Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, January 21, 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: Pulling the Rug by Imelda May
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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Teen Employment Isn't Really Very Well Correlated With the Minimum Wage
By Kevin Drum
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. . . Between 1954 and 1970 the minimum wage went up steadily in real terms, and so did teen employment. Since 1980 the minimum wage has been declining steadily, and so has teen employment. Is it really possible that changes in the minimum wage would have immediate effects in one direction but long-term effects in the exact opposite direction?
Sure, maybe. But it doesn't seem likely. In terms of short-term effects, what I mostly see are employment declines in 1973, 1979, 1990, 2000, and 2007. And guess what? Those are the dates of the last five recessions in the United States. What's more interesting about this is that teen employment recovered from its immediate decline during the Carter and Clinton years, but didn't recover during the Reagan and Bush years. . .
Bottom line: Teen employment has dropped substantially since about 1980. But during that time the real minimum wage has declined from $8 to $6 and then gone back up to a little over $7. Maybe there's a correlation there, but it sure isn't easy to see. Whatever's happening, the minimum wage seems to be a pretty small part of it.
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'123456' tops 'password' on list of worst, weakest Internet passwords
By (UPI)
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"Password" has been overtaken by "123456" as the most common and therefor worst password people use to protect their data, a U.S. security software firm says.
SplashData, of Los Gatos, Calif., has released its annual list of the 25 most common passwords found on the Internet, with longtime list leader "password" giving way to two-time runner-up "123456.
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Some other passwords on SplashData's list of weak and easily guessed passwords include "qwerty," "abc123," "111111," and "iloveyou."
"As always, we hope that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites," the company said in its release.
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The kids are alright: Erin Schrode helps teens go green
By Darby Minow Smith
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. . .
Teens Turning Green started when Schrode, then 13, discovered that the makeup she carried in her pencil case contained trace amounts of lead, formaldehyde, and other nasty ingredients. She launched an effort to educate other teens about personal care products, and soon her group of 13- and 14-year-olds traveled to local school campuses to collect the offending products. Meetings were held around her family’s kitchen table.
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Teens Turning Green finished its third annual Project Green Challenge at the end of October. During the month, 2,710 participants were asked to attempt a different sustainable challenge every day. The topics ranged from fashion to tech to Meatless Monday and were ranked from green to greenest. For example, calculating your water footprint was a green challenge — but drawing up a plan to get your campus to ban single-use water bottles was a “greenest” challenge. Participants were encouraged to blog, tweet, or Facebook about their challenges and reach a wider audience.
Schrode sees social media as an important tool to connect with teens. But she says “technology is not going to save us and technology is not going to doom us.” On the one hand, it can be used to connect like-minded teens in podunk towns. It can build movements and educate consumers. On the other, she’s wary of “slacktivism” or people feeling like they did their part by signing a Change.org petition or liking a Facebook page. Plus, she thinks everyone staring at screens all the time has “humanity going through a bit of a funk right now,” she says.
. . .
But to Schrode, getting corporations to change is key to sustainability. Government moves at a “frightening and paralyzing” pace. And, she has high hopes for her generation. Growing up with technology, she says today’s teens have “the potential to become the most civically active, aware generation in history.”
Plus, teens have a potential that moms and dads just don’t have. “If a parent comes home and tells you to do something, you say, ‘Hell no — my mom’s telling me to do that.’ It’s not cool,” she says. On the other hand, if kids get excited about an issue, “they go home and tell their parents. I’m not a mother but I can imagine having my teenage kid tell me something mattered to them. It would really affect me in a big way.”
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US judge hears appeal on teen executed in 1940s
By (BBC)
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A South Carolina judge is hearing arguments over whether to grant a new trial to a 14-year-old black boy executed for murder in 1944.
George Stinney's supporters say his conviction for the murder of two white girls was tainted by the era's racist justice system and a lack of evidence.
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But those seeking Stinney's exoneration say they will apply for a pardon if the trial is not granted.
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Stinney remains the youngest person executed in the US in 100 years. Outcry at the time over a 14-year-old going to the electric chair did not stop the execution.
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He was so small the straps of the electric chair did not fit around him, and an electrode was too big for his leg.
