R.E.M Wolves Lower

[ed. Repost taken down some time ago on YouTube but back up again. Check it out while you can (who knows how long it'll be available). An amazing performance early in R.E.M's career.]

Yo! Sushi Drone Delivery

[ed. God help us.]

Chunks of prawn cracker are flying through the air, next comes an ominous crash. It's not the best start, but this, I am told, is the latest innovation in food delivery – service by drone.

With their reputation as controversial killing machines, it's not the most obvious fit, but food outlets seem intent on proving such warlike techonology has an altogether more civilised use – if only they could get them to behave. Earlier this month, Domino's Pizza released a video of what it called its "DomiCopter", a pizza-delivering lightweight aircraft – and now YO! Sushi  is developing its "first flying serving tray", to be rolled out next year. It has a lightweight carbon fibre frame with four propellors, two fixed cameras and its own Wifi connection, and is controlled using an iPad app. But when I visit the chain's Soho restaurant to have a look at how the trial is going, there are a few teething problems.

Not yet capable of carrying the weight of the burger it was designed to serve, it is being tested outside with polysterene food and prawn crackers. But the inexperienced pilot is finding it hard to get it off the ground, and almost impossible to control once it's hovering.

Instead of flying serenely in front of him and landing gently on the table, the machine drunkenly lurches around at knee height, crashing into camera tripods and chairs or just the ground, as the pilot mutters darkly about the wind factor and low batteries. Its rotor blades are said to be powerful enough to speed it along at 20mph, at a range of 50m, but they also mean that when the tray tilts and the prawn crackers fall out they are chopped and sprayed through the area.

by Homa Khaleeli, The Guardian | Read more:

Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Elena Montemurro

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America's 50 Worst Charities Rake in Nearly $1 billion for Corporate Fundraisers

The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday.

Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.

Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.

Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.

In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms.

No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time.

But Kids Wish is not an isolated case, a yearlong investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Using state and federal records, the Times and CIR identified nearly 6,000 charities that have chosen to pay for-profit companies to raise their donations.

Then reporters took an unprecedented look back to zero in on the 50 worst — based on the money they diverted to boiler room operators and other solicitors over a decade.

These nonprofits adopt popular causes or mimic well-known charity names that fool donors. Then they rake in cash, year after year.

The nation's 50 worst charities have paid their solicitors nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years that could have gone to charitable works.

Until today, no one had tallied the cost of this parasitic segment of the nonprofit industry or traced the long history of its worst offenders.

Among the findings:

• The 50 worst charities in America devote less than 4 percent of donations raised to direct cash aid. Some charities give even less. Over a decade, one diabetes charity raised nearly $14 million and gave about $10,000 to patients. Six spent nothing at all on direct cash aid.

• Even as they plead for financial support, operators at many of the 50 worst charities have lied to donors about where their money goes, taken multiple salaries, secretly paid themselves consulting fees or arranged fundraising contracts with friends. One cancer charity paid a company owned by the president's son nearly $18 million over eight years to solicit funds. A medical charity paid its biggest research grant to its president's own for-profit company.

• Some nonprofits are little more than fronts for fundraising companies, which bankroll their startup costs, lock them into exclusive contracts at exorbitant rates and even drive the charities into debt. Florida-based Project Cure has raised more than $65 million since 1998, but every year has wound up owing its fundraiser more than what was raised. According to its latest financial filing, the nonprofit is $3 million in debt.

• To disguise the meager amount of money that reaches those in need, charities use accounting tricks and inflate the value of donated dollar-store cast-offs — snack cakes and air fresheners — that they give to dying cancer patients and homeless veterans.

Over the past six months, the Times and CIR called or mailed certified letters to the leaders of Kids Wish Network and the 49 other charities that have paid the most to solicitors.

Nearly half declined to answer questions about their programs or would speak only through an attorney.

Approached in person, one charity manager threatened to call the police; another refused to open the door. A third charity's president took off in his truck at the sight of a reporter with a camera. (...)

To identify America's 50 worst charities, the Times and CIR pieced together tens of thousands of pages of public records collected by the federal government and 36 states. Reporters started in California, Florida and New York, where regulators require charities to report results of individual fundraising campaigns.

The Times and CIR used those records to flag a specific kind of charity: those that pay for-profit corporations to raise the vast majority of their donations year in and year out.

