Media News

Twitter Censorship Move Sparks Backlash: Is It Justified?

2012-01-28T08:31:00.000-05:00

Like Yahoo and Google before it — and for the same reason, becoming a global powerhouse — Twitter has confronted an inconvenient truth: Freedom of expression is sacrosanct and protected by the Constitution in the United States, but in other parts of the world, not so much.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which typically has no patience with any sort of censorship, saw Twitter’s announcement as little more than stating the obvious. ”I’m a little puzzled by the kind of freak out that kind of appears to be happening. Companies have to abide by the law where they are,” said Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the digital rights group.

The ACLU wasn’t as forgiving. ”The countries that engage in censorship are precisely the ones in which open and neutral social media platforms are most critical,” said Aden Fine, an ACLU staff attorney. “We hope Twitter will think carefully before acceding to any specific requests by those governments to censor content simply because they want to interfere with their citizens’ access to information and ideas.”

And the Twitterverse was beside itself. “When you become the agent of the censor, there are problems there,” said Twitter power user and media consultant/critic Jeff Jarvis.

A Love Supreme - Jon Stewart

2012-01-27T16:43:00.001-05:00

The nine berobed big brains of the Supreme Court make sense of what appear to be arbitrary, archaic distinctions of profanity and nudity.

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Even Little Protests Illegal in Russia

2012-01-26T17:13:00.001-05:00

Doll 'protesters' present small problem for Russian police: Russian police don't take kindly to opposition protesters – even if they're 5cm high and made of plastic.

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: "I'm for clean elections" and "A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin".

"Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests," Andrei Mulintsev, the city's deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. "In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event."

Nike: Corporate Responsibility at a “Tipping Point”

2012-01-26T11:57:00.001-05:00

... you can see Nike grappling, in public, with some tough choices. The narrative demonstrates what can happen when a company begins reporting regularly and in-depth, and with an apparent commitment to intellectual honesty, about core issues.

For Nike, labor and human rights continue as a top priority and corporate worry. The company’s three main product lines — footwear, apparel and equipment — are made in approximately 600 contract factories that employ more than 800,000 workers in 46 countries around the world. Nearly 60 percent of the work force is in North Asia, 31 percent in South Asia. One major difficulty is that contract apparel factories generally produce for multiple brands, making it a difficult to maintain standards.

Thanks to Chelsea for this.

Consumption

2012-01-26T11:50:00.001-05:00

A woman looks at the work "Your Beliefs" by artist Jani Leinonen at the exibition "I love Aldi" at the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, western Germany. The exhibition presents works by various artists, each symbolising the "Aldisierung of Society", which is described as the attitude of consumers searching for the cheapest product possible.

UK Mobile operators censor privacy tool 'Tor'

2012-01-26T09:19:00.000-05:00

Open Rights Group and Tor have established that UK mobile networks such as Vodafone, O2 and 3 are filtering UK users' access to Tor's primary website (meaning the HTTP version of the Tor Project website, rather than connections to the Tor network) on pre-paid contractless accounts.

Tor helps people stay anonymous online. Some examples of how it has been used include those trying to avoid oppressive state censorship in places such as Iran, through to abuse victims in the UK.

Thousands march in Poland over Acta internet treaty

2012-01-26T09:11:00.000-05:00

Thousands of protesters have taken to Poland's streets over the signing of an international treaty activists say amounts to internet censorship.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk says his government will on Thursday sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The treaty, known as Acta, aims to establish international standards to enforce intellectual property rights.

But critics say it could curb freedom of expression, and government websites have been hacked in protest.

For more on ACTA, try here.

Romney income calculator: How much does Mitt make? How long would it take him to earn your salary?

2012-01-26T07:50:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax return on Monday. His total income for the year was listed as $21.6 million, more than one-half of which came from capital gains. How does that stack up against your income? Enter your annual income below to find out how long it would have taken Mitt Romney to earn the same amount of money. (Don’t worry, we’re not collecting any data you type in.)

We're #47!

2012-01-26T07:43:00.001-05:00

In this year's Reporters Without Borders international press freedom index, the U.S. slumped to 47th place, a fall of 27 places, largely due to arrests of journalists covering protests.

Insane English copyright ruling creates ownership in the idea of a photo's composition

2012-01-26T07:38:00.000-05:00

In a bizarre ruling, an English court has ruled that in favor of a commercial poster company that argued that a photo that showed a similar (but different) scene taken by a different person in a different place nevertheless infringed the copyright of a poster. What the judge ruled was that photographing a scene that is "substantially similar" to a scene someone else has already photographed infringes the first shooter's copyright.

It's impossible to understand how this will play out in real life. If a Reuters and an AP photographer are standing next to each other shooting the Prime Minister as he walks out of a summit with the US President, their photos will be nearly identical. Will the slightly faster shutter on the AP shooter's camera give him the exclusive right to publish a photo of the scene from the press-scrum?

The judge here ruled that the idea of the image was the copyright, not the image itself. Ideas have always been exempt from copyright, because courts and lawmakers have recognized the danger of awarding ownership over ideas. Indeed, the "idea/expression split" is pretty much the first thing you learn in any copyright class.

What is your Google Age?

2012-01-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

Google ad preferences manager: Does it accurately guess your age and gender?: We tend to think of Google as all-knowing, but even the search giant can get it wrong sometimes—and does it ever get its “inferred demographics” wrong. An informal survey of Slate staffers found the following:

- Women aged 24, 25, and 28 were estimated to be men aged 25-34. So was a 41-year-old woman, which she was quite pleased about.

- Men aged 30, 41, and 29, plus a 39-year-old woman, were all found to be men 65 or older

- A 24-year-old man was found to be a woman aged 25-34.

Check yours here.

Life in New Hampshire

2012-01-26T07:26:00.000-05:00

Florists, caterers and other wedding-related businesses could turn away engaged gay couples under legislation before the House that opponents likened to segregation and Nazi Germany's race laws.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the bill, which would allow providers of wedding-related goods or services to withhold those services if they believe doing business with gay couples would violate their conscience or religious faith. The bill also would bar lawsuits against business owners in such situations.

Bill sponsor Rep. Jerry Bergevin, R-Manchester, called it a "business protection bill" and said a person's personal religious beliefs should receive protection in his or her capacity as a service provider.

and:

A Franklin city ordinance barring sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school is unconstitutional, a judge has ruled.

Merrimack Superior Court Judge Larry Smukler ruled last week that city officials failed to show that the restriction protects children.

Attorney Barbara Keshen, director of the NHCLU Foundation, says city officials will be hard-pressed to frame an ordinance that passes constitutional muster.

"There have been so many empirical studies done around whether those restrictions protect children," Keshen said. "Virtually all have said there's no correlation. It's bad public policy."

