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The FCC voted today to change the way it regulates internet providers in the United States. Net Neutrality advocates say it's a major victory for the internet.

The post The FCC’s Vote to Protect Net Neutrality Is a Huge Win for the Internet appeared first on WIRED.

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1.7 percent

4 Oscars

“Birdman” took home the Academy Award for best picture last night, and it won other trophies for original screenplay, direction and cinematography. It won the most Oscars on the night, but tied with “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which won four prizes in score, costume design, production design and makeup/hairstyling. [USA Today]

4.6 percent

There are flurries, snowstorms, blizzards²³ — and then there’s what’s going on in Boston. So far in February, 58.5 inches of snow have fallen there. That’s more than the total seasonal snowfall that Boston received in 95 of the previous 124 winters (77 percent). It beats the previous all-time monthly record (January 2005) by 15.2 inches.

And this data undersells what Boston has gone through in 2015. In January and February so far, a total of 92.8 inches of snow have hit Boston. That’s 22.9 inches more than the previous two-month record (January and February 1994), and it’s greater than the total seasonal snowfall of all but two (98 percent) of the last 124 winters.

In potentially worse news for Boston, we’re not even close to being through February. According to the National Weather Service, more snow is possible later this week and weekend. Sorry.

The forthcoming “Ghostbusters” reboot, whose main cast was announced Tuesday night, will almost certainly pass “The Bechdel Test,” a basic way to estimate the involvement of, and priority given to, female characters on-screen (barring some crazy reimagining of the original film’s concept). Four women — Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones — will be donning the proton packs.

That may be good news for troubled Sony Pictures, because — as I found last year — a movie that passes the test and integrates women tends to have a better return on investment given its budget and gross:

It’s also not surprising that this win takes place in comedy, where women tend to be better represented — at least in recent years — than in other genres, according to the Media Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

Most of all, a big-ticket tentpole franchise film helmed entirely by women in a science-fiction comedy is relatively new ground. And it could spur a bump in the rate of films that feature women in meaningful roles — a rate that has unfortunately been relatively stagnant, as the chart at the top of this piece shows.

We all have digital files stored on our phones that hold an irreplaceable sentimental value. Maybe it’s a photo with a loved one who has passed away, a video of your baby taking his first steps, or a digital love note from the one who makes your heart skip a beat. For 68 year old Stan Beaton, it was a voice mail message recorded by his late wife, Ruby. Ruby passed in 2003 and Stan had kept this memento of the love of his life for over a decade, until it was deleted when Virgin Media did some technical work. Beaton was devastated, but the company found a way to make it up to him. They assigned a team of 10 employees to sift through the digital archives to uncover this sound file.

See Also Gorgeous Henna Crowns Empower Cancer Patients Who Have Lost Their Hair

BBC News got the honor of returning this priceless possession back to Mr. Beaton and we get the pleasure of seeing his heart warming reaction. Watch the video below to brighten your day and allow it to remind you to cherish your loved ones while they are still here with you.

Via: cbsnews.com

When someone visits your website, you can easily retrieve information about the charge level of their mobile or laptop’s battery through the Battery Status API (live demo). This is currently supported on Google Chrome, Opera & Firefox on the desktop and Chrome for Android.

The Battery API can be implemented with few lines of JavaScript code and reveals all the required details about the device’s battery charge level. You’ll get to know:

1. Whether or not the visitor’s battery is currently being charged.
2. How much is the battery charged?
3. If charging, how many seconds until the battery is fully charged.
4. The remaining time in seconds until the battery is completely discharged.

Battery Status Demo

You can attach event listeners so the battery data is updated as soon as the charge level of the hardware’s battery is changed while the visitor is still on your page. You can go one step further and even integrate this with Google Analytics and store the battery charge level of your visitor’s devices using Events in Analytics.

