Since banning Viber, Saudi Arabia appears to have its set its sights on another popular Internet messenger smartphone application. This time it's WhatsApp, which could be blocked in just a few weeks unless it complies with local regulations
The country's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) is considering banning WhatsApp in the coming weeks, probably before Ramadan, which starts on July 9
The ban is being considered both because WhatsApp communications are allegedly harder to monitor, and because the service cuts into local telecom companies' revenue, since it allows users to send messages over the Internet instead of the telephone networks Read more...
As pressure on the federal government continues to mount over requests for user data from major technology companies, Google has decided to swipe back at the government.
The search giant has submitted a motion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, asking it to lift a gag order that prohibits Google from disclosing the number of requests the company receives each year under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In a copy of the filing obtained by Wired (PDF), Google says it has a right under the First Amendment to release the totals.
Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have published statistics of the requests for data that they receive, but did not differentiate between requests made for criminal investigations and requests submitted under FISA.
Blair Hanley Frank is a technology journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has also worked for Macworld, PCWorld and TechHive. He can be found on Twitter @belril.
While the Seattle online giant released all 14 pilots of its original comedy and children’s series at the same time when seeking customer feedback, the company won’t be using the strategy for the final productions.
Jonathan Alter, producer of the Amazon original comedy Alpha House, told TheWrap that his show would be using a “different streaming model” than that of Netflix.
Netflix, meanwhile, has found success dumping entire seasons at once, even though people can download a free trial just to watch the show, then cancel the membership right after.
“Our decision to launch all episodes at once created enormous media and social buzz, reinforcing our brand attribute of giving consumers complete control over how and when they enjoy their entertainment,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells wrote their quarterly letter to shareholders. “Some investors worried that the House of Cardsfans would take advantage of our free trial, watch the show, and then cancel. However, there was very little free-trial gaming — less than 8,000 people did this — out of millions of free trials in the quarter.”
Amazon’s pricing model differs from Netflix’s approach, offering a portion of its catalog for no extra charge to Amazon Prime members (who pay $79/year for a package that also includes free shipping and Kindle book rentals). Amazon also offers a la carte streaming movie and TV show rentals and digital purchases.
Amazon’s five original shows, including Alpha House, will be available to Amazon Prime members later this year.
The image of a scientist usually comes with a rigid, rigorous work ethic and technical, logical, and rational mind. It can be difficult to picture a scientist as an extremely passionate violinist.
However, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was known for his love of music and the violin. Not only did it serve as a hobby he enjoyed immensely, it also helped to train his intuition and would contribute to his conception of the theory of relativity.
The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. My parents had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the result of musical perception.
In addition to sharpening his intuition, playing the violin also enhanced his persistence: it served as his outlet when he ran into tough problems. While our professional work may not be as technical or quantitative as Einstein’s was, may this serve as a reminder that our hobbies can be training tools for our other work.
For more information about Einstein’s passion for music, check out Brian Roemmele’s extremely comprehensive answer on Quora.
Getting into the zone takes time. Every interruption takes its toll; research has shown that on average people take 23 minutes to regain the level of focus they had prior to an interruption.
You can minimize the amount of time spent regaining focus by implementing a rule where you spend half your day alone. Naturally, you can host meetings or chat with co-workers and collaborators during the other half. Collaboration software company 37Signals (authors of the bestselling nonfiction book, Rework) write:
Set up a rule at work: Make half the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first or the last half of the day the alone time period. Just make sure this period is contiguous in order to avoid productivity-killing interruptions.
This type of practise isn’t necessarily restricted to the workplace; rather, this is even easier to implement (and perhaps more effective) for freelancers. By spending less time regaining focus, and you’ll have more time to build awesome things.
Russell Brand is a pretty polarizing comedian, but no matter your opinion on this eloquent Englishman, you'll want to see him in action on the set of MSNBC program Morning Joe.
Brand appeared yesterday as a guest on the show to promote his new comedy tour, Messiah Complex. After commenting on his attire early on, the anchors strangely turn on him during the interview. They discuss the comedian as if he weren't there, even ribbing him about his accent.
But Brand's a seasoned comedy professional who has no doubt dealt with his share of hostile audiences.
Near the end of the interview he asks the anchors if this is what they do for a living, and even has something of a soapbox moment to talk about the state of the media.
"That's the problem about current affairs." he said. "You forget about what's important. You allow the agenda to be decided by superficial information. What am I saying? What am I talking about? Don't think about what I'm wearing. These things are superficial."
Watch Brand shred the anchors for being unprofessional.