The effort identified hundreds of charities that run donation drives across the country and regularly give their solicitors at least two-thirds of the take. Experts say good charities should spend about half that much — no more than 35 cents to raise a dollar.

For the worst charities, writing big checks to telemarketers isn't an anomaly. It's a way of life.

by Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart, Tampa Bay Times |  Read more:

Photo: AP
See the rest of the series:
Part 2: The Failure of Regulation
Part 3: The Reynolds Family Empire

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'Jurassic Park' Is The Perfect Movie And Explains Everything About The Amazing World Of Science

On June 11th, 1993, I had my one and only "religious experience." It began, as is tradition, by staring into the cold hard eye of a raptor. It lasted for 127 minutes, in which I was in a complete state of raptor—sorry, rapture (these words are synonyms to me). I emerged from the movie theatre a changed person. I was like Saint Paul after he fell off his horse and realized, "Holy crap, Jesus is a god-man-thing!" Only my revelation was about dinosaurs, and so is obviously superior.

I had borne witness to the birth of Jurassic Park. I had seen it bite through the fence of public anticipation and burst into the public sphere. And oh, how it bellowed.

I was 8, but I remember how completely earth-shattering this film was right away. My friends and family laughed off my obsession, and chalked it up to childhood dinophilia. Exactly 20 years later, I have signed portraits of the characters framed all over my room, two sets of Jurassic Park toys splayed across my work desk, and all of the dialogue of the movie memorized (and that includes the dinosaurs' "lines"). So who's laughing now? Answer: Ian Malcolm, like this.

To say that Jurassic Park is my favorite movie would be like saying Earth is my favorite planet. These are prejudices over which I have no control. I love the movie's subtle foreshadowing, such as the helicopter landing scene in which Alan Grant—that's Sam Neil as the paleontologist—has two female seatbelt buckles that won't connect. But Dr. Grant finds a way (just like the dinosaurs' lil gametes). I love how Jeff Goldblum makes a tyrannosaur bite look really sexy. I love that when Jurassic Park owner John Hammond is forced to cut the tour short, he whines, "Why didn't I build in Orlando?" This throwaway line summons magical visions of raptors and Rexes marauding around the Magic Kingdom eating Mickey mascots off of Porta Potties. People on the Jurassic Park theme park ride wouldn't know what the Fukuiraptor was going on! Makers of Jurassic Park 4, take note: this alternate universe is where you should set your movie.

The minor characters of JP are also beyond phenomenal. For example, Robert Muldoon, the game warden, who has spent months embroiled in crazy staring contests with raptors, and it completely shows. By the time we meet him, he's too far-gone into this weird rivalry with the "big one" in the pride, like he's slowly losing his soul to her or something. Indeed, one of the great insights of the movie is that Grant learned more about raptors by studying them as wild animals than Muldoon learned by observing them in captivity. If only Muldoon had overheard Grant's take-down of that bratty kid at the beginning, he might have understood the most important thing about raptors—they attack from the side. Clever girls.

I'm even an apologist for the movie's many mistakes. I mean, the Rex footsteps' produce these monstrous impact tremors, but when she arrives to save the day at the end, she literally materializes out of nowhere. It definitely makes you wonder if she learned to tiptoe. Also, could Dennis Nedry, the park's computer programmer, have made a more suspicious exit speech? Would that even be possible? Try to sweat and stutter a little more there, guy. And did you notice that the embryo vials for Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus were both spelled wrong? I think that screw-up might actually be intentional, a subtle endorsement of Malcolm's criticism of how Hammond slaps stuff on lunchboxes before he even knows what he has. Indeed, if you watch the movie closely, you can see that Hammond's charismatic hypocrisy is a running gag. My favorite example is that he claims to be present for every raptor birth as it helps them to, no joke, "trust" him. Cut to: the highest security paddock in the park. Because trust.

But I digress, and on this subject, I always will. So let's get down to the meat, which is what the dinosaurs would want. What I really love about Jurassic Park is that it is about everything. Or at least, it's about the everything of science, and that is the most interesting kind of everything.

by Becky Ferreira, The Awl | Read more:
"Electric Rex" is by Kyle McCoy

Must Cats Die So Birds Can Live?

Inside an animal-lover civil war.

All winter, Peter Marra’s children had been pestering him to get a cat. It was ironic, he thought as he walked up the snowy path to his modern farmhouse in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Especially now, when the country’s cat lobby had him pegged as the Josef Mengele of felines. In his years as a research scientist at the Smithsonian Zoo’s Migratory Bird Center, Marra had produced many studies on different threats to bird life, like glass buildings and wind turbines, but none received as much attention as those featuring cats. Since its publication in the January issue of the journal Nature Communications, his team’s paper, “The Impact of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” which placed the number of birds felled by felines at 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion per year, had been picked up by most major media outlets, including the New York Times. Marra was proud, although when he saw the front-page headline, “That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,” accompanied by a photo of a tabby with its jaws clenched around the neck of a rabbit, he braced himself for an onslaught.

Sure enough, the reaction from Alley Cat Allies, the country’s most powerful cat group, was swift and furious. “This study is part of a continuing propaganda campaign to vilify cats,” railed the group’s president, Becky Robinson, in a press release that, to the Smithsonian’s intense displeasure, made use of an incident in which one of Marra’s researchers was accused of cat poisoning to bolster a long-running claim that his group’s work was “a veiled promotion by bird advocates to ramp up the mass killing of outdoor cats.” (...)

People love cats. Always have. The remains of Felis catus, small carnivorous mammals descended from Near Eastern wildcats, have been found in 10,000-year-old Cypriot graves and mummified by the Egyptians, who worshipped them. They’ve been the subject of poetry by fourteenth-century Thai monks, Victorian etchings, and many an Internet meme. At first, people kept cats around for their hunting skills—the ancient Greeks used them to police grain silos for vermin the same way New York City bodegas use them to keep mice away from the cornflakes. But mostly, it was because they’re cute. Cats have those aw-inspiring pedomorphic qualities—big eyes, round foreheads, snubby noses—that trigger a nurturing instinct in humans, and they can convey an almost human intelligence, as anyone who has ever found themselves in a staring contest with one can attest. Still, for every person who sees mute understanding in a cat’s eyes, another finds them creepy. Cats are strangely polarizing beasts, as capable of inspiring hatred as love. Those who dislike them see them as sneaky, moody, manipulative, even off-puttingly feminine. But to the majority, cats are beloved. Currently, nearly 90 million occupy roughly one third of American homes, and while modern cat owners might not use the word worship regarding their pets, there are signs that we are again living in an age of cat deification, the most obvious being that we allow them to poop in boxes inside of our homes.

While people are clearly committed to their cats, it’s not always clear that cats feel the same way. While they may be coerced into wearing a baby bonnet or playing the piano, they generally defy direction—hence the expression “herding cats.” They tend to give the impression of having their own lives, and because cats, unlike dogs, aren’t required to be licensed or leashed, many owners indulge them, allowing them to come and go as they please. (...)

“The population has tripled over the past 40 years. Tripled,” says George Fenwick. Wild of eye and George Lucas of hair, Fenwick runs the American Bird Conservancy, an organization he founded back in the early nineties after watching his neighbor’s cat decimate his backyard bird population. While birds are the group’s primary focus, cats are a close second. An early campaign, Cats Indoors!, encouraged cat owners to keep their pets inside, and the animals remain a bête noire. The killer instinct that makes them valuable in controlled circumstances, the Conservancy argues, is a liability on the streets, where increasing numbers of ferals are wiping out other species. “For every cat on the street, 200 birds are killed annually,” says Fenwick, a font of such information. Sitting in the ABC office above a Chinese restaurant in Washington, he rattles off types at risk: ground-nesters like California least terns, cardinals, house wrens, endangered species like piping plovers. “The important thing to remember is that even when they are fed, they still kill,” he adds. “They kill for fun.” Fenwick likens cats, who were introduced to the environment by humans, to invasive species like kudzu in the Northeast or pythons in Florida. “It’s an immense ecological problem,” he says.

It’s a problem without an easy solution, especially when more and more animal shelters are embracing the “no kill” philosophy, in which strays are rehabilitated and put up for adoption. “Socializing” a cat that’s been living on the streets takes a tremendous amount of commitment, and many are beyond it—as Ludacris says, you can’t turn a ho into a housewife—and there are too many of them for the shelters to take in and let linger. Euthanasia was never that effective, so as long as people abandon cats and let them run around unsterilized, the population will keep refreshing itself.

For the past several years, animal activists have been trying something new. Around the time Fenwick was setting up ABC, a former social worker named Becky Robinson was parking her car in Northwest D.C. when she came upon a clowder of strays in an alley. “There were at least 54,” says Robinson, who is tall and lanky with a ruffled pixie haircut. “I could tell they were related because they were all black with a white stripe here,” she says, running her fingers down the front of her shirt. We were sitting in the Maryland offices of Alley Cat Allies, the group she founded after that night to advocate on behalf of what she calls “the forgotten ones,” largely through promoting a practice called “Trap, Neuter, Return.”

As its name suggests, Trap, Neuter, Return—TNR for short—consists of capturing stray cats, having them sterilized, and returning them to the “colony” whence they came. There, they are overseen by volunteers who provide food, water, and handmade shelters. The hypothesis is that once the procreation cycle is curbed, the colony will die out naturally. In the meantime, the feeding and spaying stops the nuisance behavior that irritated the neighbors, who are encouraged to think of them as “community cats.” “This is about coexisting,” says Robinson. “This is about compassion. This is about humanity, how we exist, how we interact. This is about respect for life.”

Robinson speaks with a soft Kansas accent and the conviction of a preacher, and over the past two decades, Alley Cat Allies has persuaded the ASPCA, the Humane Society, and sundry nonprofit organizations to officially endorse TNR. Additionally, “at least 300 municipalities have passed some kind of law that embraces it,” she says. Including New York City, which in 2011 passed Local Law 59, sanctioning TNR as a method of feline population control. (...)

Of course, that’s only one way to look at it. “That is, if you’ll pardon my French, complete bullshit,” says Ed Clark, Virginia accent booming across the Upper East Side bistro he’s stopped at on the way to Greenwich, where he’s giving a talk to donors to the Wildlife Center of Virginia, the animal hospital at which he sees, on average, 250 cat-inflicted injuries a year. “Have you ever seen a cat kill a bird?” he asks. “They slice ’em right down the middle.” He traces a line up his stomach. “Whoosh.”

Clark, the voluble onetime host of Animal Planet’s Wildlife Emergency, is part of a group of conservationists who have watched the popularity of TNR escalate with horror. To him and his cohort, its supporters have made a terrible Sophie’s choice: By enabling feral cats to live outside, they’re condemning other creatures to horrific deaths. “They’re wearin’ blinders and whistlin’ in the dark,” he says. “They’re absolving themselves of culpability because they don’t have to see it. They just let it happen outside.”

by Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine | Read more:

Illustration by Bigshot Toyworks

Evelyn De Morgan - Night and Sleep, detail
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Silent War

When the history of cyber-warfare comes to be written, its first sentence may go something like this: “Israel gave the United States an ultimatum.” For a number of years, intelligence reports intermittently indicated that Iran was getting closer to building a nuclear bomb, which the Israeli leadership views as an existential threat. In 2004, Israel gave Washington a wish list of weapons and other capabilities it wanted to acquire. The list—for various kinds of hardware but also for items such as aerial transmission codes, so that Israeli jets could overfly Iraq without having to worry about being shot down by U.S. warplanes—left little doubt that Israel was planning a military attack to stop Iran’s nuclear progress. President George W. Bush regarded such action as unacceptable, while acknowledging that diplomacy and economic sanctions had failed to change Iran’s mind.

Intelligence and defense officials offered him a possible third way—a program of cyber-operations, mounted with the help of Israel and perhaps other allies, that would attack Iran’s nuclear program surreptitiously and at the very least buy some time. As with the drone program, the Obama administration inherited this plan, embraced it, and has followed through in a major way. Significant cyber-operations have been launched against Iran, and the Iranians have certainly noticed. It may be that these operations will eventually change minds in Tehran. But the aramco attack suggests that, for the moment, the target may be more interested in shooting back, and with weapons of a similar kind.

Cyberspace is now a battlespace. But it’s a battlespace you cannot see, and whose engagements are rarely deduced or described publicly until long after the fact, like events in distant galaxies. Knowledge of cyber-warfare is intensely restricted: almost all information about these events becomes classified as soon as it is discovered. The commanding generals of the war have little to say. Michael Hayden, who was director of the C.I.A. when some of the U.S. cyber-attacks on Iran reportedly occurred, declined an interview request with a one-line e-mail: “Don’t know what I would have to say beyond what I read in the papers.” But with the help of highly placed hackers in the private sector, and of current and former officials in the military and intelligence establishments and the White House, it is possible to describe the outbreak of the world’s first known cyber-war and some of the key battles fought so far. (...)

