled manually at first — by real humans — but it's working towards an automated solution capable of handling the screening process at a larger scale. "While these changes won't have a meaningful impact on Facebook's business, they will result in benefits to people and marketers," Facebook's statement concludes. The company says results won't be perfect, but it's pledged to continue working at providing advertisers a headache-free experience.
The change in policy arrives after several brands pulled their Facebook ad campaigns after their products appeared alongside content deemed offensive to their audience.
Greater Los Angeles Freeway System Map
Gay Pennsylvania lawmaker to introduce same-sex marriage bill : Washington Blade – America's Leading Gay News Source
OnlyMrGodKnowsWhyFYI @bodnyk
Gay Pennsylvania state Rep. Brian Sims
State Rep. Brian Sims (D-Philadelphia) told the Washington Blade the day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and struck down California’s Proposition 8 that he and state Rep. Stephen McCarter (D-Montgomery County) have begun to seek additional co-sponsors to the measure. Sims said the two lawmakers plan to formally introduce the bill sometime next month or in August.
“This legislation would re-define the definition of marriage as a civil contract between two people who enter into matrimony, and eliminate the current prohibition against same-sex marriage in our commonwealth,” reads a memo that Sims and McCarter sent to fellow lawmakers earlier on Thursday. “It is important to note that this bill provides protections for religious organizations and entities that do not wish to sanction, perform or in any way recognize such marriages.”
Telecom exec: NSA can't distinguish between Americans and foreigners during data sweeps
One of the Obama administration's most repeated defenses of the NSA's internet surveillance programs has been that they does not "intentionally" target American citizens communicating domestically. That may be technically true, but an unnamed telecom executive who dealt with surveillance orders tells Foreign Policy that there's no way for the NSA to tell the difference at the point of collection.
"There is physically no way to ensure that you're only gathering U.S. person e-mails," said the executive, who has reportedly complied with court orders which forbid their recipients from acknowledging receiving them. "The system doesn't make any distinction about the nationality" of the people whose communications are intercepted. That's due in part to the way international communications are routed, a large amount of which pass through the US.
"They do know that U.S. person data will get through. They admit that."
Since the NSA appears to collect indiscriminately, it says it applies procedures to determine whether that data comes from a US citizen or not. According to leaked documents detailing these procedures, an analyst must have "reasonable suspicion" that a person whose communications have been intercepted is not a "US person" communicating on US soil. But if the analyst can not prove this, the person "will be presumed to be a non-United States person" and the data will be retained. Even if analysts determine they have collected data on a US person, the document says that the NSA can still retain the data under a broad range of exceptions, such as if the communication is encrypted, holds information relevant to cybersecurity, or "contains evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed."
"They do know that U.S. person data will get through. They admit that," a former intelligence official tells Foreign Policy. "They don't listen to everything and process everything ... Sometimes they may keep it and look at it later."
President Obama's initial reassurance on the PRISM program was that "with respect to the internet and emails, [PRISM] does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States." But a leaked Justice Department memo published Thursday by The Guardian states that "NSA has in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States." The paper found that "it is clear that the [NSA] collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from U.S. communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets." When two US senators, citing privacy concerns, asked the NSA to investigate how many US citizens have had their data collected in this way, the agency refused, making the bizarre argument that doing so would violate US citizens' privacy.
- Source Foreign Policy
- Related Items nsa surveillance prism
TV: Great Job, Internet!: Gilbert Gottfried is the one who knocks now
Walter White's "I am the one who knocks" monologue has become definitive of his Breaking Bad character. The menacing confidence behind Bryan Cranston's stern delivery makes for a chilling scene. So who better to take a whack at that same monologue than Gilbert Gottfried? Well, he did, and somebody (roughly) matched it up with the actual footage. It's a different angle than Samuel L. Jackson chose, and it's not for charity, either. But it's pretty funny.
Read more“The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done”
That’s what Texas Governor Rick Perry said today, of the reproductive rights advocates who prevented Texas’ omnibus anti-choice bill from passing this week.
