Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, February 21, 2012.
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: We Got To Have Peace by Curtis Mayfield
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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Marine discharged for Haditha killings
By (UPI)
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A U.S. Marine private who admitted responsibility for the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005 has been discharged under honorable conditions.
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Wuterich did not serve any jail time for his Jan. 23 guilty plea for one count of negligent dereliction of duty for his role in the 2005 killings. His rank was reduced to private as part of the plea deal.
He admitted he told the Marines under his command to shoot first and then ask questions as they raided two houses in Haditha. One member of the unit had just been killed by a roadside bomb, the Los Angeles Times reported.
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Shrimp's Carbon Footprint is Ten Times Higher Than Beef's
By Tom Philpott
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It turns out, not surprisingly, that plates mounded with cheap shrimp float on a veritable sea of ecological and social trouble. In his excellent 2008 book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, the Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe took a hard look at the Asian operations that supply our shrimp. His conclusion: "The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world's poorest nations."
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And now, a new study from University of Oregon researcher J. Boone Kauffman finds that the flattening of Southeast Asian mangrove forests is devastating in another way, too, and not just the people who have been sustainably living in them for generations. Mangroves, it turns out, are rich stores of biodiversity and also of carbon—and when they're cleared for farming, that carbon enters the atmosphere as climate-warming gas.
Kaufman estimates that 50 to 60 percent of shrimp farms occupy cleared mangroves, and the shrimp that emerges from them has a carbon footprint ten times higher than the most notoriously climate-destroying foodstuff I'm aware of: beef from cows raised on cleared Amazon rainforest.
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Feds give seed money to startup health care insurance co-ops
By Harris Meyer
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Seven organizations will receive a total of $639 million in federal low-interest loans to launch new, consumer-governed health insurance plans in eight states, the federal government announced Tuesday.
The new plans, authorized by the 2010 health care law, are scheduled to open for business in 2014. They will be available on the new state health exchanges, or marketplaces, mandated by the law. They primarily will serve Americans under age 65 in the individual and small-group insurance markets.
More loan recipients will be announced in coming months, with the goal of launching at least one nonprofit co-op plan in every state, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers the program.
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Baby boomers at elevated hepatitis C risk
By (UPI)
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An estimated 3.2 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, and two-thirds of that number are baby boomers born between 1945 and 1964, researchers say.
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Routine blood tests could uncover liver damage caused by the virus in time, but doctors often don't ask patients about possible risk factors and many patients don't want to talk about risk factors either, Ward said.
Baby boomers are more at risk for hepatitis because there was more injectable drug use from the 1960s to the 1980s than today, and screening blood donors for hepatitis C didn't begin until 1989, so it seems reasonable that those in the baby boomer age group should talk to their doctor about hepatitis C, Ward said.
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Affirmative action heads to US Supreme Court
By (BBC)
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For the first time in nine years, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that confronts the issue of race in university admissions.
The court will hear an appeal brought by a white student denied a place at the University of Texas.
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A ruling for Ms Fisher could have an impact on so-called affirmative action programmes elsewhere, analysts say.
If the Supreme Court court makes a broad ruling in her favour, it could have far-reaching consequences for programmes at universities around the US, Vanderbilt University law professor Brian Fitzpatrick told the Associated Press.
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International |
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Greece: So, What Now?
By Scott Neuman
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Greece is looking more and more like one of those "troubled homeowners" we hear so much about.
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"If Greece can default and leave the eurozone, then others could go," says Daniel Kelemen, director of European studies at Rutgers University. "Then attention would turn to Portugal and speculation that it would default. And then, of course, that would cause their borrowing rates to go up, which would make it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy."
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Among other things, the EU and IMF want billions of euros in budget cuts, including 300 million euros slashed from public pensions, privatization of some state-run enterprises and a reduction in the minimum wage.
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Kelemen says it's important to note that Greek protesters angry over austerity, while noisy, sometimes drown out a silent majority in Greece. In opinion polls, the "overwhelming majority" of Greeks do not want to leave the eurozone.
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Cocaine trade generates $900 million a year in West Africa
By Amy Silverstein
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Cocaine trafficking in West and Central Africa has increased by $100 million annually since 2009, the United Nations announced today. The Associated Press reported that drug cartels are using West and Central Africa as shortcuts when selling drugs to Europe.
