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The Average Credit Card Now Comes With An APR Of Over 15 Percent – The Consumerist
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Google Forced To Punish Itself For Chrome’s SEO Mistake
Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website’s page ranking in search. …
So that was awkward.
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Turn Your Android Into a Hotspot Without Your Carrier Knowing
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34 Congress members call for probe of NYPD-CIA spying on Muslims – The Washington Post
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The Associated Press: Guantanamo leader signs order opposed by lawyers
The commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison has signed an order that would require a security review of legal mail to prisoners facing war crimes charges, a spokeswoman said Wednesday, rejecting arguments the new rule would violate attorney-client privilege and undermine long-delayed tribunals for five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks.
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How a couple in Alaska became the terrorists next door – Page 2 – Los Angeles Times
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Defense rests case in WikiLeaks military hearing – Washington Times
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Agent Says Terrorism Suspect’s Interview Was Kept ‘Clean’ – NYTimes.com
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The Associated Press: Mass. man convicted of conspiring to help al-Qaida
A man who grew up in the Boston suburbs was convicted Tuesday of conspiring to help al-Qaida and plotting to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq after a two-month trial in which jurors heard references to Osama bin Laden and saw dramatic images from the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Chargers that Fight the Power Suck of Vampire Energy – Technology – GOOD
…incorporating gadgetry into more and more aspects of daily life uses up an ever-increasing amount of electricity. Vampire energy—the power suck when our devices are plugged in but turned off—costs U.S. consumers $3 billion a year alone.
Electronics accessories manufacturer Bracketron is hoping its new product line of environmentally friendly batteries and chargers will help make our devices a little lest parasitic on the grid…
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Judges: UK has 4 weeks to free US-held Pakistani – Yahoo! News
British judges Wednesday gave the government four weeks to obtain the release of a Pakistani man held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan — a ruling that could make for prickly discussions between Britain and the U.S.
Britain has until Jan. 18 to free Yunus Rahmatullah from a U.S. detention facility at the Bagram air base, according to the appeals court ruling.
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BBC News – Man bailed after ‘terror document’ arrest at airport
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Court OKs immunity for telecoms in U.S. wiretap case – Associated Press – POLITICO.com
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday said a 2008 law granting telecommunications companies legal immunity for helping the National Security Agency with an email and telephone eavesdropping program is constitutional.
The case had consolidated 33 lawsuits filed against various telecom companies on behalf of customers that accused the companies of violating the law and customers’ privacy by collaborating with NSA on intelligence gathering through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
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Times Wants Info on ‘Killing as a Policy Tool’ – Courthouse News Service
The New York Times sued the Department of Justice for “at least one legal memorandum” government lawyers are believed to have written detailing “the scope of the circumstances in which it is lawful for government officials to employ targeted killing as a policy tool.”
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A Note on Politifact’s Lie of the Year | Rortybomb
Several people have commented on Politifact’s Lie of the Year 2011: ‘Republicans voted to end Medicare’ being not a lie but an actually true statement. …
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A Quick Graph on the Historical Labor Force Population and Its Current Flatline | Rortybomb
Even though the population is growing, the labor force has been flat for about four years now. …we don’t have a similar flatline anywhere else in the post-Great Depression to study to get some sense of the consequences of this.
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Could Dismantling the Submerged State Surrounding Student Debt Pay for Free Colleges? | Rortybomb
This is an example of what Suzanne Mettler calls “the submerged state,” a pattern where the government has, as she says, “shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies. These submerged policies…obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market.” Instead of directly providing public options, we subsidize the purchasing of private goods, often using the tax code. …
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NYU rolls out free course on Ancient Israel | The Do It Yourself Scholar
New York University recently began rolling out a new addition to its free open education courses on its YouTube channel. The new arrival is Ancient Israel (YouTube) taught by Daniel Fleming.
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Invention of Paper | Chinese Inventions
Samples of even more ancient paper, some of it dating to c. 200 BCE, have been unearthed in the ancient Silk Road cities of Dunhuang and Khotan, and in Tibet. The dry climate in these places allowed paper to survive for up to 2,000 years without completely decomposing. Amazingly, some of this paper even has ink marks on it, proving that ink too was invented much earlier than historians had supposed.