And here is what I have to say to that super rapey, undemocratic, and entirely tone deaf view of the situation:
Also, this:
And, in conclusion,
Silicon Alley Just Got Its First Billionaire
Music: Great Job, Internet!: Hey, there's a new Pixies track
The Pixies have released a brand new song, their first in almost 10 years. “Bagboy” comes hot on the heels of the news that Kim Deal has left the band and is available for free download now via the band’s website. The track was recorded back in October, and, according to Black Francis, features lyrics “composed at a Starbucks Coffee in Harvard Square in Cambridge, about a hundred feet from where, 25 years ago, [he] composed some of the lyrics to an old Pixies song called ‘Break My Body.’” It’s pretty industrial and maybe a little lackluster compared to most Pixies tracks, but, hey, new material!
Read more(Re)building A Simplified Firefox Logo
firehosefox loses texture, planet loses contrast
Books: Big Issues: Is Hawkeye’s Pizza Dog issue the future of superhero comics?
Each week, Big Issues focuses on a newly released comic-book issue of significance. This week, it’s Hawkeye #11. Written by Matt Fraction (FF, Casanova) and drawn by David Aja (The Immortal Iron Fist, Daredevil), this experimental issue uses a dog’s-eye view to show the vast storytelling opportunities of superhero comics. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Superhero comics are predictable and repetitive. The stories all tend to be variations on the standard “good guy vs. bad guy” narrative, and while those conflicts have become more complex in the past 30 years, at the end of the day there’s going to be one person in costume punching another person in costume. As revolutionary as Watchmen is in its exploration of superhero psychology and the real-world impact costumed vigilantes would have, it’s still a comic book about a group of superheroes trying to stop a madman’s catastrophic plan. And for ...
Read moreOpen Question: What's the impact of Reader's shutdown on traffic?
Let’s say that there are only 1 million Google Reader users. In three days, that’s a million people who won’t be clicking on American Apparel ads. Which could directly effect the bottom line of websites that are entirely funded by ads, like blogs.
Is there anyway to know by how much though? What do you think the leading indicators might be?
I have enabled comments for this post so let me know if you have any answers.
On a side note, take a look at this alexa graph of blogger.com. I site like that has to be impacted by a Google Reader shutdown, right?
Sauvignon Blanc Kettle, Wine-Infused Popcorn by Populance
firehosenope
Gourmet popcorn company Populance has created Sauvignon Blanc Kettle, popcorn infused with wine from New Zealand winemaker Kim Crawford. Populence says “the sweet popcorn’s final flavor is bright and zesty and pairs beautifully with the wine.” The unique popcorn is currently available to purchase online at Populence.
image via Populance
via Gothamist
The humanities are not in crisis. It’s just that more people are going to college
firehosetl;dr: It's because women are majoring in other things since the 60s; "as a portion of college-aged adults, the number of humanities majors is actually on the rise"
The humanities are not in crisis in the US, despite what you may have heard.
Here’s what you may have heard: the rising cost of college, coupled with a fiercely competitive job market, is tearing students away from loftier academic pursuits and turning them toward majors that will boost their salaries. Based on that notion, the common refrain has been that society’s intellectual foundations are crumbling. Diana Sorenson, Harvard’s dean of arts and humanities told the Wall Street Journal that the US is in the midst of an “anti-intellectual moment.” David Brooks of the New York Times lamented that in the bygone days when people actually valued the humanities, world leaders had a “clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it.” No more.
The narrative of ongoing moral and intellectual decay is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, and probably older. Concerns about the fall of the humanities in particular were stoked recently by a Harvard report that included the following chart (pdf):
Seemingly horrifying. But there are three fundamental problems with that data.
It doesn’t go back far enough
The chart above starts in the late 1960s, which, as it turns out, was a blockbuster period for enrollment in the humanities. So what looks like severe decay is actually just the declining half of an unusual peak. Ben Schmidt, a graduate student at Princeton, pointed this out on his blog, where he posted a chart that goes back further in time:
The decline since the 1960s is the result of women entering both the workforce and the sciences
Teachers of the humanities probably would have preferred that enrollments stayed high indefinitely after the 1960s. But the reason enrollment in humanities majors fell as a percentage of the total is that women started pursuing more vocational courses of study, along with engineering and the sciences. Gender gaps have been narrowing, which you could argue is the result of people putting their humanities degrees to good use— society has been made more equitable, undoubtedly with the help of people who studied equality.
As a portion of college-aged adults, the number of humanities majors is actually on the rise
The Harvard chart also doesn’t reflect that the number of Americans going to college has been burgeoning for decades. And naturally, many are attending school to improve their job prospects. If you’re like David Brooks, and you are concerned about the humanities having less influence on society, then the right question to ask is: What’s the portion of young adults in America that are walking around with a humanities degree? Turns out that number has been rising—in fact, it has doubled since the 1980s and retuned to the levels seen during the late-60s, early-70s boom.
