Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, December 24, 2013.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Christmas in Hollis by Run-D.M.C.
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Stick it to ‘em: Scientists call for labeling tar-sands oil
By John Upton
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For the past four years, European Union officials have been mulling a labeling system that would require fuel companies to tell their customers how much carbon pollution is produced by each of the products they sell.
The idea is deeply unpopular with oil companies, which don’t want their customers thinking about such things every time they fill up their tanks. It’s also deeply unpopular with Canada. That’s because the country’s tar-sands oil is particularly dreadful for the climate, something the government would rather not have advertised. The oil companies and Canadian government have called the labeling idea unscientific.
. . .
Reuters reports that 53 scientists from such universities as Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, as well as from European institutions, sent a letter urging the president of the European Commission “to press ahead with a plan to label tar sands as more polluting than other forms of oil, in defiance of intensive lobbying” from the Canadian government:
They say the EU draft law, which would label fuels according to how much carbon they emit over their entire wells-to-wheels lifecycle, is scientifically sound, after criticism from the oil industry that it is not.
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Male dance team draws fire for Christmas parade performance
By (UPI)
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. . .
The Prancing Elites -- a team of four men who perform a style of dance, using cheerleading-type movement and conventionally performed by women -- took part Saturday in the Semmes, Ala., Christmas parade, wearing costumes that featured tight white shorts.
The performance prompted complaints from spectators, and a parade organizer who approved their application to participate said it was "vulgar" and out of place for a family event, al.com reported Tuesday.
. . .
Kentrell Collins, the leader of the Prancing Elites, based in Mobile, suggested the criticism is based on a double standard.
"We are no different than any team out there dancing," he said. "We want people to stop looking at gender and focus on the talent.
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Where Do Nonhuman Mammals Fit in Our Moral Hierarchy?
By Michael Shermer
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The case for exploiting animals for food, clothing and entertainment often relies on our superior intelligence, language and self-awareness: the rights of the superior being trump those of the inferior. A poignant counterargument is Mark Devries's Speciesism: The Movie, which I saw at the premiere in September 2013. The animal advocates who filled the Los Angeles theater cheered wildly for Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer. In the film, Singer and Devries argue that some animals have the mental upper hand over certain humans, such as infants, people in comas, and the severely mentally handicapped. The argument for our moral superiority thus breaks down, Devries told me: “The presumption that nonhuman animals' interests are less important than human interests could be merely a prejudice—similar in kind to prejudices against groups of humans such as racism—termed speciesism.”
I guess I am a speciesist. I find few foods more pleasurable than a lean cut of meat. I relish the feel of leather. And I laughed out loud at the joke about the farmer who castrates his horses with two bricks: “Does it hurt?” “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.” I am also troubled by an analogy made by rights activists that animals are undergoing a “holocaust.” . .
Yet I cannot fully rebuke those who equate factory farms with concentration camps. While working as a graduate student in an experimental psychology animal laboratory in 1978 at California State University, Fullerton, it was my job to dispose of lab rats that had outlived our experiments. I was instructed to euthanize them with chloroform, but I hesitated. I wanted to take them up into the local hills and let them go, figuring that death by predation or starvation was better than gassing. But releasing lab animals was illegal. So I exterminated them … with gas. It was one of the most dreadful things I ever had to do.
. ..
Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish. Our genealogical connectedness, demonstrated through evolutionary biology, provides a scientific foundation from which to expand the moral sphere to include not just all humans—as rights revolutions of the past two centuries have done—but all nonhuman sentient beings as well.
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Santa Claus Points the Way to Our Robot-Filled Future
By Kevin Drum
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Dean Baker writes today that the Washington Post should be less worried. Their writers seem to think that eventually robots will take away all our jobs, but their editorial page is worried about bankrupting the country via spending on Social Security and Medicare. But you really can't have both. If robots are beavering away producing everything we could possibly desire, then national bankruptcy is hardly a worry. Except, of course, for this:
. . . for all practical purposes, you can think of the elves in Santa's workshop as a bunch of robots. As near as I can tell, they work for free, they're insanely productive, and they produce as much stuff as Santa wants them to. So how is all this bounty distributed? Santa is smart enough to have figured out that capitalism won't really work in a situation like this, so he's adopted what's basically a centrally-planned Marxist system: he decides who's been naughty and who's been nice, and then distributes gifts accordingly.
