ZackVision: Browsing

• Phys Ed: Does Stretching Before Running Prevent Injuries? - NYTimes.com
  Sep 1, 10
  Should you stretch before a run? That question, which has prompted countless academic studies, debates and inter-running-partner squabbles, is now at the heart of a notable new study published in August on the Web site of USA Track and Field, the sport’s national governing body. The study, one of the largest of its kind, involved almost 1,400 runners, from age 13 to past 60, who were assigned randomly to two groups. The first group did not stretch before their runs, while otherwise maintaining their normal workout routine: the same mileage, warm-up (minus any stretching) and so on. The second group stretched, having received photographs and specific instructions for a series of simple, traditional poses, like leaning over and touching toes, that focused on the calf, hamstring and quadriceps muscles. The volunteers were told to hold each stretch for 20 seconds, a technique known as static stretching. The entire routine required three to five minutes and was to be completed immediately before a run. The volunteers followed their assigned regimens for three months. Predictably, since running, as a sport, has a high injury rate, quite a few became injured during the three months. About 16 percent of the group that didn’t stretch were hobbled badly enough to miss training for at least a week (the researchers’ definition of a running injury), while about 16 percent of the group that did stretch were laid up for at least a week. The percentages, in other words, were virtually identical. Static stretching had proved to be a wash in terms of protecting against injury. It “neither prevented nor induced injury when compared with not stretching before running,” the study’s authors concluded, raising the obvious corollary, so why in the world do so many of us still stretch? Stretching is, of course, a contentious issue in sports. The bulk of the available science strongly suggests that static stretching before a workout not only does not prevent overuse injuries but also may actually hinder athletic performance. “There is a very important neurological effect of stretching,” said Ross Tucker, Ph.D., a physiologist in South Africa and co-author of the Web site The Science of Sport. “There is a reflex that prevents the muscle from being stretching too much,” which is activated by static stretching, inducing the muscle to become, in effect, tighter in self-protection. Past studies have found that athletes’ vertical jump is lower after a bout of static stretching than with no stretching at all. They can’t generate as much power. Meanwhile, other studies have found, like the new U.S.A.T.F. report, that static stretching seems to have little benefit in terms of injury prevention, particularly against the overuse injuries common in running. “The findings of this present study are totally in line with the existing literature,” said Malachy McHugh, Ph.D., the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma and the lead author of a comprehensive new review of decades’ worth of stretching research published in April in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. Related More Phys Ed columns Faster, Higher, Stronger Fitness and Nutrition News But many people remain fiercely attached to their stretching routines. “It was really hard to recruit runners” who, used to stretching, would agree to be randomly assigned to the nonstretching group, said Alan Roth, Ph.D., a former board member of U.S.A.T.F. and director of the study. Once they understood that they might be required to not stretch for three months, they declined to participate. It took the researchers more than two years to coax enough runners to join and complete the study, generating enough data for meaningful results. And the results are “meaningful,” according to Dr. Dan Pareles, an orthopedic surgeon in the Washington, D.C., area who originated and led the study. “I had gone into this thinking that stretching would prevent injuries. I was fairly sure of it. But that’s not what we found.” Instead, static stretching provided no particular benefit. On the other hand, it didn’t cause harm, either. One anomalous finding of the U.S.A.T.F. study was that runners who were used to stretching and were assigned to the nonstretching group became injured at a disproportionately high rate. Almost 30 percent of them wound up hurting themselves during the three months. But no experts associated with the study or who have read the results believe that this finding intimates that stretching had been keeping them uninjured in the past. More likely, Mr. McHugh said, they fell victim to a training error, “which,” he explained, “in reality can mean any abrupt change in training patterns. Your body adapts to its routine, and if that routine is monotonously habitual as with many runners, it doesn’t take much of a change to cause an injury.” So is the primary takeaway of the USA Track and Field study that, whatever you’re doing now in terms of stretching or not stretching, don’t stop? Possibly, but most physiologists, taking a broader view of the available science, would probably say no. “In all our involvement with elite athletes now, we don’t do this kind of static stretching anymore,” Mr. Ross said. Instead, the best science suggests that an ideal preworkout routine “consists of a very easy warm-up, followed by a gradual increase in intensity and then dynamic stretching,” he said. Dynamic stretching, or exercises that increase your joints’ range of motion via constant movement, does not seem to invoke the inhibitory reflex of static stretching, Mr. Ross said. When “you stretch through movement, you involve the brain much more, teaching proprioception and control, as well as improving flexibility.” In practice, dynamic stretching would mean that, instead of leaning over and touching your toes or pushing against a wall to stretch your hamstrings before running, you might raise your leg before you in a marching motion, and then swing it back, in a well-controlled arc, suggested Phil Wharton, a neuromuscular therapist and founder, with his father, Jim, of the Wharton Performance clinic in New York City. Or lift your leg to the side and scissor it in front of you to warm up the hip joint. But make any such alterations to your routine gradually, with circumspection. If there’s one lesson from the U.S.A.T.F. study, said Dr. Pareles, it was that “sudden changes are probably not a good idea.”
• FRBSF Economic Letter: The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity (2010-26, 8/30/2010)
  Aug 31, 10
  The effects of immigration on the total output and income of the U.S. economy can be studied by comparing output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few new foreign-born workers. Statistical analysis of state-level data shows that immigrants expand the economy's productive capacity by stimulating investment and promoting specialization. This produces efficiency gains and boosts income per worker. At the same time, evidence is scant that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers.
• How Immigration Boosts Your Pay
  Aug 30, 10
  Felix Salmon points to a new research note from the San Francisco Fed about the effects of immigration on U.S. employment and productivity. The bottom line results are interesting: the author says that immigration has no effect on employment ("the economy absorbs immigrants by expanding job opportunities rather than by displacing workers born in the United States"); it has a strong upward effect on average income ("total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with [...] an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker"); and immigration improves an economy's total factor productivity dramatically. Like I said: pretty interesting. But what I thought was even more interesting was the explanation that followed. Why does immigration increase average income? How does it increase productivity and efficiency? Here's the scoop:

  The analysis begins with the well-documented phenomenon that U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations....Because those born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks, such as manual labor. Just as in the standard concept of comparative advantage, this results in specialization and improved production efficiency. If these patterns are driving the differences across states, then in states where immigration has been heavy, U.S.-born workers with less education should have shifted toward more communication-intensive jobs. Figure 3 shows exactly this....In states with a heavy concentration of less-educated immigrants, U.S.-born workers have migrated toward more communication-intensive occupations. Those jobs pay higher wages than manual jobs, so such a mechanism has stimulated the productivity of workers born in the United States and generated new employment opportunities.

  What's really striking about this is that the very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don't speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they'd just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize. The usual caveats apply here. This is only one study. (Well, two actually, but still.) And in order to generate useful results the authors have to control for a whole menagerie of variables that can muck things up. There's always a chance that some important variable got missed or that another one got controlled for incorrectly. So don't take this as the last word. It does, however, join a growing literature that suggests immigration has no negative effect on wages and might actually have a positive effect. Interesting stuff.    
• Five Best Text Recognition Tools [Hive Five]
  Aug 29, 10
  Working with text on your computer offers a range of possibilities in searching and editing that simply aren't available with hard copy text. Check out these five text recognition tools to get your printed text into your computer. More »
  
• How Do I Normalize the Audio in My Music and Video Collection? [Ask Lifehacker]
  Aug 26, 10
  Dear Lifehacker,
  I have a large music and video collection but the audio levels are all over the place? How can I normalize them so I don't have to constantly adjust the volume myself? More »
  
• Prison Rape: Eric Holder’s Unfinished Business
  Aug 26, 10
  James Stenson Bryson Martel, who contracted AIDS as a result of rape in prison. He died in June 2010 at age 47. A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides grim reaffirmation of something we already knew: sexual violence is epidemic within our country’s prisons and jails. According to the report, 64,500 of the inmates who were in a state or federal prison on the day the latest BJS survey was administered had been sexually abused at their current facility within the previous year, as had 24,000 of those who were in a county jail that day—a total of 88,500 people. In fact, as we’ve explained before, the true national total is much higher. The BJS numbers don’t include thousands who we know are sexually abused in juvenile detention and other kinds of corrections facilities every year, nor do they account for the constant turnover among jailed detainees. Stays in jail are typically short, and several times as many people pass through jail in a year as are held there on any given day. Overall, we can confidently say that well over 100,000 people are sexually abused in American detention facilities every year. As appalling as this figure is, mere numbers can obscure what is at issue here. So consider the case of Scott Howard. Scott was a gay, non-violent, first-time inmate in a Colorado prison when he was targeted by members of the “2-11 crew,” a white supremacist gang with over 1,000 members in prisons throughout the state. For two years he was forced into prostitution by the gang’s leaders, repeatedly raped and made to perform oral sex. Even after he told prison staff that he was being raped and needed protection from the gang, Scott was told that nothing could be done unless he named his abusers—even though they had threatened to kill him if he did. Because Scott is openly gay, some officials blamed him for the attacks, saying that as a homosexual he should expect to be targeted by one gang or another. And by his account, even those officers who were not hostile didn’t know how to respond to his reports, because appropriate procedures were not in place. They failed to take even the most basic measures to protect him. Ultimately, despite his fear, Scott did identify some of the gang members who had raped him. Not only did the prison authorities again fail to respond, they later put Scott in a holding cell with one of his previous assailants on the day he was to be released from state custody. Again, he was beaten and forced to perform oral sex. Scott had a civil lawsuit settled in his favor recently, winning financial damages and seventeen policy changes that will now become mandatory in the Colorado prison system. Otherwise, however, nothing about his story is unusual. In 2003 Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), legislation that, among other things, called into being the bipartisan National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC), a panel of experts charged with devising national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of sexual abuse in detention. But the implementation of these standards is now being held up, because, as Attorney General Eric Holder has explained, according to PREA the new rules should not “impose substantial additional costs compared to the costs presently expended by Federal, State, and local prison authorities.” Last September, the Justice Department commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton to study what it would cost to implement the NPREC standards. Unfortunately, the results of that study are too flawed to be of much use. Even more concerning is that Mr. Holder has commissioned no study of the benefits of reducing prisoner rape; nor, apparently, does he plan to. Yet as a brief submitted to the Department of Justice by New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity makes clear, “substantial additional costs” can only be understood in relation to the standards’ projected benefits. Moreover, Mr. Holder is legally obligated to analyze the costs and the benefits of the new standards together: he cannot give greater emphasis to one half of the calculation than the other. By failing to perform proper analysis, the Attorney General is delaying the reform mandated by a unanimous Congress in passing PREA—and he has already missed his statutory deadline for issuing a final rule on the standards by more than two months. Scott Howard, who was repeatedly raped in a Colorado prison Prisoner rape is far more a legal and moral issue than a financial one. Since cost considerations are impeding reform, however, it is worth taking a closer look at the true financial implications of sexual abuse behind bars. There are at least two ways in which the Department might try to estimate the value of reducing sexual abuse in detention. One—called “contingent valuation,” and used frequently by environmental economists—seeks to assign dollar-values to goods not traded in the marketplace. Using its techniques, a recent study concluded that the public values the prevention of a single incident of rape or sexual assault at $237,000, a greater worth than it places on preventing any other kind of crime except homicide. Alternately, the Justice Department can try to quantify particular, identifiable savings and benefits of preventing prisoner rape, and weigh them against particular, quantifiable costs. The costs (no matter how benefits are measured) are the investments needed by corrections systems to comply with the recommended standards, divided by the Department’s estimation of the percentage by which the standards will actually reduce sexual abuse in detention. As for the benefits, a partial list of those to be considered might begin with the medical cost of treating rape victims, which must be shouldered by corrections systems. This is much more expensive in the prison setting than in the general community, because inmates must be transported to often-distant hospitals and escorted the whole time by security staff. And it is a cost that must be paid, not for every victim of prisoner rape, but for every instance. We can deduce from the new BJS study that victims of sexual abuse in detention suffer an average of three to five incidents apiece. The Washington Department of Corrections estimates that the cost of providing mental health treatment for victims of prisoner rape or sexual assault—which is different from immediate medical care—is approximately $9,700 per victim. Neither category of care includes treatment for HIV, Hepatitis C, and other sexually transmitted infections, which are of course spread by prisoner rape and also impose great costs on prison health services. Making our prisons and jails safer should have a positive effect generally on the mental health problems that are endemic there. And reducing prisoner rape would also lower the number of suicides and unwanted pregnancies in our prison systems. Quite apart from the horror it inflicts on the victim, failing to protect an inmate from sexual abuse contributes to the substantial legal costs our prison systems face. While it is extraordinarily difficult for an incarcerated victim to bring a civil lawsuit—the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) was enacted with the explicit purpose of limiting prisoners’ ability to be heard in court—prisons have still had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and fees to inmates who can establish that officials were “deliberately indifferent” in failing to protect them. When inmates do report sexual abuse in prison, they are often put in “administrative segregation,” isolated housing that can entail being locked alone in a tiny cell for up to twenty-three hours a day. While this is purportedly done to protect them from more assaults, such housing is also used for punishment: inmates in solitary confinement are denied many programs and services, and the extensive isolation often causes or exacerbates mental and emotional problems. It is also enormously expensive. In California, for example, it costs an additional $14,600 per year to house a prisoner in administrative segregation. Prisons and jails in which sexual abuse is widespread have been shown to be more dangerous than others generally. At such facilities, violence of every kind, importation of contraband, and other problems tend to flourish. Facilities with less sexual abuse thereby have lower overall security costs and fewer security breaches. When prisons are safer for inmates, they are also safer for corrections staff. The various measures called for by NPREC’s standards—among them better surveillance technology and external oversight—will provide a wide range of benefits for the facilities in which they are implemented, going far beyond the reduction of sexual violence. Preventing prisoner rape will also help inmates successfully re-enter their communities when they’re released from prison (as almost all will be, eventually). Not only will recidivism be decreased and the enormous costs of re-incarceration lowered, this will lower the costs of disability payments, public housing, and other government-subsidy programs. As we know from our extensive work with survivors of prisoner rape, former inmates who have not been sexually abused are far more likely to become members of the legitimate workforce and pay taxes. Severe financial, emotional, and social burdens are removed from the families who support former inmates if their loved ones are released from prison without the lasting trauma of sexual abuse. And the children who depend on those former inmates will also do better. Today, more than a million children in this country have at least one incarcerated parent. Testifying before a House subcommittee, Attorney General Holder said, “We want to effect substantive, real change, so that the horrors that too often are visited upon people in our prisons [are] eliminated…. It is something that I think needs to be done, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” That was on March 16. In mid-August a Department spokesman said that the Attorney General would send a proposed rule on the standards to the White House Office of Management and Budgets “in the fall.” Even then, however, it will take months for another layer of review. If well over 100,000 inmates are sexually abused every year, that is something like 300 every day, or even more. Since Attorney General Holder said that change needed to come “yesterday”—five months ago now—more than 40,000 people have been sexually abused in detention. Good corrections officers are doing what they can, but they are desperate for the support that binding national standards would give them. It is time for Mr. Holder to act.
• Garmin GPSMAP 62s review
  Aug 25, 10
  Hands on with the Garmin GPSMAP 62s It’s finally here… The Garmin GPSMAP 62s brings a long-awaited update to the fabled and much-loved GPSMAP 60CSx, which has reigned supreme as the gold standard handheld GPS for more than four years. During that time, Garmin experimented with new interfaces, first with the Colorado series, and later with the Oregon and Dakota lines. These have been fine-tuned through many software updates, adding things like paperless geocaching and the ability to add custom maps and aerial imagery. Quick links More Garmin GPSMAP 62s reviews
  Garmin GPSMAP 62s resources
  How much does it cost? With the 62 series (and the boater friendly companion 78 series, which shares the same interface), Garmin has married the best features of the 60/76 models, with many of the advantages of the Oregon line. The problematic high-resolution screens found on the Colorado and Oregon lines did not make it to the 62 series (although I should note that this problem has largely been solved in the latest model, the Oregon 450). Before we get into the details, lets look at some closely… Related models Drop down a notch to the GPSMAP 62 and you’ll lose wireless data sharing, the barometric altimeter, tri-axial electronic compass and the micro-SD slot; still, this one has enough internal memory to satisfy most people’s needs Going the other direction, the GPSMAP 62st adds pre-loaded 1:100,000 scale US topo maps to the features found on the 62s, but with all the free maps available, there’s little reason to bump up to this model To see how the GPSMAP 62s stands up against other Garmin models, check out my Garmin handheld GPS comparison chart   I’ll discuss the display and feature set first, then look at performance Portions of the following were adapted from my review of the previously released Garmin GPSMAP 78s and other units with shared features. Garmin GPSMAP 62s display With transflective TFT screens, the greater the pixel density, the less light that can be reflected back to the user. In order to maintain the bright screen found on the 60/76 series, Garmin left the resolution (160 x 240 pixels) alone. Screen size remains unchanged too, at 1.6 x 2.2”. The 62 and 78 series do enjoy an increased range of colors that can be displayed (65,000 vs. 256 in the 60/76 series). The result is a bright display, not quite as large or as high resolution as the Oregon series, but with much better visibility in a wide range of conditions. I definitely noticed the lower resolution, but these are the tradeoffs you make. The only time the screen seems cramped to me is when I have a dashboard showing on the map screen (discussed more below). Shown above is a photo taken in full sun, without backlight, comparing the 60CSX and 62s. It is difficult to capture screen visibility on film, but I find these two displays comparable in a wide range of conditions. Garmin GPSMAP 62s interface Garmin hit a home run on the interface. They did an excellent job taking the best aspects of the Oregon series and making it work on a non-touchscreen unit. I think it is actually better than the Oregon except for when it comes to text-entry, where the touchscreen excels. The 62/78 series interface makes it much quicker to navigate main menu items. A Page Ribbon menu appears when  you press the Page or Quit buttons (see image at right). Just like on the 60/76 series, these buttons advance through pages in forward or reverse order, respectively. The Page Ribbon menu item that appears is the next screen in the sequence. After a second or two, that screen will automatically open. Or you can press Enter to go there right away, or continue pressing Page or Quit to advance to other pages in the sequence; stop on one and it will open. Page Ribbon items and their order can be customized. I prefer this interface to the old style, but you may not. In that case, you can set the unit to a classic style menu and get the old 60/76 series functionality, eliminating the Page Ribbon. Newer features on the Garmin GPSMAP 62s The 62 series inherited a number of features from the Colorado, Dakota and/or Oregon series. These include the ability to utilize Garmin custom maps and BirdsEye aerial imagery, a tri-axial compass, new customization options, advanced track navigation, wireless data transfer and paperless geocaching. None of these were available on the 60/76 series; I’ll explore each in more detail. Custom maps and BirdsEye imagery Garmin custom maps allows you to put just about any map image on the 62s. Found a PDF park trail map online? Add it to your GPS! The image at left below shows a custom map — a USGS topo (raster) image. You can read more about this feature by checking out my posts on Garmin custom maps. With Garmin’s BirdsEye aerial imagery program, a $29.99 annual subscription allows you to add aerial imagery to the GPSMAP 62s. Since I don’t yet have a BirdsEye subscription for my unit, I’m showing a Jefferson Memorial aerial image using Garmin custom maps, but hey, you get the idea. You can read more in my posts on Garmin BirdsEye imagery. Tri-axial compass Having a tri-axial compass means you don’t have to hold the unit level while navigating. The downside is that the calibration process is more complicated than that for a two-axis electronic compass. It’s the same procedure that is used on the Dakota 20 and Oregon x50 series — here’s a brief video I shot of it. The compass should be recalibrated every time you change the batteries in the unit. Customizing the Garmin GPSMAP 62s The 62s offers lots of options for customization. I highly recommend you take the time to set up the following. Page sequence – You can customize the page sequence by choosing Main Menu > Setup > Page Sequence. This will allow you to select which pages appear in the page sequence and their order. The Page and Quit buttons move forward and backwards (respectively) through pages. I usually put the map screen as my first page and the trip computer last; this way I can toggle between them with the page and quit buttons. Profiles – The 62s comes with recreational, geocaching, automotive, marine, fitness and classic profiles. You can switch profiles by going to Main Menu > Profile Change. Or create a new one by going to Main Menu > Setup > Profiles. Select the new profile to give it a name. Any changes you make in menus or other settings will be retained in that profile. So start changing things! Want track up when geocaching and north up when biking? No problem. How about a separate profile that just shows USGS topos or aerial imagery? The possibilities are nearly endless. Data fields – You can change data fields on just about any screen that has these; simply press Menu > Change Data Fields. Dashboards – Instead of data fields (and in some cases in addition to), you can select a dashboard for the map, compass and trip computer screens. Choices (depending upon page) may include automotive, stopwatch, small or large data field, recreational, compass, geocaching or elevation plot. I’ve included screenshots showing the last four below. For the trip computer and compass pages, you access this via Menu > Change Dashboard. For the map screen, choose Menu > Setup Map > Data Fields > Dashboard. The one downside here is the small screen on the 62 series; using a dashboard can significantly reduce map real estate.
  Track navigation With the GPSMAP 62s, you can select a track to navigate and a route will be created. Waypoints are automatically generated for major high and low elevation points, and start and finish; these and any user waypoints along the track are added to the route. I’m a heavy user of track navigation. If I head out for a trail I’ve never traveled before, I do a search online for tracks (favorite search terms are .gpx, gps, trail name, and park name) and load the track to the device. One advantage of this new track navigation feature is that, unlike typical backcountry route navigation, you’ll get an estimate of actual trail distance rather than “as the crow flies” mileage. Screenshot at right. Paperless Geocaching The 62 series is set up for full paperless geocaching support, meaning you can see the description, logs, and hint, and you can log your attempt (find, DNF, etc.) for later transfer back to geocaching.com. Speaking of which, full access to these features requires a premium membership at geocaching.com. Shown below, clockwise from top left: closest geocaches, geocache description, map with geocaching dashboard, recent logs. Wireless data transfer The GPSMAP 62s is capable of wireless data transfer with other compatible Garmin units. You can transfer waypoints, tracks, routes and paperless geocache details. Other features of note Most of the following aren’t that new, but they are worth mentioning anyway: Route, Track and Waypoint management The GPSMAP 62 series has excellent route, track and waypoint management tools, including: Waypoints – The ability to project a waypoint, average location, set proximity alerts, and to reposition a waypoint at your current location.  Tracks – You can choose to hide or show multiple tracks on the map, view an elevation plot, and give them a custom color (17 colors are available). The image at the right shows a track in red (a record of a previous trip). The color of the active track may also be changed. There’s a good thread at the GPSMAP wiki that delves more into track archiving and storage.  The 2.44 beta firmware update brought additional archiving improvements; hopefully this will make it to a non-beta release soon. Routes – You can view a map of the entire route, edit the route, reverse it and view an elevation plot.
  Ability to utilize free maps One of the most awesome things about Garmin mapping units is the huge number of free maps available. My favorite site for these is http://gpsfiledepot.com where you can find 1:24,000 scale vector topo maps for most states. You can see a sample in the bottom two screen shots below. If you want shaded relief though (shown in the first two shots), you’ll need to go with Garmin’s own product, either Topo US 100K or their new 1:24,000 scale series. Auto use While I would prefer the Oregon 450 as a dual use unit, due to its touch screen (which is significantly larger too), the 62 series is capable of giving turn-by-turn directions when loaded with City Navigator maps. Under the flap and inside Under the protective weather cap is a mini-USB port and MCX external antenna connection. Just so it doesn’t trigger questions, I’ll mention that the item beside the antenna connection is a screw. Inside the battery compartment is a micro-SD slot for additional map and data storage. One hardware note here. The battery holders can be very tight with rechargeable NiMH batteries. I actually had to pry the batteries out of one unit I tested, though my wife could remove them with her amazingly strong fingernails! The batteries popped out of the other test units with a good slap, and I expect that even tight ones will loosen up over time. Carabiner and mounting system A rail mount on the back of the unit allows the included carabiner to slide onto the device (shown below). This is the same system used on the Colorado, Dakota and Oregon lines so the related accessories are interchangeable. I’ve heard some people say they don’t trust the carabiner mount, but after using it on my Oregon for a couple of years, I can say that I’ve never had any problems with it. Personally, I  really like it and find it very convenient for clipping onto my pack. Garmin’s bike mount uses the same system, as shown below. I didn’t like this at first, since it’s just a zip tie system, but after a reader suggested using pliers (to pull the zip tie tight) and a screw driver (to press against the base of the zip tie slot), I’ve found that I can get it quite tight. I’ve never had a unit pop off the mount, though it is possible to slide it on incorrectly, so be aware of that. Also, low profile mounts such as this one seem much safer to the rider, in case of a crash, than ones that protrude.  Auto mount kits that utilize this rail mount connection are also available. Garmin GPSMAP 62s performance A tale of three units I requested a GPSMAP 62s from Garmin and immediately put it on my mountain bike and went out for a test run. I was pretty shocked at the tracklog errors I saw. The unit also exhibited some abnormal behaviors just sitting still under open sky, with a lot of cycling between low and high readings. I talked to Garmin support, tried a hard reset – everything I could think of, but still saw these problems. At this point, I assumed I had a defective unit and arranged for them to send me a replacement… Unit # 2 was better, but I still saw high accuracy readings (80’+) and some tracklog errors when mountain biking. I was seeing no such problems reported in GPS forums, so what was going on? Unlike the first one, the second unit appeared to be a pre-production model, further muddying the waters. I was beginning to feel pretty unlucky. Had I really received two dogs in a row? The sister unit, the GPSMAP 78s, had been so good. What in the world was going on? Third unit and a theory So I decided I needed another unit to test and, suspecting that Garmin might take a dim view of sending me a third unit, I went down to REI and plunked down my own money’; I figured I’d end up buying one anyway. When it gave me less than stellar results, a theory started forming in my oh too slow gray matter. I never tested the 78s on my bike, because it didn’t work with standard mounts. Could it be that these new models had problems under canopy, at speed? While I was seeing wide swings in accuracy readings, the tracklogs looked pretty good except on downhill runs. After a couple of weeks of struggle, I had a theory to test. So lets break down performance by use and environment: Mountain biking (speed + canopy) Notes on methodology – Tracks were set up to record points every five seconds, WAAS was enabled. The 62s and my 60CSX were both mounted on opposite sides of my handlebars, in a position closer to horizontal than vertical. The image below shows a portion of the 62s tracklog from a representative out and back trip. On the downhill run there are numerous places where the track doesn’t match well with what was recorded on the way up. In one place the error approaches 250’. Compare this to the same section of 60CSx track below, where track separation maxes out at around 65’. However, the 60CSx exhibited much worse spidering / scattering at rest stops, up to 150’ at one point, shown below (60CSx in blue, 62s in yellow).   Enter the beta In my final round of tests before posting this review, I installed the 2.44 beta firmware, which also updated the GPS firmware to version 4.52. You can see in the 62s track below that these wild errors appear to be gone. I did see track separations of up to 110’ on the uphill and downhill runs, but nothing as large as the previous errors. On the same ride, the 60CSx also showed track separation errors of around 110’, and once again exhibited significant spidering/multipath errors when stopped. It appears that the 2.44 beta has significantly improved performance for mountain bikers and others who use their GPS receivers under canopy at faster than walking speeds. Except where indicated, the remainder of the tests discussed below were made using non-beta software. Hiking under canopy Here I used the same methodology I did when testing the 78s:

  Recordings were made out and back, on foot, with the 78s in my right hand, and the 60CSx in my left. This meant that one unit may have been closer to a cut slope on the trip up, but the other unit was in this position on the trip down.

  Tests were made in multiple locations. Basically, I saw more instances of tracklog separation with the 62s; these were in the 35-50’ range. I saw less of these with the 60CSX, but it threw larger variances, up to about 80’. And again, the 60CSx exhibited much more “spidering” when stopped. Speed or canopy? So going fast under canopy was problematic in my early testing, but going slow under canopy wasn’t so bad. How about speed alone? To test this, I stuck both units on my car’s dashboard and recorded tracks while driving. Both performed very well, though the 62s went off by about 70’ at one point. The issue appeared to be more about the combination of speed and leaf canopy, than about either alone, but again, it looks like the recent beta has largely fixed this. Geocaching performance I did some geocaching testing, but it is much harder to draw a conclusion here. Generally, the 62s put me a little closer and tended to settle down significantly faster than the 60CSx. One time, when standing 3 feet from a cache, it showed me 2’ away, with the compass pointing almost directly to the cache. Impressive! But alas, I am at the whims of the accuracy of the published coordinates when geocaching. Battery life I tested battery life using freshly charged Sanyo Eneloop batteries with the backlight off, and left it sitting under light canopy, undisturbed until the unit shut down. The unit was set to collect trackpoints every 30 seconds. The tracklog and total time data field showed that the unit ran for 17 hours and 59 minutes, a couple hours shy of the rated battery life of up to 20 hours. Altimeter In my most recent tests, with the 2.40 and 2.44 firmware, I found total ascent readings to be very accurate, on par with the 60CSx, which has always been my most reliable indicator of elevation gain. I was pleased to see this, since the Oregon series has bounced back and forth between accurate and inaccurate readings, depending upon firmware version. Creaks and bugs There have been a lot of reports on message boards about units that creak when pressed on opposite sides of the case. I have seen, um, heard this on each of the three units I tested. On the first, you could hear it when powering the unit of and off. It wasn’t as bad on the other two I tested. Whether this portends other problems over the life of the unit is unknown. With new handhelds, you can typically expect some bugs in the early firmware. The 62s certainly has these, but many are minor or esoteric. One of the more common and unresolved complaints I’ve heard is that the reported battery level stays on full, and then drops to 3/4 charge shortly before the battery dies. Until this is fixed, when the battery level shows any drop, it’s nearly time to change to a new set! Garmin GPSMAP 62s tips I imagine there are more, but here’s a few tips: Use the zoom buttons to jump a full page in a menu When entering a name, the zoom buttons will switch between keypads You can create a custom startup message (e.g., if found, please call…) by connecting it to your computer and editing the Garmin/startup.txt file The 60 series header showing battery status is gone; you can check the 62 series battery level by briefly pressing the power button, but you may also want to dedicate a data field to it. Garmin GPSMAP 62 pros Excellent menu system; fast access to features Bright screen Ability to load Garmin custom maps and BirdsEye aerial imagery Paperless geocaching Tri-axial compass Extensive customization options Advanced track navigation Wireless data transfer with compatible units Accurate total ascent readings Generally accurate tracklogs, especially with latest beta firmware Garmin GPSMAP 62s cons Small, low resolution screen Text entry more difficult than on a touchscreen Oregon Relatively heavy (compared to Oregon series) Most units seem to sport a creaky case Firmware still seems a bit immature Conclusion and recommendations I’m going to, somewhat cautiously, recommend the 62s. Garmin has nailed the user interface; my only reluctance comes from my accuracy testing. Its actually much better than the first Colorado and Oregon models, but I was disappointed that I needed to install beta firmware to see good performance on my mountain bike. Is it as good as the 60CSx under any and all conditions? Probably not, but it does show less multipath error when standing still. And it seems to settle down a lot quicker. Those two factors alone could make this a great unit for geocachers. The GPSMAP 62s may not be the best unit out there, but give it a few more firmware updates and it could be. The 60CSx and Oregon both suffered quite a bit early on, and it took awhile to nail it. In a perfect world, this thing would be rock solid out of the box, but this review is long enough already, so I’m not going to delve any further into that can of worms. If you’re sitting on a 60CSx and have been wanting to get a Garmin with new features like BirdsEye aerial imagery, custom maps, advanced track navigation, and paperless caching, it’s probably time to pull the trigger. The performance of the new models is pretty darn close to the 60CSx. You might want to wait for the price to drop a bit if you’re after the 62 series, but if you’re holding out for firmware nirvana, I can almost guarantee that when (and if) that day comes, there will be something newer and shinier waiting in the wings, with all the troubles we typically see on new units. I’ll continue to test the 62s and report on the results. Once I’m satisfied with the performance of the production (non-beta) firmware, I’ll update my recommendations. More Garmin GPSMAP 62s reviews This is a new unit, and it looks like I’m the first to the party. I’ll be posting links to more hands on GPS reviews as they appear, but in the meantime, here are some… Other Garmin GPSMAP 62s resources A PDF version of the Garmin GPSMAP 62s owners manual This chart will show you how the Garmin GPSMAP 62s compares to other Garmin handhelds A Garmin GPSMAP 62 and 62 series wiki The official Garmin GPSMAP 62s web page Compare prices on the Garmin GPSMAP 62s at these merchants: Check the current Garmin GPSMAP 62s price at Amazon Get a great deal on the Garmin GPSMAP 62s 2.6-Inch Handheld GPS Navigator – World Wide at BuyDig.com Check out the deal on the Garmin GPSMAP 62S GPS at REI.com, where satisfaction is guaranteed and members get 10% back on eligible purchases Buy the Garmin GPSMAP 62S Rugged High Performance Handheld GPS Receiver at Tiger GPS
  
  
• Make and receive calls in Gmail
  Aug 25, 10
  Google Voice lets you manage all your phone communications and seamlessly make and receive calls on any of your existing phones. But what if you don’t have your phone with you? Or what if you’re in a place with poor cell phone reception, or you’re travelling internationally and don’t want to incur expensive roaming charges? Wouldn’t it be great if you could use your computer to make or receive calls?
  
  Starting today you can use Gmail to receive or place Google Voice calls.
  
  To get started, check the box next to Google Chat in your list of forwarding phones and the next time someone calls your Google Voice number, Gmail will notify you of an incoming call. You can take the call or even listen in as the caller leaves a message, in a single step right from your computer.
  
  
  
  To make a call, just click the Call phone link in Gmail and enter any number or name from your address book.
  
  
  All calls made from Gmail will display your Google Voice phone number as the outbound caller ID and all international calls will use your Google Voice calling credit and are offered at the same low Google Voice rates. We took great care to make sure that our rates are as low as possible. For those of you not as familiar with international calling rates, check out our comparison table.
  Finally, check out this video:
  
  
  
  We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly - so stay tuned!
  
  For more information, visit gmail.com/call.
  
  Update (8/26): This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.
• Call phones from Gmail
  Aug 25, 10
  (Cross-posted from the Gmail Blog)
  
  Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”
  
  Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.
  
  
  
  Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
  
  Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
  
  
  We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.
  
  If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).
  
  We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly—so stay tuned!
  
  For more information, visit gmail.com/call.
  
  Update Aug 26: This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.
  
  Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer
• Making Sex a Chore
  Aug 19, 10
  by Oliver Wang
  
  I was never that interested in scholarship about the family until—surprise, surprise—I had one of my own. I suppose there's a fairly obvious logic to this: you study what's close to you and when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I was mostly focused on music and culture but now that I'm officially in my late 30s and have a wife and kid, I've been equally as intrigued by scholarship looking at family life.
  
  Case in point: Montclair State University's Constance Gager and ASU's Scott Yabiku put out a study last October that got a mention on Context's "Discoveries" blog: "Who Has the Time? The Relationship Between Household Labor Time and Sexual Frequency."
  
  You don't have to be a sociologist to armchair theory this one: most would assume that as household labor time (i.e. the time couples spend on housework) increases, sexual frequency decreases.
  