The shocking case of Ariel Castro, who kidnapped three young women and held them for years as rape and torture objects, fascinated the nation when it broke last month. But Cleveland has had a problem with residents living in fear of sexual predators for a while now. As Phillip Morris of the Plain Dealer reported in April, the discovery of serial killer Anthony Sowell's collection of corpses in 2009 created a climate of fear that only escalated as other serial rapists terrorized residents. Clevelanders have been repeatedly reminded of how many monsters live among us, attacking women under the radar, and understandably they are worried.
But there is one item of good news: Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, has decided to go Eliot Ness on rapists. The Plain Dealer reports:
Cuyahoga County prosecutors and investigators are revisiting decades-old unsolved rape cases, using DNA evidence to connect serial rapes, tracking down victims and sending cases to grand juries for indictment—often racing against a 20-year statute of limitations.
The Plain Dealer rightfully takes credit for this, having turned the pressure up for years on authorities. Efforts escalated in 2011 at the request of Ohio's Republican attorney general Mike DeWine, and the result has been a factory line of indictments, often against men who are accused of spending decades attacking women without facing any repercussions for it. Now the newspaper has created a clearinghouse page so readers can follow the stream of indictments since March, as well as other stories about the DNA testing, in one place. (The above screenshot is only part of the page—I couldn't get the entire thing into one screen—but gives you an idea of how many cold cases are being turned into indictments with this move.)
Many of these indictments open up multiple cold cases at once, which is to be expected, as most rapists are serial rapists. Cleveland set aside about 3,000 untouched rape kits to be processed, which is a massive amount of work, but it's hard to argue with results like this. Law enforcement nationwide has been responding to pressure to process their backlogged rape kits, often with mixed results due to poor handling of the kits in the first place. The relative success in Cleveland should serve as a reminder of how effective rape kits can be in getting justice for victims, but only if they're handled properly and law enforcement bothers to use them.
Most people with siblings can remember an instance where their arguments escalated to inappropriate levels. I recall slamming my older brother’s door so hard when we were teenagers that I splintered the door frame. Though some sparring is normal, aggression between siblings can have lasting negative effects—so says a new study in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics. According to the New York Times, one-third of the children in a study of more than 3,000 said they were victimized by a sibling at some point in the past year, and the victimized children reported higher levels of anxiety, depression, and anger.
Other studies have shown that sibling conflict occurs every day for 50 percent of young children, and 80 percent of siblings ages 3-17 reported experiencing at least one violent episode with their sister or brother in the year that study evaluated. So what are parents supposed to do? And how do we know what’s detrimental bullying versus just regular sibling bickering? I asked Slate’s resident bullying expert Emily Bazelon, the author of Sticks and Stones, and she said that the way to figure out if fighting between siblings is reaching the level of bullying is to see if there’s a pattern.
According to Bazelon, you should ask yourself, “Is one kid (or group of kids) on a campaign to make another kid miserable? Is the aggression chronic, and one-way, as opposed to mutual, where the power shifts back and forth?” If the answer is yes, then it’s important to talk as a family about what’s going on—because it’s a whole family dynamic. “It’s not about just focusing on the bully or the victim,” Bazelon says.
While this study should certainly inspire parents to keep an eye on the dynamics at play among their children, Bazelon cautions that most kids recover from sibling aggression. “These studies show that there’s a risk of depression and other negative psychological consequences. That means a higher rate, not that everyone experiences it,” she says. “Fortunately, most kids do bounce back. But it’s important to look out for the kids who have a harder time doing that.” So: No need to freak out. Look out for your more psychologically fragile offspring, but don’t break up every argument over Legos.
The benefits of e-commerce personalization are well known -- increased conversion rates, larger order values, and more engaged customers. But as with most e-commerce strategies that offer rewards, personalization comes with inherent risks. Understanding these risks and their causes --also known as personalization sins -- is an integral step in making sure your company develops and executes a successful personalization strategy.
To avoid these risks, let's explore seven of the most common personalization sins committed by e-commerce companies both large and small.
Collecting personally identifiable information (PII) without permission
One of the fastest ways to alienate customers is to collect PII without permission. Luckily, with advances in big data, machine learning, and real-time analytics, PII is not needed to provide a personalized e-commerce experience to individual customers. However, if a customer is willing to offer select PII by filling out a profile, you must use the data in an appropriate way.
Using customer data without permission
If a customer willingly provides you with PII, do not take it as an invitation to monetize and use that data in any way you see fit. Don't personalize an experience using unauthorized consumer data without permission. For example, it would be creepy if someone who I had never met came up to me on the street and started talking to me about my time in the Peace Corps. This same creepiness applies online. When determining where to draw the line, put yourself in the customer's shoes and ask yourself, "Would I provide my PII in order to receive a product or service?" If the answer is no, don't do it.
