I first met Bill Gibson in 1999 when I was profiling him for the Globe and Mail as part of a review of his book "All Tomorrow's Parties." Since then,… Read the rest of the article: The New Yorker's profile of William Gibson: "Droll, chilled out, and scarily articulate"
Librecorps is a program based at the Rochester Institute for Technology's Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) initiative that works with UNICEF to connect students with NGOs for paid co-op… Read the rest of the article: Librecorps: an organization that connects student free/open source software developers with humanitarian NGOs
A team of researchers from Microsoft and Harvard's Berkman Center have published a taxonomy of "Failure Modes in Machine Learning," broken down into "Intentionally-Motivated Failures" and "Unintended Failures."
America is one of the only developed countries in the world that pays people to donate blood, much of it sold abroad (70% of the world's plasma is of US… Read the rest of the article: The blood of poor Americans is now a leading export, bigger than corn or soy
"Fight the Traitors Together" (motto: "Hong Kong is part of China and this can't be meddled with by outside power") is a web-game that has attained new popularity in mainland… Read the rest of the article: Popular Chinese video game invites players to "hunt down traitors" in Hong Kong
Chile's months-long uprising was led by student activists protesting neoliberal reform, galvanized around the seemingly trivial issue of public transit fare-hikes.
In my latest podcast (MP3), I continue my serial reading of my novella Party Discipline, which I wrote while on a 35-city, 45-day tour for my novel Walkaway in 2017;… Read the rest of the article: Podcast: Party Discipline, a Walkaway story (Part 2)
Last summer, MD/journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal's husband had a bike accident and was seriously injured and taken by ambulance to an emergency room.
Both Phrma (the lobby for the global pharmaceutical industry) and Biotechnology Innovation Organization (biotech lobbyists) provided letters to a US-UK government meeting to discuss post-Brexit trade terms, in which both… Read the rest of the article: US pharma and biotech lobbyists' documents reveal their plan to gouge Britons in any post-Brexit trade-deal
We only have a few days left until Verizon kills off Yahoo Groups, and the volunteer archivists who've been battling with the company to preserve its legacy have just been… Read the rest of the article: As the end nears for Yahoo Groups, Verizon pulls out all the stops to keep archivists from preserving them
Jesus and his fam were refugees, so it's only fitting that the folks at Claremont United Methodist Church decided to put its nativity figures in cages behind razorwire.
George Maschke from Antipolygraph.org (previously) writes, "Thousands of individuals are annually compelled to undergo a pseudoscientific polygraph screening ritual called the 'Test for Espionage and Sabotage.' The administration guide for… Read the rest of the article: Antipolygraph.org publishes secret guidelines for the federal "Test for Espionage and Sabotage," a psuedoscientific feature of government life
Today, 800,000 Hong Kongers marched through the city in a demonstration commemorating their six months of protests. Thanks to landslide victories for pro-Democracy candidates in last month's election, today's march… Read the rest of the article: After sweeping election victories, Hong Kong protesters stage massive demonstrations marking their 6-month anniversary
The Bernie Blackout is a well-documented phenomenon: the press cover Bernie (far) less than other frontrunners, and when they do, they're (far) more negative than they are with other frontrunners.
Kentucky's Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative came out of a local electrification co-op set up during the New Deal, and in 1949 it was expanded into a telephone co-op with more… Read the rest of the article: One of the poorest, most desperate regions in Appalachia is experiencing an economic miracle thanks to fiber run by a New Deal-era co-op
T Greg Doucette is the lawyer who put the pieces together on the University of North Carolina's $2.5m handout to the white nationalist group the Sons of Confederate Veterans, then… Read the rest of the article: The lawyer who caught UNC giving $2.5m to white nationalists orders the white nationalists to create a $2.5m fund for Black students or face a lawsuit
Connor Krukosky's lifelong hobby was collecting and refurbishing superannuated computing equipment, which is surprisingly cheap provided you have a lot of space — Krukosky scored things like keypunch machines for… Read the rest of the article: A teenager describes his hilarious adventures installing a surplus, 1,500lb mainframe in his parents' basement
SCAN (Scientific Content Analysis) is a lie-detecting method invented by Avinoam Sapir, a former Israeli spook turned polygraph examiner that involves picking out small textual details from writing samples to… Read the rest of the article: Cops and spooks all over the world rely on a junk-science "walking polygraph" method to steer their investigation
This week, I've been doing our family's annual charitable giving (here's a guide to some of the charities we support), a long process that involves using Charity Navigator to verify… Read the rest of the article: Double your EFF donation with POWER UP!
In a recent installment of his Plenary Session podcast, hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad observed that "There are interventions that disperse wealth, … and they give people jobs, and they send them… Read the rest of the article: Prasad's Law: there's always enough health spending to concentrate wealth, never enough to diffuse it
