firehose

“When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”  -Jacques Yves Cousteau I can think of no two men this quote applies to more than Rick Macpherson and Al Dove.  For the last five years, these two men have shared freely […]

sulksmash:

snap

When I walked in and I saw her singing and dancing…I’m just so thankful. You know I make mistakes. My goal isn’t to be perfect, but the fact that you see something in me… I just want you to know that you don’t have to be perfect. Perfection is often the enemy of greatness. You are enough… You can be bigger than me. - Janelle Monáe, The Queen Latifah Show

After announcing plans to offer a standalone streaming service in late 2014, HBO has revealed HBO NOW, a subscription service that is scheduled to premiere in April for Apple customers. It’s somewhat unclear whether the service–which was announced at an Apple event in San Francisco today–will be exclusive to Apple for a limited time or permanently.

Apple® and HBO today announced HBO NOW is premiering next month, making an HBO subscription available directly to Apple customers for the first time ever. iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch® and Apple TV® users can purchase HBO NOW directly in-app as a standalone service to watch every episode of every season of the best of HBO’s original programming, as well as the biggest and latest Hollywood hit movies, groundbreaking documentaries, sports and exclusive comedy specials—for just $14.99 a month.

image via Business Wire

On the morning of Monday, March 2, 2015, Stephane Gaudette, a history teacher and father of two in Timmins, Ontario, opened a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and was surprised to find a message within. The top flap read “Please read the bag.” On the bag was the following handwritten note:

This is the very last bag of Canadian cereal for the Canadian market from Kellogg’s London Ontario Plant Fri. Dec. 5, 2014
Mike Cascadden 24 yrs
R. Gonsalvez 29 yrs
Frasier McAuley 28 yrs

The message refers to the December 2014 closure of the Kellogg’s Canada factory in London, Ontario. Located at 100 Kellogg Lane, the facility was in operation for 75 years. It closed as part of a global downsizing by the food manufacturer due to declining cereal sales. The workers who signed the bag–Mike Cascadden, Ray Gonsalvez, and Frasier McAuley–included the length of their careers with Kellogg’s. After reading the message, Gaudette decided not to open the bag. He and his family (his wife is also a teacher) have been bringing the box to school as a historical artifact.

photos by Stephane Gaudette

via CBC, The London Free Press, The Daily What, Neatorama

List of emoticons

Link

Dinosaur Tissue Holder

The Auburn, California-based design shop Sparkly Pony (previously) has created a cute and colorful series of wooden animal tissue holders that look like dinosaurs, rabbits, whales, elephants, and ponies. The tissue holders are all available to purchase, in various colors, online via their Etsy shop.

Elephant Tissue Holder

Pony Tissue Holder

Rabbit Tissue Holder

images via shopSparklyPony

via Incredible Things

Early on the morning of March 8th, our dear friend Danny Suthivarikom passed away. He is survived by his wife Miho and his daughter Momo.

Drawing this comic for Dom is probably one of the only ways I can be of help to the friends I left behind when my family moved across the country. It’s already been linked to in the tweet box above, but it’s worth linking it again if it further helps those that Danny left behind.

http://www.gofundme.com/HelpMihoAndMomo

I’m sorry I didn’t know you better, Danny, but your friends and family are going to make sure your daughter knows how awesome her daddy was.

Rest well.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Janice Levenhagen-Seeley, the founder of ChickTech, a national nonprofit whose headquarters are in Portland, Oregon. ChickTech is dedicated to retaining women in the technology workforce and increasing the number of women and girls pursuing technology-based careers. They are currently running an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds to expand into more cities and we spoke to Levenhagen-Seeley about it all.

The Mary Sue: What does ChickTech do?

Janice Levenhagen-Seeley: We create a community that supports, empowers, and provides educational opportunities for girls and women. This year, we are expanding from 3 to 8 chapters throughout the country.

Although we run programs for girls and women of many ages and experience levels, our signature program is “ChickTech: High School.” This is a yearlong series of opportunities for 100 high school girls who have not yet opted into technology but who have the aptitude to do well in it. It includes project-based tech workshops that expand their ideas of what a tech career might look like, one-on-one mentoring with a professional in the technology industry, and internship opportunities in the summer.

TMS: Why is it important that girls get interested in STEM careers?

