jeudi 31 octobre 2013
How I Became Gaming's Most Popular And Anonymous Photographer
I’m a very accomplished photographer. My photos have been in magazines, newspapers, textbooks, blogs, online videos, television and any other medium that you can think of. My work has been seen by millions and will be one of the most important resources for the history of video games. The only catch is that I’m almost never credited and don’t get paid for it.
Wikipedia is one of the internet’s most powerful sites, with its massive user base and high-ranking results in search engines. As a result, the photos associated with its articles quickly become some of the most-seen images on the internet. This massive visibility, however, comes at a cost: to place a photo on Wikipedia a photographer must give away all rights to the photo for free. This leads to massive exposure for your work, but at a price: you must release your rights so your photos can be used by anyone, for any purpose, without any compensation.
It’s a crazy trade off for a professional photographer, but this is exactly what I do, because my passion for video games and photography outweighs any potential financial gain. I take high-quality, hi-res photos of video game hardware and upload them to Wikipedia. From there, these photos spread – showing up in videos, magazines, blogs, and news articles.
I didn’t realize this would happen when I first started taking pictures of game consoles. It all began because I was annoyed by low-quality pictures on Wikipedia: small, poorly composed and lacking consistency. When I looked further, I found it was the same situation across the rest of the internet. Why had no one bothered to take good pictures? If no one else was going to do, I would do it.
Left – previous picture, Right – my picture
I made the jump from Wikipedia reader to Wikipedia contributor. Many don’t survive the experience: the rules and bureaucracy of Wikipedia’s formatting, along with the surprisingly unfriendly atmosphere new editors face, makes the learning curve steep. I made beginner’s mistakes and took hits for them, but my work started becoming more proficient and my persistence paid off: my photos began transforming Wikipedia articles.
At first I took photos of food items, candy bars and electronics, but I began narrowing my focus on video game systems. I started making lists of every console ever released. Before the video game crash of 1983, there were numerous systems, many now barely remembered, with little information available. Message boards and fansites had few details, with the same poor, low-resolution pictures. I realized that relatively recent history was being lost to time, all because the internet did not have good information and media about these game systems. There was a need to document these systems and show people what they looked like before they’re forgotten to time.
The problem is access to the actual systems. I only had a small collection of consoles to photograph, and it’s the same stuff everyone else owns: an NES, an Xbox and so on, but who the hell owns a VTech CreatiVision? Who has even heard of a Bally Astrocade?
I started contacting collectors and anyone willing to help. I found a passionate collector on Long Island, so I lugged all my photo equipment and lights on the Long Island Railroad to his house to get the pictures I needed. After just a few hours of intense work I was able to more than double my previous collection of photos that I had taken over weeks. I found an independent games store Video Games New York that let me “rent” out the hardware they sold, as taking pictures in the store would have been impossible. There was also James Baker, an enthusiast whose collection covered a large wall at his business. With the assistance of just a handful of collectors I was able to document a large amount of video gaming history, with a gallery that including rare consoles like the Sega SG-1000 and the Casio Loopy.
Despite my progress there were still gaps, with systems and hardware too numerous and obscure to be covered by local collectors. Travel to other collectors was cost prohibitive – remember I’m doing this for free. It wasn’t in my budget to purchase newer systems that needed photographs like the Nintendo 3DS, the PlayStation Vita and Wii U. (Plus, who wants to own a Wii U right now?) And as my process improved, I wished I had the opportunity to redo some of my earlier work. Facing these challenges my work halted.
It was during this lull that my pictures starting taking off. Gaming blogs and YouTube series about gaming began using my photos, especially the older consoles. Newspapers and magazine were using them as well. This took me by surprise, but the reasons were obvious: because my photos are on Wikipedia they’re immediately available and usually what a person finds first when they google it. Also, the photos are easy to reproduce – they’re direct and clear photos with white backgrounds – and they’re free so there’s no need to find original owners and get permission, if they can even be tracked down. As a result, my photos were popular and being used around the world.
However, even if my photos were being used often in numerous places, it was usually without credit. Maybe it’s because the pictures are free, or maybe it’s because of the nature of the internet. Either way, I’ve come to terms with it if; I’m just happy that the work is being seen and used.
Even without accreditation, people found me on my Wikimedia page. I would get the occasional thanks for my photos, like the one of the Vectrex system (an obscure flop). I begin to realize this was less about the quality of my work and more about saving and sharing the history of gaming. It turns out that my video game gallery is a valuable resource of gaming information: one central location, easily found through a web search, with consistent and complementary high-quality images available to all for free.
I wanted to continue and expand my work with new ideas: more pictures from different angles, motherboard shots, videos and detailed descriptions. Yet the same problems remained: access to systems and money, but I now understood that there was a community of gaming fans that appreciated this work and could help close the gaps. I started a Kickstarter to appeal to the gaming community and ask for their help in transforming my current gallery of pictures into an expanded and in-depth site tailored to gaming history’s needs. The funding would allow me to purchase old and obscure system and spend the time to document them in the detail they deserve.
There is a huge need for this. There is no one else trying to provide this service at this level, at this quality, at this reach (Wikipedia) and in a format (public domain) that will ensure that these photos will last for decades from now. The work that I’ve already created and its impact thus far is a testament to the importance of the project. These are the reasons why I do this work, and why I do it for free.
Please take a look at my existing gallery and watch my Kickstarter video.
If this stuff appeals to you and you want to see more, consider donating some money. There’s only a week left to donate, so there’s little time to waste. Some might see this work as madness: hundreds of unpaid hours seeking out and photographing gaming systems that have been lost to time. But my work and my Kickstarter aren’t for them. Instead it’s for the guy who would consider traveling 8 hours round trip just to visit a retro game convention or would take apart an NES controller just to see what’s inside. I admit it’s a little crazy – but I don’t think I’m alone.
About the author: Evan Amos is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Visit his Wikipedia profile here. This article originally appeared here.
from Digg Top Stories http://petapixel.com/2013/10/31/power-wikipedia-became-gamings-popular-anonymous-photographer/
Everything That's Wrong With Healthcare.gov
The HealthCare.gov launch did not go so well. Some people paid the website a visit only to be greeted by a blank screen. Others found error messages or talked to misleading call center reps or had their personal information compromised. The whole thing is borked, and everybody knows it.
It's been less than a month now since the much anticipated home for the Obama administration's healthcare exchange went online, and it's going to be at least another month before it actually works. The problems are by no means minor. Reuters reports that hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose access to low-cost health insurance as a result of the botched launch. At this point, everybody's playing the blame game pretty hard. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blames the (too many) contractors who built the site. Obama blames himself. Americans, for some reason, seem to want to blame the girl in the stock photo on HealthCare.gov. But quite frankly we might never be able to find a single culprit.
So, as Bloomberg Businessweek commemorates the epic fail that was the Healthcare.gov launch with a wonderfully glitchy Obama cover, it's worth having a look how that fail actually happened.
Site Overload
It was bad from the beginning. On day one, people trying to access HealthCare.gov immediately hit a wall. Instead of displaying the many affordable care options available under Obamacare, the site read, sadly:
We have a lot of visitors on the site right now. Please stay on this page. We're working to make the experience better, and we don't want you to lose your place in line. We'll send you to the login page as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience!
Just keep staring at that blinking cursor, America!
Unfortunately, the contractors who built the site saw this coming... but didn't say anything. Just days before the launch, site tests showed that HealthCare.gov would crash after just a few hundred visitors. The nearly 10 million that showed up on launch date never had a chance.
Site Suicide
After the nightmarish bottleneck in the site's first days, Reuters asked a bunch of security experts what could be causing all the problems. The experts agreed that it wasn't just the traffic. The site's very architecture was to blame, specifically the fact that the site made users download an unruly amount of data just to log in. One expert counted 92 separate files and plugins—including 56 JavaScript files—that users had to download when they hit the "apply" button on HealthCare.gov. Another said that the amount of data passed back and forth was so intense, it made it appear "as if the system was attacking itself." So you know about distributed denial of service attacks? HealthCare.gov was effectively launching one against itself.
Glitchy Sign Up Process
If you were lucky enough to actually load HealthCare.gov in those first few days, you probably didn't make it very far. Glitches plagued the sign-up process. Some people reported that the site wouldn't recognize their log in or passwords—more on that in a second—while others happened upon error messages and "page not found" screens. At the very least, plenty of people complained that the site ran slowly. Meanwhile, the insurance companies that were receiving information from the exchange complained that they were receiving incomplete and duplicate applications. That all adds up to a lot of unhappy Americans.
Bad Customer Service
Whenever you muster up the courage to actually call a customer service hotline and endure the bad hold music, the last thing you want is to be told the wrong thing. Well, that's exactly what HealthCare.gov reps did. As early as October 8, the site's call center was telling people to reset their passwords to help alleviate the site's log in problems. But, whoops, that's not even true because call center reps were given the wrong script. Meanwhile, other people were being told to re-register completely, albeit with a new username since their old one was stuck in limbo somewhere. Sound convenient?
Data Center Outages
Last weekend, a data center powering HealthCare.gov experienced a failure and lost connectivity. The outage affected not only all of the Americans trying to sign up for coverage through the federal exchange but also people in the 14 states and District of Columbia who had set up their own exchanges. This one is arguably not the government's fault, though. Verizon's Terremark operates the data center and said the outage happened during planned maintenance. But surely, HealthCare.gov's crappy architecture didn't help.
Privacy Violations
So on top of all that nonsense, we've recently learned that HealthCare.gov is violating its own privacy policy. Security researcher Ben Simo spotted some trouble when trying to recover his username and password. For some reason, HealthCare.gov was sending his personal data to third party companies, including analytics services like DoubleClick and Google Analytics. Those companies have since said that they have no interest in this kind of data, but the very fact that HealthCare.gov sends it to them appears to be a violation of HealthCare.gov's own privacy policy: It promises that "no personally identifiable information is collected by these tools."
Security Risks
File this one under "avoidable errors." A memo dated four days before HealthCare.gov went live reveals that the government knew that the site had "inherent security risks," but it moved forward anyway. The memo also said that the site hadn't been tested enough, "exposing a level of uncertainty that can be deemed high risk." Personal data that people surrender to HealthCare.gov include birthdate, Social Security number and estimated income range; however, security researchers revealed how the gaps could reveal users' email address and allow hackers to take over entire accounts. Nevertheless, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House committee this week that they went ahead with the launch because they had a "mitigation plan" in place. A little late for that now, Kathleen.
from Digg Top Stories http://gizmodo.com/everything-thats-wrong-with-healthcare-gov-1455989647?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+gizmodo%2Ffull+%28Gizmodo%29
Science Secrets Of The Scariest Haunted Houses
A timid guest waits for her turn to enter The Basement. Guests must go through alone or in a pair.
(Credit: CBS)
On a chilly Saturday night in October, Margee Kerr stood outside the exit of The Basement, the latest haunted attraction to enter the Pittsburgh fright scene. The Basement is part of ScareHouse, ranked among the country's top haunted houses by the Travel Channel.
If a normal haunted house is like a scary movie, The Basement is a psychological thriller. Inside, actors dressed as zombies do more than jump out of dark corners. They scream at you. Half naked, they press their bodies up against you and lick your neck. In one terrifying room, they pretend to slit your throat.
Whether guests exit laughing hysterically or looking terrified, Kerr is there to greet them. A sociologist and "scare expert" who helped design The Basement, she peppers them with questions, trying to determine if the experience hits its mark.
"A lot of the customers wanted something more intense and engaging, and there was this desire for a more extreme experience," she tells CBSNews.com.
That desire is apparent across the country. At The Basement, guests pay $35 each. To walk through Blackout, a haunted house that started in Los Angeles and now has locations New York City and Chicago, visitors shell out $65. Both The Basement and Blackout are sold out through the season.
"We wanted it to be a scary experience but one that was not going to trigger any trauma," Kerr says. "Uncertainty is so difficult to deal with. When we can't sense, we can't predict, that is terrifying... that uncertainty just triggers everything."
Given the complexity of our brains, triggering the sensation of fear -- without inflicting lasting trauma -- is more complicated than adding new zombies or heightening the sound effects.
There are two approaches to understanding how fear works in the brain. Joy Hirsch of Yale University investigates using an fMRI scanner. In the scanner, researchers provide study participants with a stimulus -- usually an image of a frightened person or a spider or snake -- that is known to trigger the response.
"No matter how well you know that there is nothing fearful going on at all, there is no real threat, that stimulus of the fearful face is sufficient to activate a whole cascade of circuitry," Hirsch explains. "It's a really important fact in studying fear that there are some stimuli that it's very difficult to override a physiological response."
The current understanding is that a region of the brain called the thalamus picks up on a threat, through visual or auditory clues. The sensory data then travels along two circuits, which Joseph LeDeux at New York University has named the "low road" and the "high road."
Inside The Basement at ScareHouse, guests go through about a dozen scenes. This image shows the security camera's view of each room, as zombies play on common phobias to frighten guests.
(Credit: CBS)
Along the low road, the sensory data travels to the hypothalamus, the region of the brain that sets off the "fight or flight" reaction.
Your heart starts racing, pumping extra blood to your muscles. You might feel a chill as less blood is pumped to your skin. Your pupils dilate to take in more light. This is all happening because the hypothalamus sets off the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system.
The adrenal glands pump out glucose, which provides an energy boost in case you need to run. The adrenal-cortical system also releases a burst of about 30 hormones, including endorphins and dopamine.
As all of this is happening, the original sensory data -- the sound of a door creaking, the sight of a zombie jumping out -- also travels along the second circuit, a longer path known as the high road.
That circuit ends in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where long-term memories are stored. The hippocampus pulls up those memories to put the threat into context. In something like a haunted house, the hippocampus will realize that the zombie is just an actor and that you are not in any true danger.
"The second signal lets us know that everything is OK," Kerr explains. "If the second signal is saying this is for real, this is legit, then it's not fun. A lot of scary material wants to trigger the first signal but also reinforce that no, this is actually not going to eat you."
The startle reaction is distinguished from more long-term fears, which Kerr says are more accurately called anxieties because "we are not going to know the answers to them for years, so we have no way of bringing about certainty. Whereas fear, that's immediate, there's a response and a resolution. Even if bad, it's over and you can move on." When anxiety is triggered, though, it has more lasting effects.
"It makes it difficult when designing scares. I want to trigger the fear, I don't want to trigger the anxiety," she adds. "I'm trying to go for something that is going to have a resolution."
A ScareHouse visitor reacts to a zombie jumping out from the dark.
(Credit: CBS)
Individuals respond differently to her designs. Since The Basement opened last month, at least three dozen people have used the designated safe word -- "Bunny" -- which lets them out immediately.
"One of the really fascinating aspects of the brain and its reaction to fear is the aspect of individual differences," Hirsch says. "Some people panic, another may think it's funny. Some are very frightened and want to run, others may seek the thrill of the chase and go chasing the frightening stimulus."
Scientists aren't sure why. "The same areas in the brain may be connected slightly differently or share information differently" in different people, Hirsch explains.
Kerr says the reason some people love The Basement and some hate it can partially be explained by looking at how our brains receive the flood of hormones during fight or flight. "Some people are going to have a lot of dopamine released," she says, which feels like a natural high.
"Once they get a taste of how much fun it can be to be terrified, they want to see how far can I push myself," she adds. "They get a taste and they love it or hate it and if they love it they say, 'OK, let's see what's next.' It sounds like a drug addiction, but it's got some of those similar patterns."
As a sociologist, she believes there's another element at play: the modern world is significantly safer than what our prehistoric ancestors encountered in the wild, at the time when the human brain was developing, but we still want the chemical pay-off of experiencing fear.
Craving that fear response explains the sheer thrill written all over the faces of so many of The Basement's visitors. "My heart's racing," said one enthusiast. "Haunted houses don't do anything for me anymore, and that actually got my adrenaline pumping."
It's music to Kerr's ears, and she can't help but note, "It's really crazy to think something terrifying and gory can bring people such joy."
Secrets of ScareHouse, one of America's scariest haunted houses
This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com.
from Digg Top Stories http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57610323-1/science-secrets-of-the-scariest-haunted-houses/
Are Bike Lanes A White Thing?
The future of bike lanes in African-American neighborhoods.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By Jay Walljasper
By arrangement with On the Commons
Rev. Kenneth Gunn’s ministry at Chicago’s Bread of Life Church covers both the Bible and bicycles. He organized a bike club that regularly rides from the South Side church to Lake Michigan and along the Lakefront Trail. In his spare time, Gunn repairs donated bikes that he gives to kids in the predominantly African-American neighborhood.
Rev. Gunn believes biking offers great benefits to the community. “Besides good recreation, biking is economical,” the 70-year-old minister explains, especially in a city where many people don’t own cars and transit fares are rising. “But health is the number one reason to ride a bike. It’s good for your coronary, your respiratory and your blood pressure. And I find it’s good for my arthritis.”
Gunn welcomes the new protected bike lanes popping up across Chicago’s South Side as a way to encourage more African-Americans to bike. “The city is becoming more and more bike friendly. The new lanes on 55th Street are super-safe and I love it.”
While African-Americans comprise the fastest growing demographic of bicyclists, doubling from 2001 and 2009 according to U.S. Department of Transportation data, bike lanes proposed for African-American neighborhoods in several cities have drawn controversy.
A few miles from the Bread of Life Church, a protected bike lane was planned for Martin Luther King Drive, which would pass six African-American churches. This raised serious concerns from some church leaders about the availability of parking for events, as well as aesthetic concerns on this historic street.
This controversy, and ones like it in Portland, Oregon and other cities, highlights the importance of community engagement in planning new and innovative bike projects. “The city was doing a lot of bike projects fast, and talking with the community was not always a priority,” said Chicago Alderman Pat Dowell, who represents residents in the historically African-American neighborhoods around King Drive.
Dowell pointed to that experience as one reason some African-Americans are skeptical about bike lanes in a presentation at the Summit on Bike Lanes & Equity, a diverse gathering of transportation leaders convened last May in Austin by the Green Lane Project. The Green Lane Project, a program of People for Bikes, helps cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
Some residents even associate bike lanes with the displacement of long-time black residents in favor of younger, often white newcomers.
Dialogue between the Chicago Department of Transportation and church and community leaders led to modifications in the plan. The protected bike lanes were shifted to a nearby street, and buffered bike lanes (which use wide swaths of paint rather than physical dividers to organize bikes and cars) were added to King Drive. Community discussions around the project also led to the creation of the Bronzeville Bikes, a group to encourage more people to bike in the neighborhood.
Dowell counts herself as a bike advocate and sponsors a number of community rides in her Ward, but notes that many of her constituents raise concerns about spending money on bike lanes when their neighborhoods are plagued by poverty and crime.
Do Bikes Lanes Spawn Gentrification?
Some residents even associate bike lanes with the displacement of long-time black residents in favor of younger, often white newcomers. “You hear that bike lanes are white lanes,” says Cynthia Bell, an African-American organizer with Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance. “But there are a lot more youth on bikes in my neighborhood these days, so you hear it less.”
In Memphis, Tennessee a community development corporation founded by the St. Thomas African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church was a key player in building bike lanes in the South Memphis neighborhood. More than a thousand community members were involved in the planning process, which was part of a broader revitalization effort. St. Thomas’s pastor Rev. Kenneth Robinson, a medical doctor who formerly was Tennessee’s Health Commissioner, is a strong advocate of creating more opportunities for physical activity in low-income neighborhoods.
Yet there are still widespread feelings in some African-American communities that bike lanes are the opening act of gentrification, says Adrian Lipscomb, a bicycle project coordinator for the city of Austin, Texas who is writing a Ph.D dissertation on African-Americans and biking. One woman in the historically African-American neighborhood of East Austin told Lipscomb, “When the bikes came in, the blacks went out.” However, census data shows the white population in the neighborhood increased only one percentage point between 2000 and 2009, while the Latino population climbed eight.
(The numbers of Latinos biking in the United States rose 50 percent between 2000 and 2009, compared to 22 percent for whites. Whites and Latinos now bike at the same level on overall trips but slightly more Latinos commute to work by bike, according to Census figures. Native Americans bike the most of all racial groups.)
