Painfully true chart of how every group involved in a software project is seen by the others.
From FAIL Blog
Monthly Archives: August 2011
TSA Is Trying Out The ‘Chat-Down’
Posted by apt46
on August 31, 2011
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Since people have been up in arms about both pat-downs and racial profiling, the TSA has been busy looking for something else — something that hopefully works, since everything they’ve tried so far has yet to catch a single terrorist. For their next trick, they’re taking a page from Israel (who is like the world expert in dealing with Arab terrorism) and trying out ‘behavioral profiling’, starting at Boston’s Logan airport. Everyone going through security is now going to get a little conversation, during which what will most definitely be highly-trained and competent agents will assess how suspicious you act — not look; definitely not how Arab you look.
They’ll be looking for any of 35 subtle, involuntary cues that show you’re nervous about flying — which you could be either because it’s your first time on an airplane, or that a stranger is probing you with personal questions, or that you’re looking to blow up the plane with the C4 you had sown into your appendix. Most, or if we’re honest, probably all of the positives will be false positives, so failing the test doesn’t mean anything more than getting selected for a pat-down.
No word on how many thousands of extra agents they hired to deal with the fact that they now have to spend a minute chatting you down, as opposed to the 10 seconds to look at your ID and boarding pass. But again, if we’re honest, they probably haven’t hired anyone new and will just tell us to now get to the airport 4 hours ahead of time, due to ‘enhanced’ security. Which, when did ‘enhanced’ come to mean “really annoying and ineffective”?
From NPR
The Mythical Self-Inflating Tire Is Here
Posted by apt46
on August 30, 2011
1 comment
Someone invented a tire that inflates itself as it rolls. It does this by forcing air through a special thin hose on the outside of the tire, when it’s pressed underneath the weight of the wheel. When the tire is fully inflated, it stops pumping it. It’s called PumpTire, and the video below explains how it works. No more having to check the air pressure before heading out for a ride!
Ai WeiWei Wrote An Article In Newsweek
Posted by apt46
on August 30, 2011
1 comment
The Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, who designed the stadium used in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, is — along with Liu Xiabobo – one of China’s most famous political dissidents and activists. He was arrested back in April, held for three months without charges, was psychologically tortured, then charged with tax evasion and let go on the condition that he does not speak to the press, use the Internet, or leave Beijing for a year. Well, he’s already used his Twitter account, and while this may not be technically speaking to the press, on Sunday, Newsweek published an article written by him about how much he hates Beijing. It actually reads like more of a diary entry than an article: it’s fairly short, personal, and very well written — he spent 12 years in the US, starting in 1981. It’s definitely worth reading, if for no other reason than that any summary will rob the piece of its soul.
Beijing National Stadium (aka, The Bird's Nest), designed by Ai WeiWei
But for the lazy, unwashed masses, here’s your soul-less summary: Beijing sucks because of its extreme inequality between those who have money and power and those who don’t; also, there’s rampant corruption and a lack of basic human rights, which makes it impossible to feel safe. As for his personal plight, the government ostracizes and exiles dissidents in various outskirts of the city, with the goal of isolating them from anyone they know, and vice-versa. He calls it a constant nightmare, along the lines of Kafka’s The Castle. Reuters asked him about the story, and he said he didn’t know what the consequences of writing it would be.
Hopefully in the long term, the consequences will be a free China.
Ai WeiWei
Undercover Policing Is Getting A Lot Harder
Posted by apt46
on August 30, 2011
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TechWorld Australia has an interesting article that points out how much harder it is to find qualified police officers to send undercover in the age of the Internet. Since everyone under 30 now has pictures of themselves strewn all over MySpace, Facebook, Twitpic, Flickr and Google Plus/Picasa, the chance of a bad guy coming across an undercover cop’s real picture, or someone recognizing the undercover cop in a Facebook album is now high enough to raise the alarm. And the next decade will make it even worse, as facial recognition algorithms become more mainstream. Facebook already has facial recognition built-in, supposedly to help you tag people in pictures more easily — it recognizes the same face in all the pictures of an album, so you only have to tag them once. Therefore it’s not a stretch to think that in the year 2025, you could search for a picture on Google or Facebook and it would tell you exactly who that person is; which, for the mafia, will be an invaluable tool.
