• Jan. 23, 1973 | Nixon Announces End of U.S. Involvement in Vietnam – NYTimes.com

  The Paris Peace Accords ended America’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War. But despite the ceasefire and provisions calling for “genuinely free and democratic general elections” in South Vietnam and the reunification of Vietnam “through peaceful means,” it did nothing to end the war between North and South Vietnam. Mr. Kissinger and Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, but Tho refused to accept because a true peace had not been reached.

  North and South resumed fighting later in the year, and in January 1974, President Thieu declared the accords no longer in effect.

• Jan. 17, 1893 | Hawaiian Monarchy Overthrown by America-Backed Businessmen – NYTimes.com

  The coup led to the dissolving of the Kingdom of Hawaii two years later, its annexation as a U.S. territory and eventual admission as the 50th state in the union. …

  U.S. President Grover Cleveland opposed the provisional government and called for the queen to be restored to power, but the Committee of Safety established the Republic of Hawaii and refused to cede power. In 1895, Hawaiian royalists began a coup against the republic, but it did not succeed.

• Jan. 13, 1990 | L. Douglas Wilder Becomes First Elected Black Governor in U.S. – NYTimes.com

  While Mr. Wilder was the first black man to be elected governor, he was not the first black man to serve as governor. That honor belongs to P. B. S. Pinchback, the lieutenant governor of Louisiana who served 35 days as governor from December 1872 to January 1873 after Gov. Henry Clay Warmoth stepped aside because of impeachment charges.

• Jan. 12, 1915 | Congress Votes Against Women’s Suffrage Amendment – NYTimes.com

  The vote was the second defeat for a suffrage amendment in less than a year, as the Senate had voted against one in March 1914. Nonetheless, suffragist leaders were pleased to have had the issue discussed in Congress, which had gone 46 years without voting on whether women should be allowed to vote. The only other time was in 1868, when the suffrage amendment was first brought before Congress.

• 41 Years Ago – Idi Amin Takes Power in Uganda | About.com African History

  General Idi Amin Dada took power in Uganda by military coup on 25 January 1971 while the existing president, Milton Obote, was at a Commonwealth meeting in Singapore. This was a pre-emptive strike since President Obote was arranging for General Amin to be arrested and replaced as chief of staff.

• 23 January 1879 – Zulu Defeat at Rorke’s Drift (Anglo-Zulu War of 1879) | About.com African History

  Following an overnight battle at Rorke’s Drift, 150 British and Imperial soldiers successfully defended this isolated station against a force of more than 3,000 Zulu warriors, at a cost of 15 dead and 10 wounded. …

• 22 January 1879 – Zulu Victory at Isandlwana (Anglo-Zulu War of 1879) | About.com African History

  The main Zulu army attacks the British Centre column at its campsite at the eastern base of Isandlwana hill. Approximately 470 of the 1,300 British casualties were black African combatants …

• Anglo-Zulu War Begins – 11 January 1879 | About.com African History

  When the British ultimatum delivered to King Cetshwayo’s representatives at the Lower Thukela Drift (on 11 December) expired – it required King Cetshwayo to dismantle the Zulu military system, a demand that the British High Commissioner, Sir Bartle Frere, knew would be impossible to accept …

• The Bantu Women’s League Campaign Against Pass Laws – 7 January 1919 | About.com African History

• Remembering Melvinia | About.com African-American History

  Seeing the first lady take her seat in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Representatives for President Obama’s State of the Union address was a reminder of the history of America and its people.

  In 1850, presidents did not yet deliver their Constitutionally required message to Congress in person. And the Compromise of 1850, which was hammered out in the Capitol, gave America the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the most despised and controversial laws ever enacted.

  And in that same year, 1850, a plantation owner in South Carolina wrote his will, and among his possessions he listed a 6-year-old girl known simply as Melvinia. She was a slave. …

• Perplexed by “Nonplussed” and “Bemused” : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

  Yesterday, our “Editorial Emergency” duo of Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner launched a salvo against a common usage of the word nonplussed, a word they “wager more people get wrong than right.” That opens an interesting can of worms: if a word or phrase used to have Meaning A, but more people now use it with Meaning B, is it time for the Meaning A folks to stand aside?

  In the case of nonplussed, the old meaning is “bewildered,” while the new meaning is “unfazed.”

  …the two primary meanings of bemused are “deeply absorbed in thought” or “perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements.” The way that political reporters have used it about Obama, however, is “above it all, with a trace of amusement,” …the newer sense, influenced by amused, has become mainstream enough to enter some dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. …

  We’re left with words that are difficult to use in either the old or the new way: if you use the traditional meaning, you might confuse those who are unfamiliar with with it, and if you use the newer meaning, you might annoy those who feel that the meaning is wrong. Bryan Garner, in his book Garner’s Modern American Usage, refers to such words as “skunked terms”: …

• Changes in the Wealth and Income of Those at the Bottom Over the Past 30 Years | Rortybomb

  Alex Gourevitch has a recent post that brings up an excellent point. So much of our conversation on changes over the past thirty years describes what is going on at the median or average value. There’s an active debate on whether or not median incomes have stagnated and what that means. But there’s little focus on what is going on at the bottom end of the distribution and less discussion of the wealth distribution.

  …notice the strong gains in income for those at the bottom in the late 1990s – full employment really does raise all boats.

  …whatever is going on for the average American, there are a huge group of Americans worse off, in absolute and relative terms, in the wages they get in the current market economy and with the wealth they’ve tried to build.

  tags: class_warfare

• A New Metaphor for Student Debt Burdens: Faculty Taxes | Rortybomb

  [The word "faculty" is being used here to mean "capability", not "group of teachers". -L]

  I love when economics is so squarely focused on the problem that a poor person might get away with something. To clarify [Francis Walker], if two people are identical, but one is a teacher and the other works for Wall Street, they should pay the same taxes – specifically the teacher should pay the high rates that the Wall Street person does. Why? Because, the teacher is capable of making Wall Street money but chooses not to work on Wall Street, instead choosing less remunerative work. His or her “social and industrial delinquency” (a phrase I promise to use more) is an “evil behavior” that punishes the whole of society by preventing productive work from being done, and it shouldn’t be rewarded by the tax code.

  tags: class_warfare

• Getting to Know Martin Luther King Jr. | About.com Race Relations

  In an effort to paint a more complete picture of who King was and why the U.S. government viewed him as dangerous, I’ve compiled notable quotes from King’s lesser-known speeches and a list of facts that many people don’t know about the slain civil rights leader. Are you aware, for example, that King opposed the Vietnam War, in part, because he viewed it as a threat to poor people? …

• Cynthia Nixon On Being Gay: ‘For Me It’s A Choice’ | Huffington Post

• Turkish drought reveals 1,600-year-old city | A Blog About History – History News

  A 1,600-year-old harbor town called Bathonea has been revealed after drought lowered the water level in Lake Kucukcekmece in Turkey.

• Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking | Open Culture

  Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of the world’s great intellectual crossroads. With Harvard University at one end of town and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the other, many of the most influential thinkers of our time either work there or visit. …

  Hidalgo is a professor at M.I.T., where he studies the relationship between physics, network science and economic development. Building on his own interdisciplinary curiosity, Hidalgo thought it would be interesting to share a little of Cambridge’s intellectual wealth with the outside world, so in October he and the M.I.T. Media Lab launched a series of informal Web interviews called Cambridge Nights: Conversations About a Life in Science.

  Cambridge Nights is a little like The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if Leno talked about things like fractal geometry in the metabolic theory of ecology. …

  tags: video science

• Jim Henson’s Zany 1963 Robot Film Uncovered by AT&T: Watch Online | Open Culture

  tags: video

• Watch Sunday & Wild Life: Two Animated Shorts Just Nominated for an Oscar | Open Culture

  When the 2012 Academy Award nominations were announced yesterday, there must have been plenty of smiles at the National Film Board of Canada. For the eighth time, the Canadian film producer/distributor scored a double nomination in the same category. In this case, Sunday by Patrick Doyon, and Wild Life by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, were selected as finalists for Best Animated Short Film.

  tags: video

• Unknown Voltaire letters uncovered | A Blog About History – History News

  An academic in Oxford has discovered 14 previously unknown letters written by the famous writer Voltaire.

• Circus Physics | PBS

  The Big Apple Circus’ jugglers, clowns and high-flying acrobats provide an entertaining and engaging way to introduce basic physics concepts to high school students. Eight videos feature footage from the series and interviews with the performers to illustrate the laws of physics at work.

  tags: education physics science

• Previously unknown medieval Jewish manuscripts turn up on antiques market | A Blog About History – History News

  More than 200 Jewish medieval Jewish manuscripts have been discovered along the Silk Road in Afghanistan and are up for sale.

• The YES! Breakthrough 15: Deb Richter — YES! Magazine

  Deb Richter resolved to fix the health care system almost as soon as she began practicing medicine more than two decades ago in inner-city Buffalo. …

  It was the tragedy of a brother and sister who had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that brought things sharply into focus. “They kept up with their insulin and needles, but they often couldn’t afford the 50-cents-apiece test strips when they didn’t have insurance,” says Richter. By the time they became her patients, the siblings were in bad shape. The boy lost his vision, his health declined, and he died at 21. His sister had a fatal heart attack at 25. …

  She and her husband and two young boys moved to Vermont in 1999, where they bought a house just two blocks from the statehouse in Montpelier. It suited a physician-activist who was raising a family. “I could testify before the legislature and walk home to do the laundry.”

  Richter kept up her medical practice three days a week, while lobbying for a single-payer system the other two days.

  [And doing the laundry. -L]

• Ditch Hard Drive Clutter with an Organized, Automated Home Folder – LifeHacker

• Legal Blog Watch – Paterno’s Death Causes Key Grand Jury Testimony to Be Inadmissible Under Sixth Amendment

  …Curley and Schultz, however, deny that McQueary told them that the shower incident was sexual in nature, which makes Paterno’s testimony potentially important. After all, one former prosecutor told The Times, “[w]hy would he have told it to Paterno and not told them? McQueary becomes more credible when you hear Paterno tell his version of it….”

• The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance: Scientific American

  Author Susan Cain explains the fallacy of “groupwork,” and points to research showing that it can reduce creativity and productivity

• The Scientist: Jim Hansen Risks Handcuffs to Make His Research Clear: Scientific American

  James E. Hansen never thought his decision to study atmospheric models would lead to his arrest. But there he was in handcuffs this summer, protesting at the White House against a pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico.

  It wasn’t the first arrest, either. Hansen, who has directed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 31 years…[testified] before Congress in 1988 on the dangers of global warming. He appeared again in 1989. Then he quietly returned to his work, turning aside television and media requests for the next 15 years because, as he said, “you have no time to do the science if you’re talking to the media.”

  That approach changed in 2004, when he realized government climate policies worldwide failed to reflect the dangerous story his science was telling.

