--

Q: And then secondly -- and this is a really kind of bizarre -- there's an entertainer who goes by the name of Andrew W.K. who says that he has been named or appointed by the State Department to be a cultural ambassador to appear at some event in Bahrain. Do you know anything about this?

MS. NULAND: And here I thought we were going to get through this whole briefing without that point coming up.

Q: Oh, you do -- you do. Is it -- is it true? You have something?

MS. NULAND: I do have a little something on this. So we had a Bahraini entity that approached the embassy about co-sponsoring a visit by this guy, who I take it is pretty popular there in Bahrain. That was initially approved, and then when more senior management at the embassy took a look at this, the conclusion was that this was not an appropriate use of U.S. government funds.

Q: Is that -- is that -- did -- would they -- the government would have paid for his trip over there had it -- (inaudible) --

MS. NULAND: I don't know what the details of our sponsorship were -- (inaudible) --

Q: Can you explain why it was -- was it -- I mean, his -- (chuckles) -- that the -- was it -- was the -- it was decided that it was inappropriate to send someone over there to Bahrain to represent the United States whose hits include, you know, "Party 'Til You Puke" and things like that? (Laughter.) Is that -- is that why it was -- is that why it was decided it was inappropriate?

MS. NULAND: Thank you for sharing that. I think --

Q: No, is that -- is that why?

MS. NULAND: I think the conclusion was when they looked at the body of his work that we didn't need to be part of this invitation. I'll leave --

Q: (Inaudible) -- and just hold on -- just to make clear, it was -- the invitation was actually never extended to him?

MS. NULAND: Frankly, I don't have the details. There may have been some preliminary conversations with him. But he is not going to be going to Bahrain on the U.S. government's dime.

Q: All right.

I dig tabletop RPGs. More specifically, I dig the tabletop RPG: Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah. So? I like D&D. Don’t look at me that way. Unless you want a fight on your hands. Brah. Honestly, most people are more curious … Continue reading →

In the 128 years since the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published, one of its greatest guiding principles has been that no word should ever be removed, explaining why the complete dictionary spans twenty volumes and weighs over 140 pounds. Its editors believe that someone today picking up a book from the 1920s should still be able to look up obscure terms even if they’re no longer in common usage. Well, The Guardian reports that a single contrarian editor named Robert Burchfield (the same guy that added swearwords) single-handedly removed words by the thousands throughout the 1970s and '80s — a claim laid out in a new book called Words of the World by former OED editor Sarah Ogilvie.

Ogilvie found that...

Continue reading…

Over the past year, we’ve continued to follow and investigate our existing top charities, and we’ve also looked for more outstanding giving opportunities. Today we are announcing our updated top charities:

1. Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). AMF focuses on distribution of insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria; of all the charitable interventions we know of that have clear room for more funding, this one has the strongest evidence of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. AMF has outstanding self-evaluation and transparency. It first became our #1 charity in late 2011 and has continued to impress us.

2. GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly’s goal: for every $1 it spends, deliver $0.90 directly into the hands of extremely poor people in the developing world, with no strings attached. We first wrote about GiveDirectly in 2011 when it was just getting off the ground, and we now have enough information from its first year to believe that it is succeeding in this goal, and is an outstanding young organization with extremely strong self-evaluation and transparency.

Our definition of “evidence of impact” includes evidence that “wealth is being transferred to low-income people.” We feel that direct cash transfers face an unusually low burden of proof because the link is so tight between cash transfers and giving additional wealth (and choice/empowerment) to recipients. That said, cash transfers have been more heavily studied than any other non-health intervention we know of. The evidence says that they increase short-term consumption, especially of food, and there is suggestive evidence that they may be invested at very high financial rates of return (e.g. ~20% per year). We are not as confident in the investment returns as we are in the evidence for some other interventions, especially bednets, but we believe that the case for increasing consumption on its own terms is strong. The many high-quality studies on cash transfers also provide little support for common concerns about such transfers (such as the idea that they are spent mostly on alcohol).

Different donors will come to different conclusions on the value of this outcome (directly increasing recipients’ wealth) as compared to health interventions, and cash has some salient strengths (putting choice in the hands of recipients) and weaknesses (potential harms if it is poorly spent) relative to health interventions. For our part, we would guess that our other two top charities’ interventions (taken in isolation from the organizations delivering them) do more good on a per-dollar basis, but we are not confident in this, and we see a strong case for supporting GiveDirectly.

3. Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). SCI focuses on deworming: treating people for parasitic infections. Deworming is extremely inexpensive (~$0.50 per person treated, including all costs), and there is evidence linking it with substantial developmental benefits (people dewormed in childhood may attend school more and earn more later in life); the evidence is not as strong as for insecticide-treated nets but is still far above what we’ve seen for most charitable interventions. We have at times struggled to understand SCI’s activities and impact, and are not as confident in the organization as a whole as in AMF and GiveDirectly, but overall it is an organization with an impressive track record and a strong commitment to transparency, and we consider it an outstanding giving opportunity.

We have published updated reviews of all three charities, as well as audio and a transcript from a conference call we did last week, at which we discussed our preliminary thinking about how to rank these charities with a group of especially involved GiveWell followers. We also give some initial thoughts in this post on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the three charities.

We plan to publish substantial additional content in the coming weeks that will give more context for the thinking behind our rankings. This will include updated reports on insecticide-treated nets, deworming and cash transfers, and blog posts going into more detail on how we see the major considerations (in particular, how the different interventions compare on cost-effectiveness and how we respond to common objections/concerns regarding cash transfers).

This year, more than in past years, our top charities have very different strengths and weaknesses, and we see substantial room for individual donors’ judgment calls in how much to give to each. We encourage donors to read on and review our take on this question. The rest of this post will (a) discuss what we’ve done over the last year that has led us to our current rankings; (b) lay out what we see as the major considerations regarding which of the above three charities to give to.

Our work over the past year

Over the past year, we’ve done the following:

• Continued to follow AMF and SCI, which were our top two charities as of December 2011. We published the following updates:
  • AMF: March and September 2012
  • SCI: April and November 2012

  Both made progress and continued to be highly transparent. We had an easier time understanding AMF’s activities (and the impact of GiveWell-sourced donations) than understanding SCI’s activities.

• Continued to investigate key questions about insecticide-treated nets and deworming.
  • Regarding insecticide-treated nets, we did a major internal vetting of our work and published a post revisiting the cost-effectiveness of this intervention; we also wrote about the possibility of insecticide resistance. Our big-picture stance on this intervention has not changed much – we still consider it an intervention with outstanding evidence of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness – though we have noted some new concerns and caveats.
  • Regarding deworming, we published a post about a new systematic review of the evidence on deworming’s benefits, and we have a post forthcoming revisiting one of the major studies arguing that deworming has developmental benefits (i.e., that it leads to better outcomes later in life). We now find the short-term case for deworming’s health benefits to be weaker than we found it to be in 2011, and we find the long-term case for its developmental benefits to be stronger.
• Kept tabs on other promising organizations and did a thorough investigation of GiveDirectly. We have considered GiveDirectly promising since its launch, but only recently did we feel that it had enough of a track record to facilitate a deep assessment. In early October of this year, we determined that it was the most promising contender for a top-charity slot (aside from AMF and SCI); we completed a thorough investigation including multiple rounds of reviewing documents and interviewing its CEO; a more thorough investigation of the academic literature on cash transfers (writeup forthcoming); and a multiple-day visit to see GiveDirectly’s operations in Kenya.
• Looked for other outstanding giving opportunities in the area of global health and nutrition. As discussed earlier this year, we focused on finding ways to deliver the most promising interventions, rather than repeating our earlier approach of scanning a large list of charities. The two most promising interventions we looked into, immunizations and salt iodization, do not appear to have the sort of room for more funding that our top charities do (i.e., we do not see opportunities to translate additional dollars directly into additional people reached). We will be writing more about this in the future.

How much should you give to each charity?

