firehose

Fou Lard, Natalie Luder

Recently, Facebook and Apple announced that they would pay for employee egg freezing. This launched a heated debate about the place of employers in women’s reproductive decisions, whether egg freezing is a good alternative to starting a family, and how women juggle the anxiety of work and kids with the existing support structures. Quartz held a Google hangout discussion with a group of women to see how they really feel about egg freezing and the workplace. Below is an edited excerpt of the conversation:

1. To freeze or not to freeze—and how to freeze

Joonji, 35, Freelance writer, South Africa

I’m 35, feel okay about not having kids, but can kinda feel the clock ticking. Would have them if I could make up my mind when or if I should even bother.

Gwynn, 36, Reporter, New York City

Hi, I’m a journalist, and am considering having kids at some point in the future with my (soon-to-be) wife. No egg-freezing plans as of yet, but for lesbians, reproductive gimmickry of some sort or another is pretty much fated.

Emma-Kate, 42, Journalist, Paris

Interestingly in France, egg freezing is not even legal except for long term hetero couples with defined infertility.

Manoush, 41, Radio host and managing editor, New York City

Sarah, can you tell us about the process? How much it costs and whether you needed to take time off from work?

Sarah, 43, Author, New York City

You take a couple weeks of hormone shots. You can definitely work up until the end, when you get your egg surgically extracted, although you feel a bit sluggish and bloated. I’ve frozen many eggs and hope to thaw in the next few years. It’s funny to be able to plan it so clinically. Still doesn’t take away the anxiety of it though!

Manoush

Important info from Tanya: According to data for vitrification cycles published in Fertility & Sterility last year, implantation success declined from 13.2% for embryos from eggs frozen at 30 to 8.6% for embryos from eggs frozen at 40. But new data needs to be collected. The problem is no one controls the clinics and doctors doing the egg freezing, so there’s no obligation to report success rates.

Sarah 

Freeze early. Freeze often. Be the heroine of your own life. And relax!

2. Does fertility affect dating (and mating)?

Manoush

Mamas out there: Would you have put off having kids if you’d had the egg freezing option?

Mitra, 38, Editor, New York City

I think it’s gonna change dating and marriage, no?

Emma-Kate 

Sarah really nailed it in the New York Times by pointing out that most women i.e. 88% freezing eggs do so because they don’t have a partner. How can Facebook et al resolve that??

Manoush

Such a good question. How can Facebook help people find supportive partners?

Christen, 43, Artist and Professor, New York City

I’m bisexual, and got married to a man because I knew I wanted to have children at 25—it was a physical sensation of “I need to have a baby.”

I sometimes question that I made big life choices based on biology and hormones.

Sarah

I know a 43-year-old freezer, and she lets guys know, “Don’t count me out! I froze!” But most don’t bring it up. What guy wants to talk about fertility over your calamari?

I felt great after freezing my eggs. I felt like I was back in the game and took control of my life that had gone off track—was in a relationship with a guy who ended up not wanting kids.

Annalisa, 32, Reporter, New York City

As an Italian, one thing that surprised me about the debate—and generally about the US—is that it uses a very professional approach to having kids. Dating is like a job interview, finding someone is a goal, having kids is planned before a certain age, and then raising them too.

Sandi, 32, Founder, Silicon Valley

As a Canadian, I totally agree. Everything in the US is much more of an “action toward a goal.”

Mitra

But I do think if you wanna have kids and have a career, you kind of set it as a goal. My practicality, I used to think, came from Indians’ pragmatism about arranged marriage but maybe it’s a sign that I’m American.

3. What women want: good, affordable childcare

Emma-Kate

Childcare is a mess in the US like in Australia. Private, costly, patchy.

Christa, 32, Lawyer, San Jose

To be fair, it is often very difficult for employers to get insurance for on-site daycare centers.