Past Injustices and Future Bike Lanes Collide in America’s Bike Capital
The racial dynamics of bike lanes also flared up in a traditionally African-American neighborhood in Portland that is seeing an influx of younger white people. Long-time residents raised the issue of bike lanes fueling gentrification two years ago at a public meeting about a protected bike lane project for North Williams Street. “The bike community was surprised at the reaction to the project,” recalls Michelle DePass, an avid bicyclist and African-American leader, who notes that there was little attention paid to improving traffic safety in the neighborhood when it was predominantly African-American. (Nationally, African-Americans suffer a bike fatality rate 30 percent higher than for whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control; for Latinos it is 23 percent higher.)
The controversy is not really about bike lanes, reported the Portland Mercury newspaper. “The public process on Williams is a hot vent for a community that’s been grieving city-imposed change and loss for 60 years,” referring to a freeway project and hospital expansion in the 1950s and ‘60s that ripped apart the community.
After decades of population decline, many cities are now seeing a boom fueled by entrepreneurial industries and young well-educated workers seeking a compact urban lifestyle, which includes safe places to bike.
Planning for the North Williams project was put on hold for several months as further research and community forums were conducted and more people of color added to the project’s Stakeholder Advisory Committee. Though the conversations were sometimes painful and emotionally charged, a new plan was enacted 18 months later with full community support. The plan included improvements for people on bikes as well as public art that recognizes the neighborhood’s history as Portland’s African-American hub.
Gerik Kransky, advocacy director of Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance, says, “This is where we learned to cool our jets and listen. It will inform how we work in the future. We need engagement, not just outreach.”
What’s Really Happening in America’s Neighborhoods
Martha Roskowski, Director of People For Bikes’ Green Lane Project, describes how demographic changes are affecting perceptions about biking and gentrification. After decades of population decline, many cities are now seeing a boom fueled by entrepreneurial industries and young well-educated workers seeking a compact urban lifestyle, which includes safe places to bike. As Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared, “You cannot be for a start-up, high-tech economy and not be pro-bike.”
“Bike lanes are not driving the wave of gentrification,” Roskowski observed at the Equity Summit. “It’s a much broader economic and social trend. But much of the process of change is behind the scenes, as properties are bought and sold and new businesses open and new people move into an area. Then, when there’s a public meeting about bike lanes, people feel they finally have a chance to say something about the many changes in their neighborhood.”
Jay Walljasper, Senior Fellow at On the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org, created OTC’s book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. A speaker, communications strategist and writer and editor, he chronicles stories from around the world that point us toward a more equitable, sustainable and enjoyable future. He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and a senior associate at the urban affairs consortium Citiscope. Walljasper also writes a column about city life for Shareable.net and is a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/jay-walljasper-are-bike-lanes-a-white-thing/
Where The World's Scariest Movies Took Place
from Digg Top Stories http://mediamaps.esri.com/geography-of-horror/
Drugs Unlimited
How easy is it to invent and manufacture a recreational drug that does not break any UK drug laws? I just spent the last two months doing exactly that – and the answer might surprise you.
Since 2008, the emergence of legal highs has wrong-footed policymakers, parents and police. These drugs imitate the effects of cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA and cannabis. They are popular, legal to take and supply, and their use is growing. Barely a week goes by without a press or TV report of a death, or major psychological consequences, as a result of using them. These reports often claim that it is a trivial task to take a banned drug and, with a little molecular trickery, get a Chinese lab to produce a new, legal version.
Most stories about legal and illegal drugs in the mass media are at best hysterical and inaccurate, and at worst simply untrue, so I decided to put this particular claim to the test.
The market in legal highs is growing. In 2009, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction's early warning system discovered 24 new drugs. In 2010, it found another 41; in 2011, another 49; and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified: a total of 243 new drugs in just four years.
Or rather, make that 244, because as part of a two-month investigation for the online science and technology publisher Matter, I just devised a new, legal drug, had it synthesised in China, and delivered to a PO Box in central London. It is a close chemical cousin of a substance that was well-loved by some of the world's most famous musicians, and, it's rumoured, by John F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Truman Capote – but was banned decades ago.
There's a bag of it sat in its courier packaging on my desk as I write. There's also a sample at Cardiff University, where Andrew Westwell, a brilliant chemist at the WEDINOS project, a Welsh government-funded initiative that tracks and identifies new drugs. He has analysed it and proved its authenticity and guessed at its likely effects if taken: a stimulant.
All it took me was a few dozen phone calls to Shanghai, a gmail account, a bank transfer, a PO Box set up in a false name, a few emails to contacts on web forums that gave me the synthesis and the modification and the name of a friendly laboratory, and a bit of reading. Job done.
In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledges (pdf): "While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene, the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon."
There are now more legal drugs on sale than were even dreamed of when the first global drug laws were written: the 1961 and 1971 UN drug conventions proscribe just 234. They were written when the Beatles were still performing, in an age when the internet did not exist.
As Australian medic David Caldicott told me, "If you treated any illness with the same antibiotic for 50 years, medical people would be stunned if resistance hadn't developed." New strains and mutations call for new medicines.
So if new drugs are the problem, what is the answer?
The response of UK governments, of all stripes, has been wholly inadequate. The Conservative/Lib Dem coalition introduced Temporary Class Drug Orders (TCDO) in November 2011, which allow drugs to be temporarily controlled for a year and then banned once the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has pondered their harms.
This law has done nothing to slow down chemical innovation. Since the NBOME-series of hallucinogenic drugs was banned this summer under a TCDO, a new family of equipotent hallucinogens – about which we know even less – has come to market, known as the NBOH-series of drugs. When 6-APB, an ecstasy-like drug was banned, 5-EAPB came to market. After methoxetamine – a ketamine derivative – was banned, a distant, inbred cousin from a far-flung branch of the chemical family tree, diphenidine, has come on sale. For every synthetic cannabinoid the authorities have banned, a half-dozen more have popped up, all of which are less understood by doctors than cannabis.
There is simply no let-up. In the time it took to write my last story about legal highs, five new drugs came on the market. Each of them will be banned, as will the legal high that I have just commissioned. A new modification will fill the gap within days.
It is not an especially simple or trivial matter to untangle the UK's drug laws and find a drug that can be sold legally, but it can be done with a little effort, as my investigation showed. It can, however, be a hugely profitable affair. Who cares about the consequences for users' health? Certainly not the vendors of these drugs, who dodge the law by saying they are not for human consumption.
The real issue is this: we are confusing cause and effect. The reason so many new drugs are appearing is precisely because we keep banning them. That approach worked in the 1960s and 1970s, and even perhaps until the 1980s. But in the internet era, it is impossible to control this market. More laws equals more drugs. If I, a journalist who until recently knew nothing of chemistry, can commission a new drug in a matter of weeks, so can many more people. And they will.
Policymakers' prime concern should not be which drugs are legal or illegal, but which are the most harmful. Their next problem is how to regulate the market in psychoactive chemicals. That will be more complicated than anyone – even those who advocate radical new approaches, including decriminalisation – dare consider.