We don’t believe in “diversifying” donations to charity, for the sake of “reducing risk” – we believe in giving in order to maximize the “expected total good accomplished,” which – by default – means finding the best giving opportunity and allocating it 100% of one’s charitable dollars. However, we do see legitimate reasons to divide one’s donation:

• If you are giving a large enough amount of money, it’s possible to hit diminishing returns by giving it all to one charity. A simple example is that if I were giving $1 billion this year, I wouldn’t give it all to AMF, because that amount would well exceed AMF’s room for more funding.
• A more subtle version of this idea pertains to learning opportunities. In a sense GiveWell is like a “large donor” with a few million dollars of anticipated money moved. If we direct major funding to more than one charity, we will have improved access to each such charity and will have improved opportunities to track its progress and learn from it. In addition, though we don’t anticipate moving enough money to overwhelm any of the three charities’ room for more funding, there is an argument that each marginal dollar means less to the charity in terms of improving its prominence, ability to experiment and plan, probability of turning out not to be able to scale further, etc.
• For donors who think of themselves as giving not only to help the charity in question but to help GiveWell, we encourage allocating your dollars in the same way that you would ideally like to see the broader GiveWell community allocate its dollars. If every GiveWell follower follows this principle, we’ll end up with an overall allocation that reflects a weighted average of followers’ opinions of the appropriate allocation. (By contrast, if every GiveWell follower reasons “My personal donation won’t hit diminishing returns, so I’ll just give exclusively to my top choice,” the overall allocation is more likely to end up “distorted.”)

We’ve polled GiveWell staff and core supporters on how they plan to allocate their own funds, and after considering these subjectively, we have settled on a recommended allocation of 70% to AMF, 20% to GiveDirectly, and 10% to SCI. However, we believe there is substantial room for judgment calls and value disagreements here, and we expect to see many individuals deviate significantly from this allocation due to their judgment calls and values. Our rough picture of the judgment calls and value choices that matter most is as follows.

	Program	Program evidence	Program cost-effectiveness	Our confidence in the organization	Potential for innovation /upside
Against Malaria Foundation	Malaria control	Very strong	Very strong	Very high	High
Schisto-somiasis Control Initiative	Deworming (treating parasitic infections)	Fairly strong	Highly uncertain, though may be strongest	High	Low
Give Directly	Direct cash transfers to the very poor	Strong on short-term consumption; moderate on investment	Highly uncertain; may be strong	Very high	Very high

For donors who place high value on supporting strong overall organizations (in light of the fact that much of the impact of a donation depends on who’s in charge of allocating it), and/or promoting innovation and experimentation, we suggest a relatively higher allocation to GiveDirectly, and lower to SCI.

• We believe that GiveDirectly has significant “upside”: it is experimenting with a type of intervention that is extremely rare in the nonprofit world, that it is hoping to experiment with many different approaches to this intervention, and that its approach may ultimately evolve and change significantly and may have a major impact on other parts of the nonprofit world.
• We believe AMF has significant “upside” as well, though in a different way (and probably to a lesser extent than GiveDirectly). Its intervention is one that has a large community around it and a lot of funding behind it. Through its unusual degree of transparency and self-evaluation, AMF may set examples for others and/or produce information/insights that are helpful to the broader malaria control community.
• While SCI is an outstanding organization, we do not believe it is as strong as the other two on this criterion.

For donors who are particularly “harm-averse” – such that they place significant weight on the “do no harm” principle as opposed to the “maximize expected good accomplished” principle (we subscribe to the latter) – we suggest a relatively lower allocation to GiveDirectly. Cash transfers (particularly as GiveDirectly structures them) have a higher risk of unintended consequences than the other two interventions. We see very little risk of harm for insecticide-treated nets or deworming.

For donors seeking to save rather than improve lives, we suggest a relatively higher allocation to AMF, the only charity of the three whose intervention has been linked with reduced mortality. For donors seeking to improve rather than save lives, we believe AMF should still get the highest allocation overall–the benefits of reducing the burden of malaria likely go well beyond saving lives. (GiveWell staff tend to prefer improving lives over saving them, and our suggested allocation takes this into account.)

For donors who are inclined to be less skeptical than we are of academic evidence and cost-effectiveness analysis, we suggest a relatively higher allocation to SCI, and lower to GiveDirectly. If one takes the evidence on deworming at face value, it indicates extremely impressive long-term benefits. Similar benefits may exist for reducing the burden of malaria, but deworming is substantially cheaper (~$0.50 per person per year, as opposed to ~$1.25) on a per-person basis.

For donors who are more skeptical than we are of academic evidence and cost-effectiveness analysis, and place a higher weight on the reasoning that “people are likely to make better decisions for themselves than we can make for them,” we recommend a relatively higher allocation to GiveDirectly.

We’ll be very interested to see what people end up doing. We encourage donors to post their planned allocations, and reasoning, as comments (or to email us if they’d prefer that their thinking stay private).

Paramount Pictures / Aurich Lawson

Facebook moved last week to eliminate the ability of users to vote on data use and privacy policy changes, according to posts in several languages on its site governance page on November 21. Both the timing (immediately before the Thanksgiving holiday in America) and the content changes have raised eyebrows with the entities who have worked to keep Facebook in check, but the company may have a point in eliminating its voting mechanisms. Does this simply give users the democracy they deserve—that is, none at all?

Facebook announced its decision to democratize its policy change process in April 2009, with plenty of fanfare and a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg itself. The very first vote took place in the following days, effectively voting in users’ ability to vote. The second vote didn’t take place until June 2012; both votes had a turnout of well under one percent of Facebook’s user base. Facebook announced both votes on its blog and the second on its site governance page, which is followed by 2.5 million users, and that's as much alerting as it bothered to do.

The third vote, which will likely be the last, is upcoming. Facebook’s proposed policy change this time, among a couple of other tweaks, removes the need for Facebook to invite comments that may lead to a mandatory vote (voting about voting, yo dawg), and removes the need for the company to advise users of any changes made for “legal or administrative” reasons.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pixel Academy needs a new home, and it’s turning to crowdfunding website Fundable for help.

The educational outreach program offers private and public workshops on topics like video game design, 3D printing, film making, and app development to children ages 8 to 18. Since April, founder Mike Fischthal and his staff have traveled all over New York City, armed with a Pelican case full of Macbook Pros, three-button mice, and Wacom tablets. They’ve operated out of libraries, museums, and even living rooms, but they are now looking to raise $20,000 in hopes of finding a permanent location.

Speaking with Fischthal (pictured right), his passion for working with kids is obvious. “I worked one summer three years ago at a camp called Galileo Summer Quest, and I taught video game design to kids 9 to 12 years old. And I thought it was fantastic. I had so much fun. The kids had so much fun. And I just realized that there was something here. It didn’t need to be just a summer activity. This is something that kids should learn all year long: how to do programming, how to be creative,” he said.

Through Pixel Academy, Fischthal said he teaches 21st century skills that traditional schools lack — ones that are important for getting into college and finding a job. And he said that teaching kids these skills is easier than you might think. “I think it’s just because they’ve grown up in this world — this digital world — where thinking in lines of code and programming — it just makes sense to them,” he said.

“When you try to teach adults, you always have to go through some hurdles and get them comfortable with the technology,” he added. “The kids are already comfortable with the technology.”

Fischthal said everything his staff does is a learning experience — not just for the children but for them as well. “We’re not just sitting still and teaching what we know,” he said. “We always want to learn the next technology, the next cool thing, the latest way to make video games, the latest 3D-printing technology. We’re doing this because we love to learn this stuff, too. We don’t ever want to stop learning.”

The money raised by Fundable will go toward a security deposit and rent for a space that can accommodate the program and its various equipment. “If we just had a spot, we could get some tables and chairs and start offering classes every day of the week,” Fischthal said.

And if Pixel Academy doesn’t reach its goal? “We’ll keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “We’ll grow a bit slower.”

Right now, Fischthal said that his program isn’t able to reach everybody, but he wants that to change. “This is something that schools are not providing. And I think a lot of parents don’t know that their kids can learn and excel in these areas. So I want a spot. I really want a spot so that kids can just come, and we can offer this to 500 kids a week instead of 100,” he said.

“There’s a real need here, and I need to grow it,” he added. “I want to grow it.”

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Guess who’s winning the brains race, with 100% of first graders learning to code?

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Filed under: Games

A crowning accomplishment of my teenage years was the custom version of Clue I made with a few friends, complete with a board, game pieces, and playing cards. Beyond the enjoyment of accusing our P.E. teacher of smothering victims with Sloppy Joes in the auditorium, this game contributed little to our futures.

A startup called MakeGamesWithUs is elevating this type of adolescent undertaking by teaching high school and college kids how to build iPhone games.

MakeGamesWithUs graduated from the YCombinator Winter 2012 and just launched its first social game in the AppStore. On the website, students take project-based tutorials that focus on hands-on, practical experience, rather than theory. Once they feel confident in their iPhone game development skills, they can begin building original games.

Students can engage with the MakesGamesWithUs community during the development process to get help, give/receive feedback, nurture ideas, and troubleshoot problems. As it nears completion, the MakeGamesWithUs team will incorporate professional art and music, help with debugging, and assist in adding trickier features. When the game is ready, MakeGamesWithUs will publish and promote the games for a share of the revenue.

To date, the startup has published seven games on the App Store. It just launched its first social game, Name That Jam!, where groups of friends challenge each other to name songs, earning more points the faster they guess. The game was built by a brother and sister team, still in high school, using MakeGamesWithUs’ Turn Based Multiplayer software development kit (SDK). This new tool makes it easy for aspiring developers to build social games, even without back-end knowledge.

“We founded the company to solve a problem we had when we were students,” said founder Ashu Desai. “This type of practical education is lacking from the traditional education system. Having built and shipped a product at an early age can really impact your outlook on life. We hope to inspire people to invest their time in both computer science as well as entreprenuership.”

MakeGamesWithUs has an educational as well as a publishing component. This distinguishes it from competitors like GameSalad and Chillingo, which support design/development and publishing (respectively), but not both. In some ways, it is like an incubator program for young iOS developers, providing the resources, support, and platform needed for success and taking a cut off the hits.

Instead of working on their tan or earning extra cash as a lifeguard, a group of 40 students spent their summer plugging away in the founders’ Palo Alto living room. The fruits of these labors will bloom over the couple of months, as MakeGamesWithUs plans to release 15 new games created during the internship program.

With all the laments echoing around the technology community about the shortage of engineering talent, this company is grooming kids early for careers as gaming moguls. Camp counseling is so 1990s anyway.

Filed under: Dev, Entrepreneur, Games, Mobile, Social

Here’s the first page for “Old Super Mario,” a touching comic by Daiki Sugimoto about what happens when heroes grow old, friends pass or drift away, and your final years are spent alone. It’s not your typical cheesy Mario comic — that’s why I wanted to share it with you all here.

You can read the entire comic, republished here with the author’s permission, after the post break. The pages should be read from right to left:

You can see more of Sugimoto’s work on his blog.

Buy: New Super Mario Bros. U, New Super Mario Bros. 2
See also: More New Super Mario Bros. U posts
[Via Daiki Sugimoto]

Every day, a new app or service arrives with the promise of helping people cut down on the flood of information they receive. It’s the natural result of living in a time when an ever-increasing number of news providers push a constant stream of headlines at us every day.

But what if it’s the ways we choose to read the news — not the glut of news providers — that make us feel overwhelmed? An interesting new study out of the University of Texas looks at the factors that contribute to the concept of information overload, and found that, for some people, the platform on which news is being consumed can make all the difference between whether you feel overwhelmed.

The study, “News and the Overloaded Consumer: Factors Influencing Information Overload Among News Consumers” was conducted by Avery Holton and Iris Chyi. They surveyed more than 750 adults on their digital consumption habits and perceptions of information overload. On the central question of whether they feel overloaded with the amount of news available, 27 percent said “not at all”; everyone else reported some degree of overloaded.

Holton and Chyi asked about the use of 15 different technology platforms and checked for correlation with feeling overloaded with information. Three showed a positive correlation as predictors of overload: computers, e-readers, and Facebook. Two showed a negative correlation: television and the iPhone. The rest — which included print newspapers, Twitter, iPads, netbooks, and news magazines, among others — showed no statistically significant correlations.

The mention of netbooks — that declining form factor — raises an important factor about the study: Its survey took place in 2010, which was like another world when it comes to news consumption platforms. The iPad was brand new; Android was just starting its rapid growth. The kind of early(ish) adopter who was using Twitter or a Kindle in 2010 is likely to be different from the broader user base those platforms have in 2012.

What the findings suggest, Holton said, is that the news platforms a person is using can play a bigger role in making them feel overwhelmed than the sheer number of news sources being consumed. So even if you read The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and ESPN in a day, you may not feel as inundated with news if you read on your phone instead of on your desktop (with 40 tabs open, no doubt). The more contained, or even constrained, a platform feels, the more it can contribute to people feeling less overwhelmed, Holton said. A news app or mobile site, for instance, is an isolated experience that emphasizes reading with minimal links or other distractions. Compared with reading on the web at your computer, your options seem smaller.

“There was no connection between the number of news outlets people were using, so it made us think it was the device,” Holton told me. “You see less of a statistically significance between outlets and more between platforms.”