  [interview]

  tags: global_climate_change

• In perspective: One hour of video uploaded to YouTube per second – FlowingData

  YouTube surpassed the one hour of video uploaded per second threshold recently. To put that rate into perspective, they launched a fun illustration-based site, One Hour Per Second. …

• BBC News – Star Wars crowdsourced film reaches million YouTube views

  A “directors cut” of a fan-made version of Star Wars has passed one million views on YouTube.

  The film, uploaded on 18 January, is made up of hundreds of 15-second scenes created by internet users.

  The Star Wars Uncut project is widely regarded as an example of the power of crowdsourcing.

• BBC News – IMF: Global economy ‘in danger zone’ over euro crisis

  The IMF predicts the global economy will grow by 3.25% in 2012, down from an earlier forecast of 4%.

  The growth forecast for the UK economy has been cut to 0.6% from 1.6%.

  But the eurozone is set for a “mild recession” in 2012, with GDP expected to shrink by 0.5%, compared with a previous forecast of 1.1% growth.

• Daily Kos: Another Whistleblower Indicted Under the Espionage Act

  Criminal prosecutions for officials who authorized or conducted torture and warrantless surveillance: 0

  Criminal prosecutions for so-called “leakers,” who are more often than not whistleblowers: 6

  [Author of this piece is "Jesselyn Radack, national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project, which represented former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake in an Espionage Act case that collapsed last year" -L.]

• JFK Tapes Related: 7 Revealing Moments – The Daily Beast

  President Kennedy recorded more than 260 hours of his life in the White House, unbeknownst to even his top aides. Now the Kennedy library has released the final 45 hours of the archives, providing a rare window into Kennedy’s life in the three months before his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

• State Bill Outlaws Using Fetuses In Food Industry; Meets Visceral Reaction : The Two-Way : NPR

  Since the bill was introduced late last week by State Sen. Ralph Shortey, a Republican from Oklahoma City, corners of the Internet have been buzzing with the news, as people try to figure out two things: 1) is this real; and 2) is there any reason the bill might be needed?

  tags: wtf

• Daily Kos: Some thoughts on observational studies

  In statistics and research design, there are two types of study: Experiments and observational studies. Some people also use the term “quasi-experiment” but I do not like it. In an experiment, the key thing is randomization. We assign subjects (e.g. people) to different conditions (e.g. drug and placebo) randomly. Often, though, such assignment is not possible or not ethical. In social sciences, it is rarely possible. We cannot, for example, randomly assign people to different levels of education. We can only observe relationships between (say) education and political party.

  When we present social science research, we often get the “correlation is not causation” reply. …While correlation does not imply causation, it is evidence of causation. And we can strengthen that evidence. There are at least three ways this can be done: …

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Go Read Charles P. Pierce On Health Care | Echidne of the Snakes

  He is telling his own story about what it is like to have good health insurance in the US. Or one tiny aspect of that experience, but I bet it is an aspect many of you have also experienced. I certainly have. …

  One very simple example of the ways health care markets fail is in the description Pierce gave us: The bureaucracy. Conservatives argue that it’s the government which creates bureaucracy but nothing is as good at creating duplication and confusion and impossible-to-interpret clauses than the US private health insurance industry.

• Keyboard Shortcuts – Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, and More

  Want to know all the best keyboard shortcuts, includng ones not found in a menu?

  [Focuses on useful shortcuts, rather than trying to comprehensively list ALL shortcuts. Nifty. -L]

• 40+ Useful Cheat Sheets for Designers | SixRevisions.com – Nov 30, 2008

  [This is a bit old, but it has useful reference info for Adobe CS3 and CS4, Gimp, and other topics like a standard paper size table, measurement conversions, etc. -L]

• Calif. HS student devises possible cancer cure – CBS News

  If you ever worry about the future of America, there is no need: it is in good hands. …

  Born to Chinese immigrants, 17-year-old Angela Zhang of Cupertino…

  “I just thought, ‘Why not?’ ‘What is there to lose?’” said Angela.

  When she was a freshman, she started reading doctorate level papers on bio-engineering.

  “At first it was a little bit overwhelming,” said Angela, “but I found that it almost became like a puzzle, being able to decode something.”

  By sophomore year she’d talked her way into the lab at Stanford, and by junior year was doing her own research.

• Afghan Calligrapher Creates World’s Largest Koran – NYTimes.com

  KABUL (Reuters) – An Afghan calligrapher has worked for five years to create the world’s biggest Koran, a bid to show the world that Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage and traditions have been damaged but not destroyed by 30 years of war.

• BBC News – Afghan snowfall: 16 dead in Badakhshan province

  tags: natural_disaster

• Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan

  ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will start repaying the $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan next month, with the first tranche of $1.2 billion that has been allocated in the budget 2011-12.

• Pakistanis’ distrust of foreigners impedes aid groups – latimes.com

  Pakistan’s suspicions of foreign aid groups rose last year after the CIA staged a fake vaccination campaign to catch Osama bin Laden.

• What the World Makes of Mitt – By Uri Friedman | Foreign Policy

  Romney’s rise may be producing yawns at home, but the Republican frontrunner has touched a nerve (make that several nerves) overseas.

• BBC News – Ethiopia forces thousands off land – Human Rights Watch

  Ethiopia’s government has been accused of forcing tens of thousands of people off their land so it can be leased to foreign investors.

• Liberia president vows to continue fighting graft – Yahoo! News

  MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) — Liberia’s president [Ellen Johnson Sirleaf] was sworn in Monday for a second term in a ceremony attended by her bitter rival, whose refusal to recognize her victory had threatened to undermine this country’s fragile peace.

• BBC News – Yemen unrest ‘may delay presidential election’

• BBC News – Mexico food aid sent to crisis-hit Tarahumara Indians

• BBC News – El Salvador head apologises for 1981 El Mozote massacre

• BBC News – China becomes more urban in historic population shift

• Martin Luther King Jr.: Notes and Papers Debut Online

  A large and comprehensive collection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s documents is now available online. The collection, consisting of nearly 1 million documents, will be available at the King Center Imagine Project. You can find them here.

  There are letters and telegrams that show correspondence between King and the likes of John F. Kennedy, Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr., to name a few. …

• Bill Duke Talks About His ‘Dark Girls’ Documentary

  …a new documentary focusing on colorism, recently spoke to The Root DC about the struggles of dark-skinned women. Duke said that the message of the film — in which women from many different cities, backgrounds and ages talk about growing up with dark skin — is one that transcends race. …

• Putting money where our mouths are – O’Reilly Radar

  As Tim O’Reilly has pointed out, one of the major problems with SOPA and PIPA is that they regulate in favor of an “old economy,” and against the new. It’s sort of like the stage coach companies lobbying for regulations against the upstart railroads, and the railroads lobbying for regulation against the roads and airlines.

  The problem isn’t “piracy” or “theft.” In fact, one of the big problems I have is the way the old media companies have been able to drive the language here. As Tim points out, piracy is “primarily the result of market failure” and ceases to be an issue when it’s possible for customers to get what they want on terms that they can accept. It’s about access, it’s about people being able to get the media they want and do what they want with it. In ” Scarcity is a Shitty Business Model,” Fred Wilson tells about being unable to find a good movie to watch at home on a weekend night: nothing good on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or the cable company. The end result is predictable…

• How to Really Help Afghanistan’s Women – by Lael A. Mohib | The AfPak Channel

  Audiences around the world were horrified to see the image of Bibi Aisha, a young Afghan girl whose nose had been cut off by her husband and his family, on the cover of an August 2010 issue of TIME Magazine. Western media outlets largely attributed Aisha’s case to the Taliban, and portrayed it as a warning of what is to come for Afghan women once the international community withdraws from Afghanistan. The unfortunate reality is, though, that there are many other cases like hers happening today…

• The AfPak Channel Top 10 – by Peter Bergen and Andrew Lebovich | The AfPak Channel

  2011 was an incredible year for news around the world. Now that it’s behind us, here are the 10 most-read articles and collections from the AfPak Channel in the last year…

• Don’t Send in the Drones: Resisting War By Remote Control | YES! Magazine – by Valerie Schloredt

  Nearly a third of the aircraft used by the United States military don’t carry pilots, according to a new Congressional report. The aircraft are drones, and their pilots are often thousands of miles away…

  One such base is the Hancock Air National Guard Base, located near Syracuse, N.Y. Ed Kinane, who lives nearby, says that since strike drones are operated from the base, his home area of New York state is, from a moral perspective, “in the zone of war”…

  On Dec 1, when most of the Hancock 38 defendants returned to the court in DeWitt for sentencing, the judge who presided over the case stated publicly that their trial had an impact on his own views about the use of drones.

• May Boeve by Colin Beavan — YES! Magazine

  While some students bond and form groups around rockclimbing or chess, May and her friends formed a community while working together to force Middlebury to reduce its carbon emissions. When they graduated, they planned to move together to Billings, Mont., to help stop the building of new coal-burning power plants. But author Bill McKibben, who brought world attention to climate change with his book The End of Nature, approached them and asked if they might instead turn the power of the group friendship to the task of building a national and, later, an international climate movement.

  With McKibben’s prestige behind them, they used phones, email, social networks, web pages, and community connections to reach every grassroots and impromptu citizens’ group they could.

  On April 14, 2007, their nationwide coalition mounted Step It Up—simultaneous actions in 1,400 communities across the country. Next, the group formalized itself into the organization 350.org, named for the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide that the atmosphere can safely contain, according to models by NASA scientist James Hansen.

• We (Still) Want Bread, and Roses Too by John de Graaf — YES! Magazine

  A century ago, in what has come to be known as the Bread and Roses strike, a group of women walked out of the Lawrence, Mass., textile mill where they worked.

  A new law had limited their working hours to 54 a week, two fewer than most of them had been working—so far, so good. But mill owners responded by decreasing the women’s weekly wage, a difference that would cost their already hungry families a loaf of bread a day. …

  The women faced clubs, bayonets, and frequent arrests. Many were hauled off to jail, children in tow. One, Annie LoPizzo, was shot and killed by the police. Still, they kept up the strike for two months, while national sympathy for their cause grew. Finally, in March, the mill owners conceded to their demands.

• Snoball Links Life’s Passions to Charitable Micro-Gifts – News – GOOD

  It’s not unheard of for sports fans to buy a round of drinks for the bar when their team wins. But why not transfer the generosity of that beer-splattered exuberance to charity instead? Snoball, a new micro-donation platform, makes it easy to link small, charitable gifts to the accomplishments of your favorite teams—or, for sports agnostics, other everyday activities.

  … The possibilities are endless and allow givers to get creative about the meaning of microphilanthropy in their own lives.

• Mental illness protects some inmates from returning to jail

  Past studies compared inmates with severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia and severe affective disorders, with a general population of released inmates and found that those with mental illnesses had higher recidivism rates.

  [This] study’s principal investigator Amy B. Wilson, assistant professor of social work at Case Western Reserve, said the researchers took a novel approach to studying recidivism among released inmates … four categories: those with severe mental illnesses, those with a substance abuse problem, those with dual problems of mental illness and substance abuse, and those with neither problem.

  When looking at individual groups, those with mental illnesses alone fared better—even compared against those with no mental or substance abuse issues.

  …”These findings point to a possible need for more integrated services for mental and substance abuse, and more attention being paid generally to the ways that substance abuse involvement among people with serious mental illness complicates these individuals involvement with the criminal justice system”…

• Terrorists! – The Daily WTF

  “She’s convinced that terrorists have compromised her computer,” Tom Davidson’s colleague – a front-line helpdesk technician – reported, “best I can tell, it’s some sort of virus problem, or something. It’s is a bit out of my league, but I’m hoping you can help.”

  tags: funny

• A List Apart: Articles: A Pixel Identity Crisis

  The pixel has always been the smallest unit in screen-based design. Because it’s been indivisible, it is the concrete unit of measurement among screen-based designers. …

  Now that hardware is changing and pixel densities are growing, pixels are struggling to find relevance as the stable unit they once were. …The truth is that there are two different definitions of pixels: they can be the smallest unit a screen can support (a hardware pixel) or a pixel can be based on an optically consistent unit called a “reference pixel.” …

  When implemented properly, this new standard will provide unprecedented stability across all designs on all platforms no matter the pixel density or viewing distance.

  Reference pixels are amazing, but now we have two conflicting definitions.

• Penn State Law Students: Now Might Not Be The Best Time To Be Getting Drunk And Calling People ‘Queer’ « Above the Law

  All right. Let’s give the Penn State students the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t know the entire world would be looking at the school; this drunkening happened before the campus was put under the microscope.

  But now, now Penn State students know that they are being watched. They know that the campus is under siege. They know that saying slurs on a list serve is going to get picked up by the press and make the school look bad.

  Don’t they?

• Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures

  Online courses from the world’s top scholars.

  tags: education

• Egyptians strike, Chinese workers protest at Sanyo, Russians rally against vote fraud / Waging Nonviolence – People-Powered News and Analysis

• California On Track to Meet Clean Energy Requirements – The Equation

  A new report from the California Energy Commission indicates that California’s utilities are well on their way to meeting the state’s clean energy goals.

  tags: california green_energy

• The Science Behind a Bad Mood and What You Can Do About It

  tags: mindhack

• Netflix Slammed With Class-Action Suit by “Misled” Investors

  A group of investors has filed a class-auction lawsuit against Netflix and several of its executives, alleging that the film and TV subscription service purposely misled the plantiffs about its earnings prospects ahead before the company’s stock took a deep dive in the second half of 2011.

  [Wow, I'm still ridiculously bitter about their price increases and other shenanigans of 2011. -L]

  tags: my_schadenfreude_let_me_show_u_it

• King Day at Dome: NAACP Outlines Strategy on Voter ID Laws

  Regardless of the content of their addresses Monday morning at the annual “King Day at the Dome” rally at the State House in Columbia, S.C., the joint appearance of NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks volumes in and of itself. Monday marks the first time Holder will have been in the Palmetto State since Dec. 23, when the U.S. Department of Justice struck down its new voter photo ID law, which the DOJ says would likely have disenfranchised minorities, students and disabled voters alike.

  The optics of their joint appearance — the leader of the nation’s oldest and most storied civil rights organization and the country’s top law-enforcement officer — send a signal about the intent, through legal challenges and social advocacy, to make voting rights a high priority in an already contentious election year. …

  The United States is a nation with a patchwork of laws on voter identification — some states with strict policies, others with no policy at all. …

• In Atheists We Distrust: Scientific American

  It wasn’t just the highly religious participants who expressed a distrust of atheists. People identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions. Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them. This belief may have some truth to it. Gervais and his colleague Ara Norenzayan have found that reminding people about God’s presence has the same effect as telling people they are being watched by others: it increases their feelings of self-consciousness and leads them to behave in more socially acceptable ways.

  When we know that somebody believes in the possibility of divine punishment, we seem to assume they are less likely to do something unethical. Based on this logic, Gervais and Norenzayan hypothesized that reminding people about the existence of secular authority figures, such as policemen and judges, might alleviate people’s prejudice towards atheists.

  …From a psychological standpoint, God and secular authority figures may be somewhat interchangeable. The existence of either helps us feel more trusting of others.

  …another potential way of reducing [anti-atheist] prejudice: by reminding people of charitable and altruistic acts committed in the name of atheism.

• The Science of Magic Series

  The Science of Magic is a series of easy to do magic tricks made available for the purpose of teaching students about how to apply the scientific method in, what I hope will be, a fun and informative way. …

  The concept is simple: perform a magic trick for your students, and then challenge them to figure out how it was done. In the process they will learn about and/or apply the scientific method.

• csvkit 0.4.2 (beta) — csvkit 0.4.2 (beta) documentation

  csvkit is a suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats.

• A Whole Lotta Nothing: Lessons for Kickstarter creators from the worst project I ever funded on Kickstarter

• Herman Cain Returns! | Mother Jones

  After dropping out of the presidential race in November amidst an avalanche of sexual harassment allegations, Herman Cain has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. On Friday, he appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show, giving one of the first TV interviews since suspending his campaign. (Cain told Maher that Americans need to “lighten up.”)

  …Cain’s timing is exceptionally good. His return to the political spotlight comes just as comedian Steven Colbert’s SuperPac has started running ads urging voters to cast ballots for Cain in South Carolina’s GOP primary. … You can watch the Colbert ad here: …

  tags: video

• Gingrich’s Racial Doubletalk On Food Stamps | Mother Jones

  During Monday night’s debate, Fox News debate moderator Juan Williams tried unsuccuessfully to get Newt Gingrich to justify his comment that black Americans should “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Instead of explaining himself, as my colleague Asawin Suebsaeng wrote, Gingrich just argued that liberals hate it when people earn money.

  Here’s the exchange: [transcript]

  Gingrich didn’t actually address the question Williams asked, which was how he justifies implying that black people would rather sit at home living on food stamps than earn money for a living, and that those traits are so ingrained that it would justify Gingrich lecturing black people collectively (in the form of a speech to the NAACP) about the virtues of working for a living. Gingrich was asked why he assumed black people were both poor and lazy (and poor because they are lazy), and he responded by shredding a strawman about how liberals don’t want people to work.

  tags: racism

• Google Plans Home Page Protest Against U.S. Piracy Measures – Businessweek

  Jan. 17 — Google Inc. will place a link on its home page tomorrow highlighting its opposition to anti-piracy measures in U.S. Congress, joining a demonstration by other Internet companies against the Hollywood-backed legislation. …

  “We oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, said in an e-mail today.

  The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites. …

  The administration of President Barack Obama stepped into the piracy debate on Jan. 14, saying in a blog post that it wouldn’t support legislation that encourages censorship, undermines cybersecurity or disrupts the structure of the Internet.

• New IWHR Reports on Reproductive Rights in Philippines and Sexual Exploitation in Haiti – CUNY School of Law News – CUNY

  January 13, 2012

  The International Women’s Human Rights Clinic and the Center for Reproductive Rights jointly submitted a report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee on issues related to the status of women’s reproductive rights in the Philippines. The paper reports on the efforts of the Philippine Government to adopt public health laws that ensure women’s rights. It finds that some specific laws, including a nationwide criminal ban on abortion without any clear exceptions and restrictions on contraceptive information, “constitute an ongoing and immediate threat to women’s life, reproductive health, and rights.”

• Physicist Lawrence Krauss Explains How Everything Comes from Nothing | Open Culture

  What is our current understanding of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it? How could something come from nothing? And what will happen to the universe in the future?

  tags: video

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• 100% Made in the Philippines | Inquirer Lifestyle

  With his trademark Mohawk hairdo, and pimped out in an all black outfit and black, knee-high biker boots, Black Eyed Pea apl.de.ap a.k.a. Allan Pineda Lindo Jr. stands out in a sea of white barongs.

  The cream of corporate Makati, mostly bank executives and their staff, have gathered together in a Legaspi Village penthouse ballroom to honor Apl who has been chosen one of the Bank of the Philippine Islands’ BPInoy awardees for 2011.

  The annual accolade goes to Filipinos who have done their country proud in the international arena. apl has been chosen not only because of his membership in the Black Eyed Peas, a massive global pop franchise that has sold more than 56 million albums worldwide, but also because for the last few years, he has been coming home to the Philippines to give some of his blessings back to the land of his birth.

  [A few words are not translated in the article: karabaw (carabao), palengke (market), panganay (first-born). -L]

• How capitalism kills companies | Felix Salmon

  As Mitt Romney cruises to his inevitable coronation as the Republican presidential candidate, increasing amounts of attention are being focused on his history at Bain Capital, where he made his fortune. Did he create 100,000 jobs, as he claims? Or is he a vulture and asset stripper?

  Glenn Kessler has the definitive take on the job-creation claim, which he says is “untenable”; as he says, Romney’s method of counting jobs created when he wasn’t at Bain or when Bain wasn’t managing the companies in question doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Meanwhile, as Mark Maremont documents, Bain-run companies — even the successful ones — have an alarming tendency to end up in bankruptcy. And I think it’s fair to say that bankruptcy never creates jobs, except perhaps among bankruptcy lawyers.

  The reality is that Romney would have been in violation of his fiduciary duty to his investors had he concentrated on creating jobs, rather than extracting as much money as he possibly could from the companies he bought.

• Authority (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

  When is political authority legitimate? This is one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy. Depending on how one understands political authority this question may be the same as, when is coercion by the state legitimate? Or, when we do have duties to obey the state? Or, when and who has a right to rule through the state?

• 10 Reasonable pronunciations that make Primer Magazine sound like pedantic twits : Notes from a Linguistic Mystic

  …an article in Primer Magazine…titled “10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You’re an Idiot”.

  …pedantry is seldom done well enough to be immune to further pedantry.

• Asian Art Museum Blog » Chinese Artist Chang Dai-chien: Bigger than Picasso?

  Chinese artist Chang Dai-chien (also known as Zhang Daqian) may not have the kind of name recognition that Pablo Picasso enjoys, but in 2011 he ousted the Spaniard as the biggest auction earner in recent years. …

  As a preeminent painter of twentieth-century China, Chang integrated modern sensibilities into traditional Chinese painting.

  tags: art

• What the battle over Bain is really about, in one chart – The Plum Line – The Washington Post

  The ongoing Dem attack on Romney’s Bain years — which will figure heavily in the general election — could help decide whether Obama can hold blue collar white voters in the numbers he needs. Given that these voters have born the brunt of the economic meltdown, it’s interesting that the GOP is set to nominate a candidate who got very rich partly off the sort of layoffs that helped decimate their communities; pays a lower tax rate than many middle class taxpayers because of investments but won’t release his tax returns; and refuses to say whether concerns about inequality and Wall Street excess are rooted in anything but “envy.”

  tags: class_warfare

• Bukowski’s “The Blue Bird,” Beautifully Animated | Brain Pickings

  Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Bluebird,” originally published in his 1992 anthology The Last Night of the Earth Poems, is a quietly profound meditation on an all too familiar facet of the human condition — our compulsion to conceal and stifle our most tender and vulnerable selves underneath tough, controlled, meticulously architected exteriors. This mesmerizingly beautiful animated adaptation of the poem by Cambridge School of Art student Monika Umba is the perfect piece of visual whimsy to bring to life Bukowski’s magic.

• 50 Outstandingly Beautiful Desktop Wallpapers from National Geographic | Onextrapixel – Web Design & Development Magazine

  tags: photography

• Build Spotify Playlists from any Wikipedia Song List – LifeHacker

  tags: music

• Closet Organization Tips | Organize Your Life

• Lazy Jedi Wakes Up | The Mary Sue

  Lazy Jedi Shows Us What Telekinesis Would Really be Used For

• Today is a Good Day to Look at Insane Klingon Fan Art – io9

• Don’t Bother Getting A Kindle Fire Unless You Have A Credit Card – The Consumerist

  Heather really likes her new Kindle Fire, once she got it working, but she’s sending it back. Why would she do that? Because the Fire isn’t a very fun device without Amazon Prime, and you need to have a credit card to sign up for Prime. She doesn’t have any credit cards, and she doesn’t want any. So back the Kindle goes.

  She wrote an open letter to Amazon on her blog about her experience owning the Kindle Fire, and trying to pay for a Prime membership with a gift card. (Spoiler alert: you can’t do that.)

• How Did 15-Year-Old Jakadrien Turner, a U.S. Citizen, Get Deported? – COLORLINES

  The bizarre details of Turner’s case make it uniquely outrageous, but immigration experts insist that the phenomena—of U.S. citizens mistakenly getting deported—is not uncommon. And with the expansion of enforcement programs like Secure Communities absent any increased protections for people facing deportations, U.S. citizens have gotten caught up in the dragnet.

  “Part of it is the push for so many deportations, which the Obama administration has ratcheted up,” … “If the priority is deporting people then there’s less priority on scrutinizing whether someone should be deported.”

  Aside from the political pressures driving increasingly sloppy enforcement, immigration experts explain that the structural mechanisms of the immigration system facilitate these kinds of terrible oversights.

  “One of the major weaknesses is there is no due process,” …

• Occupy the Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain | LA Progressive

  An electronic database called MERS has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

• California Bullet Train Chief Exits | NBC Bay Area

  What’s going on with California’s High Speed Rail project?

  The system’s Chief Executive Officer, Roelof van Ark, announced Thursday he was resigning from his $375,000 a year post after only 18 months on the job. Van Ark expressed optimism about the future of the project just a few weeks ago, telling the Sacramento Bee, “We’re on the right path to get there.”

  Now van Ark is stepping down, telling the project’s board members at a Los Angeles meeting that he wants to focus more on his family and other issues.

  The Authority’s board chairman, Tom Umberg, is also stepping down. and the system’s press secretary, Rachel Wall, is also leaving for another public relations job.

• BBC News – Mitt Romney lambasted in attack ad for speaking French

  Quelle horreur! Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has been skewered in a new political attack ad – for speaking French.

  The ad, released by rival Newt Gingrich, seeks to draw unflattering parallels between Mr Romney and another Massachusetts politician, John Kerry.

• This Is Actually Something From the New York Times | The Range: The Tucson Weekly’s Daily Dispatch – Jan 13, 2012

  If your “public editor” is positing this idea and asking for input from a comment section on the internet (nothing personal, commenters), that’s a good sign you need to hire a new “public editor”:…

  In the sense that the basic premise of what news reporters do for a living is presenting factual information to their audience, then yes, [news] reporters should probably call someone out when they lie.

  [This is of course related to the same NYT blog post which recently inspired the Vanity Fair "should we be spelling vigilantes" post. -L]

  tags: journalism

• MC Hammer would be proud – Poorly Dressed People of the World – Fashion Fails

  [MY EYES. -L]

• Solar System Scale Model

  This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web. This means you’ll have to do a bit of scrolling if you want to find the planets…

• The living latticework bridges in the Khasi Hills of India – big picture | Environment | guardian.co.uk

  Vines and roots of trees are trained to stretch across rivers and streams, to create a sturdy structure strong enough to be used as a bridge for up to 50 people at a time. Villagers create these living bridges – which take 10-15 years to grow – as a solution to the high annual rainfall, which would cause ordinary wooden bridges to rot

  tags: photography

• Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Life in the margins – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

  You have no driver’s license because you have nothing to drive. You have no passport because you’ve never been out of the country. You have no other photo I.D. because you have no bank account. You work and get paid under the table, a wad of cash sliding from hand to hand.

  It is a life lived in the margins. And if South Carolina and a number of other GOP-controlled states have their way, it will be a life to which a significant new impediment will be added: you will not be able to vote.

  …Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, South Carolina and other states and localities with histories of infringing the voting rights of African Americans are required to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. This is the first time the feds have rejected such a change since 1994.

• Amazing photos show space station crossing moon – Technology & science – Space – Space.com – msnbc.com

  tags: photography

• Space station crew eager for private craft visit – Technology & science – Space – Space.com – msnbc.com

  The astronauts living on the International Space Station (ISS) are gearing up for a milestone event in February — the first visit of a commercial spaceship to the orbiting outpost.

  The private spaceflight company SpaceX plans to launch its unmanned Dragon capsule to orbit Feb. 7 atop the firm’s Falcon 9 booster from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. The capsule will carry a load of food, clothing and other supplies for the six-man crew of the space station.

• Future of Technology – Robots show randomness in evolution of language

  In other words, there’s a tradeoff between communication efficiency and competitive robustness, the researchers note. And, randomness in evolutionary history can affect the outcome of competition between populations.

  [BAD COMMA PLACEMENT BAD. -L]

• Female Explorer Gets Her Due, 2 Centuries Later ? New Plant Species, Botany ? Exploration, Female Explorers | LiveScience

  More than two centuries after she disguised herself as a man and set out on a journey that would make her the first woman to circle the globe, pioneering botanist Jeanne Baret is getting some long-deserved recognition.

  A newly described plant species has been christened Solanum baretiae in her honor. Biologist Eric Tepe…named the newfound species after hearing about Baret’s unsung work during a National Public Radio interview with Glynis Ridley, author of the biography, “The Discovery of Jeanne Baret” (Crown, 2010)…

  Baret collected thousands of plant specimens from exotic locales around the globe, and, according to Ridley, likely collected the first specimen of one of the world’s most beloved flowering plants — bougainvillea.

• Cosmic Log – The secret formula for silly science

  “If you were to set out and try to win an Ig Nobel Prize, you would almost certainly fail,” Abrahams told me. “To win a prize, you’ve got to do something that makes pretty much everyone laugh when they first hear about it, and then it gets into their mind enough that they just want to keep thinking about it and finding out more. It’s not that hard to make something funny, and it’s not that hard to come up with something that will make people scratch their head and wonder about it. But it’s very hard to come up with things that will do both of those.”

• Roman Catholic church’s paedophile investigator jailed for possessing thousnds of child porn images | Mail Online

  He was responsible for child protection at 120 churches and parish community groups for nine years.

• Daily Kos: Un-Occupy Guantanamo and give the land back to Cuba

  It was…as if the French had stayed around to run things after the American Revolution, which could not have been won without their help. Imagine if Paris had, after years of occupation demanded an amendment be included by the Founders in Philadelphia saying France could intervene whenever it wanted in U.S. affairs and, oh, by the way, we’d like to perpetually lease the Port of Boston. The argument for ratification with that in place might have made for interesting reading in the Federalist Papers.

• FEMA to Katrina Victims: Give the Money Back

  …more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began mailing out notices to victims of the storm that ripped through the Gulf region. The message: Give us our money back.

  FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each… The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.

  David Bellinger, a 63-year-old legally blind former New Orleans resident who moved to Atlanta after his home was leveled by the storm, said he “nearly had a stroke” when he received his $3,200 bill, with 30 days to pay. “I’m totally blind; I subsist entirely on a Social Security disability check. If I have to pay this money back, it would pretty much wipe out all the savings I have.”

• Black Chicago Woman Took Elevator to Death in Fire

  If there is one takeaway from this story, it’s that if there is a fire in your apartment, you must close the door behind you [while evacuating].

• George Lucas: Red Tails Travails Highlight Racism in Hollywood

• OWS, Egypt Expose Limits of Town Square Test – Miller-McCune

  If, as TIME magazine declares, 2011’s Person of the Year was “The Protester,” then 2011’s Place of the Year was the town square. This makes the start of 2012 an ideal time to revisit the “Town Square Test,” which was first spelled out by the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his 2004 book, The Case for Democracy.

  Soviet specialist Condoleezza Rice gave the test a boost in 2005 when she praised it in her opening statement during her Senate confirmation hearings to be U.S. Secretary of State; her boss, George W. Bush, extolled it as well.

  At the heart of the Town Square Test is the notion that the difference between living in a “free” state and living in a “fear” state is clear and comes down to whether a person can go to the town square and “express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.” …

• Where Have All the Doctors Gone? – Miller-McCune

  To fully understand the link between medical schools and sophisticated hospitals — to understand medical education at all — you need to go back to Abraham Flexner, an educator who conducted a detailed study of American and Canadian medical schools for the Carnegie Foundation in 1910.

• Daily Kos: Hey, Bank of America, how many times do I have to tell you my husband is dead?

  Really, Bank of America, it’s so thoughtful of you to ensure that banking transactions are so time-consuming and personal. You see, I have so many tasks and obligations as his widow, but these little exchanges you insist we have really help add some excitement to the otherwise monotonous grieving process.

  But that’s not all. Oh no. Because despite the dozens of conversations we’ve had wherein I explain to you—again—that he can’t sign that form you need him to sign on account of him being dead, you felt that his death was no excuse for him not paying monthly fees on his old checking account you were supposed to have closed a year ago. You can imagine my surprise when I received a notice that my dead husband owed you, Bank of America, hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees because you’d been helping yourself to his money, a month at a time, until the account was emptied and then overdrawn.

  Is this because I declined your generous offer to pay off his credit card? Is it because you knew I had better things to do than check to make sure that account you said you’d closed was actually, you know, closed?

