News organizations in Germany are reporting at this hour that an estimated 8 people are dead and at least 5 more injured following a mass shooting in Hanau, Germany.
At the time of this blog post, reports indicate the gunmen are still at large.
Reports indicate that the shooting(s) took place neat at least one hookah (shisha) bar, and a second location. This is a breaking news story, and will change as more information is confirmed by authorities. Read the rest
The annual Germeval natural language processing event solicits German-language "shared tasks"; one of this year's proposed tasks from the University of Hamburg is Prediction of Intellectual Ability and Personality Traits from Text, which proposes to mine test subjects' essays as a predictor of IQ. Read the rest
Hans Calmeyer was a left-wing German lawyer -- his law license was temporarily suspended when he was accused of being a Communist -- who was inducted into the German army under the Nazis, who put him in charge of an office that determined which Dutch people would be deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation. Read the rest
149 families' home movies are archived on Open Memory Box, a massive archive of 415 hours of footage from the former East German, shot from 1947-1990. The video is indexed and searchable by 2700 search-terms, and makes for fascinating browsing as well. (via Kottke) Read the rest
[Last spring, I ran into Nikola Richter at the Republica Festival in Berlin; she told me about Sina Kamala Kaufmann, a celebrated German climate activist and sf writer whose debut short story collection, Bright Matter, had been published by Richter's independent publisher Mikrotext to great critical and public success. I offered to run one of Kaufmann's stories here in English as a way of exposing her work to a new audience. -Cory] Read the rest
Google has blinked in the ongoing attempt to organize Youtube creators in a new organization called Fairtube, under the umbrella of the powerful German trade union IG Metall. Read the rest
German law allows convicted criminals to deliver a "final word" ("Schlusswort") in court after their sentencing; this right is typically waived or used to deliver a few words of apology and remorse, but when a Hamburg court sentenced 71-year-old bank robber Michael Jauernik to 12 years in jail, he used his "final word" to speak for five solid days. Read the rest
Police in Germany say driving licenses have been suspended for hundreds of people who used electric scooters while drunk at the Oktoberfest beer festival in Munich. Read the rest
I've always been fascinated with dumpster diving: my first feature sale to Wired (21 years ago!) told the tale of Darren Atkinson, the most successful high-tech diver I know. Read the rest
In 2008, Berlin's historic Tempelhof airport was converted into a public park. Now, Stephan von Dassel, mayor of the city's central Mitte district, is proposing the installation of drive-in sex booths where sex workers can service clients in their vehicles. Resembling rows of car ports, they are called verrichtungsboxen and can be found in Bonn (above), Utrecht, Amsterdam, and other European cities. From CNN:
Stephan von Dassel, the mayor who represents the Green party, is attempting to combat prostitution on Kurfürstenstrasse, an upmarket street in Mitte with a history of sex workers.
"Residents and businesses have been calling for a ban on street prostitution for many years," he wrote in a statement. Yet he notes that the Berlin Senate has refused to implement regulatory restrictions "because it fears a deterioration of the overall situation."
He is now proposing a restriction on street prostitution in the district, instead offering sex workers booths in controlled areas in a bid, he says, to improve the lives of "residents and sex workers" alike...
Dassel argues that the current situation for the sex workers on Kurfürstenstrasse is "inhumane," and by refusing to act, the state of Berlin is tolerating "forced prostitution, violence against women and drug addiction."
image: "Verrichtungsboxen" in Bonn, Germany (Leonce49, CC BY 3.0) Read the rest
"Killing in the Name" has never been played quite like this! Thanks to Rockin'1000, a thousand musicians from around the globe gathered at the Commerzbank-Arena in Frankfurt, Germany to play Rage Against the Machine's 1991 hit song together. In some ways, it's a hot, loud mess. In others, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Judge for yourself (or not, you don't have to do what I tell you).
Zupagrafika's new book Eastern Blocks (subtitle: "Concrete Landscapes of the Former Eastern Bloc") collects more than 100 beautiful photos of the brutalist towers of ex-Soviet nations, "‘Sleeping districts’ of Moscow, Plattenbauten of East Berlin, modernist estates of Warsaw, Kyiv`s Brezhnevki." Read the rest
As Google has enacted a series of high-handed, opaque changes to how Youtube monetizes, upranks and censors videos, Youtubers have found themselves battered by the changes: they built Youtube into a global multi-billion-dollar success story, but they don't get a say in how it's managed. Now, a group of Youtubers have teamed up with Germany's powerful IG Metall trade union to fight back, using Europe's broad privacy laws and Germany's broad labor laws to force the company to come to the negotiating table and give them a say in how the service is run. You can read more about it on the Fairtube campaign site. Read the rest
Microsoft has a history of attempting to give Microsoft das boot (yes, I know boots in German is stiefel, but work with me here...) Read the rest
After the Snowden revelations, US-based Big Tech companies raced to reassure their non-US customers that the NSA wasn't raiding their cloud-based data, moving servers inside their customers' borders and (theoretically) out of reach of the NSA; then came the Cloud Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), in which the US government claimed the right to seize data held on overseas servers and the companies began consolidating their servers back in the USA. Read the rest
This video from Bohemian Browser Ballett on Germany's public broadcaster Funk is absolutely genius: a comic dialogue between a literal uniformed Nazi officer outraged that someone had the temerity to call him a Nazi: "Just because someone doesn't share mainstream opinion it doesn't mean he's a Nazi. Maybe I'm a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination!" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest
