In Memory of Robin Williams July 21, 1951 - August 11, 2014
Robin McLaurin Williams was an American actor, stand-up comedian, film producer, and screenwriter. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times, Williams received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Good Will Hunting. He also received two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Robin McLaurin Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 21, 1951. His mother, Laura McLaurin, was a former model from Jackson, Mississippi. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams, was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was Mississippi senator and governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams had English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German, and French ancestry.
He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School in nearby Larkspur, California. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Williams left Claremont and attained a full scholarship to the esteemed Juilliard School in New York City. In between Claremont and Juilliard, he attended the College of Marin for theatre.
Yesterday, Robin Williams was found unresponsive at his residence in Marin County, California, and was pronounced dead at the scene.
A short message from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, NBA all-star Chris Bosh, Gabe Newell of Valve, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Elena Silenok of Clothia, and other tech heroes, to inspire students to learn to code. This is a trailer, for a longer 5-min or 10-min short-film, available at http://code.org. Directed by Lesley Chilcott. Executive producers Hadi and Ali Partovi.
Why are Americans able to become outraged about Donald Sterling or Bowe Bergdahl, but not illegal wars of aggression, illegal warrantless wiretapping, banister bailouts or any of the other in-your-face abuses of our current political era? Are there cognitive models for understanding this apathy, and if so, do they provide answers of what to do about it?
Russell Brand's YouTube daily show 'The Trews' where he gives you the true news so you don't have to invest any money in buying newspapers that charge you for the privilege of keeping your consciousness imprisoned in a tiny box of ignorance and lies.
Brand launched the YouTube series "The Trews: True News with Russell Brand" on 27 February 2014, in which Brand "analyses the news, truthfully, spontaneously and with great risk to his personal freedom". The inaugural episode featured Brand critiquing the Daily Mail newspaper, followed by an open invitation to viewers who have suggestions on how the show can be improved. As of 8 April 2014, 29 episodes of "The Trews" have been published on the channel.
Facebook's user manipulation study: Why you should be very afraid
Getting into your head more than you thought: Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (David Ramos / Getty Images)
Facebook just doesn't get it.
The company doesn't get why people are pitching such a fit over the user-manipulation study it conducted in 2012, the details of which broke this weekend. It doesn't get what this says about how it treats its users, and why it may, and should, discourage people from using its service. It doesn't get that its researchers violated widely accepted standards for research on humans, or why that's bad.
It's tone-deaf about the implications. But that's not new. This is just one more example of a reality of the Facebook experience that users keep forgetting. In a nutshell: As a Facebook user, you are not its customer. You are its raw material, which it exploits to make money typically by selling advertising ostensibly keyed to your likes and desires.
Indeed, this entire affair underscores the need for new laws and new regulations governing how companies like Facebook exploit their users--including through invasions of privacy and marketing of personal information to others.
Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg prattles endlessly about bringing the world together via social media. Bosh. As his website's user, you're nothing but a means to an end, and that end has nothing to do with your welfare.
What is now known is that for a week in January 2012, the company manipulated the news feeds on its site of some 700,000 unwitting users for a research study, which has now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Facebook reduced the purportedly positive feeds from some users' "friends," and limited the share of downer posts received by others. The goal was to determine how the differing tone of those feeds affected the subjects.
The researchers, who were one Facebook employee and two colleagues from Cornell University and UC San Francisco, found that the tenor of the news feeds indeed affected the subjects' moods--those with fewer happy posts responded with more glumness in their own status updates, and those with fewer downcast items in their feed expressed, on the whole, more happiness. (The researchers describe the results in bloodlessly academic terms, but that's how it worked out.)
Here's how you should think about this entire affair, and why it might prompt you to reconsider using Facebook at all.
--Facebook violated fundamental guidelines of experimentation on human subjects. It's true that as a private company, Facebook isn't subject to the government's Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, known as the "Common Rule," which applies to federally sponsored research.
That's no excuse. Private companies performing such research customarily adhere to the rule; to the extent they don't have to, that should be rectified by Congress.
