Javier Carrete

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Urbee Is the First Car Made By a 3-D Printer

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:01:43 PST

3-D printing has already resulted in advances in manufacturing (as well as tiny stop-motion animation), but now taking it one step further is the Urbee hybrid: the world’s first 3-D printed car, developed by Kor Ecologic and Stratasys.

The Urbee was created using Stratasys’ Dimension 3-D printers and Fortus 3-D Production System. The full-scale prototype is not yet complete, but all of the exterior components, including the glass, will be entirely printed by additive manufacturing – printing layer upon layer of material until you end up with a car in front of you.

more info in popsci

Channel 4 Dispatches Iraq's Secret War Files

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:22:43 PST

Julian Assange on Freedom

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 18:00:44 PDT

We have crushed a number of bastards in this organisation, all the way from Nairobi to New York. These are people who through their power, crush victims and create victims of the powerless. And that’s not something that I was brought up with. You know my father taught me particular values which was that generous capable men do not create victims, they stop others creating victims.

No Women in Maths, are their choices, not their habilities

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:32:55 PST

The question of why women are so underrepresented in math-intensive fields is a controversial one. In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, set off a storm of controversy when he suggested it could be due partly to innate differences in ability; others have suggested discrimination or socialization is more to blame. Two psychological scientists have reviewed all of the evidence and concluded that the main factor is women's choices -- both freely made, such as that they'd rather study biology than math, and constrained, such as the fact that the difficult first years as a professor coincide with the time when many women are having children.

Psychological scientists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University set out to understand the differences between men and women in math-intensive fields such as physics, electrical engineering, computer science, economics, and chemistry. In the top 100 U.S. universities, only 9% to 16% of tenure-track positions in these kinds of fields are held by women.

But girls' grades in math from grade school through college are as good as or better than boys', and women and men earn comparable average scores on standardized math tests. However, twice as many men as women score in the top 1% on tests such as the SAT-M. Clearly, the picture is complex, Ceci and Williams decided. Their analysis and conclusions appear inCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Williams and Ceci also reviewed research on sex discrimination and decided that it is no longer a major factor. In fact, one large-scale national study found that women are actually slightly more likely than men to be invited to interview for and to be offered tenure-track jobs in math-intensive STEM fields.

Instead, Williams and Ceci think the problem is that women actually choose not to go into math-heavy fields, or drop out once they have started. "When you look at surveys of adolescent boys and girls and you say to them, 'What do you want to be when you grow up,' you never see girls saying, 'I want to be a physicist or an engineer,'" Ceci says. That doesn't mean they're rejecting science, but they're more likely to want to be physicians or veterinarians.

And those preferences persist. Studies of college students find that women are more interested in organic and social fields, while men are more interested in systematizing things. And indeed, more than half of new medical doctors and biologists are women today -- and in veterinary medicine, women are more than 75% of new graduates.

Also, women drop out of mathematics-heavy careers paths. Almost half of undergraduate math majors in the U.S. are women. A smaller percentage of women go into graduate school in math, and in 2006, women earned 29.6% of math PhDs. Women are also more likely to drop out after they start a job as a professor, often because they are unable to balance childcare with the huge workload required to get tenure. Young male professors are more likely than their female counterparts to have a stay-at-home spouse or partner who takes care of children.

"You don't see nearly as many men with doctorates in physics saying, 'I won't apply for a tenure-track position because my partner wants to practice environmental law in Wyoming and I'm going to follow her there and help take care of the kids,'" Williams says. Fair or not, women are more likely to prioritize family needs. "I don't think we should try to persuade a woman who's going to be a physician, veterinarian, or biologist to instead be a computer scientist."

On the other hand, women shouldn't have to drop out because the tenure schedule conflicts with their fertility schedule. "Universities can and should do a lot more for women and for those men engaged in comparably-intensive caretaking," says Williams. Coming up with alternative schedules for parents of young children who are seeking tenure, for example, or finding other ways to ease the burden on parents or young children, could help women stay in academic careers -- and not only in math-intensive fields.

