Prompt: For two years, it was the sculpture nobody would take: a life-sized Jesus sleeping on a park bench with his bare feet, wounded from his crucifixion, poking out from under a blanket. But now Jesus the Homeless and its Canadian sculptor have a new fan in the Vatican: Pope Francis. Pope Francis praying at a model of the Jesus the Homeless sculpture by Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz in St. Peter's Square on Nov. 20. ( Vatican photo ) Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz meets Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square on Nov. 20. ( Vatican photo ) Timothy Schmalz brought the

original wooden model of his sculpture to St. Peter’s Square last Wednesday to present to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. After his weekly general audience, the Pope prayed over the statue and blessed it, Schmalz said. “It is very, very amazing for a sculptor to have that,” he said. “After, the Vatican officials introduced me to Pope Francis and he said he thought Jesus the Homeless was a beautiful sculpture. So needless to say, I’m very excited about that.” The model is going to stay in one of the Vatican houses, he said, and he is working to find an outdoor location near St. Peter’s for the full-sized bronze version. Article Continued Below Schmalz, 44, is a sculptor of Christian-themed works who lives in St. Jacobs, near Waterloo. For about two years after he created his 2 1/2-metre-long sculpture, he couldn’t find a location to display it, he said. It was turned down by both St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Jesus the Homeless eventually found its way to Regis College, the Jesuit school of theology at the University of Toronto. Since it was installed in April, two of its admirers in the Catholic Church recommended Schmalz’s work to the Vatican, he said. A few weeks ago, he got the invitation to last Wednesday’s papal audience. Schmalz says his vision of Jesus as a homeless person was inspired by a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus tells his followers that whenever they help a person in need — “the least of my brothers and sisters” — they do it to him. “If you go to Rome and go to all the beautiful cathedrals, you will not see a representation (of Jesus) that shows him so close to the marginalized people,”


Prompt: It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience? In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference

that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did. But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose, that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause of behavior. In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along. Though the precise way in which the mind could do this is still not fully understood, similar phenomena have been documented elsewhere. For example, we see the apparent motion of a dot before seeing that dot reach its destination, and we feel phantom touches moving up our arm before feeling an actual touch further up our arm. “Postdictive” illusions of this sort are typically explained by noting that there’s a delay in the time it takes information out in the world to reach conscious awareness: Because it lags slightly behind reality, consciousness can “anticipate”


Prompt: Coding ● May 2016 The unintended byproducts of refactoring code Whenever I start on a large refactoring, I need to justify that the exercise is truly worthwhile. Am I objectively and unequivocally improving the understandability of the codebase? If I’ve finished and the codebase is no more readable or maintainable than it was when I began, I’d argue there were better ways to have used my time. While the goal might seem obvious, executing on it is often trickier than you’d think. The two goals of any refactoring Every refactoring has two goals. The immediate goal is technical. I have

something in my code that doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps it’s a leaky abstraction, a convoluted dependency, repeated code, or a poorly encapsulated concept that festers throughout the entire application. I then start laying out the roadmap to get from the code-at-present-moment to the glorious vision of my future code. With the completion of each small step, I re-run my automated tests, commit, then move on. After enough iterations, my plan slowly begins aligning like the pieces on a Tetris board. Eventually, I get to that one final, satisfying refactoring step—the long piece, if you will. Ahhh….the long-awaited completion of a refactoring It is at this point where the abscess has been removed and whatever smelled in my codebase no longer smells. I’m ready to pull the fresh new code into our master branch. However, It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming the work is done. That’s because the second goal of a refactoring is the more important one. Has the understandability of the codebase actually improved? If you’ve achieved the technical goal (the leak is gone!), then, you’d think the codebase would automatically be more readable and maintainable. But, I’ve found that the tunnel-vision attention required to achieve the technical goal-at-hand can blind me to this second—more critical—goal. That new refactoring smell If refactoring is like carpentry, then, accomplishing its technical goals will leave some unwanted byproducts— discarded pieces left unknowingly on the workbench or a film of sawdust hovering over the entire body of work. In order to make a refactoring truly complete, we need to go back, wipe up our workspace, and apply some polish. After you celebrate the technical achievements of your newly-updated code, look back at your work holistically to see if you haven’t inadvertently introduced some new smells. Make sure you haven’t


Prompt: × ‘I couldn’t move’ New study documents what happens to patients who wake up during surgery (CNN) — “I was awake but paralyzed,” says Carol Weihrer as she recalls undergoing eye surgery in 1998. “I could hear the surgeon telling his trainee to ‘cut deeper into the eye,'” she says. “I was screaming, but no one could hear me. I felt no pain, just a tugging sensation. I tried to move my toes or even push myself off the operating table, but I couldn’t move. I thought I was dying.” The Reston, Virginia, resident inadvertently woke up during surgery, an

infrequent phenomenon called “accidental awareness during general anesthesia.” She’s been struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder ever since. “I’ve had to sleep in a recliner for the last 16 years,” Weihrer says. “If I lie flat, I get flashbacks of the operating table and I start violently thrashing.” Fortunately, anesthetic awareness is rare. But new research is shedding light onto risk factors and the devastating psychological effects the phenomenon can have on patients who experience it, especially those who are awake and paralyzed. The numbers According to the largest study of its kind recently published in the journal Anaesthesia — in which researchers surveyed more than 3 million patients who received general anesthesia in the United Kingdom and Ireland — roughly one in 19,600 patients “accidentally” wakes up during surgery. Previous studies in the United States reported a far higher rate of one in 1,000 surgical patients. However, cases of anesthetic awareness in the new study were reported voluntarily by patients, which could misrepresent the true number. Researchers did find that certain surgeries requiring “lighter” anesthesia, like emergency C-sections, carried a higher risk — a rate of one in 670. Most incidents of anesthetic awareness occurred among patients who had received paralytics as part of their anesthetic cocktail — presumably since they couldn’t move to alert doctors to the fact they were regaining consciousness. Contrary to folklore, awareness was most likely to occur when patients were being put to sleep before surgery started or after the surgery had ended — not when the surgeon was actually operating. Patients described a range of sensations, including choking, paralysis, pain, hallucinations, and near-death experiences. Most episodes were short-lived, with 75% of them lasting under five minutes. Despite this, nearly half of all patients who were conscious during surgery had long-term psychological consequences such as


Prompt: Right photo by Diana Davies from the New York Public Library The Stonewall Rebellion, when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people fought back against police repression at a Greenwich Village bar with a six-day riot in June 1969 is considered the birth of the modern "gay rights" movement. President Barack Obama just declared June LGBT Pride Month in the United States, following an example set by President Bill Clinton during his second term. (This year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued her own proclamation at the State Department.) Obama then switched his position and let his Justice Department file briefs

supporting both the Defense of Marriage Act, prohibiting federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy excluding open gays from the military -- even though he campaigned against both laws. The 40th anniversary will be marked by the usual LGBT Pride Parade down Fifth Avenue and by pride marches all around the world from Youngstown, Ohio, which is having its first this year, to Moscow, Russia, where activists get beaten every year by skinheads and police. There now are separate African American pride parades across the U.S. as well. Stonewall gives New York a certain preeminence in the LGBT movement, but the clash was neither the first public display of gay resistance, nor has the city and state maintained their claim to be the world leader in progress since then. Five states -- from Massachusetts to Iowa -- have already beat us to opening up marriage to gay couples. Maybe it is New York arrogance, but it was not until this year that New York City launched an ad campaign, euphemistically called "Rainbow Pilgrimage," seeking gay tourism -- something that cities such as London and Amsterdam have been doing for years. (Maybe the rainbow theme is meant to pick up on the 40th anniversary of the death of Judy Garland, whose signature song was "Over the Rainbow.") With gay issues so much in the forefront this year, it's a good time to look at some examples of where New York has led and where it has followed -- despite its reputation as the birthplace of the modern movement. Pre-Stonewall History While the religious right likes to speak about homosexuality as something that was always condemned, plenty of cultures have celebrated it -- the evidence appears on some of the Greek urns in the Metropolitan Museum


Prompt: The driver of a bus that struck and killed a cyclist just outside the Olympic Park in Stratford while ferrying journalists between venues has been bailed until August, police have said. The 28-year-old man was knocked down by the doubledecker in Ruckholt Road, at the junction with the A12, at about 7.40pm on Wednesday. An air ambulance doctor pronounced him dead at the scene. A Metropolitan police spokesman said a man in his mid-60s had been arrested just outside the Olympic Park at 9.28pm on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. The victim is expected to be formally identified

later on Thursday. A date for a postmortem examination is yet to be fixed. After the fatal incident, Bradley Wiggins, who by winning a gold medal on Wednesday became Britain's most decorated Olympian, warned of the perils of cycling in the capital. "It's dangerous and London is a busy city and [there is] a lot of traffic. I think we have to help ourselves sometimes," he said. "I haven't lived in London for 10 to 15 years now and it's got a lot busier since I was riding a bike as a kid round here, and I got knocked off several times. "But I think things are improving to a degree. There are organisations out there who are attempting to make the roads safer for both parties. But at the end of the day we've all got to co-exist on the roads. "Cyclists are not ever going to go away as much as drivers moan, and as much as cyclists maybe moan about certain drivers they are never going to go away, so there's got to be a bit of give and take." Wiggins said he would like to see the introduction of a law making it compulsory to wear cycling helmets. He later clarified his comments on twitter. "Just to confirm I haven't called for helmets to be made the law as reports suggest." "I suggested it may be the way to go to give cyclists more protection legally if involved in an accident. "I wasn't on me soap box CALLING, was asked what I thought." Responding to his comments, Chris Peck, the policy coordinator for the UK's national cycling organisation the CTC said that making helmets compulsory would be counter-productive. He told Radio 5 live. "Making cycle helmets compulsory would be likely to have an overall damaging effect


Prompt: The Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City has decided to cut ties with the Girl Scouts. Archbishop Joseph F Naumann announced on Monday that he’s asked churches in his archdiocese to transition away from hosting Girl Scout troops, in favor of partnering with the Christian scouting organization, American Heritage Girls. Parishes in the diocese were given the choice to stop chartering Girl Scout troops immediately, or graduate scouts already in the program to American Heritage Girl troops over the next few years. Previously, Naumann had told priests to end sales of the Girls Scouts’ famous cookies, according to the Kansas City

Star. “No Girl Scout cookie sales should occur in Catholic Schools or on parish property after the 2016-2017 school year,” he said in a letter sent to priests in his parish in January. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images The archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, Joseph Naumann (left). The problem with Girl Scouts, according to Naumann, is that their programs and materials can cause children to be “misled and misinformed” by “secular culture.” “To follow Jesus and his Gospel will often require us to be counter-cultural,” Naumann wrote in his statement. “With the promotion by Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA) of programs and materials reflective of many of the troubling trends in our secular culture, they are no longer a compatible partner in helping us form young women with the virtues and values of the Gospel.” In particular, Naumann pointed to the fact that Girl Scouts USA pays membership dues to the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), which the archbishop claims has ties to International Planned Parenthood. Naumann also referred to how Girls Scouts materials portray birth control activist Margaret Sanger and feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as role models. “These as well as many other ‘role models’ in the GSUSA’s new manuals and web content not only do not reflect our Catholic worldview but stand in stark opposition to what we believe,” he wrote. “Our greatest responsibility as a church is to the children and young people in our care,” Naumann wrote in his statement. “We have a limited time and number of opportunities to impact the formation of our young people. It is essential that all youth programs at our parishes affirm virtues and values consistent with our Catholic faith.” John Moore via Getty Images Girl Scouts sell cookies as a winter storm moves in


Prompt: An extraordinary thing happened in the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday . A member of the seven-strong Backbench Business Committee burst out laughing at the suggestion that MPs should be allowed to debate a range of gender issues including domestic violence, suicide and premature mortality rates. In an age when offending the sensibilities of anti-sexism campaigners can cause Nobel laureates to be sacked and drive astrophysicists with unfortunate dress sense to tears of redemption , it’s a miracle there hasn’t been another hysterical lynching in the court of public opinion. At least it would be if it were a male

politician caught on camera chortling at the suggestion that parliament should discuss issues like violence against women, breast cancer screening and eating disorders. The reason the media hasn’t grabbed hold of SniggerGate yet, is that the sniggering MP is female and the gendered problems she appears to find funny are issues that disproportionately affect men and boys. (You can watch the debate in full on Parliamentlive.tv's archive. Fast forward to 14:54:10.) On the day that Jess Phillips MP sniggered at the suggestion that men’s issues should be discussed in Parliament on International Men’s Day, another 13 men died from suicide. It’s not funny. Not for the men whose lives were lost and not for their friends and family. Suicide is a men’s issue and if we don’t talk about the problem, we can’t solve it. On the day the Labour member for Birmingham Yardley clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself guffawing at Philip Davies MP’s request for a debate on men’s issues, more than 200 men died of cancer. As a nation we spend more time, money and energy trying to prevent, detect and cure female cancers in the UK – and yet men are 58pc more likely to die of cancer before the age of 65 than women. I don’t think that’s hilarious. Not for the men who die before their time and not for the loved ones they leave behind. Men of all classes have a lower life expectancy than women of the same background. It’s a men’s issue and like all men’s issues, we can’t solve it if we don’t discuss it. "We’re collectively more tolerant of the harm that happens to men and boys" Glen Poole On the day that the former manager of a charity supporting victims of domestic violence snorted at


Prompt: Your marriage has come to an end, and now that you have decided to divorce, you are in the situation of hiring a lawyer. You may even wonder if your services are necessary. Here we will explain why they are. Surely you know cases of cordial divorces and on good terms, and other catastrophic. In addition to the personality of those involved, this also has to do with the expertise of the lawyers in charge. In general, the less you need to go to court, the less painful and faster the divorce is. But anyway, even when you and your

spouse have agreed to divorce, it is advisable that both have legal advice. And this is because, beyond the emotional consequences that lead to the dissolution of the marriage bond, there are also legal aspects that cannot be ignored. A lawyer specialized in divorces will know how to guide you through this process, solving the pitfalls that arise along the way. Start by asking for references to family and friends. And when you meet with the lawyers, ask about their experience and credentials. Serious lawyers will always be able to provide you with references from other clients. If you and your spouse have been able to agree on important points such as home, child custody, and joint property, it is even possible for a single lawyer to resolve minor legal issues, such as paperwork. However, if a disagreement arises between the clients, the lawyer has an ethical obligation to transfer at least one of them to another lawyer. In the most complicated divorces, as if there had been physical or verbal abuse, infidelity or addictions, it is essential to have the services of a lawyer, especially to protect children Division of property The more property you and your spouse jointly own the more complicated this process will be. Washington is a community property state. By these statutes, all goods acquired during the marriage, including those made in the name of an individual, are seen as belonging to both parties. In the case of divorce, this means that everything can be divided between you and your spouse equitably. The assets will be distributed so that each party leaves in relatively equal conditions. Custody of the child One factor that often causes problems in a divorce is custody of the child. You and your spouse will have to solve these problems. When


Prompt: It’s Date Night with the Stoic Templum 2.1 ! Unfortunately, that’s a date between the tent and I… my girlfriend is in China for the week. I knew I was going to need a two-person tent eventually. Love might be in the air, but it’s a cold, hard breakup between my beloved Big Ag Fly Creek 1 Platinum and I. I initially approached finding a 2-person tent as my only shelter, since I still have to budget around $300 for a tent and not much more. I wanted something big enough that it’d make for many romantic forest-bound evenings and

group trips with friends or my brothers, but I needed it to be light enough that I could still strap it on the bike for an ultralight 200-mile overnight dash. I failed. That tent doesn’t exist. So, instead, I diversified my holdings. I bought the cheapest tent I could find (above the department store variety, which are a terrible investment) and bought a bivy bag for solo trips. I’ll tell you what I think of the Stoic in a minute. My second shelter was a Borah Gear Snowyside Bivy. The Borah Gear Snowyside Bivy was an equal bargain. This is a new offering from Borah Gear, a small ‘cottage’ company in the United States that makes ultralight tarps and bivy bags. Their Snowyside bivy is pretty customizeable, but it takes about 3 weeks to ship so they can actually sew it up for you. I added taped seams, a side zipper, and a full eVent floor instead of silnylon. What I got is a sub-2lb fully enclosed shelter from all weather when comfort is second to just sleeping dry and packing camp quick. I’ll do a full review of the Borah Gear bivy later; I’ve only got one night in it, shown here at “The Top of the World” in Florida, MA, which is actually just a cell phone tower that happens to be near an overlook. I can do a lot of assuming with a tent because I’ve used ten just like it, but I can’t do the same with the bivy. The Tent The Stoic Templum 2.1 is dirt-cheap (I got mine for $95 with a coupon from its flagship site, Backcountry). During times when they’re rotating old stock on camping gear, like just after the holidays or just after winter/summer ends, you can almost count on finding


Prompt: Restricts total expenditures on marriages PESHAWAR: The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly adopted a landmark piece of legislation on Thursday, barring a bride’s family members, relatives and outsiders from making dowry payments to the groom and his family. The law also restricts the maximum value of gifts given to the bride by her parents, family members or any other person to Rs10,000. It is now illegal for anyone from the groom’s family or anyone on their behalf to ask or force the bride’s family for dowry. If they still do, they shall be liable to a two-month prison term and a fine of

Rs300,000 or both. The law titled, ‘the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Dowry, Bridal Gift and Marriage Functions Restriction Act, 2017,’ states that the total expenditures on marriages, including on baarats or valimas shall not exceed Rs75,000 and other ceremonies, including nikah, baraat or valima shall be concluded before 10pm. Anti dowry campaign: Constant effort against gender violence called for Similarly, the law restricts the valima to a one-dish banquet of rice, gravy and sweets. It also states that a person or family celebrating the nikah or baraat or organising the marriage ceremony of other person shall not serve or allow anyone to meals or other edibles, excluding beverages, to people participating in the ceremony. Under the law, anyone who contravenes or fails to comply with any provision of this law shall be liable to pay a fine not less than Rs200,000 and an imprisonment term not exceeding two months. The bill, tabled by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s (JI) Rashda Riffat, was unanimously adopted by the house. Services of more than 3,000 employees of the health and irrigation departments were regularised after the adoption of two separate laws tabled by Pakistan Peoples Party lawmaker Sardar Fakhar Azam Khan. The assembly also adopted a resolution asking the provincial government to include chapters on the life of celebrated humanitarian and charity founder Abdul Sattar Edhi in textbooks taught in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Expensive weddings Concerns on Fata reforms The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Qaumi Watan Party (QWP) expressed concern over the five-year plan for merging the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) into the province. Senior Minister for Irrigation Sikandar Sherpao of QWP objected over the delay, saying that the assembly had passed resolutions asking the federal government for an immediate merger. “We want local government elections in Fata this year and general elections next year in accordance with the committee’s