• You can read Uncontrolled Substances, Mike Power's investigation into the past, present and future of the designer drugs scene, for $0.99 (60 pence) on the science and technology site MATTER
from Digg Top Stories http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/31/drugs-legal-high
School Evacuated Due To 'Noxious Odor' That Turns Out To Be Axe Spray
Aaron Showalter/New York Daily News
Medgar Evers Middle and High School in Crown Heights was the scene of an Axe spraying that made some students ill.
Emergency crews went to a Brooklyn school to investigate a report of a hazardous smell — only to learn that someone released Axe body spray in a classroom.
The Department of Education said in a statement that Axe was sprayed around 1 p.m. on Wednesday in a room full of sixth-graders at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School.
RELATED: 15-YEAR-OLD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT COLLAPSES, DIES IN BROOKLYN
“EMS transported eight students to the hospital, and parents of two students took them to their own doctors,” the statement said.
Officials at the school on Carroll St. in Crown Heights said disciplinary action is pending. There were no serious injuries.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/axe-body-spray-students-ill-brooklyn-high-school-article-1.1502109
Police Have A Video Of Toronto Mayor Smoking Crack
TORONTO (AP) -- Toronto's police chief says they have recovered the alleged drug video involving Mayor Rob Ford.
Police Chief Bill Blair said Thursday he was "disappointed" after viewing the video, but that there was nothing in the video that would provide grounds to press charges.
Balir says the video will come out in court and declined to provide details.
He said the video, recovered from a computer hard drive, "depicts images that are consistent with those previously reported in the press."
Ford faced allegations in May that he had been caught on video puffing from a glass crack pipe. Two reporters with the Toronto Star said they saw the video, but it has not been released publicly. The Associated Press has not seen it and Ford maintains it does not exist.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
from Digg Top Stories http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/police-have-toronto-mayor-rob-ford-alleged-drug-video
How The World's Populations Are Changing, In One Map
Blue countries have growing populations; red countries are shrinking. Purple are growing slowly or not at all. Data source: United Nations Population Fund. Click to enlarge.
It's often said that demographics are destiny. While the futures of nations are guided by much more than population trends, these demographic forces can play an awfully significant role. Countries need to grow in order to stay healthy and successful, but not too quickly or they risk problems like political instability. Bigger populations can mean bigger economies (and bigger militaries), but only if the state can provide the necessary infrastructure and services. More people means more pressure on natural resources, but it can also mean more businesses, more exports, more tax revenue.
All of that makes the above map really important for how we think about the trajectories of nations and of the world. It shows current trends in population growth, based on data from a new United Nations Population Fund report. The blue countries are growing, with darker blue countries growing very rapidly. Purple countries are growing slowly or are about stagnant, with less than 1 percent population growth every year. Red countries are actually shrinking, typically because people are leaving and/or because they're not having enough babies, and that can cause huge problems.
A note on the data: The researchers estimate current population growth by averaging the annual change in each country's population, per year, between 2010 and 2015. Those latter few years are obviously projections, but with the rare exception for a major war or natural disaster, such short-term projections are considered reliable. The numbers include births and deaths, as well as migration -- an important point we'll touch on later. Here are a few noteworthy trends from the data.
(1) The big story is sub-Saharan Africa
Almost all of the countries growing more than 2 percent per year are in Africa. There are a few reasons for that. Birth rates there tend to be very high. People are living much longer as health standards improve. And the continent is becoming more stable and more peaceful, meaning that there are fewer wars, famines and natural disasters. All of these trends are happening at once and are poised to completely transform Africa. This chart, from a different U.N. agency's population projections, show that Africa's growth is expected to outpace the rest of the world's for the next century, more than quadrupling in size:
Africa's amazing growth could bring great opportunity for the countries there, as well as significant risk. Natural resources will be stretched, risking returns to instability, and as more people move into cities, the demand for social services will go up. But those same trends could see standards of living rise significantly. More immediately, as the U.N. report points out, an unusually high number of sub-Saharan births are among girls age 15 to 19. That is, quite simply, a bad thing: Young mothers are at greater health risk, as are their children, and they are less likely to receive an education or enter the work.
(2) Continued rapid growth in the Middle East
The Arab Middle East has been experiencing a very significant youth bulge over the last few years, meaning that an unusually large share of the population is young people. That's been problematic because when large numbers of young people hit working age at the same time, the Middle Eastern economies aren't able to provide enough jobs. Combine that with the region's stale authoritarian regimes and it's a recipe for political turmoil. That's considered a major factor in the unrest since 2011. With populations there still growing quickly, those trends could continue for some time, if Arab governments are able to get it together.
The highest growth rates in the Middle East -- indeed, in the world -- are actually in the Middle Eastern countries that have seen the most stability during the Arab Spring. The absolute highest growth rate, by far, is in Oman, with 7.9 percent growth annually. That's just staggeringly high; there's no telling what it could mean for the country. Super-rich Qatar has a growth rate of 5.9 percent, also extremely high, though it's likely the tiny Gulf state can use its tremendous oil and gas wealth to absorb the impact. But keep an eye on Jordan: Its 3.5 percent annual growth rate, combined with its poverty and its problematic influx of Syrian refugees, could bring real instability to the little kingdom that has resisted democratization for so long.
(3) Eastern Europe is a demographic disaster (and so is Japan)
When your population is shrinking, that's bad for several reasons. First, it means your population is not growing, which you really need it to be in order to sustain a healthily growing economy. Second, it means that working-age people will make up an ever-smaller share of your population, which will be increasingly dominated by the elderly. Old people typically don't work, and they consume far more social services. So the strain on those services goes up just as the number of people paying into them goes down. It's a recipe for real trouble.
Most of the shrinking countries are in Eastern Europe, where birth rates are very low and lots of people are leaving to seek better opportunities. Some post-Soviet European countries are shrinking up to 0.8 percent per year. That's a lot. The only other shrinking countries are Germany, Japan and Cuba, all at just 0.1 percent per year. But Japan's population decline is expected to accelerate dramatically, as this chart shows:
Japan is the world's third-largest economy. Its shrinking and increasingly elderly population is expected to cause serious trouble for that economy, which also happens to be currently burdened with huge amounts of public debt. That has some economists worried that the country may face a demographic crisis that could become an economic crisis as well. Ironically, many people would like to migrate to Japan and Germany, which would seriously ameliorate their demographic woes, but both countries have strict policies limiting immigration.
(4) Immigration is counteracting the West's demographic slowdown
If you look at Europe and North America, you'll see that birth rates there are pretty low, typically quite close to zero. That's bad news; while too-fast population growth is bad, countries do want some growth, and after centuries of booms, the Western world is seeing that growth slow. It's expected to reverse in a number of countries; Germany is perhaps just the leading trend of looming Western demographic decline.
The exceptions to this trend are countries that have lots of immigration: Ireland, Iceland, Norway are all above 1 percent average annual growth. The United Kingdom and United States, though marked purple, are in the upper end of that range, with 0.6 percent and 0.8 percent annual growth, respectively. That's just a difference of a single percentage point per year, or less, but over time it can make a big difference. Check out this chart showing the projected populations of Western European countries plus South Korea, a similarly developed country:
The trend lines for countries with little immigration are down, meaning eventually they will turn red on a map like the one at the top of this page. The trend lines for countries that foster more immigration tip upward, a much healthier trajectory.