In a recently published plan for how to rescue the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences asks, “who will lead America into a bright future?” (pdf). Well, how about these folks?
Woodford Reserve expanding to tune of $35 million
firehosevia multitasksuicide
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| Woodford Reserve distillery (Bill Dowd photo) |
The folks at Brown-Forman Corp. don’t think so. They announced on Thursday they plan to boost bourbon production at the Woodford Reserve Distillery, where an expansion topping $35 million will add stills, double bottling capacity and increase storage space where the whiskey matures.
The investments at the distillery, located near the village of Versailles in Kentucky’s thoroughbred country, come on the heels of a record 250,000 9-liter cases and a 28% increase in net sales in the fiscal year that ended April 30, according to B-F spokeswoman Elizabeth Conway.
“We believe that strong consumer interest in bourbon will continue, and we’re expanding our production to meet this demand,” she said.
Overall, Kentucky’s bourbon distillers have invested $265 million — the largest expansion since Prohibition ended — in new and expanded production facilities, warehouses where the bourbon ages, visitor centers, bottling lines and other upgrades, according to Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.
Kentucky is home to 95% of the world’s bourbon production.
Sorry, that's classified: Army blocks staff access to The Guardian
In an attempt to keep classified information on the NSA’s vast and varied spying programs off of unauthorized computers, the US Army is blocking access to the website of UK newspaper The Guardian. Writing to the Monterey Herald, an Army spokesman stated that "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks" was being filtered as part of routine "network hygiene" done to limit the scope of unauthorized disclosures of classified material.
"Classified information remains classified."
The move is reminiscent of the 2010 decision to block the websites of the New York Times, the Guardian, and other news organizations for hositng secret WikiLeaks cables. At the time, the White House wrote that "classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority."
Blocking access to The Guardian from unclassified Army computers obviously isn’t going to stop the material from getting in the hands of rank and file employees, but it’s essentially all the military can do to stop the spread of information. A representative of NETCOM (part of Cyber Command) wrote that the Department of Defense is "not going to block websites from the American public in general."
- Via The Atlantic Wire
- Source Monterey Herald
- Image Credit US Army (Flickr)
- Related Items nsa spying dod the guardian classified document prism
Federal student loan rate set to increase - WFMZ Allentown
firehoseof course not
Wall Street Journal |
Federal student loan rate set to increase
WFMZ Allentown An "A" for effort? Not quite. The U.S. Senate has no plans to take action before student loan interest rates double on Monday. And students say they're not happy about it. For Penn State Lehigh Valley senior Renee Johnson, loans are a way to reach her ... A Proposed Fix for High Student Loan Interest RatesBusinessweek Inaction Means Student-Loan Rates Will Double Next WeekBloomberg Student Loan Interest Rates Set to Double by MondayOpposing Views Your Houston News -TriValley Central all 467 news articles » |
House panel finds IRS official waived Fifth Amendment right, can be forced to ... - Fox News
San Francisco Chronicle |
House panel finds IRS official waived Fifth Amendment right, can be forced to ...
Fox News A House Republican-led committee approved a resolution Friday declaring that high-ranking IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by delivering a statement before the committee in May. Lerner used to oversee ... House panel pressing IRS figure to talkWilkes Barre Times-Leader House panel voting on pressing IRS figure to talkWKYT all 117 news articles » |
A brand new reason US companies aren’t spending their cash hoard
firehose"If Dannhauser’s right, then what’s happening is the opposite of what the Federal Reserve has been trying to achieve. Low interest rates and quantitative easing, by freeing up cash, were supposed to push companies into making new investments, which, in turn, would stimulate job growth. Instead, they’re just hoarding more cash."
For an economy to grow, companies, the thinking generally goes, need to spend their money and make investments that will generate jobs. The data show that this isn’t happening in the US; in fact, companies seem to be pulling back even further. Politicians blame the opposing party’s policies, Wall Street blames persistent financial uncertainty. But there may be a completely different reason US companies aren’t spending.
