Dana Lone Hill tried logging on to Facebook last Monday only to be locked out because the social media giant believed that she was using a fake name. In an essay over at Last Real Indians, Dana, who’s Lakota and has been using Facebook since 2007, explains that she’s presented a photo ID, library card and one piece of mail to the company in an attempt to restore her account. The day after Lone Hill’s account was suspended she was able to access it briefly but she was then booted a second time. 

In her essay Lone Hill says that this has happened to other Native users she knows:

I had a little bit of paranoia at first regarding issues I had been posting about until I realized I wasn’t the only Native American this happened to. One friend was forced to change his name from his Cherokee alphabet to English. Another was forced to include her full name, and a few were forced to either smash the two word last names together or omit one of the two words in the last name. Oglala Lakota Lance Brown Eyes was bootd from facebook and when he turned in his proof of identification they changed his name to Lance Brown. After contacting the Better Business Bureau and threatening Facebook with a class action lawsuit, they sent him an apology and let him use his given name again.

To reestablish a Facebook account after being accused of using a fake name, users must submit one government-issued ID such as a birth certificate, passport or voter identification card or two other forms of identification such as library card and a yearbook photo. The company appears to have been questioning certain Native users since at least 2009, when it deactivated Parmelee Kills The Enemy’s account. More recently, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Facebook deleted a number of Native accounts. In one case, the company asked users Shane and Jacqui Creepingbear for identification to prove that they weren’t using fake names. Shane took to Twitter to express his disappointment:

Hey yall today I was kicked off of Facebook for having a fake name. Happy Columbus Day great job #facebook #goodtiming #racist #ColumbusDay

— Shane Creepingbear (@Creepingbear) October 14, 2014

Try again @Creepingbear apparently my family name does not meet @facebook standards. Way to go #ColumbusDay #facebook pic.twitter.com/HYiu55DYgh

— Shane Creepingbear (@Creepingbear) October 14, 2014

Via Facebook messenger, Shane says that the couple’s ordeal came to a swift end when he had some friends who work in the tech industry contact Facebook directly. Shane, who’s part of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, says that he and Jacqui have “administrative shields” on their Facebook accounts and that their names will no longer be questioned. 

“It’s a problem when someone decides they are the arbiter of names,” says Shane. “It can come off a tad racist.” 

Facebook’s 10-year-old real-name policy stipulates that users “provide the name they use in real life.” However, the social network doesn’t require people to use their legal names, according to an open letter the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, posted last October. In the letter Cox apologizes to ”drag queens, drag kings, transgender [people], and [to the] extensive community of our friends, neighbors and members of the LGBT community” whose accounts had been shut down after a user reported hundreds of them as fake. At press time no such apology has been issued to Natives.

In a statement to Colorlines, a Facebook spokesperson wrote:

“Over the last several months, we’ve made some significant improvements in the implementation of this standard, including enhancing the overall experience and expanding the options available for verifying an authentic name. We have more work to do, and our teams will continue to prioritize these improvements so everyone can be their authentic self on Facebook.”

The spokesperson also told Colorlines that any idenitification provided by users is reviewed and verified by a single Facebook employee and then immediately destroyed—which may calm some privacy concerns. 

Lone Hill, who went by Lone Elk until she found her birth certificate last summer, tells Colorlines that she submitted her documents to the company last Tuesday only to receive an automated e-mail asking for even more documents—“credit cards, Social Security numbers, stuff I’m not comfortable sending.” Lone Hill says she misses having access to her nearly 2,000 Facebook friends and doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to recover photos of her four children that she stored in her account. 

A petition demanding Facebook change its policy toward Native names, started about four months ago, has garnered more than 9,000 signatures. 

Update, 4:14p ET
Dane Lone Hill’s account was restored by Facebook today after being suspended for the better part of a week. Lone Hill had posted about her ordeal on Last Real Indians on Friday, which Colorlines picked up and published a post about Monday. In an email addressed to Lone Hill at 2:58p ET and forwarded to Colorlines, Facebook explained:

Hi Dana,

It looks like your account was suspended by mistake. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.

View updates from your support dashboard: [REDACTED]

Thanks,

Harvey
Community Operations
Facebook

While there are more women senators in the newly seated Congress than ever before, a New York Times story from Feb. 2, 2015 highlights the loss in women leading committees. Last year, when Democrats controlled the Senate, women led a record nine committees, including the all powerful Appropriations Committee. With the Republican win of the Senate in the last election, there are now only two women who chair committees—senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.

What happened? Women’s leadership in Congress is dominated by women Democrats—and there are too few women Republican senators and congressional representatives. Given the central role that women Senators played in the budget stand-off in 2013, a reduction in women’s leadership is not likely to bode well for this Congress.

Overall, in the Senate, Democratic women hold 14 seats and Republican women hold six. It’s even worse in the House, where Democratic women hold 66 seats to Republican women’s 22 seats.

It wasn’t always so. In the mid-80’s, the numbers were nearly equal. While Democratic women increased their representation by six-fold over the past three decades, Republican women have only increased two-fold.

If Republican women had kept pace with Democratic women, we’d be close to the 30% mark for women’s representation in Congress, an international benchmark for effective representation by women.

Instead, the US ranks 75th in the world in women’s representation. Standing alone, US Democratic women would be ranked 27^th in the world, similar to countries such as Austria and Germany. Conversely, Republican women’s representation, which is currently 11% of Republican seats, would hold a ranking of 116^th in the world, alongside countries like India and Jordan.

Why haven’t Republican women kept up? The answer is clear: the pipeline of female Republican candidates is smaller—you may recall the legendary “binders full of women” Mitt Romney needed since his own network of candidates was primarily male.

The Political Parity Project studied this challenge and published a report in January that shows that Republican women are weeded out in the primary process: “GOP women are far less likely to enter or win a primary election than their Democratic peers. Those who do run are often stuck in the starting block without adequate coaching and support.”

We can name this problem “gendermandering,” an unintended consequence of “gerrymandering.” While gerrymandering seeks to redraw districts to suit the political party in power, some political scientists have used the term gendermander to describe the increased likelihood that re-districting will marginalize a woman incumbent.

When districts are re-drawn, they often become “safer” for either party, i.e., either more conservative or liberal. And more conservative districts aren’t good for Republican women, who are negatively perceived as more liberal than their male peers despite many examples to the contrary—think Joni Ernst, Sarah Palin, and Carly Fiorina. Conversely, in a liberal district, Democratic women are viewed as more liberal than Democratic men and so they jump in the race more often. Put simply, Democratic women are running and winning more often.

Recently-elected Republican representative Renee Elmers may have been viewed as conservative when she won her election in November, but her recent efforts to stop restrictive abortion legislation will no doubt disappoint the party faithful, who dominate Republican parties. It’s likely she will be challenged in her next Republican primary.

Across many dimensions, female senior leadership hovers in the high teens. In the US, women hold 16.9% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. Likewise, 16% of executives are women in the private sector. This makes Republican women’s representation at 11% look particularly anemic.

Research shows that adding women to top leadership in business leads to better corporate performance and improved stock prices. The advantages of having more women in Congress also have data behind it.

A recent study by political scientists at the University of North Carolina and the University of Kansas shows that women are key to reducing gridlock. The men in the survey were more likely to avoid talking across the aisle and more likely to judge political arguments solely on partisan lines.

We are only a few years away from the 2020 election that will determine the next round of Congressional redistricting. Let’s hope that voters will demand bi-partisan redistricting as they have done in California, and thus create fewer polarized districts. As districts become more balanced, Republican women might start catching up with Democratic women.

Let’s also hope that Hillary Clinton’s likely presidential bid—along with prominent female Republican candidates like Carly Fiorina—will help bring new energy to all women, and draw more of them into races. It will be difficult for Democratic women to raise women’s leadership to the levels that this country needs without the help of Republican women.

Follow Marya on Twitter @maryastark. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Forget sticks or bricks. It’s now possible to buy a freshly built house of straw.

Buildings that use straw bales as their primary construction material have been around for a while, but a set of seven houses for sale in Bristol, in the west of England, are the first commercial sale.

Marketing them can be tough. “We get a lot of perceptions, as you can imagine. Because it’s straw, you get the Big Bad Wolf, and he’ll huff and he’ll puff, etc.,” says Finlay White, a sales representative of ModCell, the company that developed the technology for the homes.