The NHCLU several years ago succeeded in striking down a similar ordinance in Dover.

Keshen said Tilton, Northfield and Boscawen have ordinances similar to Franklin's. She said Boscawen's ordinance goes further-- barring sex offenders from using the public library.

Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker

2012-01-25T11:34:00.000-05:00

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.:

Coding for success

2012-01-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

We need to teach our kids to code. All of them. This should be compulsory education, a core pillar of modern schooling. Many people are worried about a shortage of trained programmers, but this misses a wider issue – one of the biggest modern threats to our individual and collective success. They will thank us for it, and curse us if we don’t. Stick with me, because I want to show you why.

Today in Censorship

2012-01-24T10:34:00.001-05:00

The World's Worst (and Ugliest) Cars

2012-01-24T09:31:00.001-05:00

Here at Dark Roasted Blend we normally celebrate weird and beautiful... except when we equally celebrate weird and ugly. Both "beautiful" and "ugly" sides of things are worth mentioning when they are brought to extremes. We already covered the ugliest architecture, the worst roads, and even the ugliest facial expressions. Now, it's time to see some atrocious cars and collectively abhor their unnatural shapes!

Taking the 5th? Not so fast....

2012-01-24T09:20:00.000-05:00

Judge forces defendant to decrypt laptop, fuels debate over Fifth Amendment rights -- Engadget: A judge in Colorado yesterday ordered a defendant to decrypt her laptop's hard drive at the prosecution's request, adding new fire to the ongoing debate surrounding consumer technology and the Fifth Amendment. The defendant, Ramona Fricosu, is facing charges of bank fraud, stemming from a federal investigation launched in 2010. As part of this investigation, federal authorities used a search warrant to seize her Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop. Fricosu's legal team had previously refused to decrypt the computer, on the grounds that doing so would violate her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination. On Monday, though, US District Judge Robert Blackburn ruled against the defendant, arguing that the prosecution retained the right to access her device, as stipulated under the All Writs Act -- a law that requires mobile operators to comply with federal surveillance.

EU proposes 'right to be forgotten' by internet firms

2012-01-23T12:04:00.000-05:00

A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.

It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to retain it.

Tenn. Tea Party Demands Removal Of Slavery From Textbooks

2012-01-23T12:01:00.000-05:00

The Tea Party of Tennessee wants to remove from history textbooks any incidents of slavery and genocide linked to the founders of the U.S. for fear those references would tarnish the image of the Founding Fathers.

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

Warrants Needed for GPS Monitoring, Supreme Court Rules

2012-01-23T11:52:00.001-05:00

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday the authorities need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move.

The decision (.pdf) in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position. The government had told the high court that it could affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

Hollywood Begins with Copyright Infringement

2012-01-23T11:51:00.000-05:00

(Note: punctuation corrected.)

Incongruous as it sounds, Hollywood was born in Fort Lee, New Jersey. At least, that’s where most of the early filmmakers hung out in the early 1900s when the “flickers” began to move from the peep shows to the Nickelodeons and money started to come in. Lots of it.

For those few years, thinly settled Fort Lee served its purpose. Its plentiful woods, easily traveled roads, and picturesque buildings lent themselves as locations for 1903's breakthrough narrative The Great Train Robbery, 10 minutes of blazing guns and cowboy action. But after a while the weather, the sunlight, and the terrain proved limiting. Even more limiting was the Motion Picture Patents Trust, which was headquartered in nearby East Orange, New Jersey, where Thomas A. Edison had built his Black Maria film studio. Together with George Eastman (who devised perforated film), importer George Kleine, producer Frank Marion, fellow inventor Thomas Armat, and others, Edison demanded royalties from the burgeoning number of fledgling independent production companies that were making movies with homemade (and sometimes purloined) equipment.

Rather than meet the Trust’s demands to pay license fees, and refusing to stop making movies, these producers packed their bootlegged cameras and fled westward, eventually settling in the sleepy Southern California village of Hollywood. Once there, they discovered a temperate climate, constant sunshine, and wonderfully varied scenery. Better yet, they discovered that the Mexican border was only an hour’s mad dash away if the Trust’s lawyers showed up with subpoenas. Sometimes the Trust hired thugs to shoot the independents’ cameras, and occasionally the independents themselves frequently the independents (such as pioneer director Allan Dwan) shot back.

Graffiti of the Day

2012-01-23T11:43:00.001-05:00

From Brisbane, Australia

Private Family Matters

2012-01-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

Roe v. Wade Passes 39th Anniversary: On the 39th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case on Sunday, which established protection for abortion rights, President Obama reaffirmed his support for a woman's right to choose in a statement released on his blog.

Obama called the right to choose a "fundamental constitutional right," despite how "sensitive and often divisive" the issue may be.

"As we mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters," his statement reads.

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

2012-01-23T07:42:00.000-05:00

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Where women rule, and men are suffragettes

2012-01-21T09:09:00.000-05:00

In the small hilly Indian state of Meghalaya, a matrilineal system operates with property names and wealth passing from mother to daughter rather than father to son - but some men are campaigning for change.

Losing the Scarlet Letter

2012-01-21T09:01:00.001-05:00

The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law. This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. At the end of the middle ages only about 40,000 people lived there, but by 1660 there were already 400,000; by 1800 there would be more than a million, and by 1850 most of the British population lived in towns. This extraordinary explosion created new kinds of social pressures and new ways of living, and placed the conventional machinery of sexual discipline under growing strain.

Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.

[...] The ultimate legacy of the first sexual revolution has been far from straightforward. In place of a relatively coherent, authoritative worldview that had endured for centuries, it left a much greater confusion of moral perspectives, with irresolvable tensions between them. That has been part of our modern condition ever since. What's more, as the history of the past few decades shows, its consequences are still unfolding, in different ways across different western societies. It is equally clear that the 18th century marked the point at which the sexual culture of the west as a whole moved on to a new trajectory.

In many parts of the world, by contrast, sexual ideals and practices reminiscent of pre-modern Europe continue to be upheld. Men and (especially) women remain at risk of public prosecution for having sex outside marriage. Often, the word of God is supposed to justify this. The Ayatollah Khomeini affirmed in 1979 that the execution of prostitutes, adulterers and homosexuals was as justified in a moral society as the amputation of gangrenous flesh. In some countries, imprisonment, flogging and execution by hanging, or even by stoning, continues to be imposed on men and women convicted of extramarital or homosexual relations. Even more widespread and deep-rooted is the extra-legal persecution of men and women for such matters. These are the same practices that sustained western culture for most of its history. They rest on very similar foundations – the theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, and the belief that men alone should govern. How they help to maintain patriarchal social order is obvious; so too is their cost to human happiness. How durable they will prove to be remains to be seen.