One of the most brilliantly simple ideas to help

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:31:45 PDT

Lisa Hickey @lisahickey from The Good Men Project says about @WeAreVisible:

October 21, 2010 at 9:33 pm

I think the idea of helping homeless people find a voice through social media is absolutely brilliant. Brilliant. The core truth of social media is that it connect people. People who have problems to people who have solutions.

People who want to talk to people who want to listen. People who have ideas with people who know how to act on ideas. Why on earth would it seem strange to connect homeless people to the rest of us?

It’s really hard for me to not think of Mark Horvath as a hero. For having an idea. And acting on it.

And I am NEVER going to waste a good crisis again.

Thanks Mark, for such great inspiration.

Was the WikiLeaks Founder Right to Walk From This Interview?

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 18:44:10 PDT

Torture, war based on lies, slaughtered mothers and babies, billions wasted, no problem. But that DAMN Wikileaks founder, he's so terrible!

Amplify’d from mashable.com

Frustrated at the direction the media’s narrative has taken, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of an interview with CNN’s Atika Schubert.

She inquired about the rape allegations made against him in Sweden but he threatened several times to walk when she brought the subject up. When she didn’t drop it completely, he removed his mic and walked away.

The reporter drew some frustrated comments from Assange when she suggested that the rape accusations —which Assange believe were fabricated by the Pentagon or another enemy —affect WikiLeaks. “I’m not going to talk about that in relation to this … this interview is about something else.

When Schubert continued to pry, asking Assange to elaborate on his earlier statement that the accusations were part of a dirty tricks campaign, Assange responded, “I will have to walk if you’re going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person.”

Assange repeated the threat several times as Schubert tried to frame her question as an opportunity for him to back up his claims that the accusations were smears, and he finally said softly, “I’m sorry” before standing up, removing his microphone and walking away.
Read more at mashable.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/dviv

Transparency: Who Are America's Illegal Immigrants

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:34:52 PDT

Download infography

Illegal immigration is much more complicated issue than the usual dichotomy of "Illegal immigrants are destroying our country" versus "Illegal immigrants play a vital role in our economy." Before we even embark on the discussion, we need to know who we're talking about. How many illegal immigrants are there, where are they from, and how do they fit in to the economy?

SOURCE: Pew Hispanic Center

U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade

How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:17:26 PDT

Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity, linked to IQ

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:01:44 PST

Yes, as I’ve always said… I don’t know if my high IQ is caused by my liberal and atheistic beliefs or vice versa. Seriously. The male sexual exclusivity should be studied further...

Amplify'd from edition.cnn.com

The IQ differences are statistically significant, but experts say the data shouldn’t be used to stereotype or make assumptions.

Extract

(CNN) — Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with “unconventional” philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart,” he said.

For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. With a goal of spreading genes, early men had multiple mates. Since women had to spend nine months being pregnant, and additional years caring for very young children, it made sense for them to want a steady mate to provide them resources.

Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger.

“It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere,” Kanazawa said.

Given that human ancestors had a keen interest in the survival of their offspring and nearest kin, the conservative approach — looking out for the people around you first — fits with the evolutionary picture more than liberalism, Kanazawa said. “It’s unnatural for humans to be concerned about total strangers.” he said.

Neither Bailey nor Kanazawa identify themselves as liberal; Bailey is conservative and Kanazawa is “a strong libertarian.”

“More intelligent people don’t have more children, so moving away from the trajectory is not going to happen,” he said.

Read more at edition.cnn.com

NASA and DARPA Plan ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ To Bring Humans to Other Worlds And Leave Them There Forever

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:01:45 PST

I've just read this article and remember when I was a child seeing the first voyage to the Moon.

Do you sign up for this unique travel?

Think about that, this is a non-return-home voyage on the new Mayflower.