But they may not be a bad idea. To research the idea, the University of Bath’s Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering built a test house.

They found that fuel bills could be cut by up to 90% compared to a less-efficient brick house. The UK has 3.8 million tonnes of spare straw, the dried stalks left behind after harvesting grains, which could be used to build over 500,000 new homes, the university said.

ModCell’s straw panels, created and tested alongside the University of Bath, have been certified with the independent industrial certification system “Q-Mark.” That’s the crucial step for the house-buying market, because it means that mortgage providers will be willing to finance houses built with the innovative building method.

Finlay White was standing outside one of the homes on the first day it became available for purchase by the public. Two-bedroom houses cost £200,000 and slightly larger ones a little more. The average Bristol house sold for £234,200 last year according to property site Rightmove.

The build works like this: Timber frames enclose compressed straw bales to form prefabricated panels that can then be craned into place, and in the case of the Bristol houses clad in brick to fit in with surrounding architecture. Use of local straw is preferable, so ModCell creates a “flying factory,” setting up near building sites and making the panels there.

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The houses, on St. Bernard’s Road, are the first generic homes, but ModCell has built plenty of classrooms, local authority buildings and offices using the stalks and husks left behind by wheat production.

But what about those perception problems—the idea that a straw house will burn down, become infested, get soggy or be blown over (for example, by a wolf)?

Straw buildings are already found in the US, where the oldest has been standing for 140 years. Researchers determined that the test-house could withstand a hurricane. The encased straw bales are flame-resistant to such an extent they are used as a fire walls between semi-detached houses, according to the School of Natural Building. The possibility of bales getting wet is a concern during the construction phase, but not once the building is complete. And the material doesn’t reduce the longevity of the building, the researchers say.

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The buildings are also flexible: An extra window can be chopped through a wall using a hay knife, chainsaw, or alligator saw.

While the houses have stirred excitement among sustainable building enthusiasts, they may be a hard sell to most, who will likely wait and see how they endure in the long-term. None of the UK buildings has been standing for long enough to know whether they’ll last as long as Norman flint or 1960s concrete. Wolves, meanwhile, have yet to be reintroduced to Britain.

Hook ’em, Serif ’em

Established in 1883, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) is one of the largest public universities in the United States and is the largest institution of The University of Texas System. It is comprised of 18 colleges and schools — Fine Arts, Law, Liberal Arts, Architecture, etc. — offering 170 fields of study and 100 majors to more than 50,000 students through approximately 24,000 faculty and staff. UT is home to the Texas Longhorns, the university's athletics program that is one of the top in the nation and has one of the most recognized logos in college sports. Lastly, UT also features one of the most unflattering colors on the human skin ever formulated: the burnt orange looks good on a logo and brochures but on the t-shirts, polos, sweatshirts, hats, sweaters, scarfs, boxers, and every other piece of apparel with the UT/Longhorns logo that every person in Austin wears to work, church, the grocery store, the movies, and everywhere else, it is absolutely detrimental to their complexion no matter their rating on Hot or Not. But I digress. At the end of 2014, UT started a soft launch — now visible in their social media accounts — of a new identity designed by local firm Dyal.

The new family of signatures gives the University flexibility based on need. Colleges are typically comprised of multiple departments and offices, often with research centers and institutes. We designed a structured system to accommodate the institutional hierarchy.

Dyal project page

The previous principal logo was set in Trajan. If it were any more unimaginative it would be a movie poster. But technically there was really nothing wrong with it and, in principle, there is nothing wrong with Trajan. It looks stately and respected. And, hey, it's an Adobe-bundled font so, unless there is a special licensing needed for big-ass universities, it was very cheap to implement and use as the in-house type for all their materials. The new wordmark is typeset in Grilli Type's Sectra, a beautiful hard-angled serif that is relatively obscure, giving UT a very distinct typographic voice that is rare for a university this size. The word "TEXAS" looks great and the "Th" ligature is quite sweet.

The shield graphic is derived from the shield contained within the official University seal. Retaining the Texas Lone Star at its center, the oak and olive branches have been simplified and abstracted. The number of leaves represents the eighteen colleges of the University. The rhythm and word breaks of the abstracted words on the book provide a "hidden" reference to the key phrase in the University alma mater: "The eyes of Texas are upon you, all the live long day."