Mitra

Where I used to work had great back-up daycare and sitter relief. And discounts on daycare. They were amazing. But they didn’t pay for IVF so I still ended up crying in the benefits office when we didn’t think we could have a second child…

Manoush

Does anyone here have on-site daycare? From QZ’s article: “The plans for Facebook’s $120 million, Frank Gehry-designed campus include a doggy daycare, but nothing of the sort for children.” That really pisses me off.

Heather, 39, Editor, New York City

There is a large bank that used to have daycares at certain sites. But in addition to it being costly, employees at other sites were upset not to have the same benefit so they closed them down and instead offered companywide backup childcare.

Manoush 

You know who helped me out the most? My mother. She’s been spending two nights a week at our place for the last seven years. And my husband still complains that we don’t spend enough quality time together. Meanwhile, I’m getting the biggest opportunity of my career and I’m going for it.  The guilt I get from everyone is exhausting.

Mitra

I pay for a concierge service to do all the stuff I think I should be doing, tracking down handymen, scheduling appointments, updating the family calendar, ordering the best gift for 4-year-old boys for this weekend’s birthday party. A friend of mine and her husband were in counseling. It was really bad. Then I saw her recently and I asked what changed: “We got domestic help.” I type these words and know it’s so privileged and so bougie and so unfair.

Emma-Kate

Mitra you are spot on. What you have done is shown up in the research of Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson the brilliant young economists with kids. We need to look at the costs and benefits and outsource the non-essential so we can work, have good relationships AND see our kids!

Heather

But nowadays, many of the mothers of women having children are still working themselves. Or they live far away. As my dad says, the demographic shifts in this country (ie aging, retirement, trend of people moving away from their parents, which didn’t used to happen so much) are really going against women today, because now that more of us are working, we need our own parents even more than perhaps our mothers did.

Rita, 30, Social Media Manager

I was basically raised by my grandparents, which is common in many Indian families. My grandfather drove us everywhere. My grandmother did all the cooking and most of the cleaning.

Joonji

The African way of doing things is with the whole community helping out and pitching in. Though that structure is being eroded as more and more black women move away from their families, into the suburbs or other cities as they advance or get more opportunities.

Domestic help is what enables the SA middle class, and you’ll be disgusted to know how little we pay them to clean the house and take care of our three kids.

Heather

What I tell my husband now is that I wish I had kids when I was 16 so that I could have just started a career at 30 when the kid was off to high school and not had any interruptions. It turns out that making the baby (with fertility issues) and having the baby and coming back from work while caring for a baby was the easy part, versus the daily—sometimes hourly—challenge I feel to manage work and my husband’s work and my kid’s needs now that she’s older.

Manoush

So far we’ve all agreed: “It takes a village”….”call my assistant”…”work/life balance isn’t possible”…”you don’t have to have a child to be a mother.”

4. Before the freeze: other benefits companies should provide

Joonji

So then is egg freezing what women (by and large) want? Is that what would free them, or is it a more accepting workplace, more maternity leave and support?

Gwynn

I think in some ways the whole FB/Apple thing is kind of a distraction from a deeply problematic issue in the US right now: the huge tradeoffs women must make to have children. Instead of figuring out how to delay having kids, we should be focusing on how to make it easier to have kids. And it shouldn’t be the job of corporations, though they’re just reflecting what the market wants.

Sandi

I talked to my boyfriend about it the other day. Since we both live/work in Silicon Valley, for us we get why they’re doing it with regard to the battle for talent. I think people here recognize that there are massive inequalities in tech/the valley, but this is hopefully one step to enable women to have one more choice.

Christa

What happens if you leave your job at Facebook and can’t afford to keep your eggs frozen? Is it also sort of a retention tool in that respect? Or is that too cynical?

Emma-Kate

Is adoption no longer even really discussed now that egg freezing is so front and center? What about company aid to help women and couples adopt?

Mitra

I think a lot of the resistance to making institutional change is that so much rests with “HR”—this mythical place disconnected from our daily realities.

Tanya

Workplace policies are left largely to the discretion of the employer, which means there are big discrepancies in which companies are more mother friendly or father friendly, etc.