The Common Rule requires "informed consent" from human test subjects. Facebook's dodge is that the 689,003 subjects of its study implicitly consented to having their news feeds manipulated by agreeing to the company's data use policy, the latest version of which comprises 9,123 words. Buried in that mess of verbiage is a warning that the company "may use the information we receive about you...for...data analysis, testing, research and service improvement."
The Common Rule, however, defines "informed consent" as requiring--among many other things--that research subjects be told about the nature of the research and "any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts to the subject," and that participation be voluntary and can be ended at any time. Plainly, Facebook's data use policy doesn't come close to "informed consent" as envisioned under the Common Rule. The researchers say the study's subjects were randomly chosen. There's no indication that any were informed in advance or afterward.
How this study got approved by the academic employers of two of the researchers remains mysterious. The editor of the published paper, Princeton's Susan Fiske, told my colleague Matt Pearce in an email that she was "concerned about this ethical issue" in regard to subjects' consent, but observed that Facebook "filters user news feeds all the time, per the user agreement. Thus, it fits everyday experiences for users, even if they do not often consider the nature of Facebook’s systematic interventions."
She told the Atlantic, however, "I'm a little creeped out, too."
--This is sadly typical of Facebook's treatment of its user community. "This is bad, even for Facebook," writes James Grimmelmann of the University of Maryland law school.
Twitter Inc. (TWTR) ’s Ali Rowghani resigned as chief operating officer after a power struggle over responsibilities, said people familiar with the matter, in the biggest executive exit since the microblogging company went public last year.
Rowghani, 41, wanted to keep control over Twitter’s product vision, as well as operations and corporate development, setting up a clash with Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo, who decided to have more of those functions report to him, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the conversations were private.
The exit illustrates Twitter’s rocky internal dynamics as it grapples with growing pains following its initial public offering in November. Rowghani’s job entailed helping Twitter increase members, yet the social media company has experienced decelerating user growth and has struggled to boost people’s engagement with the service. Twitter shares, which rose 3.5 percent today to close at $36.79, are down 42 percent this year.
“If you’ve got too many smart people opining about the same subjects -- perhaps in this case with Twitter about the direction of the growth -- it’s possible that you can have too many cooks in the kitchen,” said Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Nomura Securities. “There are plenty of companies in the Internet industry that don’t have a COO.”
Tesla Model S sedans at the Harris Ranch supercharging station on Interstate 5. (Jerry Hirsch / Los Angeles Times)
Read --> All Our Patent Are Belong To You
The Tesla just became the world’s first open-source car.
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc., said Thursday he was opening up the electric car company’s patents to all comers.
“Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor,” Musk said, “but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”
Former one term president George H.W. Bush Sr., strapped to Sgt 1st Class Mike Elliott, float to the ground during a tandem parachute jump near Bush's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Thursday.
Bush made the jump, his eighth, in celebration of his 90th birthday. In 2009, when he jumped to mark his 85th, his son George W Bush, said: "I think he's a nut to jump." Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP
Research from the University of Chicago indicates that at least 50 percent of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory.
[Audio] - Research from the University of Chicago indicates that at least 50 percent of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory.
Related story: Last updated: September 11th, 2011
The 9/11 conspiracy theories aren't as irrational as you might think http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100104249/the-911-conspiracy-theories-arent-as-irrational-as-you-might-think/
The head of the Federal Communications Commission, former cable and wireless industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler, may have a battle on his hands over his proposal to create two standards of Internet service and end net neutrality. This is welcome news for anyone who believes in an open Internet.
Now is the time to ratchet up the pressure.
So what's happened since Wheeler first floated his plan to move toward a two-tiered Internet – where companies would pay Internet service providers for special "fast lanes" to get to you and me? Quite a bit.
Open-Internet activists have gone universally berserk – in the best possible way – and are planning a series of protests leading up to a scheduled FCC vote on May 15 about whether to push Wheeler's proposal toward official rule-making.
Several influential members of Congress are raising an alarm, too, including Democrats Sen. Al Franken (Minnesota) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (California), who represents part of Silicon Valley. Eshoo pointedly noted that the moves by the Obama-appointed FCC chairman are a flat betrayal of President Obama's 2008 campaign promises.
Two Democratic FCC commissioners have expressed misgivings about the proposal. One of them, Jessica Rosenworcel, has urged a one-month delay in the vote. (Wheeler has said he'll proceed with the vote as scheduled.)
And, somewhat belatedly, a large group of technology companies – along with several major business organizations – have written an open letter to the FCC, saying the two-tier proposals are dangerous to the future of the Internet. Among the signatories were Google, Facebook and Amazon (though one of the letter's organizers, Marvin Ammori, told me that the small and medium-sized companies were the principal drivers in this effort).
The smaller Internet companies asked their users and customers to protest to Congress – but that's not enough. The large companies need to do what they did when they helped kill the odious Stop Online Piracy Act (which would have eliminated so-called "safe harbor" provisions and made every company legally responsible for any user's post). Back then, companies large and small demonstrated what might happen were the law to pass by going dark for a day.
Tech investor (and my friend) Brad Feld suggested on Wednesday that they do it again. In a blog post entitled "Dear Internet: Let's Demo the Slow Lane" he called on Internet companies to let the world see what Wheeler's proposal would actually mean:
Let the world see "Waiting for", "Connecting", and "Buffering" show up in their browser continuously throughout the day. Explain what is going on. Then click a button to bypass the Slow Lane and get normal connectivity.
Instead of everyone getting tangled up in the legal question of what "net neutrality" means, consumers can see what could happen if / when ISPs can decide which companies get to use their fast lanes by paying extra and who is relegated to the slow lane.
The big companies need to launch their lobbyists and political action committees into the fray as well. They need to push hard for measures from Congress that would create genuine competition again among Internet service providers.
If they don't, we'll know where the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons and such actually stand – waiting to see if they can profit more by collaborating with the telecom companies' ongoing shakedown of middlemen and content providers (above and beyond their already overpriced "consumer" service).
Meanwhile, it's up to the rest of us to tell Washington – starting with our own letters to the FCC and your representatives – that we need an open Internet, not the cable-TV-on-steroids system that the Comcasts, Verizons, AT&Ts and other oligopoly carriers have planned for us.
Jen Wike breaks down the RTP180 event in Raleigh, NC about open source. Summaries of speaker presentations and the idea that small, local events and meetups are an important catalyst for bringing open source to the masses.
The folks who planned the RTP180 conference for Open source all the things a few weeks ago in North Carolina did so in an open source manner. Using Triangle Wiki—a local collection of information about the towns of and around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill that anyone can edit and add to—they posted info, found speakers, and coordinated the agenda. Then, they opened the event by bringing in "contributors" from the crowd to give the introduction.
Six attendees read from bits of paper they were given, adlibbing here and there, to introduce the topic for the evening's small, local conference: open source. Lots of laughter later, the mic was handed over to Will Hardison and Erin Monday, official hosts for the RTP180 events.
The show started as they welcomed nine speakers; each talked (for only five minutes!) about how they use open source in their lives and careers, to better themselves and the public. For an idea of what these short, lightning talks, on open source can cover to reach a broad range of folks, here are the ones from the recent Open source all the things RTP180 event.
Facebook Inc., owner of the world’s largest social-networking website, acquired Face.com, adding technology that enables facial recognition in photos.
It's been a year since Facebook purchased Face.com, a facial recognition software company. They acquired Face.com for the advancement in Facebook's tagging feature. This comes at a bad time for Facebook as the U.S. Government steps up the spying on it's citizens, and as the nation goes bankrupt. Today's the first day of nearly 800,000 Department of Defense (DoD) employees furloughs. My question is, "Who or what is running this country, and what are the motives?"
Senate to reconvene after political sparring ends in stalemate and US enters first federal government shutdown since 1996
DoD said it will #furlough almost #800,000 employees. That's just DoD employees..., I can see why the country's bankrupt. If this number is just DoD employees, how many federal and military personnel do we have?
DeBos.org is in production and development of open source projects, as new contacts are made. Developing models product's design and ensure superior coding of projects for CityBulletins v1.0, DigitalDragnet.com and TunnelVine.com. If you're a coder or software engineer and are interested in participating in our open source software coding project, please post in the comment section below this post. Our key objective is for an effective user friendly software platform to interact between governments and the public for information interactions.