Mr Frierson and others working on behalf of Stinney's family say they have gathered new evidence, including sworn statements from his relatives accounting for him on the day the two girls were killed, as well as a statement from a pathologist disputing the autopsy findings.
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International |
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Obama to visit pope during European visit to address wealth gap
By (Reuters via globalpost.com)
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Obama is scheduled to meet with the pope on March 27 in a trip that will include stops in the Netherlands, Belgium and other parts of Italy, it said in a statement.
It will be the first meeting between the two men, who share a focus on addressing the gap between rich and poor.
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Pope Francis, who took the helm of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has led an effort to simplify the church and focus on the needy. Known for being frugal, he has appealed to people to help the poor, offered to drive his own car and chosen cardinals to emphasize his concern for poorer nations.
In December, Obama quoted the pope in a speech and pledged to focus his final term in office to tackling the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States.
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HSBC is paying $2 billion, or 5 weeks worth of its profit, to avoid criminal charges in drug cartel laundering case
By Brett Wolf and Aruna Viswanatha
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US regulators continue to find weaknesses in the way HSBC Holdings tries to prevent money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter, even after the British bank was forced to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties and invested millions in increasing its compliance.
The deferred prosecution agreement was reached in December 2012 and was approved Monday. The settlement was seen as a record amount to resolve charges that the bank failed to stop billions of dollars in drug money from flowing through the bank from Mexico.
Under the terms of the deal, the Justice Department agreed to suspend criminal charges against HSBC and its US subsidiary for five years if the bank agreed to pay the penalty.
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The bank is working to implement globally consistent controls and has hired experienced executives to continue transforming the compliance team and help it to work directly with HSBC bankers, Sherman said.
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African author 'comes out' in gay law protest
By (Al Jazeera)
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Binyavanga Wainaina, one of Africa's most powerful writers and a founder of the Nairobi-based literary network Kwani, published a short story online at the weekend that announced his sexual orientation, called I am a Homosexual, Mum.
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"I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five," he wrote in the short story."Nobody, nobody, ever in my life has heard this... I did not trust you, mum. I am a homosexual, mum'."
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Nigeria introduced a new law earlier this month against homosexuality. Under the law, same-sex couples who live together or attempt to solemnise their union with a ceremony can be punished with 14 years in prison.
"There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria," Wainaina said, adding that the "anti-gay marriage law shames us all."
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Deadly attack targets Pakistan polio drive
By (Al Jazeera)
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Armed men in Pakistan have killed three health workers taking part in a polio-vaccination drive - the latest in a series of deadly assaults on vaccination teams.
Following Tuesday's deaths in Karachi, the polio workers' association of Sindh said it was halting operations across the province.
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Armed anti-government groups in Pakistan see vaccination campaigns as a cover for espionage, and there are also long-running rumours about polio drops causing infertility.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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The Obama Administration Wants to End Racial Discrimination by Car Dealers. Why Are 35 Dems Getting in the Way?
By Erika Eichelberger
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In late March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the consumer watchdog agency dreamt up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—issued new, voluntary guidelines aimed at ensuring car dealerships are not illegally ripping off minorities. Since then, 13 Senate Democrats, including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.); and 22 House Dems, including Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Florida) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), have joined 19 House and Senate Republicans in signing letters to the agency objecting to the anti-discrimination measure. Consumer advocates and congressional aides say the lawmakers' backlash against the anti-discrimination rules is unjustified, and that Dems have backtracked on civil rights in this instance because of the colossal power of the car dealership lobby, which has spent millions lobbying Congress in the months since the CFPB issued these new guidelines.
Auto dealers "wield enormous amounts of power," one Democratic aide explains. "There's one in every district. They give a lot of money to charity. They're on a bunch of boards. They sponsor Little Leagues."
. . .
"I'm not surprised that any politician" would cave to the dealerships, Rossman adds. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), an industry trade group, has spent $3.1 million on lobbying in 2013, according to lobbying disclosure forms. "The dealerships made a very concerted push to get [members of Congress] to sign those letters" criticizing the guidance, Kukla says.