Amplify’d from www.popsci.com

Mars Mining This Mars miner will probably never go home again. NASA

If NASA ever gets a clear directive for interplanetary exploration, a new Hundred-Year Starship could be their version of the Mayflower. And like the first pilgrims, Martian explorers might set sail with the knowledge they would never return home.

NASA and DARPA have joined forces to build something called a Hundred-Year Starship, according to the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Simon “Pete” Worden said NASA contributed $100,000 to the project and DARPA kicked in $1 million.

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)

Beyond that, there are no details. But the prospect of a DARPA-NASA spaceship collaboration for Star Trek-esque exploration sounds thrilling — even if by definition, a 100-year ship means leaving Earth and never coming back.

Incidentally, that’s exactly the proposal in a new paper in press in the Journal of Cosmology, a relatively new, peer-reviewed open access journal. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies suggest sending astronauts to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers for a permanent Mars colony.

They would get periodic supply missions, but they would be expected to fend for themselves for water, shelter, nutrients and mineral/chemical processing. They would be expected to develop some kind of homegrown Martian industry, which could ultimately serve as a hub for an expanded colonization program. Plus, leaving some people on another planet would probably ensure that we’d want to go back, to visit them and see what they created.

Such a mission would save money, the authors say, because the prohibitive costs (in dollars and payload) of a manned Mars mission are mostly associated with bringing the astronauts home.

“Eliminating the need for returning early colonists would cut the costs several fold and at the same time ensure a continuous commitment to the exploration of Mars and space in general,” they write.

In a news release, Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University’s Beyond Center, compared would-be Mars colonists to swashbuckling explorers like Columbus and Amundsen.

“It would really be little different from the first white settlers of the North American continent, who left Europe with little expectation of return,” he said.

Still, getting there would require an advanced propulsion system that could get off the ground with minimal fuel and land safely. At the weekend event, a Long Now Foundation-funded conference in San Francisco, Worden also said NASA is also exploring electric propulsion systems.

He believes we should go to the moons of Mars first, and believes it can happen by 2030.

“(Google cofounder) Larry Page asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’ So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price,” Worden said.

Of course, that price tag does not include the inestimable cost of saying goodbye forever. NASA has worked with several psychologists and psychiatrists to study future astronauts' response to isolation and long-term absence from loved ones — but a permanent absence is even more complicated.

Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University associate professor, said he would do it — but only after his kids are grown.

Read more at www.popsci.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/cFxn2o

Empire Avenue - The Influencer Stock Market

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:16:11 PDT

Empire Avenue is a new and revolutionary online influence stock exchange combined with an advertising platform that allows individuals and organizations to convert their online influence and reach into revenue. To this end we will be connecting advertisers, consumers and influencers in a manner not as yet undertaken in the online space. Through the Empire Avenue influence stock exchange and its tracking features we will measure the influence value of individuals registered with Empire Avenue.

Influencers will be given control over the advertising they carry, and advertisers will be better able to reach their target consumer. We believe that this better targeted advertising approach will lead to better returns and leads for advertisers. Empire Avenue sets itself apart not only in its unique feature set, but also by paying influencers the majority of advertising revenue generated unlike other major advertising networks.

As in the stock market, Empire Avenue users can buy and sell stocks, and value of shares will fluctuate according to their influence in social media. The site allows you to connect our account of Facebook, Facebook Pages, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and RSS feed of our blog in order to track our activity in these sites, influencing the value of our stock. You can also raise the price of your stock as you have activity in Empire Avenue, if you invest in shares of other people, and the more people invest in you. You accumulate wealth, which can continue to invest. Not because they have few followers on Twitter, Facebook or a few friends going to stop increasing the value of your action.

