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Moth’s True Colors Shine After 47 Million Years | Wired: Science • Brandon Keim
The fossils’ time-machined hues exist because moths and butterfly wings have what’s known as structural color. Rather than pigments, structural colors are created by light-warping nanoscale surface features; if fossilization occurs delicately enough, and the intervening eons are gentle, those structures can be reproduced and preserved indefinitely.
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Newly Discovered ‘Alien’ Sea Worms Ride the Current | Livescience.com
Bizarre worms use sand for ballast and dump it before hopping aboard currents.
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ThinkUp Archives and Analyzes Your Social Media Life | Smarterware
Every day, internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google mine your online social life to advertise to you more effectively. Those companies host and control your data, and you don’t. Case in point: if you’ve tweeted more than 3,200 times, you can’t page back to your earliest tweets on Twitter.
The conversations you have online are worth capturing, keeping, and referring back to over time. In fact, the things you share and the conversations you have about them gain weight, perspective, and importance over time, not just the moment you post them. …
ThinkUp is a free web application that archives and analyzes your social media life. You’ll need a web server to run it on, and it’s geared for people and organizations who are very active on social networks and have lots of conversations they want to track, archive, and analyze. When you run ThinkUp, you’ll be able to: …
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Free Technology for Teachers: Now I Know – Short Lessons from Entrepreneurs
The purpose of Now I Know is to record and publish short videos of successful entrepreneurs sharing lessons they’ve learned along the way. Each video is under three minutes long so they are short and to the point.
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YouTube Feline Face-off: Catvertising Vs. Kittywood | Mashable! • Chris Taylor
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Nov. 15, 1969 | Anti-Vietnam War Demonstration Held | The Learning Network» Historic Headlines
On Nov. 15, 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee staged what is believed to be the largest antiwar protest in United States history when as many as half a million people attended a mostly peaceful demonstration in Washington.
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Inequality and Occupy Wall Street 4: daddy put you in the top 1% ! « milescorak
the most popular way to find a job is through family and friends. That holds true for all of us, but it is immensely more likely for the kids of the very rich. Look at this picture from a research paper that a colleague and I published in the Journal of Labor Economics…
The bottom line is that about 40% of us have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed our fathers. But if dad’s earnings put him in the top 25% these chances are above average, they start taking off if dad was in the top 5%, and reach the stratosphere for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top earning dads had a job with his employer.
All parents want to help their children in whatever way they can. But top earners can do it more than others, and with more consequence: virtually guaranteeing, if not a lifetime of high earnings, at least a great start in life.
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Credit Rating Fees Rise Faster Than Inflation as Governments Fret Expenses – Bloomberg
West Haven, Connecticut, which has closed four school buildings over the past two years and fired 14 teachers to help cut its budget deficit, is about to pay Moody’s Investors Service almost double what it cost six years ago for a credit rating.
Joseph Mancini, finance director for the city of 55,000 near Yale University, says he has no choice other than to meet the demands of Moody’s after the municipality’s bonds were downgraded to Baa1 in January, three levels above junk, from A2.
“The market’s going to punish us for the rating we’re at,” Mancini said in a telephone interview. “If we didn’t get it rated, we would be punished even more.”
Four years after faulty ratings helped trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are as dominant as ever, boosting fees at a faster rate than inflation as new competition promised by lawmakers failed to materialize.
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Mortgage Insurer’s Cash Depleted, Warns Auditor – WSJ.com
The Federal Housing Administration’s cash reserves have fallen so low that there is a “close to 50%” chance the agency could run out of money and require a taxpayer bailout in the next year, according to the annual independent audit of the FHA’s finances.
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Barbara Honegger Quotes | About.com Women’s History
Barbara Honegger was a consultant at the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. She headed the department’s gender discrimination agency review before resigning in August, 1983, the day after the Washington Post printed an opinion article written by Honnegger. …
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First Woman Elected to Congress | About.com Women’s History – November 7, 2011
Jeannette Rankin, who worked for women’s suffrage, also held the distinction of voting against America’s entry into both World War I and World War II.
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…where she became famous for her work for the Equal Rights Amendment, working mothers’ priorities, and national day care. She was defeated in a bid for the Senate in 1976.