(5) Growth in East Asia is slowing
After a world-changing demographic explosion, East Asia is seeing birth rates slow. It wasn't long ago that countries such as China, South Korea and Burma would all be deep, dark blue on this map. In fact, public health has gone way up in these countries, with people living longer and dying less frequently, which should drive home that birth rates are really coming down in East Asia.
That is, to some extent, healthy. As China's leaders knew when they enacted the deeply controversial "one-child policy," limiting all parents to a single child, the country's population had been growing faster than the economy and government could sustain. The danger comes if the population slowdown continues, as East Asians become more affluent (richer people tend to have fewer babies), and countries like China and South Korea risk a Japan-style demographic crisis. But that is at least a generation away.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/31/how-the-worlds-populations-are-changing-in-one-map/
I Used The World’s First Bitcoin ATM
“Is anyone here not a reporter?” shouted a cameraman as a throng of news teams converged around the world’s first Bitcoin ATM machine, regarding it like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver, the first automated receiver and distributor of the digital currency Bitcoin went live today, creating an early-morning media swarm followed by a steady stream of Bitcoin enthusiasts eager to try out the machine.
The honor of being the world's (and likely the universe's) first Bitcoin ATM user went to Victoria Hansen, who under the camera lights and the beaming grin of her boyfriend used the machine at around 9 a.m. “I bought $200 worth of Bitcoin,” she told Daily Intelligencer. “It’s really simple: You scan your hand, and you get a receipt.” Her plans for the funds were more wholesome than many of the nefarious things you do with the virtual currency. “We’re thinking of going to Bestie for some bratwurst," she said, referring to a local sausage joint. "They take Bitcoin.”
Not wanting to let Victoria and the clutch of pallid gentlemen in pro-Bitcoin T-shirts have all the fun, Intelligencer decided to test out the ATM. Guiding new users through the experience was Jackson Warren, one of the co-founders of the Bitcoiniacs, the Vancouver company that owns the machine and has plans to install four more across the country by December. After choosing whether you want to buy or sell Bitcoin, you have to register with the Robocoin machine — a process that requires placing your hand in the ATM’s scanner a total of six times. (Arguably an off-brand step for a currency that prides itself on privacy.)
Upon receiving a confirmation of registration via e-mail about ten minutes later — you don’t have to give them your e-mail, but it’s easier if you do — you can rescan your hand and proceed with the buy. Inserting $100 worth of multicolor bills into the machine, DI purchased 0.46 of a Bitcoin. Proof of purchase comes in the form of a receipt with QR code and an e-mail informing you that your Bitcoin will arrive sometime within the next hour.
Fortuitously, the value of my fraction of a Bitcoin increased in value by about a few bucks during the hour wait, giving the distinct sense that what I'd purchased was less a currency and more, as Matt O’Brien of The Atlantic has pointed out, a fickle dotcom stock. This volatility isn’t lost on Jackson and his co-founders, but they hope that providing a better infrastructure to increase the distribution of Bitcoins will help stabilize things. “We’re going to keep making it easier” he says, “until one day there’s thousands of these things.”
from Digg Top Stories http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/i-used-the-worlds-first-bitcoin-atm.html
FAA Finally Allows Passengers To Use Gadgets On Planes
Government safety rules are changing to let airline passengers use most electronic devices from gate-to-gate.
The change will let passengers read, work, play games, watch movies and listen to music.
The Federal Aviation Administration says airlines can allow passengers to use the devices during takeoffs and landings on planes that meet certain criteria for protecting aircraft systems from electronic interference.
Most new airliners are expected to meet the criteria, but changes won't happen immediately. Timing will depend upon the airline.
Connections to the Internet to surf, exchange emails, text or download data will still be prohibited below 10,000 feet. Heavier devices like laptops will have to be stowed. Passengers will be told to switch their smartphones, tablets and other devices to airplane mode.
And cellphone calls will still be prohibited.
from Digg Top Stories http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/faa-oks-air-passengers-gadgets-planes-20739500
Hockey Player Casually Pulls Out His Own Tooth
You should probably go ahead and not watch this if you're squeamish. Yes, the tooth was part of a bridge, so the pain might have been minimal, but self-dentistry is never pleasant.
Pittsburgh's Pascal Dupuis took a teammate's stick to the face in last night's win over Boston, and once he got back to the bench he calmly and coolly plucked out the loose tooth and handed it to a trainer. "I tried a second one, too, but it's glued there," Dupuis told the Post-Gazette.
Hockey players are tough, but even they have their limits. Sidney Crosby, sitting nearby, said he told Dupuis, "Hurry up, you're grossing me out. Just get rid of it."
H/t Brad
from Digg Top Stories http://deadspin.com/pascal-dupuis-pulls-out-his-own-tooth-1455963582
True Facts About The Cuttlefish
from Digg Top Stories http://videos.digg.com/post/65610054016/true-facts-about-the-cuttlefish
Your Coffee Is Getting Better
Customers line-up to use the world's first ever permanent bitcoin ATM unveiled at a coffee shop in Vancouver, British Columbia October 29, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Andy Clark
LONDON |
(Reuters) - Coffee drinkers in Brazil, America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East are expected to down more arabica beans in their brew in the coming year as cheap prices attract additional demand for the higher spec product.
A surplus from top grower Brazil after two successive bumper crops helped drag arabica prices to a four-and-a-half-year low this week, which is likely to prompt roasters to increase the use of the bean in their blends.
But drinkers detecting more of arabica's distinctively sweeter, gentler notes in their cup will probably be saying more about the power of suggestion than their discernment, as roasters will only be tinkering with blend changes that consumers are unlikely to notice.
A Reuters poll of 10 international coffee traders and roasters showed that between 3 and 4 million 60-kilogramme (132 lb) bags of coffee demand - out of a market total of more than 140 million - is forecast to switch out of robusta beans into arabica in 2013/14.
Arabica beans are usually found in high quality brands and typically trade at a premium to the hardier, more caffeine-rich robusta beans, which are widely used in instant coffee.
Lately the price difference between some of the lower grade arabicas and robustas has been eroded, putting in reverse the trend from 2011/12, when roasters increased the proportion of robusta in their blends to the tune of around 5 million bags globally due to a historically high premium on arabicas.
"Clearly it's happening, although I don't think it's going to be as big as the switch we saw out of arabica in 2011/12," a European analyst said.
"The biggest swing is in Brazil."
The world's top coffee grower is also one of the largest consumers, using over 20 million bags a year. Up to 1.5 million bags of Brazil's domestic robusta consumption was forecast to switch into arabica in 2013/14.
"Domestic roasters are fairly flexible so they can move out of robusta into low-grade arabicas on a large scale," said a trader, adding that Brazil was a very price-sensitive market.
