May 17, 2015
Fake Diplomas, Real Cash: Pakistani Company Axact Reaps Millions
“We host one of the most renowned faculty in the world,” boasts a woman introduced in one promotional video as the head of a law school. “Come be a part of Newford University to soar the sky of excellence.”
Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.
In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.Declan Walsh for The New York Times
A board stretcher, hammer grease, and a gallon of striped paint!
Pupsi Blue
The complete 1973-1976 original run of Wacky Packages [WIKI]: all sixteen series, including hard-to-find cards, with each card cross-indexed and contextualized, with occasional links to rough drafts. Sometimes Topps spoofed themselves. Sometimes they didn't make much sense. A lot of times, they're racist. • The gum is the final frontier of the serious collector.
Compostable Infrastructure
Check out the projects at this year's Stupid Hackathon across categories such as Disrupting The Body, Servitude-As-A-Service, and the Stealing Economy.
because a single traveller can't see it all
If only someone was brave enough to open the door to men
Public Radio Host and Metafilter's own Jesse Thorn apologizes for his sexist statements that men aren't funny.
Cuba has more than sugar and tourism: biotech and lung cancer vaccine
In 1989, Cuba conducted over 80% of its trade with Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CEMA, or Comecon), but with the relatively abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba was suddenly in a very tough economic position. Over the next years, the country focused on three key economies: sugar, tourism and biotechnology (Google books preview). While the first two seem logical enough, the story of biotech in Cuba, especially Havana at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), is getting more attention recently with Cuba's possible therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. [more inside]
Conservatives drank heavily from the Fox waters
How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics by Bruce Bartlett
The creation of Fox News in 1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical importance... This has had profound political implications that are only starting to be appreciated.
The creation of Fox News in 1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical importance... This has had profound political implications that are only starting to be appreciated.
Car bullets trump real bullets
Mods for GTA 5 are everywhere, but this could be the best yet. Watch the "Vehicle Cannon" wreak havoc on buildings, people, other cars... Two videos within. One NSFW.
Epic Rap B^hCattle
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this (c)
Expansive Thoughts, a Tweet Splitter/Separator - Split messages and comments into 140 character chunks. Completely free, no sign-in required, and imgur-friendly. From Mefite royalsong via MetaFilter Projects. [more inside]
Trade's Transitional Time
The Untold Story of Silk Road
An aberration that came with the advent of agriculture
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
Who is dying and why?
“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “kill list” validated, the drones do the rest. [more inside]
Carpe Atmospherum
YouTube Musicians Are Doing It For Themselves
It started with Scopitones in bars, then people Wanted Their MTV or watched Friday Night Videos or let their videos Pop Up.
The common thread? All that production and distribution took giant piles of money that generally could only come from Big Labels.
Then came the march of technology: mp3, mpg, h.264, iTunes, Garage Band, Final Cut, dSLR, and all the rest. Now, not content to just share self-made mp3 audio, the current batch of YouTube musicians are making ever more elaborate music videos, and growing a big audience, without a major label in sight.
And then there were the wife bonuses
It was easy for me to fall into the belief, as I lived and lunched and mothered with more than 100 of them for the better part of six years, that all these wealthy, competent and beautiful women, many with irony, intelligence and a sense of humor about their tribalism, were powerful as well. But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized, there was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men.
Poor Little Rich Women (NYT Op-Ed)
Police Bodycams Hit Toronto
By the end of May, 100 Toronto police officers across the city will be wearing the increasingly popular policing tool [more inside]
IDAHO Day
"The Day represents an annual landmark to draw the attention of decision makers, the media, the public, opinion leaders and local authorities to the alarming situation faced by lesbian, gay, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people and all those who do not conform to majority sexual and gender norms.
May 17 is now celebrated in more than 130 countries, including 37 where same-sex acts are illegal, with 1600 events reported from 1280 organizations in 2014. These mobilisations unite millions of people in support of the recognition of human rights for all, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression."
Dash cam video from tiny vehicles yet to be operational
If productivity improves, that is morally good.
"But the problem runs much deeper, because Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the implicit and explicit narrative of progress companies use for marketing and that people use to find meaning in their work. By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies."
"their intimate, closely guarded songs from home, camp and ghetto"
The Stonehill Jewish Song Collection is a website by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance containing songs sung by Jewish refugees in Hotel Marseilles in New York in 1948. All songs include the original lyrics and translations into English. Not all the songs have been digitized and translated already, but there is a variety of themes already, with more on the way soon. The songs were collected and recorded by Ben Stonehill who went to the refugees and asked them to sing anything they like.
Arguing against Captain America is always wrong
At a certain point during the critics’ screening of “Avengers: Age of Ultron”—I believe it was when Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) decided that it was more important to grab three people out of a collapsing tenement than focus on the world-ending event only he had the technical know-how to stop—I wrote “Oh, [expletive deleted] the civilians, get on with it” in my notebook.In the Washington Post, Sonny Bunch argues Man of Steel had a more realistic, mature view of superheroics than Avengers: Age of Ultron with its focus on protecting civilians. [more inside]
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