I've only a day testing the site and I must say is very addictive and fun. When creating your account you are asked to choose a ticker, as the companies name their shares on the stock. It should contain a maximum of six letters, so in my case I chose my name. You can find me in JCAR. In addition to buying actions of others, and they can also follow you. You can comment on each others' profiles, join communities by city and interests. The site also provides rankings of users and companies whose shares are priced higher. Driving a good investment portfolio, we are winning Eaves, the unit of measure of wealth of Empire Avenue, whose symbol reminds a little to the Euro.

Differences between Men and Women

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 19:00:30 PDT

Twitter Can Be Used to Predict Stock Market, Say Researchers

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:19:30 PDT

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

Researchers from Indiana University have devised a method for predicting changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average through the analysis of Twitter updates. Using two mood-recording algorithms, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) and OpinionFinder, the team analyzed 9.7 million tweets posted between March and December 2008. They found that correlations between the calmness index, one of the six "moods" measured by GPOMS, could be used to predict whether or not the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up or down between two and six days later.

According to MIT's Technology Review, head researcher Johan Bollen and his team are announcing this news at Indiana University today. Says Bollen regarding the discovery, his team found "an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average."

As MIT notes, that's an incredible result. Maybe too incredible. The article then questioned some of the methodology involved with this project. For example, tweets from around the world were used instead of just U.S.-based ones, which seems an odd choice given that the intention was an analysis of the U.S. stock market. However, during 2008, Twitter's user population was largely American, so this factor alone does not entirely discount the study.

What's interesting about this analysis of Twitter moods is that out of the six states GPOMS measures - happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness - it's the last one, calmness, that's most useful in predicting stock market changes. None of the other indices, including those from OpinionFinder, a more general positive/negative sentiment indicator, reflected any stock market changes.

The researchers admit that they don't know why or how this selection of Twitter.com user feeds was able to make predictions so accurate, and they say more research is needed.

Using Twitter to track the stock market is nothing new: StockTwits, for example, is an online community of investors where users sign in with their Twitter account to keep track of stock-related news. The service pulls in tweets tagged with a $ before a stock symbol (ex.: $AAPL). Competing service FINIF Financial Informatics, does something similar - it gathers sentiment reports in real-time from SEC filings, news headlines and Twitter. FINIF scans all recent Twitter updates that reference a stock symbol and then measures the sentiment using a custom word list to create the "sentiment score" for a given stock.

However, neither service purports to offer stock predictions on this level based on either the news or the fluctuating "moods" of the Twitter user base. In the future, perhaps, that may change, as this sentiment analysis research continues.

Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/dDtMGr

Driverless Taxi is controlled with iPad App

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:01:44 PST

Will the near future really be filled with cars that drive themselves? First Google shocked the world with news that they were working on a car that drives itself. Now a team from Germany's Freie University is making the rounds with a taxi that drives itself with just a click of a button.

It all sounds super cool and all, but how does it work? All the magic comes from an iPad app — simply put in the coordinates you want the car to drive to and then that's it. You can even watch the car drive itself along a map.

Using a variety of laser scanners, cameras, GPS and radars, the modified Volkswagen Passat does looks like it works relatively well — but we still have our doubts.

How does the car deal with jaywalkers or what happens when there is another car backing out of the parking lot, obscuring its path? Or what if some vandal decides to smash the car's obtrusive scanner on the car's roof? Obviously these are all things that will need to be sorted out before the dream of owning a car like Knight Rider's KITT becomes a reality.

AutoNOMOS, via Ubergizmo

For the latest tech stories, follow us on Twitter at @dvice

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aQnJ15

Facebook Sharing Data: Compared To Twitter and LinkedIn

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:52:36 PDT

Amplify’d from www.onlinesocialmedia.net

A question that many people will be wondering the answer to… What is a tweet worth? Well we are about to find out. Eventbrite have been measuring the social commerce to create a scale of business.

What is being talked about in Eventbrite’s article reveals the value of shares amongst the different social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This data was pulled from over a 12 week period.