Relying on profile data and past purchase history
Many retailers limit their ability to give consumers relevant shopping experiences by their over reliance on profile data and past purchase history. While this data is helpful, they provide a stagnant picture of the past, not the future. If you purchased a mattress last week, it's unlikely that you will purchase another one this week. Once you start showing interest in something else, this information can be of limited value.
Limiting the power of big data
Building off of the prior sin, retailers should leverage the power of big data and machine learning to identify contextual cues -- search terms, dwell time, and click path -- to determine what consumers want today. These signals occur across all consumer touch points. Advanced analytics tools are available to capture this type of data and turn it into actionable business intelligence.
Focusing on conversion at the expense of shopper engagement
Omni-channel is about delivering the best possible consumer experience regardless of channel or device. It's about extending your brand across all touch points and building a relationship with your customer that sticks. Any consumer experience that rushes the buyer to convert also runs the risk of alienating or detracting from the long term relationship. It isn't about a one-time conversion. It's about getting shoppers to return to your site again and again for repeat purchases.
Not leveraging online data to empower employees
Sales associates are at the front line of your company. If you do not invest in the digital enablement of these employees, you are doing your customers a disservice. Sales associates need access to the data necessary to provide customers with an in-person omni-channel experience --e-commerce catalogs, in-store and online product availability, and technology that leverages online data to create a better in-store experience.
One size fits none
Unfortunately, no single personalization strategy will solve your needs for relevant content across all of your interactions. If you are searching for that one silver bullet, stop. To consistently deliver relevant content or products, you need a breadth of personalization approaches and algorithms. These range from using search terms on landing pages for onsite search results to observing user click path for category and product page recommendations. A failure to recognize the need for a portfolio of personalization strategies will significantly hamper the shopping experience that you can offer.
Consumers are demanding more from e-commerce, which is forcing retailers to invest more and create highly personalized shopping experiences. Now is the time to take advantage of the technologies and tools available to deliver a one-of-a-kind shopping experience for your customers in addition to improving your key metrics -- engagement, revenue, and lifetime value.
It’s not easy to unite the right-wing Heartland Institute and bird-loving environmentalists.
But that’s what some wind energy developers appear to be doing by proposing to the federal government that they be allowed to kill bald eagles and other protected species with their turbines.
Across the country, 14 wind projects have applied to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for permits that would let them “take” — aka harm or kill — a certain number of eagles each year. That includes four wind farms in California, one in Minnesota, and one in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma project could be the first in the nation to actually receive such a permit. The company behind it, Wind Capital Group, wants permission to kill up to three bald eagles every year for 40 years on its proposed 94-turbine wind farm. A Native American tribe in the area is protesting, as are some conservation groups. The Daily Ardmoreite reports:
Osage Nation Principal Chief John D. Red Eagle expressed his deep concern and opposition to killing eagles in Osage territory from a cultural standpoint.
“The eagle is a sacred and symbolic figure to the Osage people, and the area targeted for this project contains a high bald eagle population,” Red Eagle said. “While the Osage Nation does not oppose wind energy or alternative energy, we do oppose the specific area for this project. It all comes down to siting projects in appropriate places, and this is not an appropriate place for a massive wind energy project.”
Reuters reports that the Obama administration has been working to loosen wildlife rules to facilitate wind development:
The fight in Oklahoma points to the deepening divide between some conservationists and the Obama administration over its push to clear the way for renewable energy development despite hazards to eagles and other protected species. …
It is illegal to kill bald and golden eagles, either deliberately or inadvertently, under protections afforded them by two federal laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
In the past, federal permits allowing a limited number of eagle deaths were restricted to narrow activities such as scientific research.
But the Obama administration in 2009 broadened such permitting authority to include otherwise lawful activities like wind power developments.
Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is seeking to lengthen the duration of those permits from five to 30 years to satisfy an emerging industry dependent on investors seeking stable returns.
As we’ve reported previously, the Obama administration has never prosecuted a wind farm for killing a protected bird, and it recently assured a California wind farm and a luxury real-estate development that they wouldn’t be prosecuted for accidentally killing endangered California condors.
The prospect of eagle “take” permits has angered some folks on the left and on the right — and in between. This despite conditions that would be attached to such permits compelling wind companies to contribute to eagle conservation efforts.
Of course, conservationists and right wingers don’t actually see eye to eye on this issue. The conservationists don’t want bald eagles, golden eagles, or other protected birds to be killed in the name of energy. “If they kill two birds, I think it’s a crime,” Steve Groth of the Minnesota-based Coalition for Sensible Siting told Minnesota Public Radio.
The wind industry, for its part, says worries about eagle deaths are exaggerated. Again from Reuters:
Fewer than 2 percent of all human-caused deaths of golden eagles occur at modern wind farms and only a few bald eagle deaths have been documented in the history of the industry — far less mortality than is attributed to such causes as poisoning or vehicle collisions, said the American Wind Energy Association spokesman Peter Kelley.