Violent Class War Coming Soon

2012-01-20T10:34:00.000-05:00

Kremlin backed propaganda artists Russia Today have predicted that the United States could erupt into a violent class war within two years. "With an assumption that a strong or very strong conflict exists increasing in only two years time, at this rate 85 percent of Americans would sense a class war in two years' time," reads the barely coherent missive. The economy is down and jobs are hard to come by, so pretty soon we'll all be killing each other in the streets. Should you be scared? You should probably not be scared.

Iranian Programmer Sentenced to Death for Developing Porn Site Software

2012-01-20T10:26:00.000-05:00

While we're all up in arms over SOPA and PIPA, the government of Iran continues to monitor its citizen's Internet access. The government has gone so far as to sentence a programmer to death for insulting the sanctity of Islam because of a piece of software used by a porn site.

The Star reports that programmer and Canadian resident Saeed Malekpour was arrested during a visit to Iran in 2008 while visiting his sick father. During his incarceration Malekpour was forced to make televised confessions on state TV after being tortured.

The horrible porn software he created was actually just a piece of photo uploading software that a porn site used without his knowledge. In June 2011, Malekpour's sentence was suspended. But, under review by the Iranian Supreme Court, his death sentence was upheld on Monday.

BBC News - India's exploited child cotton workers

2012-01-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

The noise was deafening and air in the factory in northern Gujarat was so thick with cotton dust it was like a snowstorm at night. Women and girls, some no more than 10 or 11, fed machines with raw cotton picked from the nearby fields.

It is a process known as ginning - one end of a commercial supply chain that ends up as clothes and textiles in high street shops around the world. Globally, annual revenues from the industry are measured in the trillions of dollars.

Many household-name retailers concede they do not know exactly how the cotton they use is farmed and processed. Yet, for years, labour activists here have campaigned for their help.

"The workers' lives are terrible," said Jignesh Mevani, an activist who was our guide. "They are not paid the minimum wage. There are no safety precautions. There are many children."

Filming openly, children were easy to find in both the ginning factories and the cotton fields.

Video available on link.

Supreme Court Gives the Go Ahead for Re-Copyrighting Public Domain Works

2012-01-20T10:22:00.000-05:00

You've got to be kidding me. The US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Congress can remove works from the public domain and re-copyright them in order to bring the the pieces into compliance with international copyright schemes. Yeah, because that doesn't run completely against the spirit of copyright law or anything.

For one reason or another, the American copyright protections of many famous, foreign works—including H.G. Wells' Things to Come, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, Shostakovich's Symphony 14, Cello Concerto and everything by Igor Stravinsky—moved into the public domain despite still being copyrighted overseas. To "correct" this issue, Congress passed legislation in 1994 that would move the works in question back to protected status and comply with the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty.

Modern Warfare

2012-01-20T10:19:00.000-05:00

Anonymous Shuts Down The MPAA, RIAA And Other Websitescom: For the past few days the big story has been the protest of SOPA and PIPA, the two potentially disastrous and dangerous pieces of legislation that would give major corporations and organizations the right to censor the internet in the name of protection against piracy. Yesterday, websites like Wikipedia.org and Reddit.com shut their doors to the public, demonstrating what it would be like if either SOPA or PIPA were passed, despite admonishment from the MPAA. In a move that can only be described as retaliation, earlier this morning the US government was able to shut down MegaUpload.com a file sharing website that some have chosen to use to download and upload illegal material (despite the fact that the site itself has no control over the content people share). Now Anonymous, the nameless, faceless hacker organization that is typically identified with Guy Fawkes masks, has struck back.

Since this morning's news, Anonymous has managed to shut down various powerful websites in the government such as Justice.gov along with others like MPAA.org, Universal Music Group, and the RIAA. The move is being called the biggest attack in the organization's history.

Why The 'Check Engine' Light Must Be Banned

2012-01-19T07:51:00.000-05:00

It's pretty easy to dismiss the "check engine" light as just stupid, because, well, it is. I suppose if you thought that the cause of smoke coming from under your hood had something to do with the floor mats, then, sure, the "check engine" light is handy, but beyond that, it's useless. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that the "check engine" light is a tool for the propagation of consumer ignorance about their cars. Which is why it needs to die. Now.

If it sounds like I'm making a big deal out of this, it's because I am. The continued use of a generic, uninformative "check engine" light in cars keeps car owners in the dark about the condition of their vehicle, and ensures they stay dependent and subordinate to car dealers and mechanics. The frustrating thing is it doesn't have to be that way.

God/Bang

2012-01-19T07:43:00.001-05:00

Fear Factory

2012-01-18T11:17:00.000-05:00

Fear Factory - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: By creating a convenient ecosystem, China's Foxconn draws in employees who earn 31 cents an hour working for 35 hours straight, thereby saving American companies money.

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The Day The LOLcats Died: The Ultimate SOPA Protest Song

2012-01-18T09:31:00.000-05:00

There are many ways to stand up to SOPA. Websites like Wikipedia and BoingBoing are dark, there's a rally in New York, and people everywhere are signing petitions and contacting their senators. My favorite method, though? A protest song to the tune of Don McLean's ‘American Pie'.

SOPA Blackout Set For January 18th: Here’s All The Info

2012-01-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, the Stop Online Piracy Act was dealt a major blow as the legislation was delayed until “outstanding concerns” have been addressed. SOPA will not move forward in the House as the official vote was been cancelled and the bill has been yanked from the floor. Representative and SOPA opponent Darrell Issa cheered this as a win for the internet community – but he warned that SOPA’s Senate cousin PIPA is still a major concern.

He’s right, and SOPA is still a concern as well. While it has been delayed, SOPA is not dead. It is entirely possible that SOPA could resurrect once a “consensus is reached.” SOPA must be destroyed while vulnerable.

Second Class Citizens

2012-01-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

The Gay Rights Movement - YouTube

Wikipedia Will Go Offline Wednesday for SOPA Protest

2012-01-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

Despite rumblings from Capitol Hill that the recently-defanged SOPA legislation not see the light of day, Wikipedia has announced that "the Internet must remain free" and that it is joining the blackout protests scheduled for January 18th, nonetheless.

Founder Jimmy Wales made the announcement via Twitter today. The English-language Wikipedia site will be unavailable for for 24 hours beginning midnight EST of January 18th.

Should Wearing Pajamas In Public Be Banned?

2012-01-17T09:25:00.000-05:00

Do you like to go about town wearing comfy pajama pants? Not in Shreveport, Louisiana, you won't ... if a local parish commissioner has his way!