• Daily Kos: Buenos Aires Becomes A Tropical City

  …today’s paper is full of articles… There is one about the extreme heat of yesterday…, about power outages in the city due to an overload on the electrical grid…, about living with extreme heat and changing habits, and about preventing cars from driving in the business center of Buenos Aires.

  Believe it or not, none of these articles… presents the views of scientists that don’t believe in climate change.

  [Provides English translations for some short quotes from Spanish-language articles. -L]

  tags: global_climate_change argentina

• Rock concert audience evolution – Failblog.org

  tags: funny

• Newcastle pub sells special beer for dogs | Metro.co.uk

  The pub wanted to offer more to its canine customers than just a bowl of water and a dog biscuit.

• BBC News – Letter penned by Beethoven uncovered in Germany

  In the six-page document of Beethoven’s scrawled corrections, he complains about his illness and a lack of money.

  Experts were already aware of the 1823 letter’s existence, but say it is of historic value. …

  “It means we can look at his handwriting, which was always untidy, because his father took him out of school very early so he could concentrate on music.”

• Fools rush in: liquidating the American Dream | Hullabaloo – Digby

  But you can see what he’s saying there. It’s a matter of people working harder and living a “more moral life.” It’s good for ‘em. Teach ‘em the value of a real days work for a change. Make ‘em grateful for they have instead of always wanting more.

  This [responding to economic crisis with "austerity"] is tough love for the rubes who have to get used to their reduced circumstances.

  tags: classism

• From Montana’s Supreme Court to the New York City Council, How Cities and States Are Sticking It to Citizens United by Brooke Jarvis

  The Supreme Court may have declared in Citizens United v. the FEC that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, but that doesn’t mean cities and states have to be happy about it.

  They’re expressing their disagreement on an increasing number of battlegrounds…

  Some of the most interesting recent action has been in the courts, with lower courts — including a state Supreme Court and a federal appeals court — taking on Citizens United.

• Exclusive: U.S. Redefines Rape, Updating an 80-Year-Old Characterization of the Crime – blog

  The new definition is not only a vital part of accurately capturing crime statistics, but also marks a landmark moment in combating this historically minimized problem. The change means that rape will “become a crime to which more resources are allocated,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation…

• Placebo Effect Stronger Than We Thought? – Miller-McCune

  Because of research in recent decades, new understandings of how the brain works are undermining the assumptions that support one of the main elements of that traditional trial design: the placebo control. Finding the truth about experimental drugs — and the new medicines for diseases like Parkinson’s that patients need — now requires, he says, a better understanding of placebos.

  …[Clinical testing protocols] are rigorously designed to protect patients at nearly all costs from what statisticians call a Type I error, or a false positive — concluding that a treatment is effective when in fact it is not. But Cohen maintains that for Parkinson’s, this design frequently permits Type II errors, false negatives — concluding that a treatment is not effective when in fact it is.

  …recent findings…show that there is a connection between Parkinson’s and placebo use that is even deeper than hope or expectations.

  …arguing that the human brain’s normal response to treatment is not experimental bias or distortion, but rather an element of natural human healing processes that are inherent in all medical interactions…

  tags: science

• Supreme Court Messes With Texas, Voting Rights – Miller-McCune

  The problem arises (again) from a Texas redistricting plan. Last cycle, Texas re-redrew a federal court’s lines, causing Democrats to twice flee the state to gut a legislative quorum. This caused then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to set federal law enforcement on their tail, which in turn earned Mr. DeLay a formal admonishment. …

  Because of past discrimination, Texas is subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which means the state must “preclear” election-related changes to ensure that they don’t reduce minority citizens’ practical ability to elect candidates of choice.

• People Are Awesome: The South Carolina Coffee Shop Where Everyone Pays for Everyone Else’s Drinks – News – GOOD

  It all started two years ago at Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop, when a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra, saying she wanted to pay for everyone who ordered after her until the money ran out. The staff fulfilled her request, and the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, has returned to leave other large donations every two to three months. …

  It took a while, but word has started to spread around the tiny coastal town, home to about 12,000 people. Now, more and more customers have been leaving money to pay for others’ food and drink.

  tags: people_are_awesome

• GOOD Maker

  Organizations create challenges for the community, asking for whatever is needed to drive meaningful impact. …

  The community submits ideas, plans, and designs to meet a given challenge. …

• U.S. Citizen Charged with Terrorism Offense in Florida | Foreign Policy

• Burning Our Heritage – By Adel Abdel Ghafar | Foreign Policy

  Those books we were able to save, we handed to the army unit that was blocking Sheikh Raihan Street. The irony of handing the books to the army while uniformed soldiers and plainclothes police continued their attack on us from the adjacent roof was lost on nobody.

  Egypt lost much more than a building that night.

  …it is clear that the only people to gain from this shameful disaster are the elements of the old regime who benefit from this state of chaos and anarchy, which is slowly but surely chipping away public support for the protesters, who were once depicted as heroes but are now increasingly portrayed as thugs and vandals seeking to destroy and destabilize Egypt.

  tags: 2011_protests egypt

• The Problem Prisoners – By Joshua E. Keating | Foreign Policy

  Ten of the most controversial detainees still held at Guantánamo.

• 2 Oakland Officers Disciplined for Occupy Misconduct – The Bay Citizen

  The Oakland Police Department has disciplined two officers for violating department policy during the Occupy Oakland protests, The Bay Citizen has learned. The suspension of one officer and the demotion of his supervisor are the first known disciplinary actions OPD officials have taken in the wake of hundreds of police misconduct complaints following the Occupy demonstrations.

  The department suspended Officer John Hargraves for 30 days for covering his name badge with a piece of black tape, a violation of California law. Lieutenant Clifford Wong was demoted to sergeant for failing to properly report the incident, according to police sources.

  The department is still investigating the case of protester Scott Olsen, who suffered a fractured skull during an Oct. 25 clash between protesters and Oakland police. Olsen, an Iraq War veteran, is recovering from his injuries and has hired a lawyer, who sat in on Olsen’s first interview with Oakland police investigators several weeks ago.

  tags: 2011_protests united_states occupysolidarity california

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Information Diet | Congress Being Stupid on Technology is a Bigger Problem than You Think

  Part of the problem with government not understanding technology is a lack of paid advocates that lobby on the technology industry’s behalf as compared to other, more entrenched interests. But the larger problem is that government doesn’t have enough access to the technology that it is supposed to regulate. I first began to learn this when I met with former federal CIO Vivek Kundra in 2009.

  …I started noticing: every person working in technology in the federal government has two computers on their desk. One of them is used to display a screensaver with some official looking logo on it. It’s usually the 2006 Gateway all-in-one unit pictured above. That’s the one the government put on the desk when they got to work one day. The other one is usually a macbook or macbook pro from about 2009 or 2010. It’s the one that the worker brought from home that they do most of their work on.

• Photo Pin : Free Photos for Your Blog or Website via Creative Commons

• paregmenon | Dictionary.com

  The juxtaposition of words that have a common derivation, as in “sense and sensibility.”

• How To Search A Dumpster « forensics4fiction

  I have written before about criminals using trash cans to dispose of evidence. Sometimes they do it out of habit or routine but most of the time criminals think that disposing of a body or other evidence in a dumpster is the best way to get rid of it. Truthfully, CSIs routinely look in all trash cans at the crime scene or surrounding area. They will likely even search dumpsters around the suspect’s home and work…

  Searching a dumpsters sucks. It is one of the least desirable tasks assigned to a detective or CSI. Most of us would sooner attend an autopsy.

• Bread and Roses Strike Centenniel – About.com Women’s History

  Ten thousand workers in textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, walked off the job on January 12, 1912, to protest a pay cut which the owners implemented when the legislature cut the number of hours women could work.

• Fifty Years of Progress? – About.com Women’s History

  In 1893, Lucy Stone reflected on the progress of woman over the previous 50 years — progress that Stone herself had been part of. I find it interesting to see what a woman of that time thought was most important.

• 110 Years of Women Skating Champions – About.com Women’s History

• Boycott SOPA for Android Scans Products, Warns You If the Manufacturer Supports SOPA

  Android: We’ve discussed several ways you can stay on top of the fight against SOPA, and ways you can get around it, but Boycott SOPA is an Android app that turns your smartphone into a powerful tool to speak with your dollars, and avoid financially supporting companies that support the bill.

  Once installed, use Boycott SOPA to scan the barcodes of books, CDs, magazines, DVDs, and other media to see if the producer or publisher is a member of the RIAA, MPAA, the BSA, or another organization that’s publicly supported SOPA. …

  Much like the No SOPA Chrome add-on, Boycott SOPA is designed to warn you if you’re about to support a company or product that in turn supports the bill.

• The Lifehacker App Directory Curates the Best Apps for All Your Gear

  Lifehacker’s App Directory is a constantly maintained and updated directory of the best applications and tools for computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and smartphones (Android and iPhone). Want to make sure you’ve got the best of the best installed on your system? Simply click on your platform-of-choice below to get started.

• Leave Yourself a Treat on Your Desk on Friday for a Better Monday Morning Start to the Workweek – LifeHacker

• Speak in a Lower Pitch to Boost Your Confidence When Speaking with Authority – LifeHacker

• Samsung develops emotion-sensing smartphone | ExtremeTech

  The technology behind the emotion-sensing smartphone is surprisingly simple: It infers your state of mind from how you use your phone. By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of 67.5%. …

  Emotion recognition is part of a larger school of computer science called “affective computing.” In essence, it deals with computer software that can measure, interpret, and react to your feelings.

• Paying a Price, Long After the Crime – NYTimes.com

  A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in this country, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Crime Commission found that about half of American males could expect to be arrested for a nontraffic offense some time in their lives, mostly in their late teens and early 20s. An article just published in the journal Pediatrics shows how the arrest rate has grown — by age 23, 30 percent of Americans have been arrested, compared with 22 percent in 1967. The increase reflects in part the considerable growth in arrests for drug offenses and domestic violence.

  The impact of these arrests is felt for years. The ubiquity of criminal-background checks and the efficiency of information technology in maintaining those records and making them widely available, have meant that millions of Americans — even those who served probation or parole but were never incarcerated — continue to pay a price long after the crime. In November the American Bar Association released a database identifying more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone.

• Fed hands $76.9 billion to Treasury – The Fed – MarketWatch

  The Federal Reserve transferred $76.9 billion in earnings to the U.S. Treasury during 2011, the central bank announced Tuesday, a side benefit of its unprecedented efforts to stimulate the economy through asset purchases.