JLS: “Chick Tech: High School” is important because we need more girls choosing technology as a career. This is important for multiple reasons, but the two biggest ones are:

1. As we say in our Indiegogo campaign, without diversity, technology will never reach its full potential. How can we create the best solution with only a small, homogenous portion of our population involved? So many studies have shown us the benefit of having a diverse team. Let’s start acting like engineers and use this scientific data to make systematic improvements for better outcomes.
2. Women and girls deserve an equal say in our future, and at this point, that future is dominated by technology. I can’t imagine that changing anytime soon. It is unacceptable for women’s voices to be talked over, their opinions to be ignored, and their ideas to be automatically dismissed. What kind of civilization do we live in? One where all people are treated as equally valuable regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation? Or the one that I see reflected in the reports of too many technology companies with no women on their executive teams or boards and only 2-15% women on their technology staff?

TMS: What inspired you to start ChickTech?

JLS: I started ChickTech to give girls and women the support and sense of belonging that I didn’t have when I was a computer engineer. We focus on high school girls because so many of them are still not encouraged to be engineers and programmers, and they rarely even know what a career in tech would look like. Although I fell into technology, that just doesn’t happen to the vast majority. With ChickTech, we can change both the culture of the tech industry and help provide support until the culture values all people equally.

TMS: Why should someone contribute to your Indiegogo campaign?

JLS: The Indiegogo campaign is our first fundraising drive to both raise awareness and funds for our national expansion. ChickTech is a grassroots organization, and like any grassroots movement, we need the support of the people to create lasting cultural change.

TMS: What is the one thing that drives you to keep expanding ChickTech, not only in Portland but in other cities?

JLS: The one thing that drives me to continue expanding ChickTech is being reminded daily of the systemic inequalities that women and girls face, and the fact that so many of them will never reach their potential because of it.

TMS: Do you think ChickTech will ever expand to other countries?

JLS: Once we’re strong and sustainable in the US, we absolutely expect to expand to other countries.

TMS: How do you address concerns about sexism in tech careers with the participants? Has this come up in questions or do you address it head on before being asked?

JLS: Many of our high school participants have already seen issues regarding sexism if they’ve tried other tech opportunities. Often, they think it’s just them. Without an organization like ChickTech, they don’t have a framework for understanding that this is a societal issue, or that it isn’t that they aren’t good enough–it’s that the current culture has a stereotype for who is good in technology and who doesn’t belong…and unfortunately, women tend to fit into the latter category. By giving them the emotional support they need, they can start to believe that “it’s okay to stand up against the sexism in [their] engineering class,” as one participant said.

TMS: Why “Chick”Tech?

JLS: “Chick” has been reclaimed by this generation as a fun and empowering label…think “punk rock chick” or “rocker chick.” If you do a general Google search, you see women using the word positively to identify themselves: eco-chick, nomadic chick, “that computer chick.”

When we chose the name, we had never heard of it being used negatively. It was chosen because it was more fun than “women”, definitely more fun than “females”; and “girls” didn’t feel right for a group for both women and girls. So far, our hundreds of high school participants seem to embrace and identify with it! It is our goal that we continue to take it back by empowering and supporting powerful, confident, and creative women through our organization.

TMS: Why pink?

JLS: We have chosen to break the stereotype that says that women can’t be feminine and technical, or pretty and smart. A group of technical women chose because that is what they enjoyed and what made them happy. Who are we, who is anyone, to tell them that they aren’t allowed to like pink; that they should choose a more masculine color; that being feminine and liking pretty things is to be frowned upon, especially as intelligent engineers?

Marissa Nolan-Layman is a freelance social media specialist and is Editor in Chief of Nerds in Babeland. You can find her on Twitter, @MissMarissaMae.

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

A midwestern U.S. city has one of the fastest broadband connections in the world, on par with Hong Kong. That's because four years ago, Google Fiber selected Kansas City, Mo., for the roll-out of its broadband network at speeds 100 times faster than anywhere in the county. Despite its warp-speed leap into the future, however, Kansas City still boasts a racial digital divide that tracks with its 20th century residential segregation of African-American and Latino residents. The disparity is one that's renewing conversations around barriers to Internet access for all low-income communities of color and their ability to effectively compete in the global information economy. Seventy percent of public school students, according to local tech nonprofit Connecting for Good, do not have Internet access at home.

There're a number of reasons for low adoption, as Fast Company reports. Major barriers include price (comparatively low, but not low enough for owners of buildings with low-income tenants, including public housing) and a perception among residents that the Internet--compared to paying rent or buying food--isn't a necessity.