  Now, I just have to pause for a second and say something here: Scholarship of this sort often inspires the criticism of, "well, isn't this obvious? Why don't scientists study something we don't already know?" To be sure, there's some studies where even I am inclined to feel that way but the vast majority of the time, what may seem "obvious" is only obvious because it's been repeated enough times through various outlets (media, interpersonal, etc.) that we just assume it to be "true." But if that were all that it takes to turn theory into fact, we'd still be living in Ptolemic/geocentric universe, assuming Earth was the center of everything. There's a reason why science, social or otherwise, exists: to take on assumptions and either validate them or disprove them. The Gager/Yabiku study is a perfect example since their findings more or less contradict "common wisdom." Indeed, instead of finding that household labor and sexual frequency are inversely related (i.e. as the former increases, the latter decreases), they found the exact opposite: the busier couples seemed to be, both in terms of housework and career work, the more sex they had. It's the "work hard/play hard" theory which Gager/Yabiku describe as the "multiple spheres" hypothesis (I'll explain this in a second). Going into their study (which uses National Survey of Families and Households data), Gager/Yabiku had three hypotheses they wanted to test: 1) Time Availability. This is the "intuitive" theory: you work more, you have sex less because you have less time, you're more tired, etc. 2) Gender Ideology. This is an interesting example of trying to decouple any kind of causal link between household labor and sexual frequency by finding a "hidden" third factor that might explain the appearance of any relationship. To quote:

  Because women with more traditional attitudes spend more time on housework, they would have less time for sex. Alternatively, women who are traditional might have more sex because they believe it is part of their marital duties

  In other words, the key factor here is "traditional attitudes" rather than any direct link between work and sex.
  3) Multiple spheres. The idea here is that some people "find time for multiple activities both inside and outside the home." If they're highly-organized at work, this might also apply to home life so that people who work in this "multiple spheres" mode basically make time to schedule in marital sex the same way they would organize time to get work done, etc. So what were their findings? Let's first go over some worthwhile stats: The average married couple[1] in their study[2] had sex 83 times a year, or a little over 1.5 times a week. Wives spend about 1.8 times more hours per week on housework than husbands (42 hrs vs. 23.5). Their study also validated the reality of the Second Shift...but not as much as one might think. Though men spend more time doing paid work then women, when you add up the total number of hours of work (whether pair or unpaid), women spend 4 more hours a week working than men do (61.4 hours a week for women vs. 57.1 for men). A few findings they came across not directly related to their core thesis but still worth mentioning: Protestant couples have sex more than Catholic ones, wives with college degrees report lower sexual frequency but couples with higher incomes report higher frequency, and Black couples reported higher frequency than White couples.
  And here's the payoff in regards to their study:

  The results also show a significant positive association between hours spent on household tasks and sexual frequency. For both men and women, greater time spent doing household labor is associated with higher sexual frequency... A 1% increase in wives' weekly hours on housework is associated with a 0.11% increase in yearly sexual frequency. For men...a 1% increase in husbands' weekly hours in housework results in a 0.06% increase in the couple's yearly sexual frequency.

  To put this in more concrete terms, Gager/Yabiku provide this example, comparing two different couples:
  

  [With] the first couple, the wife does 16 hr and the husband does 2 hr of housework (a week). In the second couple, the wife does 68 hr and the husband does 45 hr. The difference in predicted yearly sexual frequency between these couples is 15 times--or about 1.3 additional times per month for the second couple.

  Not only do these findings contradict the assumptions of the "Time Availability" hypothesis but they also tested it against the "traditional attitudes" thesis (i.e. Gender Ideology) and found that the same work/sex relationship held regardless if the couples involved self-identified as having more "traditional" values or not.[2]
  Their grand conclusion:
  

  For both wives and husbands in our sample, those who spend more time on household labor report more frequent sex. Even after controlling for time spent in paid labor, the positive association between hours spent on housework with sexual frequency remains, and paid work hours are also positively associated with sexual frequency. These findings suggest that as life gets busier and time gets tighter, a select group of go-getter spouses can successfully balance multiple time commitments. They devote their time to paid work and housework, while maintaining an active sexual life. In other words, rather than compromise their sex life, this group of go-getters seem to make sex a priority. We further speculate that even if women and men adjust their schedules to prioritize having sex, these adjustments do not involve reducing housework or their labor force commitments. In sum, the much lamented speedup of everyday life and resulting time crunch does not appear to have adverse effects on sexual frequency among our sample of married couples.

  It is worth noting that, at the end, the researchers make a point to mention that their data only could examine *frequency* rather than "quality". In other words, just because a couple is having more sex doesn't necessarily mean they're having better sex (though it seems to me that the big issue between married couples ultimately comes down to objective frequency of sex than subjective quality).
  
  The other important detail that needs to be said is that the researchers are not positing a causal link. It's not the case that simply increasing the number of hours you work automatically results in being able to have sex more in a marriage. What they've found here is a correlation and a correlation with a plausible explanation. But again, it's not that working more will lead to a couple increasing their sexual frequency; it's that an increased workload and increased sexual frequency share a common bond: the work/play ethic of the couple. If married couples want to increase their sexual frequency, it's not enough for them to simply put more time into household labor; they need to change their attitude towards work and pleasure. Not the easiest thing to do, obviously.  In any case, this is just one study and apparently, it's the first of its kind to look at the relationship between issues of household labor and sexual frequency so "future research is needed" to test the validity of their findings. Nonetheless, it does fly in the face of the presumed wisdom that as we get busier, we cease to make time for our pleasures. This study suggests the opposite: the more we learn to multi-task, the more likely that pleasure becomes part of what we build into our hectic schedules. Notes: [1] Cohabitation data is included in the NSFH data but for their study, Gager/Yabiku only looked at married couples for consistency sake. [2] Traditional men and women alike did report higher sexual frequency. (Uh oh, liberals better start catching up!)
  
  
  
  Sexuality - Marriage - Human sexual behavior - Montclair State University - Second Shift
• What Should I Do About My Virtual Life After Death? [Deathhacker]
  Aug 20, 10
  Dear Lifehacker,
  Twitter's recent announcement regarding how they'll deal with the death of their users got me thinking. What about my virtual life after death? What can I do to make it easy for my estate to deal with my online identity? More »
  
• Responding to the floods in Pakistan
  Aug 13, 10
  Pakistan has been struck by the worst flooding in its recorded history. The latest estimate of the number of people affected by the flood exceeds 14 million—more than the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Critical infrastructure has been damaged over the last two weeks and clean water is in short supply. As monsoons approach, flooding is expected to worsen.
  
  Our Crisis Response team has been working to use existing tools and build new ones to help the relief efforts. We just launched a page in Urdu and English where you can find information, resources and donation opportunities to help the victims of the floods. We’re also donating $250,000 to international and local NGOs to immediately aid in relief efforts. Although we’ve been able to provide satellite imagery for disasters in the past, cloud cover in Pakistan has prevented us from compiling useful imagery so far. We hope to share imagery as soon as possible.
  
  We’ve already learned a lot about building useful tools from our previous efforts to help with disaster relief. Following the earthquake in Haiti, a small team of Googlers visited relief aid workers in Haiti to understand how we could further help. In observing and speaking with the relief aid workers, we learned that they needed up-to-date information about available resources (such as which field hospitals have X-ray machines or orthopedic surgeons), their location and contact information. Coordination between various health and relief facilities that spring up in a disaster zone can be challenging.
  
  Based on what we learned in Haiti, we’ve been working to develop Resource Finder, a new tool to help disseminate updated information about which services various health facilities offer. It provides a map with editable records to help relief workers maintain up-to-date information on the services, doctors, equipment and beds available at neighboring health facilities so that they can efficiently arrange patient transfers. We normally wouldn’t release the tool so quickly, but decided to make an early release version of Resource Finder available for supporting relief efforts in Pakistan. This is the first time the tool is being launched during a disaster situation so we’ll be working closely with NGOs to understand its usefulness and will iterate accordingly.
  
  
  We’ve also launched Person Finder in both Urdu and English for this disaster. This application allows individuals to check and post on the status of relatives or friends affected by a disaster. Fortunately, we’ve heard that missing persons has not been as concerning an issue as it was during the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, but we’ll leave the application up regardless.
  
  Responding to a disaster of this scale is a daunting task, but we can all do something to help. We will try to do our part and continue working with the many incredible NGOs to develop tools that help them work more effectively.
  
  Posted by Ka-Ping Yee, Software Engineer, Google.org
• Your Privacy Online - What They Know - WSJ.com
  Aug 6, 10
  What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of cookies and other Internet-tracking technology, and the implications for consumers.
• How Can I Make iOS 4 Usable on My iPhone 3G? [Ask Lifehacker]
  Jul 30, 10
  Dear Lifehacker,
  My iPhone has been intolerably slow since I upgraded to iOS 4, and while I know I can downgrade to 3.1.3 if I have to, I was wondering if I can do anything to speed things up on iOS 4. More »
  
• Food Photography: Four Manual Settings You Need to Know for Shooting Food - Diner's Journal Blog - NYTimes.com
  Jul 28, 10
  Reshared from Rob. Thinking Courtney and Daniel V-I among others may want to see it.
  Andrew Scrivani discusses the ideal camera settings for shooting food.
• How to Transfer Google Voice to Your Google Apps Account [Google Apps]
  Jul 19, 10
  Update 2: Google Voice product manager Craig Walker confirms that the Apps transfer is NOT supported right now, and that it was only done for a small group of testers. Sorry, all. The good news? He says there will be a way to transfer your Voice account to Google Apps once the new GApps features that are being tested right now launch. In the meantime, I'm removing the link to the request form from this post. More »
  
• David Pike's Genome Analysis Utilities
  Jul 16, 10
  Available utilities: Analysing FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Raw Data for Runs of Homozygosity Analysing FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Raw Data for Heterozygous Sequences Comparing Two Raw Data Files from FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Inspecting a Shared DNA Strand in Two Raw Data Files from FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Inspecting Shared DNA Strands in a Trio of Raw Data Files from FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Searching for Mutated SNPs in Parent-Child Raw Data Files from FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe Searching for Differently Reported SNPs in Raw Data Files from FamilyFinder and/or 23andMe These utilities were put together by David Pike.
• I've Tested at 23andMe, Now What?
  Jul 16, 10
  Try a variety of tools to help you further explore your ancestry:
  
  EURO-DNA-CALC
  Compiled by Dienekes Pontikos the EURO-DNA-CALC will produce a pie chart of "Northwestern European", "Southeastern European", or "Ashkenazi Jewish".  The calc uses 300 markers from a scientific study.
  
  Comparing Two Raw Data Files from 23andMe
  This utility developed by David Pike looks at two people's raw data files and reports information about shared strands of DNA (either single strands or double strands).  This program has a threshold that can be varied so that it detects more segments than Relative Finder and Family Inheritance.  NOTE: Upload FULL raw data files using Internet Explorer.
  
  Analysing 23andMe Raw Data for Runs of Homozygosity
  Another utility by David Pike which analyses a single raw data file and reports information about strands of homozygous DNA. A particularly long homozygous segment can indicate that one's parents share a common ancestor with each other, i.e.: cousin marriages. NOTE: Upload FULL raw data files using Internet Explorer.
  
  Further explore your health and traits:
  
  Promethease
  A free shareware program that uses SNPedia to create a report with additional health and trait information. Its highly recommended that you watch the demo video and a video tutorial is coming soon.
  
• Hand-Crank Coffee Mill Grinds On-the-Go [Stuff We Like]
  Jul 9, 10
  If you're a coffee snob (or you just like brewing great coffee on-the-cheap), you likely grind coffee beans fresh with each brew. The inexpensive JavaGrind hand-crank mill grinds more uniformly than electric blade grinders and works when you don't have power. More »
  
• Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4
  Jul 2, 10
  Hahahahahahaha
  Dear iPhone 4 Users, The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned. To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design. At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this? We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising. Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place. To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see. We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G. We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused. As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund. We hope you love the iPhone 4 as much as we do. Thank you for your patience and support. Apple
• Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks [Lifehacker Top 10]
  Jun 26, 10
  Earlier this week, Google Voice opened to everyone in the U.S.. The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood. Here are our favorite tricks every Google Voice user should know about. More »
  
• The Führer Cult: Germans Cringe at Hitler's Popularity in Pakistan - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
  Jun 22, 10
  Germans are popular in India and Pakistan, but not always for the right reasons. Many in South Asia have nothing but admiration for Adolf Hitler and still associate Germany with the Third Reich. Everyday encounters with the love of all things Nazi makes German visitors cringe.
• Chart of the Day: Athletics vs. Academics « The Quick and the Ed
  Jun 21, 10
  The Knight Commission has a new report comparing spending on athletics and academics. In only the four year period from 2005 to 2008, the ratio between what schools spend on academics and athletics increased nearly 15 percent. In 2008, schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) spent more than six times as much per athlete as they did per student. In the Southeastern Conference (home to sports powerhouses like Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana State, and Georgia), the ratio was almost 11 to one. It’s important to note here that the vast majority of schools lose money off athletics. In 2008, less than a quarter of sports powerhouses made money off their athletics programs, and collectively these same institutions lost nearly $1 billion on sports. These funds must be made up by state taxpayers or student tuition bills. Find out how much your school spent with this handy database put together by researchers at USA Today.
• Knight Commission - Introduction
  Jun 21, 10
  At the nation's most prominent universities, intercollegiate athletics have always played a dual role in campus life. On the one hand, they are managed for the benefit of student-athletes. On the other, they inspire the interest and passions of thousands, if not millions, of fans. For most teams at most institutions, these roles can be reconciled. But in high-profile sports, tensions often surface between the core mission of universities and commercial values. These tensions have grown significantly over the past two decades. The pursuit of television contracts and slots in football bowl games, together with the quest to win championship tournaments in basketball, have had a destabilizing influence on athletics programs. Among other worrisome developments, the intensely competitive environment at the top levels of college sports has prompted four rounds of realignment among athletic conferences since 1994; a bidding war for prominent coaches; and accelerating expenses across the board. The growing emphasis on winning games and increasing television market share feeds the spending escalation because of the unfounded yet persistent belief that devoting more dollars to sports programs leads to greater athletic success and thus to greater revenues. In fact, only a tiny number of college athletics programs actually reap the financial rewards that come from selling high-priced tickets and winning championships. According to a USA Today analysis, just seven athletics programs generated enough revenue to finish in the black in each of the past five years.  This reality is often obscured by headlines about money in college sports, such as the recent 14-year, $10.8 billion television rights deal for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and yet another round of conference realignments and expansions designed to increase television market share. Nevertheless, the pursuit of those elusive goals by many programs creates a cost spiral that causes athletics spending to rise at rates often exceeding those on academic spending. At many universities, institutional spending on high-profile sports is growing at double or triple the pace of spending on academics. This is due to much more than multimillion dollar salaries for football and basketball coaches. Less-publicized trends also play a significant role, including a steep increase in the number of expensive non-coaching personnel devoted to individual sports (see Figure 1).

  Median athletics spending per athlete at institutions in each major athletics conference ranges from 4 to nearly 11 times more than the median spending on education-related activities per student.

  In some instances, there are legitimate reasons for athletics spending to outpace education-related spending on a per-student basis.  Health insurance for student-athletes is a unique and large expense, for example. But expenses like this cannot account for the lopsided spending patterns seen at some universities.  Median athletics spending per athlete at institutions in each major athletics conference ranges from 4 to nearly 11 times more than the median spending on education-related activities per student (see Figure 2). At most institutions, these expenditures require a redistribution of institutional resources.  Because sports revenues so often fall short of meeting the needs of athletics programs, almost all programs must rely on allocations from general university funds, fees imposed on the entire student body, and state appropriations to meet funding gaps (see Figure 3). This is a significant concern at a time when economic woes have devastated state budgets and institutional endowments alike. Conflicts over funding between academics and athletics are growing. Indeed, reliance on institutional resources to underwrite athletics programs is reaching the point at which some institutions must choose between funding sections of freshman English and funding the football team. And student-athletes in non-revenue sports risk seeing their teams lose funding or be cut entirely. These threats extend well beyond universities with high-budget athletics programs: it is clear that the spending race that too often characterizes major football and basketball programs is creating unacceptable financial pressures for everyone. In brief, if the business model of intercollegiate athletics persists in its current form, the considerable financial pressures and ever-increasing spending in today’s college sports system could lead to permanent and untenable competition between academics and athletics. More broadly, this model could lead to a loss of credibility not just for intercollegiate sports but for higher education itself. The current financial downturn should be a wake-up call for all programs. It has significantly refocused academic priorities and even forced some institutions to ratchet back spending on sports—primarily by paring teams in lower-profile sports, thus curtailing opportunities for student-athletes. However, even with this new reality, top programs are expected to have athletics budgets exceeding $250 million by 2020, based on data from the past five years.  Even for the largest and best-positioned universities, a $250 million athletics budget serving an average of 600 student-athletes is untenable (see Figure 4). In the Commission’s view, addressing misplaced spending priorities requires answering some searching questions: Are financial incentives at the national, conference, and institutional levels rewarding behaviors that are aligned with the core values of higher education, institutions’ educational missions, and amateur athletic competition? Or are they creating a “winner take all” market in which there are very few winners? More often we see the latter. Changing course will not be easy. But we know that some institutions have been able to achieve a healthy balance between academic and athletics spending. We believe that the reforms laid out in this report are achievable and can help all college athletics programs do the same.

  Academic reform hit a tipping point when graduation rates were first shared publicly. We believe the same will be true for financial reform when there is far greater openness about spending on college sports.

  Presidents of universities with major football programs clearly recognize the need for change. In a 2009 Knight Commission survey, a large majority said that they believe today’s revenue and spending trends are not sustainable for athletics programs as a whole. Nearly half expressed concern about the proportion of institutional resources being used to support athletics programs, and a similar proportion said they feared that economic pressures might force them to discontinue a sport. Presidents also understand the urgency of acting together. To be sure, some institutions have been able to achieve financial stability, taking advantage of significant revenue opportunities while exercising prudent management. But it is clear that the vast majority of Division I institutions will not be able to do so without a shared structure that provides athletics programs and universities with the information, expectations, and incentives needed to achieve a better balance in their spending priorities. The Commission believes that the first step among the many actions needed to redress the imbalance in athletics spending is to make financial data in intercollegiate sports, both for public and private institutions, readily available to the general public and to trustees, state legislators, students, parents, and the media. Academic reform hit a tipping point when graduation rates for student-athletes were first shared publicly. We believe the same will be true for financial reform when there is far greater openness about spending on college sports—in absolute dollars, in growth levels, and in comparison to academic budgets. We applaud the NCAA’s good work over the past five years in improving the accuracy of financial data and organizing that information into a database accessible to all presidents. These valuable efforts provide a solid foundation on which to build. But much more needs to be done. We believe that more data, better data, and more transparent data will mean greater accountability for college sports, both on campus and in the public eye. After all, at a time when all of U.S. higher education is under unprecedented pressure to be more transparent to the public and more accountable for the results it achieves, intercollegiate athletics cannot expect to be immune to the same standards. Moreover, as with other parts of higher education, heightened scrutiny of college sports should not be viewed as a threat but as an opportunity. With the spotlight already on intercollegiate athletics, more effective disclosure of finances—and of financial priorities—will enhance the long-term prospects of college athletics by ensuring that they remain part of, not apart from, the central mission of colleges and universities. Our recent survey of college presidents shows that they are united in their desire for greater transparency in athletics spending. Given the diversity and complexity of the challenges they face, however, they are understandably wary of one-size-fits-all solutions. Backers of constructive change face a considerable practical challenge—marking a path to financial reform in a system characterized by great diversity in resources, funding models, institutional practices, and state laws. These concerns are legitimate, but we believe they can be overcome. In the recommendations that follow, the Commission outlines in the pages that follow how the influence of big money in high-profile college athletics can and must be reduced. We aim not only to foster much-needed discussion but, above all, to stimulate reform.
• Map: Where Americans Are Moving - Forbes.com
  Jun 16, 10
  More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. The map below visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.
• The Complete Guide to Creating a Consolidated, Master Contact List [Annoyances]
  Jun 7, 10
  Ever wanted to consolidate all your contacts—from Google Contacts, Facebook, LinkedIn, your desktop address book, and your phone—into one comprehensive bucket you can effortlessly sync and export anywhere? You've come to the right place. More »
  
• A Procrastination Test to Uncover Procrastination Patterns | Psychology Today
  Jun 4, 10
  When you know where you stand on procrastination, you know what to change.This crash course on procrastination shows how to identify procrastination patterns and it prescribes remedies. The Procrastination Test is a set of self-assessment questions that spotlight areas of changeable thinking, emotions, and behavior that link to procrastination. After you identify your procrastination hot spots, I'll point you to blog themes to find remedies.Use the test to establish a baseline for where you currently stand on procrastination. A baseline is a standard for comparing future measures. After you've tested some of the remedies, use the test to identify where you've progressed and where you still have work to do.After making satisfactory progress, use the Procrastination Test bi-monthly as an early warning system. When you have a regular reminder system, it is easier to stay on a productive track. Procrastination prevention, for example, is easier than curbing procrastination once it is in motion.
• Deleting Flash Cookies
  Jun 3, 10
  I’m A Super: What if there was a type of cookie that could: Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time Store 100 kb of data by default, with an unlimited max Couldn’t be deleted by your browser Send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission Count me in the set of people who were previously unaware that such cookies existed.  As to deletion, I prefer a more direct approach: rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/*/* chmod 0500 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/* rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/* chmod 0500 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys Inspired by Dan Scott.  Also available as a firefox plugin.
• Must-Try Foods Of The World - Forbes.com
  May 30, 10
  Your guide to not eating in a tourist trap when you're traveling.
• Take a People-Free Photo in a Crowded Place [Photography]
  May 27, 10
  You're at a popular location and you really would love a photo of the place without all the people in the way. Looks like you're out of luck and you should just buy a postcard, right? Not with this clever trick. More »
  
• RouterPassView Recovers Lost Router Passwords
  May 20, 10
  Windows only: RouterPassView is a freeware application that taps into a router's configuration file, allowing you to recover important data like router login information, wireless network keys, and more in the event any of that important information goes missing.
• Joblessness and Perceptions about the Effectiveness of Democracy
  May 18, 10
  Using micro data on more than 130,000 individuals from 69 countries, we analyze the extent to which joblessness of the individuals and the prevailing unemployment rate in the country impact perceptions of the effectiveness of democracy. We find that personal joblessness experience translates into negative opinions about the effectiveness of democracy and it increases the desire for a rouge leader. Evidence from people who live in European countries suggests that being jobless for more than a year is the source of discontent. We also find that well-educated and wealthier individuals are less likely to indicate that democracies are ineffective, regardless of joblessness. People’s beliefs about the effectiveness of democracy as system of governance are also shaped by the unemployment rate in countries with low levels of democracy. The results suggest that periods of high unemployment and joblessness could hinder the development of democracy or threaten its existence.
• Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins: Just Go
  May 16, 10
  The 5 year old and I loved it when we visited during spring break.
  Having come down to Washington this weekend to give a talk, I knew I had to get over to the Smithsonian’s new Hall of Human Origins. The Smithsonian’s Briana Posiner was kind enough to take me around and tell me about what went into its creation. I suppose I could pretend to be a professional museum reviewer and present a lengthy description of the hall, tell you what I liked, give the obligatory “But nothing is ever perfect,” indulge in some musings on the state of museumology, and on and on. But I’m the sort of person who stops reading a review of a movie or a book as soon as I realize that it sounds fantastic. I don’t want to diminish the experience with rehashed details. So let me just say that if you find yourself on the Mall, just go. It’s got a collection of casts and original fossils on a scale I’ve never seen before. It’s got lifelike sculptures by John Gurche that helped me envision hominids more clearly than ever before. It’s got elegant computer interfaces and movies. It’s got casts of tiny 70,000-year-old snail shells pierced through to serve as jewelry. I’ll shut up now. Just go. (The assortment of pictures here are from Chip Clark [the really good ones] and me and my Iphone [the really blurry ones])
• Five more languages on translate.google.com
  May 13, 10
  Google can now translate Urdu.
  (Cross-posted from the Google Translate Blog)
  At Google, we are always trying to make information more accessible, whether by adding auto-captioning on YouTube and virtual keyboards to search or by providing free translation of text, websites and documents with Google Translate. In 2009, we announced the addition of our first “alpha” language, Persian, on Google Translate. Today, we are excited to add five more alpha languages: Azerbaijani, Armenian, Basque, Urdu and Georgian — bringing the total number of languages on Google Translate to 57.
  
  These languages are available while still in alpha status. You can expect translations to be less fluent than for our other languages, but they should still help you understand the multilingual web. We are working hard to “graduate” these new language out of alpha status, just as we did some time ago with Persian. You can help us improve translation quality as well. If you notice an incorrect translation, we invite you click "Contribute a better translation". If you are a translator, then you can contribute translation memories with the Translator Toolkit. This helps us build better machine translation systems especially for languages that are not well represented on the web.
  
  Collectively, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu have roughly 100 million speakers. We hope that these speakers can now more easily access the entire multilingual web in their own language. Try translating these and other languages at translate.google.com. Here are some phrases from the new alpha languages to get you started:
  
  Baietz lehenengoan
  میں خوش قسمت محسوس کر رہا ہوں
  բախտաւոր եմ զգում
  Mən şanslıyam
  იღბალს მივენდობი
  
  Posted by Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist
• Operation Mincemeat and spycraft in World War Two : The New Yorker
  May 6, 10
  A CRITIC AT LARGE about “Operation Mincemeat” (Harmony; $25.99) by Ben Macintyre, and the often ambiguous nature of information obtained through espionage. Writer describes the elaborate hoax designed by British intelligence using a corpse with a fictional identity (Major William Martin of the Royal Marines) and a briefcase full…
• Integrating virtual keyboards in Google search
  Apr 29, 10
  You’ve spilled coffee on your keyboard. The a, e, i, o, u, and r keys have stopped working. Now try to search Google for the nearest computer repair shop. The pain of typing on this broken keyboard is similar to what many people searching in non-English languages feel when trying to type today. Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible.
  
  Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google. (Try typing नमस्ते on a keyboard with English letters.) To overcome the difficulty they face in typing in their local language scripts, some people have resorted to copying and pasting from other sites and from online translation tools. But there’s an easier way — a virtual, or “on-screen” keyboard, lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using.
  
  Virtual keyboards let people type directly in their local language script and don't require any additional software.
  Last year, to make text input easy for people across the globe, we introduced a virtual keyboard API through code.google.com. This allowed developers to enable virtual keyboards on any text field or text area in their webpages. Today, we are taking this effort one step further by integrating virtual keyboards into Google search in 35 languages.
  
  A virtual keyboard on www.google.am to input Armenian text (the query term is [armenia])
  If you use Google search in one of the languages listed below, you’ll see a small keyboard icon show up next to the search field, on both the Google homepage and search results page. Clicking on that keyboard icon brings up a virtual keyboard in your language. You can input text by either clicking on the on-screen keyboard or pressing the corresponding key.
  
  You can find out more information on how to use the virtual keyboard in our help article. If you use Google in a language not listed below and feel that your language will benefit from a virtual keyboard, let us know by voting for your language. We hope virtual keyboards help you find information more easily — especially those of you who speak/type/read in non-Latin scripts.
  
  Languages with integrated virtual keyboards
  Albanian
  Arabic
  Armenian
  Basque
  Belarusian
  Bosnian
  Bulgarian
  Catalan
  Croatian
  Czech
  Finnish
  Galician
  Georgian
  Greek
  Hebrew
  Hindi
  Hungarian
  Icelandic
  Kazakh
  Kirghiz
  Macedonian
  Malayalam
  Mongolian
  Persian
  Polish
  Russian
  Serbian
  Slovak
  Slovenian
  Swedish
  Tatar
  Thai
  Turkish
  Ukrainian
  Uzbek
  
  Posted by Manish Bhargava, Product Manager Google Îñţérñåţîöñåļîžåţîờñ
• Magazine Preview - The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com
  Apr 28, 10
  Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut. Enlarge This Image Horacio Salinas for The New York Times Readers' Comments

  Share your thoughts.

  Post a Comment » Read All Comments (28) » That is, some of us do. Others use data. A timer running on Robin Barooah’s computer tells him that he has been living in the United States for 8 years, 2 months and 10 days. At various times in his life, Barooah — a 38-year-old self-employed software designer from England who now lives in Oakland, Calif. — has also made careful records of his work, his sleep and his diet. A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a sip remained in the cup. He drank it and called himself cured. Unlike his previous attempts to quit, this time there were no headaches, no extreme cravings. Still, he was tempted, and on Oct. 12 last year, while distracted at his desk, he told himself that he could probably concentrate better if he had a cup. Coffee may have been bad for his health, he thought, but perhaps it was good for his concentration. Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost. He was sad but also thrilled. Instead of a stimulating cup of coffee, he got a bracing dose of truth. “People have such very poor sense of time,” Barooah says, and without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them. Five years ago, Ben Lipkowitz, who is now 28, was living with some friends in Bloomington, Ind., and he found himself wondering how much time he spent doing one of his roommates’ dishes. Lipkowitz had a handheld electronic datebook that he purchased on a trip to Tokyo, and on May 11, 2005, at 2:20 p.m., he started using it to keep a record of his actions. Instead of entering his future appointments, he entered his past activities, creating a remarkably complete account of his life. In one sense this was just a normal personal journal, albeit in a digital format and unusually detailed. But the format and detail made all the difference. Lipkowitz eventually transferred the data to his computer, and now, using a few keyboard commands, he can call up his history. He knows how much he has eaten and how much he has spent. He knows what books he has read and what objects he has purchased. And of course, he knows the answer to his original question. “I was thinking I was spending an hour a day cleaning up after this person,” Lipkowitz says. He shrugs. “It turned out it was more like 20 minutes.” Another person I’m friendly with, Mark Carranza — he also makes his living with computers — has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced. These men all know that their behavior is abnormal. They are outliers. Geeks. But why does what they are doing seem so strange? In other contexts, it is normal to seek data. A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio. Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.
• Looking to Live Better? Move to New Jersey - Real Time Economics - WSJ
  Apr 28, 10
  Let's move back to NJ!
  Asian Americans living in New Jersey live better than any other ethnic group in any other state -- based on overall health, education and income -- a new report shows.
• Laptop-Reliability Study Highlights the Most Sturdy Laptop Makers - Laptops - Lifehacker
  Apr 26, 10
  There's nothing worse than buying new gear that malfunctions shortly after you purchase it. If you're in the market for a new laptop, check out warranty-provider SquareTrade's detailed laptop-reliability report to find the most dependable hardware.
• Beating Obesity - Magazine - The Atlantic
  Apr 15, 10
  By 2015, four out of 10 Americans may be obese. Until last year, the author was one of them. The way he lost one-third of his weight isn’t for everyone. But unless America stops cheering The Biggest Loser and starts getting serious about preventing obesity, the country risks being overwhelmed by chronic disease and ballooning health costs. Will first lady Michelle Obama’s new plan to fight childhood obesity work, or is it just another false start in the country’s long and so far unsuccessful war against fat?
• The Ghost of Bobby Lee - National - The Atlantic
  Apr 14, 10
  Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus--Ralph WileyKen Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the…
• How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars: A Case Study
  Apr 12, 10
  How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars: A Case Study Michael E Lewyn, Florida Coastal School of Law
  Article comments Published at 16 Widener L.J. 839 Abstract Shows how zoning law in Jacksonville contributes to automobile dependence. Suggested Citation Michael E Lewyn. "How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars: A Case Study" Widener Law Journal 16.Symposium (2007): 839-852.
  Available at: http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/39
• The Frequent Flier's Guide to Finding Cheap Airfare - Saving Money - Lifehacker
  Apr 12, 10
  Summer's just around the corner, and if you haven't made your travel plans yet, now's the time. Our guide to finding cheap airfare will have you whistling all the way to Peru—and saving you money all year-round.
• AH Projects » Thesis
  Apr 12, 10
• HearNames.com Boosts Your Pronunciation, Helps Avoid Embarrassment [Language]
  Apr 5, 10
  People with uncommon names don't expect perfect pronunciation the first time they meet someone, but they're probably impressed when they encounter it. Get a jump on your next business meeting or speaking opportunity with HearNames.com, along with another pronunciation resource. More »
  