For the U.S., Stuxnet was both a victory and a defeat. The operation displayed a chillingly effective capability, but the fact that Stuxnet escaped and became public was a problem. Last June, David E. Sanger confirmed and expanded on the basic elements of the Stuxnet conjecture in a New York Times story, the week before publication of his book Confront and Conceal. The White House refused to confirm or deny Sanger’s account but condemned its disclosure of classified information, and the F.B.I. and Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of the leak, which is still ongoing. Sanger, for his part, said that when he reviewed his story with Obama-administration officials, they did not ask him to keep silent. According to a former White House official, in the aftermath of the Stuxnet revelations “there must have been a U.S.-government review process that said, This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why did this happen? What mistakes were made, and should we really be doing this cyber-warfare stuff? And if we’re going to do the cyber-warfare stuff again, how do we make sure (a) that the entire world doesn’t find out about it, and (b) that the whole world does not fucking collect our source code?”

In September 2011, another piece of malware took to the Web: later named Gauss, it stole information and login credentials from banks in Lebanon, an Iranian ally and surrogate. (The program is called Gauss, as in Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, because, as investigators later discovered, some internal modules had been given the names of mathematicians.) Three months later, in December, yet another piece of malware began spying on more than 800 computers, primarily in Iran but also in Israel, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa. This one would eventually be named Mahdi, after a reference in the software code to a messianic figure whose mission, according to the Koran, is to cleanse the world of tyranny before the Day of Judgment. Mahdi was e-mailed to individuals who worked in government agencies, embassies, engineering firms, and financial-services companies. In some cases, the Mahdi e-mails bore a Microsoft Word file attachment containing a news article about a secret Israeli-government plan to cripple Iran’s electrical grid and telecommunications in the event of an Israeli military strike. Other Mahdi e-mails came with PowerPoint files containing slides bearing religious images and text. Anyone who received these e-mails and clicked on the attachment became vulnerable to infection that could result in their e-mails, instant messages, and other data being monitored.

Time started running out for all this malware in 2012, when a man from Mali met with a man from Russia on a spring day in Geneva. The man from Mali was Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency. He invited Eugene Kaspersky, the Russian C.E.O. of the cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab, to discuss a partnership to perform forensic analysis on major cyber-attacks—“like a Stuxnet,” as Kaspersky recalls. Kaspersky says that Touré made no explicit mention of Iran, even though Stuxnet was an impetus for the collaboration.

by Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Image: Getty Images

Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Landscape with a Mountain, 1893

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The Glorious Future of Shopping

The other day I ran out of toilet paper. You know how that goes. The last roll in the house sets off a ticking clock; depending on how many people you live with and their TP profligacy, you’re going to need to run to the store within a few hours, a day at the max, or you’re SOL. (Unless you’re a man who lives alone, in which case you can wait till the next equinox.) But it gets worse. My last roll of toilet paper happened to coincide with a shortage of paper towels, a severe run on diapers (you know, for kids!), and the last load of dishwashing soap. It was a perfect storm of household need. And, as usual, I was busy and in no mood to go to the store.

This quotidian catastrophe has a happy ending. In April, I got into the “pilot test” for Google Shopping Express, the search company’s effort to create an e-commerce service that delivers goods within a few hours of your order. The service, which is currently being offered in the San Francisco Bay Area, allows you to shop online at Target, Walgreens, Toys R Us, Office Depot, and several smaller, local stores, like Blue Bottle Coffee. Shopping Express combines most of those stores’ goods into a single interface, which means you can include all sorts of disparate items in the same purchase. Shopping Express also offers the same prices you’d find at the store. After you choose your items, you select a delivery window—something like “Anytime Today” or “Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.”—and you’re done. On the fateful day that I’d run out of toilet paper, I placed my order at around noon. Shortly after 4, a green-shirted Google delivery guy strode up to my door with my goods. I was back in business, and I never left the house.After using it for a few weeks, it’s hard to escape the notion that a service like Shopping Express represents the future of shopping. (Also the past of shopping—the return of profitless late-1990s’ services like Kozmo and WebVan, though presumably with some way of making money this time.) It’s not just Google: Yesterday, Reuters reported that Amazon is expanding AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery service, to big cities beyond Seattle, where it has been running for several years. Amazon’s move confirms the theory I floated a year ago, that the e-commerce giant’s long-term goal is to make same-day shipping the norm for most of its customers. (...)