• » “The sting of a hornet”; Edwardian hat-pin self defence

• Media Ignoring Teamsters Strikes Throughout the Country | Crooks and Liars

  The Teamsters is a varied union including warehouse workers, tankhaulers, solid waste workers, rail workers, public services, port workers, newspaper, magazine, and electronic media, industrial trades, freight workers, food processing, dairy, building materials and construction, bakery and laundry workers and numerous others. Currently hundreds of Teamsters members are on strike across the country and some of them have been on strike for more than a year…

• The Remarkable Public Sector Depression | FDL News Desk

  It irks me to hear Democratic officials hail “private sector jobs numbers” or the “rebound in the private sector,” as if there are somehow two economies out there, and the amount of jobs up or down in the one where governments happen to sign the paychecks somehow has no bearing on the other. When cops and firefighters and teachers and nurses lose their jobs, they lose purchasing power. They lose the ability to hire private contractors or visit private businesses for the purchase of goods and services. Public employees don’t use a different currency or a different set of businesses. You cannot divorce them from the private sector.

  And writing the public sector out of the equation like this really obscures the incredible nature of the depression in public sector jobs over the past few years. While looking for something else, I found this chart from Calculated Risk…

• Kansas: GOP House Speaker prays for President’s death, calls First Lady “Mrs. YoMama” | Pam’s House Blend

  [What. the fucking. fuck. -L]

  tags: wtf asshattery racism extremism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Santorum: Climate Change is a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy | Mother Jones

• The emergence of talent: genius and precocity : The New Yorker

  Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said …

  But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” …

  When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) …

  Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual and experimental—has a number of important implications.

  …the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. …

  If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara” — the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as [writers], Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. …

  Sharie was [Ben Fountain’s] wife. But she was also — to borrow a term from long ago — his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career…

  Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team [of patrons]…

• Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral | The Economist

  New post from Martin Luther

  The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther’s nailing of his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st 1517. The “95 Theses” were propositions written in Latin that he wished to discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at the university. …

  By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring.

• A Navajo Response to Racism Against Mexicans YouTube Video – ICTMN.com

  Earlier this week, a YouTube video showcasing two Caucasian females using racist terminology and vulgar language in reference to Mexicans began to go viral. …

  The first [video response] here was uploaded by kaylajoytom1, titled “Native American Response to Racist White Girls in Arizona.” The young intelligent female addresses many of the issues that came out of the initial video, but the biggest one was the idea that whites were here first.

  tags: video racism

• ImmigrationProf Blog: Some Positive Changes, But the Deportation Beat Goes On

  One would think that the U.S. government might conclude that immigration enforcement efforts might be reduced (and money saved) given that migration patterns, due to the lagging U.S. economy, are changing dramatically. Mexican migration patterns reportedly are changing, with the estimated net migration to the United States at or near zero. …

• Photoshop for beginners #7 – Layer Masks

  tags: video

• Florida Proposed Abortion Ban Would Put Doctors In Prison for Life | RH Reality Check

• BBC News – Jamaica ‘to drop the Queen as head of state’

  Jamaica’s new prime minister says she wants to remove Queen Elizabeth as head of state.

• BBC News – Syria ‘will strike back’ after suicide blast – BBC

  Syria has warned it will “strike back with an iron fist” after a suicide attack killed at least 26 people in Damascus.

• Mathematicians Answer Minimum Clue Sudoku Question | Geekosystem

  It’s official. There are no Sudoku puzzles with 16 clues or fewer, and it took about a year to figure that out. Gary McGuire and his crew at University College Dublin were the ones who spearheaded the campaign to find an answer to this eternal question and wound up solving it with brute force. Well, brute force, a little ingenuity, and 7.1 million core-hours of processing time on a machine with 640 Intel Xeon hex-core processors.

  …this may seem sort of like a fool’s errand, or just random mathematical wankery, but the things the team learned about reducing the sample pool through symmetrical comparison could have applications in things like gene expression analysis or network and software testing.

• Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine

• Short Sharp Science: Look into the eyes of a rare ancient African sculpture

  If they exist at all, most unglazed clay objects from ancient times are now rubble, mere fragments of their former glory.

  This terracotta head, at around 2000 years old, is a rare exception. Excavated from a village in Nigeria, this is one of the best-preserved examples of its kind ever discovered. It is a product of the Nok culture that flourished from about 1000 BC to AD 500, when it mysteriously died out, and provides examples of the earliest figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa.

  Archaeologists Peter Breunig and Nicole Rupp of the Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany uncovered the head during the 2010 field season. It was found in Kushe, a small village about 150 kilometres north of the capital Abuja. Amazingly, this specimen was very close to the surface – only 60 centimetres down.

  The Nok terracottas are a mystery. …

• Why we shouldn’t let Google (or anyone else) claim their private services are public spaces – Boing Boing

  Conduct rules are, by and large, a good thing for any private venue that wants to avoid turning into a cesspool. They’re desirable in all sorts of other private contexts, too; a good example is a newspaper that doesn’t want to publish every deranged Letter to the Editor that comes in, or a quiet restaurant that needs to turf out an abusive patron. Guests in your home can’t demand the right to say anything they like in your lounge.

  Likewise, deleting offensive content would be just fine if Google stopped marketing Plus as a public venue where you (rather than Google) can express your “real life” personal identity. …

  By doing this, Google’s encouraging a kind of double-think. It’s private in all the respects that serve Google’s business interests and protect it from liability and risk, but public in all the respects that make us want to use it. But in trying to have its cake and eat it, Google ends up staking an implicit claim to quality-control over what people think is public speech.

  It’s telling that Tom offers shoppings malls as an example of a “public” place similar to Google+. In fact, almost all malls are entirely private settings…

  Google might not be evil, but there are plenty of evil people who stand to benefit from the blurring of public and private life; and who’d love to take advantage of the systems it’s building to maintain a close eye on all of it.

• Santorum: No One Has Ever Died Because They Didn’t Have Health Care | The New Civil Rights Movement

  [Usually I feel icky about linking this site because its name  appropriates a chunk of the anti-racist cause while the site itself has (afaict) nothing to do with ending racism. But I'm linking this because it sources its claims. -L]

• Inri137 comments on I’m not as smart as I thought I was. – reddit

  It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking that “being smart” is what determines our performance. In so many ways, it’s the easiest possible explanation because it demands so little of us and immediately explains away our failings. …

  You got A’s because you studied or because the classes were easy. You got a B probably because you were so used to understanding things that you didn’t know how to deal with something that didn’t come so easily. I’m guessing that early on you built the cognitive and intellectual tools to rapidly acquire and process new information, but that you’ve relied on those tools so much you never really developed a good set of tools for what to do when those failed. This is what happened to me, but I didn’t figure it out until after I got crushed by my first semester of college. I need to ask you, has anyone ever taken the time to teach you how to study? And separately, have you learned how to study on your own in the absence of a teacher or curriculum? These are the most valuable tools you can acquire because they are the tools you will use to develop more powerful and more insightful tools. …

  You’re so young, way too young to be worried about not being smart enough. Until you’re so old you start going senile, you have the opportunity to make yourself “smarter.” And I put that in quotes because “smart” is really just a way of saying “has invested so much time and sweat that you make it look effortless.”

• The Ultimate History of Cute Robots – io9

• Debbie Cook, Former Scientology Executive, Blasts Church Leadership In Email (VIDEO) – Huffington Post

• Criminal serving his sentence with monks pleads to be sent back to prison… because monastery life is too hard | DailyMail.co.uk

• Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls – YouTube

• 7 Reasons America’s Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity | | AlterNet

  [The] status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.” …

  A generation ago, psychiatrists admitted that their diagnoses were unreliable and agreed that this was a major scientific problem. So in 1980, in an attempt to eliminate this embarrassment, they created the DSM-III with concrete behavioral checklists and formal decision-making rules, but they failed to correct the problem. Psychiatric diagnoses remain unreliable, but now psychiatry no longer talks about the unreliability problem.

  If a measurement is a reliable one, then clinicians trained with it should be in high agreement on the diagnosis.

• National Geographic Photography Contest Winners: 2011 – The Big Picture – Boston.com

  tags: photography

• BBC News – Australian ‘stolen car’ parks itself in closed garage

  Adelaide police say they think the car rolled down an incline in the car park, across a street and into a garage forcing itself under the roller doors.

  The door closed behind it and the car remained undetected for 17 days until the home-owners returned from holiday.

• Free Technology for Teachers: Mix Your Own NPR Podcast

  Yesterday, Vicki Davis published a great post titled How to Improve Your Thinking With a Podcatcher. Her post reminded me of a neat service that fans of NPR might like. NPR’s mix your own podcast service allows anyone to create their own unique collection of podcasts from NPR’s library of thousands of podcasts. To use NPR’s mix your own podcast service simply visit the page, name your podcast, select keywords and content, and then subscribe to your new custom podcast.

• Information Diet | Why Horses Are Not in the Constitution

  Neither the word “gun” nor “rifle” appear in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or Federalist Papers nor does the word “newspaper” or “web site.” But guns, rifles, newspapers and yes, websites are vital for the health of our nation. Of course, it does mention the words “press” in the first amendment to the constitution, and the word “arms” in the second, and those are the things that give us the right to have our guns, rifles, newspapers and websites.

  That, to me, seems to be the conclusion of Vint Cerf’s op-ed in the New York Times yesterday — that we shouldn’t tie a particular technology with fundamental rights.

  …the United States Postal Service is one of the few government agencies required by the United States Constitution. …

  This country was founded upon the principles of universal access to a network. It’s been vital to the underpinnings of commerce and democracy, and while “access to the Internet” may not specifically be a human right, connection to the network of citizens has been a civil right that’s been vital to our democracy since the very beginning.

• The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films | Open Culture

  Between 1981 and 1993, documentary producer Christopher Sykes shot three films and one TV series dedicated to the charismatic, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988). …

  …The Pleasure of Finding Things Out…features Feynman talking in a very personal way about the joys of scientific discovery, and about how he developed his enthusiasm for science. About the program, Harry Kroto (winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry) apparently once said: “The 1981 Feynman [production] is the best science program I have ever seen. This is not just my opinion – it is also the opinion of many of the best scientists that I know who have seen the program. It should be mandatory viewing for all students whether they be science or arts students.”

  [Also, click through to the MetaFilter discussion and links. -L]

• Information Diet | Why Hungry Academy Matters

  Living Social’s Hungry Academy is really important and you should pay close attention to it, as it’s success might be a great example of Tim O’Reilly’s idea that successful companies create more value than they capture.

  For those unfamiliar, Living Social is likely the fastest growing technology business in Washington, DC that’s run into a problem: they cannot find engineers in the DC area quickly enough. So instead of uprooting and moving to Silicon Valley or some other more tech-dense city, Living Social is taking a different approach. They’re trying to create more developers. Hungry Academy’s goal is to take 24 driven people without development skill, and turn them into developers. And they’ll employ them, full-time, while they’re undergoing training. …

  Through their work with JumpStart Lab, they’re actually publishing a lot of their course materials and other byproducts of the classes. …

  If you know somebody that might like a career change, and, well, wants to get paid to have a technical education. Encourage them to apply. The deadline is Monday.