Caddo Parish District 3 Commission Michael Williams said it was an incident at a local Walmart that offended him and some elderly customers that spurred him to push for an ordinance that would prohibit wearing pajama pants in public.

"I saw a group of young men wearing pajama pants and house shoes," he said. "At the part where there should have been underwear," his private parts were showing through the fabric. [...]

"Pajamas are designed to be worn in the bedroom at night," Williams said. "If you can't (wear pajamas) at the Boardwalk or courthouse, why are you going to do it in a restaurant or in public? Today it's pajamas," Williams said. "Tomorrow it's underwear. Where does it stop?"

Jan. 16: Worst Day Of The Year?

2012-01-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

To hear some psychologists tell it, Jan. 16, 2012—the third Monday in January—is a good day for a bad mood. In short—because of a cocktail of personal and seasonal factors—this particular day is the time when a person typically reaches their emotional low point for the year.

Indeed, January is a month when people do not have a lot of events, parties, or holidays to look forward to. And, by the third Monday, many people are struggling to cope not only with bleak weather, but also with the debts they amassed by spending too much over the holidays.

It's also a time when people may start to feel like failures because they have broken their New Year's resolutions shortly after making them.

A few years back, a UK psychologist formerly at Cardiff University named Dr. Cliff Arnall famously devised a formula that combined various ingredients to calculate the year's gloomiest day—which turned out to be the third Monday in January.

The complicated equation comprised seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels, and (NA) the need to take action.

More recently, Arnall admitted that it wasn't particularly helpful to identify the year's worst day because it became "a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Communism and America

2012-01-16T07:56:00.000-05:00

Why is communism seen in such negativity to most of the USA? An interesting Reddit discussion of the issue.

What They Don’t Want to Talk About

2012-01-16T07:46:00.000-05:00

Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.

The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.

Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour

2012-01-16T07:44:00.000-05:00

We love our iPhones and iPads.

We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads.

We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads.

And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads — and the super-high profit margins of Apple — are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.

And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.

Last week, PRI's "This American Life" did a special on Apple's manufacturing. The show featured (among others) the reporting of Mike Daisey, the man who does the one-man stage show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and The NYT's Nicholas Kristof, whose wife's family is from China.

Putting SOPA on a shelf

2012-01-16T07:36:00.000-05:00

Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

At issue are two related bills: the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the even more offensive Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, both of which are generated intense opposition from tech giants and First Amendment advocates. The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” It added that any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.”

Half the world's richest 1% live in the United States

2012-01-16T07:27:00.001-05:00

The United States holds a disproportionate amount of the world's rich people.

It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world. That's for each person living under the same roof, including children. (So a family of four, for example, needs to make $136,000.)

So where do these lucky rich people live? As of 2005 -- the most recent data available -- about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States, according to calculations by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book The Haves and the Have-Nots.

Reginald Hill Dies

2012-01-14T09:03:00.000-05:00

Hill called himself a crime novelist, but his work owed nothing to the hard-boiled tradition of the genre. His approach was cerebral, his plots labyrinthine, his characterisations sharply etched, and his dialogue richly laced with humour. His novels bristle with shrewd perceptions and whimsical wit.

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free

2012-01-14T08:54:00.000-05:00

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

TVShack's student founder can be extradited to US, court rules

2012-01-14T08:50:00.000-05:00

A British student can be extradited to the United States for running a website linking to sites carrying pirated TV shows and films, a court has ruled.

Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old student at Sheffield Hallam University, looked downward as district judge Quentin Purdy ruled that there were no valid reasons why he could not be sent to New York state for trial.

US customs agents are seeking his prosecution over a website O'Dwyer set up when he was 19 called TVShack, and ran until his arrest last year. This provided links to other sites hosting pirated versions of TV shows and film. It was so popular that the student earned £15,000 per month in advertising revenue, US prosecutors claim.

O'Dwyer's lawyers said the site was little different from a search engine like Google and was thus most likely not illegal under UK law.

The Supreme Court and the Filthy Words You Still Can’t Say on TV

2012-01-11T09:25:00.000-05:00

What lawyer would want to work amid nudity and filth?
Four Justices of the Supreme Court made clear Tuesday that they would not. Their determination did not waver even when former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, representing the ABC-TV network, pointed out that the famous frieze surrounding the Court’s chamber depicts various undraped figures that might subject a broadcaster who showed them on TV to hefty fines.

Waxman’s waving finger of shame — one of the most dramatic moments in Supreme Court argument since Daniel Webster shed tears over the fate of Dartmouth College — drew gasps and laughter from the crowd. It is not clear, however, that it budged the Court’s Decency Caucus, made up of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito. They all but begged America’s broadcasters to remain an island of decency in a sea of filth.

Whether Waxman rocked the Justices is a different question. At the end of the argument, it seemed that the best the broadcasters could hope for would be a 4-4 court: Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy and Alito favoring the FCC, and Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Thomas favoring the broadcasters. That would affirm the Second Circuit’s opinion and suspend the FCC’s indecency rule.

Breyer is no guaranteed vote to affirm, and of course, Clarence Thomas is sometimes strongly pro-speech (especially if it’s campaign speech) and sometimes strongly anti-speech (the First Amendment provides no right to anyone but parents to address speech to children, he wrote last year in a dissent to Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the violent video-games case). As usual, he said nothing.

Outside the Court Tuesday, First Amendment protesters stood in a line near the Court steps, chanting over and over the words that had gotten George Carlin in trouble 35 years ago: “Shit, piss, fuck, cunt cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.”

Google Changes the Way Its Search Engine Works, Privacy Be Damned

2012-01-11T09:20:00.000-05:00

Google's great at finding pretty much anything on the Web—no matter how obscure—but has generally lacked social content thanks to its ongoing standoff with Facebook. But, according to the search giant today, the "most radical transformation ever" has just occurred to its search engine. But maybe not in the good way.

Google dubbed this metamorphosis, "Search, Plus Your World." It integrates Google content directly into search results in three ways. First, it now provides "Personal Results" which include media—photos, blog posts, etc—that have been privately shared with you as well as your own stuff. Any images you've set to share using Picasa will also be displayed. Second, Google Search will now auto-complete queries to people in your circles and will display people who might also be interested in what you're searching for in the search results. Finally, it simplifies the process of finding other Google profiles for people or specific interest groups based on your query. So if you search for, say, NASA, it will display Google profile pages for NASA and space-related Google interest groups in addition to the normal results.

Future Past

2012-01-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

1900 Predictions: The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900, which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

Mr. Watkins wrote: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”

Some samples:

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

Prediction #19: Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented. Great musicians gathered in one enclosure in New York will, by manipulating electric keys, produce at the same time music from instruments arranged in theatres or halls in San Francisco or New Orleans, for instance. Thus will great bands and orchestras give long-distance concerts. In great cities there will be public opera-houses whose singers and musicians are paid from funds endowed by philanthropists and by the government. The piano will be capable of changing its tone from cheerful to sad. Many devises will add to the emotional effect of music.