Facebook topped Eventbrite’s charts with an average of $2.52, a close 2nd is sharing via email which valued at $2.34, LinkedIn came in at $0.90 and tweets are at only $0.43. So what does this mean? Simply, it means that the Facebook sharing data is more valuable than that of LinkedIn and Twitter.

The above results are hardly surprising seeing as Eventbrite are geared around events, generally with the different social media sites such as LinkedIn, they aren’t necessarily going to be looking for or booking events, similarly with Twitter, unless you are following someone who is performing at an event.

You can find more details over at SFGate about Facebook’s share data and its competitors. Let us know your opinions on the results in the comments, are you surprised? What social network do you value more?

Read more at www.onlinesocialmedia.net

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bXwKX2

Memories you will never remember

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:53:21 PST

There has been quite a bit of confusion about the meaning of this whole video. To simply explain, you could really conclude your own meaning to it. It's essentially an American Soldier seeing the events leading to his death as well as his comrades from an out of body point of view as he's dying. So really it's just a fogged up memory of those events that only happened an instant ago.

Inspired by SgtMovieMaker and Sabastian Larsson.

Check out their youtube channels by the links below:

SgtMovieMakers: The Aftermath Memory
Sebastian Larsson: A Sad Piano Song

The Best Pictures - Lion Profile in the Zoo

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:11:23 PST

Download Wallpaper (1600 x 1200 pixels)

August 22, 2009

Lion Profile

Photograph by Boza Ivanovic

This Month in Photo of the Day: Animals

Profile of a lion in the zoo.

National Geographic is the source for photos, free desktop wallpapers of places, animals, nature, underwater, travel, and more.It's a long time inspiration for me but now only the time helps me to bring these awesome photographs for your display.I am very happy to bring those "brilliant photography from national geographic archives" here.The following 60 beautiful photographs has beautiful wild life,nature,people and bird photos.

Extracted from Brilliant photography from Natgeo archives | Pokkisam blog

Skype with Facebook integration and group video calling

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:01:45 PST

Windows: Skype is out with an official version 5, making the group video chat seen in previous sign-up betas an official option, and linking up with your Facebook account for status updating and quick calls to friends' Skype or landline numbers.

So this release, beyond the usual bug and performance fixes, mainly makes official the group video chat, although Skype still labels the group video function as "beta." The Facebook integration, at least from the contacts-with-Skype perspective, is pretty convenient. Now you just have to bug your friends to list their Skype names on Facebook.

New also to this version is an automatic call recovery feature, which you can set to automatically re-dial and reconnect calls whenever they drop out. It won't be a great idea for every situation, but very handy in the right circumstance.

We’re excited to announce a brand new version of Skype for Windows, which will help bring you and your friends, family and co-workers together like never before. Download it now, or read on to find out what’s inside.

We’ve integrated the Facebook News Feed and Phonebook into Skype, making it easier to stay connected with the people and communities you care about. We’ve revitalised the look and feel, making voice and video calling, instant messaging, screen sharing and file sharing intuitive and easy to navigate. And you can now bring even more of your family and friends together with the new group video calling feature available in open beta.

With Facebook integration, you can:

see your Facebook News Feed in Skype
post status updates that can be synced with your Skype mood message
comment and like friends’ updates and wall posts
call and SMS your Facebook friends on their mobile phones and landlines
make a free Skype-to-Skype call if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact

Video calling accounted for approximately 40% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes in the first half of this year, and with the new version of Skype, you’ll receive a free trial of group video calling in beta. We’ve added a dynamic group video calling view, which it easy to follow who’s talking by moving the focus to the person speaking on the call – try it out!

We’ve also continued our drive to further improve call quality, and the new version of Skype introduces automatic call recovery, which helps you reconnect calls that are interrupted due to Internet connection problems. Plus, the call quality manager gauges audio and video quality during calls, helping you to resolve problems and improving the call experience.

Finally, the new Skype Home serves as the dashboard for your Skype experience, with a feed of mood messages from your contacts, and tutorials on everything from how to make a video call to how to sign up for a subscription.

Download the new version now – and carry on talking

For those of you who are Mac users: we intend to release an update to our Mac app soon.

From Skype with Facebook integration and group video calling [Skype - The Big Blog]

Blog Action Day 2010 #BAD10

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 02:31:04 PDT

DOWNLOAD 2048x1536

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us.

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses.

90% of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are to children under five years old.

Many of these diseases are preventable. The UN predicts that one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.

Visit charitywater.org
It can change the world.

McDonald’s Happy Meal resists decomposition for six months

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:42:28 PDT

What do you think about fast food?

Amplify’d from news.yahoo.com

Vladimir Lenin, King Tut and the McDonald's Happy Meal: What do they all have in common? A shocking resistance to Mother Nature's cycle of decomposition and biodegradability, apparently.

That's the disturbing point brought home by the latest project of New York City-based artist and photographer Sally Davies, who bought a McDonald's Happy Meal back in April and left it out in her kitchen to see how well it would hold up over time.

The results? "The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock", Davies told the U.K. Daily Mail.

She proceeded to photograph the Happy Meal each week and posted the pictures to Flickr to record the results of her experiment. Now, just over six months later, the Happy Meal has yet to even grow mold. She told the Daily Mail that "the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it".

[Related: 'Double Down' among the worst fast food of 2010]

Davies -whose art has been featured in numerous films and television shows and is collected by several celebrities- told The Upshot that she initiated the project to prove a friend wrong. He believed that any burger would mold or rot within two or three days of being left on a counter. Thus began what's become known as "The Happy Meal Art Project".

[DIY: Make happier meals for your kids at home -- just don't forget one key tip]

"I told my friend about a schoolteacher who's kept a McDonald's burger for 12 years that hasn't changed at all, and he didn't believe me when I told him about it", Davies told us. "He thought I was crazy and said I shouldn't believe everything that I read, so I decided to try it myself".

[Did you know? Before the Happy Meal, there was the Fun Meal]

Some observers of the photo series have noted that the burger's bun appears at different angles, and therefore aired suspicions that the Happy Meal may not in fact be as "untouched" as the project's groundrules stipulate. Davies says there's a simple explanation for the mobile-bun effect. "The meal is on a plate in my apartment on a shelf", she says, "and when I take it down to shoot it, the food slides around. It's hard as rock on a glass plate, so sure, the food is moving".

Click image to see more photos of the unchanging Happy Meal

Photo courtesy of Sally Davies

Davies' friend was the person who should have done the additional research. Wellness and nutrition educator Karen Hanrahan has indeed kept a McDonald's hamburger since 1996 to show clients and students how resistant fast food can be to decomposition.

As for Davies, she said that she might just keep her burger and fries hanging around for a while as well.

"It's sitting on a bookshelf right now, so it's not really taking up any space, so why not?" she said. It ceased giving off any sort of odor after 24 hours, she said, adding: "You have to see this thing".

[Video rewind: Gay-friendly McDonald's ad goes viral]

In response to Davies' project, McDonald's spokeswoman Theresa Riley emailed The Upshot a statement defending the quality of the chain's food. Riley's email also blasted Davies' "completely unsubstantiated" work as something out of "the realm of urban legends".

"McDonald's hamburger patties in the United States are made with 100% USDA-inspected ground beef", Riley wrote. "Our hamburgers are cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else -- no preservatives, no fillers. Our hamburger buns are baked locally, are made from North American-grown wheat flour and include common government-approved ingredients designed to assure food quality and safety. ... According to Dr. Michael Doyle, Director, Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, 'From a scientific perspective, I can safely say that the way McDonald's hamburgers are freshly processed, no hamburger would look like this after one year unless it was tampered with or held frozen".

(Photos via Sally Davies' Flickr)

Read more at news.yahoo.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/duI2XT

12 Craziest Corsets

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:23:33 PDT

Fetishism or just plain fashion?

Amplify’d from www.oddee.com

Piercing Corset

One of the newest trends in body modification comes in the form of corset piercings. They are a series of surface piercings arranged up the back in two vertical columns. The piercing is located in the spot where the eyelets would be if one was wearing a corset. It is a symmetrical piercing with an equal number of holes on each side. As few as four holes can be used (two on each side) up to as many as the expanse of skin will allow.
(Link)

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Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:18:43 PDT

Twitter Preparing New Events Feature, Aims to Reach 1 Billion Users

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:42:53 PDT

Events would track a number of keywords that auto-associate themselves with the event.

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

"Twitter will get to a billion members", Twitter co-founder and recently displaced CEO Evan Williams told the crowd at a San Francisco INFORUM event yesterday. With only 145 million-plus users at present, reaching that lofty goal is still a long ways off for the 4-year old company.

The Twitter events feature was one of the topics of the Monday night "fireside chat" with Twitter's co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. The execs were interviewed by BusinessWeek writer Brad Stone, and offered a few insights into company vision and plans for the future.

Among the topics covered, were how the new Twitter redesign was going (well -not even one protest!), their reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's recent essay on "Why the revolution will not be tweeted" (laughable -no one had claimed the revolution would be tweeted to begin with), advertising transparency (ads will be clearly labeled), censorship (they only have three rules on banning tweets: no specific violent threats, no child porn and they comply with copyright takedowns), China (not interested because Twitter is blocked there) and more.

Twitter Events the Next Big Twitter Feature?

But the big reveal, mentioned casually in a brief interview with PC Magazine, is news of a brand new Twitter feature: Events.

With Evan Williams, former chief exec, having just returned to product strategy, Twitter can finally get to work on the feature it has, internally, "been talking about forever", said Stone. And its launch may be just around the corner: "I think that's something that's going to be coming up soon".

"Twitter electrifies events", Stone explained, describing the need for the feature. "You're connected to it, in this matrix. You want to be connected to it, if you're there".

He also talked about the flip side of events on Twitter - the negatives of people tweeting from an event and how that impacts other users of the service. "If you're not there, you don't want to hear about it," he said.

If your Twitter stream has all of a sudden been bombarded with tweets from an event, then you know the frustration of dealing with live tweeting. If the event doesn't interest you, the tweets are just noise. The ability to quickly filter out those tweets from your stream would be a feature many Twitter users would rejoice over.

With these ideas in mind - that events are both incredibly popular for those attending and annoyance for those who aren't there (or aren't interested) - Twitter is beginning work on the new Events feature.

There's no word yet regarding details or an ETA just yet. We've reached out to Twitter to see if it would like to share more details, and will update if we hear back.

Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

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Blog Action Day 2010 - Water

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 03:45:26 PDT

IMPORTANT > Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.

Amplify’d from blogactionday.change.org

Why Water?

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.

Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.

Suggested Posts

Water as a Human Right:In July, the United Nations declared access to clean water and sanitation a human right over objection from the United States. Today, nearly one billion people lack basic access to safe drinking water.
More Info »

Women:In Africa, women are predominantly responsible for collecting water. They walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 40 pounds to gather water for their community, which is usually still not safe to drink.
More Info »

Children:Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
More Info »

Polluted Oceans:Not only is pollution bad for the environment, it’s also expensive! Death and disease caused by polluted coastal waters costs the global economy $12.8 billion a year.
More Info »

Uninhabitable Rivers:Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life. That’s not surprising considering the fact that 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually.
More Info »

Food Footprint:Do you know the water footprint of your food? For example, 75 liters of water are required to make a glass of beer and 15,500 liters to make a kilogram of beef.
More Info »

Water Wars:Many scholar, researchers and political analysts attribute the conflict in Darfur at least in part to lack of access to water. In fact, a report commissioned by the UN Development Program found that in the 21st century, water scarcity will become one of the leading causes of conflict in Africa.
More Info »

Water & Poverty:A lack of water contributes to poverty, with parents and children too ill or too busy collecting water to go to school and work. Water poverty also undermines progress poor countries are making on health - with half of hospital beds taken by people suffering with diarrhoea and dysentery.
More Info »

Technology Footprint:On an average day, 500 billion liters of water travel through US power plants to power all the technology that we use every day. For example, that shiny new iPhone in your pocket requires half a liter of water to charge. That may not seem like much, but with approximately 6.4 million active iPhones in the US, that’s 3.2 million liters to charge those alone.
More Info »

Bottled Water:Even though people in the US have access to clean water from their taps, they drink an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.
More Info »

Farmers vs. Animals:As water becomes scarcer in Africa, farmers not only compete with each other but also with other animals, including elephants. Forced into close contact with farmers, elephants destroy crops and wreak havoc on agriculture, causing farmers in turn to resort to violence in order to protect their crops and water sources.
More Info »

Fashion Footprint:That cotton t-shirt you’re wearing right now took 400 gallons of water to produce, and your jeans required an extra 1800 gallons. Not wearing cotton? The dyes and synthetic fibers used to make your clothes create waste that’s among the many contributors to water pollution.
More Info »

Water Celebrities:A number of celebrities have taken up the cause of water and water rights, including
Matt Damon
Adrian Grenier
Leonardo DiCaprio
Will & Jada Smith
.

Read more at blogactionday.change.org

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Michael Fertik on Privacy and Social Networks

jcarrete@hotmail.es (Javier Carrete) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:15:35 PDT

81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online. We are the last generation to know privacy as it was and from now on, it will have to be taught. We are entering a new era of publicness or publicy, where we are solely responsible for creating and defining our online persona.

Amplify’d from www.briansolis.com

Thank you for joining me for the 5th episode of (R)evolution, a new series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, marketing, and media. In this episode, Michael Fertik, founder and CEO of Reputation Defender, joins the program to discuss privacy and the reasons why you and everyone who matters to you, will be unfairly, but forever judged by what’s online.

A recent study by security company AVG and Research Now surveyed 2,200 mothers in North America (USA and Canada), the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), Australia/New Zealand and Japan, and found that 81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online. 92 percent of U.S. children have an online presence thrust upon them by the time they are 2 years old. In many cases, a digital presence is born before the child, with sonograms (23%) actively published and shared on social networks and blogs.

While innocent in nature, this behavior exhibits the simplicity of sharing first and the recognition of potential consequences later.

In Engage, I talk about fusing the “Me” in social media with the “We” in the social web. We cast digital shadows and trigger a butterfly effect with everything we share online.

I believe that we are the last generation to know privacy as it was and from now on, it will have to be taught. We are entering a new era of publicness or publicy, where we are solely responsible for creating and defining our online persona. Some will learn the hard way. Others will learn to take the wheel of their personal brand and steer it in a direction that reveals meaningful opportunities and experiences.

Studies already show that as much as 64 percent of HR managers screen candidates by what they find on social networks. 88% of universities rate social media important in evaluating prospective students. Lenders are researching your social graph to assess your credit risk.

It’s time to take control.

Remember, what works against you also works for you…as George Bernard Shaw once said, “Life is not about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself”.

A few other interesting stats from the “Digital Birth: Welcome to the Online World” study:

Mothers that gave their baby an email address

Overall – 7%

USA – 6%
Canada – 9%
UK – 4%
France – 7%
Italy – 7%
Germany – 7%
Spain – 12%
(EU5 – 7%)
Australia – 7%
New Zealand – 4%
Japan – 7%

Mothers that gave their baby a social network profile

Overall – 5%

USA – 6%
Canada – 8%
UK – 4%
France – 2%
Italy – 5%
Germany – 5%
Spain – 7%
(EU5 – 5%)
Australia – 5%
New Zealand – 6%
Japan – 8%

Read more at www.briansolis.com

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