firehose

alxbngala:

Meal Time for Baby Squirrel [ஐ]

Remember in November, when the Portland Bureau of Transportation applied for $2 million in state lottery funds to help pay for a theoretical expansion of the city's theoretical bike share system? The application [PDF] included a bold claim, which has since proven objectively false: That Portland had already found roughly $5.5 million in sponsorships to purchase a system and run it for five years.

As we reported last week, no sponsorships have been announced for bike share, and there's no indication any agreements have been reached. Kaiser Permanente, the health care provider rumored to have been on the verge of signing a sponsorship, now says that isn't even on its radar.

Earlier this year, we raised questions over the truthfulness of the PBOT application with the Oregon Department of Transportation, which administers the ConnectOregon grant funds PBOT was applying for. Others have complained to ODOT in recent months, too. ConnectOregon officials repeatedly acknowledged public concerns, but allowed the application to carry on, unimpeded. In fact, Portland's bid for more bike share money was ranked fourth among all applications for bike/pedestrian projects this year, following only projects that earned a highest-possible "Tier 1" designation. (It still faced steep odds of being chosen. ConnectOregon has only $42 million to dish out this year, and $126 million in requests.)

Not anymore. On Friday, PBOT sent word it was formally pulling the application, blaming the shifting sands that have plagued Portland's quest for a bike share program. The Mercury's obtained a copy of an email Gabe Graff, operations and safety manager for PBOT's Active Transportation division, sent to ODOT officials.

"I wanted to ask you to withdraw our ConnectOregon bike share application from further consideration," Graff wrote. "Portland Bike Share has not proceeded as we expected when we originally submitted the application and in the unlikely event that we would have been awarded funds, we wouldn’t be able to utilize them as initially described."

Reached today, Graff confirmed the cancellation, but wouldn't talk further about the situation without speaking with PBOT's communications staff.

The ConnectOregon application isn't the only instance of officials acting as though sponsorships were a done deal. Around the same time, PBOT cut a $40,000 check to Alta Bicycle Share, the company tasked with bringing bike share to Portland. The money was tied to a "system finance report" that, according to the city's contract with Alta, was to be submitted "with 100% of funds secured to acquire, install and operate a 75 station, 750 bike System for five years."

But the difficulty in inking sponsorship agreements has been the single-largest challenge in getting bike share up and running. The program was supposed to launch in spring 2013, but has been delayed twice. It's now scheduled to launch next year.

Update, 12:24 pm, Tuesday: PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera just issued a statement on this situation to the Mercury.

As we have stated earlier, at the time we made the grant application, we had sponsorship commitments at the highest level. We withdrew the Connect Oregon grant application recently because significant changes in the bike share industry have caused the City and sponsors to reconsider the project's timeline. We have had clear and frequent communication with ODOT staff throughout the process. We continue our due diligence and look forward to launching the right bike share system for Portland.

If Rivera's mentioned that the city once had active sponsorship commitments "at the highest level," it hasn't been in numerous conversations with the Mercury. In fact, every time we've talked about this with PBOT—including asking specific questions about exactly how strong sponsorship prospects for bike share were, and whether they were actually "secured" as stated in the ConnectOregon application—Rivera has demurred.

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"Count Di-Amon" - 

Bastard!! Ankoku no Hakaishin (Cobra Team/Bandai - SNES - 1994)

LeBron James is the greatest ever (at going to see "Maleficent" by himself). Teach us your ways, oh wise one.

Via Deadspin, we have been made aware that on Saturday, LeBron James took in a screening of the hit Disney film Maleficent. By himself.

We know what #Lebron is doing right now. It's a Lebron selfie!! pic.twitter.com/ZbA0xaWBiI

— Jeremy Baker (@JBWeather) June 7, 2014

Some people are taking this as an opportunity to mock LeBron James. (Other opportunities people think it is acceptable to mock LeBron: literally every instant he is alive.)

But not us. SB Nation is taking a firm stance that going to the movies by yourself is awesome. I personally have been of this opinion for some time. Going to the movies alone is like a staycation where you leave the house. (Someone should come up with a term for that.)

When you go to the movies by yourself:

- You can show up whenever you want and just see whatever
- You can get whatever you want at the snack bar, even one of those theater hot dogs you mock around your friends but that you secretly believe smell fantastic
- You can sit wherever you want, even in the very last row and use your phone to text snide comments without anyone looking at you like you just dropped a baby
- If someone is being obnoxious or kicking your seat, YOU CAN JUST MOVE AT ANY TIME
- You can sob as hard as you want to The Fault In Our Stars or Maleficent or X-Men: Days of Future Past (which has a final scene where sobbing is warranted and how dare you say otherwise)

In other words, LeBron James is reminding us all that Team Solo is awesome. He is a hero both on and off the court.

With all that being said, however:

lol

An important part of sports is wearing the correct uniform.

By now, you should know that everything is sports. And if you go to a concert when you're over the age of 30 -- even for a band that doesn't have a history of inciting riots -- you should know that three hours of standing in one spot and nodding your head a bit is pretty much the most intense workout you can possibly get.

So when you're attending a sporting event like a concert, you should dress accordingly. Nicolas Cage and Andrew Dice Clay went to a Guns N' Roses concert in Las Vegas. Did they both come attired correctly for this outing?

Nailed it. Dice is ... still dressing like that in public apparently. And while your eye may be drawn to Nic Cage's cane, cowboy hat, indoor aviators, prayer beads or PANTS WITH FRINGE, please be aware that he is wearing a T-shirt with a meme of his own face on it.

Please never change, Nic Cage. Please continue making 12 movies a year so you can buy more yachts.

(h/t to Vulture)

“I think that [Red Sonja and Wonder Woman] are the alphas of their respective worlds. I mean, I know some will say Conan and Batman/Superman are, but they just are fooling themselves.”

-

Gail Simone (via cacntommyboi)

TRUFAX

Nigeria Gunmen Seize 20 Women Near Site of Schoolgirl Kidnap Businessweek Schoolgirls who escaped from Boko Haram kidnappers in the village of Chibok, some of more than 200 kidnapped girls, arrive at the Government house to speak with Borno state governor Kashim Shettima in Maiduguri, Nigeria, on June 2, 2014. Source: ... and more »

If there is something lost in the commercialization of moonshine (a sin I’m surely guilty of participating in), then there is something gained by more and more people adopting home distilling as a way to appreciate spirits.

So, this weekend's news in the tech world was flooded with a "story" about how a "chatbot" passed the Turing Test for "the first time," with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that's what they do. First, here's the press release from the University of Reading, which should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for any reporter. Here are some quotes, almost all of which are misleading or bogus:

The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday.

'Eugene', a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

[....] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let's dig in:

1. It's not a "supercomputer," it's a chatbot. It's a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It's just a chatbot.
2. Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have "passed" the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here's a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, "passing" the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.
3. It "beat" the Turing test here by "gaming" the rules -- by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.
4. The "rules" of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing's original test was quite different anyway.
5. As Chris Dixon points out, you don't get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That's just not how it's done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you'd wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?
6. The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it's fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If you've spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. He's been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the world's first "cyborg" for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a -- since taken down -- Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have "the first human infected with a computer virus." The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both "Captain Cyborg" and a "media strumpet" and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.

Basically, any reporter should view extraordinary claims associated with Warwick with extreme caution. But that's not what happened at all. Instead, as is all too typical with Warwick claims, the press went nutty over it, including publications that should know better. Here are just a few sample headlines. The absolute worst are the ones who claim this is a "supercomputer."