Prompt: Criticize cops involved in the G20 debacle? We can now expect to be arrested and face criminal prosecution. Forget a civil defamation suit—two members of the Ontario Provincial Police, aided and abetted by the Crown Attorney’s office, have chosen the nuclear option, charging a Kitchener activist with criminal defamation. (More here. Needless to say, this latest assault on the right to dissent has not received much coverage in the corporate media.) From the Waterloo Record: Dan Kellar, 29, was recently charged with two counts of defamatory libel by officers in the OPP anti-rackets squad as he left his Kitchener home

on a bicycle. He was also charged with counsel to assault one of the officers. Police allege he published comments likely to injure the reputation of the officers by exposing them to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that were designed to insult the officers. …Kellar says the officers who arrested him are from the same unit that arrested other AW@L members and activists in connection with G20-related allegations. “The cop who arrested me is the one who’s making all the arrests for conspiracy cases,” he said. He said police agents began infiltrating activist groups before the summit. The two undercover officers joined AW@L [Anti-War at Laurier, a campus peace group], but were kicked out in the spring of 2010, before the summit, because activists didn’t feel comfortable around them, he said. …The defamatory libel charges were laid against Kellar after he put out a “community alert” on AW@L’s website, peaceculture.org. Kellar learned one of the officers had been spotted in Toronto, and, “sent out the warning…’suspected infiltrator police agent spotted in Toronto,’” he said. In the posting, he made comments police allege are defamatory. Here’s the Criminal Code provision, rarely invoked in this country—until now, I guess: 298 (1) A defamatory libel is matter published, without lawful justification or excuse, that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published. Mode of expression (2) A defamatory libel may be expressed directly or by insinuation or irony (a) in words legibly marked on any substance; or (b) by any object signifying a defamatory libel otherwise than by words. Note that the bar for a successful criminal conviction (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) is considerably higher than for a successful


Prompt: THREE and a half years into a war that has left 200,000 dead, forced more than 10m from their homes and sucked in America, Russia and a host of regional meddlers, the UN has a new plan for Syria: “Aleppo first”. It seeks to fix a local ceasefire in Aleppo, once a proud and bustling metropolis of 3m that has been reduced to a pockmarked carcass of mostly empty buildings, in the hope of gradually “freezing” battles elsewhere. Don’t hold your breath. The limited scope of the initiative, proposed on November 10th by Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy,

underscores the intractability of this century’s bloodiest conflict. A break in the fighting that has split Aleppo in two would certainly cheer its surviving residents, many of whom no longer care who wins. But too many factors militate against even a limited local ceasefire, let alone a negotiated peace. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. President Bashar al-Assad’s government said it would study the ceasefire plan, which Mr de Mistura described as a potential building block for a wider solution. “Of course they won’t say no,” says Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in London. “Assad likes anything that appears to bolster his legitimacy.” Yet he notes that previous Syrian ceasefires have tended to come in two contexts: either regime forces have besieged a rebel district and offered a choice between starvation and surrender, or a halt to fighting has proven tactically useful, allowing the government to redeploy forces elsewhere. In fact, Mr Assad has been doing better lately. The American-led air assault against Islamic State (IS) and other jihadist groups has battered some of his foes, and allowed him to pose as an ally in fighting terrorists. Mr Assad has ramped up his own, far less discriminating, aerial bombardment of rebel areas. And he has been able to release ground forces to make gains in some places, including Aleppo, after months of stalemate. America’s decision to hit jihadist groups other than IS has further splintered the fractious rebels. Some have defected to extremist groups, including IS and Jabhat al-Nusra (which is affiliated to al-Qaeda), convinced that America’s coalition is in effect an ally of Mr Assad’s. Revelations that President Barack Obama promised not to attack the Assad regime in a secret letter to Ayatollah Ali


Prompt: If epistemic individualism is an adaptation for collective deliberation, there must be some mechanism whereby the products of collective deliberation come to be accepted. Under many conditions at least, epistemic diversity must be ‘transient’ (Zollman 2010), and that, in turn, requires that we are apt to defer to others. Deference is in fact ubiquitous.10 Global warming ‘skeptics’ do not come to their beliefs unaided. Instead, they defer to others (Kahan 2015; Keller 2015). Conversely, liberals exhibit much higher levels of trust in science (Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016). As a consequence, conservatives and liberals are disposed toward biased assimilation of evidence

supporting and opposing their views (Corner et al. 2012). In part, biased assimilation is caused by asymmetrical deference: accepting views from some sources and not others. Asymmetrical deference may be partially explained by reference to message content (Keller 2015). Because responding to AGW very likely requires limitations on free markets, it is highly unpalatable to strong supporters of markets. While ‘solution aversion’ (Campbell and Kay 2014) may explain some of the observed variance, conservative distrust of environmentalism (and support for unfettered markets) appears to arise from, rather than cause, the partisan split. Conservationism has historically been a strong current within conservative thought, and up until recently there was no partisan divide on the environment, either within congress or on the part of the general public (McCright et al. 2014). While message content certainly influences the disposition to defer (Harris 2012), sensitivity to properties of the testifier sometimes trumps content. Israelis and Palestinians evaluated a peace proposal significantly more or less favorably depending upon whether it was presented as coming from Palestinian negotiators or Israelis (Maoz et al. 2002). Similarly, conservative and liberal attitudes to proposals for welfare policies were much more strongly influenced by whether the proposals were said to be supported by Democrats or Republicans than by the content of the proposals (Cohen 2003). In fact, sensitivity to properties of testifiers is able to trump content even when the content of the testimony is disagreeable to hearers. Corrections of false claims are effective when they come from sources that share the ideology of the hearer (Nyhan and Reifler 2013) and also when they come from sources that can be expected to find the claim they affirm contrary to their own ideological interests (Berinsky 2017). Thus, corrections of false claims about Obamacare, for instance, are effective for both conservatives and


Prompt: We are eight weeks into the season, and we only have three weeks left of the LCS regular season and fantasy. The pressure to win is increasing exponentially and decisions have more weight behind them now that the end is upon us. Week 8 Analysis Last week, I incorrectly predicted Millenium, Roccat, Dignitas, and Alliance. My data incorrectly predicted Roccat, Dignitas, CLG, and Gambit. I made the mistake of thinking that Mil was on a downswing, when in reality they were just being horribly inconsistent which they showed in their crushing victory over Alliance and their close game with CW.

Alliance was the exact opposite: I thought that they were just having a fluke week on super week and that their games vs Roccat and Millenium would boost them back up. Instead, they went 0-2 and look extremely vulnerable for the first time this season. It seemed expected that Dig would at least have close games with LMQ and CLG, but they were crushed in both games and garnered less than half of what was expected of them. Roccat went 2-0 against SK and Alliance. CLG went 2-0 against TSM and Dig in crushing victories. Gambit swapped their roster around and not even NiQ could post a decent score this week. SK did much worse than expected this week, however, they were expected to do the worst, or the 2nd worst in each of their respective positions, so I would say that was still accurate. Overall, my data predictions were extremely accurate and fairly precise last week. I was 0.56% accurate, and +/- 9.53 points precise for both EU and NA last week. A lot of that deviation comes from EU where teams like Gambit, SK, and Roccat scored upwards of 30 points off from the predicted values. In fact, EU was +/- 11.51 points precise while NA was +/- 7.54 points precise. The good thing about EU is that it remains extremely accurate due to many games being stomps. When one team in EU scores over, another team will score just as much under the projection. I found that another good way to compare how well predictions worked is to rank all players based on their predictions, and then see where they ended up for their actual performance. For last week, the two tables are here: Projected Week 8 Actual Week 8 As you can see, even though teams


Prompt: Big Pharma has remade their business models over time to maximize shareholder value. - Joe Raedle/Getty Images Listen To The Story Marketplace Embed Code <iframe src="https://www.marketplace.org/2016/06/08/world/profit-pharma/popout" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="240px"></iframe> There’s a new way of doing business for much of Big Pharma. Instead of relying on their own expensive laboratories, they also buy drugs or their makers and focus on getting treatments through the Food and Drug Administration and onto your TV screens. Then, raise prices every year. Move overseas for tax advantages. And reward shareholders by buying back billions' worth of shares. It wasn’t always like that. “George Merck summed

it up — one of the original CEOs of Merck back in the '50s — that the mission of Merck and other pharmaceutical companies at the time was to take care of patients and profits would follow,” said Joel Hay, a professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at the University of Southern California. At Merck & Co., in the middle of the 20th century, the idea that patients came before profits “was a big part of our culture,” said Scott Lucas, who worked in sales at the company for more than 30 years, starting in the 1970s. Lucas and other workers describe an era of the highest ethical and moral standards. Drug trials were halted over the most tenuous rumor that a similar drug in development by a competitor was running into issues. Sales staff took pains to educate doctors about the downsides of Merck’s treatments. In the second half of the 20th century, Merck really was a company where shareholder value was the result, not a prime motivation. It ran huge, productive research labs full of top-notch scientists. In charge of those labs was Roy Vagelos, who went from chief scientist to become CEO in 1984. Dan Bobkoff / Business Insider “My interest was never making money,” Vagelos, 86, said in an interview with Business Insider and Marketplace. “Even as CEO. Especially as CEO.” By today’s standards of management, it’s as if Vagelos did everything wrong. 'We’re leaving money on the table' He refused to raise drug prices more than inflation. When he told that to Merck’s marketing team, Vagelos said, “They said, 'We’re leaving money on the table,' of course. And I said, 'Fine, that’s what we’ll do.'” He bailed out of business school after just a week, which is maybe why he didn’t think much about Wall