SECRET RECIPE
Coffee roasters, typically secretive about their blends, stepped up substitution of arabicas with robustas after ICE benchmark arabica futures rose to a 34-year high in May 2011 and the premium over robusta hit about $1.90/lb.
The premium has since narrowed to below 40 cents, and dealers said it could shrink further.
There is a wide spectrum of qualities within the arabica and robusta varieties, so the premium varies between different grades, with traders noting that Brazil's rio minas arabica had traded at a discount to some robustas in the past month.
"There will be switching, but the quantity will depend on the quality of low-grade arabicas," a trader at an international roaster said.
Roasters have become more nimble in recent years to enable themselves to react to prices and availability.
"In general customers (roasters) have become a little bit more flexible in comparison to 10 years ago. In the past the blend or ingredients were written in stone, they were untouchable, and that has changed," a coffee trader said.
Beyond Brazil, traders and roasters said America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East could also see some switching, the trader said, noting that emerging coffee markets were less sensitive to taste changes.
"In emerging countries people go more for price than anything else; they are not so picky quality-wise," the head of coffee at an international trade house said, adding that the Western European market was not as flexible.
Robusta coffee futures traded at a three-year low this week, but traders were more bullish on their price outlook versus arabicas, pointing to low exchange stocks as a trigger for future price rises to attract fresh beans. [ID:nL5N0ID3XO]
In September brokerage Marex Spectron forecast 2013/14 global coffee supply and demand at close to balanced, after a 7 million bag surplus - all in arabicas - the previous year.
Brazil's coffee production rises and falls from one year to the next due to its biennial cycle, as arabica trees need time to recover after bearing large quantities of cherries.
The variations between 'on' and 'off' years have been diminishing, however, partly due to improved maintenance, replanting of trees with higher-yielding varieties and increased use of fertilizer and irrigation.
The International Coffee Organization has not yet published forecasts for 2013/14. It estimated 2012/13 global production at 145.2 million bags, of which around two fifths is robusta. The ICO pegged world consumption for calendar year 2012 growing 2.2 percent to 142 million bags.
Future demand growth is expected to be focused in Asia, the region where most of the world's robusta is grown, and where coffee is mostly consumed in the form of soluble or instant.
"I don't think that (the switching) means robusta demand is falling. I think demand in Asia is strong enough that it more than cancels any of that out. Both robusta and arabica demand will grow this year," a trader said.
(Additional reporting by Michael Hogan; Editing by Veronica Brown and Will Waterman)
from Digg Top Stories http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/30/us-coffee-arabica-idUSBRE99T14420131030
When Will There Be More Dead People Than Alive On Facebook?
When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?
Emily Dunham
Either the 2060s or the 2130s.
There are not a lot of dead people on Facebook. The main reasons for this is that Facebook—and its users—are young. The average Facebook user has gotten older over the last few years, but the site is still used at a much higher rate by the young than by the old.[1]There are a zillion surveys confirming this, such as this one from eMarketer.
The Past:
Based on the site's growth rate, and the age breakdown of their users over time,[2]You can get user counts for each age group from Facebook's create-an-ad tool, although you may want to try to account for the fact that Facebook's age limits cause some people to lie about their ages. there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died.
These people are, at the moment, spread out pretty evenly across the age spectrum. Young people have a much lower death rate than people in their sixties or seventies, but they make up a substantial share of the dead on Facebook simply because there have been so many of them using it.
The Future:
About 290,000 US Facebook users will die (or have died) in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million.[3]Note: In some of these projections, I used US age/usage data extrapolated to the Facebook userbase as a whole, because it's easier to find US census and actuarial numbers than to assemble the country-by-country for the whole Facebook-using world. The US isn't a perfect model of the world, but the basic dynamics—young people's Facebook adoption determines the site's success or failure while population growth continues for a while and then levels off—will probably hold approximately true. If we assume a rapid Facebook saturation in the developing world, which currently has a faster-growing and younger population, it shifts many of the landmarks by a handful of years, but doesn't change the overall picture as much as you might expect. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again.
Even if Facebook closes registration tomorrow, the number of deaths per year will continue to grow for many decades, as the generation who was in college between 2000 and 2020 grows old.
The deciding factor in when the dead will outnumber the living is whether Facebook adds new living users—ideally, young ones—fast enough to outrun this tide of death for a while.
Facebook 2100:
This brings us to the question of Facebook's future.
We don't have enough experience with social networks to say with any kind of certainty how long Facebook will last. Most websites have flared up and then gradually declined in popularity, so it's reasonable to assume Facebook will follow that pattern.[4]I'm assuming, in these cases, that no data is ever deleted. So far, that's been a reasonable assumption; if you've made a Facebook profile, that data probably still exists, and most people who stop using a service don't bother to delete their profile. If that behavior changes, or if Facebook performs a mass purging of their archives, the balance could change rapidly and unpredictably.
In that scenario, where Facebook starts losing market share later this decade and never recovers, Facebook's crossover date—the date when the dead outnumber the living—will come sometime around 2065.
But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.
If Facebook is with us for generations, then the crossover date could be as late as the mid-2100s.
That seems unlikely. Nothing lasts forever, and rapid change has been the norm for anything built on computer technology. The ground is littered with the bones of websites and technologies that seemed like permanent institutions ten years ago.
It's possible the reality could be somewhere in between.[5]Of course, if there's a sudden rapid increase in the death rate of Facebook users—possibly one that includes humans in general—the crossover could happen tomorrow. We'll just have to wait and find out.
The fate of our accounts:
Facebook can afford to keep all our pages and data indefinitely. Living users will always generate more data than dead ones, and the accounts for active users are the ones that will need to be easily accessible. Even if accounts for dead (or inactive) people make up a majority of their users, it will probably never add up to a large part of their overall infrastructure budget.
More important will be our decisions. What do we want for those pages? Unless we demand that Facebook deletes them, they will presumably, by default, keep copies of everything forever. Even if they don't, other data-vacuuming organizations will.
Right now, next-of-kin can convert a dead person's Facebook profile into a memorial page. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven't yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next-of-kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on?
These are issues that we're currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it.
The basic pieces that make up a human life don't change. We've always eaten, learned, grown, fallen in love, fought, and died. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviors around these same activites.
Like every group that came before us, we're learning how to play those same games on our particular playing field. We're developing, through sometimes messy trial and error, a new set of social norms for dating, arguing, learning, and growing on the internet. Sooner or later, we'll figure out how to mourn.
Happy Halloween!
from Digg Top Stories http://what-if.xkcd.com/69/
You Might Be Better Off Learning Math In Kazakhstan Than These States
Unlike students around the world, Americans do not take the international exam Trends in International Math and Science Study, which measures how primary school students are faring in major subjects. However, a study released by the U.S. government last week shows how American students WOULD fare, if they were to take the test.
The results were mixed. While Massachusetts, the highest performing state in the country, had scores aligning with the education powerhouse of Japan, other states like Mississippi and Alabama had scores that were similar to countries that aren't typically lauded for their excellent education systems.
