firehose

This MSN story says K-9 Parish Comfort Dogs are soon headed to Boston in the aftermath of the terrible bombing. Quoting the story, “The golden retrievers were brought to Newtown, Conn., to provide comfort to people of the community after the shootings. ‘Dogs are nonjudgmental. They are loving. They are accepting of anyone. It creates the atmosphere for people to share,’ said church president Tim Hetzner.”

Photo from the K-9 Parish Comfort Dogs FB page.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: This Just In!, Violence

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!

Bowen et al. caution that their results on cost savings are speculative and it is true that they do not include the fixed costs of creating the course (either the online course or the traditional course) so these cost savings should be thought of as annual savings in steady-state equilibrium. The main reason these results are speculative, however, is that Bowen et al. only considered cost savings from faculty compensation. Long-run cost reductions from space savings may be even more significant, as the authors acknowledge.

Bowen et al. also do not count cost savings to students. Based on my work with Tyler at MRUniversity, I argued in Why Online Education Works that students in online course can learn the same material in less time. Consistent with this, Bowen et al. found:

…that hybrid-format students took about one-quarter less time to achieve essentially the same learning outcomes as traditional-format students.

A 25% time-savings is significant. Moreover, the 25% time-savings figure is in itself an underestimate of savings since it does not include the time savings from not having to drive to class, for example.

Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Reverse image search is one of those handy innovations that's often hard to come up with specific uses for. Sure, you can use it to track down the origin of a photo, but it's also useful for hunting down product names, apartments, and even recipes. Here are a few of our favorite uses.

With Google, you can just drop a picture into Google Images and it'll search for similar pictures. Other tools, like TinEye do the same thing. Regardless of which service you use, you'll find all types of things when you search for an image. Last week we asked you for a few of your uses, and it turns out you have a lot of different tricks.

Find an Apartment

At a glance, using reverse image search when you're hunting for apartments probably doesn't seem all that useful. But as our own Whitson Gordon points out, a reverse image search can get you around paywalls:

There is a site in Los Angeles called "Westside Rentals" that has a bunch of exclusive apartment listings, but you have to pay $60 for a three month membership to use it. You can search their database for free, but you won't get the address or phone number for any of the apartments, so it's mostly useless unless you pay.

I found a building I really liked in the "free" search, so I reverse image searched the building's photo with TinEye. It directed me right to the building's web site. Called them, got an apartment, lived there for a year. Best building I ever lived in, and I had TinEye to thank.

If you live in a city where a realtor or apartment rental company hides addresses behind a paywall, a reverse image search might be all you need to get around it.

Find Names of Unlabeled Products

If you're the type to frequent sites like Pinterest or Tumblr, you see all kinds of cool products that often aren't labeled properly. This might include something as simple as a wedding dress or as complex as a shot of someone's apartment with a cool chair. Reader bobdvb shares how his wife uses it:

My wife often uses Google Image Search to find things and when she does she often wants to know where to buy it (but the image link is irrelevant), so I do a reverse image search. I even did this when she was wedding dress hunting!

This method works pretty much every time when you have a shot taken from a catalog, but it's also useful if you frequent sites like Apartment Therapy that have unidentified furniture in shots of people's homes.

Find Recipes from Images

Let's say you're browsing the internet and find a picture of a meal that looks terrific, but isn't actually named anywhere. If you throw that picture into reverse image search, there's a reasonable chance you'll pull up a recipe for it if it was used in a blog post or on one of the millions of different recipe web sites. This doesn't exactly work with just snapping a picture of something at a restaurant, but it's surprisingly effective for figuring out what some random picture of a meal on a news story or blog post is.

Figure Out Celebrity Names

If you're trying to figure who a celebrity is, but don't have much information, a reverse image search can quickly pull up the information you need. As mr_bigglesworth points out, it's also good for memes:

[I use it] to work out what movie a picture that's often used as a meme/annotated picture is from.

Any image you have from any film or even a snapshot of your TV can usually lead you down the path to identify the star in question. As a number of people pointed out last week, this works for all types of celebrities in, ahem, a wide range of film genres.