• The Verge: Computer passes Turing Test for first time by convincing judges it is a 13-year-old boy
• Venture Beat: Talk to the computer that passed the Turing Test, a historic artificial intelligence milestone
• Yahoo Tech: Turing Test Bested, Robot Overlords Creep Closer
• NBC News: Turing Test: Computer Program Convinces Judges It's Human
• Washington Post: A computer just passed the Turing Test in landmark trial
• The Independent: Turing Test breakthrough as super-computer becomes first to convince us it's human
• PC World: An AI milestone: Chatbot passes Turing Test by posing as 13-year-old boy
• The Wire: For the First Time Ever, a Computer Passed Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence
• Gizmodo: A Computer Program Has Passed the Turing Test For the First Time
• ZDNet: Computer chatbot 'Eugene Goostman' passes the Turing test
• Ars Technica: Eugene—the supercomputer, not 13-year-old—first to beat the Turing Test
• The Guardian: Computer simulating 13-year-old boy becomes first to pass Turing test
• CNET: Computer fools humans, passes Turing Test
• Computerworld: Supercomputer passes Turing Test by posing as a teenager
• Science Alert: Meet the first computer to pass the Turing Test

Anyway, a lot of hubbub over nothing special that everyone seemed to buy into because of the easy headlines (which is exactly what Warwick always counts on). So, since we just spent all this time on a useless nothing, let's end it with the obligatory xkcd:

Original Source

ST. PAUL, MN—In an effort to spur their local economies, many state governments are now offering tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks to any person who simply says the words “high-tech jobs,” according to a survey by the Pew Researc...

rubbishheterosexuals:

exorin:

betweenelsewherenevermore:

professorfangirl:

wburartery:

Career illusionist Teller (of Penn & Teller) is cooking up a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” using freaking MAGIC!

Read the heck out of this story.

NO SERIOUSLY YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND:

"The creators say the music and monsters do that too. Musician Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan gave Teller access to their catalog of gritty songs. The island’s creatures are brought to life by Pilobolus, a dance company known for piling performers on top of each other."

SHAKESPEARE

TELLER

PILOBOLUS

TOM MUTHAFUCKIN WAITS

aksdjfa;lkdjfa;l

This is how you Shakespeare

Wait. HOLD ON. 

I need a moment.

I’m going to see this awesome, awesome shit next week!!!

alex-v-hernandez:

radvillain:

disgusting-weeaboo:

and people say anime is shit.

this scene truly changed my life

I want, no need, Kanye West’s perspective on this.

Evil spirits, Book Graphics

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization.

Here is a clip of Pharrell, who is extremely rich, singing "Happy" at today's Walmart shareholders meeting. It's definitely uplifting and inspiring and in no way very depressing and dystopian, especially when Pharrell says "put your hands together for Walmart, guys, for making the world a happier place."

gamewtfs:

Oh yeah we got trouble, right here in DinoCity!

(Irem - SNES - 1992)

When Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the ISP's network, video performance improved immediately. Verizon subscribers aren't so lucky. Although Netflix and Verizon confirmed on April 28 that they had struck a paid peering deal, performance continued to drop in May and could remain poor for months while the companies upgrade infrastructure. "Verizon FiOS is down two slots and now ranks behind DSL providers Frontier and Windstream," Netflix wrote today after releasing its monthly speed index.

rondraper:

i still think about this tweet all the time

nicolascagesempai:

pan-pizza:

Went to Hot Topic

Did not see a SINGLE bit of Gir or Zim merchandise

Is it… Is it over? No more? Goth girls no longer care about Gir?

Jhonen Vasquez emerges from Hot Topics corporate headquarter’s basement screaming sweet freedom as he bursts out of his chains and crawls out into the unforgiving wild world of 2014

vastderp:

thekumazone:

Owls may be symbols of wisdom, but they’re actually complete morons

"WHATWHATWHAAAAAT!?"

Gail Simone is known to discriminate against Cyclops, and her followers were either trolling her, or attempting to stand up for their favorite hero. Many of the responses seemed defensive in nature. "#IRelateTo Cyclops, because no-one cares about anything I do, like, ever, and I also lack charisma."