American Bird Conservancy supports wind power when it is bird-smart, and believes that birds and wind power can co-exist if the wind industry is held to mandatory standards that protect birds.
Bird-smart wind power employs careful siting, operation and construction mitigation, bird monitoring, and compensation, to reduce and redress any unavoidable bird mortality and habitat loss. These are issues that the federal government should include in mandatory wind standards.
The bald eagle is a symbol of freedom and an iconic beneficiary of America’s environmental movement, which saved it from extinction by banning DDT and passing laws to protect endangered species. No climate activists would want it to become the new face of opposition to the renewable energy revolution.
Evie Sobczak is a young science rockstar who has already done more in her 16 years than most of us will in our entire lives (I KNOW, I should speak for myself):
For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.
And she totally did. Sobczak engineered all of her equipment herself, creating a totally chemical-free way to grow algae, extract the oil, and use it as biodiesel. Plus, her process produced as much as 20 percent more oil than current methods, which could make algae biofuel cheaper. She recently won first place at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair for her process, which is a big deal because, as Sobczak says, “It’s like the biggest science fair ever.” As she says in a video for Intel:
I really believe algae could be our next fuel source because it doesn’t take a lot of land and it doesn’t take away from our food source. And if you use my processes, you don’t use any chemicals, so it’s not harming our environment. I live in Florida, so we have a lot of algae problems, so I thought why not use something negative to help our world?
Watch her awesomeness:
And no matter what you think about algae, it’s rad to see a young woman totally kick ass in a field where women are hugely underrepresented (fewer than 1 in 4 environmental scientists is female). YOU GO, GIRL.
The trend toward skepticism and away from alarmism is now unmistakable …
Publication of a Chinese translation of Climate Change Reconsidered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences indicates the country’s leaders believe their [failure to sign a global climate treaty] is justified by science and not just economics.
But really all that happened was that one of Heartland’s climate-denial reports, “Climate Change Reconsidered,” was translated into Chinese [PDF].
And translation does not mean endorsement. Even the translators’ preface says the work was undertaken “to understand different opinions and positions in debates on climate change” and “does not reflect that [those involved in the translation] agree with the views” in the report.
When the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) got wind of Heartland’s blog post, it was not pleased. It put out a statement harshly condemning the post:
The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. …
Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.
For over a century, man has stared out at the foot of an oceanic abyss in the Rockaways, inhaling the salt-perfumed air, hearing the waves crash against the shore*, and wondered: why can't I be inside a boutique hotel in the Meatpacking District right now? This Summer 2K13, that nagging desire will be sated by The Playland Motel, a hotel/bar/restaurant/boutique for the urban beachgoer who probably didn't want to go to the beach in the first place. [ more › ]
A man was stabbed in the chest in Times Square this afternoon, and the perpetrator remains at large. An NYPD spokesman said that the victim was stabbed around 2 p.m. near the intersection of West 46th Street and Seventh Avenue. The victim was transported to Bellevue, and authorities say his injuries are not life-threatening. Police from the Midtown North Precinct are currently canvassing the area for the suspect, a male who is reportedly in his 40s. [ more › ]
New York City is the second largest tech hub in the country, trailing only behind Silicon Valley. The days of second place may soon be over, though, if the outcome of a new "Brooklyn Tech Triangle" is half as exciting as newly released renderings suggest it will be. [ more › ]
Sympathies to the researcher who had to listen to amateur impressions all day.
Scientists have identified what happens in our brain when we mimic a foreign accent or impersonate another person, according to a recent study from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
The researchers, led by psychologist Carolyn McGettigan from Royal Holloway University of London, wanted to explore the way the brain controls the non-verbal aspects of our speech--the different tones or styles people use when talking in different contexts, like talking to your boss on the phone versus chatting with a friend in a coffee shop or hitting on someone at a bar.
Popular selections included Sean Connery, Elvis and Bill Clinton. Before the study began, participants--all "non-professional impressionists"--were asked to make a list of 40 different accents and 40 people, from their mother to Arnold Schwarzenegger, they could try to impersonate. They then had to recite a few lines of a nursery rhyme in some of those accents while in an fMRI scanner. (Some popular selections included Sean Connery, Elvis and Bill Clinton.)
When study subjects consciously changed their voices, either with a new accent or during an impersonation, the left anterior insula and the interior frontal gyrus (LIFG), areas associated with planning and producing speech, lit up in fMRI images.
Impressions in particular generated greater responses in other regions of the brain, the posterior superior temporal/inferior parietal cortex and right middle/anterior superior temporal sulcus, but there was no difference in the increase in activity in the LIFG between accent and impersonation planning.
