Every day, the interwebs is filled with an interminable supply of crap and one cool thing. Like a jet-powered bloodhound, this blog seeks out and posts that one thing. On occasion, nothing interesting is added to the internets. In that case, something old is posted.
President Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders reached historic agreement Sunday night on a compromise to permit vital U.S.borrowing by the Treasury in exchange for more than $2 trillion in long-term spending cuts. The Senate emphatically passed emergency legislation Tuesday to avoid a first-ever government default, rushing the legislation to President Barack Obama for his signature just hours before the deadline.The vote capped an extraordinarily difficult Washington battle pitting Tea Party Republican forces in the House against Obama and Democrats controlling the Senate.
Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said that both his party and opposition Republicans gave more ground than they wanted to.He said it'll take members of both political parties to pass the measure. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the pact "will ensure significant cuts in Washington spending" and he assured the markets that a first-ever default on U.S. obligations won't occur. Check back here for the latest developments.
Ahh, it’s almost Halloween. I don’t know if Halloween was created by a Man or a Woman. If it was created by a Man, it’s so he could see woman dress up like hookers. If it was created by a Woman, it was so they can dress like hookers and not be ashamed of it. Either way, thanks. There is nothing better then seeing beautiful people get in the spirit of Halloween. Girls dressed as the Devil, Woman dressed as Naughty Maids. It makes me wish that Halloween could be a year long Holiday. While everyone deems Halloween to be an evil day, we here at The Netwerk think it’s beautiful!
Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected... It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.
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According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.
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There was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue located in the center of the brain. The ACC is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions — neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit — so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong.
Booking a Flight the Frugal Way is a NYT article by Matt Gross on the latest sites you need to check to find the cheapest flights. If you aren't doing this, you're living in the past!
I've been using Kayak and Farecast for years, but they did drop in a few new sites I'll have to check out.
I like the sliders that Kayak has, we need a giant meta site with moar sliders!
How To Report The News is a BBC video by reporter Chris Booker. We've all seen the "hard hitting" news stories that all follow the same formula- explained in detail here by Chris Booker.
With this as a guide, your future as a field reporter has never been brighter.
Memoir of a former abortion addict is an LA Times news story about Irene Vilar, now a mother of two, who wrote a memoir of about led her to have 15 pregnancies ended.
Exerpt:
"She describes her abortions as part of a misguided quest to free herself from the burdens of a complicated and tragic family, then as part of an immensely dysfunctional dynamic with her first husband, a professor of Latin American literature whom she met at Syracuse University when she was 16 and he was 50.
'We could be a couple as long as I relinquished my desire for children,' she said of her husband, 'a disturbingly handsome man" who taught her that 'families are nests of suffering" and informed her that he preferred young women because they are "unformed . . . unfinished, with not too many wounds.' Children, he told her, were incompatible with freedom. (Her ex-husband, Pedro Cuperman, did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.)
Again and again during their 11-year relationship, she rebelled: 'Forgetting' her birth control pills, she would get pregnant, feel the thrill of self-determination, then panic that she would lose her husband, seek an abortion and collapse in relief and despair.
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'I can completely understand the discomfort that some feminists feel,' said feminist author Robin Morgan, who wrote the book's foreword. 'There is a perfectly human tendency to say we can't afford ambiguity, we can't afford nuance. I am afraid it comes from years of being pummeled by the extreme, anti-choice right. The truth is that it's a complicated issue.' "
Health Care Explained on the Back of a Napkin is a slide show that explains what all the hullaballoo on health care is all about. There are 4 parts, and it's painful but worth the reading. Like your vaccinations! READ IT.
Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T? is an article by David Pogue about how Apple took away the google application that lets you send free text messages and call internationally for cheap.
The Last Abortion Doctor is an Esquire magazine article by John H. Richardson about the last late abortion doctor left in America (Dr. Warren Hern). Pretty dramatic words. I usually try to keep it light on TOTI, but I think we can all agree you shouldn't shoot doctors.
Exerpt:
"The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife's belly, a burden of grief. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated, and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. But the doctors recommended abortion. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialized in late abortions.
They arrived in Wichita on Sunday, May 31. As they drove to their hotel, a Holiday Inn just two blocks from the Reformation Lutheran Church, they saw television cameras. They wondered what was going on, a passing curiosity quickly forgotten.
But when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. Her father was on the line. 'There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions,' he said.
They turned on CNN. Dr. Tiller had just been killed, shot in the head as he passed out church leaflets. In their shock, they mixed up the clinic and the church: We were supposed to be there. What if it had happened while we were there? What if he couldn't complete the procedure?
Now there is only one doctor left.
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This is the day he sees patients for the first of three visits, giving them the seaweed laminaria, which slowly dilates the cervix, and his normal caseload has been doubled by Dr. Tiller's patients — including two with catastrophic fetal abnormalities and a fifteen-year-old who was raped, all in the second trimester, all traumatized by the assassin who calls himself pro-life, a phrase he cannot utter without air quotes and contempt. "
How Different Groups Spend Their Day is an infographic by the New York Times. According to the Gray Lady: "The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
According to Jen, who sent this in:
"This is a prime example of an interesting reseach question, as well as a lesson on graphic design. I don't dispute the results, or the design, just the color choice.
Honestly, the colors chosen represent what I imagine to be the inside of a septic tank, mixed with a barren dessert, and then a dark blue. Still, if you can get past the lack of catchy colors, it's worth looking at."
I loved clicking around. Good find. PS: I was disappointed to find that "Not in lab..." was not actually about the 5% of time scientists are sleeping at home.
I would print out and place this very picture in my wallet right now, if only I hadn't just burnt my father's new printer due to my forgetting that the printer is 110V, and the wall plugs here are 220V. WHOOPS.
Auto-Tune the News is a YouTube series that takes television news media clips and melodifies them with auto-tune. (Yes. Yes I did just verbify that noun. Agains.)
This particular episode (#6) deals with a jobs bill, Sarah Palin's resignation non-speech, and Michael Jackson's death.
From my friend Stef:
"This reminds me of those songs you posted a while ago that used auto tune. I think these guys are pretty talented! It's interesting to see how regular speech has such musical rhythm! Check it out."
De-Classified:The Real People Behind Craigslist Ads is a photojournalism piece by Mark Andrew on nerve.com. Basically, Mark went out and responded to the ads, and photographed the posters. You know you always wanted to know who was posting those crazy things. The photography is great, and the layout tasteful. A+ project.
Mark Andrew is the resident photographer of the National Museum of Dance and the New York Institute of Dance & Education. So far as we know, Mark did not get killed in this venture.
YES!!! This one goest out to all the dispatchers and EMS personnel who have ever dealt with a bullshit call. I don't think enough people know that you can get arrested for 9-1-1 abuse. Now you know, and the more you know... :)
End Times is a Daily Show segment where correspondent Jason Jones visited the office of The New York Times, interviewed Times executive editor Bill Keller and assistant managing editor Richard L. Berke, and mocked their aged news, lack of revenue, and landline phones. It was heartbreaking to watch. Like kicking a dog while it's down.
Given that “The Daily Show” is dependent on other news media to provide you with your fodder, is it counterproductive to help bring down an organization that supplies your content? I think the point of the piece is, really, if I could be serious for one moment, that without institutions like yours, the news would not exist. I think everyone has a genuine love of your institution here, because it’s the first paper that almost everybody reads here in the morning. You guys aren’t doing a bad enough job for us to make fun of on a constant basis. Every once in a while you slip up, and then you’re lambs to the slaughter. But you should really be more [terrible]. You’re doing too good of a job.
Why do I get the sense you’re just buttering me up, and your actual report will be much more scathing? Exactly.
The dark side of Dubai is an article by Johann Hari about the slave-underclass of Dubai. This article will make you sick. If it doesn't, your soul is in desperate peril.
I had heard about the wage based on race thing from a travel nurse before. There are so many sad labor and human rights violations mentioned I don't know where to begin expressing sorrow or outrage. Choice quotes:
"As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. 'But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,' he said. 'Well, then you'd better get to work,' they replied.
Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.
He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is 'unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night.' At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.
The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. 'It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink,' he says.
The work is 'the worst in the world,' he says. 'You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer.'
He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.
Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. 'Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported.' Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.
The 'ringleaders' were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. 'How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets...' He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: 'I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings.'
Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. 'We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison.'
This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.
Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: 'There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'.' Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a 'cover-up of the true extent' of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
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Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: 'All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world.' She adds: 'It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month.'
With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.
It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.
In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is 'terrifying' for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. 'They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless.'
This is not to mention the environmental disaster:
If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. 'At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil...' he shakes his head. 'We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive.'
...
'It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately – but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing.'
The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. 'They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off.' She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.
Suddenly, it was an open secret – and the municipal authorities finally acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. 'It's got chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic.'
She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. 'Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out,' they said. She says: 'The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!' There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.
'What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about the environment,' she says, standing in the stench. 'They're pumping toxins into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal with them – deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a total disaster.' As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land."
Bonus: ABC video coverage. A little long, so I would skip to 9 minutes 12 seconds if you're short on time.
According to Improv Everywhere's, April Fool Funeral article, New York's CW local news affiliate saw Improv Everywhere's "Best Funeral Ever" prank and reported it as fact:
"If you haven’t figured it out by now, 'The Best Funeral Ever' mission was staged for April Fool’s Day. The 'family members' were all actors and friends of Improv Everywhere. Next week we will post a new report with photo and video outtakes from the day. We staged a few over-the-top moments that were just too ridiculous to keep the video believable. Our apologizes to those who were fooled into thinking we had lost our minds and done something this horrendous. If you haven’t read the comments yet, do yourself a favor and read a few. They are probably funnier than the hoax itself.
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So basically the extent of [CW's] reporting is watching a video on YouTube and then describing it as fact on air. They didn’t bother to email Improv Everywhere for comment, call the cemetery to verify, or try to get a quote from the 'family.' They just watched the video and threw it on TV. Great journalism!"
Clearly, in terms of reputation as a news source, both the CW and Improv Everywhere fall somewhere between The National Enquirer and Weekly World News. So I hope this isn't the world's most meta/protracted April Fool's joke ever. I mean, I'm not fact checking this either. And I'm just posting it. *Fingers crossed*
The Yelp Tee is an article on 7x7 about Pizzeria Delfina and their snazzy new publicity stunt T-shirts. According to the article, Pizzeria Delfina, "made Yelp their bitch and taken quotes from one-star reviews posted on Yelp about the pizzeria and made them into T-shirts for their staff to wear. "
Snarking on the snark, I like it. I also like that the stub-of-an article included bad reviews about its own publication. Namely:
"Following are some of 7x7's better one-star reviews on Yelp.
1. 'This magazine is whiter than my ass cheeks in January!'
2. 'San Francisco Paris Hilton wannabies now have a handbook.'
3. 'Nice bathroom material... Though it chafes if you don't work the paper in fully.'
4. 'It actually burns my eyes if I dare to read it.' "