Lost inTranslation... or Maybe Not

2012-01-09T11:55:00.001-05:00

A Japanese/English Primer

German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space

2012-01-09T11:52:00.000-05:00

There’s more than one way to stick it to The Man. There’s civil disobedience, subversive propaganda, political art, outright violent revolt--each possessing its own degree of difficulty and consequence. In a decidedly 21st-century twist, team of German hackers bent on fighting the powers that be has chosen a rather ambitious means of taking the power back: building a hacker-owned and -operated space program, complete with a constellation of communications satellites beaming uncensored Internet to users on the ground.

The Hackerspace Global Grid was borne out of a call to action at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, where hackers of all stripes gather to mull the issues of the day as they relate to their craft. Hacker activist Nick Farr--motivated by legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S.--called on the community to contribute to a project that would remove the power of censorship from governments and corporations by creating an uncensored Internet in the free frontier of space.

Technology and the Pursuit of Happiness

2012-01-09T11:24:00.000-05:00

The United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts that all individuals have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the years since that document was drafted, its phrasing has been subject to much interpretation, and laws have been enacted to limit the scope of those rights, particularly the latter two. For instance, forbidding one from taking mood-altering drugs alienates an individual from his or her liberty and pursuit of happiness, but this limit exists under the debatable reasoning that drug use generally tends to trespass on the rights of others, including their right to pursue happiness.
[...]Some bioethicists feel that ESB technology should be made available to everyone, protected by the “pursuit of happiness” clause in the Declaration of Independence. Are there dangers in having euphoria just a click away, all the time? Would it be bad thing to have intense orgasmic pleasure at the push of a button?
It seems clear that the pleasure center of the brain evolved to guide our actions and to motivate us, by rewarding us when we do well. This is evidenced by the fact that the primary activity that we mammals have evolved to do– to mate for reproduction– results in greater portions of pleasure than any other natural activity. Therefore, it is possible that a pleasure-giving device would detract from our ambition and good judgment. Some people also worry that individuals who are raised without unhappiness and heartache would lack the “character” that makes us human. There is also the concern that most rewards decline in value after prolonged exposure, and some claim that this sort of technology would slowly erode a person’s ability to feel good.
But these are all guesses, there is no way to know for certain how a human might change in response to such technology. One could also point out that many people never tire of other stimulations such as sex or pleasurable foods, and that while many people will naturally partake of those pleasurable activities a lot at first, most will gradually moderate the usage to times when it is most needed or appropriate. But nothing would stop an ESB-wired person from taking a day off work, putting a brick on the button, and enjoying an afternoon of bliss. As an added benefit over sex and chocolate, this technology isn’t likely to result in unwanted pregnancies, disease, or weight gain.

Religious Morality

2012-01-09T11:21:00.001-05:00

Doing right, the Judeo-Christian way...

All four major record labels are now suing Grooveshark

2012-01-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

Grooveshark is now being sued by EMI for allegedly failing to pay royalties. This follows a lawsuit served by Universal, Sony and Warner.

Things are not looking good for music streaming service Grooveshark. After getting hit with lawsuits from Universal Music, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, EMI — the only company with whom Grooveshark actually had a licensing deal — has now filed suit against Escape Media Group, Grooveshark’s parent company, claiming that Escape has failed to make a single royalty payment.

While the lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, does not specify the amount in damages EMI is seeking from Grooveshark, reports The New York Times, correspondence between the two companies show that EMI has requested Grooveshark pay it $150,000 in royalties. Grooveshark said in a statement that the matter is simply a “contact dispute,” which the company expects to “resolve.”

New Zealand sees no Justice in quirky baby names

2012-01-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

Would you consider naming your child Princess or Justice? Lucifer or Christ? Mafia No Fear or (ahem) Anal? If so, don't move to New Zealand. Those names are all included on a just-released list of names that have been banned over the last decade by the New Zealand Internal Affairs Department.

Other names that won't fly in New Zealand? Emperor, King, Bishop, Queen Victoria, Messiah, V8, 89, and the symbols * and /. Good thing Prince didn't try to move Down Under during his unpronounceable symbol phase! Though actually, come to think of it, the name Prince wouldn't pass legal muster in New Zealand, either.

How Nicole Richie Complaining About Cow Shit Could Change TV Forever

2012-01-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

... on January 10, the Justices will consider whether or not the Federal Communications Commission violates the Constitution when it imposes fines on network TV stations for indecency. Fines in dispute include those levied against the network that aired the Simple Life episode wherein Nicole Richie asked viewers if they'd ever tried to "get cow shit out of a Prada purse." She then added, "It's not so fucking simple." Another network was fined for showing a shot of a woman's butt on NYPD Blue.

The Obama administration has spoken out against the relaxation of standards, saying that TV needs to be a safe place for families to sit around together and not talk. Those in favor of the relaxed standards say that the FCC's enforcement of decency laws is uneven, inconsistent, and unfair, especially considering the fact that most American households have cable, anyway, so Protecting the Children from swearing on CBS won't do any good when they're a click away from bloody True Blood vampire sex. Analysts and Supreme Court nerds think that the Justices will side against the FCC given their history of supporting free speech, even by corporations.

If the Supreme Court sides against the FCC, this will be the biggest change in standards for broadcast TV since the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which until 1987 required TV stations to present both sides of controversial issues. Ironically, the lifting of The Fairness Doctrine has allowed stations like Fox News to become so very Republicanly Fair and so Tea Partily Balanced today.

David Bowie's 65 birthday: 65 crazy facts and bizarre myths

2012-01-08T11:05:00.000-05:00

1 First things first - how do you pronounce David Bowie's name? It is 'Bowie' to rhyme with 'Joey', rather than as if it were similar to the acronym for The Only Way is Essex, TOWIE.

2 Did Bowie help start the credit crunch? BBC journalist Evan Davis suggests he may have had a role. In 1997, Bowie sold bonds on his future back catalogue royalties, an idea which was copied by the banks who sold on mortgage income. This ‘securitisation’ was partly responsible for the problems banks developed in the late Noughties.

3 Bowie says he was moonwalking years before Michael Jackson wowed the world in 1983's Billie Jean. He wrote on his official website that choreographer Toni Basil taught him a type of moonwalk for his 1974 Diamond Dogs tour.

4 Bowie was interviewed on a BBC programme as the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men at the age of 17. He complained: "It's not nice when people call you darling and that".