<script>
 
  if (navigator.getBattery) {
    navigator.getBattery().then(function(battery) {
      display(battery);
    });
  } else if (navigator.battery) {
    display(navigator.battery);
  } else {
    console.log("Sorry, Battery Status API is not supported");
  }
 
  function display(battery) {
    console.log('Charge level? '     + battery.level);
    console.log('Battery charging? ' + battery.charging);
    console.log('Time to charge? '   + battery.chargingTime);
    console.log('Time to discarge? ' + battery.dischargingTime);
  }
 
</script>

This can have several use cases. For instance, when the visitor’s device is running low on battery and not plugged-in, the web developer can choose to automatically save the changes – like the form entries – in localStorage before the battery is completely drained.

Here’s a complete list of browsers that currently support the Batter Status API as found on caniuse.com. To know more, refer to the documentation on Mozilla and W3.



---

The story, Know the Battery Status of your Visitor’s Mobile Phone, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 03/02/2015 under JavaScript, Internet.

What began as a series of casual sessions at a downtown Kabul fountain in 2007, Skateistan has evolved into a chain of empowering parks and classrooms in Afghanistan and Cambodia where boys and girls can get an education in everything from language to nutrition, work as skate instructors, learn how to wall climb and, of course, shred on a skateboard. Girls and young women, in particular, have a lot to gain from the non-profit.

In Afghanistan, President Karzai has stated that women may not travel without a male guardian. Afghan women are forbidden from driving vehicles or participating in the majority of organized sports, and they have a slim chance at an education or career. It is a heavily conservative patriarchy that’s been at the center of conflict for over thirty years where young kids often forgo an education to sell chewing gum on a street corner. At Skateistan, an NGO that introduced Afghan culture to skateboarding, girls play, learn and work freely. 

“I thought to myself, ‘How is it possible that I’ve been skateboarding with girls in the street, but they’re not allowed to play these other sports?’” founder Oliver Percovich says of Skateistan’s 2007 beginnings, “and I realized, skateboarding was a loophole. It was so new that no one had had a chance to say girls couldn’t do it.”

As of December 2014, more than 47% of Skateistan students are girls. In fact, skateboarding is the biggest female sport in the country. 

“Skateistan was led by the students,” said Percovich. “They were invested in it being a success. They made it success. Aid should be based on caring at respect – not pity. Today the image coming from Afghanistan of a young man with a big beard and an AK-47 can be contrasted with that of a smiling girl on a skateboard. Globally, only about 5% of skateboarders are girls. In Afghanistan 40% of skateboarders are girls.”

Here are some images of smiling young Afghan girls on skateboards (and in classrooms):

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Image via Skateistan

Stephen Biesty is a illustrator for books who draws "illustrations that are unrivaled for their ambitious scope and attention to detail". I love this but somehow I hadn't seen any of his apparently quite popular books. Many of them appear to be out of print, but there are some available on Amazon: Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections, Stephen Biesty's Incredible Everything, and Into the Unknown.

Looking through these illustrations and also thinking about Richard Scarry's books, I'm reminded of the intricate cross-sections from Wes Anderson's movies. For instance, the boat from The Life Aquatic:

Biesty's first book with this illustration style came out in 1992, the same year a 23-year-old Anderson shot his first short film, Bottle Rocket. But the director's first real use of the cross-section didn't happen until The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, and even then it wasn't explicit...but the tour of the Tenenbaum house definitely felt detailed in the same way as Biesty's intricate cross-sectional drawings. I'm not the first person to draw parallels between Anderson's work and Scarry, but I wonder if Biesty is somewhere in there too. (via @aaroncoleman0)

When Tim Urban recently began researching artificial intelligence, what he discovered affected him so much that he wrote a deep two-part dive on The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction.

An AI system at a certain level -- let's say human village idiot -- is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it's smarter -- maybe at this point it's at Einstein's level -- so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an Intelligence Explosion, and it's the ultimate example of The Law of Accelerating Returns.

There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence -- the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 2040 -- that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like -- this could happen:

It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.

Superintelligence of that magnitude is not something we can remotely grasp, any more than a bumblebee can wrap its head around Keynesian Economics. In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ -- we don't have a word for an IQ of 12,952.

While I was reading this, I kept thinking about two other posts Urban wrote: The Fermi Paradox (in that human-built AI could be humanity's own Great Filter) and From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number (how the process of the speed and intelligence of computers could fold in on itself to get unimaginably fast and powerful).