Riot Police in Manchester, England. Photo by Phil Long
A study done on the New South Wales police found that the vast majority of them use social networking, and everyone under 26 had uploaded photos of themselves onto the Internet. Which isn’t that bad, because they could theoretically take them down and hope no one copied them, however unlikely that is. But what’s worse is that 85% of them had pictures of themselves uploaded by someone else. And since people start social networking in their teens, by the time they become police officers 10 years later, they are all over the Internet. The worst part of it all though: once you found the undercover’s real Facebook page, you can identify their friends and family, which is not the kind of info you’d want a den of thieves to have.
From TechWorld Australia
Anti-Sexism
Posted by apt46
on August 29, 2011
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Data Does A Great Impression Of Picard
Posted by apt46
on August 29, 2011
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Brent Spiner, the actor who played Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, does a really good impression of Patrick Stewart at the 2011 Emerald City ComiCon in Seattle.
Now *This* Is A Marketing Gimmick
Posted by apt46
on August 27, 2011
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Back in February, the Consumerist reported that a New Zealand clothing store called Superette installed embossed plates saying “Short shorts on sale Superette” at strategic spots on park benches. The idea was that women wearing short shorts would sit on the benches, and because of the plates’ placement, they would leave an indented print in the skin on the back of the women’s thigh.
This is just really brilliant, for a couple of reasons:
- Even if the whole imprint thing doesn’t happen, they still have ads on park benches that will be seen because people will feel the embossed plates when they sit down. It’s probably a lot more expensive than a print ad, but also probably a lot more effective, due to how unusual it is
- If the imprints do happen, two things will follow: first, the woman who got branded is likely to notice the ad (even if she didn’t on the bench), and tell everyone about what happened to her. Second, pretty much everyone walking behind her will try to read what it says, without looking creepy. Ergo, free walking models advertising their stuff.
- If nothing else, they’ve gotten a lot of brand recognition since this went viral
Via Consumerist
The State Of The American Marriage In 2009
Posted by apt46
on August 25, 2011
1 comment
The US Census released a report today on “marital events” (meaning marriages, divorces and deaths of spouses) for 2009 — apparently it takes them a couple of years to analyze all the data. The short of it is that the modern marriage starts at 28 for guys and 26 for girls, lasts about 20 years and there are about half as many divorces as marriages going on.
One thing worth mentioning is that that last statistic is usually taken to mean that “half of all marriages end in divorce”, which is not true: they don’t actually know how many marriages end in divorce, since it would take some really complicated calculations to track all marriages individually. What the statistic is actually saying is that if we suppose 2 million people got married in 2009, then about 1 million also got divorced that year. But they’re not the same people: the ones getting divorced in 2009 probably got married sometime in the 1990s. So it’s hard to say what percent of marriages actually end in divorce, and it’s likely somewhere in the ballpark of 50%, but it could be 40% or 60% too.
Photo by Carlos Mendoza Lima
The report breaks things down by geography and gender too. The statistics for men and women are surprisingly similar, but geographically they are very different. For example, the religious people in the South and West tend to get married and divorced more often than their heathen counterparts in the Northeast (and to a certain extent the Midwest), who probably avoid the marriage/divorce statistic by living in sin. And in the South, where the sanctity of marriage is supposedly rivaled only by the right to bear arms, the divorce rate is the highest in the nation. The West leads in marriage rates, and is in the middle with the Midwest in divorce.
Highest marriage rates: Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Hawaii — basically the states that are also leading the nation in having nothing to do but throw weddings.
Highest divorce rates: Arkansas, Maine, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky, Alaska, Nevada — God’s country, Sin City… and Maine
Lowest marriage rates: Maine (they almost have more divorces than weddings), New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Pennsylvania — the Northeast… and Minnesota
Lowest divorce rates: DC, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Idaho — places where they don’t get married… and Idaho
Where you’re most likely to stay married: Idaho, North Dakota, Hawaii, Wyoming, Utah, Delaware — the wedding states, minus Alaska and Arkansas, plus Delaware
Where you’re most likely to get divorced: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Mississippi — the only thing New England and the Deep South have in common
Other interesting facts:
- Over the past 40 years, every 7 years, people enter their first marriage a year later in age than they used to — it’s 28 in 2009 for guys, but it was 22 in 1970
- The length of marriage tends to go down for people that get married multiple times; the first marriage is by far the longest. This may have a lot to do with death though.
- The middle of the country has the longest-lasting marriages, while the coasts tend to have the shortest; maybe that’s why they call it the heartland
- Divorced women are much more likely to have a college degree than divorced men: 68% vs 57%
- The couples that got married in 2009 are better educated than those that got divorced or widowed
From US Census Bureau, via NPR