As I learned while using Shopping Express, the plan could be a hit. If done well, same-day shipping erases the distinctions between the kinds of goods we buy online and those we buy offline. Today, when you think of something you need, you have to go through a mental checklist: Do I need it now? Can it wait two days? Is it worth driving for? With same-day shipping, you don’t have to do that. All shopping becomes online shopping.

But that’s just the start. The longer-term promise of same-day shipping is that it will bring the same revolution to groceries that Amazon once brought to books and music. That advantage is remarkable selection. At supermarkets, shelf space is finite and expensive, which is why you can rarely find everything you need at a single store. Safeway, the big mid-market chain in my neighborhood, suffices for about three-quarters of purchases, but a lot of times I’m looking for specialty goods—higher quality seafood, some specific ethnic spice, fresh roasted coffee beans, high-end local bread, a snooty variety of coconut water—that requires a trip to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, the Chinese or Indian market, or some other out-of-the-way place. (Look, people: First-world problems are still real problems.) Ideally, a single store would carry everything I need, but that’s not possible—there’s just not enough demand for fresh Indian curry leaves or live lobsters for my local Safeway to dedicate the necessary shelf space. But if a store could sell to everyone across a large metropolis, it could pool demand for even low-selling goods. This is the fantasy scenario for same-day shipping: It would create a one-stop shop for everything you’d ever want. It would give you access to the long tail of groceries.

Google and Amazon are trying to solve this problem in slightly different ways. Google’s service doesn’t maintain any local warehouses. Instead, everything you buy comes directly from a local store. To improve efficiency, the system tries to get your goods from the store located closest to your house. (The items I ordered from Target were shipped from a store 6 miles from my house.) Also, unlike AmazonFresh, Google Shopping Express does not yet sell milk, produce, and other perishables, but the company is working on ways to make that possible. It also seems likely that Google will try to expand selection by contracting with lots more retailers. The company seems to be thinking about the program in the same way it thinks about its online advertising system—in the future, any store that wants to join will be able to sign up to sell its goods through the system. In the same way that Google collects a few dollars when it sends a customer to an advertiser’s site on its search engine, Google takes a commission from the store for every purchase made through Shopping Express.

by Farhad Manjoo, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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A Letter to Verizon Customers

Today, President Obama issued the following letter to all Verizon customers:

Dear Verizon Customers,

Yesterday it came to light that the National Security Agency has been collecting millions of phone records from you each and every day. Since that news was released, many of you have called the White House with questions and concerns about this new program. To save my time and yours, here are answers to three of the F.A.Q.s (Frequently Asked Questions) we’ve been hearing from you:

1. Will I be charged extra for this service?

I’m happy to say that the answer is no. While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.

2. If I add a phone to my account, will those calls also be monitored?

Once again, the answer is good news. If you want to add a child or any other family member to your Verizon account, their phone calls—whom they called, when, and the duration of the call—will all be monitored by the United States government, at no additional cost.

3. Can the National Security Agency help me understand my Verizon bill?

Unfortunately, no. The National Security Agency has tried, but failed, to understand Verizon’s bills. Please call Verizon customer service and follow the series of electronic prompts.

by Andy Borowitz, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza

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D-12.Apr.1993 19x39 cm. Pen drawing on parchment, collage 林孝彦. HAYASHI Takahiko. 1993 photo presented by Galerie Tokyo Humanité
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Don’t Take Your Vitamins

Last month, Katy Perry shared her secret to good health with her 37 million followers on Twitter. “I’m all about that supplement & vitamin LYFE!” the pop star wrote, posting a snapshot of herself holding up three large bags of pills. There is one disturbing fact about vitamins, however, that Katy didn’t mention.

Derived from “vita,” meaning life in Latin, vitamins are necessary to convert food into energy. When people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer diseases like scurvy and rickets. The question isn’t whether people need vitamins. They do. The questions are how much do they need, and do they get enough in foods?

Nutrition experts argue that people need only the recommended daily allowance — the amount of vitamins found in a routine diet. Vitamin manufacturers argue that a regular diet doesn’t contain enough vitamins, and that more is better. Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

Another review, published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that in 19 trials of nearly 136,000 people, supplemental vitamin E increased mortality. Also that year, a study of people with vascular disease or diabetes found that vitamin E increased the risk of heart failure. And in 2011, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tied vitamin E supplements to an increased risk of prostate cancer.

Finally, last year, a Cochrane review found that “beta carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A.”

What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.

by Paul A. Offit, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sabine Dowek

Ed Ruscha
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Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed

[ed. The history of soy sauce.]

Directed by Academy Award™ Nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker, Make Haste Slowly: The Kikkoman Creed tells the story of the rich heritage and family creed that shaped Kikkoman for over 300 years.

Isogaba maware is a Japanese axiom that translates into "Make Haste Slowly." It means to advance and grow, but to do so with tremendous thought and care. From its meticulous six-month natural brewing process to a heritage dating back to feudal Japan, Kikkoman has exemplified this philosophy since its humble beginnings in the seventeenth century.

Code Red

It’s 1:30 a.m. An orange extension cord curls out of Carleton Lounge. “It blew out,” an officer tells me. It supplies, or rather did supply, the power for a room of students who flew, bused, trained, or drove in for hackNY’s spring 2013 hackathon.

A hackathon is a 24-hour race to mash your code with other people’s data, and perhaps some hardware, to make something you hope will seem cool and won’t break when you’re onstage the next day, trying to win the approval of nine judges and hundreds of your bleary-eyed peers.

There are prizes—like Sphero, a robotic ball you can control with an Android phone—and money, but nothing more than $1,000. Tumblr and Foursquare are here, as is 4chan’s founder, Christopher Poole, aka “moot.” Most students come with friends; some work alone. Everyone is tired. A student sleeps on a windowsill, a pillow under his head and a pile of clementines at his feet. Another tells me, his blue eyes not blinking, “I’ll sleep whenever I can’t stay awake anymore.”

Twelve hours, 360 Red Bulls, and over 800 cans of soda later, the attendees crowd an auditorium to watch the demos. Some sit on the floor and some wander in and out of the lobby, crushing more free sandwiches into their mouths and backpacks. The smell of BO floats through the back of the room. The boy next to me puts his head in his lap and naps through most of the presentations. He tells me he didn’t sleep last night. His team doesn’t win a single prize.

This is a snapshot of programming at Columbia, where, as in many universities across the country, computer science is booming and hackathons like the one described here are springing up with unprecedented speed. Here, the number of students projected to graduate with a degree in CS has risen 50 percent in the past two years. So has the number of students registered for the introductory class, W1004 (commonly referred to as “ten-oh-four”). On the national level, the Computing Research Association reported an “astonishing” 29.2 percent increase in new computing undergraduate majors.

CS and programming have more widespread appeal than ever before. Startups are frequently acquired for millions of dollars—and sometimes, as in the case of Instagram, for $1 billion. Starting salaries for graduates of top schools are commonly close to six figures. CS has gained cultural appeal through The Social Network, which grossed more than $220 million worldwide. “We’re treated more and more as if we possess superpowers,” explains Sam Aarons, a School of Engineering and Applied Science junior studying CS and the owner of Print@CU. “I can’t even be at a family gathering without somebody asking me if I have any ideas for companies I want to start or if I want to be the next under-25 billionaire.”

Yet the flash and money mask, as they so often do, the sadder stories of loss and failure. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the co-founder of Diaspora, which once threatened Facebook’s stronghold over social media. Aaron Swartz was arguably one of the co-founders of Reddit and led the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself. Zhitomirskiy was 22.

This past February, the Engineering student council released a newsletter containing a short paragraph saying that Tejraj Antooa, a computer science student who was not enrolled at the time, “perished on January 24, 2013 near his home in Elmont, Long Island.” The coroner’s office determined the cause of death was suicide. A flutter of Facebook activity expressed grief and anger, but after an aborted attempt to draft a letter criticizing the seemingly slow-acting administration, the formal conversation on campus ended. There was no memorial service. There was no space for discussion. (...)

What follows is by no means the experience of every undergraduate in the CS department. Not everybody is suffering. Not everybody is overlooked. Instead, these stories are meant to show the perspectives of the alienated or underrepresented who, if they are not merely silenced or told they are “wrong,” are placed on a shelf labeled “We’ll get to that later.”

by Kyla Cheung, The Eye (Columbia Daily Spectator) |  Read more:

Image: Suze Meyers