links for 2010-09-21

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links for 2010-08-24

  • Among those who sortied from Chiran, there were few fathers who volunteered to be kamikaze pilots. Captain Kuno was one of these men. On May 23, 1945, the eve of his sortie, he wrote his final letter all in katakana [1] to his 5-year-old son Masanori and his 2-year-old daughter Kiyoko who he was leaving behind. A child learns katakana in the lower grades of elementary school.
  • The difficulty is over microfinancers that started as not-for-profits by switched to a for-profit model, making them more beholden to shareholders than to the people they are attempting to help.
  • There is no history of whites being the victims of racial discrimination in the U.S. Where such charges have been raised, they have come from right-wingers with an agenda against affirmative action and other social programs created to help African Americans, who were not only slaves in this country, but then faced another 100 years of legal discrimination after slavery that only ended one generation ago.
    (tags: racism)
  • The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children's education.
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links for 2010-08-19

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links for 2010-08-18

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links for 2010-08-13

  • After reading through this article – nope. Everything I know about him is right. Rapist and Criminal. This is telling: "I went back to Brownsville with my reality-TV-show crew, they're doing a segment about my childhood racing pigeons, and Brownsville's all upscale now. They got surveillance cameras, buildings that were abandoned cost, like, a million now, and I'm thinking, My life must've been a lie, 'cause there's nothing there that looks like my childhood. This white woman come up, and I'm thinking, Wow. When I was a kid, she would've been robbed and raped and left for dead. This is a real strange scenario, and I just wanted to cry. I'm like, "Who am I? Where's my heritage?"
  • CogTool is a general purpose UI prototyping tool with a difference – it automatically evaluates your design with a predictive human performance model (a "cognitive crash dummy").
  • "Andy Schlafly, son of controversial conservative figure Phyllis Shlafly and founder of Conservapedia, the ideologically oriented alternative to Wikipedia, has found a new bugbear: the theory of relativity. Shlafly insists that Albert Einstein's world-changing idea, elegantly expressed in the equation E=mc2, is part of a pervasive and long-held liberal conspiracy to make people have abortions and stop believing in Jesus. "
  • "While on the House floor criticizing the aid package on Tuesday, Pence pointed to a jobs fair he hosted yesterday in his district as an example of Americans "reaching for a better future." He failed to mention, however, that a number of the employers present at the job fair were recipients of stimulus funding. Democrats say Pence's job fair is yet another example of Republicans taking credit for jobs created by the stimulus while at the same time criticizing the program."
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links for 2010-08-03

  • The headline is misleading – there's nothing in dispute about BPA. It's toxic and unsafe. Since I first read about this, I started paying attention to where my receipts go. The ones that get dumped in my food bag at a fast food place are the most alarming, but the others that get handed to me at checkout end up in my bag, in my pockets – places I touch them and then later eat. I've started to be super careful about how I handle them, but the fact that they've been rolling around in my camera bag that I've never washed out — yeah. Alarming.
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links for 2010-02-18

  • An interesting perspective. Dunno what I think about it yet — "A Wall Streeter buys the life insurance policies of individuals with terminal illnesses, packages them into securities, and profits when the underlying collateral dies. In his most recent movie, Michael Moore documented the practice of taking out "peasant insurance" on employees. Now we learn that firms continue to carry life insurance on former employees, hoping they will die untimely deaths so that the firm can collect."
  • By design, the Act had three primary purposes: Rescue, Recovery and Reinvestment. The enclosed report reviews our progress in each of these three areas. Almost 20 million Americans have gotten extended unemployment benefits thanks to the Act, and over 95 percent of working families have had their taxes cut. Jobs have been created thanks to tens of thousands of projects now underway nationwide. And the groundwork for the economy of the next century is being put in place as we invest in high speed rail, health technology, broadband, a smarter electrical grid, clean cars and batteries, and renewable energy.
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