Prompt: WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Pipe is a finalist in the 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative, a competition to combine clean energy production with public art. Is it public art, or is it a power station? This shimmering design for “The Pipe”, a finalist in the 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), is intended to blur the lines between the two. Imagined here as a floating installation off the coast of Santa Monica, California, the Pipe is an electromagnetic desalination device, powered by the sun. It also looks great on the horizon. In that regard, it perfectly reflects the

premise of the LAGI design competition, which this year invited participants to come up with aesthetically pleasing concepts for electricity and clean water generation that could potentially be placed in the waters near Santa Monica Pier as examples that our increasing demands for power need not blight the landscape (or seascape). As was first reported by Inhabitat, The Pipe was designed by the Canadian engineering firm Abdolaziz Khalili and Associates, which specialises in processing plants for the food, drink and packaging industries. The glittering silver tube could, the firm says, generate 10,000 MWh of electricity annually, powering an electromagnetic filtration system capable of pumping out 1.5 billion gallons of clean drinking water for the city over the same period. “What results are two products – pure drinkable water that is directed into the city’s primary water piping grid, and clear water with 12 per cent salinity,” the design brief explains. “The drinking water is piped to shore, while the salt water is redirected back to the ocean through a smart release system, mitigating most of the usual problems associated with returning brine water to the sea.” Artist Elizabeth Monoian and her architect husband Rob Ferry founded LAGI in 2008, to encourage the design of public art installations that also produce clean energy. “Now, more than ever, energy and water are intertwined. As California faces severe water shortages in the coming years, the amount of energy required for water production and transmission is sure to increase,” the couple write on the competition website. “As the infrastructures that will cleanly power our future productivity become more prevalent in our commercial and residential centres, the issue of their aesthetic integration becomes more important,” the founders argue. “Power plants, once unseen and forgotten, will become an integral part of our daily lives.” The other


Prompt: The connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century. There remains some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores reflect environmental factors as opposed to genetic ones, as well as to the definitions of what "race" and "intelligence" are, and whether they can be objectively defined. Currently, there is no non-circumstantial evidence that these differences in test scores have a genetic component, although some researchers believe that the existing circumstantial evidence makes it

at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found. The first test showing differences in IQ test results between different population groups in the US was the tests of United States Army recruits in World War I. In the 1920s groups of eugenics lobbyists argued that this demonstrated that African-Americans and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to Anglo-Saxon whites due to innate biological differences, using this as an argument for policies of racial segregation. Soon, other studies appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing instead that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for the environmental factors such as socio-economic and educational inequality between blacks and whites. The debate reemerged again in 1969, when Arthur Jensen championed the view that for genetic reasons Africans were less intelligent than whites and that compensatory education for African-American children was therefore doomed to be ineffective. In 1994, the book The Bell Curve argued that social inequality in the United States could largely be explained as a result of IQ differences between races and individuals, and rekindled the public and scholarly debate with renewed force. During the debates following the book's publication, the American Anthropological Association and the American Psychological Association (APA) published official statements regarding the issue, both highly skeptical of some of the book's claims, although the APA report called for more empirical research on the issue. History of the debate Claims of races having different intelligence were used to justify colonialism, slavery, racism, social Darwinism, and racial eugenics. Racial thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau relied crucially on the assumption that black people were innately inferior to whites in developing their ideologies of white supremacy. Even enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, believed blacks to be innately inferior to whites in physique


Prompt: The issue of how the state spends public money is not a new one but we need to consider it far more carefully looking through the lens of State Capture and the #GuptaLeaks. State Capture has consumed our headlines for many months with the #GuptaLeaks revealing a fascinating web of questionable, illegal, criminal and unethical behaviour from the usual suspects that have featured during the Zuma years but have also highlighted the role that corporate interests often play in corrupt and questionable activities that have undermined the developmental agenda of the state. There is no doubt that capture and looting

in South Africa started long before democracy was negotiated, which has been highlighted in a series of Daily Maverick articles by Open Secrets. The issue of how the state spends public money is not a new one but we need to consider it far more carefully looking through the lens of State Capture and the Gupta Leaks. From 2008 to 2011, the Auditor-General noted with some concern that the South African Government spent more than R102-billion on public money on consultants and over the past two financial years has spent a further R56-billion. With each passing day, the costs of these lost Zuma years are becoming more apparent, with the extent and scale of the rot revealing an encroaching stranglehold that has often been facilitated and supported by corporate interests and the self-interest of a few at the expense of all South Africans and our collective future. The reaction by various organisations (private and public) against KPMG may be reassuring to some but this is simply reactive conduct that does not deal with the underlying issue that the veneer of respectability of a number of major corporates has been used to launder the machinations of those that have been hell-bent on compromising the developmental agenda that South Africa should be serving. The ongoing news cycle may continue to reveal the extent of State Capture, corruption and looting, which is estimated by some to already be in the region of more than R100-billion (public money that has been extracted for the benefit of the Gupta and Zuma families). There is no question of legality regarding improper awarding of contracts, corruption and malfeasance, but what should concern us all is whether the other contracts that are not in the public domain are actually serving the interest of the country. The underlying question


Prompt: WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is leaving open the possibility that a special counsel could be appointed to look into Clinton Foundation dealings and an Obama-era uranium deal, the Justice Department said Monday. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, which is holding an oversight hearing Tuesday, the Justice Department said Sessions had directed senior federal prosecutors to “evaluate certain issues” recently raised by Republican lawmakers. The prosecutors will report to Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and recommend whether any new investigations should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require additional resources and

whether it might be necessary to appoint a special counsel to oversee a probe, according to a letter sent to Rep. Robert Goodlatte of Virginia, the Judiciary Committee’s Republican chairman. The letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd did not say what specific steps might be taken by the Justice Department to address the lawmakers’ concerns, or whether any of the matters Republicans have seized might on already be under investigation. Any appointment of a new special counsel, particularly in response to calls from members of Congress or from President Donald Trump, is likely to lead to Democratic complaints about an undue political influence on the department’s decision-making. Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly weighed in on department affairs, publicly lamenting that he does not have more direct involvement with it and calling on law enforcement scrutiny of Democrat Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 presidential race, and other Democrats. He has been particularly interested in the Clinton Foundation. “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems…” Trump tweeted earlier this month. In apparent anticipation of those concerns, Boyd said in the letter that Justice Department “will never evaluate any matter except on the facts and the law.” “Professionalism, integrity and public confidence in the Department’s work is critical for us, and no priority is higher,” Boyd said. Sessions said at his January confirmation hearing that he would recuse himself from any investigations involving Democrat Hillary Clinton given his role as a vocal campaign surrogate to President Donald Trump. He similarly recused himself from a separate investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, and in May, the Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead


Prompt: New Languages, teams and analyzing data with Excel & CSV files Exciting news – we have finished integrating Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic native support within MonkeyLearn. Now you can train and consume machine learning models for text analysis in these new languages. You can select any of these new languages within the creation wizard of a MonkeyLearn model: For existing models, you can change the language settings on the ‘Parameters’ tab within your ‘Sandbox’: Many users have requested the possibility to train text classifiers in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic, so we hope these additions enables the creation of

new and exciting text analysis models. We plan to add more languages in the short term, so if you have any suggestions or want a specific language to be supported by MonkeyLearn, please let us know in the comments of this post. Analyze data with Excel & CSV files using Machine Learning We’ve released a new feature to bring more power to your MonkeyLearn account. Besides using our Graphical User Interface to train your machine learning models, now you can also use our GUI to actually use these models and analyze data. Just upload a CSV or Excel file to analyze new texts and make predictions with a classifier or extractor. For example, let’s say that you want to use the Retail Classifier to classify a bunch of products descriptions you have on a CSV file. For doing this, you can go to the “Classify” tab (within the Sandbox or Live versions of the classifier) and then click on “Classify File“: This section will guide you through a wizard where you upload data using a CSV or Excel file, and in exchange, it will return a new CSV file with your data plus the MonkeyLearn analysis and predictions using that particular model (like those you will get using our API). We are really excited about this new feature as it will enable non-technical users to analyze data using machine learning without a single line of code! Team manager We have a new feature that you will love! Now you can invite team members to collaborate with your MonkeyLearn models. Whether it’s allowing a teammate to add new training data, curate the data, fix confusions, make changes to the tag list, try out the model or use a team token to consume queries, it’s all now very easy to do, just


