A revolutionary idea: bringing more science to science fiction conventions. This weekend's Evolution Expo in Oakland combines science lectures and astronaut talks with TV and movie panels, to try and "put science back into science fiction."
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26 Jun 00:08
A revolutionary idea: bringing more science to science fiction conventions.
by Charlie Jane Anders
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26 Jun 00:06
Lerner sought IRS audit of sitting GOP senator, emails show - Fox News
Fox News |
Lerner sought IRS audit of sitting GOP senator, emails show Fox News Congressional investigators have uncovered emails showing ex-IRS official Lois Lerner targeted a sitting Republican senator for a proposed internal audit, a discovery one GOP lawmaker called "shocking." The emails were published late Wednesday by the ... and more » |
25 Jun 23:32
baeddelshinsgirl: thinksquad: Welcome to Alabama the state of...
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Welcome to Alabama, the state of the never-ending seat belt ticket.
Hali Wood is 17. She’s applied to work at several grocery stores in her home town of Columbiana, but none are hiring. A few months back, cops ticketed Hali for not wearing a seat belt. The fine: $41. Hali has paid $41 and then some, but she’s still hundreds of dollars in debt. Why? Because the court contracts with JCS, a for-profit probation company that forces Hali to choose between paying their exorbitant fees or going to jail.
Here’s how the scheme works:
Borrowing from the payday lender playbook, companies like JCS often sign contracts in cities and counties strapped for cash. For the county, the deal seems like a sweet one: The company will collect outstanding court debts for free and make all their profits from charging probationers fees. But the problem is that many of these people were put on probation because they were too poor to pay their fine in the first place and for them, the additional fees are huge. People find themselves scrambling for money they don’t have and forgoing basic necessities to avoid being thrown behind bars for missing a payment. The impact on communities, especially low-income communities of color, is devastating.- See more at: http://ift.tt/T2kSHf
Conservatives are keen on privatizing functions of government. What they don’t tell you is that they only want to privatize the profitable ones, and let the private sector pocket the revenue from them.
This is a disgusting violation of the social contract.
bernot likes this
25 Jun 23:32
Is Warby Parker Too Good To Last?
The company gives away a pair of glasses for every pair it sells. Is it too good for its own good?
25 Jun 23:29
Your Videos Are Boring. This Algorithm Can Help By Automatically Trimming the Boring Parts - Sadly, there's not a real world analog version.
by Glen Tickle
So your dog does this really cute thing, and you want to get a video and throw it up on YouTube. You get your camera and dog ready and start rolling, but he just won’t do the cute thing. Finally, he does it! Yeah! Most of what you just shot is boring, and a new algorithm can automatically edit it, leaving only the best bits.
LiveLight was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and it analyzes video footage and judges whether any given portion is interesting. If it isn’t, it gets trimmed from the video, leaving only the parts that matter. At least, that’s how its supposed to work. Here’s a video example comparing an original video to the LiveLight-edited version.
Besides tightening up videos of adorable children and pets doing adorable things, LiveLight can also serve to help law enforcement by quickly analyzing long clips of surveillance footage, dashboard cam recordings, or other video. Of course, in its current state, LiveLight still takes quite a bit of time to process a video. Carnegie Mellon says the program can analyze an hour of raw video in “1-2 hours” on a conventional laptop.
That means LiveLight might be a convenient option, but it’s not necessarily a timesaver if you need to analyze one video for a specific event like a crime. In the long run, though, it could save time. If there’s more video to be analyzed than people to analyze it, running it through LiveLight could be a solution. More powerful systems would obviously also reduce the time needed to process video.
(via Carnegie Mellon)
Previously in algorithms
- PBS Idea Channel explains how important algorithms are
- Google is trying to scrub the Internet of child porn with an algorithm
- This algorithm can draw video game characters in Tetris
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25 Jun 23:26
Meh, A New Daily Deals Site From the Founder of Woot
by Rollin Bishop
firehosehuh
Meh is a new daily deals site from Matt Rutledge, the founder of Woot and co-founder of Mediocre Laboratories. Rutledge, who sold Woot to Amazon in 2010, wants Meh to return to the roots of the daily deal site: a single deal every single day. He is currently raising funds via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign prior to the launch of the site.