That may also explain why people have feelings of being overwhelmed by Facebook, which, like reading on the web, can be a bottomless hole of stories, videos, and endless links. But it doesn’t explain why people in the survey had different feelings towards Twitter, which can also be an unyielding stream of links.

“We expected to find some overload in the use of Twitter or YouTube because there is so much content,” Holton said. “But there was no significance we found. Twitter was almost baseline.”

One possible explanation is whether you define yourself as a news junkie. The survey asked people to report how much they enjoyed keeping up with the news — people who said they did had less of a perception of information overload. If you’re the type of person who wants to follow news during the day, it’s likely you have an established routine and a set of sites you check regularly. You also may not need as much context around the news. All of that would make Twitter a good source for you.

Conversely, if you’re more passive about following the news, you might need to make more of an effort to find the right sources or find background or contextual information, which could lead to feelings of being overloaded, Holton said. “Knowing what you’re looking for can decrease overload or perceptions of overload. So can constant engagement,” he said.

Holton said they’re planning to dig deeper into the topic of information overload, looking specifically at how different devices feed feelings of overload. What the data says so far reinforces something we know anecdotally: People have different uses for the different platforms. And a purpose-driven visit to twitter.com is different than a purpose-driven visit to facebook.com. On Twitter, you may be directly looking for news. On Facebook, you may have no agenda other than seeing what your friends are up to.

Image by Yutaka Tsutano used under a Creative Commons license.

Trailrunner7 writes "It is open season on SCADA software right now. Last week, researchers at ReVuln, an Italian security firm, released a video showing off a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in SCADA applications from manufacturers such as Siemens, GE and Schneider Electric. And now a researcher at Exodus Intelligence says he has discovered more than 20 flaws in SCADA packages from some of the same vendors and other manufacturers, all after just a few hours' work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Have you finished Hotline Miami? Have you been longing for a sequel to the violence? If so, this is where you get up and do a jig. According to PC Gamer, Eurogamer managed to catch a stray tweet from the developer, one that led to an announcement that what was originally supposed to be a DLC for Hotline Miami will now become the seeds for a full game. Before anyone gets too excited, though, it looks like they've 'barely begun' working on the new game - it's still going to be some time before we see the next installment.

[Source: PCgamer]

Q: I am making homemade tonic syrup (of the gin and tonic variety) to gift to family and friends this year. I have been scouring the internet for some inexpensive bottles (about 150-250 ml in size) in which to gift the tonic. I can't find anything. More

Read More...

New Zealand-based engineering student James McVay built “MechBass,” a MIDI-controlled robotic bass guitar, for his honors project at the University of Wellington. The robo-guitar works remarkably well—listen to it play “Hysteria” by Muse. MechBass consists of four string units on an aluminum frame. Sliding pitch shifters alter the pitch of the strings, which are then struck by rotating pick wheels.

via Hack a Day

image & video by Patrick Herd

Watch in this video (that runs over 3 hours long) as the CEO/editor of the Russian version of Esquire, Dmitry Golubovskiy, reads the longest word in English. It’s the chemical name for titin, the world’s largest known protein and it consists of 189,819 letters.

via Geekologie and Oddity Central

CBS Sunday Morning did a little piece about pencils and my pencil-sharpening business. I hope you like it!

"Ooh! Ooh! I wanna play as Celery!" In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, we have this collector's edition of Monopoly, which features artwork and references to 22 iconic episodes from the 50 years of the series. All 11 incarnations of the Doctor are featured. $39.99

Build your own TARDIS control room Build the TARDIS control room, complete with clicking date display, central time rotor, and all the controls you need to fly the old girl. Minifigures of the Doctor, Amy Pond, Rory Williams, and River Song are included in this 250 piece set. $79.99

Make your drinks Dal-icious! Exterminate your thirst with this set of five colorful Dalek tumblers. Each comes with a resealable lid and straw. We recommend not thinking about what's actually inside a Dalek while you drink. $59.99

Joining 3D printers in the personal fabricator realm is this interactive lasercutter called Constructable that has you draw on the wood with a laser pointer where you want it to cut, circumventing the standard process of designing a part on the computer.

The system uses different laser pointers that correspond to different tools, one for rounded corners, one for gears, etc. That way it can interpret your gesture and smooth it out into the correct form.