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The United Nations had previously said that drug trafficking generated $800 million annually in the area, but officials now put that number closer to $900 million. Yuri Fedotov, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said that drug cartels are taking advantage of "lack of border controls, weak law enforcement, and endemic corruption in West Africa to reach Europe," according to the AP. And the trade appears to have caused locals to get hooked as well. Fedotov told the AP that there are now 2.5 million illegal drug users in the region.
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Radiation from Japan's Fukushima power plant found 400 miles off the coast
By Amy Silverstein
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Scientists detected radioactive contamination 400 miles off the coast of Japan. Readings showed that radiation levels in the area were 1,000 times higher than before, the Associated Press reported. However, the scientists said that they are actually relieved about that figure. "This is what we predicted," Hartmut Nies, of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the AP.
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Scientist Ken Buesseler said at the meeting today that the radiation levels, though elevated, are still below levels considered harmful for marine animals or for people who want to eat fish. Though scientists consider this good news so far, Buesseler warned to the AP that "we're not over the hump" yet because of continued leaks.
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Japanese citizens are also still dealing with fallout from the disaster. The Associated Foreign Press reported that less than five percent of the rubble from the earthquake has been cleared so far, due to fears that the rubble is contaminated.
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Land grab or development opportunity?
By (BBC)
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Over the past few years, companies and foreign governments have been leasing large areas of land in some of Africa's poorest countries.
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Three years since media reports started raising public awareness on this issue, evidence has been growing on the scale, geography, players, features and impacts of the land rush. The emerging picture provides ground for concern.
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The deals were for nearly 60 million hectares worldwide, roughly the size of a country like Ukraine - and two-thirds of the land acquired was in Africa.
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UN to bolster Somalia peacekeeping troops by 5,700
By (BBC)
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The UN Security Council is to vote to increase the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia by more than 5,000 soldiers, diplomats have said.
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British Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC the threat from Somalia's al-Shabab militants was "substantial".
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The armed Islamist group controls many southern and central parts of Somalia, which has been without an effective central government since 1991.
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Yemen election ends Saleh's 33-year rule
By (Al Jazeera)
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Polls have closed in the presidential election in Yemen, with reports indicating high turnout in many areas despite calls for a boycott from the opposition and deadly violence in the south.
As the only candidate in the race, Abd-Rabbou Mansour Hadi, the vice-president, is set to take power, ending the 33-year rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.
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Southerners, who accuse the north of grabbing their resources and discriminating against them, are demanding a divorce from the north with which they fought a civil war in 1994 after political union in 1990.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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FBI purges anti-Muslim training documents
By (UPI)
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FBI officials say counterterrorism training documents that included stereotypical depictions of Arabs and Muslims have been purged.
Citing a source it did not identify, Fox News Channel reported hundreds of pages that have been removed were "not consistent with the highest professional standards and the FBI's core values." The grounds for removal included "poor taste," imprecise information, errors of facts and the use of "stereotypes."
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Working for a Living Not Such a Great Deal Anymore
By Kevin Drum
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Technically, the point of this chart is that prices go up at about the same rate as labor costs, but no more. If you try to raise prices too much, competition will eventually force you to lower them. Likewise, if you try to push labor costs down, workers will go elsewhere and you'll eventually have to increase wages to attract new employees. Generally speaking, labor gets a fairly steady percentage of economic output, and as productivity goes up, wages go up.
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We are returning to an environment where productivity gains do not accrue to unskilled labor because they are imbedded in the brains of the innovators....What this chart hides, but I believe is also true is that capital is facing a similar collapse....For now, it is still in the interest of innovators to tap public equity markets and doing so means that they come under some — but not absolute — pressure to pay a dividend.