5 Bowie shares his birthday with Elvis Presley, who was exactly 12 years older. In her book, Stardust, Angie Bowie writes David Bowie could do a “devastating” impersonation of Elvis Presley. And Elvis once considered recording a cover version of Bowie’s 1976 hit, Golden Years.

And his worst song:

Artist evades nude censorship with smartphone

2012-01-07T18:07:00.001-05:00

A photographer who specializes in nudes found a way around censorship of one of his art pieces at Fredericton city hall by using smartphone technology.

Jeff Crawford was invited to contribute to an exhibit of artworks produced during the Fredericton Arts Alliance's Artists-in-Residence summer series.
But after the photograph was up for half a day, city officials took it down. City officials asked Crawford to submit a different piece of work.

"One sentence that really sticks in my mind is, 'Do you have anything non-naked to display?' And that got my blood boiling, pretty quick," he recalled. Then Crawford had what he calls a "light bulb moment."

Jeff Crawford's work, entitled Emersion. CBCHe replaced the photograph with a framed pixilated black-and-white square, which some people thought was abstract art.

It was actually an enlarged so-called Quick Response (QR) code — a bar code-like image that can be read by a smartphone and sends the user to a link on the internet. He submitted a photograph entitled Emersion, which shows a nude woman lying in a stream with one breast visible.

The QR code Jeff Crawford put up at city hall takes smartphone users to his banned nude photograph on the internet.The QR code Jeff Crawford put up at city hall takes smartphone users to his banned nude photograph on the internet. CBC"I wanted to display my work, as it is, without any changes made to it, or censorship," said Crawford.

Ronald Searle Dies

2012-01-07T09:24:00.001-05:00

Ronald Searle, who has died aged 91, was best known in Britain for his cheerfully anarchic St Trinian’s series of books and Molesworth illustrations, though his reportage work for publications such as Le Monde, Life and The New Yorker saw him feted elsewhere as one of the world’s greatest satirical artists.

A Guide to SOPA

2012-01-06T09:41:00.000-05:00

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet on Vimeo

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Fool Me Once

2012-01-06T09:38:00.000-05:00

The Folly of Fools — By Robert Trivers: Our big brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we engage in “confirmation bias,” which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.

Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are — or than others consider us to be — can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others. “We hide reality from our conscious minds the better to hide it from onlookers,” Trivers explains. But our illusions can have devastating consequences, from the dissolution of a marriage to stock-market collapses and world wars.

Yeah, But We Did it First

2012-01-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

China claims it has successfully curbed 'excessive entertainment' on TV: A campaign to curb "excessive entertainment" by cutting the number of racy programmes on Chinese satellite television channels has been successful, state media reported, after President Hu Jintao warned that western culture was out to attack China.

The broadcast regulator ordered the cutback in entertainment programmes in October, taking particular aim at dating and talent shows, programmes featuring "emotional stories" and those of "low taste".

Channels are now showing programmes that "promote traditional virtues and socialist core values", Xinhua news agency said.

The regulator added it "believes that the move to cut entertainment programming is crucial in improving cultural services for the public by offering high quality programming".

NOT SATIRE: L.A. Tells Arrested OWS Protesters They Can Pay for "Free Speech" Classes to Avoid Court

2012-01-06T09:24:00.000-05:00

Incredibly, the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office is offering Occupy L.A. protesters arrested in recent weeks the opportunity to pay $355 for private free speech classes to avoid their court dates.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles Chief Deputy City Atty. William Carter said the city won't press charges against protesters who complete the educational program offered by American Justice Associates.
...

Carter said the free-speech class will save the city money and teach protesters the nuances of the law.

"The 1st Amendment is not absolute," he said, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled government can regulate when, where and how free speech can be exercised.

As a civil rights attorney working with some of the approximately 350 protesters who have been arrested in recent weeks noted, the offer is nothing short of "patronizing."

However, it's much more than that. It's a disgusting and cynical way to alleviate the strain on city courts by having protesters pay for an unofficial guilty plea.

In short, the city is offering protesters the chance to purchase courses in which they will learn about the free speech LAPD officers stripped from them.

Apparently, in L.A., you can pay to learn about the free speech you don't actually have.

If Logic Tells You Otherwise, Ignore Your Gut

2012-01-05T09:52:00.000-05:00

People like to think their gut feeling knows best, but new research in the Perspectives of Psychological Science shows the gut might actually overwhelm logic in decision making.

The brain, it turns out, is wired early on with an intuitive sense of logic, but we often ignore it to go with our gut reaction, which often means people let their stereotypes rule the action. When making these decisions, people still have a sense that something is off, but don't let logic prevail in the decision.

The more things change....

2012-01-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

copyranter: Racist "Vote Republican" billboard from 1948.

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right - NYTimes.com

2012-01-05T09:33:00.000-05:00

There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

What about the claim that Internet access is or should be a civil right? The same reasoning above can be applied here — Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important — though the argument that it is a civil right is, I concede, a stronger one than that it is a human right. Civil rights, after all, are different from human rights because they are conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human beings.

A New Look at Face-ism

2012-01-03T08:39:00.000-05:00

The Psychology of Nakedness: In general, people assess minds – and it doesn’t matter if it’s the “mind” of a pet, iPhone or deity – along two distinct dimensions. First, we grade these minds in terms of agency. (Human beings have lots of agency; goldfish less so.) But we also think of minds in terms of the ability to have experience, to feel and perceive. The psychologists suggest that these dual dimensions are actually a duality, and that there’s a direct tradeoff between the ability to have agency and experience. If we endow someone with lots of feeling, then they probably have less agency. And if someone has lots of agency, then they probably are less sensitive to experience. In other words, we automatically assume that the capacity to think and the capacity to feel are in opposition. It’s a zero sum game.

Nook Slip

2012-01-02T09:36:00.001-05:00

Inappropriate Tablet On QVC. Censor this, FCC.

Obama Makes It Official: Suspected Terrorists Can Be Indefinitely Detained Without a Trial

2012-01-01T09:49:00.000-05:00

Despite having once threatened to veto the bill due to controversial language about the treatment of suspected terrorists, the president signed the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on Saturday. Barack Obama did not keep his lingering concerns about aspects of the bill law a secret, however. In justifying his decision to sign NDAA into law, Obama said in a statement, "I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed." He continued, "The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists."

The most liked 2011 UK TV commercial is...

2011-12-30T09:54:00.000-05:00

copyranter: The most liked 2011 UK TV commercial is...

Best Street Art of the Year

2011-12-30T09:32:00.001-05:00

from - STREET ART UTOPIA
Hate the format of these pages, and I have posted some of these before, but there is much to love in here.

Not So Free

2011-12-30T09:18:00.000-05:00

2011: The Year Intellectual Property Trumped Civil Liberties: This dichotomy played itself out over and again in 2011, as lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.