That might not quite work for our robot-filled future, but something like it will. Distribution, as John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago, is really the most important question in economics. In the future, it will only get even more important.
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Adidas and Run-D.M.C. Made a Pair of Christmas in Hollis Sneakers
By Andrew Liszewski
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Forget the ugly sweaters, the Santa hat, the light-up tie, even that pair of green pants you only wear once a year. Adidas and Run-D.M.C. have created the only garment you'll need for holiday parties and family dinners with their new Christmas in Hollis-themed Superstar 80s sneakers.
Considered to be one of the rare modern Christmas songs that has managed to stay popular year after year, Christmas in Hollis is emblazoned on the sneakers' tongues, sitting atop Keith Haring's iconic Mother Holding Baby artwork.
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International |
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South Sudan: three mass graves discovered, UN says
By Daniel Howden
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The United Nations said on Tuesday that it had found three mass grave sites in two different parts of South Sudan, while a senior official said the death toll in the country's emerging civil war had run "into the thousands".
. . .
In New York the UN Security Council was due to vote on a new mandate to boost its peacekeeping force from about 7,000 to 12,500 following a call by secretary general Ban Ki-moon. Meanwhile forces loyal to the president, Salva Kiir, claimed they had retaken Bor, a strategically important town in the vast Jonglei state that was among the first to fall under rebel control last week.
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A UN spokeswoman said that the victims appeared to be soldiers from the Sudan Peoples' Liberation army, the national military. They were reportedly ethnic Dinka, the tribe of President Kiir. South Sudan's minister of information, Michael Makuei Lueth, said Bentiu was under the control of rebels loyal to the country's former vice president, Riek Machar, who is Nuer.
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With rival militias and army factions on the march, as well as reports of targeted killings in government and rebel controlled areas an estimated 50,000 civilians are now hiding in five UN bases across the two-and-a-half-year-old nation. Some 24,000 civilians have gathered in the bush in Lakes States, aid workers said. Tens of thousands more have sought sanctuary in churches, including 5,000 in a single Catholic Church in the capital.
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Edward Snowden declares victory: "I defected from the government to the public"
By Cory Doctorow
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Edward Snowden granted a 14-hour interview to the Washington Post, commenting on his relationship to the NSA, Russia, and the USA. It's a defiant, uncompromising, and principled interview. He says that his mission has been accomplished, because "I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself," and that chance has arrived thanks to the sunlight he shone on the NSA's illegal spying activity.
He also says that he's still "working for the NSA" inasmuch as he's taking the only path he could identify to force the agency to conduct its affairs in accordance with the Constitution. And he defended leaking the documents he brought with, because "The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy. That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not."
. . .
Asked how the US should conduct its spying, he articulates an admirably simple principle: "As long as there's an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that's fine. I don't think it's imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees."
. . .
Snowden denied having a "dead-man's switch" that would release the remaining leaks if he came to mischief, saying that this would be a "suicide switch" that would invite spies and criminals to torture him to learn its secrets and gain access to the documents themselves. The greatest irony of the interview is that Snowden reveals that the NSA refused to adopt his recommendation that two people should have to sign off on large data-transfers -- a measure that would have prevented him from smuggling so many documents out of the NSA last June.
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Top India and Pakistan military officials hold rare meeting
By (BBC)
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The Director Generals Military Operations (DGMOs) met at the Wagah crossing to work out a mechanism to ease tension, reports say.
The disputed Himalayan region is divided between India and Pakistan by the Line of Control (LoC).
. . .
The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says the talks look like a gesture from the military on both sides that they are serious about mending fences.
. . .
India has long accused Pakistan of sponsoring militants in the disputed region - though despite a recent rise in attacks, overall violence has declined since the early 2000s.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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The Truth Behind The Lies Of The Original 'Welfare Queen'
By Gene Demby
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In the popular imagination, the stereotype of the "welfare queen" is thoroughly raced — she's an indolent black woman, living off the largesse of taxpayers. The term is seen by many as a dogwhistle, a way to play on racial anxieties without summoning them directly.
Taylor's own racial reality is much harder to pin down, however. Born Martha Miller, she was listed as white in the 1930 Census, just like everyone else in her family. But she had darker skin and darker hair. People who knew her family told Levin that she had Native American ancestry. One of her husbands, who was black, said she could look like an Asian woman at times. Another earlier husband and ostensible father to some of her children was white, and during that marriage she gave birth to kids who alternately appeared black, unmistakably white, or racially ambiguous. At times she posed as a Jewish woman. In one photo, she has long, blonde hair.
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So how much fraud is there really in the welfare system? As Eric Schnurer writes at The Atlantic, it's actually not so clear.
It's not easy to get agreement on actual fraud levels in government programs. Unsurprisingly, liberals say they're low, while conservatives insist they're astronomically high. In truth, it varies from program to program. One government report says fraud accounts for less than 2 percent of unemployment insurance payments. It's seemingly impossible to find statistics on "welfare" (i.e., TANF) fraud, but the best guess is that it's about the same. A bevy of inspector general reports found "improper payment" levels of 20 to 40 percent in state TANF programs — but when you look at the reports, the payments appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence (categorized by the inspector general as either "eligibility and payment calculation errors" or "documentation errors"), rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries.
. . .
"What's clear, though, is that Linda Taylor's larger-than-life example created an indelible, inaccurate impression of public aid recipients," Levin writes. "Linda Taylor showed that it was possible for a dedicated criminal to steal a healthy chunk of welfare money. Her case did not prove that, as a group, public aid recipients were fur-laden thieves bleeding the American economy dry."
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US healthcare insurance help offered in run-up to deadline
By (BBC)
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The US government has offered help to anyone who misses the 24 December deadline to enrol for the new health insurance - known as "Obamacare".
It said anyone who failed to finish their application through a dedicated website - HealthCare.gov - could still obtain a policy for the new year.
On Monday, the government extended the original deadline by a day amid high demand and technical issues.
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Americans may still enrol in private insurance plans through the website after Tuesday, but they will not be guaranteed coverage at the start of the new year.
A more important deadline for the Obama administration is 31 March, when enrolment in the programme ends for the year.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
. . . every year since we made that record . . . I can’t even go to the mall right now without somebody saying, “It’s Christmas time, in Hollis, Queens.”
Yeah, it really has become one of those classic Christmas songs.
Right, which was unheard of, because now it’s like, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and RUN DMC. When we first did the record, we thought it was just gonna be one and done. Like, “Oh, Yo Run and D did this Christmas record." But then let’s say it came out in ‘86, we were thinking after ‘88 it’d be over with, but it gets more famous every year.
. . . this is hip hop. It’s crazy, it brings the whole thing together, too: sneaker culture, traditional community, people things, fashion, the music. This "Christmas in Hollis" adidas is just a whole ‘nother level.
. . .
Looking back at what you guys did with RUN DMC, getting that first hip hop contract from adidas and showing them that hip hop was good for their business, what do think now about artists, like with Kanye West coming to adidas now?
We don’t have to be held to a standard of 'Oh you can only do that.' I think that's one of Kanye’s beefs.
Yeah, our thing was based on creativity. The whole thing of hip-hop was based on creativity. We had no idea we were gonna make it a business. You know we had no idea we’d be opening a door. But it shows that whatever field you are an artist in, you can contribute to other areas. You know the musicians can contribute to fashion--the fashion guys can contribute to movies. We can contribute to art, entertainment, literature, stage, anything that is artistic. We don’t have to be held to a standard of “Oh you can only do that." I think that’s one of Kanye’s beefs. He hears, “You're only a musician, shut up.” But he’s like, “No, but I have so much more inside of me." So not only did we open the doors for the business, but we also opened the creative “black hole."
. . . What really represents “Christmas in Hollis” for you?
Oh man, it has to be my mother. That rhyme that I said on "Christmas in Hollis," the food. Every year, all that food. (laughter)
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Madagascar's forests vanish to feed taste for rosewood in west and China
By Tamasin Ford
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Besy and his father are small-scale carpenters in Antalaha in north-east Madagascar, and are taking advantage of a recent resurgence in demand for wood from the bois de rose tree, prized for the extraordinary coloured streaks that weave through its centre.