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Is this true? I don't know. The big brains will have to fight it out. The reason I'm posting this chart is because it's a new addition to my collection of evidence that our current economic problems started not in 2008, but in 2000 — or, possibly, in the mid-90s, but masked for a few years by the dotcom boom. Something fundamentally changed around then, and you can see this in a whole host of economic indicators. |
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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:
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Mayfield, along with several other soul and funk musicians, spread messages of hope in the face of oppression, pride in being a member of the black race and gave courage to a generation who were demanding their human rights. Mayfield has been compared to Martin Luther King Jr arguably for making a greater lasting impact in the civil rights struggle with his music. By the end of the decade he was a pioneering voice in the black pride movement along with James Brown and Sly Stone. Paving the way for a future generation of rebel thinkers, Mayfield paid the price, artistically and commercially, for his politically charged music. Irrespective of the persistent radio bans and loss of revenue, Mayfield continued his quest for equality right until his death. His lyrics on racial injustice, poverty and drugs became the poetry for a generation. Mayfield was also a descriptive social commentator. As the influx of drugs ravaged through black America in the late 1960s and 1970s his bittersweet descriptions of the ghetto would serve as warnings to the impressionable. Determined to warn all about the perils of drugs, "Freddie's Dead" is a graphic tale of street life. After hearing the Rev. Martin Luther King deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech that August day in 1963, the crowd of 250,000 sang "We Shall Overcome." In 1965, another gospel song emerged -- "People Get Ready" by Mayfield and the Impressions. "Keep On Pushing" and "People Get Ready" were two songs that became embedded in the national movement for civil and social rights, heard at all the rallies and marches, songs-as-inspiration. His song "People Get Ready" was written in the year after the march on Washington's. For many, it captured the spirit of the march—the song reaches across racial and religious lines to offer a message of redemption and forgiveness.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Beyond porkwashing: Food service company commits to humane meat
By Twilight Greenaway
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Last week, McDonald’s announced it was making a move to end the use of gestation crates — the especially despicable practice of confining pregnant sows in spaces roughly the width of their bodies. By May, their announcement read, they’ve requested concrete plans from their producers to phase out the practice.
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So, it’s refreshing to see that Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO) has promised to phase out pork produced in gestation crates, do away with all eggs from confined hens, and source at least 25 percent of their meat from farms that are third-party-certified humane by 2015. BAMCO isn’t nearly as large as McDonald’s, but they do run café and catering services for corporations, colleges, and universities in over 400 locations around the country, so a three-year timeline is not unambitious on their part. In fact, the company serves 3 million pounds of pork every year.
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Unlike many of the sea changes we hear about within today’s food companies, which are often spurred by consumer demand, BAMCO has a tendency to be more progressive than its customers. (Taking hamburgers off the menu on Low Carbon Diet Day and reducing beef purchasing by one-third are probably not the kinds of things you would do solely to please an American customer base, for instance.) But the latest change is actually the result of a long-standing beef with factory farms on the part of BAMCO’s CEO Fedele Bauccio, who has seen gestation crates and battery cages firsthand. From 2006 to 2008, Bauccio served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, a group that visited a number of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and issued a now-famous report calling for the end of the most egregious practices they’d witnessed (including gestation crates).
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Apple Report Describes New 100-Acre, 20-Megawatt Data Center in North Carolina As Largest in U.S.
By Tiffany Kaiser
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Apple has made some considerable green contributions to the renewable energy effort recently, including the company's Maiden, North Carolina data center, which will feature the U.S.' largest end user-owned, onsite solar array.
According to Apple's 2012 Facilities Report and Environmental Update, which describes the company's energy savings and environmental footprint in Apple stores, data centers and R&D buildings, solar power will become a huge part of its Maiden, North Carolina data center. In fact, Apple is out to build the largest end user-owned solar array in the nation.
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The data center has already received some attention from the U.S. Green Building Council, which gave it LEED Platinum certification. Apple also mentioned that no other data center of its size has been awarded such a high level of LEED certification.
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Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists
By (BBC)
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Dolphins should be treated as non-human "persons", with their rights to life and liberty respected, scientists meeting in Canada have been told.
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They believe dolphins and whales are sufficiently intelligent to justify the same ethical considerations as humans.
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It is based on years of research that has shown dolphins and whales have large, complex brains and a human-like level of self-awareness.
This has led the experts to conclude that although non-human, dolphins and whales are "people" in a philosophical sense, which has far-reaching implications.
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Science and Health |
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Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed: Genome Analysis of 'Living Fossil' Sheds Light On the Evolution of Plants
By (ScienceDaily)
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Atmospheric oxygen really took off on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxygenation Event. At this key juncture of our planet's evolution, species had either to learn to cope with this poison that was produced by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria or they went extinct. It now seems strange to think that the gas that sustains much of modern life had such a distasteful beginning.
