The Weirdest Thing on the Internet: Wild Casting

And that's why you don't walk into the lion house 15 minutes before feeding time, smelling of ham. I mean, really.

The a team of six talented student animators at GOBELINS l'?cole de l'image, a 50-year-old Parisian school of digital communication and interactive design, created this entertaining romp across an unnamed American city skyline. Well, not entertaining for the guy that fell off the building, that has to suck, but pretty cool for the other guy. Very few people get to brag to their friends that they've just been eaten by a ham-crazed apex predator.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-thing-on-the-internet-wild-casting-706968416

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Street Protests Are the Easy Part

A man demonstrates against Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff. How much can street protests do?

Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

LONDON?In Brazil, the protesters wore halter tops and shorts. In Egypt, they wore headscarves and long sleeves. In Turkey, they wore more of the former, some of the latter, and quite a bit of face paint as well. In each of these three places they looked different, used different slogans, spoke different languages. And yet the parallels among these three protest movements on three different continents in three countries run by democratically elected leaders are striking, not least for what they reveal about the nature of the modern street protest.

In Istanbul, Rio, and Cairo, the crowds had legitimate complaints about their respective democracies. Protesters shouted, among other things, about corruption in Brazil; creeping authoritarianism in Turkey; economic incompetence in Egypt. Economic slowdown was the background to protest in all three countries, but even so, the scale of the demonstrations was a surprise. Everywhere, the numbers were bigger and younger than anyone expected.

As we?ve all been told many times, these things are easier than ever to organize. The combination of Twitter, Facebook, as well as the more old-fashioned medium of television can help get people out on the street. If you?ve seen it already in a photograph or on a video clip, then you know how to create provocative posters, wear costumes and masks, organize bits of street theater, and create chants and songs. Heavy-handed policing in several cases helped bring people out as well: Tear gas surely creates as many street revolutionaries as it discourages.

But if it?s easier than ever to get people on the street, it?s still very hard to get people to follow up with necessary organizational work. As we?ve all learned in recent years, a flash mob created with the help of the Internet is not necessarily well equipped to make big institutional changes. Social media is not the same thing as social activism. The courage and dedication it takes to transform a society is not the same thing as the impulse it takes to join a crowd. ?Just showing up? at the demonstration or the march can help create a day?s headline but nothing more. Real change requires the founding of institutions, of political parties, of news organizations, of local and neighborhood associations, of economic clubs and discussion groups that think about the interests of the nation, not of a single group or faction.

In the end, the ultimate success of a street protest in a democracy depends on the degree to which its members are willing to turn their protest into real activism, to enter into their respective nations? political systems, to work within the law, and to transform passion and anger into institutional and finally political change. In Egypt, whose new democracy was by far the most fragile of the three, the protests have in this sense already failed. Egypt?s anti-Morsi activists had not yet organized themselves into a coherent political party, they hadn?t created a political program with mass appeal, and they didn?t have an alternative elite prepared to carry it out. ?Without these things, their influence over the course of events was necessarily going to be limited. Knowing that they might well lose a new election, they called for the help of the army, and thus threw Egypt?s entire democratic project into jeopardy.

In Brazil, by far the strongest of the three democracies, the protests seem to have already succeeded, at least in this narrow sense: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was forced to appear on television and to declare, ?I hear you,? and she has called for a plebiscite on political reform. More lasting change in Brazil will require the crowds of young people to create an alternative political party to the one Rousseff leads, to put aside their dislike of the corrupt political establishment and learn how to join it, to renew it, to clean it up, to change its habits.

If anything, young Turks in Istanbul face an even more difficult challenge: how to craft a political message that will appeal not just to the secular and the well-educated but to the mass of voters who brought Prime Minister Recep Erdo?an and his Justice and Development Party to power in the first place, and who might well do so again.

But the first step to creating such an alternative is to understand that it?s necessary to do so. It?s fine to have disgust for politicians in a democracy, as long as you?re willing to become one, yourself?and it?s excellent to dislike establishment political parties, as long as you are willing and able to build your own in their place.?