First, the numbers. The latest data from Factset show that non-financial companies in the S&P 500 amassed $30.1 billion more in cash and short-term investments in the first quarter of 2013. That’s 2.4% more cash than companies stockpiled last quarter, and pushes their total cash and short-term investment reserves to $1.29 trillion:
These companies are also spending less than they have in three years. Capital expenditures in the first quarter were just 1.6% higher than in the same quarter of last year, the slowest rate of growth in 3 years. By comparison, capital expenditures have gone up an average of 18.5% year-on-year for the past 11 quarters.
No spending, no jobs, disaster. Clearly, it’s time to prepare for the worst. Or is it?
There is an alternative way of thinking about these corporate cash piles, Lombard Street Research’s Jamie Dannhauser wrote in a client note this week:
The severity of the financial crisis means US corporate behaviour may be permanently altered. If anything, the secular upward trend in desired cash balances is likely to be strengthened in the years ahead.
The financial crisis was caused by outsized household and banking system debts, but the US corporate sector was actually pretty healthy. Nonetheless, US companies were spooked, and are more likely to keep cash on hand, even if they have no immediate worries about politics and markets.
That’s borne out by the results of a Duke University/CFO magazine survey, says Dannhauser. Fewer chief financial officers are concerned about economic uncertainty affecting their business in the next few quarters; a declining number of executives (27%, down from 45% in 2012) was concerned about building up a liquidity buffer to prepare for short-term economic shocks. And yet the percentage willing to deploy company cash isn’t rising.
If Dannhauser’s right, then what’s happening is the opposite of what the Federal Reserve has been trying to achieve. Low interest rates and quantitative easing, by freeing up cash, were supposed to push companies into making new investments, which, in turn, would stimulate job growth. Instead, they’re just hoarding more cash.
Getting ALL your data out of Google Reader
Update on July 3: The reader_archive and feed_archive scripts are no longer operational, since Reader (and its API) has been shut down. Thanks to everyone that tried the script and gave feedback. For more discussion, see also Hacker News.
There remain only a few days until Google Reader shuts down. Besides the emotions1 and the practicalities of finding a replacement2, I've also been pondering the data loss aspects. As a bit of a digital pack rat, the idea of not being able to get at a large chunk of the information that I've consumed over the past seven and a half years seems very scary. Technically most of it is public data, and just a web search away. However, the items that I've read, tagged, starred, etc. represent a curated subset of that, and I don't see an easy of recovering those bits.
Reader has Takeout support, but it's incomplete. I've therefore built the reader_archive tool that dumps everything related to your account in Reader via the "API". This means every read item3, every tagged item, every comment, every like, every bundle, etc. There's also a companion site at readerisdead.com that explains how to use the tool, provides pointers to the archive format and collects related tools4.
Additionally, Reader is for better or worse the papersite of record for public feed content on the internet. Beyond my 545 subscriptions, there are millions of feeds whose histories are best preserved in Reader. Thankfully, ArchiveTeam has stepped up. I've also provided a feed_archive tool that lets you dump Reader's full history for feeds for your own use.5
I don't fault Google for providing only partial data via Takeout. Exporting all 612,599 read items in my account (and a few hundred thousand more from subscriptions, recommendations, etc.) results in almost 4 GB of data. Even if I'm in the 99th percentile for Reader users (I've got the badge to prove it), providing hundreds of megabytes of data per user would not be feasible. I'm actually happy that Takeout support happened at all, since my understanding is that it was all during 20% time. It's certainly better than other outcomes.
Of course, I've had 3 months to work on this tool, but per Parkinson's law, it's been a bit of a scramble over the past few days to get it all together. I'm now reasonably confident that the tool is getting everything it can. The biggest missing piece is a way to browse the extracted data. I've started on reader_browser, which exposes a web UI for an archive directory. I'm also hoping to write some more selective exporters (e.g. from tagged items to Evernote for Ann's tagged recipes). Help is appreciated.
- I am of course saddened to see something that I spent 5 years working on get shut down. And yet, I'm excited to see renewed interest and activity in a field that had been thought fallow. Hopefully not having a a disinterested incumbent will be for the best.
- Still a toss-up between NewsBlur and Digg Reader.
- Up to a limit of 300,000, imposed by Reader's backend.
- If these command-line tools are too unfriendly, CloudPull is a nice-looking app that backs up subscriptions, tags and starred items.
- Google's Feed API will continue to exist, and it's served by the same backend that served Google Reader. However it does not expose items beyond recent ones in the feed.