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This crucial step forward occurred about 1.6 billion years ago when a single-celled protist captured and retained a formerly free-living cyanobacterium. This process, termed primary endosymbiosis, gave rise to the plastid, which is the specialized compartment where photosynthesis takes place in cells. Endosymbiosis is now a well substantiated theory that explains how cells gained their great complexity and was made famous most recently by the work of the late biologist Lynn Margulis, best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles.
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For those unfamiliar with algae, they include the ubiquitious diatoms that are some of the most prodigious primary producers on our planet, accounting for up to 40% of the annual fixed carbon in the marine environment.
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Stronger Intestinal Barrier May Prevent Cancer in the Rest of the Body, New Study Suggests
By (ScienceDaily)
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A leaky gut may be the root of some cancers forming in the rest of the body, a new study published online Feb. 21 in PLoS ONE by Thomas Jefferson University researchers suggests.
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A weakened intestinal barrier has been linked to many diseases, like inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and food allergies, but this study provides fresh evidence that GC-C plays a role in the integrity of the intestine. Strengthening it, the team says, could potentially protect people against inflammation and cancer in the rest of the body.
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Reporting in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dr. Waldman colleagues found that silencing GC-C affected appetite in mice, disrupting satiation and inducing obesity. Conversely, mice who expressed the hormone receptor knew when to call it quits at mealtime.
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Easy-to-read Web site on drug abuse
By (UPI)
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A new Web site on drug abuse uses plain language, videos and other features to make it easy to understand for those with lower reading levels, officials said.
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The Web site's emphasis on plain language is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's commitment to clear communication by the government that the public can understand and use, Volkow said.
The Web site goes beyond plain language by using a design and features that are easy to use, including animated videos that explain the science of addiction and how drugs affect the brain, Volkow said.
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The Web site is at: www.easyread.drugabuse.gov.
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Flowers grown from 30,000-year-old fruit
By David Pescovitz
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Russian scientists grew the plants above from the innards of fruit that had been frozen for 30,000 years. From Discover:
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Over millennia, the squirrel’s burrow fossilized and was buried under increasing layers of ice. The plants within were kept at a nippy -7 degrees Celsius, surrounded by permanently frozen soil and the petrifying bones of mammoths and woolly rhinos. They never thawed. They weren’t disturbed. By the time they were found and defrosted by scientists, they had been buried to a depth of 38 metros, and frozen for around 31,800 years…
Svetlana Yashina from the Russian Academy of Sciences grew the plants from immature fruits recovered from the burrow. She extracted their placentas – the structure that the seeds attach to – and bathed them in a brew of sugars, vitamins and growth factors. From these tissues, roots and shoots emerged.
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'Chinese Pompeii' 300m-year-old forest preserved in ash
By (BBC)
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Researchers have unearthed a forest in northern China preserved under a layer of ash deposited 300 million years ago.
Preservation of the forest, just west of the Inner Mongolian district of Wuda, has been likened to that of the Italian city of Pompeii.
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Due to the pristine preservation of some of the plants, the team estimate the ash fell over the course of just a few days, felling and damaging some of the trees and plants under its weight but otherwise keeping them intact.
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Based on the findings, the team worked with a painter to depict what the forest would have looked like before the ash cloud descended.
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Technology |
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Facebook's nudity and violence guidelines are laid bare
By Charles Arthur
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Facebook bans images of breastfeeding if nipples are exposed – but allows "graphic images" of animals if shown "in the context of food processing or hunting as it occurs in nature". Equally, pictures of bodily fluids – except semen – are allowed as long as no human is included in the picture; but "deep flesh wounds" and "crushed heads, limbs" are OK ("as long as no insides are showing"), as are images of people using marijuana but not those of "drunk or unconscious" people.
The strange world of Facebook's image and post approval system has been laid bare by a document leaked from the outsourcing company oDesk to the Gawker website, which indicates that the sometimes arbitrary nature of picture and post approval actually has a meticulous – if faintly gore-friendly and nipple-unfriendly – approach.
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The guidelines, which have been set out in full, depict a world where sex is banned but gore is acceptable. Obvious sexual activity, even if "naked parts" are hidden, people "using the bathroom", and "sexual fetishes in any form" are all also banned. The company also bans slurs or racial comments "of any kind" and "support for organisations and people primarily known for violence". Also banned is anyone who shows "approval, delight, involvement etc in animal or human torture".