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Lorries weighed down with rosewood logs make their way to the port day and night, where they are loaded on to boats in full public view. "The final destination is China," claimed Guy Suzon Ramangason, director general of Madagascar National Parks (MNP), the state body tasked with managing the country's protected areas. He said the government was aware of the problem but had failed to intervene, allowing the illicit industry to flourish.
"There is a network of mafiosi of bois de rose," he said. "Money in this type of network is very, very powerful." He said the wood was first shipped to intermediary countries, where false papers were drawn up legalising the cargo. "But we have no proof," he added.
The illegal logging and smuggling of bois de rose in the Masoala and Marojejy national parks in the country's north-east exploded after the coup in 2009. An investigation by two non-governmental organisations, Global Witness and the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency, documented the illegal harvesting and trafficking of the wood, destined mainly for China. In addition, the US guitar manufacturer Gibson reached a settlement over claims it had used illegally sourced Madagascan bois de rose.
. . .
Mamonjy Ramamonjisoa, from the ministry of environment and forests in Antalaha, said everyone knew what was going on but "they close their mouths and they close their eyes". But while carpenters, loggers and smugglers are profiting, the precious bois de rose is rapidly vanishing from the island.
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Christmas lights have toxic chemicals all over them
By Sarah Laskow
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OnEarth’s Susan Cosier was upset to find that the Christmas lights her kid had been playing with were covered in toxic lead . . .
. . .
We’re just going to go out on a fir-tree-limb here and say that, just because a mass-manufactured product is meant for a holiday associated with joy and goodwill towards fellow men (and maybe even women), that doesn’t mean it’s magically free of all the normal problems with mass-manufactured goods. But it still sort of sucks that the world’s not a better place, where twinkling lights are relatively free of lead.
But according to Cosier, that place does exist. It’s called Europe.
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First oil shale mine in U.S. is coming to Utah
By John Upton
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. . .
Oil shale is not to be confused with shale oil, or shale gas, or oil sands. So what the hell is it? “Contrary to its name,” explains Western Resource Advocates, “oil shale contains no petroleum but is instead a dense rock that has a waxy substance called kerogen tightly bound within it. When kerogen is heated to high temperatures, it liquefies, producing compounds that can eventually be refined into synthetic petroleum products.”
Companies have mulled oil shale mining in the Mountain States for more than a century, but previous efforts have foundered as energy prices have been too low to justify the large expense associated with the complicated extraction process. Now Red Leaf Resources is ready to give oil shale another crack. . .
. . .
In-situ, high-temperature petroleum refining in stunning Utah landscapes sounds like a dreadful idea. But water quality regulators say there isn’t enough water in the parched area to give them any cause to worry. “We based our permit decision on the absence of water in the extraction process, the lack of an aquifer and low permeability of the rocks underlying the test site,” one official told the newspaper.
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Science and Health |
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Scientists Find One Source of Prayer’s Power
By Piercarlo Valdesolo
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The religious find strength through God; this we know. But a new study conducted by Prof. Malt Friese and Michaela Wanke suggests that even non-believers can get in on the action. In a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they present evidence showing how and why prayer might increase anyone’s ability to resist temptation. Though we can all agree that to do so requires self-control, the authors propose that the source of such control might not be supernatural. Instead, it might come from something more earthly. Something accessible to even the most devoted atheist: social connection.
. . . Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not.
Why? The authors tested several possible explanations, but found statistical support for only one: people interpret prayer as a social interaction with God, and social interactions are what give us the cognitive resources necessary to avoid temptation. Past research has found that even brief social interactions with others can promote cognitive functioning, and the same seems to hold true for brief social interactions with deities.
This does not rule out the possibility that prayer has other effects on resisting temptation, and the spiritually inclined could see the hand of God as another causal factor here. But as the holidays approach, it reminds us all of where we derive so much of our day-to-day strength. Interacting and connecting with the people around us.
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Naked mole rat, star of cancer research, honored by science journal
By (UPI)
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The naked mole rat isn't going to win any beauty contests but has been named Vertebrate of the Year by a leading scientific magazine.