25 Jun 23:23
The Doubleclicks Cover “Trogdor” and Melt Our Hearts (With Burnination) [VIDEO] - And the Trogdor comes in the night!
by Victoria McNally
firehosemeanwhile, in Portland
If at the age of thirteen my dweeby nerd soul could have been distilled into music video form, this video from the Doubleclicks’ Weekly Song Wednesday series is exactly what it would have looked and sounded like. Fire dancing? Check. Furiously duelling cellos? Check. Homestar Runner references? Yes please. Thanks for all the thatched roof memories, Doubleclicks.
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25 Jun 23:23
Microsoft Open-Sources Its OOXML SDK
While Microsoft's Open XML (OOXML) SDK has long been publicly available, today they have finally decided to open-source this software development kit...
25 Jun 23:21
Animal Impressionist Rudi Rok Successfully Communicates With A Young Horse
by Lori Dorn
Rudi Rok, a very talented comedian and animal impressionist, successfully communicates with a colt named Troia who runs toward Rudi every time he neighs. This is not surprising at all considering that Rudi has previously demonstrated his uncanny talent for mimicking over 30 different animals and even barked at dogs.
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25 Jun 23:20
Newswire: Lana Del Rey has her first No. 1 album
by Sean O'Neal
firehose'Del Rey—who couldn’t have been more of a hotly debated Internet topic if she’d named her first single “Let’s Not Give Our Kids Vaccinations While Watching The Sopranos Finale” '
'after Frances Bean Cobain reminded Lana Del Rey that dying young isn’t glamorous, Lana Del Rey replied by placing most of the blame on the reporter, the reporter responded by posting the audio of their exchange'
Confirming that there really is no such thing as bad publicity, walking, vamping thinkpiece Lana Del Rey has scored her first No. 1 album, with Ultraviolence moving 182,000 copies amid a week colored by regrettable statements. Del Rey—who couldn’t have been more of a hotly debated Internet topic if she’d named her first single “Let’s Not Give Our Kids Vaccinations While Watching The Sopranos Finale”—made headlines yet again this week, after she told an interviewer with The Guardian, “I wish I was dead already,” in longing for the legacy-cementing exit of an Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain. The controversy only intensified after Frances Bean Cobain reminded Lana Del Rey that dying young isn’t glamorous, Lana Del Rey replied by placing most of the blame on the reporter, the reporter responded by posting the audio of their exchange (a strategy that never works as ...
25 Jun 23:17
Here’s what Facebook’s workforce looks like
by Max Nisen
firehose15% women in tech, 53/41 white/asian in tech (1% black)
Facebook just joined the growing wave of Silicon Valley companies voluntarily reporting their diversity data.
And like its peers, the company’s workforce is heavily male, with very few Hispanic and black employees. The gap is particularly wide when it comes to people in senior leadership and technology jobs. That’s pretty much what we’ve seen from the other tech giants that have released similar data.
Tap to expand image
Facebook
Technology and “senior level” positions, typically the most highly compensated and powerful types of jobs, skew much more heavily towards men, just as with Google and Yahoo. At Facebook some 85% of tech employees are men, as are 77% of “senior level” employees.
Tap to expand image
The company says in its blog post that it has seen improving diversity numbers from its recent hiring activity as well as lower attrition from underrepresented groups after it launched a strategic diversity push last year.
25 Jun 23:16
Virtual reality company Oculus VR announced the acquisition of Carbon Design team this week. Carbon Design is best known as the designer of Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller, and will continue working from its studio in the Seattle area. Oculus said it...
Oculus to acquire Xbox 360 controller designer Carbon
by Mike Suszek
firehosegreat
Virtual reality company Oculus VR announced the acquisition of Carbon Design team this week. Carbon Design is best known as the designer of Microsoft's Xbox 360 controller, and will continue working from its studio in the Seattle area. Oculus said it...
25 Jun 23:15
Here's why two protesters disrupted Google's biggest event of the year
by Verge Staff
by Lessley Anderson and Josh Lowensohn
Google I/O is one of the hottest tickets in town, and gaining entry to today's keynote and the rest of the sessions that are going on this week is no small feat. Yet that didn't stop two protesters, who began screaming out their complaints against company officials at different times during the 2.5-hour long keynote before being dragged away by security. Both protesters were part of local tenants' rights activist groups, Eviction Free San Francisco and the Anti Eviction Mapping Project.