(h/t NPR)

It's kind of sad that the first woman wearing a watch in this presentation had to be a super model, and not an Apple employee. Cook is talking about "the definition of portability" meaning, he's going to talk about a thinner notebook. Cook: We challenged ourselves to reinvent the notebook... and we did it... and here it is... The new MacBook has NO ports. Except a power port--and it's ANOTHER new power-connector design. Shoot me now. Lol we're watching a slo mo video of someone typing on the new keyboard. Wut Your watch can remind you to stand up if you're sitting too long at work.

Michael Kenneth Williams, an actor known for playing a cop cuckolded by a midget in Trapped In The Closet and probably an HBO show or something, has landed the lead role in The Spoils Before Dying, IFC’s follow-up to The Spoils Of Babylon. Williams, who was also recently seen alongside Mark Wahlberg in The Gambler and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice, will star as Rock Banyon, a jazz pianist in 1950’s Los Angeles forced to clear his name after his lead singer and on-again, off-again flame is found murdered. This role will give Williams, frequently cast as a heavy, the chance to play the pursued and not the pursuer for once, as well as make those silly faces people always make when they’re playing jazz on TV. Will Ferrell is also set to return as drunken author Jonrosh, upon whose booze-soaked musings the fictional adaptation is ostensibly ...

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Great news for Apple-loving cord-cutters: When HBO launches its new standalone subscription service , HBO Now, Apple will be its exclusive partner, and you'll be able to watch using any Apple product.

Read more...

Upcycle a wood pallet into a coffee machine via instructables

This is a project of creative reuse, upcycling or repurposing. Breaking down my coffee pad machine, and separate the housing from it’s essential parts, is a revelation. My first impression; so much plastic housing and just a few parts machine. Why not showing the machine in it’s real shape in this pallet age?

A reused pallet is an icon of a movement that points to an anti consumerism lifestyle and sustainable living. Thousands of pallet projects worldwide indicate upcycling, creativity and a personal production of consumer goods.
I show a coffeemaker inside out, on a mini pallet. A form of ‘guerrilla machine redesign’. Living in a world of black boxes, it’s a provocation to show the “internal parts”. Insight in the processes within give more understanding if something goes wrong. ‘When you don’t open it you don’t own it’. How many broken coffee makers have never been opened for a short inspection inside the housing? I am surprised, as repairer, how fast the problem is found after opening the ‘treasury’.

Features:
– Coffee AND tea maker.
– With on/off switch and fuse.
– Made of re-used materials.
– Transparent design.
– Easy repairable
– Low ecological footprint
– Easy to fit to your idea

Read more

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Idris, who next stars in Pierre Morel’s action-thriller The Gunman alongside Sean Penn, has remained tight-lipped over which of his co-stars, including Ruth Wilson (Alice Morgan), would be returning for the new episodes.

It all started when Lee Sechrest pointed me to this post by James Coyne. Sechrest wrote:

I know you have enough to do, and if you do not get to this…well, no problems. It is a blog by Jim Coyne taking apart a “classic” study in social psychology, originally published in the early ’70s.

Implausible effects on mortality of giving plants to old people to take care of. The study became the foundation for a whole movement of giving “control” to nursing home patients and other such. The study has been cited nearly 500 times. Except that a later erratum revealed a statistical error that rendered the results not significant. The erratum has only been cited 6 times. The study was never withdrawn.

The second author of the study went on to become the first tenured female professor at Harvard and she earned many (justified) awards, fellowships, and so on for her work on mindfulness.

The first author, not so often mentioned in connection with the plant study, got on the fast track in administration and became Provost at Yale, President at U Pennsylvania, and is now President of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Oak trees from little acorns grow.

This stunned me, not in a good way. I associate Ellen Langer with her wonderful article, The Illusion of Control, in the classic Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky book. So it’s a bit disappointing to see this.

A few days later Sechrest followed up with this:

Sadly, the story gets worse. Sort of hard to believe, but Coyne is quite careful. Lots of people hate him, but they don’t do so based on his mistakes. The Coan he refers to in his blog is one of our students and a good friend. When I read Coyne’s reference to his work, my thought was that he can’t be right. Then I read the whole blog and some articles: he’s right.

Here’s what Coyne wrote:

When an Ivy League psychologist promotes quackery, is it time to stop accepting her ‘scientist’ branding?

Following up on my previous dissection of her nursing home study, I [Coyne] take a skeptical look at what passes for science in the intense promotion of Ellen Langer’s planned study attempting to shrink tumors of metastatic breast cancer patients at a Mexican resort.