• What can policymakers learn from happiness research? : The New Yorker
  Apr 1, 10
  BOOK review about happiness research. In 1978, a trio of psychologists tested two groups—lottery winners and accident victims—to see if there were any significant differences in levels of happiness between them. The lotto winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the…
• Columbia Ideas At Work : Feature : Powerful+Lies
  Mar 31, 10
  Lying is costly, extracting physiological and cognitive tolls from most people. The body of research on lying consistently shows that people become stressed when they do not tell the truth. The speed with which they process information slows down, possibly because lying requires keeping track of the lie and the truth while simultaneously trying to suppress nervous habits or other signs that might give the liar away. (So-called lie-detector tests, or polygraphs, can’t actually determine if people are lying, but they can identify signs of physiological stress that are consistent with lying.) Professor Dana R. Carney, who studies social judgment and decision making, noticed that in a different area of scientific study, psychologists have observed that power — defined as control over others’ social or monetary outcomes and always accompanied by feelings of power — enhances cognitive functions and makes people feel good. The effects of feeling powerful are precisely the inverse of those that most people experience when they lie. “The overlap is remarkable. When you feel powerful, you feel good, you’re a little smarter in that you process information more quickly and are better at multitasking, and some evidence suggests you may be more physiologically resilient,” Carney says. “When you lie, you feel bad, your cognitive systems are overworked, and you are physiologically taxed. What if you put lying and power together? It’s a match made in heaven or a match made in hell.” Carney worked with Andy Yap, Brian Lucas and Pranjal Mehta of Columbia University to see what they could learn about the differences in the physiological and cognitive responses of both high- and low-power liars. Previous research has shown that the mere act of assigning subjects leadership roles and subordinate roles is sufficient to produce feelings of power and subordination. Several parts of the researchers’ experiments here were designed to intensify those feelings. Subjects first completed a survey intended to make them believe they would be assigned a role as a leader or subordinate based on their answers. In fact, subjects were randomly assigned their roles. Each leader was shown to an expansive, comfortable office, while each subordinate was relegated to a small, windowless space. Next, each pair met face-to-face in the leader’s office, and was asked to review a set of résumés and decide how to allocate a small pool of bonus funds. They also had to divide a small amount of bonus money between themselves. The conditions of the experiment gave the leader control in three significant areas: social control of the interaction, control over the final outcome of the assigned task and control over how the monetary incentive was divided between the leader and the subordinate. Once the first phase of the study was complete, the subjects were separated and asked to wait, alone, in another room, where they were led through an exercise that asked certain leaders and subordinates to steal money (hidden in the room) and lie to the researchers about having done so. Subjects had saliva samples and other measures of physiological stress taken at key points during the experiment — for example, before beginning the survey and after being asked to lie. All participants also completed a reaction-time test at the end of the experiment designed to measure their cognitive capacity. The researchers found that subjects assigned leadership roles were buffered from the negative effects of lying. Across all measures, the high-power liars — the leaders —resembled truthtellers, showing no evidence of cortisol reactivity (which signals stress), cognitive impairment or feeling bad. In contrast, low-power liars — the subordinates — showed the usual signs of stress and slower reaction times. “Having power essentially buffered the powerful liars from feeling the bad effects of lying, from responding in any negative way or giving nonverbal cues that low-power liars tended to reveal,” Carney explains. It’s an unsettling finding that prompts a number of questions, the first of which is, if powerful people can lie without suffering consequences, are they prone to lie more? “Even a very ethical person who suddenly finds herself in a position of power is probably going to notice on a conscious or unconscious level that lying no longer feels bad,” Carney says. “We can’t say empirically that power makes a person lie more, but the evidence does suggest that power would make you lie more easily and therefore more often.” Carney emphasizes that these results don’t mean that all people in high positions find lying easier: people need only feel powerful, regardless of the real power they have or their position in a hierarchy. “There are plenty of CEOs who act like low-power people and there are plenty of people at every level in organizations who feel very high power,” Carney says. “It can cross rank, every strata of society, any job.”
• Op-Ed Columnist - The Sandra Bullock Trade - NYTimes.com
  Mar 31, 10
  Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
• War of words in the cradle of south Asian civilisation - Asia, World - The Independent
  Mar 26, 10
  At the quiet ruins of Harappa, one of the two main centres of an ancient civilisation that once spread from the Himalayas to Mumbai, Naveed Ahmed took in the arid hills dotted with thorn-bush.
• A curious history of the C.I.A. : The New Yorker
  Mar 22, 10
  BOOKS review of “Courting Disaster” (Regnery; $29.95) by Marc A Thiessen…
• The Psychology of the Taboo Trade-Off: Scientific American
  Mar 19, 10
  Surprising insights into “sacred values,” and what they mean for negotiation
• Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » Evaluating statistical attacks on personal knowledge questions
  Mar 16, 10
  What is your mother’s maiden name? How about your pet’s name? Questions like these were a dark corner of security systems for quite some time. Most security researchers instinctively think they aren’t very secure. But they still have gained widespread deployment as a backup to password-based authentication when email-based identification isn’t available. Free webmail providers, for example, may have no other choice. Unfortunately, because most websites rely on email when passwords fail, and email providers rely on personal knowledge questions, most web authentication is no more secure than personal knowledge questions. This risk has gotten more attention recently, with high profile compromises of Paris Hilton’s phone, Sarah Palin’s email, and Twitter’s corporate Google Documents occurring due to guessed personal knowledge questions. There’s finally been a surge of academic research into the area in the last five years. It’s been shown, for example, that these questions are easy to look up online, often found in public records, and easy for friends and acquaintances to guess. In a joint work with Mike Just and Greg Matthews from the University of Edinburgh published this week in the proceedings of Financial Cryptography 2010, we’ve examined the more basic question of how secure the underlying answer distributions are to statistical guessing. Put another way, if an attacker wants to do no target-specific work, but just guess common answers for a large number of accounts using population-wide statistics, how well can she do? Answering this question first required developing the right mathematical model for resistance of a question to guessing. Entropy (specifically Shannon entropy H1) is commonly thrown around as the measure of resistance to guessing, but it was never intended for this purpose and is not appropriate for measuring guessing of non-uniform distributions. Guessing entropy G, the expected number of guesses if answers are guessed in decreasing order of likeliness, is better, but still highly skewed by low-probability events which wouldn’t be guessed in practice. We’re concerned with a trawling attacker, who will guess values like “Smith,” “Jones,” and “Johnson” for a target’s mother’s maiden name, and then move on to other accounts if these don’t work. The frequencies of uncommon names like “Zabielskis” are irrelevant because a trawling attacker will never try them, yet they inflate the values of both H1 and G. Entropy can be very misleading for real-world security, and we hope a contribution of our paper is to encourage the use of “marginal” guessing metrics instead. We even provide a few theorems that prove in a strong way that high entropy  (H1 or G) can give you no security at all against a trawling attacker in the real world. Using these new metrics, we examined a range of statistics on answer distributions to common personal knowledge questions. It turns out the majority of personal knowledge questions ask for proper names of people, pets, and places, and the rest are trivially insecure (eg “What is my favourite day of the week?”). We collected government census data, pet registration records, and also completely crawled Facebook’s people directory. Incidentally, we believe this Facebook names corpus, consisting of 269 M full names, is the largest such dataset ever assembled and may have many uses outside of security research, which we are happy to provide it for. Analysing our data for security, though, shows that essentially all human-generated names provide poor resistance to guessing. For an attacker looking to make three guesses per personal knowledge question (for example, because this triggers an account lock-down), none of the name distributions we looked at gave more than 8 bits of effective security except for full names. That is, about at least 1 in 256 guesses would be successful, and 1 in 84 accounts compromised. For an attacker who can make more than 3 guesses and wants to break into 50% of available accounts, no distributions gave more than about 12 bits of effective security. The actual values vary in some interesting ways-South Korean names are much easier to guess than American ones, female first names are harder than male ones, pet names are slightly harder than human names, and names are getting harder to guess over time. Still, there is a strong result that anything named by humans is dangerous to use as a secret. Sociologists have known this for years. Most human names follow a power-law distribution fairly close to Zipfian, which we confirmed in our study. This means every name distribution has a few disproportionately common names—”Gonzalez” amongst Chilean surnames, “Guðrún” amongst Icelandic forenames, “Buddy” amongst pets—for attackers to latch on to. Combined with previous results on other attack methods, there should be no doubt that personal knowledge questions are no longer viable for email, which has come to play too critical a role in web security.
• Daylight saving time saves as much energy as daylight, maybe less
  Mar 13, 10
  You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was. The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject. What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light, according to most studies.  In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy“:

  Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

  Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next. Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings. “I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month. A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

  The Kotchen and Grant NBER paper is here.  It concludes:

  We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States…. There are nevertheless several reasons we might infer that DST increases electricity demand across a much broader area.  First, existing simulations suggest that DST increases electricity consumption on average over 224 different locations throughout the United States (Rock 1997). Our results also corroborate the results of such simulation exercises. Second, even when prior research finds little or no electricity savings from DST in the United States, the effect is smaller in more southern regions (DOE 2006). Finally, the fact that we identify the underlying tradeoff between artificial illumi- nation and primarily air-conditioning suggests that the DST effect that we estimate is likely to be even stronger in the more populated, southern regions of the Unites States. Further south, the days are shorter during the summer, meaning that decreases in electrical use from lighting are likely to be smaller, and air conditioning is more common and intensively used, meaning that increases in electricity for cooling are likely to be bigger.

  In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:

  Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.

  An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.” Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02% of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study. DST’s general inanity is clear in this Rachel Maddow interview of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time:

  U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.” Enjoy!
• Magazine Preview - Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.com
  Mar 5, 10
  There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.
• Kashmir: "The World's Most Dangerous Place"
  Mar 4, 10
  Pankaj Mishra Kashmiri women looking over a wall at the funeral ceremony of Sajjad Ahmed, a suspected militant allegedly killed by Indian security forces, Rajpora, India, February 19, 2010 (Dar Yasin, AP Images) In New Delhi last week the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met for the first time since the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008; the official talks concluded with both sides arguing over what they should talk about. India demanded that Islamabad prosecute the Pakistani militants responsible for the Mumbai attacks more vigorously. Pakistan insisted that the core issue between the two countries remains the India-held Muslim majority valley of Kashmir, where, out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989. In one sense at least, the faltering dialogue between India and Pakistan resembles the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East: by the time any ways to proceed are agreed upon, usually with much acrimony, peace seems even further away. Last week’s talks in Delhi most likely came about because of pressure from the United States. The Obama administration seems to have decided that it cannot do without Pakistani assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistan has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has rewarded this overdue acknowledgment of its concerns by arresting senior Taliban leaders who have long been living in its territory. In return, the Obama administration has pressed India to be more conciliatory over Kashmir. Of course, protecting American security interests isn’t the only reason why India and Pakistan should work toward a solution in Kashmir. As Basharat Peer’s new book, Curfewed Night, recounts, India’s occupation of the valley, enforced by more than half a million soldiers, has given a powerful raison d’etre to militant organizations in Pakistan, which have grown exponentially since 1989. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, was in his teens when the insurgency began in Srinagar, the capital of India-held Kashmir. His own friends, enraged by police firing upon unarmed demonstrators, left the valley to train in militant camps set up across the border by Pakistani intelligence and army officers. Sent away to India by his parents, Peer witnessed the progressive alienation and isolation of Muslims as Hindu nationalists unleashed one violent campaign after another through the 1990s. He later returned to Kashmir as a journalist, and Curfewed Night reflects his diverse experience of the valley by combining memoir with reportage, history, and analysis. In clear, swift prose, Peer evokes the relentless ordeal of checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and disappearances that Kashmiri Muslims live with. He explores the valley’s syncretic Islam, and the attempts to undermine it by fundamentalists from Pakistan. He describes the plight of the poorest among more than a hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus, who fled the valley after radical Islamists killed many of them. He also investigates the widespread use of torture against Kashmiri young men by Indian security forces, particularly the practice of inserting live copper wires into penises, which led to hundreds of cases of impotence in the valley. Peer is not writing about a remote past; torture and extrajudicial execution remain commonplace in Kashmir today, even though Pakistan-trained or indigenous militants are fewer and less lethal. Nor have India and Pakistan gotten any closer to resolving their dispute over the region. Pakistani army and intelligence officers loudly invoke the alleged existential threat from India, helping them to preserve the ISI’s extra-constitutional authority (and business monopolies) in Pakistan and severely limiting the prospects for democracy and equitable economic growth. Kashmir also exacts a great price from India, which is still overwhelmingly poor despite its fast-growing GDP, while radicalizing many among the country’s 150 million Muslims. The Chennai daily, The Hindu, revealed last month that Pakistani militants demanding the Indian army’s withdrawal from Kashmir during the four-day terror attack on Mumbai in November 2008 were being prompted via their mobile phones by an Indian Muslim, who advised them to call the media to condemn India’s “two-faced” policy toward Muslims. The new round of talks could be derailed by another terrorist attack in India—such as the one last month that killed 15 Indians and foreigners in the Western Indian city of Pune—or against an Indian target in Afghanistan. In any case, the Obama administration doesn’t seem much interested in slowing or reversing the arms buildup in South Asia—the necessary prelude to peace in the region—as it promotes major arms deals with both India and Pakistan. As is well known, the Pakistani army under General Pervez Musharraf eagerly appropriated for their own purposes the $10 billion in aid showered on Pakistan by the Bush administration after September 11. Beholden for his survival to the army and the ISI, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari seems far from renouncing the venal ways that earned him long spells in prison. Nevertheless, American military sales to Pakistan, paid for with aid money, will increase almost two-fold next year. Meanwhile, American defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are currently vying for the world’s biggest weapons contracts from India, which is racing to modernize its military. Almost entirely exempt from parliamentary debate or public scrutiny, the unprecedented expansion of India’s defense budget, which rose 34 percent last year, is a bonanza for the country’s alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers. The consensus on defense spending is facilitated by an increasingly right-wing press that is constantly raising the alarm about various external and internal enemies. There are, as the political scientist Sunil Khilnani recently warned, grounds to fear the emergence in India of a “military-industrial complex”—especially while the Indian state, as Khilnani points out, is at war with its own people in Central India: the Mao-inspired guerillas who have organized India’s traditionally disadvantaged tribal communities and low-caste peasants into a militant movement spanning 20 of India’s 28 states. The apparent failure of an ambitious counterinsurgency campaign called “Operation Green Hunt” has recently forced the Indian government to propose ceasefire talks with the “Maoists.” As politicians and columnists frequently point out, “they are our own people.” But no such magnanimity may be extended to the 4 million Kashmiri Muslims who many Indians regard as blatantly treasonous after twenty years of anti-India, Pakistan-supported militancy. Of course most Kashmiris, weary of both radical Islamists from Pakistan and Indian security forces, long to be free of their overbearing neighbors. But even before its recent jingoistic phase, Indian press and television tended to obscure the clear Kashmiri demand for self-determination, preferring to highlight the depredations of Islamic fundamentalists. The complexity of the conflict as well as strictures on travel continue to inhibit foreign reporters from covering what Bill Clinton in 2002 described as the “world’s most dangerous place.” More disturbingly, a generation that has grown up in the shadow of the insurgency may soon be provoked into a new cycle of extreme violence. Scantily reported in the Indian and international press, Kashmir has been paralyzed for the last two weeks by strikes and clashes between police and young Kashmiri Muslims angered by the alleged killing of two unarmed teenagers by Indian soldiers. The possibility of participating in India’s growing economy will only partly defuse the fresh rage and frustration of these youths: they may prove to be no less compromising than their predecessors—Basharat Peer’s generation—who took up arms against the Indian state. No doubt Pakistani army and intelligence officials are watching them with interest, especially as talks between India and Pakistan go nowhere and the two countries embark upon their costliest arms race yet. Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland (Scribner, 2010)
• I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords
  Mar 4, 10
  Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true. The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one. It’s important to bear in mind that you can carry this galaxy of microbes around and enjoy perfect health. These microbes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, behave like well-mannered passengers. They do not barge into the kitchen, take a cleaver to the cooks, and then eat all the food. Aboard the SS Homo sapiens, the crew includes a huge staff of security guards armed with lethal chemical sprays and other deadly weapons, ready to kill any dangerous stowaway (also known as the immune system). For some reason, the immune system does not unleash its deadly fury on the microbes–even when the microbes are fairly close relatives to truly dangerous pathogens. In fact, our microbial passengers may actually help out the cruise liner’s crew. They can close up the ecological space in our bodies, so that invading pathogens can’t get a solid foothold. Some species in our guts can break down our food in ways that we can’t, and synthesize certain vitamins and other compounds beyond our biochemistry. The genes that the microbes carry–millions of them–expand our biochemical powers enormously. To understand the human microbiome better, scientists have been cataloging the microbes in and on people’s bodies, and they’ve been sequencing their DNA. (Listen to my recent podcast with biologist Rob Knight for more.) Yesterday, Nature published a head-spinningly huge study on the microbiome from a team of European and Chinese researchers. Lurking in the stool of 124 volunteers, the scientists found, were 3.3 million microbial genes. The scientists identified a core of bacteria species carried in most people’s guts, as well as other species that varied from person to person. As Ed Yong rightly points out, this study is most impressive as a titanic database. It is not the Theory of Everything for the human microbiome. That will take a lot longer to build, because the microbial ecosystem inside of us is so complex. Individual species don’t just sit in isolation, surviving in their own special way. Microbes cooperate with one another to get the food they need and produce the conditions in which they can thrive. In Microcosm, for example, I write about research suggesting that E. coli–a minor member of the gut ecosystem–may keep oxygen levels low enough for other species to invade and dominate. And it’s not as if there is some Platonic ideal of a microbiome that we all carry around with us from birth to death. The diversity of microbes I carry is different from the one you carry, and they both change over our lifetimes. Every time we take a dose of antibiotics, for example, the balance can change dramatically. And as the diversity of microbes changes, so do its ecological functions. Which brings me, at last, to the possibility that the human microbiome can become our puppetmaster. First some background. A lot of parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. (I get into more detail about this in my book Parasite Rex and in this segment of the show Radio Lab.) Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food. Parasitic wasps living inside caterpillars, for example, cause catepillars to convert the plants they eat into compounds that supply quick energy (good for wasp larvae growing quickly) instead of storing them as fat for their own metamorphosis. I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice. Scientists have found that if they transfer microbes from an obese mouse to a regular mouse that has had all its own germs stripped out, the recipient mouse will develop extra fat. In the case of these obese mice, it appears that the microbes become less efficient at helping the animals digest food, triggering a series of changes that leads the mice to be fat. Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat. They started out by engineering mice so that they didn’t produce a protein normally found on the surface of gut cells, called TLR5. TLR5 can recognize bacteria, and some studies suggest that the cells can then pass along signals to the immune system, possibly sending a stand-down command so that the immune system doesn’t start trying to kill the microbes (and end up killing gut cells too). Born without TLR5, mice got 20% fatter than normal. Not only that, but the mice had lots of other familiar symptoms that go along with being overweight, such as high levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Without TLR5 exerting its soothing influence, the mice suffered from chronic inflammation, probably thanks to the low-level war they were waging on their microbes. And things got worse for the mutant mice when they had to eat a high-fat diet. They gained more weight on a high-fat diet than regular mice, suffered even more inflammation, and even ended up diabetic. The obesity of these TLR5-deficient mice was not the result of inefficiency, as in previous studies. Instead, the mice wanted to eat more–about 10 percent more than regular mice. Knight and his colleagues restricted the diet of the mutant to what the regular mice ate. A lot of their symptoms went away. So the change in their behavior was critical to their weight change. The scientists also discovered that the make-up of the microbial diversity changed significantly in the mutant mice. Were the microbes giving the mice their symptoms? To find out, Knight and his colleagues knocked out the microbes with antibiotics. The mice ate less, put on less fat, and showed less diabetes-like symptoms. To isolate the effects of the microbes even more, the scientists transferred them from mutant mice into the bodies of ordinary mice that had first had all their own germs stripped out. Remember–these mice have a normal set of TLR5 receptors. The scientists found that the microbes made the recipient mice hungry–and also made them obese, insulin resistant, and so on. So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on. When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes. This discovery doesn’t just have the potential to change the way we think about why we eat what we eat. (Am I really hungry? Or are my microbes making me hungry?) It also provides a new target in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and related disorders. What may be called for is some ecological engineering. [Update: Links to papers fixed.]
• How Can I Ditch Cable and Watch My TV Shows and Movies Online? [Ask Lifehacker]
  Feb 24, 10
  Dear Lifehacker,
  I'd love to get rid of cable and stream all my favorite TV shows right from the internet. What do I need to know before I take the plunge? Signed,
  Ready to Cut the CoaxialPhoto by sociotard. Join the club! Some of us at Lifehacker HQ have already left or are ready to leave the cable company for 24/7 live TV streaming, too. We get this question all the time, and we've examined ditching the monthly bill in favor of watching programs online occasionally in the past, and we've also looked at ways to get your TV fix with apps like Boxee and Hulu, plus there are cool set-top devices like Roku and TiVo, but this is a good opportunity to get exhaustive. There are so many great options for catching a show here or there, but can you rely on them to replicate the cable TV experience? Well, yes and no. If you're going to unplug from the cable company, prepare to exercise some patience when it comes to watching your favorite shows as soon as they air—it can take anywhere from a day to a week for them to appear online. Also, be ready to do some digging around to find who's streaming special events, sports, and other programming outside of the drama/sitcom variety. Let's take a look at ways to find certain types of programming without relying on your cable company. Watch TV Online You can watch most of your favorite network shows by simply streaming them directly from the networks' web sites. They're often available a few hours after they air, and regularly have additional goodies like behind-the-scenes footage or teasers for upcoming episodes. In addition to official network sites, more and more useful tools are popping up every day to help you get your TV fix online. Clicker – Bookmark this site to help you figure out where your favorite shows are airing around the internet. It combs through what's available on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming video sites, and is searchable by show or topic. Hulu – This video streaming service offers the five most recent episodes of dozens of many of the most-watched shows on television. Episodes are available for 30 days after their air date, so this is a great way to catch up on any shows you've missed. It's also full of full seasons of older TV shows. CBS – Episodes from lots of current programming, as well as some oldies but goodies (MacGyver!). NBC – Check out new episodes of current primetime, daytime, and late night programming, and some original online-only series like Office parody show Ctrl. ABC – Episodes of current shows, including daytime programming and archives of specials like the American Music Awards. FOX – Full-length episodes of many popular shows, including Family Guy and Glee. Netflix – Best for catching episodes of your favorite shows from last season or from the last decade. While Netflix doesn't typically offer recently aired episodes of popular shows, it's perfect for streaming episodes from previous seasons, or for getting your "Murder She Wrote" groove on. There's a monthly fee to subscribe to Netflix but once you're signed up, you can stream an unlimited amount of shows. iTunes – You can pick up new episodes of shows on iTunes hours after they air on television, but be prepared to pay for the privilege. They'll usually set you back $1.99 per episode, or upwards of $30 per season. On the other hand, buying through iTunes means you can drop the shows on your iPod and watch them on the fly. Amazon Video On Demand – Like iTunes, you'll pay for most of the television shows you get from this site. The upside is, you can watch programs on your computer or convert them to a format that's playable on a mobile device. Gawker.TV - Okay, so our association aside (Gawker.TV is the all-video site of our blog network's namesake, Gawker), Gawker.TV was the go-to online destination we fired up every day during the recent Late Night debacle for comprehensive coverage of all the drama—and we didn't have to stay up all night to keep up with the latest. Gawker.TV isn't the only site out there that posts clips and synopses from shows and news events, but it's got a quick turnaround and can really fill a gap you miss when you don't have access to the regular cable lineup. If you're nuts for Psych, The Daily Show, or other cable TV shows, Hulu's got you covered. Some programs take a week to turn up on the web site, though, so you'll have to exercise some patience and avoid spoilers for a few days. On the other hand, Hulu has a bunch of nice features that let you organize, queue, and search shows. There's a desktop app that works with standard Apple or Windows Media Center Remotes. If you're sporting Windows 7 on your computer, don't forget to check out the Hulu Integration app for Windows Media Center. Watch Movies Online Hulu – Unlike television shows, current popular movies generally will take a while to turn up on Hulu. If you like to channel surf for movies until something catches your eye, then this is a great place to start. There are zillions of flicks to choose from and they're all searchable by name or genre. Netflix – Although much of the Watch Instantly movies at Netflix are titles that date back six months to a decade or more, there are a few newer movies if you hunt around a bit, and they've been improving their Watch Instantly service regularly. With unlimited streaming for subscribers and a handy queue feature to remind you of what movies you want to watch, this is a great substitution for paid movie channels from your cable company. iTunes – As with television shows, you'll pay per movie at iTunes. Buy a flick for about $15 or rent it for 24 hours for about $3 ($4 if you want it in HD). Most movies are available at iTunes the same day as the DVD becomes available in stores. Amazon Video On Demand -  Like iTunes, Amazon offers lots of newly-released movies for purchase or rent. You'll find lots of independent and niche films here, as well as the option of pre-ordering flicks a few weeks before they become available. Watch Sports Online Watching professional sports without cable is a tougher nut to crack and, depending on the event, you may have no choice but to head to your local sports bar. Even with cable, however, there's no guarantee you'll be able to access your favorite team's game. Fortunately, professional sports associations are getting in on the online action and streaming some or all of their televised games via paid subscriber network. MLB.TV – Baseball fans can watch every regular season game live or on demand, and more than 150 spring training games with no blackouts. Viewers also get access to game day audio, game archives, and real-time stats. NFL Network – Though this is actually the National Football League's official cable channel, its website has a ton of post-game video footage for fans to check out. Due to licensing and TV restrictions, finding a legal way to live stream NFL football is next to impossible unless you live outside the US, but at least you can listen live to every game of the season with an NFL Field Pass. NHL Game Center Live – Watch up to 40 live hockey games, including some of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, with a subscription to this service. It streams live in HD (when available) and includes DVR functionality so you pause, rewind, and fast forward during games. NBA All Access – Basketball fans can choose from two types of season passes: unlimited for access to all teams, or a league pass to follow only seven teams. Watch three games at once, and control the live action with full DVR controls. Yes, subscriptions that let you watch professional sports still cost you some coin, but a one-time fee of $50 - $150 per season to catch your favorite games is better than paying $50 or more a month all year for cable. Of course, some events, like the Olympics, will have several viewing options to choose from. Set-Top Boxes and Gadgets Set-top devices like Roku and TiVo let you stream movies and some television shows directly from Netflix, Blockbuster, and similar subscription services. They're great options for scratching that movie itch, and perfect for times when you feel like browsing viewing options until something strikes your fancy. Boxee Box - Whether you build your own cheap but powerful Boxee box or buy the pre-built Boxee Box once it's available, Boxee integrates a lot of the online TV sources listed above into one TV- and remote-friendly interface. TiVo – The granddaddy of DVRs, a TiVo device is great for streaming programs from Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon Video On Demand. It connects to your home's TV antenna so you can watch free network programming, and the HD TiVo units will even pick up your local high-definition channels. The drawback is that on top of the price of the device ($200 and up), you'll need a monthly $12 subscription to access TiVo's best features. Roku – This nifty little device streams a batch of different free internet channels like Blip.tv, Twit.tv, and even your Flickr photostream. You can also use it to access your Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand Accounts, making it a great alternative to a TiVo or other DVR. A new Roku will set you back anywhere from $80 - $120, depending on the model you choose. AppleTV – This somewhat limited device lets you easily stream your iTunes media library right to your television. The $229 device will also stream content from YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe. If you're willing to hack your AppleTV, you can put Boxee Media Center on it for some added functionality like viewing torrents fresh off the net. PlayOn – If you've got an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, this software download lets you wirelessly stream internet video content from Hulu, Netflix, and more right to your game box. It'll also pick up content from ESPN.com and CBS.com, or grab a free plugin to stream programming from The Weather Channel, Adult Swim, The Food Network, and more. PlayOn has a 14-day free trial, then you'll have to pop for $40 to keep it. The Antenna Option Finally, though you probably already know this, you can watch your home teams, local news, and, yes, even LOST without cable. In fact, these are the easiest types of shows to get because they're free and just require a TV antenna to capture. If you have an HD-ready TV, you can even pick up high-def channels. Not sure what kind of antenna gives you the most bang for your geographical buck? AntennaWeb will help you figure out which antenna works best for your house based on where you live, and even tell you which way to point it. But you're here to watch TV online, so let's get to it. So, Coax, here's a few ways to get you started on the road to cable-free living. We'd love to hear more ideas from readers who've axed their cable, and we'll update this post as tips roll in. Love,
  Lifehacker
• Google Voice + Locale at That Smith
  Feb 24, 10
  I figure the only way Google Voice could be improved is if it magically knew where I am and make my phones ring accordingly – so that’s exactly what I made it do. You can too with an Android phone, the Locale app and a web server.
• A Whole Lotta Nothing: My recommended kid games
  Feb 22, 10
  It started out innocuously. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant, my daughter was about two years old and fidgeting. I checked the App Store on my iPhone for a kid genre, found a fake phone game, and...
• Booking a Flight the Frugal Way - Frugal Traveler Blog - NYTimes.com
  Feb 18, 10
  The Frugal Traveler sifts through the many booking sites out there, and outlines the steps he takes when booking a flight for himself.
• Google Voice, Explained
  Feb 18, 10
  Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.
  
  While we've heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we're conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.
  
  So we've created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do:
  
  
  
  In addition, we've created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:
  Voicemail transcriptionOne numberPersonalized greetingsInternational callingSMS to emailShare voicemailsBlock callersScreen callersMobile appConference callsThe videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.
  
  Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.
  
  We hope these videos help you get the most out of Google Voice.
  
  Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager
• Can chocolate lower your risk of stroke?
  Feb 18, 10
  Eating chocolate may lower your risk of having a stroke, according to an analysis of available research. Another study found that eating chocolate may lower the risk of death after suffering a stroke.
• Valentine's Day statistical love poems
  Feb 14, 10
  Elissa Brown sends these in. They're actually pretty good, with a quite reasonable Ogden-Nash-style rhythm and a certain amount of statistical content. It's good to know that the kids today are learning useful skills in their graduate programs.

  You are perfect; I'd make no substitutions You remind me of my favorite distributions With a shape and a scale that I find reliable You're as comforting as a two parameter Weibull When I ask you a question and hope you answer truly You speak as clearly as a draw from a Bernoulli Your love of adventure is most influential Just like the constant hazard of an exponential. With so many moments, all full of fun, You always integrate perfectly to one.

  And here are a bunch more:

  A frequentist would say the chances of love are small, using 1 in a million as an close approximation. But I'd rather let a Bayseian make the call, who would conclude it's certain based on observed information -+- I'm aiming for a p-value less than .01
  That you and me together could have lots of fun
  The R2 of those before you were really quite poor
  But the multiple comparisons problem we'll just ignore -+- I used to think you were a little proc mean
  But now I see that I was wrong
  Your data is much more classy than I'd seen
  So how 'bout we get our proc freq on? -+- Some hypothesize all love turns sour
  And that even the hottest flame will grow dull
  That's why you and I should combine our power
  And once and for all reject the null -+- You're the apple of my pi
  You're the square to my chi
  You're the source of my love, shining and nu
  And that is why I love mu -+- They say that Y equals m-x plus b
  (well, when you remove the uncertainty).
  So let me reveal a secret confession:
  You're the solution to my least squares obsession. -+- In this world, I seek a fellow actuary;
  but I am careful to avoid those who are ancillary.
  When I need some help estimating my coefficient,
  you, my dear, are minimal and sufficient. -+- I may know all things statistical
  But how to win your love is far more mystical
  I could derive and integrate with great flair
  And we could make a perfectly correlated pair -+- #2 in the homework? I'll show you what I got:
  My heart's the confounder in Y-dot-dot
  Just check out the box and spaghetti plots
  Now let's get to rejecting H sub naught! -+- H0: All is lost, our love is not mean to be
  Ha: Oh happy day, you really like me
  Our favorite test statistic says p=0.053
  That's a little high but it's good enough for me -+- WSR, WRS, MWU
  The highest rank of love is in group You
  Distributions lead to models that aren't very true
  Because parameters our love most readily eschews -+- Help! My heart's survival is approaching zero
  There's been no recurrence of love to observe
  So do me a favor and be my hero
  And flatten the shape of my survival curve -+- You could say my love life was missing
  And my crushes so dismissing
  But then I had an idea most astute:
  A new lover I could impute!
  And now how I'm enjoying lots of kissing. -+- I've suffered through dates that were very extreme
  When all I was hoping for was closer to the mean
  Their knowledge of boring facts was encyclopedian
  When it would have been better to be on the other side of the median
  And eventually even their manners did erode
  With scores for politeness nowhere near the mode
  So I apologize for being so informal
  But I'm so glad I finally found someone normal

  I don't know what "WSR, WRS, MWU" are, but the other poems pretty much make sense to me.
• A recent improvement for Arabic searches
  Feb 2, 10
  This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
  
  We've learned that when performing a search on Google, people sometimes forget to separate words with spaces. Moreover, people often mistakenly repeat a letter within a single word. For instance, when writing the query [amazingly beautiful poem], you might write it as [amazingly beautiifullpoem].
  
  These types of errors are much more common in languages like Arabic, where most of the letters are cursive. That means that the shapes of the letters change, based on the position of the letter in the word (initial, middle, final or isolated). Moreover, some Arabic letters are considered word breaks, meaning that the following letter must be in an "initial" shape. In other words, if the last letter of one word is a word break, the following word may not be separated with a space.
  
  For example, the queries [وزارةالتعليم] and [وزارة التعليم] have an identical meaning (Ministry of Education) and they're both written in a common form for Arabic documents. But they have different, albeit correct, formats — the first query is written as a single word, while the second is written as two. Google needs to understand that while they're written differently, they mean the same thing and should yield the exact same search results. In this example, both queries were written correctly, just in different formats. But sometimes people just make errors — like repeating the same letter twice. For example, you might write [راائعة الجماال], repeating the letter "ا" twice in both query words. In this case the correct spelling should be [رائعة الجمال]. It's important that Google search recognizes your query — despite spelling errors.
  
  To address issues like this, we recently developed a search ranking improvement that targets certain Arabic queries. Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, when you type a query leaving out spaces or repeating a letter, we'll return better results based not only on what you typed, but also on what our algorithm understands is the "correct" query. For example, here's what happens when you type [قصيدة راائعةالجماال] ([amazingly beautiful poem] in Arabic) with repeated letters and dropped spaces between words.
  
  
  As you can see, the Google results contain the corrected query, the terms قصيدة رائعة الجمال, in bold.
  
  For most people, this might seem like a small enhancement. But for us, it’s a big change. Our tests show we've improved search for 10% of Arabic language queries. Which, when you think about it, is a lot of people.
  
  Posted by Moustafa Hammad and Mohamed Elhawary, Software Engineers, Search Quality Team
• How important is physical attractiveness to a happy marriage?: - Barking up the wrong tree
  Jan 28, 10
  Hmmm

  Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. These results highlight the importance of dyadic examinations of the effects of spouses' qualities on their marriages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

  Source: Beyond initial attraction: Physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. By McNulty, James K.; Neff, Lisa A.; Karney, Benjamin R. Journal of Family Psychology. Vol 22(1), Feb 2008, 135-143. --
• Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  Jan 28, 10
  What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. When you visit...
• Behind The Bail Bond System : NPR
  Jan 26, 10
  It's a shame.
  Behind The Bail Bond SystemBail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates(186) (169)January 21, 2010 Two-thirds of the inmates in U.S. jails are petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason: They can't afford their bail. Sometimes, it's as little as $50. Some will wait behind bars for as long as a year before their cases make it to court. And it will cost taxpayers $9 billion this year to house them.TranscriptOn All Things ConsideredPlaylistCHART: Jails Stuffed To Capacity In Many U.S. CountiesInmates Who Can't Make Bail Face Stark Options(159) (100)January 22, 2010 Shadu Green was like hundreds of thousands of inmates nationwide who can't afford bail or a bondsman's fee. So Green, who insists he is not guilty of a series of misdemeanors after getting pulled over for speeding, had to decide whether to fight his case from jail or plead guilty and get out faster. Studies show that internal debate usually works in prosecutors' favor.TranscriptOn Morning EditionPlaylistPART 1: Bail Rules Keep U.S. Jails Stuffed With InmatesBondsman Lobby Targets Pretrial Release Programs(62) (49)January 22, 2010 The pretrial release program in Broward County, Fla., was working, but commissioners voted to gut the program nonetheless. Industry experts say powerful bail lobbying groups have begun using Broward as a road map of how to squash similar programs elsewhere.TranscriptOn All Things Considered
• Google Voice for iPhone and Palm WebOS
  Jan 26, 10
  Today we are launching a new Google Voice mobile web app for iPhone OS 3.0 and higher and Palm Web OS devices, harnessing the power of HTML5, a new web technology that makes it possible to run faster, richer web-based applications right in the browser.
  
  
  In addition to letting you access a streamlined version of your Google Voice inbox, the new web app also lets you display your Google Voice number as the outbound caller ID (so return calls come back to your Google Voice number), send and receive text messages for free, and place international calls at Google Voice's low rates.
  
  
  To get started, visit m.google.com/voice in your mobile browser. For quick access, don't forget to create a shortcut to this URL on your home screen or Palm Launcher.
  Just a reminder: you'll need a Google Voice account and a voice plan on your cell phone to place calls using this web app. Don't have a Google Voice account? Request an invite.
  Posted by Michael van Ouwerkerk, Software Engineer
• electoral college reform
  Jan 24, 10
  The electoral college is a time-honored system that, has only broken down three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. the organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size. The 2000 Census records a population of 81,421,906 for the United States. The states ranged in population from 493,782 to 33,871,648.1 In this map, new states have formed, all with equal populations of roughly 5,617,000.2 enlarge this map Advantages of this proposal Ends overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now. Disadvantages Some county names are duplicated in new states. Local governments would have to deal with shift in state laws and procedures. Alaska and Hawaii are part of the states of Olympia and Coronado, respectively. 1. Wyoming and California, respectively 2. Every effort was made to place major cities and their close-in suburbs in a single state, leading to slight variences in state sizes. Each state shown has a population between 5.4 and 5.635 million, according to Census 2000 figures. Most are 5.616 million. The District of Columbia is preserved as it is.
• FBI broke law for years in phone record searches - washingtonpost.com
  Jan 19, 10
  The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact...
• The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
  Jan 18, 10
  When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006. Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners. As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Camp America to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion. Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable. According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.
• Mikey Hicks, 8, Can’t Get Off U.S. Terror Watch List - NYTimes.com
  Jan 14, 10
  Since Michael Hicks was 2, he has been frisked and his family delayed at almost every airport they have entered.
• Parasite of the Day
  Jan 12, 10
  The United Nations has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. In celebration of the enormous diversity of parasites and to highlight their importance, we have created this blog, which will showcase a species of parasite every day.
• Upload your files and access them anywhere with Google Docs
  Jan 12, 10
  Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out the ability to upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online. Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to backup large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud. More importantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more convenient option for accessing your files on different computers.
  
  This feature can also help you work with teams to organize and collaborate on information online. For example, an architect can share large schematic files with her construction firm, while a P.T.A. member can share large graphic files for posters with other members. You can even add these files to the same shared project folder your team has already been using to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.
  
  In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, our Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to seamlessly upload many files at once and sync them with their desktop in real time using third party applications. You can read more about how the ability to upload any file will help businesses on the Google Enterprise blog.
  
  This feature will be enabled for your account over the next couple of weeks — look for the bubble notification when you sign in to Google Docs. For more information, check out our post on the Google Docs blog.
  
  Posted by Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs
• The 31 Places to Go in 2010 - NYTimes.com
  Jan 9, 10
  From palm-fringed beaches in Bahia to the wilds of Norway, travel choices for nomads have never been more compelling.
• Documents Show Officials Covered Up Deaths in Immigrant Deaths - NYTimes.com
  Jan 9, 10
  Not unexpected, but very bad conduct by DHS and ICE. Heads need to roll.
  Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Nery Romero, who died in immigration detention in 2007. Multimedia Interactive Feature Documents: Deaths in Immigration Detention Enlarge This Image Robert Stolarik for The New York Times The family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell. Readers' Comments

  Share your thoughts.

  Post a Comment » Read All Comments (225) » But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security. The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them. But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity. In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk. The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead. Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.” In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits. Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
• A Peek Into Netflix Queues - NYTimes.com
  Jan 9, 10
  Examine maps of Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities across the nation.
• TeamViewer Solutions
  Dec 31, 09
  Useful, free and easy to install, especially on the remote computer.
  Remote support over the Internet Want to easily and quickly help your customers and business partners?
  With TeamViewer you can establish instant connections to any computer over the Internet, even through firewalls - your first session can start in less than a minute. TeamViewer is free for private users.
• Hamachi:Gaming - LogMeInWiki.com
  Dec 16, 09
  Hamachi can be used to connect you and your friends together for a gaming session by creating a virtual LAN (called Virtual Private Network). A VPN client will give you better latencies (less lag) than traditional Internet based gaming because it bypasses the extra servers required to Host/Join a game session.
  Please consult the Hamachi user manual before continuing!In order to insure that you will be able to create/join a Hamachi VPN and others will be able to join you the minimum required instructions are listed below, in the Basic guide.
• State of the Art - Barnes and Noble’s Nook Reader Fails to Live Up to Promises - NYTimes.com
  Dec 10, 09
  Good thing I have a Kindle.
  Worse, the touch screen is balky and nonresponsive, even for the Nook product manager who demonstrated it for me. The only thing slower than the color strip is the main screen above it. Even though it’s exactly the same E Ink technology that the Kindle and Sony Readers use, the Nook’s screen is achingly slower than the Kindle’s. It takes nearly three seconds to turn a page — three times longer than the Kindle — which is really disruptive if you’re in midsentence.Often, you tap some button on the color strip — and nothing happens. You wait for the Nook to respond, but there’s no progress bar, no hourglass, no indication that the Nook “heard” you. So you tap again — but now you’ve just triggered a second command that you didn’t want. It takes four seconds for the Settings panel to open, 18 seconds for the bookstore to appear (over Wi-Fi), and 8 to 15 seconds to open a book or newspaper for the first time, during which you stare at a message that says “Formatting.”“Over one million titles?” Yes, but well over half of those are junky Google scans of free, obscure, pre-1923 out-of-copyright books, filled with typos. (They’re also available for the Kindle, but Amazon doesn’t even count them).Fact is, Amazon’s e-book store is still much better. Of the current 175 New York Times best sellers, 12 of them aren’t available for Kindle; 21 are unavailable for the Nook. Kindle books are less expensive, too. Inkmesh.com studied the top-selling 11,604 books for early November, and found that 74 percent of the time, Amazon offers the lowest-priced e-books (cheaper than B&N or Sony) by an average of 15 percent.What about the Nook’s built-in Wi-Fi? It’s there, but you get no notification when you’re in a hot spot. And if the hot spot requires a login or welcome screen, you can’t get onto it. And the “loan e-books to friends?” part? You can’t lend a book unless its publisher has O.K.’ed this feature. And so far, B&N says, only half of its books are available for lending — only one-third of the current best sellers. (A LendMe icon on the B&N Web site lets you know when a book is lendable.) Furthermore, the book is gone from your own Nook during the loan period (a maximum of two weeks). And each book can be lent only once, ever.Also unfinished: the auto connection to the wireless hot spots in B&N stores, which will offer special treats like a free-cookie coupon. Those missing features are symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis. But the biggest one of all is the Nook’s half-baked software.To use the technical term, it’s slower than an anesthetized slug in winter.
• PHOTO: Meetings: The practical alternative to work. (via Ariel)
  Dec 8, 09
  Meetings: The practical alternative to work. (via Ariel)
• The Torture Archive
  Dec 7, 09
  The Torture Archive, an ongoing project of the National Security Archive, is assembling at a single location documents from wide-ranging sources on United States government policy toward rendition, detainees, interrogation, and torture. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the George W. Bush administration's subsequent launching of its "Global War on Terror", the Afghanistan war, and the invasion of Iraq, rumors circulated of disappearances, abusive treatment of prisoners, "extraordinary renditions", and "black site" (secret) prisons. Human rights and civil liberties organizations, investigative journalists, and congressional committees, including, notably, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Associated Press; and reporters for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, and the New York Times began to investigate. In early 2004 leaked photographs revealed the degradation of prisoners and their captors at the U.S. prison facility at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, shocking both the American public and the international community. Subsequent Freedom of Information Act requests, lawsuits, and public pressure compelled the U.S. government to release thousands of records documenting abusive detainee policy. Many of these records are already available on various websites, but using them is difficult because of their diverse locations. The Archive project is consolidating the documents and cataloging them, while also providing full-text searching, in order to facilitate public access.The Archive currently includes records disclosed through the American Civil Liberties Union's successful lawsuits against the Department of Defense and other federal agencies, and almost 20,000 pages of documents produced by the Combatant Status Review Board (CSRT) and the Administrative Review Board (ARB). The latter entities were created by the Defense Department in response to a Supreme Court ruling, and scathing internal and external criticism of detainee policy, to determine whether prisoners were, and continue to be, "enemy combatants" -- a term coined by the Bush administration for those judged to have committed or supported hostilities against the United States or its allies.Information in the Archive can be searched by title; creator, such as the Defense or State Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation; recipient, such as the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command; individual, such as former secretary of state Colin Powell; organization, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or the contractor CACI International; date; document type, such as memorandum, court-martial record, email, medical record, or sworn statement); and document, listed by date. As indicated, full-text searching is available. For the records obtained by the ACLU, document descriptions include notes prepared by its lawyers and staff, often summarizing content. The "individual" browse option can be used to retrieve documents on detainees whose cases are discussed in the ARB and CSRT records. Document descriptions for these records also display internment serial numbers (ISN), which were assigned to each prisoner by the Defense Department.Preliminary work on the Archive was carried out in association with Washington Media Associates, which produced the documentary film Torturing Democracy in 2008. The website project would not have been possible without support from the Open Society Institute, the JEHT Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the staff of the Washington Research Libraries Consortium. The National Security Archive is deeply grateful for their assistance.
• What Children Need
  Dec 5, 09
  I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this week, and was very lucky that Jane Waldfogel was giving the A. Kahn Memorial lecture on Thursday. She gave a fascinating talk on developments in comparative social policy studies, and also discussed her forthcoming book on Britain’s war on child poverty. I’m sure that when that book is out, somewhere in April 2010, someone more knowledgeable on the UK and the lessons that can be drawn for the US will post a piece here. I don’t think we’ve discussed her work here on CT before, which is a shame, really, since her book What Children Need is an excellent book on the topic of its title. The book focuses especially on the question what children from working parents need. How can we make sure that the care that children get when their parents have to work is good enough?
  It is quite difficult to find a balanced overview of discussions related to these issues, since many people have strong opinions. What I liked so much about Waldfogel’s book, is that she doesn’t try to come up with a one-sentence simplistic view, such as “children are better off in parental care until they are three” or “children under one should never be in daycare, since this will harm them.” Instead, she points out the different aspects at work – for example, that extending parental leave has beneficial effects on children up to one year, but that extending it for longer has not shown to have any effects, and has harmful effects for women as workers; that the problem with non-parental child care under the age of one are related to it being full-time and the care being of low quality, which in combination with insensitive parental care may lead to bad health and behavioural outcomes for children; but that the higher income of working mothers may offset some of these effects. What I found especially enlightening in her chapter on infants, is the importance of the quality of parental care for the effects of nonparental care; if parents are sensitive caregivers, then the children do much better in nonparental care. Also interesting, but not surprising, was her conclusion that we don’t know anything about the effects of working fathers on infants, since this has not been studied. Waldfogel also discusses what older children need, like after school programmes which will keep them off the street in case there is no-one to care for them after school. She argues, convincingly in my view, that if we want the needs of children to be adequately met, that we need the following policies (I copy them from the book): allowing parents more flexibility to take off time for family responsibilities; break the link between the employment and essential family benefits, such as health insurance; give mothers and fathers the opportunity to spend more time at home in a child’s first year of life; improve the quality of care for infants and toddlers; improve the quality of care and education for preschool-aged children; increase access to high-quality out-of-school programs for school-aged children and teenagers; and increase the role of the schools by extending the school day and year. I think all of this make eminently sense and looking at European states shows us that this is not financially impossible, as long as the political community is willing to invest money in children and their future. And that is probably where, for the US at least, the problem lies, since the government is too often not perceived as enabling opportunities and supporting vulnerable people (such as children) but rather as getting into the way of families. My only quibble with the book is that it separates the agenda of what we need for children and families, from the agenda how to create a more gender just world. I can see that for political-strategic reasons it may be wise to separate the two; but if the children’s agenda is implemented without thinking about how this will work out for the gender constellation, it may have unintended negative effects on that front. In any case, highly recommended for anyone interested in thinking about policy making for children and the family.
• Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » New Details About Destroyed Torture Tapes
  Dec 2, 09
  Last Friday, we got a list, called a Vaughn index, of records related to the CIA's destruction of videotapes that showed the torture and abusive interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody overseas. Among the most interesting revelations in the index are the precise date the tapes were destroyed, and evidence that the Bush White House was involved in early discussions about the tapes' destruction.Listed in the index released late last week are a November 8, 2005, cable from a CIA field office to CIA headquarters requesting permission to destroy the 92 tapes, and a November 9, 2005, cable confirming their destruction. The precise date of destruction confirms that the tapes were destroyed immediately after the Washington Post reported the existence of the CIA black sites and the New York Times reported that the CIA Inspector General had questioned the legality of the agency’s torture program.The index also lists the earliest known record of White House participation in discussions about destroying the tapes — an email dated February 22, 2003, revealing that CIA officials met with Bush administration officials to discuss how the agency should respond to a letter from Representative Jane Harman (D-Calif.) advising the agency not to destroy the tapes (PDF). While it was known previously that the White House participated in discussions about the disposition of the tapes, this is the earliest record to date of any such discussions.To learn more, check out our new selected chronology of what is now known about the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes.
• Contra Max Weber
  Dec 2, 09
  Davide Cantoni (who by the way is on the job market, from Harvard) reports:

  Many theories, most famously Max Weber's essay on the 'Protestant ethic,' have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of the Holy Roman Empire present an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures in a dataset comprising 276 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and does not appear to depend on data selection or small sample size. In addition, Protestantism has no effect when interacted with other likely determinants of economic development. I also analyze the endogeneity of religious choice; instrumental variables estimates of the effects of Protestantism are similar to the OLS results.

  The full paper, and other work by Cantoni, is here.  I believe this is the most thorough statistical test of the Weberian hypothesis to date.
• Luck versus Skill in Mutual Fund Performance - Fama/French Forum
  Dec 1, 09
  Basically, mutual funds consistently underperform index funds.
  Our paper, "Luck versus Skill in the Cross Section of Mutual Fund Returns," examines the performance during 1984-2006 of actively managed US mutual funds that invest primarily in US equities.  It is an academic paper with lots of technical detail.  The purpose of this white paper is to provide a summary of the results that are relevant for investors.  We begin by examining the overall α for aggregate wealth invested in actively managed mutual funds.  We then turn to the performance of individual funds.
• NCERT کی اردو درسی کتب
  Nov 25, 09
  سن 1961ء میں حکومتِ ہند نے ایک خود مختار تعلیمی ادارہ "نیشنل کونسل آف ایجوکیشنل ریسرچ اینڈ ٹریننگ (نیشنل کونسل برائے تعلیمی ریسرچ اور ٹریننگ - NCERT)" کا قیام عمل میں لایا تھا تاکہ مرکزی اور ریاستی حکومتوں کے مدارس کے لئے ایک موثر تعلیمی پالیسی بنانے میں تعاون کیا جائے۔
  برسہا برس کی مخلصانہ محنت کے بعد یہ ادارہ اب ایک ایسا منفرد تعلیمی ادارہ بن چکا ہے جس نے ہندوستان بھر میں اسکول کی تعلیم کے حوالے سے ایک منفرد شناخت حاصل کی ہے۔ آج اس ادارے سے ہندوستان کی تمام ریاستوں کے سینکڑوں اسکول منسلک ہیں۔ ان تمام اسکولوں میں یکساں معیار کی تعلیم دی جاتی ہے اور مشترکہ نصاب پر عمل کیا جاتا ہے۔ اور یہی ادارہ خود سے منسلک ہندوستان بھر کے تمام اسکولوں میں امتحانات کا انعقاد عمل میں لاتا ہے اور دسویں اور بارہویں جماعت کے بورڈ امتحانات کے نتائج کا اعلان بھی ایک ہی دن میں کیا جاتا ہے۔
  NCERT کی ویب سائیٹ پر اس ادارے کے متعلق مزید معلومات حاصل کی جا سکتی ہیں۔ NCERT کا پروفائل بروچر یہاں سے ڈاؤن لوڈ کریں۔
  بحیثیت ایک سرکاری زبان کے ، اردو کی درسی کتب بھی پڑھائی جاتی ہیں۔
  پہلی جماعت سے 12 ویں جماعت تک پڑھائی جانے والی اردو درسی کتب ذیل کے روابط سے پ-ڈ-ف فائلوں کی شکل میں ڈاؤن لوڈ کی جا سکتی ہیں۔
  بشکریہ : NCERT Text Books
  
  
  جماعت
  بنیادی کتاب
  معاون کتاب
  بارہویں (12)
  گلستانِ ادب (12)
  خیابانِ اردو (12)
  گیارہویں (11)
  گلستانِ ادب (11)
  خیابانِ اردو (11)
  دسویں (10)
  نوائے اردو
  گلزارِ اردو
  نویں (9)
  نوائے اردو
  گلزارِ اردو
  آٹھویں (8)
  -
  -
  ساتویں (7)
  اپنی زبان
  اردو گلدستہ
  چھٹی (6)
  اپنی زبان
  اردو گلدستہ
  پانچویں (5)
  -
  -
  چوتھی (4)
  ابتدائی اردو (4)
  -
  تیسری (3)
  ابتدائی اردو (3)
  -
  دوسری (2)
  ابتدائی اردو (2)
  -
  پہلی (1)
  ابتدائی اردو (1)
  -
  
  
• Survey of Pakistan’s Young Predicts ‘Disaster’ if Their Needs Aren’t Addressed - NYTimes.com
  Nov 22, 09
  A majority of the country’s young people think the nation is on the wrong course, and they are divided between a preference for democracy and Islamic law, a report says.
• Art, sports, and the decline of a great university « The Reality-Based Community
  Nov 20, 09
  Another couple of shoes have dropped in the story of screwed-up values and national humiliation at Berkeley.  The good news: readers will recall that the faculty senate passed a resolution demanding that subsidies to the intercollegiate athletics program stop going up, and quickly go back to zero (the accumulated debt of this program, which is supposed to be self-supporting – like the parking garages -  over the last decade is about $170m but most of it was just forgiven as a present from the new chancellor in 2007, so we ate it in reduced academic funding).  Projections for the current year are for a budget of about $60m, and a loss of $6.4m plus a campus subsidy of $6m. I should say that it is extremely difficult to get coherent and complete financial information about athletics. When we see some, I will be able to present better figures; we know some athletics-only costs are not included in this budget.Note that we are talking here only about letter athletes, some on scholarship, competing with other college teams.  Among a student body of about 30,000, there are between 500 and 900 of them.  Every athletic activity for the other 29,100 except sitting in seats watching games, from throwing a frisbee to pickup or intramural basketball, is not covered by this program (and quietly starving in degrading and shrinking facilities).The athletic department (DIA) is flogging long-term seat subscriptions for football to pay for a stadium renovation that will cost about $300m and will begin next year.  The sole function of the stadium is to have six football games a year, though there is a perfectly nice stadium down the road, with convenient rapid transit access, that the Raiders never use on Saturdays (there might be some conflicts to resolve with baseball in September).DIA is already building something called a Student Athlete High Performance Center, which is about a sixth that (exclusively for the lucky 900), half football offices and facilities, and another sixth party venue for players, donors and boosters, which will cost about $136m.  As I understand it, this was a requirement to keep our $5m/yr  football coach, who has brought the team all the way to the top of the bottom half of the PAC-10, and to number 25 in the BCS rankings this week (AP and Coaches, not so much, but we did get a few votes).We are paying for these projects with bonds backed by the campus as a whole that will cost about $31m per year to retire.  DIA proposes that it will find this money and close the $12m deficit from new contributions and ticket sales, a rosy expectation of almost tripling ticket sales and gifts, from$25m for ‘09-10 to  $68m, every year for two decades.  Every penny by which they fall short will come out of the teaching and research activity of the campus.  The total exposure from this plunge is about $13,000 per faculty member per year, well more than the furlough salary we left on the table this year.
• The Brain: Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine
  Nov 19, 09
  New research suggests that math has evolved its way right into our neurons—and monkeys', too. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
• Economic Scene - Promise in a ‘Cash for Caulkers’ Program to Weatherize Homes - NYTimes.com
  Nov 19, 09
  We are also thinking of an energy audit of our house.
  A “cash for caulkers” program has the potential to get contractors working again, as well as keep more money in homeowners’ pockets.
• Retaliating against the Mickey Tax
  Nov 12, 09
  Stupid Mickey Tax!
  I wrote a couple of blog posts last year on the Mickey Tax, or, as its promoters would prefer to describe it, the ‘Travel Promotion Act’ bill, which would seek to ‘promote’ travel to the US by imposing a fee on anyone entering the country which would in turn be handed over (after costs were deducted) to an advertising slush-fund. Now the FT is reporting that the European Union is threatening to retaliate against it by imposing visas on US visitors.

  US plans to levy fees on European Union tourists and business travellers visiting the US have come under fire in Brussels and could prompt the EU to enact its own visa-like system for US travellers, according to diplomats. … In the past, most Europeans visiting the US for less than 90 days have not had to make pre-departure arrangements. The same applies to US visitors to the EU under visa-reciprocity guidelines. “If this tax is indeed introduced, the Commission will have to re-evaluate once again whether it is tantamount to a visa,” said a spokesman for Jacques Barrot, the commissioner for justice and home affairs, on Tuesday.

  If the EU carries through on this threat, American tourists to Europe who have to pay visa fees, wait in queues at overworked consulates etc, should know who is responsible – the Walt Disney Corporation of America.

  JAY RASULO STOOD IN FRONT OF TWO MASSIVE SCREENS, each projecting his balding visage, and did what he loves to do: sell a big idea. The dapper, diminutive chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts implored 500 tourist industry executives to ask the federal government for an expensive favor. … Executives from tourism giants such as Marriott, American Express and Hertz buzzed with excitement—and skepticism. Getting taxpayers to underwrite overseas commercials had been the travel industry’s Holy Grail for decades. But the idea had never gotten very far in the councils of government. … A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask—the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress.

  It’s an interesting story. When it became clear that the travel industry was unlikely to get US taxpayers to pay for a $200 million travel promotion campaign, lobbyists started looking for alternative ways of raising money – and the most obvious was to top up the industry’s own efforts with the Mickey Tax. Hence the bill, and hence the possible retaliatory measures from Europe. All thanks to Jay Rasulo and his balding visage.
• Kindle for PC Beta Brings E-Books to Bigger Screens
  Nov 10, 09
  Windows: Amazon has released a Windows application, Kindle for PC, that tells you everything in its name. It syncs with other Kindle devices, offers color pictures, font size control, and other controls for reading on your computer. Amazon seems to be pitching Kindle for PC as a supplement to, not a substitute for, a standard Kindle experience. Kindle for PC doesn't offer blogs, newspaper, or magazine subscriptions, and the interface doesn't offer much over the Kindle device it sprung from. That said, those without iPhone/ipod Touch or Kindle devices might be eager to try out the instant-on e-book experience, along with the joys of reading through free sample chapters for any and every book. Kindle for PC is a free download for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 systems only. A Mac version is "coming soon," according to Amazon. Kindle for PC [Amazon via Resource Shelf]
• Seymour M. Hersh: In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?
  Nov 8, 09
  In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen . . .
• State Secrets
  Nov 5, 09
  Here's an interesting little story.  Way back in 1993 a couple of CIA agents wiretapped a DEA agent in Burma named Richard Horn, and when Horn found out he sued both the agents and the CIA for violating his civil rights.  The case muddled along for years, and a couple of days ago the government agreed to a settlement. So far, so boring.  But why, after 15 years, did the government finally cave?  Turns out it's because they were lying to the judge and got caught:

  Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth suggested that the past and present CIA men may have perpetrated a "fraud on the court" through inaccurate declarations....Until Lamberth's angrily worded July decision, government attorneys had successfully argued that the lawsuit, first filed in August 1994, must be sealed to protect state secrets. ....Tellingly, Lamberth further hinted in September that the government could be on a losing course if the case went to trial, as he suggested that "the only secret the government might have left to preserve is the fact they did what Horn alleges."

  The CIA had invoked the state secrets privilege, insisting that the case against one of its agents be dropped because he was working covertly and his identity couldn't be revealed.  And they kept insisting that even after his cover had been lifted.  When Lamberth found out, he was not a happy judge. More here.  This is yet another data point that restates the obvious: just because the government invokes the state secrets privilege doesn't mean there really are state secrets involved.  Congress and the courts, who know this perfectly well, would be wise to demand a wee bit more judicial oversight in these cases instead of allowing the executive absolute discretion.  Pat Leahy's State Secrets Protection Act would be a good place to start.
• New Study Debunks Link Among Winning College Athletic Programs and Increases in Donations and Quality of Applicants - Knight Foundation
  Nov 5, 09
  Success in big-time athletics has little if any effect on a college’s alumni donations or on the academic quality of its applicants, a leading economist concludes in a new study commissioned by the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Robert H. Frank, H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Economics at Cornell University and author of the study notes: “Individual institutions that decide to invest more money in their sports programs in the hope of raising more funds or improving their applicant pools may be throwing good money after bad, and would be wiser to spend the money in other ways.” In response to these findings, Dr. Frank suggests that “groups of institutions that compete against each other in sports could jointly agree to cut back on sports spending – to abandon the ‘arms race’ in which they are now engaged – without reducing either donations by alumni or applications by prospective students.” According to NCAA reports, costs for college sports programs are on the rise, and most athletic departments spend more than they take in. Why then, Frank asks, are colleges willing to keep spending more and more money to support programs that, on average, lose money?
• Ezra Klein - An insurance industry CEO explains why American health care costs so much
  Nov 2, 09
  On Friday, I sat down with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson to talk about health-care reform. The conversation was long and ranging and will take a while to transcribe. But before we really got into the weeds, Halvorson handed me an astonishing packet of charts. The material was put together by the International Federation of Health Plans, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an association of insurance plans in different countries. But it showed something I've never seen before, at least not at this level of detail: prices.The packet's 36 pages are mostly graphs showing the average prices paid in different countries for different procedures, diagnostics and drugs. There is a thudding consistency to the pages: a series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.
• Released Government Documents Responsive to 2004 Torture FOIA | American Civil Liberties Union
  Nov 2, 09
  Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel Letters and Memos to CIA Regarding Detention and Interrogation Policies:11/3/2003 Letter to Senator Leahy from FBI Director Mueller confirming that the CIA is bound by the Constitution 10/18/2004 CIA Office of Medical Services (OMS) Guidelines on medical and psychological support to detainee rendition, interrogation and detention CIA Office of Inspector General report excerpts Interrogation Legal Authorities Description of stress positions and facial slap Interrogation of Detainees CIA/OLC interrogation questionnaire12/12/2002 Department of State fax coversheet 2/7/2002 White House memo regarding Geneva Conventions and humane treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees 5/11/2004 Assistant Attorney General Goldsmith memo regarding advice to DOD on interrogations Applicability of Geneva Conventions III (POWs) and IV (civilians) in Iraq after June 30, 2004 and effect on U.S. powers and duties regarding detentions 1/27/2004 Saddam Hussein Interrogation document 1/27/2004 Memo regarding legal issues surrounding interview/interrogation of Saddam Hussein 5/19/2004 Memo regarding treatment of prisoners and detainees 10/4/2001 Department of State fax to White House National Security Counsel regarding Geneva Conventions and POWs 10/11/2001 Department of State fax to White House National Security Counsel regarding 10/12/2001 Department of State fax to White House National Security Counsel regarding POWs Department of Defense Documents Regarding Detention and Interrogation Policies Department of Justice Criminal Division Documents FBI Documents Regarding Detention and Interrogation Policies Reprocessed FBI Office of Inspector General Report:Pages 1-100Pages 101-220Pages 221-321Pages 322-441
• Adobe Gets Sharky Snarky With Apple's iPhone Flash Ban
  Nov 2, 09
  As I have always said, Apple is EVIL.
  Pulling a Donald Sutherland in Body Snatchers, Adobe shows its darkest side screaming and pointing the finger at Apple in this Flash installation web page for iPhone users. Their razor-sharp message:

  Flash Player not available for your device. Apple restricts use of tecnologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod touch.

  Bad Adobe BAD! Next time, please put this in every single Adobe Flash box inside every single page using Flash on the web? [Check it here from your iPhone via Gear Diary]
• The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
  Nov 2, 09
  Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
• African Film Library
  Oct 30, 09
  The African Film Library is an M-Net initiative showcasing the best of the African film industry – making the movies easily accessible for movie aficionados around the world.
• Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap
  Oct 29, 09
  You won't find a better media center than the open-source XBMC, but most people don't have the space or desire to plug a noisy PC into their TV. Instead, I converted a cheap nettop into a standalone XBMC set-top box. Here's how. In the spirit of our Winter Upgrades theme this week, this guide details how to turn a cheapo nettop (think netbook for the desktop) into a killer settop box running XBMC. It handles virtually any video file I throw at it with ease (including streaming Blu-Ray rips from my desktop), it looks tiny next to my Xbox 360, it's low energy, and it's whisper quiet. Huge props to this guide on the XBMC forums, which served as the starting point for much of what I did below. What You'll Need Acer AspireRevo: This $200 nettop ships with 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom 230 processor, 160GB hard drive, Windows XP (which we won't use anyway), and an integrated graphics chip that handles HD video and can output it to HDMI. It also comes with a small wired keyboard and mouse, but once you're done here, you shouldn't need either of them. Oh, and it's tiny. (Other, more powerful nettops will work [like this one's beefier, $330 older sibling], but this is the cheapest one I could find with the NVIDIA ION graphics powerful enough to handle the HD playback.) XBMC Live: This is a Live CD version of XBMC that boots directly into XBMC and has a tiny footprint. Basically all you're running is XBMC, so your media center stays light and snappy. You can find the download specifically set up for these NVIDIA ION machines on this page, you can grab the direct download here, or download via BitTorrent here. A thumb drive: It doesn't have to be huge, but it'll need to be at least 1500MB of capacity, according to the installer. You should also format it to FAT32. An IR receiver/Windows Media Center remote: This isn't strictly necessary, but if you want to control your shiny new XBMC via remote control, you'll need some sort of supported remote with a USB receiver. I bought this $20 remote because it was the cheapest I could find. (Incidentally, it also works like a charm with XBMC as soon as you plug it in.) Getting XBMC Live up and running on your nettop is a breeze if you follow a few simple steps, so let's get started. Install XBMC Live on Your Thumb Drive XBMC Live allows you to try XBMC on any computer from a bootable CD or thumb drive, then optionally install the lightweight, XBMC-focused Linux distro directly to your device if you like. Since our nettop doesn't have a DVD drive, we'll need to first install XBMC to our thumb drive. (There are ways around this. If you had a USB optical drive, you could probably burn XBMC Live to a disc and go from there. The thumb drive method isn't much more difficult, though.) Here's how it works: 1. Download the XBMC Live installer with the updated NVIDIA drivers included on this page (direct link, torrent link). Update: Huge thanks to Mike and Aaron for the file hosting and torrent creating. It's a 341MB file, so it may take a while. 2. Burn XBMC Live to a CD
  Once the download completes, unzip the xbmc.zip file. What you're left with is an xbmc.iso file—the disc image of the XBMC Live installer. Now you need to burn this ISO to a CD. Install our favorite tool for the job, ImgBurn, then right-click the xbmc.iso file and select Burn using ImgBurn. (If you're running Windows 7, you can use its built-in ISO burner, too, by selecting Burn disc image.) 3. Install XBMC Live to Your Thumb Drive
  Now that you've burned XBMC to a CD, you're ready to install it to your thumb drive. To do so, plug in your thumb drive, put the XBMC Live CD in your DVD drive, and reboot your computer. If it's not already your default setting, go into your system BIOS (for most computers hitting Delete at the first boot screen will launch your BIOS) and set your optical drive as the primary boot device. (All this means is that when your computer boots, it'll first check to see if there's any bootable media in your optical drive. If not, it'll continue booting to your secondary device—generally your hard drive. If your optical drive does contain bootable media—like your XBMC Live CD, for example—it'll boot it up.) When XBMC Live loads, select "Install XBMCLive to disk (USB or HDD)", then accept the first prompt (by pressing any key). Next you'll end up at the "Choose disk to use" prompt, where you'll tell the installer that you want to install to your USB stick. Be careful here not to choose your hard drive, because it would be happy to overwrite your operating system if you told it to. Remember, your thumb drive is the Removable disk. After you pick the disk you want to use, confirm that you want to proceed and let the installer do its magic. (It'll only take a few minutes.) Eventually the installer will ask you if you want to create a permanent system storage file, which presumably you'd want if you're not sure whether or not you want to install XBMC Live to your Acer's hard drive. I went ahead and created the system storage (even though we'll install XBMC Live directly to the hard drive in the next step.) Once the installation finishes, you're ready to proceed to the next step. Set Your System BIOS You'll need to make a couple of tweaks to your system BIOS to get it working smoothly with XBMC Live. So plug in your thumb drive, boot up your Acer AspireRevo, and hit Delete at the first boot screen to edit your BIOS. Look for the "Boot to RevoBoot" entry in the Advanced BIOS features menu and disable it. While you're there, set your XBMC Live thumb drive as the primary boot device. (You can set the primary boot device back to your hard drive later, after you've installed XBMC Live to your drive.) Then go to the Advanced Chipset Features menu and set the iGPU Frame Buffer Detect to Manual and set the iGPU Frame Buffer Size to 256MB. (This is detailed here; the actual guide says 512, but that requires that you install more RAM—something I may do in the future, and will detail with a guide if I do. The 512 buffer size will help you stream the larger HD videos without hiccups.) Now that your BIOS are set, you're ready to try out XBMC Live on your Acer AspireRevo. Boot Up/Install XBMC Live to Your Hard Drive At this point, you've got two choices. You can either restart your Acer AspireRevo and boot into XBMC Live to play around a little before you install it to your disk. If you're sure you're ready to install it for reals, just go ahead and run through the exact same installation as you did above, only this time install it to your nettop's hard drive. When you install to the hard drive, you'll also set a system password. This'll come in handy later. The Final Tweaks Okay, so far so good. XBMC should boot up directly from your hard drive now, and if you've plugged in your Windows Media Center remote, it should also be working without a hitch. You've just got to make a couple of adjustments to make it shine. Now, what makes your little nettop work so well is that its onboard graphics processor can handle all the HD business without eating up your regular processor power, so you'll want to enable this in the XBMC settings. So head to Settings > Video > Play, find the Set Render to section, and set it to VDPAU. Now, depending on how you're planning on hooking up your XBMC Live box to your television, you've got a few more tweaks you'll want to make. Namely this: If you want to use HDMI for your audio out, head to Settings > System > Audio hardware, then set the audio output to Digital. Set your Audio output device to hdmi, and set the Passthrough output device to hdmi. Last, enable Downmix multichannel audio to stereo. If you are using HDMI as your audio out (I am, and it's pretty nice), you've got to make one final tweak if you want the audio output to work with menu sounds. (It'll work fine with video without making this tweak, but the click-click sounds that play when you move around the XBMC menu are nice to have.) If that applies to you, create a new text file on your regular old computer (name it asoundrc.txt) and paste the following code (again, this awesome tweak comes from this post): pcm.!default { type plug slave { pcm "hdmi" } } In the next step, I'll show you how to copy that file over to your nettop (a little trick that'll also come in handy for manually installing plug-ins and copying files to your nettop). SFTP to Your XBMC Box If you want to transfer files to your XBMC Live box from another computer, you'll need to get yourself an FTP client (I like FileZilla) and log into your nettop with the password you set when you were installing XBMC Live. To do so, create a new connection in Filezilla that looks something like the screenshot below (the default user is xbmc). Once you're connected, make sure you're in the /home/xbmc/ directory, then copy over the asoundrc.txt file we made above. (The one you want to use if you're running your audio through the HDMI output.) Once it's copied over, rename the file to .asoundrc, restart XBMC, and the click-click menu sounds should be working along with regular old A/V playback. The same SFTPing method here will be useful if you ever want to manually install any plug-ins or skins down the road, or just copy over media directly to your nettop's hard drive. (Though we'd recommend streaming—see below.) Other Options As I said above, you can buy more expensive, meatier machines, but for my money this Acer nettop has worked perfectly. Apart from upgrading to better equipment, you can also add up to 2GB more RAM if you're up for the job (RAM's so cheap these days, anyway). Like I said, though, so far I haven't seen the need for it. I also quickly switched the skin to the MediaStream skin, which is the one you see in the photo at the top of the page. For a look at some other great skins you may want to apply to your XBMC box, check out these five beautiful skins—or just head to XBMC's main skins page. Now that you've got it all set up, you've probably also realized that 160GB isn't all that much space for your media. You'd be right, of course. You've got two pretty good options. First, the nettop should have something like four free USB ports still, so you can easily plug in a big old drive that way. Assuming, however, that you can run an Ethernet wire over to your nettop, your best option is just to connect it to a shared folder on your home network. XBMC works like a charm with Samba shares (Windows shared folders use this). Whichever method you use, you just need to add your extra hard drive space as a source in XBMC. You can do so through any of the individual menu items (videos, for example), or you can add a default Samba username and password in the settings so it can connect automatically without asking for a password each time you add a new watch folder on that machine. At this point I could go into more detail on how to use and get the most out of XBMC (it can be a little hard to get your head around at first, even though once you do, it's not actually confusing). We've covered souping up your XBMC—and building your classic Xbox XBMC machine—and both offer some help in those directions. But stick around; tomorrow we'll follow up with an updated guide to some of our favorite XBMC tweaks. This guide covers in pretty close detail one method for putting together a dedicated, quiet XBMC media center without breaking the bank, but it's certainly not your only option. If you've gone down this road before, offer your tips and suggestions in the comments. For my part: I'm completely in love with my new little media center. Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker and loves a good computer-based DIY, especially when the results are as beautiful as XBMC. His special feature Hack Attack appears on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader, or follow @adampash on Twitter.
• Torture makes you seem guilty
  Oct 29, 09
  Problem solved!
  A Harvard psych study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows that when people are present during torture, they gradually come to believe the torture victim is guilty as a way of assuaging their consciences for their complicity in torture:

  Participants in the study met a woman suspected of cheating to win money. The woman was then "tortured" by having her hand immersed in ice water while study participants listened to the session over an intercom. She never confessed to anything, but the more she suffered during the torture, the guiltier she was perceived to be... "Our research suggests that torture may not uncover guilt so much as lead to its perception," says Gray. "It is as though people who know of the victim's pain must somehow convince themselves that it was a good idea -- and so come to believe that the person who was tortured deserved it." Not all torture victims appear guilty, however. When participants in the study only listened to a recording of a previous torture session -- rather than taking part as witnesses of ongoing torture -- they saw the victim who expressed more pain as less guilty. Gray explains the different results as arising from different levels of complicity. "Those who feel complicit with the torture have a need to justify the torture, and so link the victim's pain to blame," says Gray. "On the other hand, those distant from torture have no need to justify it and so can sympathize with the suffering of the victim, linking pain to innocence."

  Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty Previously:Torture Trading Cards - Boing Boing Musicians call for release of torture soundtrack details - Boing Boing Waterboard torture memo set to music - Boing Boing Solitary confinement is torture: psych expert - Boing Boing Report: Gay men systematically targeted for torture, death in Iraq ... Lawsuit Against Former Bush Official Over Torture Claims Can ... Obama Reverses Promise to Release Detainee Torture Photos - Boing ... Boing Boing Video: "OUTLAWED" excerpts, pt. 1 -- Guantánamo ...
  
  
• Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain
  Oct 28, 09
  You registered a domain name and set up the free Google Apps Standard Edition to get Gmail, GTalk, GCal, and GDocs running behind it. Now, take a look at some advanced settings Google Apps (for your domain) makes available. What the what? Sometimes we refer to all of Google's regular, free, public products as "Google Apps," but today we're referring to the product formerly known as "Google Apps for Your Domain" as just plain "Google Apps." (Note to Google: Come up with a clearer naming convention.) Give this flavor of Google Apps a domain name you own—like yourfamily.org or example.com—and it puts Google services behind it. If you've got a regular Google Account and you@gmail.com email address, that's cool—you can forward mail for you@yourdomain.com address to and from it. But Google Apps lets you create and manage several users associated with your domain and enable various services for them. Google Apps (for your domain) comes in several flavors: Standard Edition (free for individuals and non-affiliated groups, what we're going to cover here), Premier Edition (for businesses), Non-Profit Edition, Education Edition, and Government Edition. Nerd Threat Level: Orange This flavor of Google Apps is only useful to people who own their own domain name (or want to purchase one), and who plan to set up a workgroup behind that domain. For example, if you're Carol Brady and you register thebradybunch.com domain name, you're going to want to set up several users at that domain. With Google Apps, Carol could create a greg@thebradybunch.com account, a marcia@thebradybunch.com account, all the way down to Cindy, Bobby, Alice, and Tiger. When Marcia gets hitched? Carol can add her spouse to the family domain. When Alice moves onto greener pastures? Carol could shut down or suspend her account. The two key advantages to using Google Apps this way are: 1.) you get a custom you@yourdomain.com email address that you can take with you to another email provider if Gmail goes away or you want to transfer it. Your regular @gmail.com address is married to Google's service, so you can never use it with another provider. 2.) You get system administrator-level capabilities for setting up your workgroup's IT needs with Google's easy interface. We've already done an overview of what Google Apps can do; if you haven't already, here's how to get it set up with your domain. If you're not using Google Apps but you're interested, know that it takes a low level set of system administrator skills to get it up and running. You'll need to configure domain settings, such as your email MX record for your domain at your registrar. It depends on who you used (I recommend NameCheap), but most likely your registrar offers a settings panel to configure these things. You'll also have to verify your domain by adding files to the web site, most likely via FTP or another method. With me? Good. Take a look at some of the gems buried in Google Apps' administrative interface. Access it at google.com/a/yourdomain.com, replacing the "yourdomain.com" part with, well, your domain name. Name Your Domain Google Apps give you the option to give your domain a human-readable label beyond just example.com. For fun and an inflated sense of self-importance, I called mine "Gina Trapani Enterprises," which you'll see in many of the screenshots here. You can set up your domain's name in the Google Apps Dashboard, under Domain Settings>General. You and your domain users will see this name in your apps tab titles, and when you sign into any service. Map Multiple Domains to Your Account If you own multiple varieties of your domain name—for instance, multiple top-level domains like example.com, example.org, and example.net—you can map those to a single Google Apps account using domain aliases. To add another domain to your primary domain, from your Google Apps Dashboard> Domains settings> Domain names, click "Add a domain alias" to set another up. (This is located at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/DomainSettingsDomains, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) As you can see from the screenshot, I've got both ginatrapani.org and ginatrapani.com running under Google Apps. This means that if someone emails user@ginatrapani.org or user@ginatrapani.com, those messages all wind up in the same place. This also works for totally different domains, not just different top-level domains (.org, .com, .net, etc). Manage Domain Users and Groups If you've got only a few users to create, you can add them to your domain one by one. However, if you've got a large group, Google Apps offers a bulk upload option. To use it, you make a spreadsheet of user's first and last names, username and password, and upload that to your Google Apps Dashboard. (Visit https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Users, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) You can also create user groups or mailing lists with various flavors of permissions—accessible to the outside world, only reachable from people sending from inside your domain, and with custom roles for each user (member or owner). For example, a softball league might have an "Umpires" group, a "Coaches" group, and a "Players" user group. Activate Your Services Once you've set up your domain's users, it's time to activate the services you want to provide. Google Apps Standard comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, an iGoogle-like start page, Google Docs, Sites, and Mobile services. (Sadly, there's no Google Reader. Wah!) Activate services from the front page of your GApps Dashboard, and log in and use them at the /a/yourdomain.com URL provided in green below each service. If you click on the "More Services" link, you'll see more (less popular) services, like Contacts (for accessing your contacts list outside Gmail in Calendar and Docs), Sites (which appears to be a simple intranet application), custom applications hosted on Google App Engine, and even Labs services that include a URL shortener and Google Moderator. I haven't used any other services extensively besides Gmail, GCal, and GDocs in my Apps account, but the more adventurous should dive right in. Enable Pre-Release Features One of the biggest complaints about Google Apps accounts is that they're usually the last to get new and experimental features like Gmail Labs. (Yes, that took an excruciatingly long while.) To speed up the process and get new features in your Google Apps account faster, in your Dashboard under Domain Settings>General, check off "Enable pre-release features." (While you're there, it can't hurt to check off "Enable SSL" box in the section below that to encrypt your users' sessions automatically for a higher level of security.) Create a Catch-all Email Address One of the advantages of having your own domain name is that you have control and access to every single word combination @ yourdomain.com email address that you want. If you create a "catch-all address," you can forward any email that comes to your domain and doesn't match a user to a specific address. This means that if you wanted to use custom email addresses on the fly—like amazon@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Amazon, or lifehacker@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Lifehacker, you can do so without having to create custom addresses. Instead, set up your domain's catch-all address to forward to your user account. To set up a catch-all address, in your Google Apps Dashboard, from the Service Settings drop-down choose Email. There you can either reject mail that comes to addresses that don't match a user, or set up a catch-all forwarding address as shown above. Share Calendars, Contacts, and GDocs Within Your Domain Only Where Google Apps really shines is in its workgroup-level permissions-handling. In Google Docs as well as Google Calendar, you can choose to share docs and calendars with everyone within your domain only. That means if someone leaves your team and you suspend their account, they automatically lose access to sensitive workgroup data in one shot. You don't have to remove them from every doc and calendar you've ever shared with them. Conversely, when you choose the "Share" option in Docs and Calendar, you have the option to share with everyone in your domain, instead of individuals, as shown here. Likewise, Google Apps can automatically share a global address book across your domain users. When you add, remove, or update a user from Google Apps, with Contact Sharing enabled, everyone's Google Apps Gmail Contacts list gets automatically updated. (So when someone changes his or her name, that change goes out to everyone's address book in the domain, too.) Essentially, Google Apps Standard Edition gives you IT director-level administrative control over your workgroup's domain, for free. For more adventures in Google Apps migrations, see Scott Hanselman's thorough writeup on how he switched his family from Outlook and Thunderbird to Google Apps. This article only scratches the surface of what you can configure Google Apps to do. GApps users, what are your favorite tips and settings? Give 'em up in the comments. Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, likes her GApps goodness and a portable domain name, too. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
• Google Maps Navigation on your mobile phone
  Oct 28, 09
  Hope they create an iPhone app soon too.
  Google Maps Navigation is an internet-connected GPS navigation system with voice guidance. It is part of Google Maps for mobile and is available for phones with Android 2.0.Google Maps Navigation uses your phone's internet connection to give you the latest maps and business data. But that's not all that's different about Google's approach to GPS navigation.
• Introduction to the Old Testament — Open Yale Courses
  Oct 28, 09
  This course examines the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) as an expression of the religious life and thought of ancient Israel, and a foundational document of Western civilization. A wide range of methodologies, including source criticism and the historical-critical school, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and literary and canonical approaches are applied to the study and interpretation of the Bible. Special emphasis is placed on the Bible against the backdrop of its historical and cultural setting in the ancient Near East.
• Victorinox Chef's Knife Performs Like a $100+ Knife for Much Less
  Oct 26, 09
  A good chef's knife is a must-have for any kitchen, but a nice chef's knife can be expensive. The Victorinox chef's knife is a notable exception. From good gadgets weblog Cool Tools:

  A really great chef knife will be insanely sharp, yet retain its edge easily, and be well balanced and welcoming to hold. These days a decent high-grade chef knife can cost between $100-$200. Several cooking publications (including Cook's Illustrated) recently identified a bargain $27 chef knife that in their tests rated just about as good as the $100 plus knives. This is the one we use.

  In case you've never come across it, Cook's Illustrated is an incredible advertising-free, in-depth, bi-monthly cooking magazine that conducts thorough testing on everything they write about, from the best way to prepare a recipe to the best kitchen equipment, so when they say that the Victorinox knife rated nearly as good as the $100+ chef's knives, that's a solid endorsement. The Victorinox 8-inch blade will set you back around $30—not a bad price for something you'll use all the time in your kitchen. Victorinox 8-Inch Chef's Knife, Black Fibrox Handle [Amazon via Cool Tools]
• Library of Funded Projects
  Oct 26, 09
  Would be interesting to see when it's online.
  The Virtual Taxila project will develop a web-accessible, 3D, immersive, multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), where visitors will engage in situated, participatory learning about ancient Indian culture. The project will focus on the archaeological site of Taxila, the ancient capital of western Punjab and now an UNESCO World Heritage site located in Pakistan. Taxila was inhabited c. 500 BCE to c. 700 CE, but the project will model the city as it stood at circa 1 CE. The model will include both the city's tangible heritage (the built environment and the physical artifacts) and its intangible heritage (the people and their rituals, commercial transactions, and work activities). Virtual Taxila will create a "situated" community of practice, where visitors will be immersed in the historical context about which they learn. By logging in online, visitors will be able to interact with computer controlled characters that will act as guides, providing them with an insider's experience.
• Graduating During a Recession Has Big, Long-Lasting Negative Consequences
  Oct 24, 09
  Over the summer, there was a tendency for rising senior interns to ask me if I had any advice for someone set to be graduating into the face of a horrible recession. Unfortunately, the best advice I can think of is “hope the United States rapidly becomes more committed to equality and social justice” because the empirical evidence is that you’re screwed. Peter Orszag at the OMB Blog reminds us:

  The chart below illustrates this effect: a one percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate is associated with a 6 to 7 percent loss in initial wages. The annual wage loss declines over time, but is still statistically significant 15 years later. Comparing the wages earned by the class of 1982 (a peak unemployment year) with the wages of the class of 1988 (a peak employment year) over the first 20 years of a career, the wage difference resulted in a difference of nearly $100,000 in cumulative earnings in net present value. The long-term effect isn’t just a residual of low first-year wages: the author suggests that poor job match, lower prestige placements, and fewer opportunities for training and promotion also play a role. Other researchers have found similar effects: Oreopolous et al find persistent wage effects for Canadian college graduates; Bowlus and Liu find persistent wage effects for high school graduates moving directly into the work force, and other studies assess how the macroeconomy affects impact newly minted MBAs and economics PhDs.

  Fifteen years later! If you’re graduating from college this spring, you’ll be sitting around at the age of thirty-five still suffering from the fact that Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, and Kent Conrad decided to make the stimulus bill stingier in order to better bolster their credentials as preening centrists. When thinking about short-term inflation-unemployment tradeoffs, this sort of thing is crucial to keep in mind. Inflicting a high unemployment rate on the population has incredibly punitive and deleterious long-run consequences for young people.
• Princeton Readings in American Politics
  Oct 24, 09
  One feature of the American political media that I’ve oft had occasion to the lament is the lack of influence by the field of political science. It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it. It’s true that political science isn’t really science like physics that’s going to definitively answer every question you might have, but empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues. Certainly it seems to me to stand up to economics as a viable body of research, so I don’t know why people are so comfortable ignoring it. One issue, however, may be that it’s not very accessible. So I’d like to offer a preliminary recommendation to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of American politics to check out Richard Valelly’s edited volume Princeton Readings in American Politics. This is academic work, so it’s a bit slow-going and I certainly haven’t read it cover-to-cover yet (full disclosure: I got sent a free copy by PUP) but what I have read has been interesting. And as you can see from the table of contents it covers a nice broad range of important topics in US politics.
• NFB Films Brings Hundreds of Free Documentaries and Other Films to Your iPhone
  Oct 21, 09
  iPhone/iPod touch only: Need a little something enriching to pass the time on your non-driving commute? The National Film Board of Canada's NFB Films iPhone application brings access to hundreds of free animated movies, documentaries, and experimental films to your iPhone. All the films stream from the internet, so you'll need an internet connection to grab them, but this app also allows you to download and store films to watch later (up to 24hrs), which is fabulous for those places around town where signal is weak or non-existent—like the 3rd floor bathroom in your office, or the spotty signal you get while riding the train. The content includes everything from children's cartoons to Oscar-winning flicks, and to top it all off, the download and the entire contents of their film library are free of charge. NFB Films [iTunes App Store via Drawn]
• NetDoc Hospital Ratings
  Oct 23, 09
  Hospitals around your zip code are shown on the map. The color of a hospital's marker shows how it performed on benchmarks set out by the US Department of Health and Human Services in four categories: Heart Attack, Heart Failure, Pneumonia, and Surgical Care Improvement/Surgical Infection Prevention.Hospital ratings are based on an algorithm that combines information from a variety of hospital quality measures collected by the US federal government. These hospital rankings use information gathered about frequent types of primary care admissions, rather than tertiary or specialty care admissions.
• Two new tools for making Garmin custom maps
  Oct 23, 09
  I didn’t think this would take long. Some of the more technically adept GPS enthusiasts among us have put together some great tools for creating custom maps for the latest generation of Garmin handhelds. Here are two new ones released in the last day or so. Both allow you to create maps without manually calibrating them in Google Earth. G-Raster Created by Lester Pawlowicz of Free Geography Tools, G-Raster allows you to create maps from imagery freely available online. The following formats are supported: GeoTIFF MrSID NOAA BSB (.kap) ERDAS (.img) USA PhotoMaps Big JPEG UTM world file images World file images for other coordinate systems
  TopoFusion One of my favorite mapping programs, TopoFusion, has a new beta for registered Pro users, that allows for easy export of any of the imagery you can view in TopoFusion. This includes: USGS topos (to 2 meters/pixel) Landsat (to 15 meters/pixel) Color aerial (to < 1 meter/pixel) B/W aerials (DOQQ; to 1 meter/pixel) Urban aerials (to 0.25 meter/pixel) Australian topos (about 6 meters/pixel) Canadian topos (about 6 meters/pixel) A cautionary tale This past weekend I loaded a large .kmz file to my Oregon 400t and bricked it. I was able to recover it using this technique (the second one) posted by GPS Fix. So remember, the Garmin firmware release is a beta. Leszek suggests loading .kmz custom maps to a micro-SD card; that way you can just pull the card if anything goes wrong. Sage advice, indeed!
• Afghanistan: A Special Issue
  Oct 23, 09
  The essays in our forum call into question many of the myths and faulty assumptions about the best course of US policy in Afghanistan.
• Lifehacker's Complete Guide to Windows 7
  Oct 22, 09
  Windows 7 officially launches today, but we've been testing, tweaking, customizing, fixing, and writing about this OS for a year now. We present here a guide to everything we've learned about the OS, from first install to final settings change. Whether you've played around with Windows 7 during its beta or release candidate versions, launch day is finally here, and Windows 7 is finally ready for widespread, public consumption. This guide will take you straight through from system requirements and upgrading your PC to highlighting Windows 7's best new features to helping you hit the ground running with all of the awesome tweaks Windows 7 has in store for you. System Requirements According to Microsoft:

  1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

  Buying, installing, and upgrading Figure Out Which Windows 7 Edition Has the Features You Need: Not everybody needs Windows 7 Ultimate, but what if there's a certain feature you must have when you grab your upgrade this Thursday? CNET breaks down each Windows 7 edition feature by feature in a handy chart. Prep Your PC for Windows 7: When Windows 7 drops this Thursday, you can either spend many, many hours watching a progress bar, or you can boot into a clean, speedy system with that new-OS smell. Let's get your system set up for a proper Windows 7 upgrade. Get Windows 7 Home Premium for $30 With a College Email Address: If you're a U.S. college student, or at least having a working .edu email address, you don't have to pay $120 to upgrade Vista to Windows 7. You can get the Home Premium upgrade for just $30. Run Windows 7 for 120 Days Without Activation: The command line code (slmgr -rearm) that could be entered at the end of three different 30-day periods to give Vista 120 days without activation works just the same in Windows 7. Our take on Windows 7 Top 10 Things to Look Forward to in Windows 7: Windows 7 isn't a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, but it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Windows 7's Best Underhyped Features: It's these less sexy, but very useful features, that make me think the more I use Windows 7, the less chance I'll ever use Vista or XP again. Windows 7 Versus Mac OS X Leopard: The Feature-by-Feature Showdown: Oh, I know: the Mac versus PC debate is so played out. Perhaps, but dumb commercials aside, if you're deciding between buying a Mac or a PC in the coming months, it helps to know what you're getting from one or the other. New features Windows 7 Tells You Why You Can't Touch That File: Windows 7 doesn't just give you a wagging finger (and pretend-useful "Try Again" button) when you want to move or delete a file that's in use. It actually tells you which application is using the file. Windows 7 Lets You Customize Your Logon Background: Expert Windows hacker Rafael Rivera finds a change in the latest build of Windows 7—you can finally customize the log-on screen natively. Windows 7 Transfers Your Wireless Settings Easily: To transfer the settings for yourself, head into the Network and Sharing Center, click on Manage Wireless Networks, and then in the properties for your wireless network you'll find the link to open the wizard that will copy all your settings onto a flash drive. How to Burn ISOs in Windows 7: Burning that ISO to a disc is as simple as: 1. Double-click the ISO file (or right-click and select Burn disc image); 2. Click Burn. Play Your iPod Through Your Windows 7 PC's Speakers: You can play an external audio device through your computer's speakers without any extra software using a simple configuration setting. Windows 7 Makes UAC Less Annoying Than Vista: The biggest change in Windows 7 is the new User Account Control "slider" setting, where you can choose your own balance between annoyance and security—but behind the scenes, Microsoft reduced the amount of actions that will prompt you. Netflix Update Comes to Windows 7 Media Center, Looks Excellent: Starting this week, Microsoft is rolling out an upgraded Watch Instantly interface to Windows 7 Media Center for users looking to get their streaming TV and movie fix on their upgraded PCs. Setup File and Printer Sharing From XP to Windows 7: This guide walks you through the process of enabling network discovery, sharing your folders and printers, and accessing your shared resources from either Windows 7 or XP. IE8 Can Proactively Close Crashing Tabs in Windows 7: The copy of IE8 found only in (Windows 7) has a "timer" that monitors new tabs as they open. If they aren't responsive within a relatively short amount of time, the browser will pop up and tell you this, possibly with a reason why, and ask whether you want to wait or kill the tab before it causes further problems. Windows 7 Lets You Finally Uninstall Internet Explorer (Kinda): ... It won't completely uninstall—only the executable is actually removed. Still, being able to finally banish IE proper from your system is a pretty good start for folks who really don't like IE. Windows 7 Will Let You Uninstall Most Built-In Apps: You can turn almost every built-in application on or off, including Windows Search, Gadgets, and even Media Player. The Taskbar Aero Peek: Peek supercharges Windows' taskbar thumbnail previews, and lets you view, close, and switch between multiple windows by just hovering over the taskbar thumbnail, as well as pin programs to the taskbar permanently. Pin Individual Folders to the Windows 7 Taskbar: Windows 7's taskbar lets you pin any running program to the taskbar for easy future access, but it treats folders like second-class sub-items of the Explorer icon. Create a fake "program" to pin individual folder shortcuts to your taskbar. Middle-Click to Close Applications from Windows 7's Taskbar: In Windows 7, middle-clicking a taskbar button opens a new program instance. The easy solution for closing an app? Middle-click its preview window. Hold Shift While Dragging to Windows 7 Taskbar to Open Files: All you have to do is hold down the Shift key while dragging a file to an icon on the taskbar, and the tooltip will change to say "Open with" instead of pinning to the taskbar. Pin Any Item to the Windows 7 Taskbar: We already showed you how to pin specific folders, and this is just a slightly tweaked application of that method. Put a Recycle Bin Shortcut on the Windows 7 Taskbar: Once you are finished, you'll have a separate recycle icon on the taskbar—useful for quick access to deleted files without having to hunt down an icon on your desktop. Get a Functional Recycle Bin on Windows 7's Taskbar: TechSpot's solution—creating a Quick Launch taskbar, removing its text and title, then bringing the desktop Recycle Bin icon into it—covers all the bases, and lets you place your Recycle Bin pretty much wherever you'd like on the taskbar. Jump lists Master Windows 7 Jump Lists to Boost Your Win7 Productivity: For those of you that haven't yet tried out Windows 7, when you right-click on a taskbar button in Windows 7, a menu slides out with recent documents and application tasks. Here's a rundown of our favorite Jump List boosters. Winfox Adds Jump Lists to Firefox on Windows 7: Jump Lists are one of the best new features in Windows 7, and since Firefox still doesn't take advantage of them, a small utility called Winfox adds the feature for you. Win7shell Adds Windows 7 Jump List Support to Winamp: Once you've downloaded, installed the plugin, and pinned Winamp to the taskbar, the Jump List should immediately start tracking your recently played media files. Built-in Applications Set Up and Use XP Mode in Windows 7: Windows 7's new XP Mode lets you seamlessly run virtualized applications alongside your regular Windows 7 applications—so your outdated software will continue to work. Calculator: While mathletes, scientists, coders, and statisticians will appreciate Windows 7's built-in calculator's programmer, statistics, and scientific modes, everyday people will love figuring out things like hourly wages and mortgage payments without a spreadsheet. PowerShell: (A) souped-up command line and scripting GUI that frees you, finally, from the limits of DOS batch scripts. Windows 7 Media Center's Music Player Is Hot Hot Hot: Good news for music lovers excited for Windows 7: The new and improved music interface in Windows 7 Media Center is overflowing with eye candy and usability. Windows 7's WordPad Opens Word 2007 DOCX Files: ... The ribbon-style WordPad in Windows 2007 opens Word 2007 files, the .docx kind, pretty handily, albeit with some formatting loss. Backup and Restore Center: For the average user with both media and crucial file needs, Windows 7's default backup features look promising. Windows 7 Guest Mode Creates Bomb-Proof Accounts: In the simplest terms, Guest Mode takes a snapshot of how a PC was working before the kid, friend, coffeeshop customer, or whoever else is using the Guest Mode account logs on. That user can't do much to alter the system, and whatever they can do, like dropping files on the desktop, is discarded when they log off. Windows 7 Calibration and ClearType Tools Fine-Tune Your Displays: Windows 7's color calibration and ClearType tools might be good enough for non-graphic-designers to stick with. Themes, wallpapers, and login screens Windows 7 Beta's Many Free and Legit Themes: Microsoft is offering 20 fresh themes (in Windows 7). Here's a closer look. Grab Every Region's Windows 7 Wallpapers in One Download: Microsoft allowed Windows Vista Magazine to bundle up every wallpaper from Windows 7's regional releases and, boy, we're glad they did. One file brings a lot of new looks to any desktop, Windows 7 or otherwise. Secret Registry Hack Customizes Windows 7 Logon "Button Set": Rafael Rivera, the same expert Windows hacker that figured out how to customize your Windows 7 logon background, finds another hack that changes the UI to look better with darker background images. Microsoft Releases More Free Windows 7 Theme Downloads: The full-fledged themes are specific downloads for Windows 7 users, but anyone can grab the wallpapers from Windows 7's Personalization Gallery for their system. Mouse and Keyboard Shortcuts The Best New Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts: Windows 7 has more cool new shortcuts than you can shake a stick at. Aero Shake: When you want to focus on the task at hand on a desktop cluttered with windows, just grab the window bar of the app you want to work in and shake it back and forth to clear away the rest. Another shake will restore the background apps to their former state. You can also drag and drop a window to the edge of the screen to maximize it, and click on its top bar again to restore its previous size. Snap windows to half screen size: ... Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it. Following that, if you drag a window all the way to the left or the right of the screen, Windows 7 will display a glass overlay on the desktop. Let go of the mouse button and it will snap the window onto that overlay, which is half the screen's size—a handy helper for widescreen monitor owners. Maximize Windows Vertically with a Double-Click in Windows 7: Reader John points out that you can simply move your mouse to the top of a window until the pointer switches to the resize icon, and then double-click your mouse to instantly maximize the window to fill all the available vertical space. Shift and Right-Click to Expand Windows 7's Send To Menu: Just as with Vista, holding down the Shift key while right-clicking in Windows 7 gives you a fuller range of options. Activate Windows 7 Jumplists with the Left Mouse Button: You don't have to right-click on the taskbar buttons to activate Windows 7's Jumplists—you can hold the left mouse button and drag upwards. Windows 7 Creates New Folders With a Hotkey: To create a new folder, simply press Ctrl+Shift+N with an explorer window open and the folder will instantly show up, ready to be renamed to something more useful. Tweaks, fixes, and customizations The Best Windows Tweaks that Still Work in Windows 7: The final version of Windows 7 is being released this week to the general public, and after you get your hands on it the first thing you'll need to know is: Do all my tweaks still work? Customize or Disable Windows 7's Action Center: Windows 7's Action Center does a great job of compressing all of Windows' update/alert/whatever notifications into one icon, but it takes some tweaking to make it show what you want, or disable it entirely. Add text to the Windows 7 taskbar buttons: Just right-click the taskbar, select Properties, then change the Taskbar buttons drop-down from "Always combine, hide labels" to "Never combine." Set Default Printers Based on Network in Windows 7: Windows 7 sports a great new feature that allows you to set default printers based on what network your computer is connected to, perfect for folks who carry laptops from network to network. Get Quick Access to Windows 7's Jump Lists From the Keyboard: When we showed you how to master Windows 7's new Jump Lists feature, there was one extremely useful tip that we left out: you can also access them from your keyboard. Create and Share Custom Themes in Windows 7: Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 weblog details how to create, save, and share your own custom Windows 7 themes, complete with wallpaper, window color, and sounds. Get the Old "Show Desktop" Back in Windows 7—Kinda: The short version: Create a folder, place a "Show Desktop.scf" file in there (either your standard Google-found kind or the script available at the bottom link), then right-click your taskbar to create a "New Toolbar" that points to that folder. Turn off the text and titles on that new toolbar, change the icons to large size, and then put your new one-button toolbar where you'd like. Hidden Windows 7 Tool Troubleshoots Sleep Mode Problems: The report lists all of the devices that are causing problems with sleep mode, explains the different power saving modes your computer supports, and even gives you detailed information on your battery—invaluable information when your system takes forever to go in and out of sleep mode. Disable the New Libraries Feature on Windows 7: Simply download, extract, and double-click on the provided registry hack file, then restart your computer and you'll see that the Libraries are completely gone. There's also an uninstall registry script provided just in case. Third-party helpers Logon Changer Customizes the Windows 7 Login Screen: Tiny system customizing utility Logon Changer for Windows 7 swaps out the logon screen wallpaper easily. Using the utility is simple—just select a new wallpaper, test it, and you are done. Xdn Tweaker Updates to Tweak Windows 7: If you want your system to remember or not remember how you sort certain folders, edit what's accessible through the right-click menu, or de-hook Windows Media Player from all the files it tries to glom onto, Xdn does those things for Windows 7. Glass CMD Enables Aero Transparency for the Command Prompt: Glass CMD for Vista forces command prompt windows to use Aero's glass transparency effect. Gmail Notifier Plus Adds Email Alerts to the Windows 7 Taskbar: Gmail Notifier Plus displays your unread email count right in the Windows 7 taskbar, including popup message previews and Jump Lists integration. Switch Power Management Plans With a Hotkey: Once you've created the shortcut, you can assign a hotkey in the properties dialog—even better, put the shortcut in a location to be indexed by Launchy or the Vista start menu search, or even add it to your AutoHotkey automation script. CSMenu Brings the Classic Start Menu Back to Windows 7: Application launcher CSMenu makes up for the lack of a classic start menu option in Windows 7 by creating a menu that looks and works just like the ancient Windows 2000 menu did. Ultimate Windows Tweaker Updates, Improves Windows 7 Support: Ultimate Windows Tweaker adds new features to an already excellent tool for tweaking all of the hidden Windows settings you normally can't access. VistaSwitcher is an Absolutely Awesome Alt-Tab Replacement: It's a little difficult to showcase how well this thing works with just a screenshot, but you can see the partially transparent Alt-Tab switcher window, complete with a massive preview window and the window titles easily readable. Windows 7 Recovery Discs Gets Your System Out of Tight Spots: Boot your system from NeoSmart's CD, and you'll get a stripped-down Windows system with a window offering startup file repair, Restore Point returns, recovery from a whole-cloth image, memory testing, and a command prompt for those dire moments when only frantically Google-d terminal instructions can save you. Hulu Desktop Integration Brings Hulu to Windows 7 Media Center: Free application Hulu Desktop Integration brings Hulu's remote-friendly desktop app to your Windows Media Center. We hope you found at least one link in that rather large list that helps you get settled into your new OS. Did we miss anything? Got a favorite tip or link you feel Windows 7 newcomers should consider? Share it in the comments.
• Held by the Taliban - A Times Reporter’s Account. A Five-Part Series by David Rohde. - Series - NYTimes.com
  Oct 22, 09
  A Times reporter, David Rohde, and two Afghan colleagues were kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008 and held for seven months in Pakistan. This is the first installment in a five-part series offering his account.
• Analyzing Those You Can’t Offend
  Oct 20, 09
  Coming from Pakistan where the military used to be a sacred cow, I am very sensitive to this aspect of the US and dislike it very much.
  Elisabeth Bumiller has an interesting piece on how much of the military brass is frustrated that Barack Obama won’t make up his mind quickly and has instead decided to think things through before escalating in Afghanistan. I agree with Spencer Ackerman that Bumiller’s mystery military analyst closes the piece with strong points:

  A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ” Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

  In some ways, though, I think the most interesting thing about the piece is the stated reason given for anonymity. Somebody out there is—or at least is being represented as—sufficiently afraid of alienating the top commanders in the uniform military that he won’t kiss the White House’s ass in public. A few weeks back there was what I thought was a pretty overblown controversy about General McChrystal making some comments on Afghanistan which led to a lot of rending of garments about civilian control of the military. I don’t think the public having some sense of what generals think seriously undermines anything. But what I do think tends to undermine our democracy is the kind of dynamic on display here. We learn about defense policy issues through journalists. But to successfully cover the defense establishment, you need to have good sources inside the defense establishment. And to cover it with perspective, you’ll also want to talk to outside experts and analysts. But those experts and analysts face the same problem as the journalists themselves—in practice, they’re heavily dependent on goodwill from the military. And for that matter there’s a similar dynamic in congress—the politicians who the press takes seriously on defense matters are the ones the Pentagon takes seriously, which is to say the ones who play to the military’s desires and sensibilities. The saving grace of the situation of the situation is that the defense establishment is so gigantic that it contains a diversity of views on many subjects. But it also excludes a huge number of perspectives and creates a systemic bias in favor of big defense budgets and protracted military engagements. What kind of a world are we living in, after all, if military analysts who agree with the President of the United States are reluctant to say so in public?
• Who's in Big Brother's Database? - The New York Review of Books
  Oct 16, 09
  On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.
• Tectonic Shifts Altering The Terrain At Google Maps
  Oct 15, 09
  Google recently upgraded Google Maps with a new land parcel data layer, added a Map error reporting function, has promised map fixes to street errors in 30 days
• Imagery sources for Garmin custom maps
  Oct 13, 09
  There are a lot of new map makers out there now that Garmin has opened the door to custom maps on their latest generation handhelds. And the results are cool. Just don’t expect those people standing around the Jefferson Memorial to be in the same place when you visit! The process for adding aerial photos and topo maps is simple enough, once you find the imagery. To get you up and running faster, I’ve posted a list of sources for aerial imagery and various types of maps below. But first, let’s look at some of the acronyms and terms you’re bound to come across as you delve into this… BizRate
  Terminology Raster maps – These are image files (USGS topo maps, aerial photos, etc.); this is what we’re using to make these custom maps. They require more memory and computing resources than… Vector maps – These are made up of lines, points and polygons; these are datasets and not images, though they are used to create the map on your GPS screen. These require much less memory than raster graphics. Examples include Garmin Topo and City Navigator products. DEM (Digital elevation model) – A dataset of elevation points; these are not needed for making custom raster maps, so you can safely ignore them for this purpose. DRG (Digital raster graphic) – A typical digital format for a scanned topo map. Usually available as a GeoTIFF, GeoPDF or .tif + .tfw (see below). DOQQ (Digital Orthophoto Quarter Quadrangles) – Digitized aerial photos; because of the large file size, each 7.5’ USGS quad is broken into four quadrants. GeoPDFs – A newer format used to present maps in PDF format. GeoTIFFs – An image format (.tiff/.tif) with georeferencing information embedded. An alternative format is a .tiff + .tfw, where the latter (world file)contains the georeferencing information. GIS (Geographical Information System) – A broad term useful to us because many government GIS sites offer free imagery (see Finding state and local imagery, below). MrSID (Multi-Resolution Seamless Image Database) – Highly compressed raster images; cannot be opened with standard graphics programs. NAIP (National Agricultural Imagery Program) – Often one of the few sources of color imagery for non-metro parts of the U.S. Orthoimagery – An aerial photo that has been corrected for scale, distortion, etc. SHP (Shapefile) – A vector data format (.shp) common to GIS; not of direct use in making custom raster maps. Aerial v. satellite imagery – In general, the former will offer a much higher resolution. Sources of custom maps GPS Visualizer KML overlay tool – The easiest way right now to make custom maps using USGS topos and 1 meter (per pixel resolution) B/W aerial imagery. Scott at GPS Fix has posted a tutorial. I believe these images are being sourced from TerraServer, so you’ll get cleaner looking, higher resolution images by downloading a DRG or DOQQ from another source, but these images (especially the topos) may be “good enough” for many purposes. The National Map Seamless Server – Use the pan and zoom tool on the left and the layer extent on the right to narrow things down. Then use the download tool to define the area you want to download data for. This is very important: When the summary page comes up, click Modify Data Request. Uncheck NED and select the orthoimagery or the maps that you are after. EarthExplorer – This may be the best source for high-resolution color urban imagery, despite the clunky interface. Registration is required, including a billing address (no credit card info though), but it appears that downloads are free. US Forest Service topo maps – These are often much more current, and have better trail and road info, than USGS maps. Store.USGS.gov – Offers USGS topos as GeoPDFs. Finding local and state imagery States and many local jurisdictions have websites that allow you to download GIS imagery. Here are some tips and resources for finding them: Google advanced search is your friend. Enter terms such as file types, your city or town, your state, the term GIS, try limiting the search to .gov and .edu domains, etc. A state by state list of GIS data resources. An older list, with a lot of dead links, but there’s too many good ones working to leave it off. Have fun! Related posts: Garmin adds custom raster imagery support to newer handhelds Garmin custom maps – Day 2 BizRate
• Behind Montana Jail Fiasco: How Private Prison Developers Prey On Desperate Towns
  Oct 12, 09
  With the unraveling of the deal for the shadowy American Private Police Force to take over and populate an empty jail in Hardin, Montana, it's pretty clear that the small city got played by an ex-con and his (supposed) private security firm. But an investigation by TPMmuckraker into how Hardin ended up with the 92,000 square foot facility in the first place suggests that, long before "low-level card shark" Michael Hilton ever came to town, Hardin officials had already been taken for a ride by a far more powerful set of players: a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs. The projects have generated multi-million dollar profits for the companies involved, but often haven't created the anticipated payoff for the communities, and have left a string of failed or failing prisons in their wake. "They look for an impoverished town that's desperate," says Frank Smith of the Private Corrections Institute, a Florida-based group that opposes prison privatization. "They come in looking very impressive, saying, 'We'll make money rain from the skies.' In fact, they don't care whether it works or not."The Pitch
  In June 2004, James Parkey, a Texas-based prison developer and architect, met at the Las Vegas airport with Judy Martz, who at the time was the Republican governor of Montana. Described by the Texas Observer as a "polished salesman" for the booming private prison industry, Parkey presents himself on his Web site as a beneficent savior for local communities hit hard by the decline of the manufacturing sector. Parkey, who runs a company called Corplan Corrections, was seeking to sell Martz on a prison project for her state. His method is to promise a full-service team to handle the entire project from soup to nuts -- what one source described as a "turn-key system." That team includes a construction firm to build the prison, a prison operator to work with local officials to find prisoners, then run the facility, underwriters to sell the bonds, and even a consultant to do an economic feasibility study. "They walk into a municipality and say, you don't have to do a thing, we'll take care of everything," Christopher "Kit" Taylor, a municipal bond expert who has followed Parkey's operation, told TPMmuckraker. State officials eventually referred Parkey to the city of Billlings. From there, he was directed 50 miles east, to rural Hardin -- where he found a receptive audience. Parkey promised the town's brass that his team would take care of everything. The project would generate 150 solid jobs. The prison operator in Parkey's team pledged to pay the town a business license fee and at least $100,000 in annual per-prisoner fees. To officials in a county whose poverty rate is double the national average, that seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down. Big Pay Day
  For Parkey and his crew, the deal soon paid off. The prison's designer and builder, Hale-Mills Construction of Houston, was guaranteed a maximum price of $19.88 million, according to the official bond statement obtained by TPMmuckraker. The exact amount the firm ultimately received isn't known. And Hardin's $27 million municipal bond sale, conducted in 2006, netted the underwriters -- a pair of companies called Herbert J. Sims, of Connecticut, and Municipal Capital Markets Group (MCM), of Dallas -- a total of $1.62 million. Other players recruited by Parkey -- lawyers, surveyors, and the North Carolina-based consultant who conducted the feasibility study -- reaped $169,750. It's not known how big a cut Parkey took, and he didn't respond to calls for comment. Hardin itself didn't make out nearly so well. Not a single inmate has ever slept in the jail, and the town hasn't seen a cent of revenue from the project. The bonds, which were to be paid back through the anticipated -- but non-existent -- revenue, have gone into default, and the bond investors have lost money. The prison "was built on spec," says Taylor, the muni bond expert, who has looked at the Hardin deal. "[The consortium's] whole premise was hell, we don't care what happens to the bonds." That's left Hardin with an empty jail that it so desperately wanted to fill that it begged first for sex offenders from the state, then for Gitmo inmates from the Feds, and, finally, for some kind of salvation from the American Private Police Force. A Compromised Consultant?
  Central to Hardin official's expectations for the deal was the feasibility study that Parkey's team conducted, which concluded that the project was all but certain to pay off. But that study appears to have been not only deeply flawed, but essentially rigged from the start. A Montana state auditor found in a 2007 memo that the study -- carried out by Howard Geisler, a North Carolina feasibility consultant specializing in prisons -- was racked with problems. It provides "little methodology" regarding its estimates of potential prisoners for the jail. It lacks "historical data to support anticipated prisoner counts." And it makes "a number of assumptions made related to financial viability that appear to be unfounded," including "potential improvements to local aviation facilities." In addition, Geisler's study failed to mention that bringing in out-of-state prisoners is potentially illegal under Montana law -- even though that idea was held up as a key method for recruiting prisoners. The state's attorney general challenged Hardin over the provision, and though a judge ultimately sided with the town, it was only after a year of legal wrangling. Perhaps those flaws aren't surprising. The study was paid for by one of the underwriters, MCM, which had worked frequently with Geisler in the past. A truly independent feasibility study, says Taylor, the muni bond expert, would involve multiple firms making bids to do the job for the city. Geisler was clearly aware while writing the study of the conflict of interest inherent in the set-up. On one page, he notes in bolded text that, "to assure independence," his fee "is not contingent upon the sale of the Bonds." But Taylor calls that "a smokescreen." "[The passage] is trying to give a sense of legitimacy to the deal, when that's not the case at all," he told TPMmuckraker. Indeed, the study was in fact the third such report produced on the subject -- and the second by Geisler -- over a two-year period, according to a Montana source close to the process. The first two studies -- the other of which was done internally by Hardin -- came to ambiguous conclusions as to whether the project would succeed. After the first two reports, says the source, "the MCM people had [Geisler] come back and do another. That's when they decided it made sense to go forward." To this day, some local officials defend the study, arguing that it's easy to criticize with the benefit of hindsight. Dan Kern, Hardin's economic development director in late 2005 and early 2006, told TPMmuckraker he's not sure why support for the project evaporated after the jail was built. "Everybody told me that this was a great project and there was a need for it," he said. But Taylor says if the official bond statement, which includes the feasibility study, was false or misleading, the bond players have legal liability. Beyond Hardin
  It looks like Hardin isn't the only place where the the lavish promises of Parkey's consortium failed to pan out. The Montana state auditor's memo notes that, in three separate jail deals with Texas counties, pushed through by Parkey's team, "current revenues are insufficient to cover operating and debt expenses." And in 2005, three Texas county commissioners were convicted on bribery charges in connection to one of those Parkey-led projects. As in Hardin, MCM acted as the underwriter, and Hale-Mills handled construction. All of the companies in the consortium either declined to comment for this story or did not return calls and e-mails.
  
  
• Authoritarianism in American Politics
  Oct 12, 09
  I'm reading a compelling new book, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, co-written by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. (Disclosure: Jon is a longtime friend; we were in grad school together at Univ. of North Carolina.) The book is an examination of how authoritarian tendencies among American citizens inform and explain attitudes toward government, public policies and their fellow citizens. It is impossible to summarize the book properly in a blog post, but I wanted to hit on some of the points that struck me, many of which were unsurprising and yet startling to see demonstrated empirically.
  
  The first point Hetherington and Weiler make is that authoritarianism is really about order--achieving it, maintaining it, and affirming it--and especially when citizens are uncertain or fearful. This, they say, is why authoritarians seek out and elevate, well, authorities--because authorities impose order on an otherwise disordered world. They provide a useful review the existing literature on authoritarian traits, which have been connected to negative racist stereotyping, a belief in biblical inerrancy, a preference for simple rather than complex problem-solving, and low levels of political information.
  
  Hetherington and Weiler expand and update the authoritarian literature by applying it to contemporary controversies. For example, what they measure and define as "maximum authoritarian" types show much lower support for gay marriage and gay adoption (19 percent, 28 percent) than do "minimum authoritarians" (71 percent, 89 percent). Maximums are three times more likely than minimums to support the government use of wiretaps without a warrant in the war on terror (60 percent to 19 percent), and four times more likely to say it is unacceptable to criticize the president about fighting terrorism (33 percent to 8 percent).
  
  And what do authoritarians look like? The table above--which I have reproduced from Table 3.2 (p. 39) of their book--shows average levels of authoritarianism by descriptive characteristics that, taken together, produce a composite image: rural, southern, under-educated, evangelical Protestant churchgoers. Is it any wonder that when George W. Bush was down to his bottom 30 percent of public support during his second term so much of that support derived from people fitting this profile? And although there is a strong connection between authoritarianism and conservatism (and thus Republicanism), as Hetherington and Weiler caution, authoritarianism is not bounded by party: Among 2008 Democratic primary voters there were significant splits on issues of race and immigration, smacking of authoritarian impulses, that played a role in support for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. "There is strong suggestive evidence that authoritarianism was a core reason for the voting behavior of nonblacks" in the Democratic primary, they conclude.
  
  As for the current debate over health care, some of the same cleavages exist. In a recent piece for the Huffington Post, Weiler talks about race and authoritarianism in the context of the health reform debate: "In sum, there is reason to think that beneath the arguments about government intrusion into the health care market, death panels, and such, a much more visceral dynamic is at work. To be perfectly clear, it is far from the case that every opponent or skeptic of significant health-care reform is a racist or racially motivated in her or his thinking. But there is, at the least, very strong circumstantial evidence that views of race and beliefs about health care reform are linked significantly among many Americans, which probably explains why the debate on health care reform has caused a much stronger uproar in 2009 than it did in 1994."
  
  Reading the book, I kept hearing echoes of Glenn Greenwalds's book, A Tragic Legacy. Greenwald's book is a character study of Bush43 and the Bush White House, its Manichean worldview, and what that meant for public policy. But an us-v-them, good-v-evil governing mentality is only possible in a democracy where authoritarian currents run deep enough to sustain (and re-elect) such leadership. The governing atmosphere Greenwald describes makes even more sense after reading Hetherington and Weiler.
• Google Wave Help
  Oct 11, 09
  Now that I have Google Wave!
  Official Google Wave Help Center where you can find tips and tutorials on using Google Wave and other answers to frequently asked questions.
• European Journal of Human Genetics - Abstract of article: Traces of sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern lineages in Indian Muslim populations
  Oct 11, 09
  Islam is the second most practiced religion in India, next to Hinduism. It is still unclear whether the spread of Islam in India has been only a cultural transformation or is associated with detectable levels of gene flow. To estimate the contribution of West Asian and Arabian admixture to Indian Muslims, we assessed genetic variation in mtDNA, Y-chromosomal and LCT/MCM6 markers in 472, 431 and 476 samples, respectively, representing six Muslim communities from different geographical regions of India. We found that most of the Indian Muslim populations received their major genetic input from geographically close non-Muslim populations. However, low levels of likely sub-Saharan African, Arabian and West Asian admixture were also observed among Indian Muslims in the form of L0a2a2 mtDNA and E1b1b1a and J*(xJ2) Y-chromosomal lineages. The distinction between Iranian and Arabian sources was difficult to make with mtDNA and the Y chromosome, as the estimates were highly correlated because of similar gene pool compositions in the sources. In contrast, the LCT/MCM6 locus, which shows a clear distinction between the two sources, enabled us to rule out significant gene flow from Arabia. Overall, our results support a model according to which the spread of Islam in India was predominantly cultural conversion associated with minor but still detectable levels of gene flow from outside, primarily from Iran and Central Asia, rather than directly from the Arabian Peninsula.
• Garmin custom maps – Day 2
  Oct 9, 09
  Owners of the Garmin Colorado, Dakota and Oregon series got a nice surprise yesterday, when the company rolled out the ability to create a custom map image in Google Earth, opening the door to viewing aerial photos, USGS topos and park maps on your GPS. I immediately downloaded a US Forest Service topo (which often have greater FS road detail than USGS topos), transferred a portion to my Oregon, and hit the trail. You can see the results in the image to the left. Accuracy is completely related to how well you georeference the image, but I was pretty pleased with the results. The red line is a track of the trail created by someone else, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that, but my own track lined up well with the USFS trail on the map, and had me on the proper side of the creek, so I was pretty pleased with my first attempt. I’ll also note that the Oregon was in a mesh pocket on the back of my pack, not the ideal spot for reception. Admittedly, I wasn’t going that fast (15 MPH tops), but I noticed no problems with redraws. Others are reporting sluggish behavior for larger mapsets. Tips for making custom Garmin maps Use a DrawOrder of 50+ to keep the custom map on top of other imagery, as I did above. You’ll still be able to see waypoints, tracks, POIs, etc. This is ideal for topo maps. Use a DrawOrder of less than 50 and contour lines, roads and depth contours present on the underlying Garmin map will show through. This may be better for park maps, marine charts and aerial photos. This site has links for free raster imagery for each of the 50 United States. DRGs are topo maps, DOQQs are aerial photos. This is an older page, but enough links work to make it worth sharing. If you need to convert from a particular file type to a .jpg (and don’t have software for it), search for an online file conversion service, or learn to use GIMP. Scott at GPSFix had a great tips post yesterday, and has promised another today. Custom Garmin map discussion threads We’re all still learning about the process and limitations of this new tool. There are active discussions going on in the following forums: Garmin has their own custom map forum Custom map thread on gpsfiledepot.com Groundspeak forum discussion on custom raster maps More to come Stay tuned. Over the next few days I’m expecting a lot of sharing of custom maps (this is already being done on the Garmin forum), tools for converting geo-referenced maps (eliminating the need to do this by hand), and information on using sources of .kmz files with images already posted online. Maybe some of you Google Earth ninjas can enlighten us on the latter in the comments section. And how about the rest of you? Have you tried this? How is it going?
• SEIU's Data Footprint In 2008 - The Atlantic Politics Channel
  Oct 8, 09
  For several cycles now, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been among the most active progressive groups in the liberal firmament, spending in excess of $80 million to influence the 2008 election alone. According to an analysis of their efforts, the SEIU was in regular contact with more than 4.5 million voters in ten battleground states, including more than 1.2 million in Virginia alone.
  For the first time, thanks to the data crunched by Catalist and the Analyst Institute, we can now figure out what, besides money, distinguishes SEIU's efforts from others.
• The Catalist After Action Report - The Atlantic Politics Channel
  Oct 8, 09
  This 2008 post-election report is based on the most up-to-date information in Catalist's database. It reflects the work of over 90 progressive organizations, unions, campaigns, and party committees that contracted with Catalist during the 2007-2008 presidential cycle (see Appendix for a client list).  Many of these subscribers themselves represent scores of additional candidates, coalition partners and affiliates. These progressive stakeholders uploaded information from their voter contact and civic engagement work into Catalist's database, resulting in a very substantial total data set. On the whole, progressives completed over 127 million contacts to more than 49 million unique individuals[1]. Of these, 28 million voted on Election Day, representing over 20% of all votes cast. Furthermore, and of greater significance, is that 82% of this work occurred in 16 swing states, accounting for 37%[2] of all votes cast in these states[3]. The results described in this report strongly indicate that progressive activities had positive effects, and in some places were essential to progressive victories.
• Exclusive: How Democrats Won The Data War In 2008 - The Atlantic Politics Channel
  Oct 8, 09
  Get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and progressive organizations mobilized more than one million dedicated volunteers on Election Day. But it was buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never beforeparticipated in. In 2008, the principal repository of Democratic data was Catalist, afor-profit company that acted as the conductor for a data-drivensymphony of more than 90 liberal groups, like the Service Employees Union -- and the DNC -- and the Obamacampaign.
• Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life: New Study Estimates Global Muslim Population at 1.57 Billion
  Oct 8, 09
  A new, comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion. Released today by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, Mapping the Global Muslim Population offers the most up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the size and distribution of the worldwide Muslim population, including sectarian identity.
• Google Wave 101
  Oct 7, 09
  So you've snagged an invitation to Google Wave—or a pal is sending one your way—and you've already taken a look at what to expect. Let's dive deeper into Wave features, etiquette, and extensions. Learn Wave's Keyboard Shortcuts Every good webapp has a full set of keyboard shortcuts for getting around and performing the most common actions, and happily Google Wave is no exception. While Wave is still missing common shortcuts (j/k, please?), there are a few you must know now. Here are the ones to learn first: Arrow keys: Move up/down within a list of waves, and left/right from inbox to open wave panel with your arrow keys. Spacebar: Go to the next unread wave in a list Ctrl+E: Edit a selected wave Shift+Enter (in edit mode): Finish editing your wave; equivalent to clicking the "Done" button Enter: Add a reply to a selected wave directly under it Shift+Enter (in view mode): Add a reply to the bottom of a list of waves Here's the full list of keyboard shortcuts. Alternately, you can click on the image below to see them all. Filter Waves with Advanced Operators and Saved Searches Wave is a very Googly product, so searching is simply a matter of typing a keyword into the search box. But like Gmail, Google Wave also offers several advanced search operators that let you find waves based on who they're with, what they're tagged, and other attributes. For example, to see all the public waves—that is, waves in which anyone using Wave can see—use the with: operator. In fact, if you're feeling lonely in Wave, the first Wave search you should try is with:public. To save a search for reuse, click on the "Save Search" button on the bottom right of your Wave inbox. When you save a search you can also specify filter actions for all the waves that match it. Right now the only choices are "Archive" and "Mark as read." Once you run that with:public search, every public wave you read will end up in your inbox, which becomes overwhelming almost immediately. So save your with:public search and check off "Archive" so they don't clutter up your inbox. (You can also "Mute" chatty public waves that did make it into your inbox if you're not interested in every new update.) The opposite of with:public, the with:me search is very useful for just seeing waves that are explicitly with you (not with the public group). To limit your results to only waves you've updated, use by:me. Other search operators include tag: for tags, and has: for attachments like images, files, and gadgets. For example, has:gadget returns waves with gadgets; has:image returns waves with images in them, and has:attachment returns waves with gadgets, images, or files. You can combine search operators, like with:public has:gadget, and use the minus sign to exclude waves as well, like -has:image. Here's the full list of Wave's advanced search operators. Make a Wave Public Now that you know how to find public waves, you probably want to make one of your own waves public. Problem is, there's no one-click button to make a wave public. The trick is to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list. To do so, click the + button on the bottom right of your Contacts module. Type public@a.gwave.com into the Address field, and even when Wave says "User does not have a Google Wave account", press Enter. The public group will appear in your contacts list, as shown. Add public to any wave you want to make public, but be prepared: Public waves often get destroyed by newbs and bots who haven't been in Wave long enough to grok the etiquette (see below). Also note that if you switch computers, you may have to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list again. Know Wave's Bot Etiquette (and Bounce Unwanted Bots) One of the biggest problems with public waves is that anyone can edit them or add recipients to them: including content-changing, and sometimes busted, bots. When you do your with:public search, you'll find dozens of waves that have been destroyed by newbs adding bots to them that delete or mangle the existing content so bad that even playback is broken. Good Wave etiquette dictates that you don't add bots to public waves. If you want to mess with a public wave, from its menu choose "Copy to New Wave" and go to town with your private copy. If you've created a public wave and someone added a bot to it that you want out, add the Bouncy bot to your contacts (bouncy-wave@appspot.com). Then, add Bouncy to the wave, and reply to it adding the command bounce:botaddress, replacing botaddress with the email address of the bot to bounce. Bouncy will oust the unwanted bot from your wave. This only works on bots. After Bouncy's done his job, you can delete the wave with the command and Bouncy's response. Update: The Google Wave team has enabled the "Remove" button for bots only, obviating the need for Bouncy. To remove an unwanted bot from a wave, click on its icon at the top o the wave and lean on the "Remove" button. This only works on bots, not humans. Garden Your Waves Like a wiki, useful and popular waves require oversight and gardening, or else they fall in to disrepair or go out of date or get vandalized (especially if they're public). You can oversee, clean up, edit, and update any wave you're a participant in, and everyone will appreciate it if you do. First, empty "blips" or replies are a common occurrence around Wave, which is still kind of twitchy in different browsers and new to a lot of folks who might accidentally hit Enter when they didn't mean to reply. Delete empty blips when you come across them by clicking on the wave action drop-down on the top right of it, and choosing "Delete." To automate this process on waves you create, add the Sweepy bot (sweepy-wave@appspot.com) to your contacts and to the wave itself. Sweepy will not delete existing empty blips, but it will delete any newly-added empty replies automatically. (Sweepy is one of the very few bots that may supersede the "never add bots to public waves" rule, as Sweepy's functionality cleans up the wave. For more on bots and gadgets, see this Google Wave Extensions list.) If a wave becomes totally destroyed and you want to restore it to a former useful state, use its playback feature. Pause at the revision you want, and use the "Copy to a new wave" menu item to fork it into a new copy. Bookmark a Custom Wave Layout Netbook owners or those who keep Wave open in a small window appreciate the ability to minimize unneeded Wave modules and maximize the reading or writing area on the wave you're working on at the moment. To load Wave with certain modules minimized by default, you can use a custom Wave URL with the #minimized parameter. For example, https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact launches Wave with the Navigation and Contacts modules minimized. The https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search URL minimizes Navigation, Contacts, and Search panes as shown here. URL-observers will also notice that every individual wave has an ID that appears in the URL when you click on it. This means you could bookmark or IM a link to a public wave to anyone on Wave. What Doesn't Work in Wave The Wave Preview is a pre-beta webapp, and lots of things aren't working or just simply aren't implemented yet. From the "it's not just you" department, here are some notes on what's not working: Some bots and gadgets: A couple of bots I mentioned in my first look at Google Wave worked in the Developer preview, but don't work in the regular preview, namely Bloggy, Polly, and several others. The best way to see if a bot works is to just try it, or search for its name and the with:public operator to find discussions about it. Requests, or waves from other servers: The Requests link in the Navigation pane is presumably for you to approve waves that come from other servers. However, while Wave server federation is part of the protocol, it's not yet working for real. That's why users on the Developer preview can't wave at users on googlewave.com. Yet. Removing Wave recipients: Right now you cannot remove non-bots from a Wave once they've been added to it. Copy your wave to a new one and reinvite folks instead. Uploading files (that are not images): While you can drag and drop images into a wave (and be sure to try that, it's fantastic fun), you can't upload other filetypes using the Files button yet. Update: While the files menu on the lower righthand corner of a wave is disabled, you CAN add files to a wave by dragging and dropping them onto the wave, or clicking the paperclip icon on a wave's toolbar in compose mode. The "I'm online" green dot: When the Wave preview first launched, a pretty green dot would show you which of your contacts was online at the moment. This feature had a serious bug involving Suggested Contacts so the Wave team had to pull it. Expect those dots to come back in the next few weeks. Playback (sometimes): If a wave is huge and has lots of revisions or a bot has made extreme changes, playback on waves can be wonky or just not work at all. Blog publishing: The Bloggy bot does not work right now, and while the Madoqua bot will give you Javascript embed code to add to your blog, ONLY people who are signed into Wave will be able to see your wave (and it has to be public, which makes it editable by anyone). So, while publishing waves on any web page with proper permissions and access by anyone on the web will happen, it's not working right now. Overall, Wave is a rich platform with a huge community of people discovering more of its ins and outs and quirks and workarounds every day. Wave users, what are your favorite tricks and tips for getting more out of Wave? Post up your comments below or in this public wave. Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, really hopes to meet Dr. Wave someday to tell him just how shiny everything is. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
• Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools (That Aren't Google Wave) [Lifehacker Top 10]
  Aug 5, 10
  Google Wave is shutting down and merging into other Google projects. Even if the app itself didn't gain traction, it made us think about the tools we use to collaborate. Here are some of the best non-Wave project and communication tools around. More »
  
• Great Smoky Mountains Trails – Hiking trail info for the Smokies
  Oct 2, 09
  Great Smoky Mountains trails: Hiking trail descriptions, key features, pictures, maps, elevation profiles and more for 70 hike trails in Smoky Mountains
• Online Extras: Ardipithecus ramidus
  Oct 1, 09
  In its 2 October 2009 issue, *Science* presents 11 papers describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus. These 4.4 million year old fossils cast new and sometimes surpsising light on the early evolution of the human lineage.
• Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last
  Oct 1, 09
  Meet Ardipithecus. This introduction has been a long time coming. Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the fossils they had unearthed. “Later,” it turned out, meant 15 years. I’ve mentioned before how unfashionable this slow-cooked style of science can be. But sometimes, it’s the only way to do things right. Getting clues about HIV by observing sick chimpanzees in the wild takes years.  And so does reconstructing a fossil–particularly one as delicate as Ardipithecus happened to be. Today, the journal Science has handed many of its pages over to White and his colleagues, who have filled them with lots of details about Ardipithecus, plus a couple excellent articles by writer Ann Gibbons. Ardipithecus has gone from being an enigmatic collection of bones to a new touchstone for our early hominid ancestors. To appreciate the importance of this new look of Ardipithecus, you have to step back into the history of hunting for hominid fossils. In the early 1970s, Tim White was part of a research team that found what was, at the time, the oldest hominid known: a 3.2 million year old fossil of Australopithecus afarensis. What made their discovery particularly spectacular was that they found a fair amount of a single A. afarensis individual, whom they named Lucy. Combined with other A. afarensis fossils, paleonthropologists got a pretty decent picture of what hominids looked like. Lucy was a chimpanzee-sized ape with a brain that was only a little bigger than a chimp’s. She still had long arms and curving hands and other traits hinting that she could still climb in trees. But she also had feet with stiff, forward-facing toes, an adaptation for walking on the ground. So things stood for about 20 years. But then, with the discovery of Ardipithecus and a few other hominid fossils, the record of our ancestry got pushed back millions of years. The oldest fossil that’s been identified as a hominid, Sahelanthropus tschadensis, dates back between 6 and 7 million years old. But scientists have only found pieces of the Sahelanthropus skull. Another species, Orrorin tugenensis, is 6 million years old; it’s represented by little more than a leg bone. Scientists have learned a lot from these pre-Lucy hominid fossils, but before now they weren’t able to make very detailed reconstructions of these creatures. Only about halfway along the journey from the first hominids to us did hominids come into full-bodied focus. At first, Ardipithecus ramidus was yet another scrappy pre-Lucy fossil. The first report offered details about part of a 4.4 million-year-old jaw bone–a remarkable jaw bone, but just a jaw bone nonetheless. Soon after, White’s team found more fossil bones, from the hominid’s hand, skull, pelvis, feet, and on and on–110 pieces all told. But finding these pieces was just the start of the team’s labors. They picked away at the bits of rocks surrounding the fragile bits of fossils. They used a computer to manipulate CT-scans of the fossils to figure out how crushed fragments had originally fit together as a skull or a pelvis. All this happened in strict secrecy. Some of us science writers knew a little about what the scientists were up to, but we could only guess when they’d finally finish working on the fossil. Sometimes when I’d speak to White, I’d inquire, and he’d politely say he wasn’t done yet. Looking at the papers out today in Science, you can see that they’ve been very busy. I won’t even try to offer an all-encompassing account of their new results. In many cases, it wouldn’t actually be worth the effort, because these papers are just the first salvo in what will be a fascinating debate about how our ancestors evolved. I was speaking to University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks yesterday on another subject, and he was giddy about the papers’ imminent publication. “Tomorrow’s Christmas!” he said. (His young son overheard him on the phone and got very excited and confused. I had to give Hawks a few minutes  to explain the nature of metaphor. Not sure how well that went over.) For now, I’ll point out a few of the results on Ardipithecus that are particularly intriguing. Nice Guys With Little Teeth Those of you reading this post that have a Y chromosome have canine teeth that are about the same size as those of my XX readers. The same rule applies to the teeth of some other primate species. But in still other species, the males have much bigger canines than the females. The difference corresponds fairly well to the kind of social lives these primates have. Big canines are a sign of intense competition between males. Canine teeth in some primate species get honed into sharp daggers that males can use as weapons in battles for territory and for the opportunity to mate with females. Men have stubby canines, which many scientists take as a sign that the competition between males became less intense in our hominid lineage. That was likely due to a shift in family life. Male chimpanzees compete with each other to mate with females, but they don’t help with the kids when they’re born. Humans form long-term bonds, with fathers helping mothers by, for example, getting more food for the kids to eat. There’s still male-male competition in our lineage, but it’s a lot less intense than in other species. White and his colleagues  found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys. Walking, Of A Sort; And Climbing, Of A Sort
  C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University spearheaded the studies on how Ardipithecus moved. He and his colleagues argue that its pelvis could support its upper body during bipedal walking. It wasn’t a fabulous walker, and was probably a terrible runner. Nevertheless, it had some of the same anchors for muscles that we have on our pelvis, and which chimpanzees and other apes lack. Its pelvis was, in other words, a mosaic. Lucy, we now can see, represents a later step in the journey towards out own walking-adapted anatomy. Ardipithecus’s feet were mosaics too. The four little toes were adapted for walking on the ground. Yet the big toe was still opposable, much like our thumbs. This sort of big toe helped Ardipithecus move through the trees much more adeptly than Lucy. But Ardipithecus could not climb through trees as well as, say, chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have lots of adaptations in their arms and shoulders to let them hang from branches and climb vertically up trees with incredible speed. Ardipithecus had hands were not stiffened enough to let them move like chimpanzees. Ardipithecus probably moved carefully through the trees, using its hands and feet all at once to grip branches. Just a Reminder: We Didn’t Evolve From Chimpanzees Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but that doesn’t mean that our common ancestor with them looked precisely like a chimp. In fact, a lot of what makes a chimpanzee a chimpanzee evolved after our two lineages split roughly 7 million years ago. Ardipithecus offers strong evidence for the newness of chimps. Only after our ancestors branched off from chimpanzees, Lovejoy and his colleagues argue, did chimpanzee arms evolve the right shape for swinging through trees. Chimpanzee arms are also adapted for knuckle-walking, while Ardipithecus didn’t have the right anatomy to lean comfortably on their hands. Chimpanzees also have peculiar adaptations in their feet that make them particularly adept in trees. For example, they’re missing a bone found in monkeys and humans, which helps to stiffen our feet. The lack of this bone makes chimpanzee feet even more flexible in trees, but it also makes them worse at walking on the ground. Ardipithecus had that same foot bone we have. This pattern suggests that chimpanzees lost the bone after their split with our ancestors, becoming even better at tree-climbing. Chimpanzees do still tell us certain things about our ancestry. Our ancestors had chimp-sized brains. They were hairy like chimps and other apes. And like chimps, they didn’t wear jewelry or play the trumpet. But then again, humans turn out to be a good stand-in for the ancestors of chimpanzees in some ways–now that Ardipithecus has clambered finally into view. [Reconstructions: Copyright 2009, J.H. Matternes. Cover: Copyright 2008 T.H. White]
• How to Choose the Fastest Line at the Market
  Sep 29, 09
  One of the more frustrating parts of grocery shopping is waiting in line, and determining which line will get you through the quickest somehow becomes a big deal. Blogger and math teacher Dan Meyer drops a little science on this common dilemma. Photo by specialkrb. When choosing which line will be the fastest, it might surprise you to learn that the "express" lane may not always be the best choice. Meyer took a scientific look at supermarket checkout times and came to the conclusion that the number of people in line adds more to the wait time than the number of items each person has in their cart.

  [W]hen you add one person to the line, you're adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that's "tender time" added to "other time") without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you'd rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person!

  Of course, other variables, both known (dedicated bagger) and unknown (payment type, coupons, cigarettes) affect on the speed of the line, but this is a good rule of thumb to use as a baseline. To save time and money before you get to the checkstand, try shopping every other week and make an organized list before you go shopping. If you've got your own tricks for getting through the checkout lane in a hurry, let us know in the comments. What I Would Do With This: Groceries [dy/dan via True/Slant]
• Google Earth 3D climate change simulator unveiled — starring Al Gore
  Sep 29, 09
  The Sydney Morning Herald further reports these “new tools were introduced in partnership with the Danish Government ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Convention in December.”  And as as HuffingtonPost reports, “Al Gore stars” in the Google Earth climate simulator video:

• Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo - The New York Review of Books
  Sep 26, 09
  An article by Howard W. French from The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009
• The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers - The New York Review of Books
  Sep 26, 09
  An article by David Cole from The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009
• Hell and High Water hits Georgia
  Sep 23, 09
  Once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding — Hell and High Water — that’s something larger and larger swaths of this country will need to get used to, especially if their Congressional reps keep opposing action on climate change. Douglas county Georgia was “hit by 21 inches of rain in a 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, knocking out the drinking water supply to most residents, and forcing others to boil their water,” the NYT reports.  “As much as 15 to 20 inches of rain pounded counties around Atlanta for more than 72 hours.” On Tuesday, Reuters reported “a state climatologist said this was the worst [flooding] in 100 years in some parts of Atlanta.”  Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed the records set.  Here are just a few:

  Among the flooding records, a nearly 90-year-old mark was broken Monday when the Chattahoochee River reached 29.61 feet near Whitesburg, west of Palmetto. The old record was 29.11 feet, set on Dec. 11, 1919. Downstream, the Chattahoochee on Tuesday beat another nine-decade record near Franklin, reaching 29.97 feet. The new record bested a Dec. 15, 1919 mark. The largest jumps came at Utoy Creek, near Atlanta, where the water level surged to 27.54 feet, nearly 11 feet over the May 2003 record of 16.86 feet, and Sweetwater Creek at Austell, where Tuesday’s crest of 30.17 feet topped the previous record of 21.81 feet set in 2005.

  I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started (see below). And on top of the direct storm-related deaths, it is a broad threat to human health.  As the AJC reported yesterday:

  The record rains of the past few days flooded out sewage treatment plants in Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, dumping millions of gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways. So, water already polluted by oil and gasoline, trash, pesticides and other ground contaminants will also be carrying debris and bacteria from human waste…. The damaged plants around metro Atlanta continue to dump untreated, or not-fully-treated sewage into floodwaters that then end up rising into homes and businesses.

  The main reason I am writing about Georgia’s once-in-a-century flooding, though, is that just a short while ago, the region was hit by a once-in-a-century drought (see “And the drought goes on“).  This is the climatic whipsawing of Hell and High Water.  Here is how things looked in October 2007: As the New York Times reported back then:

  For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water…. The situation has gotten so bad that by all of [state climatologist David] Stooksbury’s measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history….

  And no, far be it from me to say that current flooding is caused directly by global warming.  Wouldn’t want to earn the wrath of the deniers and delayers who rush from house to house removing the batteries from the smoke detectors. But funny how we are seeing these wild swings from extreme drought to extreme flooding more and more, just like those pesky climate scientists warned — see, for instance, my June post, AP, Washington Times: “Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency”:

  Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

  Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

  The surprise isn’t just the record flooding, it’s that the flooding followed record droughts:

  Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

  Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

  The BBC also got the story right in May, “Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years.” Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

  While the U.S. suffered a record-smashing hurricane season that deluged southern Louisiana with rain in the summer of 2005, “the eight months since October 1, 2005 have been the driest in 111 years of record-keeping” in southern Louisiana, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center reported in July 2006.

  What makes the AP and the Washington Times story on Brazil so unusual is not only that the Times is a right-wing newspaper, but that the story continues with an extended discussion of the climate issue:

  … climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the U.S. grain belt, as rising ocean temperatures and rainforest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns. “It’s important to note that it’s likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future,” Mr. Nobre [a climatologist with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research] said. “So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It’s not for the next generation”… “Something is telling us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we’re seeing them as well in Brazil,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this month on his radio program….

  Duh? And for completeness’ sake on the subject of “global warming type” record rainfall, let’s run through some of the literature one more time.  Regular readers can skip the rest of this post. In 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.” They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature. In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

  An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

  Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges, click to enlarge): Even the Bush Administration in its must-read U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:

  Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense…. It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming. In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity.

  In short, get used to it. If you are a journalist wondering what is a reasonable way to talk about this, one of the best recent examples comes from a New York Times story on Australia made possible by our friend Andrew Revkin:

  The firestorms and heat in the south revived discussions in Australia of whether human-caused global warming was contributing to the continent’s climate woes of late — including recent prolonged drought in some places and severe flooding last week in Queensland, in the northeast. Climate scientists say that no single rare event like the deadly heat wave or fires can be attributed to global warming, but the chances of experiencing such conditions are rising along with the temperature. In 2007, Australia’s national science agency published a 147-page report on projected climate changes, concluding, among other things, that “high-fire-danger weather is likely to increase in the southeast.” The flooding in the northeast and the combustible conditions in the south were consistent with what is forecast as a result of recent shifts in climate patterns linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research.

  That’s how it is done. And no, I’m not say that the media should link every extreme weather event the way Revkin did. But when we have “worst on record” type events, or 100-year floods — and especially ones that last more than a day and hit a broad area — then I think the reporter has an obligation to include the issue. Related Posts: Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather? Sorry, deniers: Even U.S gov says human emissions are changing the climate Sorry, deniers & enablers, Part 2: Climate change means worse droughts for SW and world
• The Beginner's Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog
  Sep 23, 09
  You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it's time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours. What You're In For With all the hype around cloud computing and no-configuration-required hosted services, you don't hear about the joys of running great software on your own server very much. The fact is, if you're just a casual user who doesn't know if you'll stick to blogging over the long haul, or if you don't want to spend a little time maintaining WordPress, you should sign up for a hosted blog at WordPress.com or Blogger or TypePad. (Also, this tutorial is not for you.) But if you're willing to keep WordPress updated religiously, you get access to a whole world of WP plug-ins that add features to your site, the opportunity to create and tweak custom WordPress themes, and a huge sense of accomplishment. In the most recent version of WordPress, keeping your installation up-to-date is a matter of clicking a link when you get notified to do so. Everything you need to know about installing WordPress is right here. Got it up and running? Let's get to customizing. Initial configuration The first thing you want to do on your WordPress blog is set up a new author with administrative access. Don't use the default "admin" user to write your posts; create your custom username and give it admin privileges. Then, log out of WordPress and back in as your new username. For security reasons, some folks like to delete the admin user completely (as some WordPress attacks have used it to do bad things to your blog). Once you've got your administrative account working, add other authors to the list of users who might be posting to your blog. Now it's time to cruise through WP's settings area and configure things just how you like 'em. First, set up your post permalinks to look prettier for both humans and search bots. WordPress' default post permalink looks like http://example.com/?p=123. Instead, under Settings>Permalinks, select something like http://example.com/2009/09/welcome-to-my-blog. Next up, configure how you want comments to work on your blog. Under Settings>Discussion, you can enable comments and set other advanced options, like whether or not users have to be logged into your site to comment, or if comments should automatically close on posts after a certain number of days, if user avatars show up, or what words in a comment should automatically mark it as spam. Speaking of, spam comments is a ridiculously epic problem across the internet for all blogs, so how you set up comments will mean the difference between miserable hours spent gardening V14gRa and "check out my sexy webcam!!" comments or not. Coming from Lifehacker's "must register to post here" model, I checked off "Users must be registered and logged in to comment." If you don't want to put up the registration hurdle in front of your commenters, make sure you install the Akisment spam-killing plug-in (more on that below). Must-have plug-ins Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. When you're logged into WordPress, click on Plugins, and search for the name of the plug-in you want to install (which you can do without involving your FTP client). You can also just search on keyword, too—to find Twitter related plug-ins, just enter Twitter. The plug-ins that you use will depend on how you want your site to work and look, but here are a few that every WP user can benefit from. WordPress Database Backup (Backup): Running your own server and database means that if things go wrong, it's up to you to have a backup. This plug-in can email a full backup of your WordPress database on a schedule to an address you specify. I've had great success building my WordPress site locally with the backup this plug-in created; however, the other resident WP expert here on staff, The How-To Geek, recommends using the old-school cron job for "mysqldump -uUser -pPassword databasename > filename.bak" approach. No matter how you do it, make sure you're backing up both your blog's database and files. It's worth consulting with your blog hosting provider about the best way for you to do this, too. FD Feedburner Plug-in (Feeds): Google-owned FeedBurner is a must-use for anyone who publishes RSS feeds, like your blog does. FeedBurner saves you bandwidth costs by hosting your blog's feed and offers statistics about how many people are reading it; this plug-in will redirect your blog's feed to FeedBurner for you. WordPress.com Stats (Stats): See what posts are most popular using this up-to-the-minute statistics plug-in, right inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress.com stats doesn't count visits to your own blog, and unlike the richer Google Analytics service, there's no day-long delay to see what's happening on your site. To run this plug-in, you have to get a WordPress.com API key (it's free) and enter it into the plug-in's settings. Search Meter (Stats): If you have a search box on your site, you'll want Search Meter, a plug-in which shows you what readers are looking for and finding (or not) on your site. Search meter also offers widgets you can add to your site which show readers what other readers are searching for. WP SuperCache (Optimization): The first time a highly-trafficked site like Digg links to your blog, you'll wish you had installed this plug-in, which maintains high-speed, database-call free "cached" copies of your WordPress pages on your server. Your site will run faster and won't buckle under the strain of a lot of traffic if you're caching it with this excellent plug-in. Akismet (Comments Spam killer): Because comment spam can get so bad, WordPress now ships with the Akismet spam filtering plug-in. Since I'm requiring user registration to leave comments on my WordPress blog, I don't have any experience with how good Akismet is (and haven't had any spam at all), but word on the street is it's absolutely essential for sites with open comments. Like WordPress.com stats, Akismet requires a WordPress.com API key. Finally, to make your site as accessible to Google and other web search engines as possible, a few Search Engine Optimization SEO plug-ins help. I use All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. Make Your WordPress Theme Yours If you've got HTML and CSS chops, you can make your WordPress theme sing your tune. (For advanced stuff, some PHP skills come in handy, too.) First you want to start with a base theme. WordPress' default theme is ok, but if you google "free WordPress themes" or take note of what themes sites you like already use, you'll find an insane number of gorgeous and eye-catching site layouts. Picking your theme is one of the most fun (and most time-consuming) parts of setting up WordPress. It will be hard to choose! Once you've installed the theme you want by downloading the .zip file and putting it in your WordPress themes folder, you can dig into the CSS and markup and make it your own. WordPress offers a theme editor in its interface which lets you update files on the fly (under Appearance>Editor). While this is convenient, it's also dangerous if you hit the wrong key, save the file, and don't have a backup. My recommendation is to set up WordPress and your theme of choice on your own computer, edit it in your favorite text editor, and upload it to your live server when it's perfect. I started my WordPress blog with Lucian Marin's Journalist theme, and made it mine by adding color to the header and tweaking how comments look. If you've got patience and custom HTML you want to turn into a brand new WordPress theme, copy the default theme's files into a new folder and get to hacking. The WordPress Codex is an invaluable resource for both starter reading and reference as you go. That is, when you get to the part where you're thinking "WTF is wp_list_comments?", Google it and you'll find the function reference at the codex. It took me a full weekend of pretty intense theming work to get my first custom theme done and ready to go live, so give yourself some time, and most importantly, have fun with it. Here are some tips and links from my Twitter followers on creating a custom WordPress theme. Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My! The easiest way to customize your WordPress blog without digging into code or your FTP client is to do so with widgets. The latest versions of WordPress offer drag-and-drop custom modules you can add to and remove from your blog. When you're logged into WordPress' admin interface, under Appearance, click on "Widgets" to see what's available and add and remove what you want on your site's sidebar (or top bar or bottom bar, depending on where your theme puts it). Advanced trickery Here are a few more tips for advanced WordPress hackers who want to troubleshoot or try even more customization: Use multiple custom sidebars: WordPress' sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. (For example, the sidebar that shows up on a post page can look different than the one on the front page.) Troubleshoot slowness and other problems with Firebug: Every web developer knows that the Firebug Firefox extension is absolutely essential when developing any site, and it's true for WordPress, too. When my WP site went down because of multiple background 404's doing resource-sucking searches, Firebug revealed the problem and so I knew how to fix it. Use tags to display content differently: You can use conditional tags to display different types of content on your blog in different ways, like a short link or big photograph. I use has_tag to display "quick links" with smaller inline headlines on my front page by assigning the tag "brief." Set up a "staging" server: Once your blog's up and running and live, you don't want to make huge changes to it with the whole world watching. Set up WordPress on your local computer, hack away on your theme and/or plug-ins, then upload your changes when they're complete and ready. This post only scratches the surface of WordPress customization possibilities. The good news is WordPress' open nature and huge community means that you can find the answer to almost any WP question hitting up Google—or in worst case, asking the forums. Special thanks to the author of this CSS Tricks post who also writes the excellent Digging into WordPress blog, which I referenced for this post. What did I miss? What are your favorite WordPress tricks, hacks, themes, plug-ins, security measures, and widgets? Shout 'em out in the comments. Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, loves herself a little WordPress hacking. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
• Picasa 3.5 Organizes Your Photos with Facial Recognition
  Sep 22, 09
  Windows/Mac: Google's free desktop photo organizer is stepping up to iPhoto's killer feature by adding face recognition and syncing it with Picasa Web Albums, making it easy to send Uncle Bob every single photo you've got of Aunt Marla. The new Picasa 3.5 contains a facial recognition feature similar to the one already present on Picasa Web Albums, but letting it run over your likely vast collection of assorted photos stashed on your hard drive is a lot more convenient. Picasa creates a new sidebar menu list of "People," and asks you to name the folks it finds in its main "Scanning" menu. If you're signed into Web Albums with a Google account stuffed with contacts, that's pretty easy, actually—just start typing a name, then select the contact that pops up as you type. You'll probably have to leave Picasa running a long time to get through everything—after 20 minutes, it's about 9 percent through with 13.8GB of photos on my laptop. As you might guess, some of the facial matching is hit and miss, but you get to approve any of the picks Picasa isn't absolutely sure of, and if someone's in your photo library who you don't want to take the time to tag, you can send them to the "Ignored People" pile. All this is in service of a better search function, so you can more easily find photos of yourself and your spouse, your spouse and her friend, or any combination of people, dates, or other search parameters. Here's Google's video demonstration of how name tagging works in Picasa 3.5:
  As noted in the video, the other additions to Picasa 3.5 are a tool to use integrated Google Maps pickers to geo-tag photos, and an option to import photos from a camera card onto Picasa Web Albums directly. Neat features, but kind of underwhelming paired with something like facial recognition, no? Read up on Picasa's name tag features, grab it at the link, and tell us how well facial recognition is working, or not, with your own photos in the comments. Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more [Official Google Blog]
• Transferring features from a PDF map to your GPS
  Sep 23, 09
  I learned the other day about a new 10,000 acre tract of public lands near me. There are no trail maps of the area and I am dying to explore it (once all this rain stops). I’ll probably do another post on prepping my GPS for exploring there, but this one aspect warrants its own post. A quick search turned up a PDF map of the area. This gave me a map of the boundary, but I wanted a way to place that boundary in mapping software where I could create waypoints, layer tracks, and transfer it to my GPS. It turns out that TopoFusion has a “user calibrated maps” feature. It will only accept .jpg, .png and .bmp files though, so the biggest hurdle was converting the PDF. If you don’t have Photoshop or something similar, you can use a free online converter. From there it was amazingly easy. One more tip before you get started – it’s best to size the TopoFusion map view as closely as possible to the area covered on the PDF. If you’re following along with TopoFusion, you can get to this feature by going to Window > User Map Library. Once you add the map, you click on Calibrate Point 1. You can pan and zoom the map as needed. Find a point (I chose a benchmark in the upper left portion of the map) and click on it. The user added map goes away and you can then click the same point on the underlying TopoFusion map. In this case it was a USGS 7.5’ topo. Repeat for points two and three, spreading them apart as much as possible (I try to use points near opposite corners of the map). With that done, I was able to use the track tool to trace the boundary lines and transfer those to my GPS. You could use this same process to trace trails shown on a PDF park map (though I’d search for actual GPX track files online before taking that route). I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about how my Rocky Fork trail mapping goes. In the meantime, download the free demo version of TopoFusion and check it out. Get the Pro version, as this feature is not found in the basic version. Related post: Ten reasons TopoFusion rocks
• Yeah, About that ACORN Law
  Sep 22, 09
  I like that law more now.
  by Eric Martin To follow up on the discussion about the ACORN hoopla that sprung up in the comments to one of Lindsay's recent posts, what we know is that some ACORN employees were caught on video engaging in unethical and, possibly in some instances, illegal behavior.  What we also know is that some ACORN employees that were approached by the same sting operation reacted in a completely appropriate way, reacting to the subterfuge as required by law and other codes of ethical conduct.  Of course, those employees' reactions didn't receive any media attention. Nevertheless, the fact remains that out of thousands of employees, a small handful acted in reprehensible ways.  The question, however, is what should be done about it?  Should an entire organization be punished for the actions of a few of its employees?  Should the government sever ties, or cut off funds, for any and all such organizations?  Or should the organization discipline the wrongdoers internally, and continue its operations and continue to receive government funds for its otherwise worthwhile activities? Riding the crest of the media frenzy surrounding the ACORN revelations, Republican legislators pushed for the more punitive outcome: mustering broad support for passage of a law aimed at cutting ACORN's funding - a paltry $53 million over the past 15 years - based on the misconduct of a small group of employees.  The problem is, in enacting a law that makes it possible to hold a group like ACORN responsible for the actions of its employees, the GOP might have opened up Pandora's box.  Consider, for example, some other groups that receive government funds (far in excess of $53 million over 15 years) whose employees have committed far more grievous crimes (ie, rape and murder for employees of KBR, Blackwater and other private contractors).  Ryan Grim on some of the implications:

  Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately -- but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process. The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things. In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who's Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors. POGO is reaching out to its members to identify other companies who have engaged in the type of misconduct that would make them ineligible for federal funds.

  Hmmm, maybe if ACORN just changes its name to XeCorn we can all just pretend this law never happened.
• Google Sync Updates with Push Gmail Support
  Sep 22, 09
  Google Sync, released earlier this year, keeps your calendar and contacts synced between your mobile phone and Google account. Now they've added that great, final bit of ultimate sync support by pushing Gmail to your phone. If you're sporting an iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile phone, or Nokia S60 phone, you can now set up Google Sync to actively push your email to your device, ensuring you're never stuck waiting around for an update to see what's new or wondering if various work-around alternatives will follow through. From the Official Google Mobile Blog:

  Sync works with your phone's native email application, so there's no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.

  Check out the full post at the link below to see how to get Google Sync if you're not already a user and how to enable Gmail syncing if you've already got a Google Sync account. Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support [Official Google Mobile Blog]
• Five Best Time-Tracking Applications
  Sep 20, 09
  Where does the time go? Whether you need to know for billing purposes or just want a better idea of how your work day is split up, you can always answer that question with a good time-tracking application. Photo by judepic. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite time-tracking tool, and now we're back with the five most popular time-tracking applications to help you track the time you spend on projects and tasks of every size. Whether you're an old veteran of time tracking and are curious to see alternatives to your current system, or you're new to the premise and curious to see what kind of apps people use, we've got five solid tools to showcase. Klok (All platforms with Adobe AIR, Free)
  Built with Adobe AIR, Klok is a lightweight and cross-platform tracking solution. You can create a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects in the task-management sidebar and then track the time spent on each by dragging and dropping them into the workflow for the day. While you can delve into the details of each block of time, simple adjustments like expanding the amount of time you've worked on a project is as easy as grabbing the edge of the block with your mouse and tugging it down.
  
  Manic Time (Windows, Free) One area of resistance many people have to using time tracking software is a fear that they'll waste too much time actually plugging information into the system. Manic Time alleviates that fear by actively tracking what you're doing on your computer to make tagging and analyzing your daily work flow simple. Your day is represented by three time lines: Activity (either on the computer or off), Applications (which were open), and Tags (your personal annotations to your work flow). Mousing over any of the three time lines gives you additional data about that moment on the time line and you can always pull up the statistics window to see your work patterns over time. Check out their video tutorials to see Manic Time in action.
  
  SlimTimer (Web-Based, Free)
  SlimTimer is a web-based tracking solution. Once you've signed up for a free account, you can begin creating new tasks you want to track. You track those tasks by flagging time you spend on them in the little pop-out time manager you see in the screenshot above or by keeping the SlimTimer web site open. You can add tags to your tasks in the management section of the SlimTimer site as well as share tasks with coworkers. If you're concerned about using a web-based tracker and losing control of or flat out losing your data, you can export your time-tracking data or even have SlimTimer email you a backup once a week.
  
  RescueTime (Windows/Mac, Free)
  RescueTime aims to be the least intrusive time-tracker you'll use. Rather than have you log each individual activity you do in a journal-style system, RescueTime monitors the web sites you visit and the applications you use. You can set goals in RescueTime based on a variety of factors, like how much time you want to spend doing certain tasks or how much time you want to dedicate to certain projects. RescueTime analyzes your computer usage and reports back to you on whether or not you're meeting those goals. RescueTime takes a different approach from most time-tracking tools, so we'd definitely recommend reading their FAQ file for additional insight into how they handle time tracking.
  
  Project Hamster (Linux, Free)
  Hamster is a simple time-tracking tool for Linux-based systems. You enter tasks as they occur, and then you can categorize and sort them. When you're done with a given task, you simply tell Hamster to stop tracking it. You can also set up a reminder system that will remind you to record what your current activity is every X number of minutes. One of the more interesting features of Hamster is the ability to shift how your day is defined. If you're a night owl and do most of your work after hours, Hamster won't slice your "day" in half at midnight just because the clock says it's a new day.
  
  Now that you've had a chance to look over the candidates for best time-tracking application, it's time to log your vote:
  
  Which Time-Tracking Application is Best?(answers)
  Have experience with some of the applications in this week's Hive? Can't believe your favorite wasn't included? Sound off in the comments.
• Top 10 Underhyped Webapps, 2009 Edition
  Sep 19, 09
  As with rock music, video games, and other awesome pursuits, great web applications often don't get enough credit for what they do well. We're revisiting and updating our favorite underhyped webapps to give a new crop of contenders their due. Photo by thievingjoker. 10. Freckle Like previous underhyped champ Remember the Milk, Freckle doesn't require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients. If you type "Writing copy for Benderson Corp. 1h45m," it assigns a 1-hour-and-45-minute billing for Benderson. Want to make something non-billable, but still tracked? Add an asterisk after it. Freckle offers visually appealing reports about how you're spending time for clients, but also how you're spending your own time, giving you the chance to assess how you're spending your time. A plan with one account and one project is free, and any of Freckle's other plans can be tried for 30 days free, so if you don't find yourself addicted to its charts and graphs, you can return to your spreadsheet. (Original post) 9. TinyChat Setting up a live video, audio, and screen-sharing chatroom for up to 12 people at once seems like something that might require a dozen software installations and point-by-point walkthroughs. If you aren't pitching a client so much as just trying to get folks talking, TinyChat handles the task admirably, and nobody has to do a thing but follow a link and turn on a mic or webcam. The rooms aren't password-protected unless the chat owner has a paid account, but you can require chatters to sign in with a Twitter handle to verify identity, and control just who gets to jump in with their video or audio feeds. Pretty impressive stuff for a free web service. (Original post)
  8. ScreenToaster Your boss asks you to demonstrate exactly how "that thing you do with that program works," but you're at work without screen recording software installed. Fire up ScreenToaster's site, load its Java-based applet, and you can record surprisingly decent quality screencasts and demonstrations, with audio voice-overs, at the push of a single button. When you're done recording part of your desktop or the whole thing, you can have ScreenToaster upload the finished product to YouTube or ScreenToaster's own site, download your screencast as a QuickTime or Flash file, and re-record audio if you didn't hit it the first time. Here's our own quick ScreenToaster test. Tell your viewers to hit the full-screen button for your screencasts and it's like you're hovering right over their shoulder, semi-patiently showing them just how it's done. (Original post)
  7. Lovely Charts Sure, it's a pretty presumptuous name, but Lovely Charts succeeds at what it promises. The Flash-based webapp produces very clean-looking charts for all kinds of purposes, be it a flowchart to describe a process, a diagram describing a network setup, conference seating, or whatever you might want to sketch out on the back of a napkin. You only get to save one chart at a time to edit later with a free account, but you can export any number of charts to JPG or PNG as often as you'd like. (Original post) 6. Instapaper & Read It Later It's a really cool article or blog post you just stumbled across, but at the moment—right this second—you don't have time to read it. If you had a bookmarklet or browser plug-in for either the Instapaper or Read It Later service, you'd be able to quickly send that web page to your account for bookmarking. Once there, it can be stripped of all but essential text for reading, saved for offline reading in your iPhone, marked as read when you're done with it, shared with others—you get the idea. Read It Later offers a Firefox extension for offline reading, easy saving, and a lot more functionality in general, but Instapaper keeps it clean and simple on purpose. Both are great services that quietly do similar, and extremely useful, things. (Original posts: Read It Later & Instapaper)
  5. YouMail Not everybody can swing a smartphone, many smartphones don't offer visual voicemail, and very few people (at the moment) get to play with Google Voice and its transcribed voicemails. For those feeling like their phones are under-powered, there's YouMail. Sign up, follow YouMail's instructions on setting up your phone to hand over your phone's voicemail duties to its service, and you'll be able to listen to or download voicemails from its web site or smartphone apps. With the limited free or paid unlimited transcription plans, the halfway decent speech-to-text versions of your messages are emailed or sent by SMS right away. If you want different voicemail greetings for different contacts, YouMail can do that, too. Whether you're rocking the cheapest phone they had at the store or an iPhone, YouMail's a great add-on. (Original post) 4. PDF to Word If you need to grab elements from a PDF, edit part of its text, or cut down its size, you might try converting it to a Microsoft Word file. For doing that task, PDF to Word is more than just adequate—it's darned impressive. We were kind of amazed at how well even the most complex of PDFs we had access to (an invitation to a snooty art installation opening) were flipped into almost exact facsimiles in Word format. Simply upload a PDF, provide an email address, and your document is on its way to you. Maker NitroPDF has other free PDF tools worth checking out, and paid software to entice you with, but PDF to Word is a webapp that does exactly what it says, no catches or gimmicks. (Original post)
  3. drop.io It's hard to say that drop.io doesn't have a fairly persistent marketing push behind it, but for all the helpful functions it offers, the service doesn't get enough notice. Besides giving anyone 100MB of temporary file-sharing space without any sign-up required, drop.io can handle the rare faxing job, record voice memos by telephone, set up quick multimedia presentations, and more as developers hack on the open API. Having recently been assigned as Yahoo Mail's default large attachment handler should bring drop.io out of semi-obscurity, though its deeper functionality still deserves a bit more attention.
  2. Fonolo If calling a company's customer service line and dealing with automated answering systems fills you with a certain kind of dread, you need a Fonolo account. The free service has diagrammed the customer service phone trees of more than 500 major firms, letting you click the point in the call you want to be at ("Press 4 to cancel an account ..."), then taking care of the tedious number-punching up to that point, calling you to connect exactly where you want to come in. With its latest update, Fonolo can even record your call, giving you the power to get better customer service with detailed records. (Original post)
  1. The Aviary suite Aviary is a webapp maker that specializes in fully-featured Flash apps, and they're seemingly engaged in a dare to see how much users can get done entirely in a browser. Jackson West called Phoenix the best online image editor, and our readers agree. They've got a lighter, faster version dubbed Falcon, and if you want to annotate an image that's already on someone's server, you can paste its URL after http://aviary.com and it'll quickly import the image for your editing pleasure. Most recently, and most impressively, they've launched a full-featured audio editor that we totally geeked out over. If you can remember their name, you can benefit from Aviary's host of impressive in-a-pinch tools.
  What underrated webapps are making life easier for you? Which smaller-scale sites do their jobs better than the big guys? Trade your tips in the comments.
• The Rise and Fall of the Secretary
  Sep 19, 09
  Job Voyager is a cool tool that lets you see the share of the American workforce that’s been in different job categories over time. Behold the rise and fall of the secretary: Voicemail, email, cell phones, smart phones, and laptops are rapidly making this occupational category obsolete. Also interesting to note that as of Mad Men’s 1963 we still hadn’t arrived at Peak Secretary occurred in the 1970 Census and secretaries were a larger proportion of the population in 1990 than they had been in 1950.
• What do children remember from a museum?
  Sep 19, 09
  There is a new study and here is the central result:Gross's team said the results "demonstrated that children learned and remembered an extraordinary amount of information about a school trip to a museum" even after a lengthy delay. The findings also showed that giving the children the opportunity to draw, significantly increased the amount of accurate information they recalled. This is consistent with previous, forensically motivated research showing that drawing facilitates children's verbal reports of their experiences.These same children do poorly in recollecting information about the museum on a comprehension test designed by adults.  In another words, what children learn from the museum is not in general what the adults are inclined to test them on or what the adults think they should be learning.  The funny thing, I think, is that they consider this a study of children rather than of human beings.The children were brought to the Royal Albatross Centre in Dunedin, New Zealand.  Here are six (presumably) adult reviews of the Centre.
• The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers
  Oct 8, 09
  By David Cole
  
  On Monday, August 24, as President Obama began his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, his administration released a previously classified 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general that strongly criticized the techniques employed to interrogate 'high-value' al-Qaeda suspects at the CIA's secret prisons. The report revealed that CIA agents and contractors, in addition to using such 'authorized' and previously reported tactics as waterboarding, wall-slamming, forced nudity, stress positions, and extended sleep deprivation, also employed a variety of 'unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented' methods. These included threatening suspects with a revolver and a power drill; repeatedly applying pressure to a detainee's carotid artery until he began to pass out; staging a mock execution; threatening to sexually abuse a suspect's mother; and warning a detainee that if another attack occurred in the United States, 'We're going to kill your children.'
• Pew Forum: Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
  Sep 15, 09
• Extreme Ice Survey :: Home Page
  Sep 12, 09
  Very interesting photographs of glaciers showing climate change via time lapse photos.
• How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? - NYTimes.com
  Sep 4, 09
  The Great Recession was the result not only of lax regulation in Washington and reckless risk-taking on Wall Street but also of faulty theorizing in academia.
• Iphone apps directory - Gizmodo
  Sep 4, 09
  Which ones do I not have yet?
  Bud American Ale Finder AirSharing Amazon AOL Radio BeejiveIM
• Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo
  Sep 24, 09
  By Howard W. French
  
  Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
  by Gérard Prunier
  
  The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
  by René Lemarchand
  
  The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
  by Thomas Turner
  
  Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa's third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.
• Make Free VoIP Calls from Google Voice [How To]
  Jun 22, 10
  Google Voice is great, but it isn't an entirely free voice-over-internet service if you have to pay a phone bill to use it. With a few tweaks, though, you can make completely free internet phone calls with Google Voice. Here's how. More »
  
• Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty : The New Yorker
  Aug 31, 09
  A REPORTER AT LARGE about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for setting a fire that killed his three children in Corsicana, Texas, in 1991. Writer describes the Willingham home being consumed by fire on December 23, 1991. Neighbors arrived to find Cameron Todd Willingham on the…
• Brad DeLong's Things Worth Reading (and Others) - Favorites
  Aug 30, 09
  Some books to keep in mind, I guess.
• The Problem Being ???
  Aug 30, 09
  I agree. CIA personnel should fear prosecution if they break the law. That's a feature, not a bug. If not bring able to boldly torture anyone lowers morale, that's a good thing.
  The Washington Post cites worries among intelligence officials:

  A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

  … Krongard, one of the few active or retired CIA officers with direct knowledge of the program willing to voice publicly what many officers are saying privately, said agency personnel now may back away from controversial programs that could place them in personal legal jeopardy should their work be exposed. “The old saying goes, ‘Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk.’ ” “If you’re not in the intelligence business to be forward-leaning, you might as well not be in it,” Krongard said. ‘Forward-leaning’ in this context being a rather transparent euphemism for being ‘willing to break the laws forbidding torture of captives.’ There is of course a case that relatively low ranking CIA officers should not be prosecuted for torture while the high officials that ordered them to torture, or provided flimsy legal justifications for torture (or perhaps indeed encouraged them to go beyond the guidances provided) get off scot free. But I think that the pragmatic case that these officers should be prosecuted is a stronger one; on two grounds. First, and most obviously, bringing these cases to trial may lead to the uncovering of new evidence. The most obvious defense open to these officers is that they were indeed only following legally mandated instructions – and it seems at least plausible to me (as a non-lawyer) that a judge will be more likely to allow discovery on potentially exculpatory evidence for these officers than for other potential plaintiffs, such as those who were in fact the victims of this torture. This is of course screwed up – but it is (as best as I can tell) part of the legal culture of this country. This evidence might perhaps (not very likely, given politics – but then I would not have predicted Holder’s decision a month ago) lead to the prosecution of high level officials who were more directly involved in creating the policies in question and possibly encouraging their underlings to go beyond even these policies. Second, the more cautious that low-ranking CIA officers are about breaking the laws criminalizing torture in future, the better. I want them to be worried that they will be hung out and left to dry by their political masters if they break the law. This will give them a strong rationale to say no, the next time that they are asked to, and at least partially reshape the incentive structure in benign ways. There is something rather obviously fucked up about a political culture in which high ranking officials can make the opposite claim – that we want intelligence officers to be able to break the law by torturing people, and that not giving them this license ‘lowers morale.’ But you would not know that from reading the Washington Post.
• Chart of the Day
  Aug 28, 09
  OK, it's not really a chart.  It's a table.  But it comes from CBPP and it takes a closer look at the recent headlines screaming that deficit projections have risen from $7 trillion to $9 trillion.  Long story short, it's not true. Here's why.  The lower number is from the CBO and relies on its "baseline" budget calculation.  This is an estimate of what would happen if current law remains unchanged forever, and as such it bears little resemblance to reality.  In reality, the Bush tax cuts aren't going to disappear in 2011, Medicare reimbursements aren't going to be suddenly slashed, and the Alternative Minimum Tax won't be left alone to gobble up ever more income.  As usual, the law will be changed to take care of all these things, just like it is every year. So if you take a look at what the deficit would be under current real-life policies, and compare it to estimates under Obama's proposed policies, what do you get?  As the table below shows, the real-life deficit isn't $7 trillion, it's more like $11 trillion.  And the Obama deficit isn't $9 trillion, it's about $10.5 trillion once adjustments are made so that it can be compared to CBO estimates on an apples-to-apples basis.  So the bottom line is simple: properly accounted for, the deficit actually goes down when you compare Obama's budget proposals to current policy, not up. All the grisly details are here.  Warning: not for the faint of heart.
• GPS Hackers Blaze Own Trails With Crowdsourced Maps | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
  Aug 27, 09
  Now the whole world knows about my Italian vacation.
  Last month, when Zack Ajmal was planning a vacation to Italy, he set out to find the first thing that a traveler would need in a foreign land: a map. But
• Record and Transcribe Notes for Yourself with Google Voice
  Aug 27, 09
  In our first Lifehacker Wishlist, we came up with five wanted features in Google Voice, including an easy way to record and transcribe notes for yourself. Mark Stout suggests a Voice settings tweak to fulfill that wish. Stout's method involves setting up a special group in Voice's caller settings for yourself (dubbed "Special Transcription" in his case), adding your cell phone number as the only member, setting up a very short greeting for that group, then setting the "Direct access to voicemail" question to No. He calls his own Voice number, records a memo, and it's transcribed and sent to him via email. If you rely on listening to your voicemail over your phone, this makes pressing the "#" key during your uber-short greeting somewhat tricky. Then again, if you're cool with Voice's mostly-okay transcription, you likely don't listen to your voicemail all that often. Hit the link for Mark's full run-through, and leave your own methods for recording an audio note to self, with Google Voice or without, in the comments. Recording your own notes with Google Voice [Ideas from Mark Stout]
• The Washington Independent » The 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture
  Aug 24, 09
  Yes, the CIA interrogators must be prosecuted even if the Bush administration officials are not.
  Classified for years — and still heavily redacted — here is former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s 2004 report into the CIA’s Bush-era interrogations operations.
• Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions | Newsweek National News | Newsweek.com
  Aug 24, 09
  A long-awaited report on post-9/11 interrogation tactics will reveal harrowing new details about treatment of suspected terrorists.
• Google Web Elements
  Aug 24, 09
  Easy way to add different Google stuff like calendar, conversation, presentations, maps, news, etc to your web page.
• The Definitive Guide to Finding Free Wi-Fi
  Aug 19, 09
  You're out and about with your laptop and you're in need of some fast internet connectivity. Here are some tried and true ways to find and get free Wi-Fi. Photo by °Florian. Easy: The Most Likely Places You'll Find Free Wi-Fi You can find some free Wi-Fi love at the local public library, Barnes and Noble, McDonald's, the airport, university campus, independent coffee shop, or hotel lobby. Not all airports or hotels or even campuses offer free Wi-Fi though, so give the destination a ring before you hoof it over there only to be disappointed. (For example, the San Diego airport offers free Wi-Fi as does JetBlue's T5 in New York's JFK, but many other airports are pay-for access only. On the UCSD campus you used to need a password to log on; now guests can get free access.) If you're in a residential area, a little war-driving with the right equipment can turn up an open "linksys" hotspot. Rather than breaking open your conspicuous laptop, use your Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone or a Wi-Fi scanner keychain to scan and detect networks. (See the smartphone apps for finding open networks below.) The serious nerd can even outfit him or herself in a Wi-Fi scanning t-shirt, hat, or pair of sneakers. (Thanks, adrian_rich!) Medium: Employ Wi-Fi Scanner Apps and Look-up Tools Sometimes the built-in scanner on your smartphone or laptop can be too slow or won't give you all the information you want about area networks. Here are some free apps and tools for scanning and finding free Wi-Fi networks. Windows
  When Windows' built-in Wi-Fi network detector isn't cutting it, download the free NetStumbler to get a detailed listing of available networks listed by channel, signal strength, and security type, including "hidden" SSID's your PC might not detect otherwise.
  Previously-mentioned free Windows app WeFi offers a community-generated database of free hotspots for searching. It does an okay job of finding hotspots, but beware of optional crapware in the installation process. (Just say no.)
  
  Mac
  On the Mac, iStumbler is the free scanner application of choice. iStumbler offers an informative table of nearby hotspots, including their names, security mechanism, channel, signal and noise percentages, and MAC addresses. iStumbler hasn't been updated in a long time, and it didn't work as well as it used to on Leopard on my Snow Leopard installation. For a pay-for alternative to iStumbler, check out AirRadar ($16/license, free trial available).
  
  Smartphones: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android
  Your Wi-Fi enabled smartphone can scan for nearby networks using its built-in antenna, but a few apps let you search near your location or another location, too. On the iPhone, I got the best results from JiWire's Free Wi-Fi Finder, which searches areas by zip code or your current location. (You can also use the mobile JiWire webapp at iphone.jiwire.com.) Other iPhone Wi-Fi scanner apps include WifiTrack ($1) and WiFiFoFum ($3). On Windows Mobile, WiFiFoFum is available, and as Kevin pointed out, the WeFi app is also available for Android.
  Webapps
  Installable applications aside, if you've got a smartphone with internet access, several webapps will search an area to help you find a Wi-Fi hotspot for your laptop, including: WiFinder Hotspot Haven JiWire Wi-Fi Hotspot List Hotspotr Bookmark those in your mobile browser for future reference. Desperation Level: High Desperate times call for desperate measures. If your search for Wi-Fi is fruitless—or turning up only security walls—you've still got a few options. First, you can turn your smartphone into a router by tethering to its connection. This isn't going to give you the fast connection that most public Wi-Fi hotspots will, but it will get your laptop online. Here's one method for enabling tethering on your iPhone 3.0; here's how to turn a Palm Pre into a tethered Wi-Fi router. Android owners, the PdaNet app tethers your device to your laptop. In fact, PdaNet is a popular tethering app that works on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm OS, and iPhone—though you'll need to jailbreak your iPhone to get it working. Finally, from the "don't be a jerk" files, if you absolutely have to, you can force your way onto a WEP-secured wireless network. Here's how to crack a Wi-Fi network's WEP password with Backtrack. Just because you can doesn't mean you should, of course—be prudent about hopping someone else's virtual gate. What's your favorite method, app, or search engine for finding free Wi-Fi? Let us know in the comments. Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, wishes you a neighborhood blanketed in free Wi-Fi. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
• Make Free Calls to Canada with Google Voice
  Aug 19, 09
  Any Canadians want me to call them?
  You probably already knew that Google Voice let you make free long distance calls inside the U.S. (the way cellphones work, I think most of us just assume this is a given, anyway), but today Google Voice announces that they're bringing back free calls to Canada. This feature existed back when Google Voice was called GrandCentral, but it's great to see another way you can get more out of Google Voice. (Unfortunately, Google Voice is still only available in the U.S.) [Google Voice Blog]
• The Brain: The Dark Matter of the Human Brain | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine
  Aug 19, 09
  Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
• The Buzz vs The Bulge Chart Compares Caffeine to Calories
  Aug 19, 09
  Does a small Frappuccino give you enough caffeine to be worth the calories? How long would you have to run to work off an iced latte? David McCandless' beautiful chart puts all your caffeine concerns in perspective. McCandless' chart, posted at his Information is Beautiful blog, puts caffeine on an X axis and calories on the Y, plotting the majority of drinks one can brew at home or shell out spare cash for all around the grid with representative sizes. That allows you to find your personal energy beverage sweet spot—say, 150 calories and lots of caffeine, or almost no calories and just a soda's worth of the temporary boost—and also see the caloric equivalent in food, alcohol, or 30 minutes of exercise. It looks great, tells a lot of information in a small space, and makes me want at least an 8.5x11 print of it to keep nearby for moments of dietary weakness at around 3pm. Caffeine and Calories [Information Is Beautiful via Serious Eats]
• Would you pay more for walkability? Should you? | Grist
  Aug 19, 09
  Better for your bod. Better for the planet. Better for your gas and insurance bills. Is that why people are coughing up more cash for houses in walkable neighborhoods? A new study looks at the trend.
• GPush Brings Push Notification to Gmail Users on the iPhone
  Aug 17, 09
  It also works with Google Apps accounts.
  iPhone only: Last month we showed your how to set up push Gmail on your iPhone in OS X or Windows, but if you didn't like running your PC all the time to get your notifications, GPush can help. GPush is a newly approved iPhone application that, very simply, adds Gmail push notifications to your iPhone. (If you're unfamiliar with the concept of push notifications, GPush notifies you the instant you receive a new email rather than after your Mail application checks for new email [or pulls].) To use it, just fire up the app and give it your Gmail username and password (your login credentials are encrypted with SSL and sent securely to Google). After that, you'll get push notification (complete with the From and Subject fields) any time you get a new message in Gmail. GPush allows you to toggle sounds, alerts, and badge notifications, so you can determine what level of alert you want. The catch: GPush will set you back $1 at the App Store (for now, at least—it goes up to $2 eventually). Still, a one-time price of $1 isn't bad for the potential time- and battery-saving advantages of push Gmail on your phone. Update: Readers are having mixed results with the app, and the makers of the application are aware of the problem and working on a solution. It's still working fine for us, but your mileage may vary. GPush [iTunes App Store]
• Interrogation Inc. - A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails - NYTimes.com
  Aug 12, 09
  CIA's torture prisons
  A look at the rise of Kyle D. Foggo, from fringe player into the C.I.A.’s indispensable man provides a fuller account of how the detention centers were built and life inside them.
• Interrogation Inc. - 2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake - NYTimes.com
  Aug 12, 09
  These guys need to be prosecuted.
  In 2002, two psychologists found a business opportunity selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.
• How Different Groups Spend Their Day - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
  Aug 12, 09
  Interesting graphs. NY Times is very good with these graphics.
  The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
• 'Can I Trust This Poll?' - Part II
  Aug 11, 09
  by Mark Blumenthal"Can I trust this poll?" In Part I of this series I tried to present the growing clash between traditional polling methods and a new breed that breaks many of the old rules and makes answering this question difficult. In this post, I want to review the philosophies at work behind efforts to evaluate polls and offer a few suggestions about what we can do to assess whether poll samples are truly representative.
  Those who assess polls and pollsters generally fall into two categories, those who check the methodology and those who check the results. Let's consider both. Check the Methods - Most pollsters have been trained to assess polls by looking at the underlying methods, not the results they produce. The idea is that you do all you can to contact and interview a truly random sample, ask standardized, balanced, clearly-worded questions and then trust the results. Four years ago, my Hotline colleagues asked pollsters how they determine whether they have a good sample. The answer from Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, best captures this philosophy:

  A good sample is determined not by what comes out of a survey but what goes into it: Rigorous methodology including carefully designed probability sampling, field work and tabulation procedures. If you've started worrying about a "good sample" at the end of the process, it's probably too late for you to have one.   

  A big practical challenge in applying this philosophy is that the definition of "rigorous methodology" can get very subjective. While many pollsters agree on general principles (described in more detail in Part I), we lack consensus on a specific set of best practices. Pollsters disagree, for example, about the process used to choose a respondent in sampled households. They disagree about how many times to dial before giving up on a phone number or about the ideal length of time a poll should be in the field. They disagree about when it's appropriate to sample from a list, about which weighting procedures are most appropriate, about whether automated interviewing methods are acceptable and more. This lack of consensus has many sources: The need to adapt methods to unique situations, differing assessments of the tradeoffs between different potential sources of error and the usual tensions between the goals of cost and quality. Yet whatever the reason, these varying subjective judgments make it all but impossible to score polls using a set of objective criteria. All too often, methodological quality is in the eye of the beholder. A bigger problem is that the underlying assumption -- that these rigorous, random-digit methods produce truly random probability sampling -- is weakening. The unweighted samples obtained by national pollsters now routinely under-represent younger and non-white people while routinely over-representing white and college educated Americans. Of course, virtually all pollsters weight their completed samples demographically to correct these skews. Also, many pollsters are now using supplemental samples to interview Americans on their cell phones in order to improve coverage of the younger "cell phone only" population. Most of the time, this approach appears to work. Pre-election polls continued to perform well during the 2008 general election, matching or exceeding their performance in 2004 and prior years. But how long will it be before the assumptions of what SurveyUSA's Jay Leve calls "barge in polling" give way to a world in which most Americans treat a ringing phone from an unknown number the way they treat SPAM email? And when it does, how will we evaluate the newer forms of research? Check the Results - When non-pollsters think about how to evaluate polls, their intuitive approach is different. They typically ask, well, how does the pollster compare in terms of accuracy? The popularity of Nate Silver and the pollster ratings he posted last year at FiveThirtyEight.com last year speaks to the desire of non-pollsters to reduce accuracy to a simple score. Similarly, pollsters also understand the importance of the perceived accuracy of their pre-election poll estimates. "The performance of election polls," wrote Scott Keeter and his Pew Research Center colleagues earlier this year, "is no mere trophy for the polling community, for the credibility of the entire survey research profession depends to a great degree on how election polls match the objective standard of election outcomes." So what's the problem in using accuracy scores to evaluate individual pollsters? Consider some important challenges. First, pollsters do not agree on the best way to score accuracy, with the core disagreement centering on how to treat the undecided percentage that appears nowhere on the ballot. And for good reason. Differences in scoring can produce very different pollster accuracy rankings. Second, the usual random variation in individual poll results due to simple sampling error gives especially prolific pollsters -- those active in many contests -- an advantage in the aggregate scores over those that poll in relatively few contests. Comparisons for individual pollsters get dicey when the number of polls used to compute the score gets low. Third, and probably most important, scoring the accuracy this way tells us about only one particular measure (the vote preference question) on one type of survey (pre-election) at one point in the campaign (usually the final week). Consider the chart below (via our colleague Charles Franklin). It plots the Obama-minus-McCain margin on roughly 350 surveys that tracked national popular vote between June and November, 2008. An assessment of pollster error would consider only the final 20 or so surveys -- the points plotted in red. Notice how the spread of results (and the frequency of outliers) is much greater from June to October than in the final week (the standard deviation of the residuals, a measurement of the spread of points around the trend line, falls from 2.79 for the grey points from June to October to 1.77 for the last 20 polls in red). Our colleague David Moore has speculated about some of the reasons for what he dubs "the convergence mystery" (here and here; I added my own thoughts here with a related post here). But whatever you might conclude about the reasons for this phenomenon, something about either voter attitudes or pollster methods was clearly different in the final week before the 2008 election. Assuming, as many pollsters do, that this phenomenon was not unique to 2008, how useful are the points in red from any prior election in helping us assess the "accuracy" of the grey points for the next one? So what do we do? How can we evaluate new polling results when we see them? The key issue here is, in a way, about faith. Not religious faith per se, but faith in random sampling. If we have a true random probability sample, we can have a high degree of faith that the poll is representative of the larger population. That fundamental philosophy guides most pollsters. The problem for telephone polling today is that many of the assumptions of true probability sampling are breaking down. That change does not mean that polls are suddenly non-representative, but it does make for a much greater potential than 10 or 20 years ago for skewed, flukey samples. What we need is some way to assess whether poll samples are truly representative of a larger population that does not rely entirely on faith that "rigorous" methods are in place to make it so. I will grant that this is a very big challenge, one for which I do not have easy answers, especially for the random digit dial (RDD) samples of adults typically used for national polls. Since most pollsters already weight adult samples by demographics, their weighted demographic distributions are already representative. But what about other variables like political knowledge, interest or ideology? Again, I lack easy answers though perhaps as the quality of voter lists improve in the future, we may get better "auxiliary data" to help identify and correct non-response bias. But for now, our options for validating samples are very limited. When it comes to "likely voter" samples, however, pollsters can do far better informing us about who these polls represent. As we have reported here and especially on my old Mystery Pollster blog over the years, there are almost as many definitions of likely voters as there are pollsters. Some use screen questions to identify the likely electorate, some use multiple questions to build indexes that either select likely voters or weight respondents based on their probability of voting. The questions used for this purpose can be about intent to vote, past voting, political interest or knowledge of voting procedures. Some select likely voters using registered voters lists and actual turnout records for the individuals selected from voter lists. So simply knowing that the pollster has interviewed 600 or 1,000 "likely voters" is not very informative. The importance of likely voters around elections is obvious, but it is less apparent that many public polls of "likely voters" routinely report on wide variety of policy issues even in non-election years. These include the polls from Rasmussen Reports, NPR, George Washington University/Battleground and Democracy Corps. What is a "likely voter" in an odd-numbered year? Those who voted or tend to vote in higher turnout presidential elections? Those who intend to vote in non presidential elections? Something else? One thing I have learned from five years of blogging on this topic is that some pollsters consider their likely voter methods proprietary and fiercely resist disclosure of the details. Some will disagree, but I think there are some characteristics that can be disclosed, much like food ingredients, without giving away the pollster's "secret sauce." These could include the following: In general terms, how are likely voters chosen - by screening? Index cut-off models? Weights? Voter file/vote history selection? What percentage of the adult population does the likely voter sample represent? If questions were used to screen respondents or or build an index, what are the text of questions asked? If voter lists were used, what sort of vote history (in general terms if necessary) defined the likely voters? Perhaps most important, what is the demographic and attitudinal (party, ideology) profile -- weighted and unweighted -- of the likely voter universe? Access to cross-tabulations, especially by party identification. Regular readers will know that better disclosure of these details is a topic I return to often, but will also remember that obtaining consistent disclosure of such details can be difficult to impossible, depending on the pollster.
  How can we help motivate pollsters to disclose more about their methods? I have an idea that I will explain in the third and final installment of this series. Update: continue reading Part III.
  [Note: I will be participating in a panel on Thursday at this week's Netroots Nation conference on "How to Get the Most Out of Polling." This series of posts previews the thoughts I am hoping to summarize on Thursday].
• Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective | The Economist
  Aug 9, 09
  Of course, it doesn't work but it never hurts to pose as tough on crime and being for the children.
  America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?
• Torture’s Fall Guys
  Aug 9, 09
  I disagree. While prosecuting the bigshots would be best, prosecuting the interrogators/torturers is definitely better than nothing. May be these grunts will use some brains/morals next time.
  Spencer Ackerman writes:

  And now it appears Attorney General Holder is getting closer to appointing a special prosecutor for the CIA’s torture apparatus. That prosecutor will focus, according to Greg Miller and Josh Meyer, just on the CIA, and not even on the top agency officials who helped create the apparatus, but on the frontline interrogators who went beyond the “legal” guidance about how much torture was permissible. I don’t want to suggest that an operative who walks into an interrogation chamber with a gun is an innocent. But it’s plainly an affront to common sense to suggest that the circumstances that led him into that room shouldn’t be the subject of investigation.

  Tom Malinowksi from Human Rights Watch says “An investigation that focuses only on low-ranking operators would be, I think, worse than doing nothing at all.” I think that’s probably going too far, but this seems like an extremely rotten deal. Something similar was done after Abu Ghraib and it’s no good.
• Civil War Booklist - Ta-Nehisi Coates
  Aug 7, 09
• 50 Things to Do with Kids in New York City This Summer (mostly free) - Free Events and Activities for NYC KIds | Mommy Poppins - Get more out of NYC with kids
  Aug 7, 09
  I don't know about you, but this summer we've pared back on camps and vacations in an effort not to spend money we don't have. But our loss is your gain because, instead, what we're going to be doing this summer is exploring New York City and all the fun
• Matthew Yglesias » Independence Day
  Aug 7, 09
  Instead of my usual July 4 musings on historical counterfactuals, let’s talk about some good books on American history.
• Infinite Jest | Mother Jones
  Aug 7, 09
  So a bunch of folks are reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this summer and blogging about it.  Infinite Summer kicked things off and A Supposedly Fun Blog is the stomping grounds for IJ musings from a bunch of political types. I feel
• AT&T's iPhone App Brings Remote DVR Scheduling To U-Verse Customers - Remote mobile access - Gizmodo
  Aug 7, 09
  If you happen to be a U-Verse customer, AT&T has an app for you. AT&T Remote Mobile Access allows iPhone / iPod Touch users to control their DVR remotely.
• Jailbreak and Unlock iPhone 3.0 - jailbreak unlock iPhone 3.0 - Gizmodo
  Aug 7, 09
  There's no need to be intimidated. I'm here to hold your hand every step of the way while you jailbreak or unlock your original iPhone, iPhone 3G or iPod Touch, and it's really not much hassle at all. (One Page)
• Matthew Yglesias » The Success of Development
  Aug 7, 09
  A lot of people are depressed about the state of global development. And they are particularly miserable about Africa. There is a widespread belief that the region remains mired in a Malthusian trap, home to many of the ‘bottom billion’ who are living in ‘fourteenth century’ conditions.
• Brian's Coffeehouse: May 2009
  Aug 7, 09
  Best Books, 2008-09
• How to Hack the iPhone to Use SlingPlayer and Skype Over 3G - Slingplayer 3g - Gizmodo
  Aug 7, 09
  AT&T's impotent network—and good ol' fashioned greed make it do douchey things sometimes, like lock down SlingPlayer and Skype for the iPhone. But you can unlock their true 3G powers.
• Americans Returning Home Searched & Interrogated About Politics, Faith & Finances - Muslim Advocates
  Aug 7, 09
  Muslim Advocates released a report, Unreasonable Intrusions: Investigating the Politics, Faith & Finances of Americans Returning Home, today documenting the systematic and widespread practice of federal agents interrogating Americans returning home after overseas travel at our nation's borders and international airports. Given President Obama's pledge to restore the rule of law, the treatment of Americans returning home is ripe for review and reform
• The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine
  Aug 7, 09
  A broken symmetry from our evolutionary heritage is part of what makes us human. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
• The Week in iPhone Apps: Essential Jailbreak Apps - iPhone - Gizmodo
  Aug 7, 09
  Apple just today declared jailbreaking illegal. So, in outlaw style, it's a good day to take a break from the App Store to peruse the naughty treasures available to jailbreakers via Cydia.
• The 25 Best iPhone Apps For Outdoor Adventurers - iPhone Apps - Gizmodo
  Aug 7, 09
  Even outdoorsy types can find something useful in the App Store. There are apps for astronomers, fitness buffs, hikers, skiiers and more. The guys at The Adventure Life have picked 25 of the best.
• Making Light: Leavin' on a jet plane? A few handy links before you go
  Aug 7, 09
• 'Can I Trust This Poll?' - Part I
  Aug 7, 09
  by Mark BlumenthalWhat makes a public opinion poll "scientific?" If you had asked that question of a random sample of pollsters when I started my first job at a polling firm twenty-three years ago, you would have heard far more agreement than today. Now, many more pollsters are asking fundamental questions about the "best practices" of our profession, and their growing uncertainty makes it ever harder to answer the question I hear most often from readers of Pollster.com: "Can I trust this poll?" Let's take a step back and consider the elements that most pollsters deem ssential to obtaining a high quality, representative survey. The fundamental principle behind the term "scientific" is the random probability sample. The idea is to draw a sample in a way that every member of the population of interest has an equal probability of being selected (or at least, to be a little technical, a probability that is both known and greater than zero). As long as the process of selection and response is truly random and unbiased, a sample of a thousand or a few hundred will be representative within a predictable range of variation, popularly known as the "margin of error." Pollsters disagreed with each other, even twenty or thirty years ago, about the practical steps necessary to conduct a random sample of Americans. However, at the dawn of my career, at a time when at least 93% of American households had landline telephone service, pollsters were much closer to consensus on the steps necessary to draw a random, representative sample by telephone. Those included: A true random sample of known working telephone numbers produced by method known as "random digit dial" (RDD) that randomly generates the final digits in order to reach both listed and unlisted phones.   Coverage of the population in excess of 90%, possible by telephone only with RDD sampling (in the pre cell-phone era) but almost never (decades ago) through official lists of registered voters. Persistence in efforts to reach selected households. Pollsters would call at least 3 or 4 different times on at least 3 or 4 successive evenings in order to get those who might be out of the house on the first or second call.    A "reasonable" response rate (although, then as now, pollsters differed over what constitutes "reasonable"). Random selection of an individual within each selected household, or at least a method closer to random than just interviewing the first person to answer the phone, something that usually skews the sample toward older women. The use of live interviewers -- preferred for a variety of reasons, but among the most important was the presumed need for a human touch to gain respondent cooperation. Weighting (or statistically adjusting) to correct any small bias in the demographic representation (gender, age, race, etc.) as compared to estimates produced by the U.S. Census, but never weighting by theoretically changeable attitudes like party identification. I am probably guilty of oversimplifying. Pollsters have always disagreed about the specifics of some of these practices, and they have always adopted different standards. Still, from my perspective, these characteristics are the hallmarks of quality research for many of my colleagues -- especially those I see every year at the conferences of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR; for more detail see their FAQ on random sampling). The application of these principles has shifted slightly in recent years, even among traditionalists, in two ways: First, pollsters are no longer convinced that a low response rate means a skewed sample. As described in my column last week, pollsters have learned that some efforts to boost response rates can actually make results less accurate. Second, to combat the rapid declines in coverage posed by "cell phone only" households, many national media pollsters now also interview Americans via mobile phone, using supplemental samples of cell phone numbers to boost sample coverage back above 90%. But by and large, traditional pollsters still use the same standards to define "scientific" surveys as they did 20 or 30 years ago. A new breed of pollsters has come to the fore, however, that routinely breaks some or all of these rules. None exemplifies the trend better than Scott Rasmussen and the surveys he publishes at RasmussenReports.com. Now I want to be clear: I single out Rasmussen Reports here not to condemn their methods but to make a point about the current state of "best practices" of the polling profession, especially as perceived by those who follow and depend on survey data. When it comes to sampling and calling procedures, Rasmussen is consistent with the framework I describe in only one respect: They use a form of random-digit-dial sampling to select telephone numbers (although Rasmussen's methodology page says only that "calls are placed to randomly-selected phone numbers through a process that ensures appropriate geographic representation"). But in other ways, Rasmussen's methods differ: They use an automated, recorded voice methodology rather than live interviewers. They conduct most surveys in a single evening and never dial a selected number more than once. They routinely weight samples by party identification. They cannot interview respondents on their mobile phones (something not allowed via automated methods) and thus achieve a coverage rate well below 90%. If you had described Rasmussen's methods to me at the dawn of my career, I probably would have dismissed it the way my friend Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor and former AAPOR president, did nine years ago. "Until there is more information about their methods and a longer track record to evaluate their results," he wrote, "we shouldn't confuse the work they do with scientific surveys, and it shouldn't be called polling." But that was then. This year Traugott chaired an AAPOR committee that looked into the pre-election polling problems in New Hampshire and other presidential primary states in 2008. Their report concluded that use of "interactive voice response (IVR) techniques made no difference to the accuracy of estimates" in the primary polls. In other words, automated surveys, including Rasmussen's, were "about equally accurate" in the states they examined. Consider also the analysis of Nate Silver. On his website Fivethirtyeight.com last year, he approached the issue of survey quality from the perspective of the accuracy of the results rather than their underlying methodology. He gathered past polling data from 171 contests for President, Governor and Senate fielded since 2000 and calculated accuracy scores for each pollster. His study rated Rasmussen as the third most accurate of 32 pollsters, just behind SurveyUSA, another automated pollster. When he compared eight daily tracking polls last fall, Rasmussen ranked first in Silver's accuracy ratings. He concluded that Rasmussen, "with its large sample size and high pollster rating -- would probably be the one I'd want with me on a desert island." The point here is not to praise or condemn any particular approach to polling but to highlight the serious issues now confronting the profession. Put simply, at a time when pollsters are finding it harder to reach and interview a representative sample, the consumers of polling data do not perceive "quality" the same way that pollsters do. Moreover, the success of automated surveys in estimating election "horse race" results, and the ongoing transition in communications technology and the way Americans use it, has left many pollsters struggling to agree on best practices and questioning some of the orthodoxies of the profession. The question for the rest of us, in this period of transition, remains the same: How do we know which polls to trust? I have two suggestions and will take those up in subsequent posts.    [Note: I will be participating in a panel at next week's Netroots Nation conference on "How to Get the Most Out of Polling." This post, and hopefully two to follow, are a preview of some of the thoughts I am hoping to share].
• Questions re Janet Napolitano
  Nov 20, 08
  President-elect Obama has tapped Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to become the new Secretary of Homeland Security. It seems to be a good choice: Napolitano is smart, politically experienced, and apparently did a wonderful job both as US Attorney in Arizona and as that state's Attorney General. But her background might also raise questions--not about her fitness for the job (which is indisputable), but rather about how we go about making DHS a real, functioning department. The reason is that Napolitano's background and world view are that of a prosecutor, and public discussion of the agency is beginning to take a turn to thinking about it as sort of a big law-enforcement agency, which it is not--or at least only is partially. As with anything about DHS, the key text is Edward Alden's terrific book, "The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11." This book, which appeared a couple of months ago, hasn't gotten the press that The Dark Side or Angler have (and they are both also great), but it should. Alden posits a split in thinking about homeland security between the "technocrats," who wanted to use precisely-tailored measures based upon technology to control the border and enphasized intelligence gathering, and the "cops," who took a traditional law enforcement approach and particularly relied upon immigration enforcement, because they did not have to worry about constitutional due process and other Bill of Rights limitations. Alden's book is so good in no small part because he shows how neither approach is perfect: technology just can't do what we want it to do, and what its promoters (often the contractors who make it) claim it will do. But the costs of a pure law enforcement approach are even worse: there is precious little evidence that rounding up thousands of immigrant men of Middle Eastern background actually get us much intelligence or prevent crimes. Instead, they undermine intelligence by destroying the government's credibility in immigrant communities and are fabulously expensive. And there are two other terrible problems with the cops' approach: 1) First, it keeps people out whom we want and need to let in. Put another way, the law enforcement approach doesn't consider the costs of tightening the border: theoretically it could, but its adherents are used to chasing bad guys, not thinking about broader policy goals. Alden begins his book with the tale of a world-class pediatric cardiology surgeon, who is from Pakistan, and couldn't get into the country for years because, well, he's from Pakistan. How many childrens' lives were lost because of this? America is in danger of losing is scientific and technical edge because we keep out thousands of talented students, who normally might have stayed in the US and helped build American companies. And US companies start moving production overseas, because they can't interact with foreigners for meetings and projects, because they can't get into the country. 2) Second, the law enforcement approach likes the immigration power because it frees it from legal shackles. But the more that DHS guards the border through immigration enforcement, the more its mission begins to morph from a security agency to an immigration enforcement agency. Indeed, this is probably a major reason why Obama tapped Napolitano: she's a border state governor with a tough reputation for cracking down on illegals, and Obama doesn't want to get into a cultural struggle on that issue (at least not now). This might be a wise political judgment, but it might have the unintended effect of distorting what DHS should be and needs to be. If I have a choice between hiring Border Patrol guards and hiring intelligence operatives to disrupt Al-Qaeda and Hizbullah, there's no question we need to choose the latter. But I worry that an immigration-focused DHS will push for the former. I hope that Napolitano understands these issues. As I said, she is smart and competent, and if she has a strong staff who can help her navigate the poisonous interagency rivalries that have sapped DHS' strength, she has the potential to do an outstanding job. But she needs to understand what that job is.
• The Terror Effect
  Oct 9, 08
  John Sides directs our attention to a new paper from Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor called “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate”. Key findings:

  This article relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on the preferences of the Israeli electorate. We find that the occurrence of a terror attack in a given locality within three months of the elections causes an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality’s support for the right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect is of a significant political magnitude because of the high level of terrorism in Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the right and left blocs. Moreover, a terror fatality has important electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated, and its electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections it occurs. Interestingly, in left-leaning localities, local terror fatalities cause an increase in the support for the right bloc, whereas terror fatalities outside the locality increase the support for the left bloc of parties. Given that a relatively small number of localities suffer terror attacks, we demonstrate that terrorism does cause the ideological polarization of the electorate. Overall, our analysis provides strong empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly sensitive reaction to terrorism.

  They conclude that the “terror effect” was enough to put Likud over the top in 1988 and in 1996. To state what’s obvious to me, but apparently not to a majority of voters, what you’re see here is the dysfunctional codependence of competing nationalisms. Terrorist attacks lead to right-wing political policies that lead to repressive policies that lead to more terrorist attacks. This is good for violence-friendly leaders on both sides of the green line but makes both the Israeli and the Palestinian populations worse off than they would have been had the Palestinians eschewed violence and the Israelis elected dovish politicians. It’s particularly maddening to see how this played out in 1996 which was a real turning-point election.
• *MUNASAHA*. As a rule, no one would accuse the Saudi government
  Nov 8, 08
  MUNASAHA. As a rule, no one would accuse the Saudi government of being a liberal one. But their attacks on violent jihadism may turn out to be effective, and more so than by always fighting violence with violence. It's a kind of deprogramming, and education, as well as, yes, therapy.

  [...] When the latecomers slipped into the front row, Jilani nodded at them briskly. “Young men,” he began, “who can tell me why we do jihad?”
  
  [...]
  
  Finally, someone answered: “We do jihad to fight our enemies.”
  
  “To defeat God’s enemies?” another suggested.
  
  “To help weak Muslims,” a third offered.
  
  “Good, good,” Jilani said. “All good answers. Is there someone else? What about you, Ali?” Ali, in the second row, looked away, then faltered: “To . . . answer . . . calls for jihad?”
  
  Jilani frowned slightly and wrote Ali’s answer up on the white board behind him. He read it out to the class before turning back to Ali. “All right, Ali,” the sheik said. “Why do we answer calls for jihad? Is it because all Muslim leaders want to make God’s word highest? Do we kill if these leaders tell us to kill?”
  
  Ali looked confused, but whispered, “Yes.”
  
  “No — wrong!” Jilani cried as Ali blushed. “Of course we want to make God’s word highest, but not every Muslim leader has this as his goal. There are right jihads and wrong jihads, and we must examine the situation for ourselves. For example, if a person wants to go to hajj now, is it right?”
  
  The class chuckled obligingly at Jilani’s little joke. The month for performing hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that observant Muslims hope to complete at least once in their lives, had ended five weeks earlier, and the suggestion was as preposterous as throwing a Fourth of July barbecue in November.
  
  “Well, just as there is a proper time for hajj, there is also a proper time for jihad,” Jilani explained.

  And place, and enemy.

  [...] Though the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young men the trappings of stability — a job, a car, possibly a wife.
  
  [...]
  
  Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief plays in the recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate among scholars of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is far less important than family and group dynamics, psychological and emotional needs. “We’re finding that they don’t generally join for religious reasons,” John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. “Terrorist movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision, purpose, camaraderie,” he went on, “and involvement with them has an allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually something you acquire once you’re involved.”
  
  Other scholars emphatically disagree, stressing the significance of political belief and grievance. But if the Saudi program is succeeding, it may be because it treats jihadists not as religious fanatics or enemies of the state but as alienated young men in need of rehabilitation.
  
  [...]
  
  In Saudi Arabia, psychological disorders are often understood as the results of a person finding himself somehow outside the traditional circle of family and community. Most of the counseling that the inmates receive is focused on helping them to develop more healthful family relationships. “We use Western psychiatric techniques together with Islamic techniques,” T. M. Otayan, the center’s staff psychologist, says, referring to the intensive religion classes.

  I can already hear the more militant among us mocking the idea, mentioned later, that they also get art therapy. But, you know, militancy, it turns out, isn't always the answer. Weird idea, eh? And one that some people in every society are resistant to.

  [...] Upon release, each former jihadist is required to sign a pledge that he has forsaken extremist sympathies; the head of his family must sign as well. Some also receive a car (often a Toyota) and aid from the Interior Ministry in renting a home. Social workers assist former jihadists and their families in making post-release plans for education, employment and, usually, marriage. “Getting married stabilizes a man’s personality,” Hadlaq says. “He thinks more about a long term future and less about himself and his anger.”

  A lot of these people are just kids, looking for something to do in a society that doesn't give them much.

  [...] And global jihad is still a socially acceptable path for a young Saudi man with few options, the psychiatrist says. “You have a young man who’s depressed, frustrated with life, maybe he fails an exam. He can go from being a loser, a failure, to being a jihadi, someone with status.”

  Give them an alternative, and maybe they have an alternative.
  
  The case of Abu Sulayman, who spent three years in Guantanamo, and now is apparently happy working for an electrical company, with no hard feelings -- amazingly enough -- is illuminating.
  
  There were articles a couple of years ago about similar programs in Yemen working. And here is a piece from 2007 about an earlier Saudi program working on reforming jihadists from Iraq. And Lawrence Wright wrote at length a year ago about growing trends of extremist Muslim theological writers turning against al Qaeda and similar Islamists. Similar programs have been going on in Egypt, as well. More money spent to support programs might be far better spent than buying another F-22.
  
  Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5.
• The New Genome
  Nov 10, 08
  Over the past year or so I’ve been engaging in a bit of science-writing masochism. I’ve been asking a few short  questions and trying to get some answers from people who’ve spent years grappling with them. For example: What is life? (in Seed) What is a species? (in Scientific American) What is intelligence? (also in Scientific American) In tomorrow’s New York Times, I tackle my next question: What is a gene? This article emerged out of a lot of conversations with my editor over the past few months. We marveled over the steady stream of intriguing studies on genetics that were being published–studies that were pushing us to expand our ideas about things we took for granted, like the very nature of genes. So I started talking to scientists who are looking closely at the human genome. Some are studying how the same stretch of DNA can spew out many different proteins. Some are looking at the previously underappreciated army of RNA molecules that create a shadow network in our cells. Some are studying heredity beyond DNA–the molecules that cling to DNA and control which parts get used to build proteins and RNA, and which are silenced (as wonderfully illustrated by the toadflax flowers shown here–identical genes, but different flowers). We talked about undead genes and carcasses of viruses that have been dead for millions of years. It’s a very long article for a newspaper, but trust me–I could have kept writing for a lot longer. In fact, my piece is actually just the lead article to a package of stories exploring similar terrain, from Andrew Pollack on the search for RNA-based medicines to Natalie Angier on the philosophy of genes. Check them all out. As I cryptically mentioned earlier, I’ll be talking about my article  tomorrow morning on the Takeaway, a morning news show on NPR. Check here for schedule information; you can also to the site for the podcast. Image source: Nature Genetics
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