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J.R.R. Tolkien in His Own Words | Open Culture
In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford.
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A Young Frank Zappa Plays the Bicycle on The Steve Allen Show (1963) | Open Culture
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Quote Details: Kevin Bacon – The Quotations Page
The greatest justice in life is that your vision and looks tend to go simultaneously.
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Situations Matter: How Context Shapes Our Lives | Brain Pickings
From why “personality” is a myth…to how “character” fluctuates…to a multitude of other psychological biases and misconceptions that cloud our interpretation of reality…, Sommers fuses cognitive science with sociology and witty observation to pull into question what personhood means…and illuminate the puppeteering power of situations over our lives.
Though uncomfortable and dissonant with our self-perception as independent individuals acting, rather than reacting, under our own volition, the eye-opening insight into these influences offers a new way of relating to and navigating everything from workplace dynamics to romantic relationships to self-actualization — what Sommers calls “both the mundane and the sublime aspects of our social world.”
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You may recall mathemagician Vi Hart from her delightful stop-motion explanation of the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip and her ingenious illustrated unpacking of the science of sound, frequency, and pitch. …
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A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles circa 1895 | Brain Pickings
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Black Lesbian Films: Before Pariah | The Root
20 Years of Black Lesbian Cinema
A slew of unheralded but significant films helped pave the way for critically acclaimed Pariah. -
NYPD Arrests 68 OWS Protesters Attempting to Occupy Zuccotti Park
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Obama Signs Controversial Defense Bill On New Year’s Eve | Mother Jones
Following a long tradition of tactical White House holiday news dumps, President Barack Obama quietly signed the National Defense Authorization Act Saturday. Obama released a signing statement that pledged to avoid, disregard, and in some cases grudgingly accept new restrictions imposed by Congress.
Detention of American citizens. This was the most controversial section, of the bill, and the most misreported. A Senate compromise amendment to the bill leaves open the question of whether the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks authorizes the president to detain American citizens suspected of terrorism who are captured on American soil. This matter may never be settled, as the risk of getting smacked down by the courts may dissuade presidents with even more expansive views of executive power than Obama from ever trying it.
In his statement, Obama says he wants “to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” …
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Exclusive: Occupying the Occupy Movement – Women’s Media Center
In Bristol, England, feminists called for “Carrying Our Safe Space With Us,” aiming to empower women to speak at Occupy general assemblies. On November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Feminists Occupy London took to the streets denouncing rape; that same day, Italian women marched in Rome, defining economic austerity measures as a form of violence against women, and citing policies that in effect force women to work multiple jobs, paid and unpaid. In Manila, Occupy was taken over by women, becoming Occupy RH (reproductive health), Filipina-led. Women in Slovenia, New Zealand, and Australia publicly decried the lack of safety for women at Occupy sites. Such international groups as Code Pink, WomenOccupy, RadFem, the Filipina network Af3IRM/GabNet, and others raised women’s profile, thus challenging men’s hegemony. The Feminist Peace Network established the Occupy Patriarchy website, to provide a supportive, global space for feminist analysis, response, organizing, and networking within the global Occupy movement.
Having caught the world’s imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and seemingly grassroots, the Occupy movement is now poised at a crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of humanity.
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Iowa Caucuses: The Mudslinging Begins | The Root
RightWatch: The GOP showdown is just the beginning of what promises to be a nasty election season.
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How the Iowa Caucuses Work – The Root
We break down how they work, why they’re so influential and whether or not they should be.
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How Crowdfunding Saved 722 Square Miles of Rainforest – Environment – GOOD
As long as the world depends on oil, fears climate change, and values biodiversity, Ecuador can essentially charge the world rent on benefits derived from the rainforest.
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A place in Venezuela that gets 40,000 lightning strikes per night
Residents of Venezuela have been treated to a light show that has been going on for thousands of years. …
Theories abound as to why the lightning is concentrated in one area all the time. Some scientists say that the geological features around the Catatumbo River basin contribute to a constant low-pressure system.