Prompt: by Photo by Ninian Reid | CC BY 2.0 It is said that Twitter has been responsible for stirring nascent revolutions in the Middle East, going beyond its initial description as the Seinfeld platform of social media. It has also been targeted by authorities for stirring the pot, lighting fires and generally being a nuisance. From useless babble and inane navel gazing, users became connected activists, Molotov cocktail throwers and inane spouters of few-line messages. A whole spectrum of connectivity, riddled with messages of varying quality, grew up. What then, of the terms of use? Given the nature of the

platform, community guidelines, of a sort, are supposedly meant to be followed. This hardly means that they are enforced with any zeal. It means that an individual such as minor celebrity Tila Tequila, whose social media rants were often richly anti-Semitic, will only be banned after taking a bridge too far. That bridge was crossed in posting a picture of herself in the company of two men luxuriating with the Nazi salute.[1] The suspensions share a thread of inconsistency, though they veer from aspects of bullying (such as New Zealander Hanna, known on Twitter as “Poison Ivy” or then 19-year-old Jane Oranika on racial suggestiveness in an online make-up video on how to make a White Face. “Barack Obama? Is that some kind of sauce?”[2] Trump supporters didn’t see the humour in that. Various, even more venal figures have made it to the ban list. George Zimmerman, who gunned down an unarmed Trayvon Martin in 2012, was suspended in 2015. But it was the now oft used term “revenge porn” that ultimately sank his social media bliss, despite previously posting a picture of his murderous handiwork: Martin, lingering lifelessly in the grass. The knotted realm of bitchiness and abuse is one thing; but removing political activists from the platform for violating various forms of claimed conduct is an onerous, and in some cases dangerous task. One of the discordant voices of the alt-right movement, and Breitbart’s former tech editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, provides such a case. When does free speech, notably of the insensitive sort, transmute into pure hate speech? Where Yiannopoulos ran foul was leading a social media strike on actress Leslie Jones of Ghostbusters fame, a form of character assassination in text. This got him booted off the platform in 2016. Since then, he has been doing a merry


Prompt: Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul. Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.~ John Muir To care for their health and well-being, many men carefully watch their diet, take supplements, exercise, and go for regular check-ups at the dentist and the doctor. Some even supplement this routine with visits to a masseuse or a therapist. But many men are

skipping out on something essential to their manly vigor-spending time in the great outdoors. Great men from Theodore Roosevelt to Ralph Waldo Emerson loved to tear out into nature. Yet today men see activities like hiking, fishing, hunting, and camping as hobbies to be enjoyed by some and not by others. They’ve become just another recreational opportunity: you can take it or leave it. But spending time in the outdoors is essential for every man. It will strip off the stale, sissified patina that civilization has covered you in and renew your soul in 5 crucial ways: 1. Nature gives you a chance for unstructured exploration Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. ~ John Muir Most men’s lives are tightly scheduled and routine. Wake up, shower, commute, work, home, sleep. Each day you drive the same route, sit in the same cubicle, and sleep in the same bed. Yet within each man is a strong urge to set out and explore, to start out a day with only the faintest outline of an agenda, and to discover things never seen before. Scrambling over rocks, hiking up mountains, and fording streams will make you feel like a kid again. 2. Nature gets you in touch with the basic elements and your primal self In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world – the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. ~ John Muir The modern man is subject to all sorts of rules, expectations, and constraints. Buttoned up and buried in paper work, he must act polite, follow the traffic laws, and refrain from throttling the a-hole who prolongs the company meeting with asinine questions. His spirit his constantly hemmed


Prompt: As most of you know, Google recently turned 10 years old. The powerful search engine has been growing its Internet empire through acquisitions and partnerships ever since it went public. In this post, I’ll be going in depth about the companies Google acquired in the past and where are they now. 1. Deja.com (Price unknown, Date: February 12, 2001) Google bought Deja.com in February 2001. Deja News Research was a forum based on Usenet that started in 1995. Steve Madere started Deja News in Austin, TX and Google wanted it because of it’s searching capabilities. Deja News could search across

all of their archived newsgroups. Results were found immediately. However, some of the material submitted to Deja.com included that from The Church of Scientology so the company found themselves facing a couple of lawsuits. In 1999, Deja.com shifted their business model to focus on shopping comparison. The archived messages did not become available to their users any longer. Then one year later, the company was in financial distress so they sold the shopping service to eBay’s Half.com and the archives to Google. Google took the archives from Deja and integrated it into Google Groups. “We welcome Deja’s loyal users into the growing community of Google users worldwide,” stated Larry Page in a press release from 2001, who was the CEO of Google at the time. “With more than 500 million individual messages and growing fast, Usenet and its thriving community is one of the most active and valuable information sources on the Internet.” Deja.com redirects to Google Groups and is blocked from Archive.org. 2. Outride (Price: unknown, Date: September 20, 2001) Outride was a spin-off from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Outride specialized in online information retrieval. Through the acquisition, Google bought the I.P., the patent rights, source code, trademarks, and domain names from them. Using the technology from Outride, Google created iGoogle in May 2005. iGoogle is an AJAX-based starting homepage where users can aggregate RSS feeds and Google Gadgets. Outride had 2 products created at the time: Outride Search Service and Outride Communications Service. The technology platform created by Outride was called Outride Relevance Builder and Outride Relevance Miner. Outride Search Service provided search results based on user interests and demographics. This data was collected by their search habits. Outride Communications Services was a Web-based community platform that harvests hyperlinks from emails, calendars, communication apps, and


Prompt: by BRIAN NADIG The 41st Ward Zoning Advisory Board at its Aug. 5 meeting unanimously approved plans to build four homes on the site of Edison Park Community Church and two homes near Newcastle and Foster avenues, and it conditionally endorsed a proposed Starbucks coffee shop in Norwood Park. The 20,000-square-foot church property at 6675 N. Oketo Ave. is for sale because the congregation is planning to move to a smaller facility. Plans call for the site to be rezoned from RS-2 to the less restrictive RS-3 because two of the lots would not meet the minimum lot size of

5,000 square feet under the existing zoning. The two-story homes would have an asking price of about $800,000. "We are not going to have one elevation for four homes," project attorney Paul Kolpak said in response to concerns expressed at a previous meeting. "People like the architecture in the neighborhood, but they just don’t want to see it four in a row," Alderman Anthony Napolitano (41st) said. The same zoning change also is being sought for a 7,400-square-foot parcel at 5128-32 N. Newcastle Ave., where a 72-year-old house would be demolished. Plans call for the 60-foot lot to be subdivided for two two-story homes, each with a basement. Two similar 2,500-square-foot homes were constructed at 5134-36 N. Newcastle Ave. after that site was rezoned in 2013, and a resident of the block told the board that those homes are out of character with the neighborhood because they are too large. "Young people have been coming up here because of the schools," Kolpak said. "People want the bigger houses." The board also approved the concept of building an 1,800-square-foot Starbuck’s with a drive-through facility at 6340 N. Northwest Hwy., but members said that they would like to see a traffic study for the project before giving their full endorsement of the proposal. A special use permit is required for the drive-through facility. There is no driveway on the Harlem Avenue side of the 27,000-square-foot vacant parcel, and project developer Lee Wolfson has said that a curb cut on Harlem would be needed in order to attract a national tenant to the site, which is next to Metra railroad tracks. Concerns have been raised that the proximity of a railroad crossing on Harlem could cause traffic on northbound Harlem to back up over the tracks. The city Department of Transportation conducted a


Prompt: David Nickle, the longtime president of the City Hall Press Gallery and reporter for Metroland Media, has a side career as a respected author of genre fiction. The title story in his latest collection, Knife Fight And Other Struggles, starts: “Not many outside the confines of the political wing at City Hall would guess it, but our new mayor is an expert with a knife.” One day toward the end of Rob Ford’s mayhem, perhaps in summer 2014, I spitballed with Nickle about how one would go about shaping Ford’s saga into a story: a movie, TV series, whatever. I’d

imagined telling it from the perspective of the mayor himself, the most fascinating and compelling character in the world, but Nickle – whose City Hall office is next to mine – had a better idea. The Ford story, he observed, would be better told from the point of view of someone like Mark Towhey: the ex-military man who was by Ford’s side from day one of the 2010 campaign, worked in his office as director of policy and strategy, and eventually became his third of five chiefs of staff. It was an excellent idea – a narrative from Towhey’s perspective could chart the arc of an ambitious crisis manager who would gradually find himself in far over his head, as layers of absurdity and darkness inexorably pile on. What would begin as a comedy about helping a buffoonish populist realize his goals would eventually transform into a dead-serious Sisyphean parable about managing the unmanageable. Just over a year later, we now have such a work: Towhey’s tell-all, Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, co-authored with Johanna Schneller and published by NYC-based Skyhorse, came out today (October 27). In most respects, it fulfills the promise of the premise, explaining how the experience of working for Ford turned bit by bit from exhilarating to traumatic. But it misses an element crucial for such a yarn – an outside vantage point. Towhey would be a superb vehicle for a narrative so long as someone else was telling the story and holding him up as a flawed protagonist whose questionable choices and malleable ethics implicate him in everything that happens. The book’s subtitle is How I Tried To Help The World’s Most Notorious Mayor, but it could just as easily have been Why I’m Not To Blame. I've never read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but my understanding


Prompt: The topic of my Sloan project came about very organically. As soon as I decided to apply for the grant, I knew it was going to involve forensics. Then I asked myself, "What's the most common tool people associate with criminal investigation?" The answer was obvious: fingerprints. After some preliminary research I discovered this very little-known but fascinating murder case that few people outside law-enforcement circles have heard of. It involves the death of two children in the small, seaside Argentine town of Necochea in 1892. As I continued my research into the state of forensics in Argentina and the

rest of the world at the time, I came across some very fascinating facts. Juan Vucetich was at the center of this case. During this time he was working on his own methods of fingerprinting, which was first developed in England. Although his views on criminal investigation, like his preference for evidence over coercion or torture, differed from those of his contemporaries, he wasn't met with as much institutional resistance as one might expect. The anthropometric method, which involved measuring body parts and distinguishing characteristics, was accurate, but it was expensive, time-consuming and hard to implement on a uniform basis, because it required careful training. That's where fingerprints come in. The fact that each fingerprint was unique had been known for centuries. In order to avoid fraud, the British even used fingerprints to pay pension benefits in colonial India. So naturally the reason that fingerprints became widespread was their simplicity and low cost. But even at the time of this case, prints were only used to generate databases of convicted criminals and to register immigrants, which is a whole other topic of discussion entirely. The story seemed very topical, mainly for two reasons. First, the way law enforcement goes about investigating crimes has always been a huge problem, be it the imperfection of the methods used or the inability of police to process the evidence already at hand. Just look at how many thousands of rape kits in U.S. never get tested because of their sheer volume. Also, needless to say, even after more than a hundred years since the beginning of modern forensics, evidence too often is politicized and misused by the police -- which happens to be the case in the Argentine murder case in 1892. What was true in Necochea back then is true in New York


Prompt: 0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard As former acting attorney general Sally Yates prepares to testify, Donald Trump lashed out this morning via his customary outlet, Twitter, to attack both the Obama administration and Sally Yates herself. In his first tweet, Trump went after the Obama administration, attempting to shift blame for the hiring of Michael Flynn off himself and onto his predecessor: General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration – but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017 Oh, dear, things

seem to have gotten too deep for Trump almost immediately, as national security expert and former NSA analyst John Schindler quickly pointed out: WH does not adjudicate clearances. IRL Obama fired #MoscowMike as DIA director because he's an incompetent asshat. https://t.co/R0ZYtK5hQZ — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017 Schindler further dismantled Trump’s absurd attempt at blame-shifting by a simple appeal to logic and fact: Flynn was commissioned in Army MI in 1981. By Trump's "logic" Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 & Obama all cleared him. This is insane BS. — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017 Trump’s second tweet was directed at Sally Yates: Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017 Again, Schindler quickly pointed to the fly in Trump’s buttermilk (a mistake Trump has since quietly corrected to “counsel”): There's a WH Counsel. And there's a National Security Council. There is no "WH Council". POTUS is a complete moron. https://t.co/hUMBsq7NKS — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017 Schindler followed that up with a stinging condemnation of Trump’s continued dishonesty and where it’s going to get him (hint: not a good place): There's so much dishonest desperation in this tweet you can taste it across the room. Gonna be a bad week for Trump & his #KremlinGate pals. — John Schindler (@20committee) May 8, 2017 Donald Trump has good reason to be frightened and good reason to want to shift blame for his hiring of Kremlin mole Michael Flynn onto Obama, who fired the guy and to discredit Sally Yates, who has the proverbial “goods” on Donald Trump. John Schindler called it: Trump is a complete moron and he has only himself to blame for


Prompt: Downtown Cleveland looms beyond the Tremont neighborhood, where old factories and warehouses are quickly being replaced with new housing and businesses. Downtown Cleveland looms beyond the Tremont neighborhood, where old factories and warehouses are quickly being replaced with new housing and businesses. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post What Cleveland looks like as it prepares for the Republican National Convention What Cleveland looks like as it prepares for the Republican National Convention When Democrats gather for their national convention in Philadelphia, the list of speakers praising Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy is expected to feature the president, the vice president, the first lady,

a former president and a galaxy of well-known political luminaries. But when the Republican convention opens next week in Cleveland, presumptive nominee Donald Trump will showcase an assortment of family members, defeated primary opponents and politicians whose names barely register with the general public. Many of the GOP’s past, current and future leaders are staying away from the spotlights at the Quicken Loans Arena. The star-power disparity between the conventions speaks volumes about the state of the two parties — one is united and marching together toward what it hopes will be its fifth win of the past seven presidential elections, while the other remains divided and still not fully accepting its new standard bearer. “Republicans have always had a terrible star-power deficit — the Democrats have the latest hip-hop or pop act and we’ve got Lee Greenwood and the Oak Ridge Boys — but now it’s going to be even more pronounced,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who is not supporting Trump. Looking ahead to Philadelphia, Wilson said of the Democrats, “Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren — they’re all going to be out there swinging for the fences. But the Republicans, it’ll be like a hostage video of people forced on stage.” View Graphic Trump picked Pence for VP. Here’s who he passed up. Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who is considered a finalist to be Clinton’s running mate, is expected to give a major address, as are two other vice presidential prospects, Sens. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). Other expected speakers include Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who on Tuesday ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Clinton after weeks of holding out. On the Republican side, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) looks to be the highest-profile party leader. He


Prompt: Shining Resonance Re:frain announced for PS4 [Update 2] Remastered release due out on March 29 in Japan. The latest issue of Weekly Famitsu reveals Shining Resonance Re:frain for PlayStation 4. It will launch on March 29, 2018 in Japan in standard and “Premium Fan Box” limited editions. Shining Resonance Re:frain is a remastered version of Shining Resonance, which was released for PlayStation 3 in Japan in December 2014. It will feature various additional elements and enhanced graphics. Weekly Famitsu has an introduction of the game’s new elements, including a “Refrain Mode” that features a “what if” story. Thanks, Famitsu. Update

6:35 a.m.: More information has come in. The standard edition will cost 5,990 yen. The Premium Fan Box limited edition will cost 9,490 yen, and include a fan book, drama CD, and theme song CD. Shining Resonance Re:frain will feature all of the more than 150 pieces of downloadable content from the original release packaged into the game, as well as a new theme song and costumes. In the new “Refrain Mode,” you can enjoy the “what if” story for Excela Noa Aura and Jenius Aeon, who were unable to become party members in the original game. The last boss of the first chapter is easier to defeat. If you lose in battle, you can restart from before the event. Rinna Mayfield’s AI has been made a bit smarter as to refrain from plunging into the enemy. Request rewards and completed quests have been made easier to understand. Fromage’s navigation can be switched off. Dialogue text has been added when moving on the field. When Shining series producer Tsuyoshi Sawada, the series came to a pause, but Sega’s Makoto Suzuki said “rather, let’s start from here,” and restarted the series. The resolution has increased and it runs at 60 frames per second. The main story has not been changed. Images of Refrain Mode will be revealed in the second week. The volume is much greater than dates with the other characters from the original story. New voices have also been recorded. The limited edition will have more content than the limited edition of Blade Arcus from Shining. Character designer Tony Taka wants to see a Shining revival. He hopes that Re:frain can be seen as the start of it all. Thanks, Ryokutya2089. Update 7:20 a.m.: A few more details. The new theme song is called “Towairo no Aria” and sung


Prompt: Matti Breschel (Saxo-Tinkoff) won stage 3 at the Tour of Denmark from a five-rider breakaway and also moved into the general classification lead of his national Tour. Francesco Bongiorno (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) and Wilco Kelderman (Belkin) finished second and third respectively behind the 28-year-old Dane, followed by Lars Bak (Lotto Belisol) in fourth and Edoardo Zardini (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) in fifth. Related Articles Tour of Denmark hints at Swedish sojourn for 2015 Breschel not only won his second straight stage, but now holds the leader's yellow jersey with a six-second advantage over Bak while Bongiorno moves up to third at

14 seconds. The peloton was shattered on the 200km queen stage from Sønderborg to Vejle through a combination of crosswinds, record heat, hills, plus a taxing finishing circuit. Overnight race leader Magnus Cort Nielsen (Team Cult Energy) finished in a 16-rider group at 48 seconds and dropped to ninth on general classification. The day's early break formed just 10km into the stage as six riders went out on the attack: Alex Rasmussen (Garmin-Sharp), Mikhail Ignatyev (Katusha), Mark Sehested Pedersen (Blue Water Cycling), Michael Reihs (Team Cult Energy), Søren Kragh Andersen (Team Tre-For) and Mikkel Mortensen (Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal). After 25km of racing their lead reached three minutes and for the next couple of hours their advantage fluctuated slightly between 2:40 and three minutes on the peloton. Crosswinds split the peloton at the 84km mark, but the field eventually re-grouped. The Belkin team had been setting tempo at the head of the peloton and after covering 113km the break's lead had dropped to 1:30. In addition to the hilly terrain during the Tour of Denmark's longest stage, the peloton was having to grapple with the hottest temperatures in race history, with the mercury reaching 31.5 Celsius. Belkin kept the break's advantage pegged at 1:30 for the next 30km but then the escape group started to falter as both Rasmussen and Sehested were dropped at 146km. Saxo-Tinkoff and Lotto Belisol both provided assistance to Belkin in the peloton and the four riders in front saw their lead drop below one minute. With approximately 35km remaining, the break was caught and a group of 10 went out on the attack. Just prior to reaching the 5.6km finishing circuit in Vejle, to be completed three times, the lead group had increased in size to approximately 20 riders. The finishing circuit featured a stiff, 21