• Censored Books

  This site deals with book censorship attempts which actually resulted in some action, even if it was later reversed.

  Freedom of speech is for everyone, and includes the freedom to say “I don’t think this belongs in the library,” just as it also includes the freedom to say “sorry, but the library is for everyone in the community, including people who find this book useful” or “I can understand that you wouldn’t want your child reading books on that subject, and I can respect your opinion, but some parents do want their children reading books on that subject.”

  I put this site together because I didn’t like the sites I found about banned books–most of the information I found included challenges which didn’t result in any change in access to the books, and none of the sites were hyperlinked in ways I wanted (e.g. stories by author, by challenge reason, or by action taken).

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Women’s Health Policy Report: N.J. Hospital, Nurses Reach Agreement on Care for Abortion Patients

  The dispute centered on the extent to which providers can refuse care. According to hospital officials, the nurses were not asked to directly participate in abortion procedures, but they were asked to provide abortion patients with pre- and post-operative care that is provided to all surgical patients…

  Under the agreement, reached in federal court on Dec. 22, 2011, the nurses can keep their current positions and will not have to assist in any care for abortion patients, including taking blood pressure readings or recording patients’ names (Augenstein, New Jersey Star-Ledger, 12/23). The nurses will be required to assist patients during medical emergencies if no non-objecting staff member is available, until someone can be brought in to relieve them.

  [And now, I am going to get a job as a letter carrier and then refuse to deliver letters to houses where I suspect immoral lifestyles are being pursued, and I expect to receive the same pay as the letter carriers who are actually DOING THEIR FUCKING JOBS. -L]

• Women’s Health Policy Report: Democratic Lawmakers Urge Obama To Clarify Rules on Foreign Aid for Abortion

• Women’s Health Policy Report: States Passed More Abortion Restrictions in 2011 Than in Decades

  Five states enacted bans on abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, seven states now require abortion providers to perform or offer an ultrasound prior to the procedure and eight states now bar private health insurers from covering abortion services, Kliff notes.

• New Hampshire GOP Bill Mandates That New Laws Find Their Origin In 1215 English Magna Carta | ThinkProgress

  tags: wtf

• Santorum: ‘Get rid of’ Medicare agency – The Hill’s Healthwatch

  Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says he not only supports privatizing Medicare, but wants to eliminate the agency that oversees the program.

• Daily Kos: What’s the Rush?: Another Voter ID Argument That You Won’t See in the Media – Jan 05, 2012

  Akadjian demonstrated that from a cost/benefit analysis, voter ID laws are the equivalent of shooting a termite with a tactical nuclear weapon.

  …Voter ID laws should only be put into place after a state has certified that a high percentage (e.g., 95-100%) of eligible voters have ID’s.

• Tracking the Decline of the Omnivore – Miller-McCune – March 14, 2011

  Omnivores — defined by sociologists as people who regularly participate in a broad range of cultural activities — represent a small minority of the population, but a large portion of the arts audience. In a new analysis recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts, author Mark J. Stern concludes that this engaged, energetic group is both shrinking in size and becoming less active.

  Stern, a professor of social policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, describes this trend as “a double blow” to the nation’s arts organizations. …

  First identified by sociologist Richard Peterson in the 1990s, omnivores are people who attend both a wide range and a large number of arts events. Highbrows also attend arts events frequently but limit their participation to such art forms as ballet and classical music.

• Daily Kos: 5 of 5 essays: How Occupy LA got itself evicted

  Occupy Los Angeles is just beginning. Occupy 2.0 is now being launched.

  tags: 2011_protests united_states california occupysolidarity

• Daily Kos: Cheap plastic/sand composite absorbs CO2 like crazy

  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one way to mitigate climate change. This new substance makes the carbon capture part of that equation easier and cheaper, and that’s important. But unfortunately, it’s the storage part of CCS that seems to be the major sticking point. We just don’t know what to do with the stuff to take it out of the carbon cycle for the long haul.

• F.D.A. Restricts Cephalosporin Antibiotics in Livestock – NYTimes.com

  Federal drug regulators announced on Wednesday that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat in people of bacterial infections that are resistant to treatment. …

  Surgeons also often use [this class of antibiotics] before surgery, and they are particularly popular among pediatricians.

  …the vast majority of antibiotics used in the United States still go to treat animals, not humans. Meanwhile, outbreaks of illnesses from antibiotic-resistant bacteria have grown in number and severity.

• In 2012, finally pay off credit cards with the ‘Debt Dash’ method – The Washington Post

  I’ve found in working with individuals and couples that when they can knock off a bill quickly, it motivates them to press on and aggressively tackle their remaining debts.

  …you list your debts and then take any extra money you have — say, from reducing expenses or from a second job — and apply it to the debt with the lowest balance while making the minimum payments on the others. When you’ve paid off the first debt, [then work at] the one with the next lowest balance…

  It’s okay to ignore the interest rate. I know that some will criticize you for using this method of debt reduction. They will argue that it’s better to pay the debts with the higher interest rates first. Mathematically, it does make sense. But it ignores the psychological reasons people get into debt.

• Artist Weaves Confederate Black Hair Flag | The Root

• Pakistan the Unreal – By Aatish Taseer | Foreign Policy

  My relationship to the country has always been a complicated one. My father was Pakistani, but I had grown up away from him in New Delhi with my mother and had known neither him nor his country until the age of 21, when I first went to Lahore to seek him out. That time of great personal upheaval coincided with my first wish to be a writer, and knowing next to nothing about the mechanics of fiction but seduced by its glamour, I sat down to write a novel about the experience.

  It was an abysmal failure, a baggy black hole of a book. I tried to calm my well-founded fears about it by taking comfort in the urgency and relevance of the real-world circumstances that had inspired the novel. But no outside reality, no matter how compelling, can rescue a work of fiction that doesn’t work on its own terms.

  …The days that followed the death of Pakistan’s former prime minister were days of great emotion. The political landscape had in one stroke been made much bleaker. In a country swaying from trauma to trauma, it had produced an outpouring of grief, of breast-beating, riots, and mourning. But the intimation I had, the one I later found too subtle to express in nonfiction, was of catharsis.

• Daily Kos: I See What Occupy Vancouver Did There…And It’s Brilliant – Dec 23, 2011

  The media’s latest attempt to undercut the message of Occupy movements all across the globe is by touting the “cost” of these protests. Many sources are reporting that Occupy movements are costing cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime because apparently it takes an entire precinct to make sure that 50 people don’t sleep through the night. When an internal city memorandum stated that Occupy Vancouver had cost its city nearly a million dollars in taxpayer money, the organizers did something brilliant: they broke down the cost of what they were doing for the city of Vancouver.

  Citing a recent press release from Occupy Vancouver, member Eric Hamilton-Smith noted, “…over 37,000 meals were served, $672,000 of primary medical care was provided, and 30 people were housed for 37 days at a time when beds at primary shelters were not available.” This assessment puts the overall price tag of benefits to the community at over one million dollars, approximately matching the “cost” attributed to the protests, as well as picking up the tab for services that would have been stuck to the community-at-large.

• Shades of last year’s walkout | Journal and Courier | jconline.com

  INDIANAPOLIS — The first day of the 2012 legislative session was a virtual repeat of 2011, as partisan disputes over legislation targeting labor unions again resulted in gridlock.

  The Indiana House, shut down for five weeks last year, never was able to start business on Wednesday. House Democrats, who last year fled to Illinois, stayed behind closed doors in a private meeting, while Republicans sat idly in the House chamber.

  Democrats, outnumbered 60-40 in the House, are trying to stop passage of the bill that would ban unions and companies from negotiating a contract that requires non-members to pay fees.

  While backers call it a “right to work” proposal, unions call it the “right to work for less” bill.

  tags: indiana union-busting

• Daily Kos: UPDATE: Holy Crap. Santorum just mocked the idea of everyone having decent health care.

  Rick Santorum just stated, quite calmly and without any appearance of it being a “heated moment” or a “gaffe” exactly what the thought process of the modern Republican Party is:… [video and transcript]

• Native American Netroots:: Sacred Places in Northern California

  Throughout North America there are two basic kinds of sacred American Indian sites: (1) those which are sacred because of human acts of consecration, dedication, and ritual practice, and (2) those which are intrinsically holy, places which are endowed with great spiritual power. Religious traditions which are based on animism—the view that all things are alive and have souls—tend to have sacred places that are natural rather than being made by human beings. …

• Daily Kos: Medical bills cause 62 percent of bankruptcies

  A study released Thursday [pdf] by the American Journal of Medicine finds a huge increase…in medical bankruptcies between 2001 and 2007. …

  Note that this is data from 2007, before the great recession began, meaning the picture has likely become more bleak in the last five years. Also discouraging is the evidence that just having health insurance is no magic bullet.

• How the Unconscious Mind Boosts Creative Output – Miller-McCune

  A study from the Netherlands finds allowing ideas to incubate in the back of the mind is, in a narrow sense, overrated. People who let their unconscious minds take a crack at a problem were no more adept at coming up with innovative solutions than those who consciously deliberated over the dilemma.

  But they did perform better on the vital second step of this process: determining which of their ideas was the most creative. That realization provides essential information; without it, how do you decide which solution you should actually try to implement?

  …112 university students were given two minutes to come up with creative ideas to an everyday problem: how to make the time spent waiting in line at a cash register more bearable.

• US vows to stay in Gulf despite Iran warning – Americas – Al Jazeera English

  The Pentagon has responded to an Iranian warning to keep US aircraft carriers out of the Gulf by declaring that US warships will continue regularly scheduled deployments to the strategic waterway.

• Official: Jamaica’s opposition easily wins vote – Yahoo! News

  Jamaica’s first female prime minister has officially led her party to a landslide victory in general elections with final results announced Tuesday giving it a two-to-one margin in Parliament. [Portia Simpson Miller]

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Daily Kos: WA Gov. Chris Gregoire will introduce marriage equality bill

  tags: washington_state marriage_equality

• Daily Kos: Dallas girl missing since 2010 was “mistakenly” deported

  The ICE took Jakadrien’s fingerprints, but failed to confirm her identity before deporting her to Colombia. When she arrived the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

  Turner tracked down Jakadrien through her Facebook messages and U.S. Federal authorities tracked down the house where she worked cleaning all day. When informed of Jakadrien’s whereabouts, the Colombian government put her in a detention facility where she has been for more than a month. According to the story, they “won’t release her, despite her family’s request.”

  ICE cannot explain how Jakadrien’s deportation happened. However, the Washington Post reported last month that “government officials say they are targeting immigrants with criminal backgrounds.” While Jakadrien did herself no favors by giving the Houston police a fake name that also happened to match a wanted Colombian woman, the ICE still deported her without confirming who she really was. Her fingerprints obviously would not have matched. Also with nearly 7 billion people in the world, there’s bound to be a more than a few duplicate names.