This probably won't replace all or even most fabrication use cases since the measurements of what you're making are usually important. But for artists, visual thinkers, or people looking for quick and dirty rapid prototyping, this seems like a great new opportunity.

(via product by process)

“Gay Women Will Marry Your Boyfriends” is a response video to “Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends”, the video that gives great reasons why straight men should support gay marriage. In “Gay Women”, the ladies of Unsolicited Project turn the tables and give reasons why gay women will marry your boyfriends if you don’t support same sex marriage.

via Daily of the Day

The channel has opened its first Food Network Kitchen at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in South Florida in the JetBlue terminal.

Oregon officials are holding a public hearing Wednesday to get comment on proposed rules governing Oregon's health insurance exchange, the online marketplace that goes live next October. The rules affect how plans are rated and structured for consumers.

“Hey, stupid TV companies!” the Internet says, over and over. “Stop making us sign up for pay TV to see your shows!”

“Not gonna happen,” comes the response from the TV guys, over and over. “Not anytime soon, at least.”

That’s particularly true for premium pay channels like HBO and Showtime, which make almost all their money from subscription sales, and rely heavily on pay-TV providers to handle their marketing, as well as all of their customer service, billing, etc.

Yes, there are a bunch of people who would pay to watch episodes of “Game of Thrones,” but don’t want to get HBO. And there also a bunch of people who say they would be happy to subscribe to HBO, but not pay for cable. But HBO and Showtime executives figure that the upside of pleasing those people doesn’t outweigh the downside of angering the cable, telco and satellite guys, who give them a ton of dough.

You can go around and around on this one, but it’s easier to show instead of tell. So take a look at this ad, which millions of you have already seen this fall:

To sum up: That’s a classic twofer, promoting both the hottest show on cable TV and the company that will bring it to you.

But I’m told that the financing for this one is pretty one-sided, with Time Warner Cable footing almost all of the bill. People familiar with the ad tell me that Showtime took care of the six-figure bill for Claire Danes’s participation, but everything else is on the cable guys, who will end up spending more than $20 million on the campaign.

Clearly, big TV campaigns promoting their network and their hit show aren’t the only thing keeping Showtime tethered to the pay-TV model. If CBS wanted to run its own marketing push for Homeland, it could do so.

But the ad does speak to the tight, profitable symbiosis between the network and the guys who run the pipes. The Internet isn’t going to break that up anytime soon.

The Honey Pot

Sad news hit our mailbox on Saturday that The Honey Pot at Good Food Here had been broken into and robbed of their holiday sales on Friday night. Mary Sheridan, the owner and sole breadwinner for her family had worked a hard week to bake and sell her pies and other goods to Thanksgiving eaters. With winter coming, loosing that kind of sales is crushing, along with the pies the thieves took.

There is a silver lining to this story though. Since she posted to Twitter and Facebook, over the weekend, anonymous donors here in Portland have donated more than enough to help her though this difficult time. All donations that were above what Mary lost are being donated to charity. Portland, you’re awesome. The Honey Pot is at Good Food Here on SE 43rd and Belmont and Mary is one great baker. Drop on by, support a local business and help her out. We’ve seen a rash of power cord thefts and now a break-in. This is the time to make that extra trip to support your local food cart.

As the Notorious B.I.G. so eloquently stated: “mo’ money, mo’ problems, mo’ ambition, mo’ development time needed”. He was working on an FPS sequel to Chuckie Egg at the time but the developers of Shadowrun Returns would no doubt sympathise with his dilemma. In a large update to their Kickstarter page, the team provide reasons for the shift in release date, which was initially set for January, a target that was retracted a while ago. They’re now aiming for May or June.

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http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Romney-Obama-Coalitions-vs-Age-Groups-01.png

A couple of weeks ago I called attention to a striking graphic from the Public Religion Research Institute that compared the religious layout of the Obama and Romney coalitions with the religious layout of the electorate by age cohort. Short version: Obama's (i.e. Dems) looks like the electorate of the future; Romney's (i.e. GOP's), like the electorate of the past.

But that, it turns out, was based on pre-election survey data. Now PRRI has a similar graphic up with post-election data. And let's just say that the news for the Republicans is even worse. 

For example, pre-election, evangelicals made up 37 percent of the Romney coalition. In the actual vote, it was 40 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Nones slipped from eight percent to seven. On the flip side, the proportion of Nones in the Obama coalition bumped up two points to 25 per cent, even as the proportion of Nones in the 18-29 voting cohort jumped from 32 percent to 35 percent. 

Nothing is more stunning, however, than the Catholic youth vote. Pre-election, PRRI found found roughly equal proportions of young Hispanic and young non-Hispanic Catholics: 10 percent of the former versus eight percent of the latter. Post-election, it was 11 percent Hispanic Catholics and just five percent non-Hispanics. By comparison, among Catholic voters over the age of 30, there's less than one Hispanic for every four non-HIspanics.

The Obama coalition was 10 percent Hispanic Catholics of all ages versus 13 percent non-Hispanics. The Romney coalition was 2 percent Hispanic Catholics versus 18 percent non-Hispanics. 

Think of it this way: Not only did the vast majority of Hispanic Catholics vote Democratic but also, the rising generation of Catholic voters is twice as Hispanic as it is non-Hispanic. Bottom line: The GOP's demographic problem is as much with Catholics as it is with Hispanics.

Designed by Apsara | Country: United States

“Apinya Thai Chili Sauce is our signature hot sauce inspired by the flavors of Thailand and made with fresh Thai chilies, roasted red peppers, garlic, and ginger.

The creative team designed the overall brand based on extensive research of Thai cultural design elements and existing Thai food packaging. The brief required that the product be quickly visually recognizable, include references to Thai culture, and focus on details to convey a high-quality product. The label artwork was custom illustrated to reflect a “maximal” aesthetic of Thai design while staying visually balanced.

The octopus character is unique, eye-catching, and real octopus pairs well with the hot sauce itself. A clear label was used to actively exploit the texture and bright color of the sauce as part of the design. The octopus’s tentacles showcase the main ingredients and he even has a mouth full of the sauce if you look closely.”

Some Christians believe sex outside of marriage is wrong because God can’t watch.

In 1970, shortly after being elected Attorney General of Alabama, 29-year-old Bill Baxley reopened the 16th Street Church bombing case — a racially motivated act of terrorism that resulted in the deaths of four African-American girls in 1963 and a fruitless investigation, and which marked a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. Baxley's unwavering commitment to the case attracted much hostility, particularly from local Klansmen, and in 1976 he received a threatening letter of protest from white supremacist Edward R. Fields — founder of the "National States' Rights Party" and "Grand Dragon" of the New Order Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — in which he was accused of reopening the case for tactical reasons.

Bill Baxley's famously succinct reply, which was typed on his official letterhead, can be seen below.

The next year, a member of the United Klans of America named Robert Chambliss was found guilty of the murders. He remained in prison until his death in 1985.

Full transcript follows.

(Source: Francis Buckley; Image: Bill Baxley in 1983, via.)



Transcript

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
STATE OF ALABAMA

February 28, 1976

"Dr." Edward R. Fields
National States Rights Party
P. O. Box 1211
Marietta, Georgia 30061

Dear "Dr." Fields:

My response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is – kiss my ass.

Sincerely,

BILL BAXLEY
Attorney General

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Microsoft is eyeing Europe as the next beachhead in its retail store expansion. The company has been scouting U.K. locations for its first European flagship stores and talking to landlords there, a person familiar with the discussions told the Financial Times. Microsoft plans to open those stores next year, assuming their predecessors in the U.S. are performing as expected.

Microsoft has been aggressively expanding its retail presence in support of the launch of Windows 8 and its new Surface tablet. But that expansion has been limited to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, and a number of the stores it has opened recently are pop-up holiday kiosks that presumably will close up shop come January.

Since Microsoft plans to sell the Surface only through its own retail stores and Microsoft.com, it’s clearly in the company’s best interests to expand its retail footprint. Right now, consumers curious about Surface have very, very few locations where they can have some hands-on time with the device. That will inevitably limit sales — not exactly a winning strategy for a new product that Microsoft has so much riding on. Hence the company’s plan to open 75 brick-and-mortar storefronts over the next two to three years. As Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said earlier this year, “We’re going to continue to build and roll out more stores. And we’re going to keep going more and more pervasive. And you’ll see the store brand continue to go out and go out into the world with the opportunity we believe we have to tell the Microsoft story.”

Microsoft declined comment.