Debunk Social Media Posts and Profiles

Whatever your social network of choice is, a number of fake profiles exist that try to friend you. Since most of these use stock photos or random pictures of the internet, finding the fakes is easy with a reverse image search. Reader oe_ku uses it to find all kinds of fake profiles:

Mostly I am using it to identify fake profiles on Facebook or similar. If the picture I am searching for comes up on several profiles with different names than it's probably fake (especially if you consider some other facts to identify a fake profile).

The process works for any type of social network where people are creating their own profiles—from Facebook to AirBnB, and even dating sites. As Sayerofnothing points out you can do the same thing to debunk viral posts in your news feed too:

I like to debunk viral images that comes up on my facebook feed, the last one was of a man saving a dog in a flood, it claimed it was of a flood we had a couple of weeks ago here in Buenos Aires, but I had seen it before, and alas, it was from 2011, a flood in the Phillipines.

Spam, fake accounts, and misinformation are annoying enough as it is. With a quick reverse image search you can report it and move on with your day. It's even useful for Ebay or Craigslist listings that look too good to be true.

Track Down Wallpapers and Higher Resolution Originals

One of the more common uses for reverse image search is to track down high resolution original images for things like wallpapers. Our own Alan Henry uses it for wallpapers quite a bit:

I use it all the time for wallpapers - if I want to know where a specific photo was taken, who made the art, where the image came from, stuff like that. :D If it pops up in rotation and I get curious, I'll save a copy, upload it, and sift through the results. It's usually pretty easy to find out, too!

It's not just for finding specific wallpapers either. Since reverse image search can often work with nothing but a crop, it's also handy for tracking down backgrounds and wallpapers you find on tech blogs or screenshots.

Find Where Your Own Artwork Is Being Used

If you're a creative type who posts photographs or art on Flickr, your own personal blog, or wherever else, you might want to know where else it's popping up on the web. Part of that is making sure people are respecting your attribution requests or copyright, but it's also just about finding any other conversations that might be happening around your art. Kexino shares their experience:

I used to publish images under a Creative Commons (attribution) license on Flickr. Every couple of weeks or so I'd do a reverse image search to see who was using my images and if they were giving proper attribution. It turned out (surprise surprise) that the vast majority of sites were using my images without giving any attribution at all.

Of course, it's not just photographers or artists who have a use for this. Even if you're a DIYer sharing your projects on places like Instructables, using reverse image search is a useful tool to track down where your creations are talked about.

Track Down Original Artists

If you're looking for the original artist for a picture you find online then reverse image search makes total sense. But it's not just for images online. Reverse image search can often identify the artist behind paintings or photos you find in the real world as well. TheWraighL98 shares their experience:

I saw a framed picture I really liked in a restaurant while on vacation last year. I took a picture with my phone and figured out who took the picture and where to buy it.

As FIGJAM also points out, you can apply this same logic to murals, graffiti, and more.

Identify Plants, Animals, and More

If you're trying to identify plants, animals, or even some crazy bug you find in your basement, you don't need a degree in biology. Reverse image search is handy for identifying all sorts of living things, and although the results are a little less predictable than what's mentioned above, it's still a great hail mary to throw out when you're out of ideas. Carole Richard shares a success story with tracking down a tree name:

We have a tree in the front yard of the house that we bought a couple of years ago. I didn't recognize it and wasn't sure when to prune it, etc. So I took a picture of it and searched Google images. I found out it was a Rowan tree (not indigenous to our area) and that the tree needed some extra care.

Tom4Surfing has also had luck identifying birds:

When I can't identify an interesting bird or plant when I'm out walking, I take a picture and use image search. It pops up other pictures of the same plant or bird - often the name is associated with the image.

Your luck with this one is going to vary, but in my own experience I've been able to identify weeds and even the occasional bug by digging through the "visually similar images" section. It's always worth a shot to at least figure out if that thirty-legged bug that just bit you is poisonous.

Title image remixed from Shortkut (Shutterstock).

When informed of the accession of Peter III of Russia in 1762, George III said, “Well, there are now nine of us in Europe the third of our respective names”:

• George III, King of England
• Charles III, King of Spain
• Augustus III, King of Poland
• Frederick III, King of Prussia
• Charles Emanuel III, King of Sardinia
• Mustapha III, Emperor of the Turks
• Peter III, Emperor of Russia
• Francis III, Duke of Modena
• Frederick III, Duke of Saxe-Gotha

Such a coincidence was unprecedented in European history.

Comic URL: http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/1426/

pleatedjeans:

“My friend who is a gardener sends me photos of himself at work” (via)

If you want to watch a film about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, you'll have plenty of options before long: You could track down the aging Pirates of Silicon Valley, or wait for the Aaron Sorkin film based on Walter Issacson's authorized biography. You could hope that Ashton Kutcher's jOBS gets a release date. Or, you could watch Funny or Die's iSteve, an 80-minute parody starring Justin Long, who once portrayed the Mac in Apple's famous Mac vs. PC commercials. Jorge Garcia (Lost, Once Upon A Time) plays his partner Steve Wozniak. It's free to stream right now at our source link below.

Continue reading…

New trendy design for this season's hottest fashion? Nope, it's lung surfactant:

The snapshot is a microscopic image that used fluorescent dye to reveal the patterns made by lung surfactant, a soaplike material that covers the inside of the lungs. Without surfactant, the lungs would collapse.

"During the breathing cycle, as your lung is compressed, it will form this pattern," said Prajna Dhar, the creator of the striking microscopic image. [...] The researchers took the patterned surfactant image as part of a study investigating how nanoparticles affect the body.

Now, who says that science can't be hip? Link

The complete run of Omni, one of my all-time favorite magazines, is now available for free on the Internet Archive! In its late-1970s and 1980s heyday, Omni was a wonderful blend of technology, science, art, fiction, futurism, and high weirdness. It really inspired my own writing and interests. OMNI Magazine Collection (via Warren Ellis)

In fact, as I've posted before, if I could launch a new Boing Boing print magazine I'd want it to have this logo, courtesy of Mr. Beschizza:

UPDATE: Rob now says that this is what Boing Omni would look like...

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: grades , exams , Neil deGrasse Tyson , students , g rated , School of FAIL Share on Facebook

I've been forcing myself to get better around the edges. I'm forcing myself to pay more attention to the little things that I use, but use very inefficiently. One of those things is Git. Here are a couple tutorials that are really helpfull.

Learn Git Branching is a highly visual introduction to Git. The visual nature of the tutorial is unique. A nice balance of words and cartoons.¹

Ryan Irelan's Git Tutorial is a basic introduction to Git. Ryan does a really well paced walkthrough of the fundamental use of Git and some of the nicer Mac apps for Git. It's $15 for an hour of training. Not cheap, but not expensive either. I thought it was worth it.

---

1. Thanks to Dr. Bunsen for the tip. ↩

We're living on a planet with an expiration date. One day, Earth will die or explode — and if we're lucky, some of us won't be there. Science fiction is full of stories where we abandon a dead Earth, including the upcoming films Oblivion and After Earth. Here are all the reasons people leave Earth for dead in science fiction.

Read more...

Condom manufacturer Durex has announced Fundawear, vibrating underwear that encourages couples to “touch over the internet” using an iPhone app. Fundawear aren’t currently available for sale, but Durex Australia is holding a contest on its Facebook page to win a set of his and hers Fundawear.