Thanks largely to the work of two University of Rochester biologists, Science Magazine, one of the world's leading journals on scientific research and news, has bestowed the honor on the naked mole rats, saying the long-living, subterranean rodents"may hold a lesson or two for humans" when it comes to warding off cancer.
The rodents, which are native to East Africa and whose scientific name is Heterocephalus glaber, can live as long as 30 years, stay healthy right up to the end, and never get cancer.
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Gorbunova and Seluanov have said they hope their work with the less-than-lovely mole rats will one day lead to clinical treatments for preventing or controlling cancer in humans, although they caution any medical solution is a long way off.
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If facing adversity, you can't force yourself to be happy
By (UPI)
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Dr. Amit Sood, a Mayo Clinic physician and stress management expert, said the holidays don't have to be perfect or just like last year. As families change and grow, traditions and rituals often change as well.
. . .
Sood also suggested to set aside differences and try to accept family members and friends as they are, even if they don't live up to all of your expectations. Set aside grievances to enjoy the holiday cheer, Sood said.
Make some time for yourself, Sood suggested. Spending just 15 minutes alone, without distractions, might refresh you enough to handle everything you need to do. Find something that reduces stress by clearing your mind, slowing your breathing and restoring inner calm, Sood said.
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Why Do These Trippy Reindeer Eyes Change Color With The Seasons?
By Jordan kushins
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Dogs and cats are adorable creatures by day, but under the cover of night their eyes seem to shine like demon spawn. That's the work of the light-reflecting tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue that sits right behind the retina. As it turns out, that same tapetum lucidum just might be responsible for turning reindeer eyes from gold-hued in the summer to blue-tinted in the winter. Neat!
. . .
When it's consistently bright outside, lots of light is reflected through the retina, resulting in the gold coloring. Once the weather gets grim, reindeer pupils are constantly dilated; this also blocks ocular drainage, resulting in collagen compression, which in turn impacts both the amount of light that's captured, and the wavelengths of reflection from within—thus, the deep blue hue. . .
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Technology |
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Network provider: Christmas Internet traffic likely to break record
By (UPI)
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A surge in Internet traffic at Christmas likely will break records and make 2013 the most digital holiday period ever, U.K. service provider Virgin Media says.
The provider said it estimates the peak amount of data crossing its network will reach 1.6 terabytes per second, a 55 percent increase over last year, the Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.
. . .
Streaming services like Netflix now generate a third of all Internet traffic, Virgin Media said.
Peak usage on its network could reach 2.5 terabytes per second by the end of 2014, the provider said.
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"Pressure Cooker" Method Requires No Catalyst to Produce Algal Crude
By Jason Mick
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Algal biofuel is still much more in the research stage, but it does have some big backers, most notably the U.S. Navy, which is paying a premium to startups to test the future fuel. And while it's hard not to hear some similarities between the big promises that cellulosic ethanol made a half decade ago and some in the algal fuel industry are today making, algal fuel does enjoy some distinct advantages in the future fuels race.
. . .
Algal fuel avoids this issue, as the microorganisms handing the basic oil stock are the source of oil themselves. The difficulty with algal biofuels is to take the oily sludge that comes from filtered, ground up algae and chemically transform it into fuels that resemble crude oil. The result is that algal fuel is available but remains very expensive.
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The HTL process . . . essentially filters out unwanted organics like phosphorous, to get a pure hydrocarbon sludge, which is then burned. At standard pressures this burn would destroy the carbon chains, producing CO2). But under high pressures and moderately high temperatures it essentially does the same thing as the HT catalysts -- it strips off the oxygen replacing it with hydrogen. Except, instead of feed gas hydrogen is grabbed from neighboring molecules.
The product is a solid that is then liquefied (broken down and blended) to produce oil comparable to HT.
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Iron Maiden makes millions by touring countries where their music is most pirated
By Cory Doctorow
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Iron Maiden hired a BitTorrent analytics company called Musicmetric to determine where piracy of their music was highest, then scheduled tours of those countries. They made millions touring Central and South America. Iron Maiden LLP has outperformed the UK music sector as a whole and was named one of the "1000 Companies That Inspire Britain" by the London Stock Exchange.
