Afghanistan School for Girls
In Afghanistan from 2006 to 2008, there were 461 attacks on schools for girls, and in 2008, 15 girls were attacked with battery acid on their way to school.
~
Koba, 22, has been teaching for two years. She was the only teacher who allowed the photographer to take her picture. (Other teachers feared reprisal if their families found out they’d been photographed.)
via Cellar – Image of the Day via Newsweek
Facebook Privacy Scanner
Facebook’s privacy settings are a confusing mess of bantha poodoo. Luckily, ReclaimPrivacy.org has a handy bookmarklet that rates your privacy levels on Facebook. Simply:
- Go to their website
- Drag the bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks bar
- Log into Facebook
- Click on that bookmarklet you just saved
You can see my results in the screenshot above (yay!).
via ReclaimPrivacy.org via Lifehacker
How To Pack 10 Days of Clothes in One Carry-On
If you’re looking for tips on how to pack your bags efficiently for air travel (or any travel, really), what better person to ask than a flight attendant?
Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, demonstrated how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on.
via The New York Times via Lifehacker
SWAT Abuse
I generally try to keep subject matter here on MCOJ relatively light, but after seeing the above video, I am compelled to post and propagate.
From BoingBoing:
Radly Balko of Reason posted this video of a SWAT raid on a family in Missouri. The officers found a small amount of cannabis, and so they arrested the parents on a charge of child endangerment, naturally.
“It’s horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years — cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.”
After forwarding the above video to a friend, he pointed me to the equally horrifying account of Cheye Calvo, the Mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. In 2008, a SWAT team smashed into his home, shot his two dogs and terrorized his family with no warrant in hand. He was quickly exonerated of any wrong-doing, but no apology was given for the mistake.
Cheye Calvo spoke at the Cato Institute on September 11, 2008 and recounted his experience. You can view a snippet of the talk here.
The implications of this are horrifying to me. The idea of 8 to 12 officers in full armor with high-caliber firearms breaking into my house, shooting my cats (because they are major threats to fully-armored SWAT officers, naturally) and terrorizing/traumatizing my family on the basis of suspicion of trafficking a non-narcotic is straight out of a dystopic movie.
I’m sure I’d be within my rights as a citizen of the United States of America (land of the free, etc.) to defend my home from invaders. Sadly, though, I doubt that I, in my pajamas and armed with my eskrima sticks, would fare well against 8 to 12 fully-armed officers.
via BoingBoing
via CATO Institute
The “CSI Effect” – CSI TV Shows Teach Real Criminals
Being a huge fan of CSI: Las Vegas, I’ve idly wondered if actual criminals take notes from the hugely popular franchise.
Indeed, criminals do, in fact, watch television, and they learn. This is referred to as the “CSI Effect”.
via The Economist via BoingBoing
School Spied on Student Using Webcam
This blatant privacy violation is disgusting to me.
The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
via BoingBoing
Sarychev Peak Eruption
What a perfect example of scientific serendipity. The International Space Station just happened to be floating over “Matua Island, in the Kuril Island chain, northeast of Japan” just as Sarychev Peak erupted in a spectacular fashion.
“Junk DNA” Re-Awakened to Fight HIV
What? We (humans) have had the potential ability to naturally resist HIV-1? Well, golley-gee, Toto, let me click my heels and decry, “There’s no place like our genomes! There’s no place like our genomes!”
In all seriousness, this is a huge breakthrough and something to keep an eye on:
A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV – one that worked with the body’s own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.
…
The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.
For the more scientific-minded, here’s a more technical article. For the rest, here’s a summary.
via io9 via PLoS Biology
Chicken a la Carte
Synopsis: This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people.
Mike’s RSS- Dana Soliman- Only Love July 31, 2010 (author unknown)
- Is It Legal to Jailbreak and Unlock Your Cellphone? Copyright Office Officially Says, "Yes" [IPhone] July 26, 2010 Adam Pash
- How to Rebuild Your Attention Span and Focus [Focus] July 27, 2010 Clay Johnson
- How the Anchoring Effect Messes Up Your Purchases and Estimates [Mind Hacks] July 28, 2010 Kevin Purdy
- Howard Scott July 26, 2010 (author unknown)
- A First Look at the AirTurn Bluetooth iPad Page Turner Prototype July 24, 2010 (author unknown)
- A First Look at the AirTurn Bluetooth iPad Page Turner Prototype July 24, 2010 (author unknown)
- The Chipophone July 23, 2010 (author unknown)
- The Bechdel Test for women in movies July 22, 2010 Lisa Katayama
- Why Photography Bullying is Illegal, and You Don't Have to Take It [Police] July 21, 2010 Sam Biddle
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