The first protester to stand up was Claudia Tirado, a third grade teacher at San Francisco's Fairmount Elementary School, who currently faces eviction from her home in the Mission District — just minutes away from where Google's press conference took place. Tirado rose suddenly in the middle of a presentation by Google's Android engineering director David Burke, who somehow managed to keep going on as if nothing was happening.
Protesters targeted Google's lawyer and robotics company
"You need to develop a conscience, Google," Tirado yelled while holding up a T-shirt urging people to stop Google's lawyer Jack Halprin. Halprin owns the seven-unit Victoria building where Tirado and her family live, and is reportedly trying to evict them using a controversial piece of California legislation called the Ellis Act to take the entire building off the rental market and evict rent-controlled tenants. The other protester let loose on Google for what he called "machines that kill people," a reference to the company's acquisition of robotic engineering company Boston Dynamics last December.
Erin McElroy, one of the protest's organizers, told The Verge that Tirado got into the show by receiving a pass donated by a sympathetic attendee. The conference cost $900 to attend, though tickets were extremely limited, causing Google only to offer them as part of a lottery system to interested developers.
"One of our demands of Google is to make Jack Halprin rescind the eviction," says McElroy, whose group Eviction Free San Francisco and the Anti Eviction Mapping Project was responsible for organizing these protests, and others that have taken place in San Francisco over the past few months.
Activists view the eviction as a prime example of the broader problems caused by San Francisco's recent tech boom. An average rental in the city now costs $3,200, meaning that lower and middle income residents who are forced into the rental market often have to leave the city. That change has spread out to surrounding areas like Oakland, where median home prices have nearly doubled in the past two years.
When asked whether she believed Google had a legal right to intervene in its employees' personal lives in this manner, McElroy responded, "We're asking for Google to take a stand on the eviction crisis and acknowledge that its employees are directly responsible for the displacement we're seeing."
Protesters gather outside of Google I/O. (Annette Bernhardt / Facebook)
The outbursts were just the latest in a series of protests organized by Bay Area locals, who have blamed Google and other technology companies for raising the cost of living. Along with the two inside, protesters gathered outside of San Francisco's Moscone Center (where I/O is taking place) to publicly chide the company over a number of issues, from the evictions to taxes and investments in local communities.
Not the first protests for Google
Other complaints have centered on the buses that ferry tech workers between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where most of the companies are headquartered. A new pilot program, which begins August 1st, will let commuter shuttles rely on certain whitelisted public-transit infrastructure like bus stops as long as the companies pay a fee and agrees to operate only during certain hours. Citizens have complained that the companies were making unfair use of the stops, and have continued to find faults in the proposed solution.
In a statement, Google said that thousands of its employees lived in the Bay Area, and that the company wanted to be "good" neighbors. "Since 2011 we've given more than $70 million to local projects and employees have volunteered thousands of hours in the community," a spokesperson told The Verge. "We're excited to be expanding that work in 2014 with the recent Bay Area Impact Challenge winners — several of them have even joined us at I/O." (The Impact Challenge is a Google-sponsored competition for grants given to nonprofits with ideas for improving local Bay Area communities.)
While fleeting, the scenario was highly unusual for what's considered the inner sanctum of a high-profile press conference. It's frequent to see protesters outside of press conferences and shareholders meetings from publicly-traded technology companies, though not inside an event where people pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars to attend, and are often vetted ahead of time. Today, that wasn't enough to let a few slip by.
- Related Items san francisco google protesters protests io google io 2014
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25 Jun 23:07
theacademy: Anna May Wong was a native Los Angeleno and the...
Anna May Wong was a native Los Angeleno and the first Chinese-American movie star. She landed her first film at 17 years old in the silent The Toll of the Sea and later appeared opposite Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express.
Though she was a talented actress, she struggled to avoid being typecast. What’s worse, she occasionally was passed over for Asian roles when producers hired Europeans instead of her.
In 1951 Wong became the first Asian lead in a U.S. television show when she starred in “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong”.
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25 Jun 23:06
UC Berkeley project studies the West Coast cocktail
by Risa Nye
firehosevia Overbey
Shanna Farrell, a historian for the Regional Oral History Project, is hoping an Indiegogo campaign will help her raise money to study the history of the West Coast cocktail. Photo: Risa Nye
Shanna Farrell, of UC Berkley’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), has the perfect qualifications for conducting research on the legacy of the West Coast cocktail: she holds a master’s degree in oral history from Columbia University, and she spent several years tending bar. She is the lead historian on the project, currently seeking financial support through an Indiegogo campaign.