This research "could potentially lead to new treatments for those looking to recover their own vocal identity following brain injury or a stroke," lead author Carolyn McGettigan explained in a statement. Identifying the regions of the brain involved in controlling the voice could be helpful in treating rare afflictions like Foreign Accent Syndrome, a condition that distorts speech patterns, often after brain damage, giving a person a completely different accent.
Who knew America was so well hydrated? These maps, created by former Google engineer Nelson Minar using data originally from the U.S. Geological Survey, show America's extensive system of waterways, including streams, tributaries and creeks. Even in places you don't often think of as water-logged, it's a surprisingly expansive network.
As beautiful as the maps turned out, Minar created the project largely just as a tutorial on how to make a vector-based map. (His code and more background on the process are on GitHub.) "It's mostly a demo project with readable source," he writes on his blog, "but it's also kind of pretty."
This particular map includes all flow lines, which is why you see a lot more blue than you might expect in desert areas--it encompasses seasonal water flow, like creek beds that are dry for much of the year. Down in Florida, the Everglades don't have well-defined enough flow lines, so the swampy preserve isn't included, and the state looks mysteriously white in comparison to, say, New Mexico.
And here's California and some of the surrounding area (look how all the squiggles converge on the California Delta near the San Francisco Bay over at the left):
You can see the full zoomable map and pinpoint precise waterways here.
Researchers in Switzerland recently developed a concept to use a swarm of UAVs as a local communication network for emergency workers in disaster areas.
Courtesy EPFL
Flight is freedom. The power to rise into the air and reach a destination unshackles us from gravity, distance, topography, and time. This is why we, as a publication, return to flight so often. It is humanity's greatest victory against the limitations of being human.
It can also, at its fringe at least, seem a bit fantastical. For example, I recently shook hands with Bertrand Piccard, adventurer and pilot of the Solar Impulse, just before he set off from California on the first cross-country flight of a sun-powered plane. I pointed out that the craft seemed a bit rickety. In order to make it on today's meager batteries, it needs to be unbelievably light. Piccard smiled brilliantly. "When the Wright Brothers went up, no one could have imagined a plane carrying 300 people," he said. He's right. Dreaming far beyond today's limitations made flight possible.
That was the spirit with which we undertook our survey of the Future of Flight . We want to provide a showcase for all that could be when you strip limitations away. Likewise, it was with this same spirit that we undertook an experiment.
Modern life looks a lot like the dreams of the past century. Why not ask today's best sci-fi minds what they dream about?As Hollywood's summer flood of rockets and phasers began, we asked sci-fi writers and artists (people whose award-winning work will undoubtedly be optioned soon, at which point they'll stop emailing us back) to take on a few big topics. Cities. Work. Space travel. The self. Modern life looks a lot like the dreams of the past century. Why not ask today's best sci-fi minds what they dream about? We've also included whole chapters of out-there, visionary sci-fi in our digital edition. And on your tablet, July includes my conversation with M. Night Shyamalan, who reinvented our planet as it might look 1,000 years from now in his first space opera, After Earth. You'll also find a hard-core geek-out between writers Dan Engber and Erik Sofge, who dissect the jetpacks and robot interfaces of summer blockbusters in this issue. Please let us know if you enjoy our effort to forecast tomorrow based on today's dreams. Because we just might do it again.
The causes, symptoms, and effects of autism are some of the most puzzling mysteries in all of psychology and neuroscience, but researchers at Stanford University may have connected a few of the dots. They dove deep into the brains (not literally) of a selection of kids with and without autism, and found that those with autism respond differently to the human voice than those without.
The researchers took 20 kids with similar IQs and reading abilities, 10 with high-functioning autism and 10 without any sign of autism, and examined activity between several parts of the brain. There is a theory, says the lead researcher, that social cues don't interact with the brain's reward system in the same way as in non-autistic people. This study supports that: it found that in the brains of the kids with autism, there's a significantly weaker connection between the parts of the brain that interprets voices and the part that doles out pleasure. In other words, the sound of the human voice gives those with autism less joy.
There's also a weaker link between those voice-processing centers and the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals in emotion. That suggests a neurological reason for an autistic person's inability or disinterest in social cues--their brains don't reward them for caring about these things.
The study doesn't have any immediate ramifications for the treatment or even diagnosis of autism, and it only tested one very particular segment of those on the autism spectrum. Still, it's pretty fascinating, and may lead these or other researchers down a path that could help treat or diagnose autism in the future.
Mannitol, a plant-produced sweetener used in gum and candies, has proven effective at blocking production of a Parkinson's-related protein.
A sweetener produced by most plants could hold the key to treating Parkinson's disease, a recent paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry asserts.
