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http://media2.policymic.com/d224667cc0e0100af9d4befe2794504c.jpg

A private company has purchased nearly 150 acres of Detroit’s east side, with plans to repurpose the vacant lots and dilapidated houses into farmland and orchards.

In an agreement with the city, Hantz Woodlands bought 1,500 land parcels within Detroit, and is committed to “cleaning up the blight.” The company bought roughly 150 acres for $500,000 at a per-lot price of $300. Hantz Woodlands will spend the winter clearing the land to prepare for planting in the spring and summer.​
- read the full article There Are Plans to Turn Huge Parts Of Detroit Into Farmland (from PolicyMic)​
 
Laurel said:
http://media2.policymic.com/d224667cc0e0100af9d4befe2794504c.jpg

A private company has purchased nearly 150 acres of Detroit’s east side, with plans to repurpose the vacant lots and dilapidated houses into farmland and orchards.

In an agreement with the city, Hantz Woodlands bought 1,500 land parcels within Detroit, and is committed to “cleaning up the blight.” The company bought roughly 150 acres for $500,000 at a per-lot price of $300. Hantz Woodlands will spend the winter clearing the land to prepare for planting in the spring and summer.​
- read the full article There Are Plans to Turn Huge Parts Of Detroit Into Farmland (from PolicyMic)​
Click to expand...

Interesting. It's an alternative, viable solution to decaying cities.
 
"Sex: what women really, really want
Contrary to accepted thinking, women are as likely to be as regularly and easily sexually aroused as men – or even more so, says author Daniel Bergner."

http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/what-women-really-really-want/?outbrain=obnetwork


"As a result of his writing the ambitiously titled What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Sexual Desire, American Daniel Bergner is in regular contact with the various pharmaceutical companies hoping to crack what might loosely be termed the female version of Viagra. And boy, are they a nervous bunch.

“They’ve said to me that they’re extremely worried that if they get something that works too well, the Federal Drug Administration will knock them back. Because, what if we create a society full of … nymphomaniacs?”


It is, he says, a serious game plan that in order to avoid the risk of societal breakdown caused by a rampage of newly sexually aggressive women, the drug must be “good, but not too good”.

Bergner laughs, but admits it isn’t all that funny, considering the corresponding question was never considered when Viagra came to the market. No one quaked at the impact of older men being able to have sex for as long and as often as they pleased.

And there, for Bergner, lies another exhibit for the prosecution against an injustice that led him, despite being a man, to stick his neck out and challenge the prevailing wisdom about the nature of women’s sexuality."
 
Determined that Russia will put on the most lavish Winter Games in history, Vladimir Putin has spent $51 billion, quashed environmental critics, and turned one of Europe’s most beautiful natural regions into a construction zone.

http://media.outsideonline.com/images/sochi-olympics-fisht-stadium_fe.jpg

“Sochi is a unique place,” Putin had told the International Olympic Committee in 2007, when his personal touch helped Russia beat out Austria and South Korea for the chance to host the Games. “On the seashore, you can enjoy a fine spring day—but up in the mountains, it’s winter.” Putin had flown to the IOC meeting in Guatemala just to deliver his country’s pitch. He’d spoken English, one of the few times he’s done so publicly. Now, to ignite similar Olympic passions in Russia, his government held a mascot contest. Common citizens would submit designs and vote for a winner. Whoever came up with the champ would receive two tickets to the Games.

Forty minutes after it was introduced online, a psychedelic blue frog with a ski pole in its mouth rose to the top of the ranks, and it stayed there until the contest was done. There are a few reasons why. One is that democracy, even carefully managed democracy, is messy. Another, as I witnessed over and over when I visited Sochi last February, is that Putin’s Olympics are Putin’s Russia in microcosm. The frog wore a tsarist crown on its head— a reference to “nationhood and spirituality,” explained its creator, the Moscow cartoonist Egor Zhgun, with faux solemnity. In its eyes, in place of pupils, were rotating Olympic rings: black, yellow, blue, red, and green. The frog was covered in fur—these being the Winter Olympics, after all—and it had no hands, which left many people wondering about the intended metaphor. (Zhgun says he simply neglected to draw them.) Its name was Zoich, a clever use of letters and numerals. To a Russian eye, the 2 in 2014 looks like a Z. The 4 looks like the letter Ч, which is pronounced ch. With a squint, or a bit too much vodka, “2014” reads “Zoich.”​
- read the full article The Sochi Olympics Are a Five-Ring Mess (from Outside Magazine)​
 
SeaDaddy1 said:
Interesting. It's an alternative, viable solution to decaying cities.
Click to expand...

Naaah. Detroit was agricultural a century ago when it changed to heavy industry. Manufacturing creates greater wealth than growing organic cauliflower one season out of the year. Florida will always kick Detroits ass cuz we have 4 growing seasons.
 


Has Science Lost Its Way?
by Judith Curry [Ph.D.]



“The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims. And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having splashy papers in Science or Nature — it’s not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it’s gotten a lot of attention.” – Michael Eisen​


Last October, LaTimes had an interesting article in the business section titled Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity, subtitle Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy...


...A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology. But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid...


...the drive to land a paper in a top journal — Nature and Science lead the list — encourages researchers to hype their results, especially in the life sciences. Peer review, in which a paper is checked out by eminent scientists before publication, isn’t a safeguard. Eisen says the unpaid reviewers seldom have the time or inclination to examine a study enough to unearth errors or flaws...​





- read the full article Has Science Lost Its Way ? (from Climate Etc. blog)



​
 
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/71408000/jpg/_71408857_pooblue.jpg

A gigantic "communal latrine" created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina.

Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say.

The 240-million-year-old site is the "world's oldest public toilet" and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds.

The dung contains clues to prehistoric diet, disease and vegetation says a study in Scientific Reports.

Elephants, antelopes and horses are among modern animals who defecate in socially agreed hotspots - to mark territory and reduce the spread of parasites.

But their best efforts are dwarfed by the enormous scale of this latrine - which breaks the previous record "oldest toilet" by 220 million years.​
- read the full article Giant prehistoric toilet unearthed (from the BBC)​
 
http://batshitcrazynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/mice.jpg

They floated down from the sky Sunday — 2,000 mice, wafting on tiny cardboard parachutes over Andersen Air Force Base in the U.S. territory of Guam.

But the rodent commandos didn't know they were on a mission: to help eradicate the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has caused millions of dollars in wildlife and commercial losses since it arrived a few decades ago.

That's because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.

The unlikely invasion was the fourth and biggest rodent air assault so far, part of an $8 million U.S. program approved in February to eradicate the snakes and save the exotic native birds that are their snack food.

"Every time there is a technique that is tested and shows promise, we jump on that bandwagon and promote it and help out and facilitate its implementation," Tino Aguon, acting chief of the U.S. Agriculture Department's wildlife resources office for Guam, told NBC station KUAM of Hagatna.​
 
The selfish gene is one of the most successful science metaphors ever invented. Unfortunately, it’s wrong

http://dc37.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/humanities/gabriel/DTP/selfish_gene.gif

These days, Dawkins makes the news so often for buffoonery that some might wonder how he ever became so celebrated. The Selfish Gene is how. To read this book is to be amazed, entertained, transported. For instance, when Dawkins describes how life might have begun — how a randomly generated strand of chemicals pulled from the ether could happen to become a ‘replicator’, a little machine that starts to build other strands like itself, and then generates organisms to carry it — he creates one of the most thrilling stretches of explanatory writing ever penned. It’s breathtaking.

Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace, charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel, its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen. It’s a gorgeous argument. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits, it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple.

Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and others, it’s wrong.​
- read the full article Die, selfish gene, die (from xxxSOURCExxx)​
 
http://www.the-scientist.com/images/December2013/612px-Sapioheterosexuality_Symbol.svg.jpg

New research on the neural connections within the human brain suggests sex-based differences that many have suspected for centuries: women seem to be wired more for socialization and memory while men appear geared toward perception and coordinated action. The female brain appears to have increased connection between neurons in the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and males seem to have increased neural communication within hemispheres from frontal to rear portions of the organ. University of Pennsylvania researchers announced the results, generated by scanning the brains of about 1,000 people using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, on Monday (December 2) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
[...]
“There is biology to some of the behavior we see among men and women,” Verma told the Los Angeles Times. “In the population, men have stronger front-back connectivity, and women have inter-hemispheric or left-right connectivity more than the men. It’s not that one or the other gender lacks the connectivity altogether, it’s just that one is stronger than the other.”

These physiological differences, which didn’t appear in stark contrast in those under 14, could possibly give rise to behavioral differences between the sexes. “So, if there was a task that involved logical and intuitive thinking, the study says that women are predisposed, or have stronger connectivity as a population, so they should be better at it,” Verma told the LA Times. “For men, it says they are very heavily connected in the cerebellum, which is an area that controls the motor skills. And they are connected front to back. The back side of the brain is the area by which you perceive things, and the front part of the brain interprets it and makes you perform an action. So if you had a task like skiing or learning a new sport, if you had stronger front-back connectivity and a very strong cerebellum connectivity, you would be better at it.”​
- read the full article Male and Female Brains Wired Differently (from The Scientist)​
 
http://htmlgiant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/writers.png

http://htmlgiant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/rappers.png

http://htmlgiant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/song.png

It is not just an artist’s work, but their personalities — inadvertent, performative, implied, affected, whatever — by which an overall narrative, or “personal brand,” of the artist is measured, which invariably informs how the art is perceived. Do likeable people make likeable art, and vice versa? Is it better to be an arrogant genius than a modest one? At what point is arrogance reasonable?​
- read the full article Artist Temperaments (from HTML Giant)​
 
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2013/11/26/1385493642844/Ger-Mood-Sweater-by-Senso-009.jpg

A phlegmatic character can belie a multitude of feelings, making it difficult for others to pick up on emotional cues. But help is at hand. The GER mood sweater, by design lab Sensoree, is wearable tech that attempts to shed light on the inner feelings of the wearer, without the need for uncomfortable chat.

According to Sensoree, the top makes use of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) – the way in which the conductance of human skin changes in response to stimuli. When you are calm and at rest, skin GSR is lower than when you are anxious. While GSR has previously been exploited in lie-detectors, Sensoree has harnessed it to turn a funnel-shaped LED collar a range of colours. These are designed to indicate different levels of arousal that the firm has extrapolated to different emotional states ranging from "tranquil – Zen" (green) to "nirvana – ecstatic, blissful" (yellow). Sensoree says the technology works by attaching sensors to the wearer's hands that are then hooked up to the collar creating what it calls a Galvanic Extimacy Responder. But beware, the mood sweater will turn you red-faced if you meet the love of your life – it should glow crimson when you are "nervous – in love".​
- read the full article The mood-sweater that means you can wear your heart on your sleeve (from The Guardian)​
 
http://www.utaot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/640x427xhenrybreanlasvegasjournal1.jpg.pagespeed.ic_.e-jK5O2u0d.jpg

If you’re ever really lost on a road trip across America, and I’m talking really lost (let’s say the battery on your smartphone just died along with that compass application you downloaded for situations just like this), perhaps you might be lucky enough to find yourself next to one of the giant 70 foot concrete arrows that point your way across the country, left behind by a forgotten age of US mail delivery.

- read the full article Forgotten Giant Arrows
 
trysail said:


It is eye-catching BUT the "article" (and there really isn't one) provides no explanation whatsoever of how and where the rankings/ratings are calculated or derived. To say there's a massive amount of subjectivity involved would be to put it mildly.



​
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I linked it because I thought the graphs were interesting - and also because someone put so much time and effort into making them. I don't see how they could be anything but subjective. That said, kinda fun to see what you agree with him on, and on what you disagree.
 
Very interesting read re: long tail vs huge hit and the music/movie biz

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2013/12/02/p233/131202_r24333_p233.jpg

When Dannen published his book, the old business model still worked. The record companies’ fat profits got fatter during the nineties, because of the compact-disk boom. Then, ten years after Dannen’s book appeared, the golden principle failed. In 2001, album sales started a sharp decline; some years, it seemed as if none of the big companies were making any money at all. Executives from television, film, and publishing began to wonder whether this would be their fate, too. It seemed possible that America’s long pop-culture boom, which spanned most of the twentieth century, was finally going bust.

This was a dominant refrain in the aughts; commentators mourned the disappearance of small record stores, big bookstores, broadly popular television programs. Chris Anderson, who was then the editor of Wired, had a more optimistic view: in 2006, he published “The Long Tail,” which celebrated the coming demise of “the hit-driven mindset” and the growing importance of online distribution. Using Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes, you could browse what Anderson called “the infinite aisle,” where vast inventories and smart suggestion software made it easy to shun blockbusters and follow your own passions, no matter how obscure. He argued that retailers, too, had been freed from the tyranny of the hit. Technology made it possible for businesses to profit by “selling less of more,” catering to an explosion of niche markets that, taken together, rivalled the size of the mainstream. Consumers were travelling down the demand curve, away from the head, where the most popular products lived, and out onto the tail, home of the miscellany, which was growing longer (as variety increased) and fatter (as sales of non-hits increased). The new popular culture would be more interesting and more efficient, catering to the ever more diverse tastes of a general public that was outgrowing its reliance on old-fashioned hit men.
[...]
One of the executives central to “The Long Tail” was Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, the company that helped put video-rental stores out of business. Hastings told Anderson that while Blockbuster’s brick-and-mortar stores derived about ninety per cent of their business from new releases, Netflix’s business, built around mailing out DVDs, was only about thirty per cent new releases, partly because of its ability to offer individualized recommendations based on consumer data. Anderson called Netflix’s granular approach “a remarkable democratizing force in a remarkably undemocratic industry.” But, as Netflix expanded into streaming video, the company needed to secure licenses for its movies, rather than simply buying DVDs. And these licenses grew more expensive as film studios realized how lucrative streaming video could be. (If Netflix was making lots of money, that meant the studios were charging too little.) In response, Netflix did something that “The Long Tail” didn’t predict: in 2011, it decided to become a studio itself, spending something like a hundred million dollars to create an American version of the British political drama “House of Cards,” starring Kevin Spacey. Netflix has continued to produce expensive and attention-generating series, including “Hemlock Grove,” by the horror-movie auteur Eli Roth, and a revival of the surreal sitcom “Arrested Development.” Netflix, according to Elberse, is behaving “more like an old-school television network than the long-tail company it once seemed intent on becoming.” Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Netflix was negotiating with cable providers, in hopes of finding a place on set-top boxes.​
- read the full article Blockbluster: Who needs hits? (from The New Yorker)​
 
Laurel said:
The selfish gene is one of the most successful science metaphors ever invented. Unfortunately, it’s wrong

http://dc37.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/humanities/gabriel/DTP/selfish_gene.gif

These days, Dawkins makes the news so often for buffoonery that some might wonder how he ever became so celebrated. The Selfish Gene is how. To read this book is to be amazed, entertained, transported. For instance, when Dawkins describes how life might have begun — how a randomly generated strand of chemicals pulled from the ether could happen to become a ‘replicator’, a little machine that starts to build other strands like itself, and then generates organisms to carry it — he creates one of the most thrilling stretches of explanatory writing ever penned. It’s breathtaking.

Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace, charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel, its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen. It’s a gorgeous argument. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits, it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple.

Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and others, it’s wrong.​
- read the full article Die, selfish gene, die (from xxxSOURCExxx)​
Click to expand...

official translation: YOU DIDNT DO THAT! SOMEONE ELSE DID THAT!

A simple kaleidoscope ends all the wonder and mystery of gene expression. Genes dont change, their chemical space changes because of outside forces. The jostling makes cancer possible and mutations possible and change possible.

A better metaphor to explain change is natural development from conception to death.

And none of Mary Jane Rotten-Crotch's blabber changes Dawkins' theory an iota.
 
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