Die Mannschaft or Les Bleus?
Quarter-Finals Open Thread Germany v FrancePost + Comments (110)
by Randinho| 110 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Die Mannschaft or Les Bleus?
Quarter-Finals Open Thread Germany v FrancePost + Comments (110)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 151 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
When Samuel Alito sits down with his family for a good old-fashioned Opus Dei Fourth of July, which version of the story of the Declaration of Independence do you think he will tell? The one where Jesus gave Thomas Jefferson the words on an inscribed tablet of gold, or a chiseled tablet of stone?
Open thread.
This post is in: KULCHA!, Open Threads
A clip from last year’s Boston celebration, since last night’s concert was cut short due to a thunderstorm (the Beach Boys played, the fireworks went off, but the Pops didn’t get to perform the 1812 Overture).
Hope that our North Carolina and other south-shoreline readers have all come through Arthur safely/are well out of harm’s way!
Per the NYTimes, scholars are still arguing about “the nation’s founding charter”:
… A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less.
The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original.
That errant spot of ink, she believes, makes a difference, contributing to what she calls a “routine but serious misunderstanding” of the document.
The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she says. But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments — “instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — in securing those rights.
“The logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights,” Ms. Allen said. “You lose that connection when the period gets added.” …
***********
Apart from remembering that Our Nation has always been a kludge in progress (see below), what’s on the agenda for the start of the long weekend?
This post is in: Movies
If you loved Ever After, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, or Willow, you should definitely make the effort to see Maleficent on a big screen. The CGI is excellent, the storytelling is workmanlike, and the actors will break your heart — not just the two stars (Jolie-Pitt and Fanning) but Sam Riley as Diaval, Maleficent’s faithful lieutenant, and even the critically maligned Sharlto Copley as the fairy-tale “hero” whose ambition leads him to forge his own doom.
Joan Acocella has an excellent, though spoilerific, review in the New Yorker:
The sexual politics of Disney’s “Maleficent” are a complicated business. The most important thing, or at least the basic thing, is that the moviemakers took a villainess and turned her into a sympathetic character… [A]n innocent princess, Aurora (her name means “sunrise”), is condemned to death, or to a permanent coma, by an evil fairy, supposedly because, by mistake, the fairy was not invited to the princess’s christening party. A lot of readers and movie- and ballet-watchers will notice that, at the party, the invited guests are all dressed in pretty clothes and have nice manners, while the evil fairy wears a slick black garment, simultaneously deluxe and sinister, and arrives at the palace in a carriage drawn by rats or the like—circumstances that raise a doubt as to whether her exclusion was, in fact, due to a clerical error. Might she not be a reiteration of an old trope: Eris, the goddess of discord, who threw the golden apple, thereby precipitating the Trojan War? Might she not be that thing we’ve all been told about, the thing than which Hell hath no greater fury: a woman scorned?…
It is not as simple as that, of course — it never is — but it’s both a ripping yarn and a metaphor about the once-in-a-lifetime actions we think will make us powerful and the slow accretion of small daily actions that actually give us power…
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Movies, Open Threads
I found this kind of fascinating:
Michael Bay – What is Bayhem? from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.
Interesting.
by John Cole| 68 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!
This is excellent and should be happening a helluva lot more often:
A reverend in Illinois organized a demonstration to hand out condoms outside of a local Hobby Lobby store in order to protest the Supreme Court’s ruling on contraception, the Daily Herald reported.
Rev. Mark Winters of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Naperville, Ill., said it started out as a joke in a Facebook, but after he got a great response, he decided to organize a protest.
The group of demonstrators stood outside the store to hand out condoms donated by Planned Parenthood.
Winters told the Daily Herald that he wanted the protest to show that not all Christians oppose birth control. He also said he hoped to get people to question whether the Supreme Court’s decision was fair to Hobby Lobby employees’ religious freedom.
“You can make the religious freedom argument, you can make the argument about contraception, but ultimately, for me, this is about power,” he said. “Jesus had a lot of issue with powerful people using power over the powerless.”
As an atheist, I recognize there are some really good people who believe and that religion is not all evil, but damned, why are they so damned quiet all the time and letting these lunatics define how their beliefs are perceived? And if you are voting due to your religious beliefs, I just find that really, really weird. And they should have handed out female contraception, as I’ve not heard of any man being denied viagra and condoms are a dime a dozen. Hand out some stuff the women can use, because they are the ones being, well, screwed.
At any rate, it’s nice to see some people out there telling America that not all people of faith are taking their marching orders from the Opus Dei wing of SCOTUS and the Vatican.
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, C.R.E.A.M., Science & Technology, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Oh, look, that DFH conspiracy website Quartz says that “The US military is already using Facebook to track your mood“:
Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion.
Though Cornell University, home to at least one of the researchers, said the study received no external funding, but it turns out that the university is currently receiving Defense Department money for some extremely similar-sounding research—the analysis of social network posts for “sentiment,” i.e. how people are feeling, in the hopes of identifying social “tipping points.”
The tipping points in question include “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey,” according to the website of the Minerva Initiative, a Defense Department social science project…
If the idea of the government monitoring and even manipulating you on Facebook gives you a cold, creeping feeling, the bad news is that you can expect the intelligence community to spend a great deal more time and money researching sentiment and relationships via social networks like Facebook. In fact, defense contractors and high-level US intelligence officials say that social network data has become one of the most important tools they use in the collecting intelligence….
The growth of social media has not just changed day-to-day life at agencies like DIA, it’s also given rise to a mini gold rush in defense contracting. The military will be spending an increasing amount of the $50 billion intelligence budget on private contractors to perform open-source intelligence gathering and analysis, according to Flynn. That’s evidenced by the rise in companies eager to provide those services…
Lots of exciting anedotes on the “One tweet and they can find you” theme at the link.
Meanwhile, Facebook hunts for a medium-strong frowny-face emoticon and says it is sorry, not sorry:
On Wednesday, Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, expressed regret over how the company communicated its 2012 mood manipulation study of 700,000 unwitting users, but she did not apologize for conducting the controversial experiment. It’s just what companies do, she said.
“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated,” Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told the Wall Street Journal while travelling in New Delhi. “And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”…
(I’m sure FB has done the research establishing a major corporation should always shove a chick out front under these circumstances, because women do the best sorry-not-sorrys.)
And the Wall Street Journal helpfully explains that, hey, FB’s been doing this for years, and there’s nothing you can do about it, citizen:
Thousands of Facebook Inc. users received an unsettling message two years ago: They were being locked out of the social network because Facebook believed they were robots or using fake names. To get back in, the users had to prove they were real.
In fact, Facebook knew most of the users were legitimate. The message was a test designed to help improve Facebook’s antifraud measures. In the end, no users lost access permanently.
The experiment was the work of Facebook’s Data Science team, a group of about three dozen researchers with unique access to one of the world’s richest data troves: the movements, musings and emotions of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users….
Until recently, the Data Science group operated with few boundaries, according to a former member of the team and outside researchers. At a university, researchers likely would have been required to obtain consent from participants in such a study. But Facebook relied on users’ agreement to its Terms of Service, which at the time said data could be used to improve Facebook’s products. Those terms now say that user data may be used for research.
“There’s no review process, per se,” said Andrew Ledvina, a Facebook data scientist from February 2012 to July 2013. “Anyone on that team could run a test,” Mr. Ledvina said. “They’re always trying to alter peoples’ behavior.”…
Since its creation in 2007, Facebook’s Data Science group has run hundreds of tests. One published study deconstructed how families communicate, another delved into the causes of loneliness. One test looked at how social behaviors spread through networks. In 2010, the group measured how “political mobilization messages” sent to 61 million people caused people in social networks to vote in the 2010 congressional elections…
“Facebook deserves a lot of credit for pushing as much research into the public domain as they do,” said Clifford Lampe, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information who has worked on about 10 studies with Facebook researchers. If Facebook stopped publishing studies, he said, “It would be a real loss for science.”…
Hey, as long as “no users lost access permanently”, amirite?
In Case You Were Still Wondering, Facebook Is Not Your FriendPost + Comments (83)