. . .
In the case of Iron Maiden, still a top-drawing band in the U.S. and Europe after thirty years, it noted a surge in traffic in South America. Also, it saw that Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Chile were among the top 10 countries with the most Iron Maiden Twitter followers. There was also a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil.
Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary "Flight 666." After all, fans can't download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.
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Cultural |
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China's relaxation of one-child policy to begin rolling out early next year
By (Reuters via theguardian.com)
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Beijing said last month it would allow millions of families to have two children, the most radical relaxation of its strict one-child policy in nearly three decades. The move is part of a plan to raise fertility rates and ease the financial burden on China's rapidly ageing population.
. . .
"China still has a large population. This has not changed. Many of our economic and social problems are rooted in this reality," Xinhua quoted member of parliament Jiang Fan as saying. "We could not risk letting the population grow out of control."
China, with nearly 1.4 billion people, is the world's most populous country. The government says the policy of limiting families to one child, which covers 63% of the population, has averted 400 million births since 1980.
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U.S. belief in God down, belief in theory of evolution up
By (UPI)
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Three-quarters of U.S. adults say they believe in God, down from 82 percent in 2005, 2007 and 2009, a Harris Poll indicates.
The Harris Poll found 57 percent of U.S. adult say they believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, down from 60 percent in 2005, and 72 percent say they believe in miracles, down from 79 percent in 2005, while 68 percent say they believe in heaven, down from 75 percent. Sixty-eight percent say they believe Jesus is God or the son of God, down from 72 percent; and 65 percent say they believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, down from 70 percent.
. . .
Just under 2-in-10 U.S. adults described themselves as very religious, with an additional 4-in-10 describing themselves as somewhat religious down from 49 percent in 2007. Twenty-three percent of Americans identified themselves as not at all religious, nearly double the 12 percent reported in 2007.
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Uruguay's neighbors now considering legalization of pot
By Simeon Tegel
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Argentina has given the first sign that Uruguay’s groundbreaking cannabis reform just may have started a domino effect across Latin America.
Following the momentous vote by its smaller neighbor’s senate this month — making it the first nation in the world to completely legalize the soft drug — Argentina’s anti-drug czar Juan Carlos Molina has called for a public discussion in his country about emulating the measure.
. . .
Crucially, Molina, a Catholic priest appointed earlier this month by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as head of her government’s counternarcotics agency, said his boss also wanted a new approach.
His comments are the clearest sign yet that Uruguay’s strategy — aimed at breaking the link between the lucrative marijuana trade and organized crime — has kicked off a trend in a region that long ago wearied of the bloodshed, expense and failed results of Washington’s “war on drugs.”
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Kazakhstan: Christmas tree-top trouble
By (BBC)
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It's reported in Kazakhstan that a man has been jailed for scaling a Christmas tree in protest at what he said were overdue wages. He said they were owed to him by the company which erects the trees.
. . .
Even though Kazakhstan is a predominantly Muslim country, many towns and cities are decorated with Christmas trees, known as "New Year's trees".
This tradition was encouraged across the former Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as a way of wooing people away from celebrating Christmas in the officially atheist USSR.
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Macy's has a secret black Santa – for those who know how to ask
By Amanda Holpuch
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At 2.2m sq ft, the sprawling branch of Macy’s at Herald Square, New York, is the largest department store in the US and its Santaland Junction is a tightly organized, richly decorated paradise/hell of screaming children and yelling parents, queuing for a short audience with a big man.
As part of the attraction, the store tries hard to maintain the fiction that there is “only one Santa Claus”. But everyone apart from the youngest children knows that’s not true. A much better-kept secret, though, is that for years, the store has offered an alternative Santa for those who know to ask. The difference: he’s black.
. . .
Almost all the elves I encountered seemed to know what I meant by "special" Santa. They ushered me just to the side while an elf went to see whether he was ready.
While I waited, 25 families were brought in, escorted by elves, to three separate areas to see Santas. Presumably, the Santas are hidden in separate areas so that no child sees more than one.
. . .
In the quiet room was a black Santa, jolly as could be. He asked me what I wanted for Christmas and even urged me to ask for more.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |