June 3
“Sexual orientation does make you poor,” says Manohar Elavarthi, a community organizer with Sangama in Bangalore. “Poverty is not just economic – you miss access to so many things: ration cards, inheritance rights, voter ID cards.” In several South Asian countries, there are reports that LGBT people have even been denied access to disaster relief. And homophobia is intricately connected with other divisions in South Asian societies, particularly around gender but also religion and caste.
Yet I saw many signs of hope and change in both India and Nepal. Those transgender sex workers in Chennai have organized a coalition, called V-CAN, of every single community-based organization in the state of Tamil Nadu that serves homosexual or transgender people. Working with the NGO Praxis, they have been able to gain access to some public benefits, such as pensions and registering as “third gender” on government ID cards. Activists in Nepal’s Blue Diamond Society have achieved similar results and more. ~
World Bank blog post
posted by infini at 10:55 AM - 1 comment
"
Such are the exquisite sensitivities that surround every detail in the creation of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which is being built on land that many revere as hallowed ground. During eight years of planning, every step has been muddied with contention. There have been bitter fights over the museum’s financing, which have delayed its opening until at least next year, as well as continuing arguments over its location, seven stories below ground; which relics should be exhibited; and where unidentified human remains should rest. Even the souvenir key chains to be sold in the gift shop have become a focus of rancor. But nothing has been more fraught than figuring out how to tell the story."
posted by davidjmcgee at 9:27 AM - 49 comments For more than two years, scholars and imaging scientists have been using advanced scanning techniques to recover the mostly illegible contents of an 1871 field diary kept by the British explorer David Livingstone in Africa. Low on paper and ink, the explorer had resorted to writing on newspaper sheets, with ink made from berries, and over time the original document had become almost impossible to read. Now the team has unveiled an online “multispectral critical edition” with images, transcriptions, and relevant notes, making Livingstone’s first-person account accessible again. They’ve also created a “Livingstone Spectral Images Archive” to give anyone who wants it direct access to the images, transcriptions, and metadata the project has created, no strings attached. Almost everything in both the edition and the archive comes with a Creative Commons license that allows the contents to be reused with attribution. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:41 AM - 6 comments
Colin Lionel Emm, known to the world as
Richard Dawson,
has died.
[more inside]
posted by evilcolonel at 8:07 AM - 49 comments Pete Cosey dead at 68. Though he had a career as a session guitarist prior to and had some important appearances after, Cosey is most well known for his brief time playing with Miles Davis (1973 - 1975) during an era of Miles' that has at times confounded critics*. Cosey appeared on
Get Up with It, Dark Magus, Agharta and
Pangaea with Miles.
[more inside]
posted by safetyfork at 7:52 AM - 10 comments
What Would Khaleesi Wear [.tumblr.com] Because Daenerys Targaryen is the blood of the dragon.
posted by Fizz at 7:46 AM - 17 comments
You may remember the sounds your old dial-up modem used to make, but do you know why it was making those sounds and what was happening during each part? The Atlantic explains
the Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound.
posted by bjrn at 1:38 AM - 36 comments June 2
FaceTracker is an example of a complex technique that builds on top of a series of computer vision, image processing, and machine learning functions in order to achieve its result. Here's an interview with Kyle McDonald, artist and researcher in New York with a background in computer science and philosophy. He released
FaceOSC, a tool for prototyping face-based interaction. Kyle has a growing body of work that uses face tracking in an artistic context, notably
Face Substitution.
posted by netbros at 9:22 PM - 10 comments
Catcopter. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their helicopters, or why.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 5:46 PM - 83 comments
The US
has lost a quarter of its high-tech jobs since 2000, the number declining by 687,000. A veteran headhunter
opines on the causes:
The technical jobs in Silicon Valley are hard to fill with Americans...I get email every day from new grads, asking for help finding jobs, but honestly, most are Indian or Chinese, not many Americans. He cites a
NYT article which claims that the reason iPhone manufacturing doesn't happen in the US is that
Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
posted by shivohum at 3:13 PM - 94 comments Mechwarrior online From
Piranha Games and
Infinite Game Publshing. After waiting for the "stars to align" properly, have aquired the rights to reboot the
Mechwarrior series as a somewhat free to play online game. There is a Founders pack and Elite pack if you want to shell out the money, but the basic game is free to play.
[more inside]
posted by Redhush at 2:52 PM - 53 comments
The Costa Concordia ran onto rocks and capsized last year. It's been sitting there ever since. A consortium of
Titan Salvage and
Mericoperi have just gotten approval for
a plan to refloat it and take it to an Italian port to be scrapped. The project is just beginning and it's expected to be finished in about a year.
[more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:48 PM - 21 comments On May 18, after a hearing with the Superintendent of
Edmonton Public Schools, Lynden Dorval was
suspended for insubordination after repeatedly refusing to comply with his school's
Grading Policy (PDF).
This has sparked
outrage and
discussion about high school grading policies.
Opponents of the "no-zero" policy claim that it does not prepare students for real life, while the Superintendent of EPSB, Edgar Schmidt, claims that it helps the School District achieve it's goal for
"more students to complete high school".
The 35-year veteran teacher
expects to be fired for his position on the grading policy.
posted by Amity at 10:48 AM - 102 comments 29/31 by Garfunkel and Oates (the sensational Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci), a song about the same woman from a perspective two years apart.
(some NSFW language) [previously 1, 2] [via]
posted by quin at 8:02 AM - 39 comments
The gas station of the future? With ten million in venture capital and more that twenty million in dollars in grants, the fueling station of the future does not offer electricity or natural gas.
posted by vozworth at 7:40 AM - 38 comments
At least the South Africans acknowledged the ownership of 400,000 square miles of South Africa by the original native inhabitants. We would regard [Ian Smith, the then Prime Minister of Rhodesia] as going entirely berserk in Rhodesia if he acknowledged no native land rights at all. But the position in Australia is that we acknowledge no native land rights whatever. We took the lot with our proclamations of sovereignty.
That complaint, made by Mr Beazley MP in 1967, was corrected
twenty years ago on 3 June 1992, when the High Court of Australia found that "
the common law of this country recognizes a form of native title", overturning the doctrine of terra nullius that had held since the 1830s.
[more inside]
posted by kithrater at 7:38 AM - 23 comments The photograph of 9 year old
Phan Thi Kim Phuc (often referred to as the "napalm girl"), taken nearly 40 years ago on June 8th in 1972 by press photographer Nick Ut, won a Pulitzer Prize at the time and became one of the most important images from the Vietnam War era.
[more inside]
posted by HuronBob at 6:41 AM - 39 comments
The Global Middle Class Is Bigger Than We Thought A new way of measuring prosperity has enormous implications for geopolitics and economics.[...] the number of passenger cars in circulation serves as the most reliable gauge we have about the size of a country's middle class.
posted by infini at 6:40 AM - 25 comments
It all comes down to race. Michael Tesler, expanding upon the research of his mentor David Sears, has found racial bias to be a strong indicator of people's opinions on a myriad of political and other issues. The effect extended even to issues that normally would be the most stable and to opinions that would seem divorced from politics.
[more inside]
posted by caddis at 4:58 AM - 32 comments
After
a year without Mubarak, Egypt is about to get a much longer reprieve: the 84-year-old former president has been
sentenced to life in prison for his role in the deaths of protestors during last year's popular uprising. The former Interior Minister—though not his aides—will also be cooling his heels in a Cairo jail. The effects of this news on
national elections, with runoffs to be held in just a few weeks, remains to be seen.
posted by whitewall at 2:33 AM - 10 comments June 1
The Indian Memory Project "is an online, curated, visual and oral-history based archive that traces a personal history of the Indian Subcontinent, its people, cultures, professions, cities, development, traditions, circumstances and their consequences." See for example,
Sarees, or
Migration.
posted by dhruva at 7:21 PM - 3 comments
Mets pitcher
Johan Santana has
just thrown the first no-hitter in the fifty-year history of the New York Mets.
posted by Fister Roboto at 6:56 PM - 49 comments DC Comics hinted recently that one of its first-tier superheroes would be revealed as gay, and
here he is: Alan Scott,
the original Green Lantern (...sort of). [more inside]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:04 PM - 123 comments Anniina, the editor of
Luminarium, makes
beautiful cookies that look like medieval illuminated initials: "I chose
historiated initials from several manuscripts, printed them on edible paper with edible ink, attached them to square cookies and gave them gold edges. Who says love of literature and art can't fill a belly?!"
[more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:50 PM - 13 comments The NYT published an article this week covering a new "
digital divide" where poor children are spending more time "wasting time" online.
[more inside]
posted by momochan at 1:00 PM - 47 comments While reading an e-book copy of
War and Peace on his Nook, North Carolina blogger Philip
noticed a minor glitch in the text: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern." He ignored it and moved on, but then encountered a similar error shortly thereafter. As it turned out, the word "kindle" had been systematically replaced by "Nook" throughout the whole book.
[more inside]
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:34 PM - 66 comments "The judge in the
George Zimmerman [who is accused of killing teenager Trayvon Martin] second-degree murder trial revoked his bond today and ordered him to surrender himself in 48 hours. Prosecutors had filed a motion today seeking to revoke his bond and accusing Zimmerman of 'deceiving' the court about his finances and his possession of a second passport, which he apparently acquired two weeks after the shooting....In conversations Zimmerman and his wife speak in code -- reducing the amounts in their financial accounts by a factor of 1,000. Prosecutors said the couple knew that their jailhouse conversations were likely being recorded. The new documents show that Zimmerman had $135,000 in his bank account the day before his bail hearing -- in which he declared himself financially indigent."
Zimmerman has 48 hours to turn himself in.
posted by ericb at 11:55 AM - 151 comments Books Received is the latest post in a series by BLDGBLOG about interesting books that have crossed their desk. Previously:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5
posted by Cloud King at 11:36 AM - 3 comments
Mention the British record label
4AD, and some significant band names usually come to mind:
Bauhaus,
Dead Can Dance,
Cocteau Twins,
Pixies, and
The Birthday Party, to name a few. There is no singular "4AD sound," but there is
an overall aesthetic, with some off-shoots into unusual territory (see:
M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume). Recently, 4AD added another off-shoot to their roster:
South Florida producer and MC, SpaceGhostPurrp. Purrp took a moment and
talked with MtvHive about his decision to sign with 4AD, his current work, and growing up in Miami. More of 4AD and SPVCXGHXZTPVRRP inside.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:37 AM - 38 comments In the 1950s,
Maurice Stokes was a superstar basketball player for the
Rochester (later Cincinnati) Royals. Stokes was Rookie of the Year and an NBA All-Star in each of his three seasons, trailing only Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson in scoring. But at age 24, a brain injury sustained in the last game of the 1958 season left him almost completely paralyzed. With his teammate alone in an unfamiliar city,
Jack Twyman became his guardian and advocate. Stokes died in 1970, after years of care and friendship with the Twyman family;
Jack Twyman [NYT]
died yesterday. [more inside]
posted by Madamina at 10:31 AM - 10 comments Flash Friday: Written for
Ludlum Dare 23,
Super Strict Farmer is a flash game that plays like a light version of the popular Eurogame Agricola. If you have trouble figuring out how to play, the rules are in the comment thread.
[more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:00 AM - 20 comments « Older posts