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How No Amount of Cloud Computing Will Kill off Local Music Storage
By Eliot Van Buskirk
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The supply of wireless data in the United States - the stuff that lets us use the internet on our smartphones and tablets - is fast disappearing, as reported by CNN Money, which found the crisis pressing enough to warrant a week of dedicated coverage.
Consumers - and music fans in particular - are already feeling the squeeze. As a recent example, AT&T reneged last month on its promise to provide unlimited data to customers who ordered and paid for it. Not only does AT&T not sell unlimited data plans anymore, but it won't even honor the ones it already sold, despite pledging to grandfather those users in (if they agree never to tether their computers to their phones and abide by other annoying restrictions). If you were counting on AT&T to let you stream all the music you wanted, well, you no longer can.
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As the bandwidth crunch continues, we expect to see bargain plans proliferate alongside with new ways of throttling accounts when they play too much music or watch too much video. Are music fans really going to want to listen to another hour of music if it means they might lose the ability to read web pages or use Facebook by the end of the month? Maybe, but they won't use the cloud to do it.
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However, one precedent suggests app developers shouldn't have to pay copyright holders anything extra for caching songs and videos on portable devices. ISPs don't have to pay for so-called "ephemeral copies" of media on their servers (stored there to ease transmission), so long as those copies are destroyed after being sent on to users. The same concept could apply to ephemeral copies stored on users' devices, which would make it easier for developers to add this increasingly important feature.
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Scalable stylometry: can we de-anonymize the Internet by analyzing writing style?
By Cory Doctorow
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One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a CMU research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the practice of trying to ascribe authorship to an anonymous text by analyzing its writing style; "adversarial stylometry" is the practice of resisting stylometric de-anonymization by using software to remove distinctive characteristics and voice from a text.
Stanford's Arvind Narayanan describes a paper he co-authored on stylometry that has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012. In On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification (PDF) Narayanan and co-authors show that they can use stylometry to improve the reliability of de-anonymizing blog posts drawn from a large and diverse data-set, using a method that scales well. However, the experimental set was not "adversarial" -- that is, the authors took no countermeasures to disguise their authorship. It would be interesting to see how the approach described in the paper performs against texts that are deliberately anonymized, with and without computer assistance. The summary cites another paper by someone who found that even unaided efforts to disguise one's style makes stylometric analysis much less effective.
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In an earlier article, I noted that we don’t yet have as rigorous an understanding of deanonymization algorithms as we would like. I see this paper as a significant step in that direction. In my series on fingerprinting, I pointed out that in numerous domains, researchers have considered classification/deanonymization problems with tens of classes, with implications for forensics and security-enhancing applications, but that to explore the privacy-infringing/surveillance applications the methods need to be tweaked to be able to deal with a much larger number of classes. Our work shows how to do that, and we believe that insights from our paper will be generally applicable to numerous problems in the privacy space.
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Cultural |
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Mardi Gras Indians Tout Generations-Old Traditions
By (NPR Staff)
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. . . New Orleans is at the heart of the party. Every year, millions of people crowd the streets of the Big Easy for the event. But in the communities away from the madness and merriment of Bourbon Street, self-described tribes of Mardi Gras Indians have been celebrating with their own unique traditions for generations. The groups' importance to the local black community was strengthened during the decades when African-Americans were excluded from the city's official Mardi Gras celebrations.
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The outfits of the Mardi Gras Indian groups, who call themselves "tribes," are inspired by Native American ceremonial regalia. Members call these costumes "suits," and it can take up to a year to create the intricate designs out of thousands of sequins, beads and pounds of feathers.
These days, the "tribes" still draw members from black neighborhoods in and around New Orleans, and they parade through the streets of their own respective neighborhoods for Mardi Gras: Singing, playing the drums and staging mock battles in which the "tribes" try to outdo each other with their performances.
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Alexandra Singer: Debut novel from brink of death
By (BBC)
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Four years ago trainee lawyer Alexandra Singer was in a coma on the brink of death after being struck down with a rare disease.
But next month her debut novel is published - a story which had been wiped from her memory by an attack of the autoimmune disease cerebral lupus.
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Desperate to get her hands working again, she set herself a target of writing a certain number of words a day alongside her intensive physiotherapy.
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Her big break came when she was runner-up in the Luke Bitmead Bursary competition, which was established to support young novelists in the memory of Legend Press author Luke Bitmead, who died young. A publishing deal with Legend soon followed
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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. |