Mannitol, a sugar alcohol found in plants and fungi, is used as a sweetener for candies and jams, as well as as the dusting powder on chewing gum and in chewable pharmaceutical tablets. Researchers from Tel Aviv University have found it can also prevent a protein called α-synuclein from clumping in the brain, which has been associated with Parkinson's Disease.
After discovering that mannitol could effectively prevent the protein from clumping in test tubes in the lab, the researchers studied the locomotive abilities of fruit flies that had been genetically altered to carry the gene for α-synuclein by watching their climbing behavior in a test tube. Only 38 percent of the transgenic flies could climb up a test tube at first, versus 72 percent of normal flies.
After eating food laced with mannitol for almost a month, 70 percent of the transgenic flies could then climb up the tube. The protein's presence in the brain had also been reduced by 70 percent.
One of the study's authors, Daniel Segal, a professor of molecular microbiology and biotechnology at Tel Aviv University, suggests that combining mannitol with other Parkinson's medications may help the other treatments break through the blood/brain barrier.
Mannitol would be an attractive treatment option because it's already approved for various medical uses by the FDA, as a diuretic and as a rinsing agent during certain surgical procedures.
Many of us know that feeling. That gut punch of shock and denial as we watch our camera fall from our grip or swing to the earth from an unsecured tripod. We’ve watched as it impacted with the ground with a hard thud or bounced amongst the rocks collecting more damage with every tumble as it travels farther away from the safety of your hands.
We know what it’s like to stare at our damaged gear for minutes straight trying to figure out how we may be able to time travel back just a few moments and avoid the destruction that has ensued.
It’s a horrible feeling and one that can ruin a shoot and even an entire day. But don’t worry. As this post will hopefully soon prove, you are not alone in your tribulations. If you’ve ever damaged or destroyed your camera, here’s a lighthearted list of a few interesting ways other people have suffered a wounded soldier while out in the field. This will hopefully make you feel a little better if you’re mourning over your own personal loss.
#1: Photograph a Rocket
Not every broken camera is an act of negligence or unforeseen forces. Sometimes a photographer enters a situation knowing his camera will be damaged or even destroyed. It’s called a calculated risk and most sane people often decide to keep their camera in one piece and just miss the shot. But those driven to get the best shot possible no matter what will dive right off that edge and place their camera directly in harms way. As we all have learned or will learn eventually, when it’s worth it, it’s worth it.
Such was the case when Ben Cooper rigged a sound activated camera to go off as this rocket launched, capturing this stunning photo. Despite the extreme conditions the camera faced to take such a photo it surprisingly remained intact in this instance and only the lens was destroyed. You know you’ve got a good photo when you can walk away happy that only the lens was destroyed.
#2: Photograph Wild Lions
We can all be enticed by trying something out of our wheel house. Portrait photographers trying their hand at photojournalism, photojournalists attempting documentary filmmaking, or even wedding photographers giving it a go at wildlife photography. Often this produces mixed results but rarely do we think it will result in the complete destruction of our camera.
Unfortunately for self-described “family photographer” Ed Hetherington, such was the case when he setup his 5D Mark II on a tripod near a dead buffalo while out in Zimbabwe. The lioness he was attempting to photograph from a distance so as not to disturb her made quick work of his camera, carrying it away and gnawing on it like a chew toy. Luckily for Ed he had another camera with him and was at least able to catch a few fun photos of his Mark II’s last moments.
#3: Repair Your Own Camera
This one may not be a rare or special instance but it is one that should be mentioned. Why? Because we’ve all done it. And we’ve all regretted it. At some point or another you’ll find yourself with some slight damage, be it from wear and tear or a wild jungle cat using your camera as a chew toy and you’ll think to yourself, “I can probably fix this.” Now, you may feel a slight hesitation at first but don’t worry, that’s just rational thinking and it’ll go away soon enough.
Next you’ll crack that bad boy open and start moving all sorts of things around. Stop. Just don’t do it. If you’ve had experience repairing cameras, fine, then by all means go ahead. But if you’re like a lot of us and can be surprisingly inept when it comes to handiwork you’re best to avoid this trap. Some people will do it to save money while others will do it simply to pad their ego but more likely than not you’ll just cause more damage and feel stupid when you finally do bring it in to be repaired by an expert.
#4: Shoot in a Sulfur Mine
As I stated above, sometimes we take a calculated risk in order to achieved our more ambitious goals. When Olivier Grunewald went to the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia to document the lives of the sulfur miners that work there, he undertook a huge risk both to his health and his gear.
While constantly wearing a gas mask (that few of the miners have available to wear) and fending off the overwhelming noxious fumes, Grunewald lost a camera and two lenses to the intense conditions inside the sulfur mine. And while most would never dream of subjecting themselves to such an extreme environment, the photos of this fiery alien world appear to be conjured straight from Sci-Fi’s most creative minds. The vibrant glowing pools and blood red dripping sulfur formations make the lost gear a small price to pay for such amazing photographs.
#5: Photograph Celebrities
Whether it be paparazzi or just a commercial director working with a star, dealing with celebrities is a dangerous job for your gear. Just ask Frank Todaro who, perhaps foolishly, asked Tiger Woods to hit a ball directly at the camera during a Nike commercial shoot. Tiger did exactly as he was asked and of course destroyed the camera.
This is one freak example though, the norm seems to be celebrities intentionally destroying the cameras of paparazzi as their privacy is invaded in a strobe of flashes while they leave their favorite club. Perhaps the most infamous celebrity to attempt to photograph would be Kanye West. Who has on multiple occasions confronted the paparazzi and sought out the destruction of the cameras as shown here. Perhaps the smartest bet is just not to become a paparazzi?
And in case those weren’t enough, one last bonus one…
Long exposure photographs of stars and romantic engagement photographs aren’t often found together, but that’s the fusion wedding photography couple Robert Paetz and Felicia Wong have been dabbling with as of late. The duo takes their clients out into natural landscapes away from light-polluted cities and photographs them under the night sky. They call the resulting photos, “astro wedding photography.”
The whole thing started late last year when a client of theirs asked about having their engagement photo shoot done in Joshua Tree, California… in August… in 100-degree weather. After reading the message, Wong groaned, looked over at her husband, and jokingly asked, “Can we just shoot in the middle of the night?!”
Upon hearing this, the gears in Paetz’s head began turning. “Why can’t we shoot at night?” he thought to himself.
He had been poking around in the area of astro photography at the time, so Paetz decided that they could give it a shot. They called up the adventurous couple and asked them to meet them by the vending machines of a “dodgy desert motel” at 2am the next weekend. Here are the photographs that resulted:
Paetz tells us that it’s getting harder and harder to find good nighttime locations for his astro wedding shots. “A hundred years ago we could all have seen skies like this from most places, but because of urbanization and electricity we have polluted our skies with light, leaving the view of the stars confined to the deserts and wild places,” he says.
Finding the right conditions is one of the big challenges for this type of engagement shoot. If the moon is too bright, the stars can be overwhelmed. If the spot is too close to a city, the light pollution affects how the night sky looks. If it’s too cloudy, nothing shows up.
Paetz says that for his business’ astro wedding shoots, they “keep a hawk-like watch on the phases of the moon and the weather forecast.” Oh, and it helps to have trusting clients who are willing to hold still in very cold temperatures.
Under development in the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo is a dynamic target tracking camera capable of keeping fast-moving objects centered in frame.
It works by essentially bouncing the target into the lens using mirrors moving very rapidly. What you get is a stable image of a fast-moving object. In the video demo, a fast-moving ball tied to a string is tracked — and the accuracy may surprise you.
“This system does very fast image processing to recognize the subject. It captures and processes an image every 1/1000th of a second. In this way, it can track the subject stably and continuously, simply by feeding back the subject’s position, without particularly predicting its behavior.”
Uses for such a system seem limitless. From tracking a race car to following a baseball at a major league game, this type of technology could soon become the norm in sports broadcasting and other industries. In fact, the Lab says it may be useable for broadcasting in about two years.
Other uses for this system allow for the connecting of a projection device instead of a camera, which allows for projected images on moving objects — a potentially useful solution for augmented reality applications.
After promising he wouldn’t be a jerk about Community‘s fourth season, the comedy’s once and future showrunner Dan Harmon spoke out on his Harmontown podcast about what he thought of the Harmon-less season. Spoiler alert: He wasn’t too happy with it, and wasn’t afraid to say it with some backhanded and profane responses. He’s since apologized, but the damage’s already been done.
Mostly, Harmon expressed regret that the replacement showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port tried and, in his opinion, failed to follow his lead. “It’s obviously not somebody doing what they do and trying very hard to make people happy,” he said. “It is very much like an impression, and an unflattering one. It’s just 13 episodes of ‘Oh, I’m Dan Harmon! Huh huuh! Die Hard! Duh huh huh huh!’”
“They could have just done a sitcom set at a community college,” he said, and while he acknowledged that fans would have been disappointed, he thought that “then, five episodes later, regular people would have been like, ‘Oh, this is a pleasant little show set at a community college.’”
One of Harmon’s major regrets was the introduction of Jeff’s dad, who he had always wanted to be played by Bill Murray. He explained that while watching the fourth season, he left Murray an awkward voicemail asking him to be on the show. He followed this up with a bizarre rape metaphor we won’t reproduce here, but sufficed to say it was pretty bad.
Though he was negative about the replacement showrunners, he saved his hardest shots for the company that fired and rehired him. “Writers fighting other writers is the fucking American dream in the eyes of Sony. That is what they want. They want creative people rewriting each other. They want creative people replacing each other. They want us interchangeable.”
He’s since apologized, which you can read in full here, but it pretty much boils down to him saying, “You know what, guys? This one’s on me. My bad.”
Every time you save an image as a JPEG, some of the original information is lost forever. This loss of information is hard to detect with an untrained eye. In an attempt to demonstrate exactly what is happening here, blogger Tom Scott has taken the original text from William Shakespeare’sRomeo and Juliet and processed it in the same way one would process a JPEG image, effectively demonstrating the varying degrees of image compression and information degradation. In short, image compression works by removing redundancies within the file, allowing the image to take up less space while still being able to communicate a message.
For “Shakespeare.txt.jpg,” Tom Scott took Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet text and processed it at varying image compression rates.
The compression rates determine file size as well as overall quality of the image. Each compression rate effectively reduces the final file size of the image and, when applied to a text file, can transform a once coherent text into nothing more than pure nonsense.
After running this text through various rates of image compression Scott then printed them into a total of six short “books” which are not available for purchase but can be downloaded in their entirety here, saying:
If anyone wants to commission a professionally bound hardcover set for some net art exhibit, let me know. I’ll happily pretend to be a serious artist.
After over nearly two years of deliberation and denial, it has been decided by India’s largest telecommunications company Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited to forgo the use of messages sent by telegram, a service that to much surprise continues to remain ubiquitous within the country.
Apparently, the FINALLY outdated method of communication is favored by many, not only because the country’s developing networks leave much to be desired — only about 26% of citizens own cellphones — but also due to its ”sense of urgency and authenticity.”
When questioned about the company’s decision to discontinue the service, general manager of BSNL’s telegraph services Shamim Akhtar said, “We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant.”
That being said, an industry that once employed approximately 12,500 people, now only requires the efforts of 998 people, some of whom will be accommodated with jobs in other departments.
For a communications technology that has been in use since as early as 1792, telegrams have had an impressive run.
While it’s not news that Facebook cannot seem to handle even the slightest bit of tasteful nudity — THANKS, FACEBOOK! — the ever ubiquitous terms of service agreements and certain sacrifices in privacy we must make in order to use social networks are nevertheless a frustrating detail to put up with, especially for an artist.
Earlier this afternoon Richard Prince decided to tweet out against Instagram’s request that he “remove all images containing nudity.” Here are his tweets and #artboobs. Watch the artist’s battle against censorship unfold below:
As we all know, there are tons of characters in HBO television series ‘Game of Thrones’, and some of them might seem familiar to you.
To show you where you might have seen them before, Imgur user Mattie432 created a comprehensive chart that lists the cast of the series next to their previous movie roles.
For example, Jack Gleeson—who plays ‘Joffrey Barathoen’—was the young boy that Batman saved in the ‘Batman Begins’, while Michelle Fairley—who portrayed the now decreased ‘Catelyn Stark’—was Hermione’s mother in the ‘Harry Potter’ movie.
The photographs taken by Alfred T. Palmer are essential to our understanding of history, especially these photos of women at work during World War II.
Commissioned by the Office of War Information, which was in charge of encouraging women to contribute to the war effort, one of Palmer’s assignments was to photograph women in a positive light.
Palmer took these color photographs on reversal film, and each shot shows that women have made significant contributions during WWII.
These pictures are both aesthetically pleasing and give us a better understanding of history—and the role women had to play in it.
Scroll down to view the rest of these eye-opening shots.
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For over a century, man has stared out at the foot of an oceanic abyss in the Rockaways, inhaling the salt-perfumed air, hearing the waves crash against the shore*, and wondered: why can't I be inside a boutique hotel in the Meatpacking District right now? This Summer 2K13, that nagging desire will be sated by 
A man was stabbed in the chest in Times Square this afternoon, and the perpetrator remains at large. An NYPD spokesman said that the victim was stabbed around 2 p.m. near the intersection of West 46th Street and Seventh Avenue. The victim was transported to Bellevue, and authorities say his injuries are not life-threatening. Police from the Midtown North Precinct are currently canvassing the area for the suspect, a male who is 
New York City is the second largest tech hub in the country, trailing only behind Silicon Valley. The days of second place may soon be over, though, if the outcome of a new "Brooklyn Tech Triangle" is half as exciting as newly released renderings suggest it will be. [ 
For “Shakespeare.txt.jpg,” Tom Scott took Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet text and processed it at varying image compression rates.
![Richard Prince Loves Boobs and Hates Instagram: Live! [NSFW]](http://content.animalnewyork.com/wp-content/uploads/prince_gram-600x337.jpg)