The idea behind the project is to learn more about the history of the West Coast cocktail, while exploring themes that have played a part in its evolution. Farrell will conduct interviews with some of the Bay Area’s most esteemed cocktail historians, bartenders, craft spirit distillers and bar owners. As a recent transplant from New York with bartending experience in Brooklyn, Farrell has observed the tension between the coasts where cocktail culture is concerned, and says the Bay Area cocktail scene has a “rich and varied history that rivals the East Coast.”(...)
Read the rest of UC Berkeley project studies the West Coast cocktail (924 words)
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Post tags: Dale DeGroff, David Wondrich, East Bay drinking, Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, Jorg Rupf, Julio Bermejo, Leslie Pariseau, Mike Buhen, Murray Stenson, ROHO, Shanna Farrell, Talia Baiocchi, Thad Vogler, UC Berkley’s Regional Oral History Office
25 Jun 23:05
The death of the Urdu script
by donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda)
firehosevia Arnvidr
Way back in 2009, I wrote about a few specific cases in which computers led to (subtle) changes in the Dutch language. While the changes highlighted in that article were subtle and not particularly substantial, there are cases around the world where computing threatens much more than a few subtle, barely noticeable features of a language.
This article is a bit too politicised for my taste, but if you set that aside and focus on its linguistic and technological aspects, it's quite, quite fascinating.
Urdu is traditionally written in a Perso-Arabic script called nastaliq, a flowy and ornate and hanging script. But when rendered on the web and on smartphones and the entire gamut of digital devices at our disposal, Urdu is getting depicted in naskh, an angular and rather stodgy script that comes from Arabic. And those that donât like it can go write in Western letters.
It'd be fantastic if Microsoft, Google, and Apple could include proper support for nastaliq into their products. It's one thing to see Dutch embrace a new method of displaying direct quotes under the influences of computers, but to see an entire form of script threatened is another.
25 Jun 23:04
Google Introduces New Gmail API
by John Gruber
firehosevia Overbey
great
Eric DeFriez, Google technical lead for Gmail APIs:
For a while now, many of you have been asking for a better way to access data to build apps that integrate with Gmail. While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.
Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.
Is this the beginning of the end for IMAP and SMTP access to Gmail?
25 Jun 22:53
UFC Glitches, Narrated
by gguillotte
Incredible use of sorcery here on the ground. He is the Michael Jordan of magic. Alex goes for a leg and gets hold of a ghost that's been haunting the arena, and huge takedown.
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25 Jun 22:44
already own the games on the right, want to play at least two of...
already own the games on the right, want to play at least two of the games on the left
pounding the devil out of the button on the right anyway
firehose likes this
25 Jun 20:32
The Anti-Vaxxers Just Suffered A Major Legal Defeat
by Mark Strauss
Three New York families fought against a policy barring non-immunized children from public schools during a disease outbreak, and lost. This is a major setback for the anti-vaccine cause, and an important precedent for public health.
firehose and -1 others like this
25 Jun 20:30
Google's Cardboard turns your Android device into a VR headset
by Josh Lowensohn
firehoseare you fucking serious
While Facebook's virtual reality effort involved a multi-billion dollar purchase of Oculus VR, Google's gone with a decidedly simpler route: cardboard. Quietly released today following its Google I/O keynote, the company's put out an app called Cardboard that lets users slot their device into a cardboard viewer that can be looked through like a viewfinder and special lenses.
Some of the early examples of things you can do:
• Earth: Fly where your fancy takes you on Google Earth.
• Tour Guide: Visit Versailles with a local guide.
• YouTube: Watch popular YouTube videos on a massive screen.
• Exhibit: Examine cultural artifacts from every angle.
• Photo Sphere: Look around the photo spheres you've captured.
• Street Vue: Drive through Paris on a summer day.
• Windy Day: Follow the story (and the hat) in this interactive animated short from Spotlight Stories.
Developing…
- Source Google Cardboard (Google Play) Google Cardboard
- Related Items android cardboard google io io vr
25 Jun 20:29
Artists Spoofs the “Disney Princesses Reimagined As Every. Damn. Thing.” Trend - Disney Princesses as kitchen appliances!
by Rebecca Pahle
firehosethe last one
We’ve been known to participate in the “Disney Princesses as Star Wars characters! Game of Thrones characters! Warriors!” trend, so we don’t have a ton of room to talk here, but screw it: Gemma Correll’s “Disney Princesses, Reimagined” illustration still got a monstrous chuckle out of me. We’ve put a few more of her amazing illustrations below; you can check out more on her blog:
(via Fashionably Geek)
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25 Jun 20:27
zerostatereflex: Crow solves an 8 step process. Crows are...
firehosevia Tadeu
Crow solves an 8 step process.
Crows are amazing, I’ve been photographing them here in Seattle for a couple of years. They have distinct personalities and remember our faces. They actually started flying in and waiting for me when I would get home in hopes of a free unsalted peanut. I think of them as friends.
I had no idea they could do THIS.
An 8 step problem solving process. They’ve trained on each separate task, though not all together. This was the first time.(Crows will survive the zombies and restart society, no doubt.)
25 Jun 20:27
The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before
firehose'Native American groups got stuck with names chosen arbitrarily by European settlers. They were often derogatory names other tribes used to describe their rivals. For example, "Comanche" is derived from a word in Ute meaning "anyone who wants to fight me all the time," according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"It's like having a map of North America where the United States is labeled 'gringos' and Mexico is labeled 'wetbacks,' " Herman says. "Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you're naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not." '
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The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before:
Aaron Carapella couldn’t find a map showing the original names and locations of Native American tribes as they existed before contact with Europeans. That’s why the Oklahoma man designed his own map.
This is fantastic.
25 Jun 20:26
BESM 3rd edition
by super_bruno
firehoseshit, BESM is still around?
Just a quick question. Is 3rd edition of BESM compatible with the 2nd edition modules?
25 Jun 20:22
Amtrak train shoulda turned left at Albuquerque, or Ruggles perhaps
by OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy
firehoseTRAINS~
According to T alerts, Needham, Providence and Franklin Line riders who just want to go home are currently delayed due to "congestion."
MBCR explains that, in this case, "congestion" means an outbound Amtrak train was mistakenly switched onto the Needham line, which is sort of like the train equivalent of a truck trying to get on Storrow Drive, given that Amtrak trains use electric power and the Needham Line, well, doesn't.
firehose likes this
25 Jun 20:21
Sperm Donation Goes Hands-Free With the Automatic Sperm Extractor - This is not how Terminator taught me robots would come after our unborn children.
by Dan Van Winkle
firehosemainstream institutionalized sex robot
Yesterday, we found out that Japan had robots that are after news anchors’ jobs, but today we found out there’s another job robots are after: hand jobs. A Chinese hospital has introduced an automatic sperm extractor, which sounds kind of terrifying at first, but once you see it in action, it’ll tickle your funny bone.
The machine’s actually been around for a few years, and its concept is about as straightforward as it gets. It can be adjusted to suit its user’s height and has a protruding massage pipe with adjustable frequency, amplitude, and temperature. It’s even got a little screen to help get you in the mood, which you’ll probably need to distract you from, well, this:
According to the Urology Department director at the Nanjing, China hospital where the machine is located, it’s there to help men who have trouble donating the old fashioned way. In that case, I’m going to hope that it’s actually used in a more private setting than its location in the video. Sperm banks are great, but I don’t know how many people are going to be comfortable making deposits in walk-up sperm ATMs.
(via I Fucking Love Science, image KickAsshTv via YouTube)
Previously in sperm technology
- Science made sperm bionic with tiny motors
- And there are also just full-on spermbots
- But hey, those spermbots may save your life some day, because reasons
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25 Jun 20:18
Pre-order the Wii U GameCube controller adapter ⊟ Amazon now has...
by 20xx
firehose"this is the third console generation in which Nintendo has produced GameCube controllers"
Pre-order the Wii U GameCube controller adapter ⊟
Amazon now has a pre-order link available for both the Wii U GameCube controller adapter ($20) and the Smash Bros.-edition black GameCube controller ($30).
If you want a new GameCube controller right now, or just want some variety for your upcoming Smash meetups, you can also order the white GameCube controller Nintendo made back in the Wii generation (that’s right, this is the third console generation in which Nintendo has produced GameCube controllers). It’s got a 10-foot/3-meter cord, a full meter longer than the stock GC controller.
Not sure how long the cord on the new Smash controller is…
PREORDER Super Smash Bros for Wii U/3DS, upcoming releases
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