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Simple Justice: SCOTUS: Prohibit Admission of Eyewitness Testimony – 3 Nov 2011
If only law followed its obvious, natural course. Oral argument in Perry produced widespread recognition of the indisputable fact that there is no evidence more persuasive and yet more unreliable [than eyewitness testimony].
…There is no single piece of evidence that has been subject to as much scrutiny as eyewitness identifications, and the empirical evidence is overwhelming, beyond dispute, whether reasonable or not, that it’s uniquely unreliable and singularly persuasive. If nothing else, it’s clear that unreliable eyewitness identifications contributed to 75% of wrongful convictions.
So what does a court, in order to protect the due process of individuals hauled before it and subjected to the potential of imprisonment, maybe even death, do about this ridiculously unreliable and persuasive piece of evidence? …
“…’Why aren’t all those safeguards enough?’ Justice Ginsburg asked.”
The question may have been posed as a rhetorical, but there’s a very good answer. Because it’s failed to suffice forever.
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Borking: An Unequivocally Good Thing : Lawyers, Guns & Money
It’s also worth noting that Bork also believed that not only the landmark Afrcian-American disenfranchisement case Baker v. Carr but the housing discrimination case Shelley v. Kramer were wrongly decided. Bork, in other words, on civil rights was to the right of a unanimous Supreme Court from 1948. We’re supposed to see his defeat in 1987 as some massive outrage against human decency?
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One Point and 150 Grand | Mother Jones – Kevin Drum – 30 Oct 2011
If you want a simple slogan for the masses, “1 point and 150 grand” does the job just fine. Add one point to Social Security taxes and increase the earnings cap by $150,000 over the course of 20 years. Done.
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The American Dream, Inequality, and Immobility « wakingupnow.com – 27 Oct 2011
The numbers measure male intergenerational income elasticity — in other words, how much a man’s income depends on what his father made. Given the self-made/by-your-bootstraps culture in the US, we’d like to see that number as close to zero as possible. The US is on the high end, though, at 0.47. What does that mean?
Simply put (very simply put), on average, if my dad made $100,000 a year more than your dad, then I can expect to make $47,000 a year more than you. You and I enter the income race and — bang! – my origins gives me a $47,000 advantage.
I don’t expect our immobility number to get all the way down to zero. No country is down to zero. But the US figure is so very high. This feels like an assault on justice, an attack on fairness. And not just from a moonbat/liberal/left-wing perspective. The American Dream, in its most individualist, free-market incarnation, holds that your fate lies in your hands, that you can go as far as your abilities can take you, and that your success — or failure — is your own achievement, not the result of class, or ancestry, or factors completely beyond your control.
These numbers tell me America isn’t living up to its Dream.
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Does Inequality Make Us Unhappy? | Wired Science | Wired.com – Jonah Lehrer – 3 Nov 2011
It’s now possible to glimpse the neural mechanisms underlying this inequality aversion, which appears to be a deeply rooted social instinct. …
When people in the “rich” group were told that a poor stranger was given $20, their brains showed more reward activity than when they themselves were given an equivalent amount. In other words, they got extra pleasure from the gains of someone with less. “We economists have a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested and won’t try to help other people,” Colin Camerer, a neuroeconomist at Caltech and co-author of the study, told me. “But if that were true, you wouldn’t see these sorts of reactions to other people getting money.” …
The primatologists trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them pebbles in exchange for cucumbers. Almost overnight, a capuchin economy developed, with hungry monkeys harvesting small stones. But the marketplace was disrupted when the scientists got mischievous: instead of giving every monkey a cucumber in exchange for pebbles, they started giving some monkeys a tasty grape instead. (Monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers.) After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.
…It’s not that the primates demanded equality — some capuchins collected many more pebbles than others, and that never created a problem — it’s that they couldn’t stand when the inequality was a result of injustice.
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These are not abstractions or “power” as a theoretical concept. This was power made frighteningly manifest, on the bodies of human beings …
Why were the tents so important? Why is that so many people allowed the police to beat them rather than get out of the way? …
In order to prevent a situation “beyond our control and ability to manage safely” from arising, [Chancellor Birgeneau] empowered the Alameda County Sheriff’s department to bring riot cops in to do what riot cops do, which is control people by hurting them until they comply. …
In July of 1986, the University of California pulled its $3.1 billion investment out of companies doing business in South Africa… The UC regents (and the California governor who appoints them) ended up doing what the students of the University of California told them to do. This is what’s at stake: who gets to make decisions about the University of California.
…when “intransigent” individuals refuse to acknowledge the university’s authority, the administration won’t be able to exercise its authority, so it will therefore need to exercise its authority. This is exactly as tautological and contradictory a line of “reasoning” as it sounds, a rhetorical snake eating its own tail. To maintain hygiene, the students cannot use tents to keep themselves warm; to manage the space, students must be kept out; to address “conflict issues,” students had to be attacked; and to keep the students safe, they will be beaten.
The language falls apart at this point, because it’s not “philosophy” that’s driving any of this, but the question of who has the right to speak and be heard about what the university is for.
…[Chancellor Birgeneau] argues that the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” which deserves honor, is a tradition of obedience to civil authorities.
… “Civil Disobedience” has always been, manifestly and unmistakably, a tradition of disobeying the civil authorities. I feel silly even needing to spell that out. … Linking arms and occupying the space between the police and their objective is a tactic used by just about every example of civil disobedience I can think of. It is, quite frankly the single best and most iconic example of the thing he says it is not.
…the UC will hurt you if you obstruct them or challenge their authority, even nonviolently. Free speech is a function of free thinking, and on the campus of free speech, Birgeneau should be free to say and think what he pleases, even if what he says is that those who do not obey will be beaten into submission. But let us hear him say that, if that’s what he believes. Let him admit and stand behind the decision he has made.
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David Kennedy: ‘Don’t Shoot:’ A Journey To End Gang Violence : NPR – 1 Nov 2011
Kennedy has devoted his career to reducing gang and drug-related inner-city violence. He started going to drug markets all over the United States, met with police officials and attorney generals, and developed a program — first piloted in Boston — that dramatically reduced youth homicide rates by as much as 66 percent. That program, nicknamed the “Boston Miracle,” has been implemented in more than 70 cities nationwide.
…there are plenty of law-abiding residents in these neighborhoods that have been overtaken by drugs, says Kennedy. They outnumber the gang members and drug dealers by significant percentages. …
…brought gang members into meetings with community members they respected, social services representatives who could help them, and law enforcement officials who told them that they didn’t want to make arrests — they wanted the gang members to stay alive, and that they planned to aggressively target people who retaliated. The interventions worked to reduce the homicide rates.
“In city after city, what we see is you may have to do it once or twice, but as soon as the streets believe that that’s what’s going to happen, they change,” says Kennedy. “In the summer of 1996, just a few months after we implemented this, the streets had quieted down dramatically, and they kept getting better.”
A variation of Operation Ceasefire was also implemented to shut down open-air drug markets. Instead of arresting drug dealers, the police officers and Kennedy set up meetings with drug dealers — and their mothers.
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Occupation in October: beautiful, long-form OWS radio documentary by Alex Chadwick – Boing Boing
You *must* carve out some undistracted time, and just listen. And then when you’re done? Make someone else listen. Someone who doesn’t understand what the Occupy movement is all about.
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Police choke non-violent protester at Occupy San Diego (video) – Boing Boing – 12 Nov 2011
The San Diego Reader reports that O’Grady is 28 years old, and that he was choked and arrested at around 2:35 AM Saturday morning in San Diego’s Civic Center Plaza after police ordered him to “exit his sleeping bag and sit up.” The video above shows that he appeared to pose no threat to the armed officers surrounding him. Read eyewitness reports here.
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NYPD raid Occupy Wall Street, evict OWS encampment after two months – Boing Boing
So: Why the raid, and why now? “Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags,” Bloomberg said. “Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
[This post has tons of updates and links]
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A Penn State Primer | Alas, a blog • Jeff Fecke
“I want to share a resource for boys and men who have been sexually assaulted. It’s called 1in6.org, and it’s called that for a reason. … “More women than men have suffered sexual abuse. But the number of men who have been abused, especially those abused as children, is still staggeringly and depressingly high. And they must be told, in no uncertain terms, that it was not their fault, that they did nothing wrong, and that all decent people support them unconditionally.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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