“Any civil liberties agenda was a complete non-starter with Congress and the Obama administration,” said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director. “They had no interest in finding any balance in civil liberties.”

It wasn’t just on the federal level, either.

In California, for example, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have demanded the police obtain a court warrant before searching the mobile phone of anybody arrested. But Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation authorizing the authorities to search, without a warrant, CD-stamping plants that dot Southern California’s landscape.

Underscoring that civil liberties would take a back seat in 2011 was the debate, or lack thereof, concerning the Patriot Act. The House and Senate punted in May on revising the controversial spy act adopted in the wake of 9/11. Congress extended three expiring Patriot Act spy provisions for four years, without any debate.

2011 Pops

2011-12-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

2011 In Pop Music, According To DJ Earworm: DJ Earworm has just dropped his mashup of all that was POP in 2011, entitled “World Go Boom.” It sounds a lot like Katy Perry.

Time Off Around the World

2011-12-27T08:36:00.001-05:00

It's the day after Christmas: Are you reading this blog post from work or are you home for the holidays? How is your vacation time as compared to other workers from around the world?

Here's a graph from the Economist, based on the data compiled by consultancy group Mercer:

Flavorwire � 20 Bizarre Works of Public Art from All Over the World

2011-12-27T08:31:00.001-05:00

Maybe it’s just us, but we feel like we’ve been seeing a whole lot of strange public art in recent months: for instance, Claes Oldenburg’s newest project, an enormous paintbrush, was unveiled last month in Philadelphia, Florentijn Hofman’s Big Yellow Rabbit was erected this summer, and a huge Marilyn Monroe sculpture was recently unveiled in Chicago (she also just turned up with an ugly tattoo — that’s adolescent sculptures for you).

Spoiled Rotten

2011-12-26T09:01:00.001-05:00

People Who Didn't Get What They Wanted For Christmas

Marketing 101

2011-12-26T08:40:00.000-05:00

Riley on Marketing - YouTube

8 Crazy "As Seen On TV" Products

2011-12-24T09:41:00.000-05:00

There can be no greater As Seen on TV product than this! Forever lazy is like a representation of America itself. In fact, I think we should put one on the Statue of Liberty. After watching the woman in this commercial fuss and struggle with one of those silly old fashioned blankets, we can thank our lucky stars that some genius thought to bring us this adult onesie with a Bugs Bunny style trap door in the back so you never have to take it off. Ever. Your move, Snuggie!

Bill O'Reilly Covers The "War On Christmas" More Than Actual Wars

2011-12-23T10:19:00.001-05:00

Every year, "Culture Warrior" Bill O'Reilly devotes considerable time on his Fox News show to the "War on Christmas." This December, O'Reilly has covered the imaginary "War on Christmas" more than three times as much as the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Everyone on Twitter Is Increasingly Depressed

2011-12-22T09:14:00.000-05:00

"It appears that happiness is going down," says a University of Vermont researcher and head of a new study on wellbeing. The proof? Twitter, of course. Millions of users point to a global depression of an entirely non-monetary kind.

The team took 46 billion tweeted words across three years, and had users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing machine to assign them happiness values—poison is unhappy, cake is happy, etc. These were then averaged and their frequency plotted, allowing researchers to calculate a rough global mood. From the graph above, you can see it's not a major drop, but overall, we're getting unhappier. Whether that means we as in everyone or we as in the tweeting populace is up in the air. Still, the UVM team feels confident enough to deem their Twitter lens a proper hedonometer—gauge of happiness—and extrapolate outwards.

Americans Are So Fat, Washington State Ferries Have to Carry Less* of Them

2011-12-22T09:10:00.000-05:00

America's gotten significantly heavier over the past twenty years and we should have seen this coming. First Kevin Smith gets booted off that flight, then that guy sues White Castle for not having plus-sized booths. Now, one of the nation's largest ferry systems is obligated to carry fewer people on each trip.

(*That should be "fewer." Grammar Police)

Sade?? Kenny Chesney??? Andre Rieu!?

2011-12-22T09:06:00.000-05:00

Top 25 Tours of 2011 | Billboard.com: 2011 turned out to be a resounding comeback year for the live music business, including a new record for the highest-grossing and most widely-attended tour of all time, U2's three-year 360 Kenny Chesney??? tour. The list of the Top 25 Tours comprises a healthy mix of genres and generations, from country stars Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney to classic rockers Bon Jovi and Roger Waters -- and of course, a few pop divas like Gaga and Britney.

1 U2 Total Gross: $293,281,487

2 Bon Jovi Total Gross: $192,947,

3 Take That Total Gross: $185,175,360

4 Roger Waters Total Gross: $149,904,965

5 Taylor Swift Total Gross: $97,368,416

6 Kenny Chesney Total Gross: $84,576,917

7 Usher Total Gross: $74,954,681

8 Lady Gaga Total Gross: $71,900,434

9 André Rieu Total Gross: $67,104,756

10 Sade Total Gross: $53,178,

11 Michael Bublé Total Gross: $49,856,

12 Eagles Total Gross: $49,759,190

13 Katy Perry Total Gross: $48,851,

14 Lil Wayne Total Gross: $46,300,

15 Justin Bieber Total Gross: $44,124,922

16 Glee Live! In Concert! Total Gross: $40,854,811

17 NKOTBSB Total Gross: $40,415,307

18 Journey Total Gross: $39,069,939

19 Britney Spears Total Gross: $37,100,000

20 Iron Maiden Total Gross: $33,085,671

21 Kylie Minogue Total Gross: $32,559,439

22 Neil Diamond Total Gross: $31,303,070

23 Enrique Iglesias Total Gross: $30,811,001

24 Jason Aldean Total Gross: $27,768,963

25 Toby Keith Total Gross: $27,313,132

The 6 Most Secretly Racist Classic Children's Books

2011-12-20T09:11:00.001-05:00

Every piece of art is a product of the society that created it. You can't watch a romantic comedy from the early '90s without getting a little desensitized to the horrible high-waisted jeans and turtleneck/flannel combo that was deemed attractive at the time. Fortunately, we can shield our children from movies that might otherwise lead them to believe that the cast of Friends had successful film careers.

But some classic children's books are another matter....

Tastes Like Chicken

2011-12-20T09:01:00.000-05:00

Dutch TV Hosts Dine On Each Other's Flesh: A reality show from the Netherlands called Proefkonijnen ("Guinea Pigs") set about tackling the ultimate taboo head-on. No, not that taboo. The other taboo: Cannibalism! The gluttonous consumption of tasty, fatty, crispy-skinned human flesh. Mmmmmm. Peeeeeople. So co-hosts Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno submitted themselves to what is informally known on Fire Island as "the Gentleman's Agreement" — you eat my meat, I'll eat yours.