Infographic by Jan Diehm for the Huffington Post.
Copy the code below to embed this infographic on your site:
Earlier on HuffPost:
from Digg Top Stories http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/american-math-scores_n_4175031.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics
Inside The Factory That Built Cars For The Soviet Leadership
We are about to visit the shop where they make executive class cars, and we are going to do it illegally. It’s one of the shops of the factory named after I. A. Likhachev. In some areas it looks abandoned nevertheless it still works and remains under guard.
This shop was built in the 30s, probably during the second reconstruction of the factory.
There was time when even authorities were not allowed to enter the shop freely. They were required to have a special pass from KGB.
The first executive class car made by the factory was ZIS-101 ( 1936 – 1941 г.). In general they produced 8752 cars.
Click here for all pictures on one page
from Digg Top Stories http://englishrussia.com/2013/10/30/the-place-where-cars-for-country-leaders-were-made/
Are We Still Evolving?
Our evolutionary trajectory over the last three million years took us from small-brained walking apes who lived in East African grasslands to modern humans who have colonized just about every type of environment of every major land mass on the planet. So what's next? Are we still evolving? If so, have our culture and our technology changed our evolutionary trajectory? Using new genetic inventories of world populations, researchers are now tracing our recent evolutionary path in remarkable detail. They are discovering that our culture and our general restlessness as a species have had a big impact on our genetic makeup.
A human living in Africa 50,000 years ago wouldn't look out of place groomed and dressed up in a business suit, sipping coffee at a Starbucks in Manhattan. Yet while fully modern humans evolved in Southern Africa, a glance around a Manhattan Starbucks is enough to show you that human evolution has continued since we migrated out of Africa and settled the rest of the world: our stature, skin color, hair, eye color, and other facial features clearly show where in the world at least some of our ancestors lived. Modern humans began branching out into the Near East, Asia, Europe, and Australia by about 40,000 years ago, finally arriving in South America by 12,000 years ago. As our species colonized new environments around the world, we confronted new foods, new pathogens, and other new challenges posed by differences in sunlight, temperature, and altitude. Different populations around the world evolved in response to their unique environmental challenges; as a result, we differ from each other not only in our outward appearance, but also in the inner workings of our bodies. The effects of different evolved adaptations among humans in different parts of world can be seen today in the strong influence our ancestry can have on our health.
By moving around so much, we stir up the human gene pool and alter how evolutionary pressures act on our genes.
To get a better understanding of the changes in our recent evolutionary past, scientists have been looking under the hood at the genetic workings of those evolutionary changes. They're using large genetic inventories of different world populations, such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, to look for mutations that show signs of being actively promoted by evolution. Among the findings are mutations that cause lighter skin color in northern human populations. Lighter colored skin may have evolved in response to the need to maintain sunlight-activated vitamin D synthesis as humans migrated northward. Scientists have discovered different mutations in Europeans and East Asians that are responsible for the lighter skin color in these populations. Other studies have uncovered mutations responsible for straight hair in Asians and blue eyes in Europeans; the evolutionary basis for the short stature of “Pygmy” populations that live in the tropical forests of Africa, Asia, and South America; and the different genetic adaptations of Andean, Tibetan, and Ethiopian high-altitude societies to low oxygen levels that would make the rest of us sick. These changes may seem subtle when you consider what can happen over millions of years, but there is no question that humans have continued to evolve.
There is also no question that we've managed to influence the course of our own evolution. One of the biggest cultural changes we've undergone as a species has been to settle down into villages and cities, and support ourselves by raising crops and livestock. In the process, we've altered the evolution of our immune system and our metabolism. The clearest example of a diet-induced evolutionary change is adult lactose tolerance in dairy-consuming Europeans and African Maasai, a useful trait to have before the availability of Lactaid.
Our species' wanderlust has also had a profound impact on how we've experienced evolutionary change. Much of our genetic makeup is due to what geneticists call founder effects, meaning that our genes reflect the chance membership of the small band of colonists that we've descended from, rather than evolutionary pressure to adapt. The fact that Scots commonly have red hair, while Norwegians have blond hair is likely due to founder effects and not because red hair is better suited to the Scottish climate. Our long tradition of pulling up stakes and seeking our fortunes elsewhere has also had the effect of putting the brakes on natural selection in many cases. One research team studied the fate of seemingly favorable mutations worldwide and concluded that human "populations may be too mobile, or their identities too fluid" for advantageous mutations to spread completely through a population. By moving around so much, we stir up the human gene pool and alter how evolutionary pressures act on our genes.
The recent evolutionary changes studied by scientists all occurred well before a few game-changing developments that include antibiotics, vaccines, mass-produced food, fertility drugs, and online dating services. We've raised the odds that, in most areas of the world, children will live to adulthood and go on to have their own children. Does this mean that we've transcended the messy process of evolution and made ourselves largely immune to natural selection? Not quite—just because our children aren't eaten by predators or don’t succumb to childhood diseases does not mean that evolution has lost its power over our species. For the past 40,000 years, we've been adapting to the local environments that we've colonized; in the future, we will adapt to the social and physical environment we are making for ourselves. We'll face the uncertain new challenges of climate change, but we also continue to confront the questions of how to successfully choose a mate and whether and when to have children. More people are choosing to have children later in life or not at all, a choice that generally wasn't an option for most women not too long ago. The well-being of our children today depends less on the chance occurrence of a famine or epidemic, and more on the choices we make as parents. These kinds of decisions clearly influence whose DNA ends up in the next generation. Our future evolutionary trajectory depends on how billions of people resolve these choices over the next 40,000 years.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.psmag.com/science/still-evolving-69121/
Gargantuan Chinese Officials Star In Best/Worst Photoshop Of The Year
Photoshop is the scourge of Chinese officialdom. Only recently, criminals in the country's southern Hunan province were splicing the faces of officials into pornography stills, which they used as blackmail leverage. And when party leaders try to wield photoshop to their own advantage, things have a tendency to go remarkably wrong.
What you're supposed to see in this photograph, taken in Ningguo County, Anhui province, are four party honchos, including the city's vice mayor, visiting a 100-year-old woman. What you actually see, however, are four curious, middle-aged giants hovering over an elderly hobbit.
Some local citizens, angry after the government cancelled an online fundraising drive, dug up the photo from the county's web page, part of a set showing the officials visiting elderly residents to celebrate China's "Elderly Day." The photo has since been paraded across Chinese social media as more evidence showing the dishonesty of China's ruling class and the latest in an infamous series of poorly photoshopped propaganda pictures.
What's really strange here, as Offbeat China notes, is that those officials really did visit the elderly woman. "It’s more [a] matter of stupidity than dishonesty," the site observes. As if those options are mutually exclusive.
H/T Beijing Cream | Photo via ChinaNews.com
from Digg Top Stories http://www.dailydot.com/lol/giant-chinese-officials-elderly-visit-photoshop-anhui/