Ellen Langer’s identification as an eminent, well-published Harvard psychologist is an important part of her branding and the promotion of herself and her products. The promotion is infused with references to her 40 years of research. Yet, she assumes none of the responsibility that goes with being a scientist. She does not consistently submit her work to peer review. She makes references to unpublished studies, even those that have remained so for many years. Some of her studies are described only in an ostensibly peer reviewed journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, but with insufficient details to allow any independent evaluation of her claims. There is evidence of deliberate, selective publication in her direct quotes in the New York Times article. She talks about ongoing studies in ways that suggest biases being introduced by her monitoring incoming data. She is flippant in presenting her theoretical model and the sources of her hypotheses. There are discrepancies between claims that she makes to the media and what is available in published accounts of her research. And finally, she is dismissive of the basic responsibilities of a scientist conducting biomedical research to justify the work with reference to plausible mechanism and to provide patients with an accurate sense of the evidence base supporting or not supporting treatments.

Langer has published in scientific journals, but she is not otherwise acting like a scientist. One of her studies involved telling hotel chambermaids that their work involved lots of exercise, with the result that the women lost weight without increasing their actual exercise. These implausible results are reported in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science, with Langer explaining results with the same sort of mental frame explanation. If I am skeptical, do I owe it to her to carefully examine this article before dismissing it? I don’t think so. Her other activities establish sufficient prior probabilities it will not be worth the effort.

There is a way in which, once a researcher is eminent enough, he or she becomes a “brand.” Is this good or bad, I don’t know. Linus Pauling, Roger Penrose, Jared Diamond, that Bell Curve guy.

To get back to Langer, though: this is just sad. She was famous (to me) for her 1975 article on the illusion of control, “defined as an expectancy of a personal success probability inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant.” And then, in her own research, she herself becomes subject to the inclusion of control.

I’d like to believe that, if someone were to just talk with Langer and explain what’s going on, she’d say, something like: “Wow—you’re right! I totally fell into that trap, the illusion of control. Damn!” and it wouldn’t be too late for her to rectify things. Realistically, though, nahhhh, I can’t imagine it will happen. Presumably she’s had lots of chances already to see what was going on, and if she hasn’t taken the opportunity so far, she’s probably not going to do it now. I can only assume that she “knows” that her scientific hypotheses are true, so the strength of the evidence would seem to her to be nothing but a minor technicality.

P.S. More here.

The post Ellen Langer: expert on, and victim of, the illusion of control appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

bijikurdistan:

Ceremony of the Kurdish Female PKK Fighters on the international Women’s Day at the Qandil Mountains.

“

19-year-old Kevin Thompson didn’t think that he was going to jail the day he pulled his car out of the garage to go to his job in an auto-repair shop. He was pulled over for a speeding ticket and found out that he had not properly renewed his license. When Thompson appeared in traffic court, he was unable to pay the $810 fine and was put on a 30-day probation period to pay his ticket. The judge handed his case over to Judicial Correction Services, Inc., a for-profit corporation that oversees the collection of fines and the probation of people who have committed minor infractions, such as traffic tickets.

Thompson met with his parole officer from JCS weekly and made payments totaling $85, most of which he borrowed because he was unemployed. JCS kept $30 of those payments as a fee, so that amount didn’t count toward the total owed. Eventually, Thompson told his probation officer that he was unable to pay, and she informed him that he would have to appear before a judge to have his parole revoked. He ended up in a jail cell for owing $838 in fines and fees.

What Thompson experienced is called “pay-only” probation. It’s part of the growing private business of what’s euphemistically dubbed “incarceration alternatives,” a lucrative industry that ranges from electronic monitoring to drug treatment and halfway houses…

But for people like Thompson, this industry helps contribute to a cycle of jail, unemployment, and poverty. In late January, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against JCS and DeKalb County, alleging that pay-only probation unfairly targeted people who were too poor to pay at sentencing—and were, therefore, likely to be unable to pay later. “Across the county, the freedom of too many people is resting on their ability to pay,” said Nusrat Choudhury, an ACLU attorney who represents Thompson. “We seek to dismantle that two-tiered system of justice, which disproportionately punishes people of color.”

”

- Locked Up for Being Poor
(via smdxn)

tastefullyoffensive:

(photos by Bill Watterson and an octopus)

yogibreez:

dicedpineapplex2:

Must watch

Got damn he went off and give a fuck bout them white folk next to him

Buuunk!