SCOTUS for the D&D Set (JPEG Image, 720 × 582 pixels)
firehoseI knew liking Sotomayor would pay off
Scholastic unveils Kazu Kibuishi’s third Harry Potter cover
firehosemeanwhile, in Portland
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/harry-potter-prisoner-625x951.jpg
New Insights Emerge About Voyager 1's Epic Journey to the Edge
firehoseVoyager keeps leaving the solar system beat
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered into a turbulent and dynamic region of space that's once again resetting our notions of what's out there at the edge of the solar system.
    
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Facebook Shadow Profiles [Link]
firehoselove sharing this constantly
From Violet Blue at ZDNet:
Facebook was accidentally combining user's shadow profiles with their Facebook profiles and spitting the merged information out in one big clump to people they 'had some connection to' who downloaded an archive of their account with Facebook's Download Your Information (DYI) tool.
According to the admissions in its blog, posted late Friday afternoon, Facebook appears to be obtaining users' offsite email address and phone numbers and attempting to match them to other accounts. It appears that the covertly collected information is then being stored in each Facebook user's invisible 'shadow profile' that is somehow attached to accounts.
But don't worry, they fixed the problem by hiding the shadow profile from all users. So, nothing to worry about. Solved.
Point of Cosmic Order, Mr Speaker
firehosevia Overbey
Openly gay Penn state Rep. blocked from discussing the DOMA decision on the House floor because he was speaking "against God's law."
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Send an Arduino to the moon for $300
firehose$60,000 to put a useless tardis-shaped box in orbit, or $300 to put science on the moon
We’ve seen Kickstarter campaigns to put a single satellite into space and one to launch your own personalized postage-stamp sized satellite into low Earth orbit. This time, though, you can break the bonds of Earth and send your own Arduino compatible satellite on a collision course with the moon. The project is called Pocket Spacecraft, and exactly as its name implies, it allows you to send a small, flat, 8 cm diameter spacecraft to the surface of the moon.
The pocket spacecraft are made of metallized kapton, a very thin membrane stretched inside a loop of wire. On board this paper-thin spacecraft are a pair of solar cells and a bare die MSP430 microcontroller connected to a suite of sensors. Before launch, you can program your tiny space probe with commands to relay data back to Earth, either useful scientific data or a simple tweet.
These pocket spacecraft will be launched from a cubesat – a highly successful line of amateur spacecraft that are usually launched by hitching a ride with larger commercial satellites. To get from low Earth orbit to the moon is much harder than just hitchhiking, so the cubesat mothership comes equipped with either a solar sail or its own engine that electrolysed water into hydrogen and oxygen, the perfect rocket fuel.
Pocket Spacecraft is an amazingly impressive feat; there are literally dozens of amateur-built spacecraft orbiting above our heads right now, but so far none have ventured more than a few hundred miles away from their home planet. Getting to the moon with an amateur spacecraft is an amazing accomplishment, and definitely worthy of the $300 price tag.
Filed under: kickstarter
"They condemned the system adopted in some countries such as Spain – where parents are sometimes..."
…
Previous legislation is to be amended sweep away the traditional understanding of “gender specific” terms which could exclude those legally married under the new arrangements.”
- Men can be ‘wives’ and women ‘husbands’ as Government overrules the dictionary - Telegraph
Let our powers combine: Sony Pictures rumored to produce 'Captain Planet' movie
A live-action adaptation of popular 1990s edutainment cartoon series Captain Planet and the Planeteers could be headed to the silver screen. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures is reportedly in "final negotiations" to acquire the necessary rights for the film. Mark Gordon, Don Murphy, and Susan Montford are all reportedly on board to produce the project.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers was the brainchild of cable executive Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle. The show centered around five teenagers from across the globe, each given a magic ring granting them control of an element of nature. Recruited by Gaiai — the spirit of the Earth — these Planeteers were tasked with raising public awareness of and battling pollution and other threats to the environment. When taking on the "eco-villains" proved too much, they could combine their powers and summon Captain Planet, a one-of-a-kind hero with a green mullet, crystal blue skin, and a yellow globe emblazoned on his chest. Unfortunately we don't yet know who will portray the Earth-loving superhero, nor who will take on the role of Ma-Ti — the Planeteer saddled with the underwhelming "heart" ring.
- Source The Hollywood Reporter
- Related Items captain planet and the planeteers captain planet planeteers sony pictures movie