Both men had small pieces of flesh removed from their bodies by a surgeon — Storm from his ass cheek, Zeno from his belly — and handed the proteins over to a chef, who sauteed them in sunflower oil, using no spices so as to preserve the integrity of the meat's natural taste.

Stop Censoring the Names of Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Dickens and Other Penis Named People Please

2011-12-20T08:57:00.001-05:00

A cable company in the UK had a bit of a snafu with a super strict censoring system in its TV guide over the weekend. They were asterisking Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Dickens, the soccer team Arsenal, the movie Hancock and any other name or title that had a penis or butt related word in it.

Great Street Art of the Year

2011-12-19T16:38:00.001-05:00

Beautiful/Decay Cult of the Creative Arts

The nightmarish hybrid taxidermy that could land Franken-artist in jail

2011-12-19T16:33:00.001-05:00

Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals.

But it is his beloved mythical creatures that could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.

De Molina uses the parts of once-living animals and merges them together to create strange beings, one example features the head of two swans on the body of a goat and another shows the head of a squirrel meshed with a crab.

Science and the Chattering Classes

2011-12-19T09:37:00.001-05:00

Thanks to science—not so much medical as industrial—life expectancy increases every year, mostly as a function of affluence. So why is science—to say nothing of the very idea of progress—so unfashionable?

One obvious reason is that, among the chattering classes, hardly anybody knows anything about it. Today’s children of the native-born bourgeoisie study cinema or gender studies or even marketing, but not so much physics or chemistry, at least in my experience. It's indicative, perhaps, that in 2006 (the most recent year for which I could find data), foreign students earned nearly two-thirds of the U.S. doctorate degrees in engineering and computer sciences, while snaring about half of those in the physical sciences and math. Mercifully, many of these foreign students stay.

But for too many Americans, science is something alien and abstract. Max Weber observed nearly a century ago that, by explaining so many natural phenomena, science has lead to the “disenchantment” of the modern world. What a difference 100 years makes! Nowadays we’re surrounded by products of technology (from gelcaps to smartphones) whose essential workings are unintelligible to all but a specialized few. The result is that technology and ignorance have succeeded where religion has failed: in draping the world in a cloak of mystery, but one we find more threatening than enchanting.

With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

The Dangers Of SOPA In A Nutshell

2011-12-18T09:17:00.000-05:00

The Dangers Of SOPA In A Nutshell: An explanation in simple terms of why this dangerous new bill in congress could result in the extinction of sites that are based on user-generated content like YouTube, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. If you care about our freedom on the Internet, show your support.

Wonderful World

2011-12-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

David Attenborough - Wonderful World - BBC - YouTube

Vermont Higher Education

2011-12-17T09:23:00.000-05:00

Man Misspells ‘Slut’ in Vandalism Attacks, Gets Caught By Spelling Test: A Vermont man has been apprehended on criminal charges after his failure to spell correctly gave him away to police.

Adam Hall, 34, is accused of vandalizing his ex-girlfriend’s car by bending the license plate frame and scratching the word “sult” into the hood, according to a Bennington, Vt., police affidavit. Hall’s former girlfriend, Brittany Speckman, and police believe that Hall was trying to spell the word “slut.”

BBC News - Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer

2011-12-16T08:34:00.001-05:00

British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had , at a Texas hospital. Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher".

He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar".

"Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

Keep Drawing Is the Coolest Polymorphic Animation You'll See This Week

2011-12-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

For as revolutionary as the introduction of CGI was for animation, sometimes hand drawn pieces can still be just as amazing. Case in point: Keep Drawing by South Korean animation house, Studio Shelter.Each frame is drawn in a distinct animation style but stitched together around the same characters.

keep drawing from studio shelter on Vimeo.

Simpsons Secrets

2011-12-16T08:23:00.001-05:00

Secret Hidden Beatles Message

In the episode “Lisa the Vegetarian,” Paul McCartney made a guest appearance, along with his wife, Linda. In the closing credits of the episode, Paul sings “Maybe I’m Amazed.” There is a background voice on the song that does not appear on the record. The voice is Paul’s. If you play it backwards, the voice is a recipe for lentil soup read by Paul.

Most unnecessary translation switch.

The Simpsons is dubbed in by foreign-speaking actors for its runs in many different countries. In episodes dubbed in French, Homer’s catchphrase “D’oh!” is translated and read as “T’oh!”

The New Full-Frontal: Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?

2011-12-14T10:02:00.001-05:00

Although sex, hygiene, and clothing are all contributing factors, Fitzpatrick, Herbenick, and Pinto all agree that there's one main driving force behind America's villainization of pubic hair: pornography.

When a team of researchers from George Washington University took a closer look at Playboy's representations of women's genitalia throughout the years, they found that in issues dating from the magazine's inception in 1953 up through the 1970s and '80s, more than 95 percent of the centerfolds and naked models sported full, apparently natural pubic hair.

In the late 20th century, though, that changed. As Joseph Slade, professor of media and culture at Ohio University, puts it, the media legitimized voyeurism and turned it into a way of life; suddenly, porn viewers wanted to see everything more deeply and without the veil of hair. Thus, Playboy's love affair with the au naturel look faded: By the 1990s, more than a third of the models appeared to have removed some of their pubic hair. And in the new millennium, less than 10 percent of nude models now sport the full pubic bush, while a third remove their hair partially and one-quarter remove it completely. Playboy has trimmed down the standard from the un-modified, detail-obscuring "fur bikini" it helped popularize in the 1960s to the vanishing act it promotes today.

Federal safety board wants nationwide ban on cell phone use in cars

2011-12-14T09:58:00.000-05:00

The federal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called for the first-ever nationwide ban on the use of any personal electronic devices while driving a car.

The NTSB recommendation calls for the ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices for all drivers. The safety recommendation also urges law enforcement to use high-visibility techniques to support the ban. The recommendation includes hands-free and hand-held phones and would go beyond what many states have done to curb texting while driving.

America's College Students Are Sad, Alert

2011-12-14T09:51:00.000-05:00

How are our visibly depressed college students faring this year? Poorly. Very poorly.

Colleges say they're seeing more students on campus with psychiatric illnesses. About 11.6% of college students were diagnosed or treated for anxiety in the last year, and 10.7% were diagnosed or treated for depression, according to a survey of more than 100,000 students at 129 schools conducted by the American College Health Association.

UVM suspends fraternity after survey asks members who they want to rape

2011-12-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

A survey that asked fraternity members at the University of Vermont about their preferred rape victim, allegedly circulated by members of Sigma Phi Epsilon, has resulted in the fraternity’s suspension and a visit from its national headquarters, according to university officials.