“Georges will watch this all day. While he does love all sports, tennis is his favorite. Yes, his name is Georges.” (more…)

If you don't need this banner, you're probably doing it wrong: $36 from Unicorn Parade of Vancouver. (via Mary Sue)

Businesstown is the place to be

Can a company best known for explaining Kanye West lyrics and telling Warren Buffett to do unseemly things actually annotate the world?

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

HEY. this article is improtant. for when me make mistakes, the warb will never florgret.

seriously, though, the internet is a very real thing. best we start treating it that way. we need to know how it works. why it is the way it is. and who makes it, decides for it, and keeps track of it. this is a start.

The Web is continually erasing its past. The Wayback Machine aims to preserve its tracks. Jill Lepore reports.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Here's a map showing when slavery was abolished in North and South America:

Surprising, right? Along with Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, the United States was among the last nations in the Americas to abolish slavery. Americans like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, progressive, and more "evolved" than other countries, particularly those in the "third world" (what a loaded term that is), but this map shows differently.

It's tempting to dismiss American attitudes toward slavery as something that happened long ago. Except for, you know, the whole Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing racism against African Americans in the US. And there are also many respects in which the US is currently less free, less progressive, and less evolved than some less industrialized nations, e.g. on things like gun control, murder rate, use of the death penalty, prison population, healthcare, and anti-science views (evolution, vaccines). So maybe the lag in abolishing slavery shouldn't be so surprising, particularly because it was so lucrative and the only thing Americans have historically cared more about than freedom is money. (via civil war memory)

This article attempts to explain, in great detail, what happens when you type 'google.com' into your browser and press enter.

To pick a zero point, let's choose the enter key on the keyboard hitting the bottom of its range. At this point, an electrical circuit specific to the enter key is closed (either directly or capacitively). This allows a small amount of current to flow into the logic circuitry of the keyboard, which scans the state of each key switch, debounces the electrical noise of the rapid intermittent closure of the switch, and converts it to a keycode integer, in this case 13. The keyboard controller then encodes the keycode for transport to the computer. This is now almost universally over a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or Bluetooth connection, but historically has been over PS/2 or ADB connections.

An I, Pencil for the internet age.

via http://ordenyprogreso.tumblr.com/post/35685445604/glitchplay

If you want to drive a black cab in London -- the only cars that passengers can hail from the kerb -- you have to pass "The Knowledge," an unbelievably tough exam that tests you on your minute knowledge of every street, landmark, hotel, restaurant, hospital, church, stadium, airline office, club, police station, court, and tourist destination within six miles of Charing Cross station. Read the rest

Elon Musk is afraid that artificial intelligence research could go wrong---very wrong. On Thursday, he announced a donation of $10 million to the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which will run a global research program aimed at keeping AI “beneficial to humanity.”

The post Elon Musk Donates $10M to Keep AI From Turning Evil appeared first on WIRED.

I don't know, but it seems to me like it was retouched a bit too much. The Bieb looks like a sensory homonculus.

I have a hard time with this decision sometimes, too. (more…)

Photographer Vincent Laforet has been on aerial photo shoots above New York City over 50 times in the last 15 years, but this time was “by far the most frightening flight of them all.” Leaving the door open on the helicopter, his team flew to over 7000 ft. above the city – something rarely done at night. From that towering vantage point (above other aircraft, but below where you need an oxygen mask), he captured absolutely stunning images of the much loved city, all lit up.

The piece was created for Men’s Health magazine for an article about the power of coincidence. Here, life in the Big Apple is a web of beautiful chance connections, formed by the intersecting paths of the people far below.

To properly capture the city by night, Laforet used a Canon 1D X and Mamiya Leaf Credo 50MP shooting at 3200/6400 ISO with a set of f/1.2-f/2.8 lenses. That combination allowed for the quick shutter speeds needed to combat the vibrations of the helicopter and achieve the sharp results you see here.

You can read more about how the shoot was done, and tips on how to put one together yourself, over at FStoppers.

Here, Vincent Laforet and team take us 7000 ft. above New York City for an afternoon and night flight:

(via Petapixel and FStoppers)