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/07/protests_in_brazil_egypt_and_turkey_the_wave_of_massive_uprisings_requires.html

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Penn State ex-president files libel lawsuit papers

(AP) Penn State's former president Graham Spanier initiated a libel and defamation case Thursday against Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who a year ago produced a report for the school that was highly critical of Spanier's role in the child sex abuse scandal involving longtime assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Paperwork filed in Centre County, where the school is located, disclosed little about the nature of his claims but checked off a box on a court system form that described the case as "slander/libel/defamation."

The filing was made one day before the one-year anniversary of Freeh's report, which concluded that Spanier, late coach Joe Paterno and other high-ranking Penn State administrators failed to protect children against Sandusky. Under Pennsylvania law, those who believe they have been libeled or defamed have a year to initiate a civil lawsuit.

Calls and emails seeking comment from Freeh and from Spanier lawyer Elizabeth Ainslie were not returned. Along with Freeh, the paperwork also names as a defendant the law firm where Freeh works.

The Freeh report said Spanier told Freeh's investigators that he never heard anyone say Sandusky was sexually abusing children. But Freeh wrote it was more reasonable to conclude that Spanier, Paterno, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse from the authorities, the university's board of trustees, the Penn State community and the public at large."

Curley, who was placed on leave to serve out his contract, and Schultz, now retired, were both charged in November 2011, when Sandusky was arrested, and accused of perjury and failure to properly report suspected abuse.

Spanier was forced out as president at that time, and a year later was himself charged as part of an alleged cover-up of complaints about Sandusky. A school spokesman said Thursday Spanier remains a faculty member on administrative leave.

Paterno died of complications from lung cancer in January 2012 and was not charged with any crime. The Freeh report's scathing conclusions about the former coach was followed more than a week later by the school administration's decision to remove his statue from outside the football stadium.

Additional charges were also filed against Curley and Schultz last November, but there has not been a preliminary hearing yet because of a legal dispute about the role played in the grand jury proceedings by Cynthia Baldwin, a former state Supreme Court justice who at the time was Penn State's top lawyer.

On Tuesday, a district judge in the Harrisburg suburbs announced the preliminary hearing would be held for Spanier, Schultz and Curley starting July 29 in the county courthouse. The hearing will determine if there are grounds to forward the case to county court for trial. All three men have vigorously denied the allegations against them.

Sandusky, 69, was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse, including violent attacks on boys inside school facilities, after a three-week trial last summer in which eight victims testified against him. He is serving a 30- to 60-year prison term and maintains he was wrongfully convicted. He is pursuing appeals.

Associated Press

Source: http://timesleader.com/news/apsports/302684456877727946088/Penn-State-ex-president-files-libel-lawsuit-papers&source=RSS

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ID got you, under the skin

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Forget fingerprints or iris recognition, the next big thing in biometrics will be a thermal imaging scan that maps the blood vessels under the skin of your face for instantaneous face recognition that would be almost impossible to spoof.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/IHKNoe4GOJg/130711113420.htm

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GALEX decommissioned: What happens to abandoned space probes?

NASA's earth-orbiting GALEX was shut down Friday, meaning that the spacecraft will join a long line of space probes sacrificed to the universe.

By Elizabeth Barber,?Contributor / July 1, 2013

This NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mosaic of ultraviolet images obtained from December 2003 shows the large galaxy in Andromeda, Messier 31.

NASA/California Institute of Technology /AFP

Enlarge

The pink slip was delivered at 3:09 p.m. EDT on Friday in Dulles, Vermont. The order: decommission Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

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And so, after about a decade of use, the power was flicked off on GALEX.

The Earth-orbiting spacecraft ? which had been cut from NASA?s budget in February 2011 and had survived off funds from the California Institute of Technology ? had racked up a sizable roster of discoveries?during its mission, observing the teenage-stage of galaxy growth, a black hole consuming a star, the presence of new stars around dead galaxies, and?insights into the nature of dark energy.

The spacecraft will remain in orbit for at least another 65 years, floating glumly and uselessly around the Earth. Then it will fall back toward the planet, burning up as it re-enters the atmosphere, doing one last service as a ?shooting star? on which a celestial-looking child might make a wish ? just as writer Ray Bradbury, in his 1951 story Kaleidoscope, imagined an unlucky, falling astronaut as the object on which a small Illinois boy pins all his hopes.?

GALEX?s sad, lonely end is typical. Few objects launched into space have hope of seeing Earth again. Unless, of course, there are people on board, that brave object is designed not to come back to us, but to serve its mission and then remain out there as a teeny record of human ingenuity and curiosity floating through an impassive universe.

Some of these explorers, like GALEX, will meet a sudden end. Our space record is packed with casualties ? spacecraft that made fatal landings and the dust of which has been received neatly into the universe. There was Russia?s Venera 3, a Venus-bound probe that crashed into the planet in 1966. And there?s the US?s Mars Climate Orbiter, which in 1998 made a faulty entry into the planet?s orbit and fizzled up in the unfriendly atmosphere.

But for other spacecraft, the end is more uncertain, more a long wait for something, anything, to happen. Other Venera probes (Russia launched some 16 of them) are presumably still somewhere on Venus, their batteries shot. And on Mars, NASA's Spirit Rover stopped communicating in 2010; since then it has lingered hopelessly there in the Martian desert. Opportunity, its twin rover, is still chugging along, sending back new information as it waits for something to go wrong. ?Every day is a gift,? said John Callas, of NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of that rover, earlier this month.

Curiosity rover ? which landed on Mars last summer ? has a mission of one Mars year, or some 687 Earth days. Perhaps it will outlast its warranty. But eventually it will join the other decommissioned, powerless rovers on the Red Planet, waiting dully for something to happen to it, ever so slowly eroding and gathering Martian dust.

Perhaps the loneliest of ends is reserved for the most far-flung objects, which quietly, without complaint, recede into the universe.

In Bradbury?s Kaleidoscope, a spacecraft splinters midflight and sends its human cargo floating through the terrible emptiness, waiting for something that will put an end to it all. And so they fall with ?vague acceptance,? with ?varying degrees of terror and resignation,? with the knowledge that ?nothing could bring them back.?

The falling astronauts in that story enjoy the benefit of a reasonably short lifespan. But for the (mercifully non-sentient) space probes, the wait is much longer, possibly forever.

Voyager 1, which is now at the outskirts of our solar system and preparing to depart for the rest of our galaxy, and Voyager 2 will run out of fuel in about 2020. After that, the siblings will drift through space, waiting, "each going to a separate and irrevocable fate."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/2ZnQarWW6-c/GALEX-decommissioned-What-happens-to-abandoned-space-probes

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Authors lose class status in Google digital books case

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - Google Inc notched a legal victory in its bid to create the world's largest digital books library, winning the reversal of a court order that had allowed authors challenging the project to sue as a group.

A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Circuit Judge Denny Chin prematurely certified a class of authors without first deciding if the "fair use" defense under U.S. copyright law allowed Google to display snippets of books.

The three-judge panel also signaled it may prove improper to allow a class action on behalf of potentially hundreds of thousands of writers arguing that the Google Books Library Project improperly copied their works without permission.

"Putting aside the merits of Google's claim that plaintiffs are not representative of the certified class ? an argument which, in our view, may carry some force ? we believe that the resolution of Google's fair use defense in the first instance will necessarily inform and perhaps moot our analysis of many class certification issues," the panel said.

A class action would let The Authors Guild, an association of authors, and others sue as a group rather than individually, potentially resulting in higher awards and lower legal costs.

Google has scanned more than 20 million books after partnering in 2004 with major libraries around the world such as the Harvard University library and the New York Public Library.

The lawsuit began in 2005, and Google has estimated that it could eventually owe more than $3 billion if The Authors Guild, which has demanded $750 for each scanned book, were to prevail.