Emma-Kate

I have noticed that in the US often there are some allowances for mothers who work (though very little) but dads of little babies get nothing! And this impacts moms and kids.

Mitra

So I would add concierge services to the list of What Women Want. Daycare, paid leave, egg freezing, IVF, and a person to schedule the flu shots.

Sonali, 23, Reporter, New York City

I think millennials aren’t sold on the “women can have it all” message—we’re told that you can have kids and have a job, but it’s very very difficult and you’ll always feel inadequate somewhere.

Tanya, 43, Documentary Filmmaker, New York City

It’s a myth that there is such a thing as work/life balance, but we can advocate for the system in America to be more accommodating of women who are mothers. The system was built by and for men’s needs and schedules. That system is broken and inherently misogynist.

Mitra

What do you wish you could tell your (maybe male) manager or co-workers?

Christen

Get a fucking clue.

Tanya

Guaranteed parental leave for both parents and subsidized childcare are some measures to improve the system.

Mitra

I think I also envision a workplace where we are more open about TTC (trying to conceive), miscarriages and the drama that awaits as they grow up…

Manoush

The best managers are fathers whose wives had post-partum depression.

Rita

The best managers are fathers who have daughters!

Christen

My final thought is about how this affects younger workers/women, in terms of work being the thing that is supposed to be the main priority in their lives. It could be seen as the beginning of a dystopian nightmare—a Margaret-Atwood type situation (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake)—it’s as if corporations are taking over every aspect of intimate life.

Heather

Something else (maybe) worth mentioning… I think women, whether they have kids are not, are prone to really losing themselves in their work. I almost think men are better hard-wired for work-life balance, because often they’re better at compartmentalizing. When 5pm comes and they have to go pick up the kid (IF they had to pick up the kid), they’d just go. Whereas for me, it’s a constant struggle to pull myself out of my work that way.

Mitra

I always tell moms to tout the fact that they are such a key to their companies’ bottom lines… Moms with purse strings, purchasing power, pulse of the people/schoolyard/etc.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

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Google has been trying to reinvent email for years. Five years ago, Google launched Wave, which at the time spurred breathless articles about redefining email. A year in, Wave was shut down.

Today, Google’s giving it another more refined attempt with Inbox, a new app. If you believe the reviewers to whom Google has showed the app, it is “a total reinvention of email,” “a big reimagining of the email interface,” that “puts the important stuff on top” and could very well be “a replacement for Gmail.”

It is probably all of those things. But Medium’s Steven Levy gets closest to what Google is trying to do, which is about an “evolution to nudge Inbox even closer to Google Now so that the concept of email itself blurs.”

Google’s Inbox is not an email app. It is a personal assistant, a tool for reminders, and a way to quickly scan incoming information all in one. Google Now, an automated personal assistant Google has been keen to promote, scans all of the data Google has on you and your movements to give you useful updates, such as if your train is delayed. Inbox will do the same for your email, showing photos from links, flight times from reservation emails, reminders from your calendar, and so on.

Ron Amadeo proposed an interesting theory over at Ars Technica last week, namely that Google’s strategy is to make two of everything. Inbox is the other Now. Will it replace email? Probably not. But it could be a very useful supplement for terribly busy people whose lives are filled with travel, adventure, photos from their recent outings, and several meetings every day. And it could also convince people of the virtues of Google Now.

Waterfall can’t

Carlos tries to be funny by telling several jokes, but they often backfire and cause the kids to groan “CARLOS!” in an aggravated manner

Link

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

@MurmerMurmer but I can’t remember why

Always a favorite at our Thanksgiving table is baked acorn squash. They’re so easy! The hardest part is cutting the squash in half—you need a sharp knife and a strong, steady hand. But then all you have to do is scoop out the seeds, score the inside, dot with butter and brown sugar or maple syrup and bake. To eat you can cut them in wedges, or keep them in halves and scoop out the flesh with a spoon.