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2011’s Memorable Quotes: Good and Bad Part 1 – ICTMN.com
“To Natives Geronimo is a hero because he fought America. To Natives Bin Laden was evil because he fought America…[try to] explain that to a kid.”—Filmmaker Chris Eyre…
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A useful reminder (i.e., this really is old news) from the Seattle Times that undocumented immigrants annually pay billions into Social Security but have little, if any, likelihood of ever receiving a cent in Social Security benefits: …
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Car Seat Sensors Scan Your Butt To Protect Vehicle From Theft – The Consumerist
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Amazon’s Cloud: A Supercomputer Anyone Can Rent
The company said in the fall that a client it would only describe as a “Top 5 Pharma” used the service for seven hours at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour. That’s peanuts compared to building your own supercomputer — and probably a cheaper option even if you had to run it 24/7 for a year. Other companies, such as T-Platforms, lease supercomputing time, of course, though it’s doubtful customers would get a machine as fast (there are only 41 in the world, after all).
Although Amazon has proved the viability of the concept, cloud supercomputing may not replace those room-filling clusters completely. …
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Three New African History Timelines
Angola, Benin, and Botswana
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Death of Algerian President Houari Bouemdienne – 27 December 1978
Houari Boumedienne had been a leader in the Algerian fight for independence from France. In July 1965 he led a military coup which ousted Muhammad Ahmed Ben Bella from Power. …
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This Day in African History — Zululand Annexed by Natal
…The region was made a British Crown Colony in 1887 under the authority of Natal and run accordingly under ‘Native Law’. In 1894 the Natal Native Code resulted in two-thirds of Zululand being confiscated and the Zulu nation was effectively confined to a native reserve. Zululand was totally incorporated into Natal on 30 December 1897. The Zulu people rebelled twice against Natal’s rule. …
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We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
Barack Obama, New Hampshire Democratic Primary Speech, 01-08-08 -
If you want change, you have to make it. If we want progress we have to drive it.
Susan Rice, Stanford University Commencement, 2010 -
Brazil’s slaves came from wider area than initially thought | A Blog About History – History News
Tooth analysis performed on the remains of slaves in a cemetery in Brazil have revealed that the African slaves came from a much wider geographic area than originally thought.
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After Promising No Teleprompters, Bachmann Reads Speech from iPad | Video Cafe
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Figure Out Which Graduate Degrees Are Worth the Debt with the One-Year Salary Rule
“Basically, prospective grad students should calculate what their expected salary at graduation, then borrow no more than that amount.”
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DOJ Reportedly Prepping Criminal Charges Against BP – The Consumerist
More than a year and a half after the disastrous collapse of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, it looks like someone may finally be held accountable for the accident, as federal prosecutors are reportedly preparing to file criminal charges against the oil company and perhaps some individual employees.
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Verizon Wireless Adds $2 ‘Convenience’ Fee To Make Your Life More Inconvenient – The Consumerist
Basically, if you haven’t set up auto-pay on your account, Verizon will now start slapping you in the face with another two dollars each month just to bully you into setting up auto-pay.
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Given the similar names and the fact that doctors are not known for their legible handwriting, the agency is asking pharmacists to be vigilant when filling prescriptions, as putting Durasal’s salicylic acid in your eye could do some serious damage, and dabbing your wart with Durezol — an anti-inflammatory given to patients after eye surgery — is probably not going to help.
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Lou Henry Hoover, who with her husband, Herbert, translated De re metallica (Latin for “On the Nature of Metals” (or minerals more generally)). For this, Lou and Herbert won the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America first Gold Medal for Distinguished Service (1914). …
As First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover invited all Congressmen’s wives to visit the White House including Jessie DePriest — the black wife of the nation’s one black Congressman, Oscar DePriest. In a time when the Ku Klux Klan held genuine political power, this was called “an arrogant insult to the nation” and was an act of real courage.
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Free Technology for Teachers: Remember 2011 – A Map of 2011′s Biggest Stories
Maps of World has produced a neat interactive map of the world’s most important news stories in 2011.