Prompt: Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – Netflix and Amazon are adding so much streaming content in May we're not sure the month's 31 days is enough time to sift through it all. You can kick off your movie and TV bingeing with "Adventures in Babysitting," which is now available on Netflix. Hide Caption 1 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Forrest Gump" (1994) -- Life is like a box of ... . This film stars Tom Hanks as a child-like man who stumbles into

some of the biggest moments in history. (Netflix) Hide Caption 2 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Boys Don't Cry" (1999) -- The film based on the tragic story of Brandon Teena won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for best actress. (Netflix) Hide Caption 3 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Hook" (1991) -- Robin Williams is a the now grown-up Peter Pan who must save his children from his arch-enemy Captain Hook in this fantasy film. (Netflix) Hide Caption 4 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Gladiator" (2000) -- Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix star in this Ridley Scott-directed film about a Roman general who is enslaved and forced to fight as a gladiator. (Netflix) Hide Caption 5 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Broadway Idiot" (2013) -- It's not every musician that can go from being a platinum-selling punk rocker to Broadway star. This documentary about Green Day front man Billie Armstrong tells the story of his journey. (Netflix) Hide Caption 6 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Kill Bill" Volumes 1 and 2 (2003, 2004) -- The body count is high in these Quentin Tarantino movies as Uma Thurman's character The Bride seeks her revenge in the martial arts flicks. (Netflix) Hide Caption 7 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in May New movies for May – "Kiss the Girls " (1997) -- Based on the James Patterson novel, this thriller stars Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. (Netflix) Hide Caption 8 of 31 Photos: Netflix, Amazon Prime: What's streaming in


Prompt: Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The move is part of the government's effort to control net migration, as Hugh Pym reports Thousands of foreign nurses working in junior posts in the UK could be forced to return home under new immigration rules, union leaders have warned. A new pay threshold for migrants means non-European workers will have to leave the UK after six years if they are not earning at least £35,000. The Royal College of Nursing said the rules would "cause chaos" for the NHS and waste money spent on recruitment. The Home Office said

the rules would help reduce demand for migrant labour. And Prime Minister David Cameron even got drawn into the issue, saying more homegrown nurses were in the process of being recruited. The move is part of the government's effort to control net migration, but the union says that by 2017 more than 3,300 NHS nurses could be affected. And by the end of the decade the numbers could be double that - a potential waste of nearly £40m when all the costs of recruitment are taken into account, the RCN says. There are more than 400,000 nurses working in the NHS and over 600,000 registered to work. The warning comes as the RCN's annual conference gets under way in Bournemouth. More difficult RCN general secretary Peter Carter said: "The immigration rules will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services. "At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas." He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the move was "totally illogical" as there is currently a "major shortage of nurses", leading to many NHS trusts spending "tens of millions" to recruit from overseas. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption RCN's Peter Carter: "[Foreign nurses] will have to leave their homes in the UK, many of them now have families here... it's a truly deplorable state of affairs" Dr Carter also stressed that most nurses earn "nowhere near" £35,000, with most on salaries of between £21,000 and £28,000 a year. Due to cuts to nurse-training places, trusts are being forced into relying on overseas recruitment as well as temporary staff just to provide safe staffing. The long-term solution is to train more nurses in the UK, but in the interim, foreign nurses filled the gap, he added.


Prompt: The Democrats and their media acolytes who are pushing back against a full investigation of the Benghazi scandal are in full circle the wagons mode. They are trying to make investigating this scandal into some sort of late night joke against Republicans, but instead are looking more desperate by the day. Many Americans do not believe the Obama administration’s account of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2012 attack. They smell a cover up. According to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month, 59 percent feel it is unlikely the administration has revealed all of the details

surrounding the tragic attack. “Seventy-two percent continue to believe that it is important to find out exactly what happened in the Benghazi matter, with 46 percent who say it is ‘Very Important.' Twenty-five percent consider more information about the Benghazi case unimportant, up from 19 percent in January, but that includes just 7 percent who say it is ‘Not At All Important,'” said Rasmussen. Distrust of the Obama administration was stoked by the recent revelation of an e-mail written by then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes showing White House involvement in concocting the bogus anti-Muslim video explanation for the killings. The purpose of this intervention by the White House was to prepare then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice for her Sunday TV show appearances on September 16, 2012, with the goal of pushing the video narrative even though senior officials at the State Department and intelligence personnel on the ground knew early on that a pre-meditated terrorist attack was the real cause. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made a fool of himself yet again when he tried to claim with a straight face that the Rhodes e-mail had nothing to do with Benghazi. It’s all old news anyway, he intoned. Bill Clinton has tried to blunt criticism of his wife’s conduct as Secretary of State by saying that the State Department’s own Benghazi investigation, which was led by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and former U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering, “looked into what was wrong. They gave 29 recommendations. She took 'em and started implementing them." That may be true, but Bill conveniently left out the fact that Hillary’s hand-picked Accountability Review Board failed to interview her. When she finally appeared before Congress to testify, Hillary responded to questions with a question of her own: “What difference at this point does


Prompt: Food and Fuel Control Act Other short titles Lever Food Act Long title An Act to provide further for the national security and defense by encouraging the production, conserving the supply, and controlling the distribution of food products and fuel. Nicknames Lever Act Enacted by the 65th United States Congress Effective August 10, 1917 Citations Public law 65-41 Statutes at Large 40 Stat. 276 Legislative history Introduced in the House as H.R. 4961 by Asbury Lever (D-SC) on June 23, 1917 H.R. 4961 Asbury Lever (D-SC) June 23, 1917 Passed the House on July 21, 1917 (81-6) July 21, 1917

(81-6) Passed the Senate on July 23, 1917 (51-8) July 23, 1917 (51-8) Reported by the joint conference committee on August 2, 1917; agreed to by the House on August 3, 1917 (360-0) and by the Senate on August 8, 1917 (66-7) August 2, 1917; August 3, 1917 (360-0) August 8, 1917 (66-7) Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on August 10, 1917 The Food and Fuel Control Act, Pub.L. 65–41, 40 Stat. 276, enacted August 10, 1917, also called the Lever Act or the Lever Food Act was a World War I era US law that among other things created the United States Food Administration and the Federal Fuel Administration. Legislative history [ edit ] The act was a very controversial piece of legislation. The act was sponsored by Rep. Asbury F. Lever, a Democrat from South Carolina. President Wilson urged its passage as a wartime emergency measure. Some opposed the authority that would rest in the person of the "Food Administrator." Others opposed language that empowered the president to limit or prohibit the use of agricultural products in the production of alcoholic beverages, thereby establishing a form of national prohibition. Senators proposed alternatives, including a prohibition on the production of whiskey alone for the duration of the war. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge objected to the language that authorized the president to "use any agency or agencies, to accept the services of any person without compensation, to cooperate with any person or persons in relation to the processes, methods, activities of and for the production manufacture, procurement, storage, distribution, sale, marketing, pledging, financing, and consumption of necessaries which are declared to be affected with a public interest."[1] Wilson also had to fight off the proposal of Massachusetts Republican Senator John W. Weeks to establish instead a Joint


Prompt: The Nuraphones determine your personal hearing profile by listening to "otoacoustic emissions" -- sounds emitted by the inner ear when stimulated -- with a tiny microphone. These emissions reveal a lot of info about our hearing, enough that Nura believes can be deciphered into a sort of hearing "fingerprint." Nura takes this fingerprint and uses it to adjust the audio signal from the headphones. The end result is a bit like a personal EQ setting, without all the guesswork, designed to make music sound like the artist intended (rather than amplify arbitrary frequencies). It's a tantalizing prospect: Corrective headphones that

know the quirks and failings of your beleaguered ears. When we wrote about them last year, I'll admit I was skeptical. Pretty much every headphone pitch I have ever had (and that is many) has espoused the virtues of its revolutionary audio, be it custom drivers, magical sound engines, dynamic doo-dahs or cutting-edge EQ algorithms and so on. But none of that helps if you're not able to hear all of those sounds and frequencies equally. Setting up the Nuraphones is a bit more involved than most other headphones (in that there's even a setup process at all), but it's simple. Using the companion app (iOS/Android), you are first guided to make sure you have the headphones placed on your head correctly. Nuraphones have an unusual configuration that we'll get into later, but this makes it important to have them on just right during setup. Once you have them on properly, the app plays some audio that sounds a bit like a futuristic fax machine. This doesn't last long, but it soon moves onto the next stage of configuration, which takes a little longer. All in all, it takes about a minute. Once complete, you can save your profile and forget about it if you wish. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to know was how it sounded without the custom profile. Fortunately, this is easy to do in the app, as there's a switch to toggle between generic and custom audio. I'll be honest, the difference was incredible. In the generic setting, the audio sounded actually pretty bad. But once I put on the custom profile, the music sprang to life. The first thing you notice is that the music is louder. This alone -- a simple bump in volume -- is often enough to "trick" the brain into