Continue reading "Classic Baked Acorn Squash" »

Original Source

Original Source

They call themselves satire sites, but they're really spreading scary rumors for profit

"We’ve seen stories on satire sites — fake news sites — getting tremendous traction because they feed on people’s fears," says Craig Silverman, the founder of Emergent.Info. "It’s really becoming an epidemic now." Silverman launched Emergent with Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism last month to track the spread of rumors online in real time. Many of the stories he’s seen have been organic rumors, things like the pumpkin spice condom or the 50-foot crab that begin life as jokes, get taken out of context, are written up in news stories, and take off on Facebook before anyone bothers to verify them. But he’s finding that a surprising number, especially when it comes to Ebola, are deliberate attempts to deceive. "I've had people emailing me about the Purdon story, very scared, asking if it was true," says Silverman.

"It’s really becoming an epidemic now"

These sites claim to be satirical but lack even incompetent attempts at anything resembling humor. They’re really fake news sites, posting scary stories and capitalizing on the decontextualization of Facebook’s news feed to trick people into sharing them widely. On Facebook, where stories look pretty much the same no matter what publication they’re coming from, and where news feeds are already full of panicked school closures, infected ISIS bogeymen, and DIY hazmat suits, the stories can fool inattentive readers into thinking they’re real. Panicked, they share, spreading the rumor farther and sending more readers to the story, generating ad revenue for the site.

It’s proving to be a very successful strategy, particularly for a site called the National Report, which saw its traffic spike to 2 million unique visitors yesterday according to Quantcast. Very few are repeat visitors, meaning they’re just seeing the link on Facebook and clicking.

The tendency for bad satire to take off on Facebook is well-documented. I’m not talking about The Onion, which is absurd and funny enough that most people paying attention can’t mistake it for real news, and well-enough known that anyone who does will be quickly mocked. The problem is more with sites like The Daily Currant, whose brand of just-barely-unbelievable stories are political share-bait and have suckered more than a few actual publications into aggregating its stories as news. The Awl’s John Herrman calls it the Borowitz Problem, after The New Yorker humor columnist whose pandering fake news often gets shared far out of proportion — I hope — to the people who actually find it funny. "When you publish a fake headline that sounds almost real, place it on top of satire that's soft enough to skim without really reading, give it a newyorker.com URL, and promote it on Facebook, where basically every headline sounds like satire now, you know what you're really doing," Herrman writes.

The new sites like National Report take this phenomenon and push it to its amoral conclusion. If satire mistaken for news can get shared more on Facebook than real news, and you're totally unscrupulous about how you get your clicks, why not drop the satire pretense and just write fake news? "What we’ve seen emerge over the last year is a much more malicious breed," says Silverman, "which are not driven by trying to do comedy or satire, but by what kind of fake stuff can we spin up to get shares that earn us money."

"What we’ve seen emerge over the last year is a much more malicious breed"

The National Report appears to have begun as an inept satire site a little over a year ago. Notable past stories include the news that residents of Hanna, Oklahoma, were going to be implanted with RFID chips as part of an Obamacare pilot program, which freaked people out sufficiently to warrant a debunking in the Caspar Star Tribune — "Satirical article creates stir in Wyoming town" — in which the Report’s publisher, Allen Montgomery, mocks anyone dumb enough not to fact-check his stories. That was back when the site called itself satire in a now-deleted disclaimer. More recently, the Report wrote a tremendously popular story claiming that Facebook would begin charging users, replete with fake quotes from Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this week it posted a story about Banksy getting arrested and identified, repeatedly debunked but still getting tens of thousands of likes.

Emergent's chart of the spreading Purdon hoax. Green represents shares linking to the hoax, red represents shares debunking it.

On October 1st, National Report posted a story claiming that an entire Texas town was quarantined after a family tested positive for Ebola. The story exploded on Facebook, accruing hundreds of thousands of likes. The Report has since thrown all its fake resources into the fake story, sending a fake journalist to file fake reports from the ground about fake outbreaks, quarantines, and CDC coverups. On Monday the site claimed that a class of kindergartners had been infected by a Liberian exchange student, a xenophobic detail in keeping with the site’s right-wing tone. Now it’s pushing a story about ISIS Ebola agents in Arizona.

Emergent's data on the spread of the National Report's Banksy hoax. Green represents shares supporting, red represents debunking. Despite being immediately debunked, the hoax eventually won out.

Facebook is the major vector for these fake news stories, partly because Facebook drives much of the traffic to news stories generally, but also because certain characteristics make it a powerful platform for disseminating rumors. Sites, no matter their pedigree, look pretty much the same in your news feed — just a headline and a caption — making disreputable sites harder to detect. You’re more likely to trust news coming from someone you know. Readers often reshare without reading, or skim quickly if they do click through. Salacious and alarming stories are more sharable than stories debunking them; Silverman's initial data shows multiple takedowns combined getting just a fraction of the shares as the original rumor. The Banksy hoax was quickly debunked by 12 different sources, and for a while the truth was winning out over the lie, but three days later the fake story has been shared almost three times as often.

"Twitter is more where rumors are birthed, but Facebook is where things absolutely catch fire"

The Texas quarantine story was shared almost entirely on Facebook — 0.3 percent of shares came from Twitter — which makes sense considering how quickly it would be debunked on a faster platform populated by more news-savvy users. "Twitter is more where rumors are birthed," says Silverman, "but Facebook is where things absolutely catch fire, in particular when you’re talking about hoaxes and fake news articles."

A change Facebook made earlier this year may have inadvertently made it a better vector for fake news. Facebook added "trending topics" in an attempt to highlight important, or at least popular, stories in a near real-time, Twitter-like fashion. In doing so it created new pressure for sites to quickly glom on to whatever topic trending as a way of reaching a wider audience. People have complained that this encourages shoddy, rushed reporting, but the sites best positioned to capitalize on it are the ones that don't need to report at all. I wasn't watching the Ebola section when National Report's campaign ramped up, but I've since seen stories that indicate trending topics will highlight nutty stories (pot can cure Ebola, Obama is infecting Christian's with Ebola to start a new era of liberal darkness) along with legitimate ones. By running fake stories on trending topics, these fly-by-night sites can drastically increase the number of people who see their stories, increasing the odds that their posts will go viral.

There are a bunch of them, spammy banner-ad-festooned sites like Big America News, Huzlers, Celebricity, Empire News, and others that run the spectrum from Daily Currant plausibility to National Enquirer fantasy, Ebola outbreaks to Ebola zombies. Some have disclaimers at the bottom of the site saying it's satire, or a mix of news and satire; others bury them so deep they might as well not exist. National Report used to have a satire disclaimer, but at some point deleted it (Snopes took a screenshot), leaving only a single line at the end of a hard-to-find legal page, reading, "The National Report officially states its purpose as an online portal for general news and commentary from its staff, citizen journalists and other sources, and may include unconfirmed or satirical material."

Ebola is the perfect subject for these sites. "There’s a lot on Emergent about ISIS and Ebola for the simple reason that it’s human behavior," Silverman says. "When there’s a lot of fear and anxiety and lack of information, or at least lack of understanding, humans try to talk through it, they throw stuff out there, and that births rumors." Aid workers in Africa dealing with the actual Ebola crisis have also had to contend with dangerous rumors — that Ebola itself is a hoax, that it’s a Western plot, that aid workers will kill anyone infected. Here in the States there is less to fear, but plenty of media ready to capitalize on it, whether through deliberately deceptive "satire" sites or irresponsible misinterpretations of science. The idea that Ebola is airborne is proving a particularly persistent rumor as various sites twist statements that such a mutation is not beyond the realm of biological possibility to mean that it’s possible or may have already happened. These rumors would likely be bouncing around anyway. Social media and the incentives it creates, Silverman says, simply work as an accelerant.

A diagram of a spreading rumor by Facebook data scientists in the paper Rumor Cascades. The rumor was an image of a Cabela's receipt that said customers were paying an extra tax because of Obamacare. Despite persistant Snoping, the rumor continued to spread.

Obviously it's in Facebook's interest to keep its newsfeed from filling up with garbage, but it's unclear how it could stop the spread of these hoax stories. Facebook is continuing to test , but only in the related articles that pop up after you click on a story and return to Facebook. (The Onion summed up people’s response well.) It has attempted to algorithmically weed out misleading clickbait headlines by burying stories that people share without reading, or that people click on and immediately return to Facebook, but it’s hard to imagine a similar filter that would work for posts that deliver exactly the story the headlines promise, albeit a fictional one. Debunking fake stories has a limited effect: a Facebook data science study earlier this year found that putting a link to the rumor-debunking site Snopes into fake stories made people four times more likely to delete their link, but the story continued to spread. "This suggests that their high virality can overcome the temporary setback dealt by being Snoped," wrote the researchers.

One branch of the rumor cascade. Red dots indicate posts that were Snoped.

Maybe the sites will become victims of their own success. The Daily Currant doesn’t seem to get linked to so much anymore, and it seems likely that the National Report’s Ebola spree is on its way to burning itself out. Already you can see the narratives diverging. As the quarantine ends for those in contact with Dunan, the National Report is declaring that Dallas has cancelled Halloween and infected ISIS agents are crossing the border. Hopefully panic will subside to the point that these headlines seem obviously fake to everyone, and attention will go back to the real crisis in Africa. At least until we find something new to panic about.

In the meantime, Silverman is busy with Emergent, watching how the rumors spread and get debunked, collecting data for a paper due sometime next year. He’s interested in the dynamics of online rumors generally, but the fake news sites have become an unexpected focus. "I’m actively now thinking about ways to go after these fake news sites," he says. "We need some way to crawl these sites and figure out which stories are starting to get velocity so we can counteract them, ruin their incentive, prevent them from getting the big hits. But I have no idea what the best way might be. There are so many."

plaid-monkey:

You garden is quite lovely. It would be a shame if something were to… happen to it…

Oops. That's not London. pic.twitter.com/2LfXpriCng

— Derrick Docket (@ddocket) October 22, 2014

Congratulations, Barcelona. You're getting an NFL game, too! No ... wait. Okay, geography can be tricky sometimes. Either that or plane fares were a lot cheaper to Spain and they'll drive the rest of the way.

The Falcons have since updated their infographic, but this doesn't look good -- whichever way you slice it.

thebaconsandwichofregret:

bronzebasilisk:

blu-thoth:

meta-bubbles:

DO NOT GIVE OR GET ANY VACCINATIONS FOR YOURSELF OR  YOUR KIDS………..

Ok, lets break this down nice and simple.

Formaldehyde is from the purification of the vaccine. 99.9% of which is removed. The reason it doesn’t give a dosage is so minuscule that it can’t be measured without going into picograms. That’s one trillionth of a gram. You breathe in more formaldehyde by driving down a busy road than in a vaccine.

Thimerosal is NOT elemental mercury, It is a molecular compound made up of carbon, hydrogen, mercury, sodium, oxygen, and surfer. This is used as a preservative for the vaccine. Thimerosal is used in a variety of other things, like tattoo ink, facial creams, nasal sprays. It’s toxic to humans only in fairly large quantities but highly toxic to aquatic born organisms like infectious bacteria. In short, it makes sure you don’t get salmonella from a stray bacteria from the chicken embryos.

As for the dosage of the Thimerosal. That is the most laughable point in this post. It says 25 mcg, that’s micrograms, or one millionth of a gram. To put this in perspective, a dollar bill weighs roughly 1 gram, the average human eyelash is around 80-90 micrograms. The box also says that it contains a 5ml (milliliter/cc) vial which leads me to my next point.

A little simple math and we find out that 25 mcg = 0.00003 ml and a little more math we find that 0.00003 ml is 0.00006% of 5 ml. Let me put this another way. By the age of 5, an American child weighs about 50-55lbs and their body contains 55 mcg of Uranium. I don’t see any kids running around with radiation sickness, so I think they’re safe with a preservative in them.

TL;DR: This is like saying you don’t want your child eating their baked birthday cake because raw eggs were used to make it and you don’t want your child getting salmonella from it.

THANK YOU

not vaccinating your children is child abuse and it should be illegal.

Wrist radio project from VectraSoft.

Parts List

• Raspberry Pi Model B
• Adafruit LCD Keypad Pi Plate
• Adafruit PowerBoost 500
• 3.7v 1200mAh Lipo Battery
• Wrist Mount
• USB Sound Card
• 3.5mm Microphone

Software

• NOOBS\Raspbian
• PiFM
• Adafruit LCD Keypad Library
• RaspWristRadio Python Script

Setup

Install and update software listed above. Be sure to have the pifm folder inside your home directory (typically /home/pi/pifm). Save the RaspWristRadio Python Script to your home directory. Make sure the script is executable: chmod +x radio-wearable.py To have the script work without editing, create a folder named music in the ~/pifm folder (typically /home/pi/pifm/music) and copy your WAV audio files into that folder. Set the script to run on boot by adding sudo python /home/pi/radio-wearable.py & to /etc/rc.local with a text edit like nano. Reboot the Pi and the system should be up and running as seen on the video.

If you have your WAV’s in another folder you and edit the script and change the path to that folder on this line – for root, dirs, files in os.walk(“/home/pi/pifm/music”):

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Products!

Adafruit Blue&White 16×2 LCD+Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi: This new Adafruit Pi Plate makes it easy to use a blue and white 16×2 Character LCD. We really like the 16×2 Character LCDs we stock in the shop. Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another 1 to control the backlight for a total of 7 pins. That’s nearly all the GPIO available on a Pi!

With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a Pi plate that lets you control a 16×2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the R-Pi! The best part is you don’t really lose those two pins either, since you can stick i2c-based sensors, RTCs, etc and have them share the I2C bus. This is a super slick way to add a display without all the wiring hassle. Read more.

PowerBoost 500 Charger – Rechargeable 5V Lipo USB Boost @ 500mA+: PowerBoost 500C is the perfect power supply for your portable project! With a built-in battery charger circuit, you’ll be able to keep your project running even while recharging the battery! This little DC/DC boost converter module can be powered by any 3.7V LiIon/LiPoly battery, and convert the battery output to 5.2V DC for running your 5V projects. Read more.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Wonderful story by Judith Newman, on her 13-year-old autistic son’s relationship with Siri:

It’s not that Gus doesn’t understand Siri’s not human. He does — intellectually. But like many autistic people I know, Gus feels that inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration. I realized this when he was 8, and I got him an iPod for his birthday. He listened to it only at home, with one exception. It always came with us on our visits to the Apple Store. Finally, I asked why. “So it can visit its friends,” he said.

Don’t miss this one.

Liz Kennedy, originally writing at Demos, republished at Moyers & Company.

The Supreme Court said Saturday that, for the first time, it is allowing a voting law to be used for an election even though a federal judge, after conducting a trial, found the law is racially discriminatory in both its intent and its impact, and is an unconstitutional poll tax. It is not only not a good look for the court, it is an abdication of the federal responsibility to protect every American voter from racially discriminatory voter suppression.

These continuing voter restrictions are the worst attack on Americans’ voting rights since Reconstruction led to the Jim Crow era. We are in the middle of the storm that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described in her Shelby County dissent. Studies show that recent restrictions on voting were more likely to be introduced and adopted in places that saw increased political participation from lower-income people and people of color.

Voting in Texas starts Monday, and the new law only allows seven forms of acceptable identification, including a gun permit or a military ID but not a student ID from a state institution. The federal district court found that African-American registered voters are 305 percent, and Hispanic registered voters 195 percent, less likely to have one of these seven forms of ID. In the words of Attorney General Holder, these voter ID restrictions are “inconsistent with our ideals as a nation… founded on the principle that all citizens are entitled to equal opportunity, equal representation and equal rights.”