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The oddest aspect of Democrats' push back on the CFPB anti-discrimination measures, advocates say, is that in issuing the guidance, the CFPB didn't actually create any new regulation or law. "The funny thing is that… [the CFPB] is getting hit…because someone is actually enforcing rules already on the books," says the Dem aide.
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Earmarks are Back, Baby!
By Kevin Drum
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Why did so many Republicans vote for last week's budget bill? One reason is that they wanted to avoid getting blamed for another government shutdown. As you'll recall, the last one didn't turn out so well. But Stan Collender says there's another reason:
This is real inside-baseball: An omnibus appropriation provided an opportunity for the leadership to buy support from reluctant members by providing more dollars for their pet programs and projects. The demise of earmarks several years ago plus the use of continuing resolutions (which generally don't provide dollars on a program-by-program basis) to fund the government took that ability away. This was the first appropriations bill in five years where that wasn't the case.
[More....] Virtually every Republican who voted for the bill got some dollars devoted to something, if not many things, that her or his constituents will be very happy to have. In other words, this was the first real return of earmarks since they were banned several years ago and even anti-spending members couldn't resist.
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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:
‘Good life came callin’ I fell under its spell and kept fallin’, throatily sings rockabilly star Imelda May on ‘Pulling The Rug’, the deliciously infectious opening track on her soon to be released new album, Mayhem. As with many of the beautiful Dubliner’s songs, there’s more than a touch of autobiography in the lyric.
After many impoverished years hard slogging on the Irish and UK nightclub circuit, the good life finally came callin’ for May a little over two years ago when the producers of Later... with Jools Holland rang the then 34-year-old Liberties girl and asked if she could step in as a last moment replacement for a virus-stricken Natalie Cole.
It turned out to be a life-changing phone call. Although she’d already self-released her critically acclaimed 2005 album, Love Tattoo, and supported Holland at several gigs, appearing on his influential TV show alongside the likes of Jeff Beck, Roots Manuva and Elbow proved a definite turning point in the musical fortunes of the singer once lazily described as “Ireland’s answer to Amy Winehouse”.
“. . . I’ve been constantly gigging for as long as I can remember – certainly in the last few years. I’m pretty happy with it all, I’m enjoying it, and I’m enjoying how it’s going. To be honest, it’s great to be able to do a job that you love, because I’ve done loads that I’ve hated, and I know there’s plenty of people still doing that.”
. . .
“Ah, you know, you always meet weirdos,” she laughs. “Some weirdos are fantastic – weirdos in a good way. We do get hecklers and they’re mad as a brush and sometimes they can almost make the gig for ya, you know? We had one guy in an audience that wanted to get up on stage and have his photo taken with us. He was mad as a brush, and the whole audience were laughing their heads off, and it was a good night. But bad weirdos? Ah, a couple, but I think probably the best thing to do is ignore them, really. Because that’s the one thing that really gets to them – when you totally ignore them and give them no attention. The best thing you should do. Get on with your life.”
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Row over renewable energy holds up EU greenhouse gas emissions deal
By Fiona Harve
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Negotiations over landmark targets for greenhouse gas emissions in Europe are continuing , just hours before their planned publication on Wednesday.
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The current EU targets include a goal of producing a fifth of energy from renewable sources by 2020, an aim that is credited with assisting the substantial growth in clean energy across the bloc. Many countries want a similar – but more stringent – goal to be included in the 2030 climate and energy package.
Ed Davey, the UK's Liberal Democrat energy and climate change secretary, has claimed that his opposition to a 2030 renewables goal was "getting traction" among other member states, although he could only name Spain. The Spanish government did not reply to a request for comment.
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It is understood that the Treasury wants to be able to include nuclear power and fears that a renewable energy target would mean less investment in its favoured alternative, shale gas.
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Climate change: 'water supply at risk from back-to-back extreme events'
By Oliver Milman
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Analysis of 41 water utilities in Australia and the US found water quality was put at most risk by a combination of extreme weather events, such as bushfires and then a flood, rather than a single event.
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Khan said that while Australia is fairly well prepared for threats to its water supply, more needed to be done to diversify supply and establish overarching principles to ensure its safety.
One way of diversifying water supply is through seawater desalination. This has proved expensive and, in some cases, environmentally controversial, such as in the case of Melbourne’s $5.7bn desal plant. But Khan said it will have to be an option for water utilities.
“Last year Brisbane nearly ran out of water because it couldn’t treat high turbidity of water in time to meet demand,” he said. “They had to use the Gold Cast desal plant to deliver water to Brisbane.
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Plant STD linked to honeybee collapse
By John Upton
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Major crops including soybeans and tobacco can suffer from a crippling malady called tobacco ringspot virus. The disease is spread through sex, which in the plant kingdom involves the freaky use of vibrating creatures: bees. Honeybees and other pollinators carry infected pollen from one plant to the other and, in doing so, can spread the virus, which is also called TRSV.
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When these researchers investigated bee colonies classified as “strong” or “weak,” TRSV and other viruses were more common in the weak colonies than they were in the strong ones. Bee populations with high levels of multiple viral infections began failing in late fall and perished before February, these researchers report. In contrast, those in colonies with fewer viral assaults survived the entire cold winter months. . .
Listen up, bees! When you touch a plant’s pollen, you’re also touching the pollen of every other plant that plant has had sex with. So be careful out there. |
How Do We De-Suburbanize the Suburbs?
By Alissa Walker
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Phoenix, Arizona, is a famously fast-growing city. But, instead of growing up, the city has almost uniformly grown out, with terracotta-tiled subdivisions consuming the adjacent desert at a frightening rate: some estimates claim its suburbs grew an acre per hour during the early 2000s housing boom.
A story on Marketplace discusses how Phoenix has been trying to reverse that pattern in recent years. Specifically, developers want to take a low-density neighborhood called Grant Park and build a 14-acre project that will connect it to Phoenix's urban center. The neighborhood in question happens to be a Latino community separated from the city's downtown both physically (by railroad tracks) and economically. Developers plan to add housing and commercial space that would deliver services for residents but also lure people from the nearby downtown towers, creating a unified urbanized corridor.
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Instead of building new developments to fix suburbia, perhaps we have to start with correcting all the mistakes we made in the first place. Can we take stuff we built that's sprawly and spaced-out—like malls and office parks—and make it feel connected to the larger city? Georgia Tech architecture professor Ellen Dunham-Jones thinks so. She wrote a book named Retrofitting Suburbia with June Williamson that calls for revamping what they've named "underperforming asphalt properties"—asphalt being the signature landscape of suburbia. Her ideas include turning dead box stores into community centers and parking lots into parks.
This reclaiming of suburbia is happening in places like Bell Labs, the corporate campus designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962 that pretty much invented the idea of the suburban office park. The 472-acre campus is now being turned into a mixed-use development that will serve as a new center of Holmdel, New Jersey. According to Metropolis, "it's here that the building's new owner, Somerset Development, imagines a new urbanist temple to commerce. Plans are in place to revitalize the site as a town center for Holmdel, complete with urban amenities like shops and a coffee shop."
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We can also fix what's broken in a more incremental way, one that fills in the "gaps" from car-centric infrastructure. Back in Phoenix, the neighboring city of Mesa announced that it would be revising its general plan to include "sprawl repair" in 2014. With a population of 1.5 million—about the same size as Phoenix itself—Mesa is defined as a "boomburb," a quickly growing city inside a city, and much of that growth went unchecked as the city boomed. The idea here is to create "character areas" in different neighborhoods that connect parts of the city through walkable development. They even have a guidebook: the 2010 Sprawl Repair Manual, which offers "comprehensive guidance for transforming fragmented, isolated and car-dependent development into complete communities."
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Science and Health |
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Can Intelligence Bring Universes Into Being?
By Jason Rosenhouse
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One of Pitman’s talking points was the idea that natural selection is not capable in principle of crafting complex biochemical systems. Of course, this is standard fare for ID folks. Pitman made the claim that there is some level of functional complexity beyond which natural selection cannot go. His only actual argument for this was that a mechanism based on variation and selection has only been observed to produce relatively small amounts of complexity (leaving aside for the moment any questions of precisely how we define complexity.)
A lot of ID writing is devoted to putting meat on the bones of this idea. Michael Behe’s notion of “irreducible complexity” and William Dembski’s notion of “complex specified information” were both intended to provide the missing “in principle” argument for why natural selection cannot produce complex systems. In neither case were these authors successful. Among people who understood some biology and mathematics, Behe and Dembski were quite properly laughed at, since their arguments were really quite bad.
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So the situation is this: With regard to natural selection, we start with the fact that there is no theoretical reason why it cannot craft complex systems. Once you grant that selection has been observed to craft small increases in complexity in short periods of time–and how can you not–then it is hard to find an in principle argument for why it can’t craft more complex systems over longer periods of time. We also have the successes of evolutionary algorithms in solving problems in engineering and medicine, as well as computer simulations of evolution, to serve as a proof of concept. Moving on, for many concrete systems we have strong evidence for how they evolved gradually, and the fact that virtually every complex system studied to date shows clear vestiges of its evolutionary past. It is the universal experience of the scientists who do this work that complex biological systems are incomprehesible from the standpoint of engineering, but become comprehensible as soon as their histories are taken into account. And, most persuasive of all, you have the many practical successes of adaptationist reasoning in biology.
ID folks respond to this by folding their arms, shaking their heads, and repeating ad nauseum that we have no evidence that natural selection can do what we say it can do.
But when it comes to intelligence they are willing to make groundless extrapolations from what is seen to occur, and to hypothesize into existence an awesomely powerful supermind that can do just about anything with acts of its will. This they brazenly claim to be clearly the best explanation for the universe and for life, and they accuse scientists of rejecting it only because of their morbid, anti-religious bias.
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More experience, rather than age, is why our brains slow down
By (UPI)
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Our brains slow as we age not because of cognitive decline but because the have so much more experience to wade through, European researchers say.
While it has long been assumed age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, researchers at the University of Tuebingen in Germany suggest older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, a process that may be misidentified as declining capacity.
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"What does this finding mean for our understanding of our aging minds, for example older adults' increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea," Ramscar said.
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Flu vaccine reduces risk of illness by half in pregnant women
By (UPI)
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the flu shot as a priority for pregnant women because studies and history have shown they are at a higher risk for flu-related hospitalizations and death compared with non-pregnant women.
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Influenza activity is widespread in most of the United States at this time and is likely to continue for the next several weeks at least, but it's not too late for pregnant women to get vaccinated and still benefit from the protection the flu vaccine can provide, the CDC said.
Vaccination not only protects the pregnant mother from flu and its complications, but also has been shown to provide some immunity to the newborn child during the first six months of their lives.
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Technology |
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Securing the Smart Home, from Toasters to Toilets
By Rachel Metz
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Hackers have long wreaked havoc on PCs via the Internet, leading to data breaches and computer crashes. Now that the rush is on to add connectivity to everything from crockpots to light bulbs, the stakes get even higher—and more personal (see “More Connected Homes, More Problems”). Antivirus software helped PCs, but you can’t simply install a software suite developed for your desktop on a smart toaster; as a result, connected home devices typically rely on the user going online and setting up a username and password for protection.
A number of tech companies and industry groups say that “smart” devices are hitting store shelves with little in the way of security protection. Security experts blame a number of factors for the problem: startups may put security in the backseat in their haste to get products out the door, and established companies that have traditionally operated offline—like stereo or TV manufacturers—could simply fail to realize that they need to protect against threats when it comes to Internet-connected gadgets.
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In some cases, then, the simplest solution may be to simply limit the number of devices that can connect to the Internet. One thing the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn software can do is enable smart devices to communicate just with other devices in the home—a group of light bulbs, for instance, or a door lock—and not connect to the Internet beyond. To some connection junkies, it might sound limiting, but Ben-Zur sees it as a way to keep your devices safer and more private, too.
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Privacy tools used by 28% of the online world, research finds
By Jemima Kiss
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The gathering crisis of trust around consumer web services and the fallout from Edward Snowden's revelations is fuelling a significant uptake in anonymity tools, new research shows, as internet users battle censorship and assert their right to privacy online.
Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.
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"VPNs serve a perfect dual purpose for consumers in lots of markets, allowing them to access restricted content and better content as well as stay anonymous," said Jason Mander, GWI's head of trends. "It's a perfect combination and one that is likely to see their popularity grow. It also means that the numbers using sites such as Facebook in China are likely to have been under-estimated, and that geo-located advertising is completely missing the mark for these internet users."
"The figures also suggest that the global internet audience is a lot savvier and more concerned about this type of thing than is traditionally supposed, and chimes with the statistic that 55% are concerned about their privacy being eroded by the internet."
. . .
The data also underscores the shift from text messaging to mobile messaging apps, with WeChat seeing a 379% increase in active users between the second and fourth quarters of 2013 to around 385 million users, 78m of whom are in China.
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Big Brother strikes again: Ukraine protesters get creepy text message
By Sarah Wolfe
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In a scene reminiscent of the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Ukrainians standing near the site of protester clashes with police in Kyiv received a creepy text message from the government early Tuesday.
"Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance," it read.
The phrasing echoed a new law that had just gone into effect making participation in a protest a violent crime punishable by prison, according to The New York Times.
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The interior ministry denied involvement.
Three Ukrainian cellphone companies — Kievstar, MTS and Life — also denied sending the text or providing location data to the government, with Kievstar suggesting it may have been the work of a "pirate" cellphone tower in the area.
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Cultural |
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Which Artworks Should We Save? Cash-Strapped Italy Lets Citizens Vote
By Christopher Livesay
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"Italy needs help restoring its art and monuments," says Anna Maria Buzzi, whose job is to protect and promote Italy's artistic heritage. "Ticket sales alone are not enough to completely fund their upkeep. We don't even have a full understanding of how much art exists in the country. We have to start somewhere, so we came up with 'Art Helping Art.' "
Here's how it works: The government selected eight pieces of art from across Italy deemed to be in need of repair, ranging from an ancient Roman marble horse to a painting by Renaissance master Pietro Perugino. Then, it posted pictures of them on Facebook, and asked people to vote for the work they felt was most deserving of a fix-up. The work that draws the most clicks wins the money raised at these late-night events.
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Just outside the Colosseum, which is currently being restored by a private investor, Cifani points out what he calls one of Italy's many "scandals." As we enter the ruins of Domus Aurea — the once opulent "Golden House" built by Emperor Nero in the first century — he tells me to keep an eye on my recording equipment. Broken wine bottles litter the ground in what's become an unauthorized camp for scores of the city's homeless.
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"Italy is committing cultural suicide," says Luca Carra, who works for Italia Nostra, Italy's oldest nongovernment historic preservation group. "... Every time it rains, for instance, some roof or walls or some part of these monuments fall down, fall apart. So this is really, I think it's sort of a national emergency. It's a cultural emergency, but I think it's more than a cultural emergency."
Even Pompeii — the country's prize pony of archaeology — suffers routine collapses, as do countless other lesser-known sites. But the government is optimistic. The late-night fundraisers have been a big hit. And so was the online vote, which closed at the end of the year. The winner is Perugino's painting of a Madonna and child. As for the seven other objects, the government says it will fix them soon. But Italy's revolving door of politicians have made similar promises in the past. And there are no firm plans to take another roster of candidates for restoration to Italian voters.
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Bartender places Tony Blair under citizen's arrest for unprovoked war against Iraq
By Cory Doctorow
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Twiggy Garcia, a bartender at the east London restaurant Tramshed -- which is right around the corner from me! -- interrupted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's dinner to place him under citizen's arrest and ask him to come to a police station to hear charges for his decision "to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq." The war criminal smiled winningly and tried to change the subject to Syria, while his offspring hurried off to get their private muscle. The bartender, sensing an impending beat-down, left, quitting. |
Iran: Rule banning musical instruments on TV is broken
By (BBC)
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Iran's Channel One television has caused a sensation by showing musical instruments on screen for the first time in 30 years, it's reported.
Some Shia Muslim clerics say broadcasting music is at odds with the religion, and Iran has adopted a curious policy of broadcasting concerts but not showing the instruments - often replacing them with pictures of flowers. Strangely, TV aimed at Iranians abroad does show instruments.
There is confusion over whether Channel One intended to break the taboo or simply made a mistake in showing traditional musicians performing a tribute to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad on the anniversary of his birth - a public holiday in Iran.
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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. |