“Egg on Egg.” This still-life is painted on top of the actual food.
Gallery: Stunning Alexa Meade images that blur paint and photography | TED Blog September 6, 2013
CIA records now prove that Washington knew Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons (including sarin, nerve gas, and mustard gas) in the Iran-Iraq War, yet continued to pour intelligence into the hands of the Iraqi military, informing Hussein of Iranian troop movements while knowing that he would be using the information to launch chemical attacks. At one point in early 1988, Washington warned Hussein of an Iranian troop movement that would have ended the war in a decisive defeat for the Iraqi government. By March an emboldened Hussein with new friends in Washington struck a Kurdish village occupied by Iranian troops with multiple chemical agents, killing as many as 5,000 people and injuring as many as 10,000 more, most of them civilians. Thousands more died in the following years from complications, diseases, and birth defects.
10 Chemical Weapons Attacks Washington Doesn't Want You to Talk About September 6, 2013
Napalm is a sticky and highly flammable gel which has been used as a weapon of terror by the U.S. military. In 1980, the UN declared the use of napalm on swaths of civilian population a war crime. That's exactly what the U.S. military did in World War II, dropping enough napalm in one bombing raid on Tokyo to burn 100,000 people to death, injure a million more, and leave a million without homes in the single deadliest air raid of World War II.
10 Chemical Weapons Attacks Washington Doesn't Want You to Talk About September 6, 2013
A more general NSA classification guide reveals more detail on the agency's deep partnerships with industry, and its ability to modify products. It cautions analysts that two facts must remain top secret: that NSA makes modifications to commercial encryption software and devices "to make them exploitable", and that NSA "obtains cryptographic details of commercial cryptographic information security systems through industry relationships".
Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security | World news | Guardian Weekly September 6, 2013
The agencies have not yet cracked all encryption technologies, however, the documents suggest. Snowden appeared to confirm this during a live Q&A with Guardian readers in June. "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.
Serifs are said to help the flow of letterforms, binding cohesive words together, aiding the eye across the text and making reading easier. Sometimes, however, they can complicate a typeface, causing the reader fatigue and therefore actually hindering readability. The argument has been topical for decades and no concrete evidence has ever been succesfully presented for either of the two being more readable.
The Anatomy of Web Typography - Tuts+ September 6, 2013
Often confused with tracking is kerning. Kerning refers to the adjustment of spacing between specific letterforms (not a whole group of characters), again, to improve readability. A proportional font (as opposed to a monospaced font, whose character spacing is uniform) will make allowances for specific pairs of characters which need extra help to visually sit next to one another.
The Anatomy of Web Typography - Tuts+ September 6, 2013
Admin tools are always one of the best areas to find security holes because they usually aren't tested as heavily and are built by more junior programmers.
Security Researcher Discovers Bug That Would Let Hackers Delete Any Photo Off Facebook | TechCrunch September 5, 2013
زبان کامبیز حسینی زبانی نزدیک به زبان روز ایران و انتخابش از وقایع سیاسی ایران، انتخابی قابل توجه و جذاب است. کار مونیتورینگ تصاویر مربوط به تلویزیون ایران که غالبا برای افرادی که بیرون ایران زندگی می کنند و دسترسی خوبی به تلویزیون ایران ندارند، کاری دشوار و گران است. باید ساعتها تصویر ببینی تا بتوانی تصاویر مناسب را پیدا کنی و با تلفیقی از تصاویر و صداها و متنی که مجری برنامه اجرا می کند به یک برنامه خوب برسی. پلتیک در این مورد موفق است. ویژگیهای برجسته کامبیز حسینی در اجرای تلویزیونی صدای شفاف و رسا، بازی خوب با دوربین، استفاده خوب از تدوین برای کامل کردن بازی مجری و استفاده از کلمات و عبارات جذاب است
جنبش راه سبز - اوباما اوباما، نه با خودت نه با ما September 5, 2013
Claim: There is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number. Proof by Contradiction: Assume that you have a non-empty set of natural numbers that are not interesting. Due to the well-ordered property of the natural numbers, there must be some smallest number in the set of not interesting numbers. Being the smallest number of a set one might consider not interesting makes that number interesting. Since the numbers in this set were defined as not interesting, we have reached a contradiction because this smallest number cannot be both interesting and uninteresting. Therefore the set of uninteresting numbers must be empty, proving there is no such thing as an uninteresting number.
11 Brain-Twisting Paradoxes - Listverse September 5, 2013
The algorithm was designed specifically to target recognition of sound files that are already present in the database. It is not expected to generalize to live recordings. That said, we have anecdotally discovered several artists in concert who apparently either have extremely accurate and reproducible timing (with millisecond precision), or are more plausibly lip synching. The algorithm is conversely very sensitive to which particular version of a track has been sampled. Given a multitude of different performances of the same song by an artist, the algorithm can pick the correct one even if they are virtually indistinguishable by the human ear. We occasionally get reports of false positives. Often times we find that the algorithm was not actually wrong since it had picked up an example of “sampling,” or plagiarism. As mentioned above, there is a tradeoff between true hits and false positives, and thus the maximum allowable percentage of false positives is a design parameter that is chosen to suit the application.
Microsoft Word - ISMIR-2003-Shazam-rev2.doc - Wang03-shazam.pdf September 3, 2013
We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology. We suspect the "alphabetical discrimination" reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications.
ingentaconnect What's in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic ... September 3, 2013
How much equity should you give a partner?
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running Your Business | TechCrunch September 3, 2013
Divide things up into these categories: manage the company; raise the money; had the idea; brings in the revenues; built the product (or performs the services). Divide up in equal portions.
Since that day in Venice Beach, I'd spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction -- wanting to be desired, resisting others' unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing. I'd spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror -- admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it -- and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom? - CNN.com September 1, 2013
On the way to the store, I stole glances at her in my rearview mirror. She stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small Southern town -- I, merely her chauffeur.
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom? - CNN.com September 1, 2013
I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing a rolling emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii. But Aliya envied these girls and had asked me to buy her clothes like theirs. And now a headscarf.
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom? - CNN.com September 1, 2013
agreed we would raise her to choose what she identified with most from our dramatically different backgrounds. I secretly felt smug about this agreement -- confident that she would favor my comfortable American lifestyle over his modest Muslim upbringing. Ismail's parents live in a squat stone house down a winding dirt alley outside Tripoli. Its walls are bare except for passages from the Quran engraved onto wood, its floors empty but for thin cushions that double as bedding at night. My parents live in a sprawling home in Santa Fe with a three-car garage, hundreds of channels on the flat-screen TV, organic food in the refrigerator, and a closetful of toys for the grandchildren.
Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom? - CNN.com September 1, 2013
History will indeed be what we make of it. With all that is at our fingertips can we still find a way to gather together and share a more Frank Capra like world? We all still crave shared experiences. But these days the water cooler moment (where people gathered at work to talk about what they’d seen on TV the night before) has vanished. We no longer live in a world of appointment viewing. So the water cooler has gone virtual, because the discussion is now online. And it’s a sophisticated, no-spoilers generation; and because of that we need never be alone with our Breaking Bad habit or our crazy obsession with Dexter. And stories are the great leveler - capable of crossing borders to unite audiences. And when there is so much conflict in our world as countries go to war, with all that pulls us apart - it is culture that unites us.
Kevin Spacey: James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in full - Telegraph September 1, 2013
And the audience has spoken: they want stories. They’re dying for them. They are rooting for us to give them the right thing. And they will talk about it, binge on it, carry it with them on the bus and to the hairdresser, force it on their friends, tweet, blog, Facebook, make fan pages, silly Jifs and god knows what else about it, engage with it with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of. All we have to do is give it to them. The prize fruit is right there. Shinier and juicier than it has ever been before. So it will be all the more shame on each and every one of us if we don’t reach out and seize it.
Kevin Spacey: James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in full - Telegraph September 1, 2013
آن‌گونه که از آرای وبر در دو کتاب سترگش «اخلاق پروتستانی و روح سرمایه‌داری» و «اقتصاد و جامعه» بر می‌آید، اقتدار کاریزماتیک از «وفاداری و سرسپردگی» انبوه مردم به «قداست، قهرمانی، یا خصایص بی‌بدیل یک شخص و الگوها و نظامی که بنیان نهاده» نشات می‌گرفت: کاریزما فطری و ذاتی بود، اکتسابی و آموختنی نبود، امتیاز «فوق‌العاده»ای بود که فرد را از انبوه مردم «عادی» جدا می‌کرد و فوق آن‌ها قرار می‌داد.
وبلاگ ها - BBC فارسی - کاریزمازدایی از کاریزما: کاریزماتیک کیست؟ September 1, 2013
1. You will confuse a child by raising it with two or more languages This is an old belief prevalent in monolingual countries that has almost become political. Rest assured that your child's little brain has more than enough horsepower to cope with two languages or more without affecting the dominant language. This has been well proven by decades of research and countless families around the world, including the many bilingual counties where multilingualism is the norm, not the exception -- such as Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and Finland, just to name a few. 2. Bilingual maybe, but more than two languages doesn't work Considering how much babies have to learn in their first 3-5 years, another language doesn't really add much to the load. As long as they get consistent interaction, they will have no trouble learning more than one language.
Myths; Multilingual Children's Association September 1, 2013
Practical examples show that it's usually only when more than four languages are taught simultaneously that it starts to be difficult to provide the child with enough exposure in all of the languages.
But in general hipsters are known — and admired or mocked — for riding fixed-gear bikes, wearing suit vests and thick glasses frames, adopting hobbies like chicken raising, and affecting snobbery for microbrews and a general more-ironic-than-thou attitude. Whatever they are, they’re amassing in Somerville, which claims to be the only city in the country that conducts a happiness survey. The 2010 Census found that the city has the second-highest proportion of residents between the ages of 25 and 34 in the United States. That places Somerville right after Hoboken “but ahead of Cambridge,” said Daniel Hadley, director of SomerStat, the mayor’s data analysis team. Take that, Cambridge.
Some in Somerville worry it’s become too hip for its own good - Style - The Boston Globe September 1, 2013
The candle problem or candle task, also known as Duncker's candle problem, is a cognitive performance test, measuring the influence of functional fixedness on a participant's problem solving capabilities. The test was created [1] by Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker and published posthumously in 1945. Duncker originally presented this test in his thesis on problem solving tasks at Clark University.
Candle problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia September 1, 2013
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt Psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem." (Duncker, 1945) This "block" limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. This inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails, is functional fixedness. The person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function. When tested, 5-year-old children show no signs of functional fixedness. It has been argued that this is because at age 5, any goal to be achieved with an object is equivalent to any other goal. However, by age 7, children have acquired the tendency to treat the originally intended purpose of an object as special (German & Defeyter, 2000).
Functional fixedness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia September 1, 2013
Brownie points in modern usage are a hypothetical social currency, which can be acquired by doing good deeds or earning favor in the eyes of another, often one's superior. In New Zealand slang, the expression also carries the derisory connotation of having accomplished something petty or otherwise unimportant.
Brownie points - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia September 1, 2013
This book won't give you the connection from concept to workplace. But Pink does deliver many key ideas that matter. Key Idea: There is a difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Key Idea: Intrinsic motivators are more powerful. Key Idea: If you use monetary rewards to get people to perform the way you want, those rewards may have the opposite effect. These are important things for a boss to know, but if you only have Drive to guide you, you will get some things very wrong. The examples that are used are heavily weighted toward academic and consulting studies. It's not apparent that Pink talked to a single worker or frontline supervisor. The book would have been more helpful if he had. Throughout the book, Pink equates "monetary" incentives with "extrinsic motivation." That ignores praise, promotion, preferment (in scheduling, eg), the admiration of peers, time off, and a host of other positive incentives. It also skews the discussion toward academic studies and away from the real workplace.
Amazon.com: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (9781594484803): Daniel H. Pink: Books September 1, 2013 | Modified
Massachusetts has the weirdest accent. Trailing close behind are Louisiana, Alabama, Minnesota, New York and New Jersey.
POLL: How Americans Feel About The States - Business Insider September 1, 2013
1. Western Game. Used almost exclusively in the Anglosphere, this type of game is based on the alpha male model that you’re familiar with. It depends on the man being overconfident (bordering on arrogance), cocky, aloof, and possessing the ability to banter for hours in primarily a non-sexual way. It’s also becoming more dependent on aesthetics. With so many choices in men, Western women now place appearance much higher on their laundry list of desired qualities than before. In ten years, the best game in America will probably be “approach with big muscles and cartoon overconfidence.” Your appearance will matter more and you will have to come close to being the “perfect” man that women are being brainwashed to believing they are entitled to.
The 3 Principal Types Of Game September 1, 2013
The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader.
(36) Emotions: How can I raise my emotional competence/awareness? - Quora September 1, 2013
The Johns Hopkins U. (Baltimore) has received a pledge of $350-million from Michael R. Bloomberg. Most of the gift, $250-million, to endow 50 professorships for interdisciplinary studies and research. The remainder will be directed to financial aid for undergraduate students. Mr. Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City and founder of Bloomberg LP. He has donated over $1-billion to the university to date.
America's Top Donors - The Chronicle of Philanthropy - Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas September 1, 2013
The "gay accent" or varies from person to person, but it's usually characterized by lisping, hypercorrection, and lilting, "feminine" pitch and vowel length. There are also vocabulary differences, so you can even think of it as a "gay dialect"... or, rather, a "gay sociolect," since it's not tied to a geographical area. Most speakers are able to "code switch" - in essence, they can turn it on and off. It's a marker of identity. Lots of cultural groups have sociolects that they use to show membership in a group - think of BEV (Black English Vernacular aka Ebonics), or "Valley Girl" speech, or the l337speak used online. As far as history, some linguists say that the gay accent was influenced by the California accent, since California was the heart of the early gay rights movement in the US. But a "gay dialect" actually goes back a lot farther than that! The British dialect of Polari might go back to the 16th century. Polari actually sounds a bit like what we'd call a "gay accent" today, and it has its roots in a combination of Roma argot, Cockney rhymbing slang, and exaggerated, singsong theatrical speech (think the old Punch and Judy puppet shows).
What is the origin of the "gay accent"? : AskHistorians September 1, 2013
