firehose

The “London Cage”, a hidden WWII Guantanamo-esque compound on the most expensive street in London, Kensington Palace Gardens, was kept secret from the British public for nearly sixty years.

Movie makers also go as far as to integrate women relatable topics such as pregnancy, motherhood, lesbian relationships, and babysitting jobs into their films in order to gain even more female oriented audiences.

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High-school hazing and bullying used to involve name-calling, towel-snapping and stuffing boys into lockers. Now, boys sexually abusing other boys is part of the ritual.

When Amazon Publishing unveiled Kindle Worlds last month, one of the first questions was which comics publisher would be the first to sign on. Today, Valiant Entertainment announced its participation in the platform.

Flying Lettuce Brothers… notorious combat impressionists

An anonymous reader writes "Stanford Law School has kicked off a 'Cookie Clearinghouse' web privacy initiative that brings together researchers and browsers. The project aims to provide a centralized and trusted repository for whitelist and blacklist data on web tracking, much like StopBadware does for malware. Mozilla and Opera are collaborating on the initiative, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox's new default third-party cookie blocking. The leader of an advertising trade group has, of course, denounced the participating browsers as 'oligopolies.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Entertainment Weekly has put together a “Kanye West Yeezus lyric or Lucille Bluth quote?” quiz where fans of the rap mogul and/or the Bluth matriarch can put their knowledge to the test, figuring out whether lines like “I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona” and “You love me when I’m hungover” come from Yeezy’s new album or that musty old claptrap. The quiz is surprisingly difficult (for the record Lucille hates Arizona and Kanye has the hangover) which either proves that Kanye has the soul of a critical, alcoholic mother or that Lucille is actually an ostentatious rapper. Perhaps Franklin should weigh in on this, since he knows a thing or two about bringing people together through the power of song.

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I knew Marc Edwards would figure this out quickly. (What’s a superellipse?)

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Bosh: You never give up. People gave up on us, and they can stay where they are and watch the game at home. ///// Media member: Did you like the punishment? They didn't let them back in. ///// Bosh: Yeah, you can't get let back in after you leave. I know that. Hell, I've been to games. You can't leave a game and then come back. It doesn't make any sense. You left. It's not punishment; that's protocol.

The U.S. Navy has confirmed the shocking news that Cap'n Crunch, the legendary explorer of many an uncharted cereal bowl, is a fraud.

Anthony ‘Tony’ Soprano Sr.

NPR

Blackhawks return to Chicago champions again Chicago Tribune The greatest -- or at the least the most publicly accessible -- victory lap in all of sports has picked up where it left off three years ago, with the Blackhawks trotting the Stanley Cup around Chicago as the city celebrates its second NHL championship since 2010. Blackhawks' Stanley Cup triumph a fitting end to hectic seasonLos Angeles Times 17 seconds and Chicago is on the verge of a dynastyUSA TODAY Late rally propels Blackhawks past Bruins, to Stanley CupCBS News Sports Chat Place -Greenwich Time -Vermont Public Radio all 3,768 news articles »

You can stop counting how many golfballs will fit in a schoolbus now.

Google has admitted that the headscratching questions it once used to quiz job applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

A list of Google questions compiled by Seattle job coach Lewis Lin, and then read by approximately everyone on the entire Internet in one form or another, included these humdingers:

• How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
• Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco
• How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
• A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
• You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Bock says Google now relies on more quotidian means of interviewing prospective employees, such as standardizing interviews so that candidates can be assessed consistently, and “behavioral interviewing,” such as asking people to describe a time they solved a difficult problem. It’s also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores.

(PS: The answer is 500,000)

The common defense of the unpaid internship is that, even if the role doesn't exactly pay, it will pay off eventually in the form of a job. Turns out, the data suggests that defense is wrong, at least when it comes to college students.

For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they've received a job offer and if they've ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it's reached the same conclusion: Unpaid internships don't seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment. 

This year, NACE queried more than 9,200 seniors from February through the end of April. They found that 63.1 percent of students with a paid internship under their belt had received at least one job offer. But only 37 percent of former unpaid interns could say the same -- a negligible 1.8 percentage points more than students who had never interned. 

The results were even worse when it came to salary. Among students who found jobs, former unpaid interns were actually offered less money than those with no internship experience.

"While there's a stark difference between having a paid internship and no internship in terms of offer rates and median salary, it all pretty much seems to wash away when you're talking about unpaid internships versus no internships at all," Edwin Nace, NACE's research director, told me. 

Those findings dovetailed with data I tracked down from Intern Bridge, a widely cited consulting firm that specializes in college recruiting. The firm runs a huge annual survey of intern salaries, and I asked them to pull some unpublished numbers from their 2012 poll. Their findings showed that college students were about twice as likely to receive a job offer at the conclusion of a paid internship than at the end of an unpaid internship.

Intern Bridge's figures require a few disclaimers. In 2012, the firm surveyed more than 11,000 college students who were sophomores or higher during the Fall term. It's possible that many of these students received job offers later in the year. And if the firm only surveyed seniors, the job offer rates would likely be higher across the board. 

Nonetheless, that 2:1 ratio seems in keeping with NACE's findings. Even if unpaid internships do occasionally turn into permanent job opportunities, it's relatively rare.

It's not entirely clear why unpaid interns fare so poorly on the job market. Many companies do treat their paid internship programs as important talent pipelines, which boosts hire rates for students lucky enough to land in them. But that doesn't explain why unpaid interns appear to barely outcompete students who skip internships altogether. 