Dyal project page

The new identity also features a new symbol, derived from the university's seal. I'm not as crazy about it as I am about the typographic choice, mainly because there is a visual disconnect between all of its elements. The leaves are have a mono weight approach while the star and book taper in some places and the shield tapers heavily. The star is too big and has little breathing room too. It just feels a little crowded. However, as a whole and when reduced and locked up with type it looks and works quite well.

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In application, things are pretty straightforward: lots of white, lots of burnt orange, and the logo used small and simple. It may seem boring but for a university this size, it's the exact thing to do. Maybe I'm locally biased but I think this is an extremely successful redesign for an extremely large and complex institution. The simple act of changing an identity and steering such a large ship in a new, more refined and distinct identity is worth commending. I will still not wear any UT-colored merch, no matter how pretty the type is.

The story of Texas’ “Petticoat Court” is one of old boys’ clubs political vendettas, and a group of women bold enough to serve a court that actively undermined their interests at every turn.

A Tale of Two Zippers « bunnie’s blog.

Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
This factory is a highly-automated, vertically-integrated manufacturer.

Read more.

“

Here’s what I think happened between Tolkien/Le Guin and now: Dungeons and Dragons. D&D has a lot to answer for re the modern fantasy audience (and I say this as a fan of D&D). I blame D&D for systematizing so many things that don’t need to be or shouldn’t be systematized: fantastic racism, real racism, gender essentialism — hell, let’s just say all the “isms” — career choice, morality. Yes, yes, D&D has gotten better over the years, and yes all these things happened in the genre (in spades) before D&D, but remember boys ‘n’ girls et al: systems are remarkably effective at reinforcing stupid thinking. This is because systems are self-reinforcing and have internal consistency even when they’re logically or ethically questionable. It’s the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode. Then suddenly we see nothing wrong with saying that of course orcs are evil, because they’re orcs. Or of course magic has to be logical, because how else are we going to simulate its effects numerically and in a fair way that encourages good team mechanics?

That’s game logic, this concern over quantitative fairness and teambuilding. Game logic should not apply to magic, because it’s fucking magic.

”

- N.K. Jemisin

cattletyrants:

blurds:

avianeurope:

Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) »by Kee Liu

I’m seeing some confusion about this one in the reblogs, and it is for my money one of the most interesting things to know about birds, so:

The big guy in this picture is the cuckoo - a young cuckoo.  The little one is the momma bird, who is feeding the baby, even though the baby is now like five times as big as she is.  That’s because the cuckoo is a brood parasite.

Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.  If the hosts notice the cuckoo egg, they will try to get rid of it - if they don’t, though, and the cuckoo chick hatches, they will raise it as their own, even though the first thing it does when it hatches is to murder all of their other children.

The question with this is always: why, at that point, do the host birds raise the cuckoo chick?   It’s way too hungry, it’s way too aggressive, it hangs around way longer than a normal chick would, and it’s huge, for god’s sake.   It’s obviously not theirs. There are a couple of theories. One is that the begging call a baby cuckoo makes sounds like an entire nest of normal chicks, and the parents are programmed to feed whatever makes that noise.   I got some doubts about behavior models that are that deterministic, though.  I like to think it’s some avian variation on the sunk cost fallacy - the parents put all these resources into making this nest and laying this clutch, and by god they’re going to get a baby out of it, even if it’s a giant monster baby.

There is absolutely zero science behind this but my impression has always been that the parasitized parents, upon raising a gargantuan monster child, are basically just thrilled to pieces, like, “fuck yeah my huge Gundam kid can beat up your honor student” and “gaze upon my feathered monster truck pride and joy and despair”.

treesofarden

corgnelius:

Friends are at a bar and asked if I wanted to roll by. “Naw, I’m good, thanks for the invite tho.” Unless they’re at a bar with beds and snugglier corgis than this one, I think I made the right call.

I remember everything. I didn’t black out. It was a simple, intense accident, going after a loose ball. I remember thinking. "Does my head hurt? Of course it does, I just took a right high top to my left temple. Shit happens, I’ll just sit out practice and be good to go tomorrow."

An anonymous reader writes with the news that Richard Stallman is upset over the prospect of GNU Emacs's Grand Unified Debugger (Gud.el) supporting LLVM's LLDB debugger. Stallman says it looks like there is a systematic effort to attack GNU packages and calls for the GNU Project to respond strategically. He wrote his concerns to the mailing list after a patch emerged that would optionally support LLDB alongside GDB as an alternative debugger for Emacs. Other Emacs developers discounted RMS' claims by saying Emacs supports Windows and OS X, so why not support a BSD-licensed compiler/debugger? The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

metasonix writes Originally developed by Wikia coders, "Liquid Threads" was intended to be a better comment system for use on MediaWiki talkpages. When applied to Wikipedia, then each Wikipedia talkpage or noticeboard would become something resembling a more modernized bulletin board, hopefully easier to use. Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal." After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for 'prime time' for us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As an avid fan of NYC history, I’m thrilled by this new project from the NYPL.

From FastCoExist:

What if we could peel back the layers of the cities we live in? Imagine if you could look up any address in New York and be able to see what was there 10, 50, 100, or even 350 years ago. That’s the idea behind the NYC Space/Time Directory, the newest project of New York Public Library Labs.

“The NYC Space/Time Directory will aggregate data from thousands of historical maps and offer it freely online through a searchable, map interface,” says Ben Vershbow, the director of NYPL Labs. “Users will be able to feed it old addresses and get accurate results, and to look up historical locations, events, and people.”

Read more.

The Portland Trail Blazers point guard will be on the West’s All-Star roster after all.

It took a while, but Damian Lillard was finally named to the West's All-Star roster, taking the injured Blake Griffin's spot. The Portland Trail Blazers point guard said he felt "disrespected" having not originally been chosen to the team, but ended up making the West's lineup after all.

Lillard is having his best year in his third season in the NBA. He's averaging 21.6 points, 6.3 assists and 4.6 rebounds in 36.5 minutes per game for the Blazers, who are 34-17, which is good enough for the fourth best record in the West. The Trail Blazers have struggled as of late, however, dropping nine of their last 13 games.

Portland now has two All-Stars. Lillard's teammate LaMarcus Aldridge will suit up for the West, too.

He will join the West's stacked roster of point guards alongside Stephen Curry, Russell Westbrook and Chris Paul.

It marks Lillard's second All-Star appearance. Earlier in the week, it was reported that he declined the opportunity to defend his two consecutive Skills Challenge titles at All-Star Weekend's Saturday night festivities.

Lillard may not be in New York for the Skills Challenge, but he will be there for the headline event.

As someone who runs a corporate Twitter account, I can't shame anyone for making a mistake like this (since deleted). I'm just curious: Where on ANY part of Twitter can typing out "please remove me from this list" accomplish anything?

“An outbreak of the measles at Kenneth Copeland’s Texas megachurch has gotten some attention because (1) measles is something children are generally vaccinated for, these days and (2) Kenneth Copeland is, of course, an anti-vaccine crackpot. In what seems to be yet another bitterly ironic attempt by God to teach noisy religious fundamentalists what-for, the church has thus become the epicenter of a small but worrisome outbreak that has so far infected 10 and resulted in the Department of State Health Services issuing an alert spanning North Texas.”

- Anti-vaccine megachurch hit with measles epidemic, now offering free vaccinations

treesofarden

coelasquid:

I found out that if you give your tomato plant adequate water and fertilizer you run the risk of it never flowering because consistently comfortable conditions convince the plant that there is no environmental pressure to spread and reproduce.

You can literally be a helicopter tomato parent and grow a spoiled directionless manchild tomato plant.

teal-deer:

king-of-roses:

So Excentrique’s spring range is interesting.I think I want most of it.

:0

treesofarden yooooooooooooooooooooooo

mydrunkkitchen:

ultrafacts:

Giant river otters have been hunted extensively and are now among the rarest otters in the world—only a few thousand are believed to survive in the wild.

At about 6 feet (1.8 meters) long, they are the world’s largest. They live only in the rivers and creeks of the Amazon, Orinoco, and La Plata river systems and also take on crocodiles. [x]

(Fact Source) Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

But when they sleep do they hold hands?