• Jan. 4, 1965 | Lyndon Johnson Outlines ‘Great Society’ Plans – NYTimes.com

• Library computers can block porn—but Wicca? ACLU says no

  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just filed a complaint (PDF) on behalf of a Salem, Missouri resident named Anaka Hunter, who contends that the Salem public library is unconstitutionally blocking her ability to access information on “minority” religious views. Federal and state law both govern libraries in Missouri, which are generally ordered to block access to obscene online material and child pornography. But the Salem library allegedly goes far beyond the mandate.

• Hasdai Crescas (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

  Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340–1410/11) was the head of the Jewish community of Aragon, and in some ways all of Hispanic Jewry, during one of its most critical periods. Crescas was one of the leading rabbinic authorities of his time, the political leader of the Jews of Aragon …[He critiqued] the radical Aristotelian philosophy of Maimonides and some of his philosophical heirs.

• Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Audio | Open Culture

• The New Nullification Crisis: Cordray’s Recess Appointment Helps Implement a Law That Congress Already Passed | Rortybomb

  One way to think about how the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act goes about policing finance is that it levels the playing field of rules and regulations between bank and non-bank financial firms. In the lead up to the crisis, financial firms acted like “shadow banks” without having to follow the rules regular banks did. The legal and regulatory infrastructure that evolved since the Great Depression for regular banks was never extended to these new shadow banks.

  This was especially true for consumer financial products, particularly home mortgages. …

  Dodd-Frank, signed into law in July 2010, created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that had a single director and was consciously funded in a very specific way. In order for the CFPB to fully work, it needs an appointed director — certain powers don’t kick in otherwise. So in effect a minority of Republican Senators say that they won’t allow an act of law to be fully implemented unless certain, crucial, parts of the law are overturned.

• Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder Is Often Flawed: Scientific American

  This past June renowned clinical psychologist Marsha M. Linehan of the University of Washington made a striking admission. Known for her pioneering work on borderline personality disorder (BPD), a severe and intractable psychiatric condition, 68-year-old Linehan announced that as an adolescent, she had been hospitalized for BPD.

  [Article discusses self-harm as well as the stigmatization of BPD sufferers. -L]

• Tiny Fish Filmed Mimicking Octopus That Mimics Fish | Camouflage & Mimicry | Black-Marble Jawfish & Mimic Octopus | LiveScience

• Server Tent, Bridging The Gap, and More Server Set-ups – The Daily WTF

  “This is not what I meant when I told my client to get network attached storage,” writes Tyler.

  tags: wtf

• The World Is Round: A Tiny Children’s Book by Gertrude Stein | Brain Pickings

  In 1938, author Margaret Wise Brown of the freshly founded Young Scott Books became obsessed with convincing leading adult authors to try their hands at a children’s book. She sent letters to Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway and Steinbeck expressed no interest, but Stein surprised Brown by saying she already had a near-complete children’s manuscript titled The World Is Round, and would be happy to have Young Scott bring it to life. Which they did, though not without drama.

  Stein demanded that the pages be pink, the ink blue, and the artwork by illustrator Francis Rose. …

• Ten Facts About Simon Bolivar | About.com Latin American History

• New Startup Gives Local Businesses the Kickstarter Treatment – Business – GOOD

  There’s now a better way than the tip jar to show appreciation for your favorite local businesses. Lucky Ant, the latest startup to enter the crowdfunding space, hopes to do for neighborhood merchants what Kickstarter does for artists: provide a convenient, social way for small-scale entrepreneurs to tap their communities for help funding special projects.

  Every week, Lucky Ant will post a new call for funding from a business in your neighborhood—when the service arrives there, that is. (It’s just in New York for now.) Supporters of the business can chip in funds in exchange for special perks—and, of course, the good feeling of helping a local company grow.

• The Sloth’s Evolutionary Secret | Wired Science | Wired.com

  Together, two- and three-toed sloths illustrate the relationship between constraint and convergence. To say that natural selection repeated itself would miss the broader picture. Starting from terrestrial origins, both sloth lineages were adapted in similar ways due to particular, shared constraints. Sloths may have taken to the trees thanks to the digging adaptations of their ancestors, but other inherited traits limited the ways they could climb through the canopy.

  For more on sloth evolution and locomotion, see this WIRED Science article I wrote about Nyakatura’s previous work in 2010. And, since we’re on the topic, I think there’s no better time to share this insufferably cute video of baby sloths:…

• Nobody Understands Debt – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman

  …this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

• Mitt Romney and ‘America the Beautiful’: When Reach Exceeds Grasp – NYTimes.com

  The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.

  Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:

  America! America!
  God shed his grace on thee
  Till selfish gain no longer stain
  The banner of the free!

  [via Paul Krugman]

• You are awful, too « Kate Harding

  Whether there is a sexism problem within the atheist community is really not up for debate. People affected by it have been telling you and telling you and telling you there is a problem. So when you say, “Sexism is not a problem for/by/about atheists,” those of us who have direct experience with sexism hear, “I like things fine the way they are and thus would rather spend my time antagonizing the people who say they’re hurt than the people causing the pain.” And we conclude that you are awful.

  …if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live” … you are so fucking awful, I can’t even. It’s not just that you’re putting all the onus on the targets of hatred to change so that bullies won’t have to, or that you’re conveniently ignoring situations, in almost 20fucking12, where a woman might want to have her picture and contact info on the internet for, I dunno, business reasons? For example? … No, it’s that you’re arguing that abuse of women online would solve itself if only women disappeared from the internet.

• Disease Outbreak Sparks Fears in Philippines’ Storm-Hit Mindanao – Businessweek

  The Philippines is struggling to help about 429,000 people on the southern island of Mindanao after the country’s worst storm in three years as the first outbreaks of disease are reported and more rains forecast.

  Tropical Storm Washi, locally known as Sendong, killed 1,257 people on Mindanao, many as they slept, as rivers overflowed and inundated coastal cities in the early hours of Dec. 17.

  tags: natural_disaster

• Adele Unsinkable As She Nears ‘Titanic’ Soundtrack’s Stretch On Album Chart | Music News, Reviews, and Gossip on Idolator.com

• Catherine The Great’s Roller Coaster | The Mary Sue

• Architects draw up the blueprints for your favorite fairy tale homes – io9

  How does one build a single turret that a grown man can scale up, aided only by a hair rope, without the whole thing toppling over? Kate Bernheimer and Andrew Bernheimer have created a fascinating series over at Design Observer, where a batch of slick architects and designers have plotted out the blueprints for various fairy tale abodes.

• What if The Thing starred the beloved claymation penguin Pingu? – io9

  tags: video

• Man Makes Home-Made Robot Piloting System; Brushes Incredibly Tolerant Cat | The Mary Sue

  Taylor Veltrop put this rig together using a Nao robot, a Kinect sensor bar, two Wii remotes, a head-mounted display, and a treadmill; but he still needed a friend to make sure the cat stayed within optimal brushie range.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Retail Websites Admit They Sort Of Encourage Drunk-Buying – The Consumerist

• The Happiness Project: Making New Year’s Resolutions? Ask Yourself 6 Questions.

• Isadora Duncan

  …brought modern dance to the world, living with personal tragedy from childhood to the loss of her two children to her dramatic death. Read more about and from this woman who once said “What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life”: …

• George Sand

  A French writer who was notorious for her love affairs, smoking in public, and wearing men’s clothing, George Sand was popular in her day with artists and the intelligentsia. Her work, which often dealt with women’s lives, loves, and marriages, is fodder for today’s feminist literary analysts. Read more: …

• Western Women’s Rights Pioneer

  Abigail Scott Duniway, an early settler in Oregon, established a newspaper there that supported women’s rights. She helped bring women’s suffrage to Washington and Idaho before Oregon finally granted women the vote. She also worked for married women’s property rights. Read more: …

• The Flight of Time – Godey’s Lady’s Book 1850

  Godey’s Lady’s Book, for those not familiar with it, was a widely-read magazine of the 19th century, popular especially before the Civil War, that, through the images of fashion and home life, and through articles especially by literary editor Sarah Josepha Hale, set the tone for women’s role in the domestic sphere of that era.

• Unnamed civilization’s tombs found in Panama | A Blog About History – History News

  This is a super interesting find: Archaeologists working in Central America have found tombs from an unnamed civilization currently known at the “Golden Chiefs”.

• languagehat.com: DOCTORS’ SLANG.

  As an astringent palate-cleanser after the overindulgence of holiday dinners, may I present (courtesy of Marc Adler) a page of Doctors’ Slang, Medical Slang and Medical Acronyms, Veterinary Acronyms & Vet Slang. People with delicate sensibilities should probably not click, but if you have a dark and robust sense of humor, you should find much to enjoy.

• Video Of Little Girl Getting Pissed Off About Pink Toys Will Make Your Heart Swell

  I kind of knew I would love this video when I clicked on it and I was right. I just didn’t know how much I would love it.

• What will it take to make a woman president? – In America – CNN.com Blogs

• Opponents Collect Enough Signatures to Recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

• Occupy Your Sidewalk With A Micro-Library – Culture – GOOD

  Occupy Wall Street’s “people’s library” helped popularize the idea of book lending that takes place outside of library stacks. Now ousted from Liberty Plaza, OWS’s community library has been shuttling alternative books to New York City protests via shopping carts and other “mobile units.” Meanwhile, guerrilla librarians are occupying street corners across the country with more permanent community-curated micro-libraries.

  Since 2007, alterna-lender Colin McMullan has been learning the “quirks” of city regulations to figure out how to stash free reading materials in public spaces. …

• Women’s Health Policy Report: Continuing Lawsuit Might Be Best Bet for Challenging HHS Decision on Plan B

  Legal experts and reproductive health advocates say a 2005 case brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights could be the “best legal recourse” for challenging HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decision to maintain age restrictions on the emergency contraceptive Plan B One-Step, Reuters reports.

  The lawsuit charged that FDA’s refusal in 2005 to allow a two-pill version of Plan B to be sold without a prescription to women of all ages “was not supported by medical or scientific evidence.” FDA this month was set to remove the age restrictions on Plan B One-Step — a newer, one-pill version — but Sebelius overruled the agency, saying that there was not enough evidence that girls younger than age 12 could properly use the drug.

• Feds Poke Hole in Needle Exchange Funding – Miller-McCune

  Despite evidence that needle exchange programs for drug users slow the spread of AIDS, the new U.S. government spending bill once again defunds such programs.

• One Laptop Per Child Redux – Miller-McCune

  Declared dead just two years ago, the plan to provide every child in the developing world with a computer shows signs of life.

• Leaky Homes Show Green Intentions Gone Wrong – Miller-McCune

  In another kind of housing crisis, New Zealand homes built with chemical-free wood are leaky, while their owners are up a creek.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.