"We're obviously disappointed," Michael Boni, a lawyer for The Authors Guild, said in a phone interview. "We're going to litigate the fair use now, and that is the shooting match."

Matt Kallman, a Google spokesman, in an emailed statement said the Mountain View, California-based company is "delighted" with the decision.

Google has said its digitization of current and out-of-print works would help researchers and the general public.

It has argued that authors, especially of obscure works, could benefit from the library, and that a case-by-case approach was needed to determine fair use.

"DE FACTO MONOPOLY"

In certifying a class, Chin in May 2012 said it would be unfair to force authors to sue individually given the "sweeping and undiscriminating nature of Google's unauthorized copying."

But the 2nd Circuit panel said several court rulings, including a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision favoring Wal-Mart Stores Inc, might help Google avoid a class action.

It sent the case back to Chin to review fair use issues, and eventually consider class certification again.

In March 2011, Chin had rejected a $125 million settlement, saying it raised copyright and antitrust issues by giving Google a "de facto monopoly" to copy books en masse without permission.

Among the individual plaintiffs is former New York Yankees baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, the author of "Ball Four."

Groups of photographers and graphic artists have also been suing Google over its digitization of their works.

Publishers had also been part of the lawsuit, but settled with Google last October.

The 2nd Circuit panel included Circuit Judges Pierre Leval, Jose Cabranes and Barrington Parker. Chin oversaw the case as a trial judge and kept jurisdiction after joining the 2nd Circuit.

The case is Authors Guild Inc et al v. Google Inc, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-3200.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Sofina Mirza-Reid and Phil Berlowitz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-court-throws-google-digital-books-class-status-140506289.html

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Long-term cannabis use may blunt the brain's motivation system

July 1, 2013 ? Long-term cannabis users tend to produce less dopamine, a chemical in the brain linked to motivation, a study has found.

Researchers found that dopamine levels in a part of the brain called the striatum were lower in people who smoke more cannabis and those who began taking the drug at a younger age.

They suggest this finding could explain why some cannabis users appear to lack motivation to work or pursue their normal interests.

The study, by scientists at Imperial College London, UCL and King's College London, was funded by the Medical Research Council and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

The researchers used PET brain imaging to look at dopamine production in the striatum of 19 regular cannabis users and 19 non-users of matching age and sex.

The cannabis users in the study had all experienced psychotic-like symptoms while smoking the drug, such as experiencing strange sensations or having bizarre thoughts like feeling as though they are being threatened by an unknown force.

The researchers expected that dopamine production might be higher in this group, since increased dopamine production has been linked with psychosis. Instead, they found the opposite effect.

The cannabis users in the study had their first experience with the drug between the ages of 12 and 18. There was a trend for lower dopamine levels in those who started earlier, and also in those who smoke more cannabis. The researchers say these findings suggest that cannabis use may be the cause of the difference in dopamine levels.

The lowest dopamine levels were seen in users who meet diagnostic criteria for cannabis abuse or dependence, raising the possibility that this measure could provide a marker of addiction severity.

Previous research has shown that cannabis users have a higher risk of mental illnesses that involve repeated episodes of psychosis, such as schizophrenia.

"It has been assumed that cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia by inducing the same effects on the dopamine system that we see in schizophrenia, but this hasn't been studied in active cannabis users until now," said Dr Michael Bloomfield, from the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial, who led the study.

"The results weren't what we expected, but they tie in with previous research on addiction, which has found that substance abusers -- people who are dependent on cocaine or amphetamine, for example -- have altered dopamine systems.

"Although we only looked at cannabis users who have had psychotic-like experiences while using the drug, we think the findings would apply to cannabis users in general, since we didn't see a stronger effect in the subjects who have more psychotic-like symptoms. This needs to be tested though.

"It could also explain the 'amotivational syndrome' which has been described in cannabis users, but whether such a syndrome exists is controversial."

Other studies have looked at dopamine release in former cannabis users and not seen differences with people who haven't taken cannabis, suggesting that the effects seen in this study are likely to be reversible.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/G5dWhevvbJA/130701081053.htm

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