via The Telegraph, BetaBeat

“It’s been an awfully long time coming, but at last it looks we can say that the New York Yankees parking garages are in default on their bonds!New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez reports that “Bronx Parking Development LLC failed to make a $6.9 million payment due April 1 on more than $237 million in tax-exempt bonds arranged by the Bloomberg administration back in 2007. The group, which is not connected to the Yankees, thus fell into one of the biggest defaults of a New York City-sponsored bond in decades.” Unless you’re one of the poor schmoes who bought Yankees parking garage bonds thinking that the garages would actually pay their bills, the default probably won’t mean very much to you: Since a nonprofit corporation was set up to sell the bonds, neither the Yankees nor the city of New York is on the hook to bondholders. (The city can forget about ever getting the $43 million in rent payments it was supposed to accrue from the garages, but then, it’s probably already forgotten about that long before now.) Of course, this isn’t a very good sign if, say, you live in a certain California state capitol that is considering a similar parking bond deal, only this time with taxpayer funds set to fill in any gap in parking revenues. Though officials there swear that they’re using conservative assumptions, and we all know that public servants would never fudge the numbers about something so important as — what’s that, Juan? City economic development aides have privately acknowledged they were ordered by City Hall back then to “make the numbers work” in order to justify tax-exempt bonds. Not a very good sign at all.”

- Yankees parking garages go belly-up at last | Field of Schemes

The planets orbiting far-off stars are close to Earth-sized and are a distance from their suns that makes their surfaces neither too hot nor too cold. Since launching in 2009, the Kepler telescope has identified more than 100 planets.

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forlackofabettercomic:

Consider yourselves judged.

The teenage boy authorities once investigated as possibly being connected to the Boston Marathon bombing said today he was shocked to see his face pop up on television and all over social media.

Stages of Decay is beautiful photo book of abandoned theaters by photographer and urban exploration pioneer Julia Solis. In her research for the book, Solis photographed more than 100 theaters in America and Europe, from grand performance palaces to school auditoriums. Stages of Decay is available for pre-order on Amazon. The book releases on April 25, 2013.

Ruins symbolize the transitory state of human endeavors and show that even our strongest barriers against the forces of nature will one day crumble and collapse, even fortresses made to withstand whole armies and cathedrals designed to raise the spirit from the earthly muck into the heavens. No matter how grandiose, all would succumb to the dark embrace of rot, pulling the physical building back into the cycle of nature, inevitably ending with decay and decomposition. By touching on these powerful sentiments and becoming a visual reminder of mortality, ruins are the embodiment of drama.

For more on Stages of Decay, check out the write-ups by Laughing Squid partner John Law and Flavorwire.

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Tagged: breakfast , text , dog Share on Facebook

Keep calm &c.

Yes, that is a Boston parking ticket on the windshield of one of the trucks that has turned the Charles Street side of the Common into a National Guard encampment. Richard Lynds couldn't believe it, either.

Original Source

“

In 2005, the Pew Internet foundation found that 5% of the online population was using RSS.
In 2010, a Reader product manager is quoted as saying Google Reader had “tens of millions of monthly active users.”3
CNN had 25,120,973 subscribers on April 15th, 2013.4
Engadget had 6,840,662 subscribers on April 15th, 2013.5

To be conservative, If we give CNN a very high market penetration, like 50%, then we can estimate that the entire Google Reader ecosystem is roughly 50 million users. This is backed up by the claim that in 2010 Google reader had, “tens of millions of monthly active users.” Second, I estimate that Reader is 80% of the total market for this type of RSS reader, which would put the total market at roughly 65 million users.

That’s not a small market by any means, and if treated right, it will probably grow, but that’s not the end of the story. What we all really want to know is what is the size of the paid market. For this, I would point at conversion rates for existing freemium services. If Evernote gets 6%6 Dropbox gets 4%7, and Flickr gets 7%8, it looks reasonable based on these other data that the RSS service of the future would get 4%. So, that means we are looking at 2.6 million paying feed-reading customers.

”

-

How Large Will the Paid Feed Reader Market Be? - Rumproarious

written by App.net’s Alex Kessinger

policecars:

Brimfield PD (Ohio) - This is the new puppy at training today….we don’t think the bullet proof vest fits….just yet

*SHRIEK* 

*SHRIEK*

*SHRIEK*

LOOK AT THE BRAVE LITTLE BUDDY FIGHTING CRIME

Original Source

#R2K

Original Source

Original Source

Jose Canseco is an admitted steroid user and a former MLB player. Most recently, he's gained a cult following on Twitter for being a bit of a weirdo. Now he's brilliantly answering your questions online.