Could the issue have to do with which types of majors tend to take paid internships, and which tend to settle for unpaid work? Apparently not. As shown in this graph of hiring rates from a recent NACE presentation, unpaid interns fared roughly the same or worse on the job market compared to non-interns across a variety of fields, including business, communications, engineering, English, and political science.

Maybe unpaid interns just aren't as bright as the students who manage to score paid gigs? Again, not so. According to Intern Bridge's internal data, paid and unpaid interns had about the same distribution of GPA's.

So we're left with a bit of a mystery. Though a few receive long-term offers from their employers, unpaid interns generally don't outperform non-interns in the job search. Their collective lack of success doesn't seem to depend much on major or smarts. It might be the case that unpaid internships are just concentrated in industries with weak job markets (think magazine journalism). However, that isn't obvious from Intern Bridge's published figures. It's also possible that there are inherent differences between the kinds of students who take unpaid internships and their peers that would show up in a more refined data analysis. But again, we don't know.

Meanwhile, we also still can't say for certain if unpaid internships* are useful for students who have already graduated from school, but can't find full-time work. Intuitively, it would make sense that putting something on your resume is better than casting around unemployed. But given the results we've seen among college students, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions.

In the end, thanks to a spate of lawsuits and a landmark court ruling last week, it's possible that unpaid internships are headed for the dustbin of labor history. That might not be much of a loss.

________________________________________

*It might also be time to stop calling post-collegiate internships "internships." As Intern Bridge Vice President Robert Shindell said to me, whether or not they're paid, they really are just generally temp jobs with a fancy title.

Top image: Jeremy Kaposy/Shutterstock.

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic.

Our stuff often says a lot about us, whether we own a hybrid car or a station wagon, a MacBook Pro or an ancient desktop. And this is no less true of our smart phones, sold on a sharply divided market between iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries.

Among other things, cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5 (and even more money to keep up with the latest models that come out faster than plan upgrades do). Consider, then, this map of Washington, D.C., which uses geolocated tweets, and the cell phone metadata attached to them, to illustrate who in town is using iPhones (red dots) and who's using Androids (green dots):

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guru Eric Fischer.* They've converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

The locals and tourists map scales up a beautiful earlier project from Fischer. You could kill a few hours playing with all of these tools, built on the same dataset. But we particularly liked looking at the geography of smart phone devices. As in Washington, above, iPhones are often more prominent in upper-income parts of cities (and central business districts), while Androids appear to be the dominant device in lower-income areas.

These maps are also a blank canvas with nothing on them other than tweets. To the extent that you can easily make out the Washington Beltway above, or plenty of other roadway networks throughout the rest of these maps, that means people are tweeting while driving (or, preferably, sitting in the passenger seat).

Here is New York City, which has a smattering of Blackberries in Manhattan (yes, it's possible to tweet from a Blackberry). That green patch to the left is Newark:

Here is Chicago:

And Houston:

Atlanta:

Los Angeles:

And one place that really loves Blackberries? Jakarta.

Correction: This article initially misspelled Eric Fischer's name.

All images courtesy of MapBox, Gnip and Eric Fischer.

People are capable of amazing kindness, but also of unbelievable callousness. We go out of our way to help strangers, but we also turn a blind eye to misery. But what if you could make human beings kind all the time? What does science teach us about empathy, and how to create it in people? We decided to ask the experts.

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Universal Pictures has officially optioned Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez' acclaimed IDW series "Locke & Key," with go to genre screenwriting duo Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci attached to write.

rachel shared this story from Hannanimal.

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Also, Lily Potter would have never wanted an abortion, because she was a financially well-off white woman starting a family in a happy marriage with a secure place at the top of wizarding society.

The question you should be asking is what if Merope Gaunt, an impoverished and uneducated single woman who escaped from a severely abusive family only to become pregnant with the unwanted child of a man who wanted nothing to do with her, had had access to an abortion and not had immense social pressure brainwashing her into carrying to term?

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Last month, Food Network chef Paula Deen gave a videotaped deposition as part of a discrimination suit she’s facing. Sounds like the perfect time to spout some racist fantasies and drop the N word, right?

The producers of an upcoming documentary on TWA Flight 800—which exploded and crashed into the waters off Long Island, N.Y., on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board—claim to have proof that a missile caused the Paris-bound flight to crash. And six former investigators who took part in the film say there was a cover-up and want the case reopened.

I'm changing my name in August to Jesus Shuttlesworth Metta World Shuttlesstein Jesus World Peace Shuttles World Something with Jesus Shuttlesworth in it.

Adrienne Bennett, the governor's press secretary, said Wednesday that it was her decision to give a blanket "no comment" to the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal in the state capital of Augusta and the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, where LePage once served as mayor. All three daily newspapers are part of MaineToday Media Inc. "All we're asking for is objectivity and a balanced approach to reporting. We're not finding that MaineToday Media has done that with the LePage administration," she said. The announcement from the governor's office was made after a Press Herald investigation of Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Patricia Aho, a former lobbyist portrayed as working behind the scenes to roll back environmental laws and regulations opposed by her former clients in the chemical, drug, oil, and real estate industries. The three-part series was entitled "A lobbyist in the henhouse."

We are thrilled to announce Neil deGrasse Tyson will narrate the Museum's newest Space Show, premiering this fall at the Hayden Planetarium.

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