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dw_news: Community importing is live.
There are a few things you should be aware of before you go ahead and start importing your communities. …
* The imported content will be owned by an OpenID account for the original author. This means that the content is still under the control of the author — LJ/IJ/etc users can come to DW, log in with their remote account, and manage their content.
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Storify Reveals Its Favorite User-Generated Story of 2011
Social media curation tool Storify doled out its Story of the Year honor Thursday to Josh Stearns, who is using the service to keep track of journalists arrested during the nationwide Occupy Wall Street protests. …
Since launching into public beta in April, Storify has allowed professional and citizen journalists to take content from various social networks — such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Instagram — and plop everything into one interactive post that can be embedded onto other websites.
Stearns filled his story with links to news articles, videos, photos, quotes and resources for journalists.
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Cute Alert: Tiny Dancer Cuts a Rug at Checkout (Video) | Strollerderby
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Early Animals Dethroned – Science News
The oldest known “animal” fossils may have been living in the wrong kingdom. New images suggest that 570-million-year-old, many-celled blobs from China are not animal embryos as once thought, but rather some kind of spore-releasing cyst.
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Molecule Ties Itself In A Complex Knot – Science News
…a molecule whose 160 atoms loop over one another like a five-pointed star.
The molecule’s design, called a pentafoil, is the most complex knot synthesized from building blocks other than DNA. Knowing how to make a pentafoil, its discoverers say, could lead to ways to make materials lighter, stronger or more flexible than before.
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The Art of the Science Tattoo: Scientific American
Some of the tattoos are simple and clean, some are old and fading, some are big and colorful and wild. They tell stories of galaxies and molecules and disease research and mathematical equations and unusual species. And they delve into the history of science. One scientist has a tattoo of the original drawing from the patent for Thomas Edison’s first phonograph. A neuroscientist whose father died of Lou Gehrig’s disease has the neuron that gets destroyed by the disease inked onto her foot.
How many science writers can boast an art book that digs so deeply into personal stories while celebrating such a broad spectrum of scientific research?
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The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) earlier this week chose a shopping center in Bellingham as the first location to break ground on the state’s segment of the West Coast Electric Highway, part of a 444-kilometer stretch of road along Interstate 5 between Washington’s borders with Oregon and Canada.
Bellingham will host the Electric Highway’s first direct-current (DC) electric vehicle fast-charging station…
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Friday Cephalopod: Two legs…good. Eight legs…divine : Pharyngula
One of the bonuses of having lots of legs is that you can go bipedal whenever you feel like it.
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For New Year’s Eve, Toast The Chemistry Of Champagne
Champagne, unlike other wines, undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle to trap carbon dioxide gas…
…early champagne makers had a tough time with that second fermentation. Some bottles wound up with no bubbles at all while others got too much carbon dioxide and exploded…
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Pregnancy May Change Mom’s Brain For Good | Gestation & Childbirth | Brain Development | LiveScience
Studies have found that pregnancy causes rats’ brains to form new olfactory, or smell-related, neurons. What’s more, such pregnancy-related changes persist for the rest of the animals’ lives. In rodents, at least, additional pregnancies seem to cause additional changes, so that the more litters a rat has, the more altered its brain will be.
It’s not known whether women experience permanent changes as well; humans are very different from rats, after all. But according to Glynn, it’s “extremely likely” that pregnancy permanently alters the human brain. The hormone flood that occurs during pregnancy dwarfs the hormonal changes that occur during other volatile times of life, such as adolescence…
…recent research is revealing that fetuses have more effect on their mothers than previously realized. According to a 2004 study reviewed by Glynn, movements by the fetus after 20 weeks’ gestation increase a mother’s heart rate and her skin conductance…
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Why Women Report Being in Worse Health than Men | LiveScience
…a new study from researchers in Spain says this is because women have a higher rate of chronic diseases — contradicting a previous theory that women’s lower self-rated health is simply a reporting bias.
…What the new study doesn’t answer, Annandale said, is why women have a higher rate of chronic health problems.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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