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Fact checking the new Web site, ‘RedskinsFacts.com’
The Washington Redskins have been paying for ads promoting a new Web site, RedskinsFacts.com, which supposedly sprung up organically from frustrated former players who wanted to defend the team’s embattled name, which many find offensive. (Slate turned up evidence that the Web site is tied to image-makers Burson-Marsteller, which was later confirmed by the team.)
Matika Wilbur continues photo trip throughout Indian Country
Photographer Matika Wilbur (Tulalip / Swinomish) has spent the last two years documenting members of every federally recognized tribe in the U.S. Wilbur hopes Project 562 helps dispel stereotypes about Native people. She asks her subjects questions about identity, sovereignty and self-determination before asking them where and how they want to be photographed.
Like many U.S. transit agencies, MARTA has long struggled to secure reliable funding. The agency doesn’t receive money from the state, instead relying on sales tax income from participating counties, making it vulnerable to big economic swings. After the Great Recession, MARTA reduced staff and service while increasing fares, and when an effort to expand the revenue base failed in a 2012 referendum, the agency found itself facing a $33 million deficit.
So MARTA got creative. Keith Parker, who took over the agency in late 2012, implemented a transformation initiative that involved, among other things, a new planning strategy emphasizing TOD. In spring of 2013, Parker announced that MARTA would have five station-area projects underway within two years; to date the agency has identified developers for three projects, targeted several stations for the final two projects, and expects groundbreaking on some of the buildings as early as next year.
Enabling the projects is MARTA’s recognition that certain stations have devoted too much space to parking—an insight that several transit agencies around the world now share. At King Memorial Station, an urban station that Rhein says doesn’t make sense to reach by car, the agency owned four acres of parking lots adjacent to the station that it didn’t even use. Instead, the space had been subleased to a nearby hospital.
[Image: Tim Adams/Flickr]
Binairy Talk
Installation by Niklas Ißelburg and Jakob Kilian uses controlled smoke to relay a binary message from one computer to another - video embedded below:
The interactive installation “Binairy Talk” uses smoke signs to transmit digital data. Air serves as the communication medium for binary code, as a carrier of data and information across a distance. The hidden processes of the digital world are transfered into the analog world whereby the apparent immateriality and infallibility of the computer language is overcome.
In her series “Sound Form Wave,” Ukrainian designer Anna Marinenko draws a fresh comparison between visualized sound waves and jaggedly oscillating patterns in our natural environments. Mountain ranges, cityscapes, far-off tree lines, jet streams, and speedboat wakes are juxtaposed with graphics that reconsider their shapes as sound frequencies. The effect is at first beautiful—because the images blend so well. And then, as your eye adjusts, the effect is slightly jarring.
Any soccer fans in the house? The Stream's own Lisa Fletcher will interview Jürgen Klinsmann - and we want to feature your questions!
Is someone using your child's social security number to buy a car, open a bank account, or "borrow" a new identity in the United States? Identity theft of children is on the rise - and most people don't realize that a truthful Facebook profile and real life relatives may be the biggest vulnerabilities. Tell #AJAMStream your experience before our show tomorrow.
When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.
Wired reviews The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, by Sarah Dry.
Image: Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Tomorrow, #AJAMStream is taping a show on food trends: From boutique cupcakes and “cronuts,” to toasted and smoked spices, what makes food fashionable? Next Tuesday at 12:30pmET The Stream takes a look at the hidden forces propelling traditional food to trend-setting. Plus - the $15 billion dollar a year industry of craft-beer, and the food truck fad that’s boosting economies and expectations in the world of food and beverage. What do you think about "trendy" foods?
The scary, wonderful future of the Pentagon’s science fair The scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aren’t secretive, they’ll tell you — they’re just busy. But on Wednesday afternoon, DARPA put its work on pause and opened up to the press for a precious two hours. The agency that brought you the internet and GPS erected white tents inside the Pentagon courtyard and staged 112 simultaneous demonstrations as journalists rushed around harriedly, trying to suck up as much information as possible before our handlers nudged us out.
Data about people and where they are, visualized
Sometime around 2013, Twitter-obsessives became fixated on favoriting. It started with the evolution of Twitter’s platform, which shifted to show users their favorites more clearly. As with most of Twitter’s standard features, users seemed to co-opt the fav from its original use as a ‘Like’ button stand-in, assigning any number of meanings to the action.
The fav began its public transformation from a garden variety feature into one of the most complex and cryptic forms of online communication. We started naming our favs. The ‘hate fav’ was born. So was the ‘flirt fav.’ And twitter responded, making favorite counts public on its new user profile pages. We saw that some had faved tens of thousands of times! The fav had taken on a life of its own.
It was time for science to intervene and tell us why we fav.
Thanks to a study published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, this year we now have what amounts to an official taxonomy of faving behaviors. Conducted by Florian Meier and David Elsweiler from the University of Regensburg, Germany and Max L. Wilson from the University of Nottingham after extensive surveys with 606 Twitter users (many long-term users), the study sought to classify the myriad of individual reasons for favoriting a tweet in order to “enhance our understanding of what people want to do with Twitter.”
While only 65% of participants were actually aware of the favoriting function, 73.5% of the remaining group were active favoriters and have provided an interesting look at Twitter’s most curious feature. It’s a by-no-means comprehensive but nonetheless scientific look at the way we fav.
Right now, there about 1,100 satellites whizzing above our heads performing various functions like observation, communication, and spying. There are roughly another 2,600 doing nothing, as they died or were turned off a long time ago.
How did each of these satellites get up there? And what nations are responsible for sending up the bulk of them?
The answers come in the form of this bewitching visualization of satellite launches from 1957 – the year Russia debuted Sputnik 1 – to the present day. (The animation starts at 2:10; be sure to watch in HD.) Launch sites pop up as yellow circles as the years roll by, sending rockets, represented as individual lines, flying into space with one or more satellites aboard.
Hal Varian, chief economist for Google, on the future of the Internet of Things.
Will we all have cyberservants?
(via pewinternet)