Prompt: Ryder Cup golf tournament in Perthshire seeks 1800 volunteers SWNS Ryder Cup organisers are seeking 1800 volunteers to help out at the golf competition next year. Those keen to help out will be asked to pay £75 for the privilege. The cost will cover the food, drink and clothing they will be given at the event, organisers say. The tournament, which involves the best players from Europe and the US, will be held at Gleneagles, Perthshire in September next year. Around 250,000 spectators are expected to descend on the area for the event, and organisers say they need volunteers for

roles on and off the course. Applicants can apply for duties such as scoreboard carriers, crowd safety marshals, programme sellers and buggy shuttle drivers. But the recruitment drive for scores of volunteers has been met with criticism from the Scottish Trades Union Council. Ian Tasker, assistant secretary, said: "Our position is that this is an event that clearly generates massive amounts of money for the Scottish economy and a substantial sum for the PGA. We think it is quite strange that they are asking for £75 from each volunteer to register and that this could be a barrier to stop some people from volunteering. "They appear to want to recruit people from a golfing and middle class background. It is a good opportunity to give people paid work and we believe some money should go towards investing in people. It would have been possible to employ 1800 young people who are currently looking for work to give them a bit of experience and pay them a decent wage, and that could probably have cost less than £500,000. "And you need to consider that as a tiny percentage of the profits that are going to be derived from this event." Europe beat the US to win last year's competition, in Illinois, US, by a single point in one of the most dramatic final days the tournament has seen. Paul McGinley, captain of the 2014 European team, is promoting the campaign after seeing how volunteers influenced previous tournaments. "It takes a huge team of people to make the Ryder Cup a successful event, and the thousands of volunteers involved are a very important part of that. We are always appreciative of anyone who gives their time to volunteer and support golf and there are not many countries in the world better than


Prompt: It was planned as the most daring operation undertaken by the IDF in recent years — exceptional in courage and complexity. The mission: take captive the head of Hamas’s military wing, Ahmed al-Jabari, in the heart of the Gaza Strip, and bring him back to Israel as a bargaining chip for Gilad Shalit’s release. Details of the Entebbe-style raid of the 21st century are being published here for the first time. One can only imagine the stories generations of fighters from special units would have grown up on had it succeeded. But the soldiers — men from an elite unit

who were sent into position and were ready to carry out the capture of Jabari in Gaza — ultimately returned empty-handed. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up From the moment the operation received approval in late 2008, the defense establishment kicked intelligence gathering on Jabari into high gear. They quickly identified a weak spot, a routine: the man would often come back from a visit with one of his two wives, then travel across the Gaza Strip in a way that would allow an IDF team to ambush him. He also made a habit of not driving in a secure convoy, and preferred moving about in a private car with just one or two bodyguards. More information collected by military intelligence and by the Shin Bet paved the way for the operation. The fighters began to train. On the designated day, “D,” the commander of the unit, oversaw the operation at a location not far from Gaza, while another commander took up a position in the field. Jabari was expected to arrive at the location and encounter a well-planned ambush, carried out under cover of darkness. According to sources involved in planning the operation, “the likelihood that he would have been taken alive was high. We have the necessary equipment to have ensured his survival of the ambush, and if we would have wanted, we could have taken out the bodyguards.” After a long wait, the troops received the green light and started making their way into Gaza for the operation — a daring raid, directed at the heart of the Islamist group that was holding Shalit hostage, a reassertion of IDF potency designed to attain the leverage to secure the soldier’s release. But at the last minute


Prompt: Untangling Evented Code with Ruby Fibers Event-driven programming requires a mind-shift in how you architect the program, and oftentimes directly affects the choice of language, drivers, and even frameworks you can use. Most commonly found in highly interactive applications (GUI, network servers, etc), it usually implements the reactor pattern to handle concurrency in favor of threads: the “reactor” is a main loop which is responsible for receiving all inbound events (network IO, filesystem, IPC, etc) and demultiplexing them to appropriate handlers or callbacks. Turns out, the reactor pattern performs extremely well under heavy loads (C10K challenge), hence the continuous rise

in adoption (Nginx, Beanstalkd, EventMachine, Twisted, Node.js), but it does have its downsides: it requires reactor-aware libraries, still relies on background processing capabilities for long running computations, and last but not least, once you have nested several callbacks, it results in much more complicated code. Functional purists will disagree with the last statement – after all, we all love JavaScript, and node.js is the new hot thing on the block – but what if we could write event driven code without the added complexity imposed by hundreds of nested callbacks? Accidental Complexity of Event-Driven Code Anyone who has written a non-trivial event driven application will be familiar with the following pattern: you often start reading your code bottom-up and then navigate your way up the callback chain. In addition, since there is no single execution context, each callback requires its own nested exception handling, which adds to the complexity - debugging is non-trivial, to say the least. Of course, this is usually not too bad in a context of a simple demo, but it also quickly spirals out of control. EventMachine . run { page = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( 'http://google.ca/' ) . get page . errback { p "Google is down! terminate?" } page . callback { about = EventMachine :: HttpRequest . new ( 'http://google.ca/search?q=eventmachine' ) . get about . callback { # callback nesting, ad infinitum } about . errback { # error-handling code } } } Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer the if-then-else control flow, with top-down execution and code I can actually read without callback gymnastics. And as luck would have it, turns out these are not inconsistent requirements in Ruby 1.9. With the introduction of Fibers, our applications can do fully-cooperative scheduling (worth a re-read to make sense of the


Prompt: As the Daily Wire reported Tuesday, the Hollywood trade Variety released its latest issue, a special Inaugural edition that features five left-wingers opposed to Donald Trump, the man who will be sworn in as our 45th president Friday. The cover features CNN's Van Jones, Chelsea Handler, rape-hoaxer Lena Dunham, Michael Moore, and Hamilton's Brandon Victor Dixon. All five stand together holding a large American flag… A flag that, in full-violation of United States Code, is dragging on the ground. Take a look at this brazen disrespect for yourself. There is no gray area on this matter. Title 4, Chapter 1,

Section 8 of the U.S. Code ("Respect for flag") states clearly in paragraph (b) that: The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise. No, it is not against the law to allow the flag to drag on the ground. There is no civil or legal penalty. Also, contrary to the myth, you do not have to burn the flag if it touches the ground. Out here in the Flyover Hinterlands, it is common knowledge that, out of respect for our country and those who sacrificed for it, you do not allow Old Glory to hit the ground. Ever. Nevertheless, being careful to keep the flag from touching the ground is something we were all (well, most of us) taught as children. Out here in the Flyover Hinterlands, it is common knowledge that, out of respect for our country and those who sacrificed for it, you do not allow Old Glory to hit the ground. Ever. Moreover, when handling the flag, again out of respect, this is something you are supposed to be highly conscious of -- and anyone who esteems the flag, certainly is. If the flag touches the ground in error, no harm done. It happens. But that is not what happened in this Variety cover…. What you have here are four celebrities and one CNN (naturally) anchor posing as patriots. And yet, not a single one of them had the presence of mind, or enough regard for our flag, to say, Whoa, hey, wait a minute! Get the flag off the floor! First off, it's not okay and I'm not doing it. Secondly, America already sees us as clueless, America-hating, commie elites. Yes, we do, and this Variety cover is just more proof of that. Some of you might


Prompt: Partisans of the Left compulsively claim President George W. Bush was an imbecile who couldn’t be trusted on anything. If they’re right, all of us must reflexively and wholly refute every statement he ever made. It would seem very reasonable, then, to first dispense with a sweeping pronouncement on one of the most pressing and thorny issues of modern times, an issue that obviously no Texan troglodyte could hope to grasp: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Those words were spoken by America’s forty-third commander-in-chief

at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, just six days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Lo and behold, if there’s one thing that Bush clearly shares in common with his renowned ideological rivals—Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—it’s an obstinate belief that the religion of Islam has nothing to do with violence. Obama has defended “the true peaceful nature of Islam.” Clinton has tweeted, “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” And Biden, after listening to activist, author and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali discuss the relationship between ISIS and Islam, reportedly retorted, “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam.” Actually, there are a few things that Bush, Obama, Clinton and Biden share in common. None of them are theologians, none of them are scholars of Middle Eastern history and none of them—not even Obama, as far as I’m aware—can read classical Arabic and, thus, understand the Koran, the hadith (the traditions and habits of Muhammad) or the sunna (the teachings and sayings of Muhammad) in their original form. (Whether Bush, Biden or Clinton has bothered to read a single translated page of these texts remains to be seen. Obama, who from ages six to ten, attended a public school in Indonesia influenced by the West, appears to be in much the same boat.) Yes, our political leaders are perfectly unified in their immense ignorance of the worldview to which 1.6 billion people—around a quarter of the global population—subscribe. But let’s leave aside for a moment the contentious and oft-debated question of whether Islam is a religion of peace. Why the absence of “’splaining” accusations? After all, the numerous branches of the PC Police typically leap to castigate those who opine on topics beyond their “knowledge.” (“Knowledge” and,