Located in same area, 2 very different schools in wealth, privilege, culture. Spotlight on the football programs and the kids.

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Aussie Rules has some huge big body on body clashes. Here's the top 7 bone crunchers for 2008.

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The Nintendo Wii is easily the most successful console of the latest generation, but the monster hits on the console come from Nintendo. There is money to be made on the system, but Nintendo seems to be taking the lion's share;

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A quick look at the themes that didn't make the cut.

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I built one prototype prior to the Mega Ramp in 2001, I think it was, for this contest called the "King of Skate." I built the first prototype and it was a little bit smaller than the Mega Ramp. I had two of the other ramps I built before that, and I called them the super ramps back then. There was never a calculation, just human trial and error.

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Private information at bargain prices. It was a high-tech flub at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Arlington when Fox 5’s Investigative Reporter Tisha Thompson bought a Blackberry device containing confidential campaign information. It started with a snippet we read that The McCain-Palin campaign was selling it's equipment at a discount.

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We simply cannot allow the practitioners of this perverse and unnatural lifestyle choice to get away with destroying marriage!!Don't give in to the Southpaw agenda. This country was founded by right-handed people. Stand up for traditional morality! Stand up for right-handedness!

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Great bulb. I look forward to purchasing the end of the month!

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As amateurs, most of the time we don't fully understand a science article we are reading but the newspapers sure do make it easier for us with their pretty pictures and dumbed down explanations. Leave it to the Onion satirize bad science for the masses.

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Can commercial jets fly upside down? Has terrorism forced a change in transoceanic flight paths? And other probing questions for our expert.

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The discussion about whether or not an unpowered vehicle can be made to go directly downwind faster than the wind (DWFTTW) is ongoing. I was reading the comments this morning, and came across a link to this intriguing video, titled "Under the ruler faster than the ruler." It's starting to make me think that a DWFTTW cart is feasible. In the video, I was surprised to see which direction the big wheel turned when the ruler was run across the top. I'm also quite impressed that this fellow and others are making models to conduct experiment, instead of simply speculating. Hooray for amateur science! As I've requested in previous posts on this subject, if you have something to contribute to the discussion boards, please refrain from insults and name-calling. Previously: Video: can a vehicle move downwind faster than the wind? Downwind faster than the wind, part 2 Directly downwind faster than the wind - part 3...


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GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a long-standing and hugely respected open source graphics program, and many readers probably already use it.

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(Stereoscope photo from 1906) A wealthy film director is spending £40 million to build an exact replica of the Taj Mahal in Bangladesh, but Indian officials are trying to block its constructing, claiming the Taj Mahal, which was completed in 1653 is protected by copyright. For their part, Bangladeshi officials are incensed by suggestions that the Taj Mahal - which was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and completed in 1653 - is protected by some sort of copyright. “I'm not sure what they are talking about,” one said. “Show me where it says that emulating a building like this can be illegal.” To make his Taj, Mr Moni imported marble and granite from Italy and diamonds from Belgium to add to 160kg (350lb) of bronze. He hopes that his version of the mausoleum will attract tourists to Bangladesh, a country that is well off the beaten track for Western holidaymakers. India is trying to block Bangladesh's copycat Taj Mahal...


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If BF wants to pull an all-nighter to crush some monsters, it’s fine by me. What do I care if my BF gets his kicks from a server? He’s a bonafide dork, I knew that when I met him.

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MIT professor Hal Abelson started today’s final presentation for the school’s “Building Mobile Applications” class by saying, “A course like this couldn’t have existed ten years ago… maybe not even a year ago. Courses like this right now are unique, but in two years they’ll be completely ordinary.” What’s extraordinary is that on top of a full college course-load at one of the most challenging schools in the country, these groups of students built fully working mobile applications for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian devices while mentors from the likes of Google, Nokia, Bank of America, and Microsoft oversaw their progress.
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Sun has reached an agreement with Toshiba to pre-install the OpenSolaris operating system on Toshiba laptops.

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Produced by Ice Cube, this is not your everyday gynecologist.

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As the cartoon turns 20, creator Scott Adams speaks out on boss diversity, where Wall Street went wrong, Dilbert's scary job hunt, and more.

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This morning I had the opportunity to have a chat with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP of Product Management of Qik, a popular live video casting application available on most major mobile platforms. It's not the first time we've interviewed him but, with competition at an all time high, I figured it was time to check back in. The interview was conducted over IM and later formatted to fit within the traditional Q&A structure.
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Pop surrealist David Stoupakis has a solo exhibition of his phantasmagoric paintings opening tomorrow, December 13, at Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. Corey Helford Gallery has invited BB readers to preview the entire exhibition, titled "These Predicaments," at the link below. Seen above, "Soup" (oil on canvas, 36" x 72"). I wish I could see these gorgeous paintings in person! From the show description: For his second solo exhibition at the Gallery, Stoupakis parlays his talent for the supernatural and macabre into dramatic narratives that reveal symbolic turning points and unexpected dilemmas. A delicate balance of childhood innocence and haunting imagery, the series of oil-on-panel paintings and graphite drawings recounts grim fairytales of the decadent and demure. Marking a new direction for the artist, Stoupakis employs a brighter color palette than before and will unveil his largest piece to date for the exhibition. The reception for “These Predicaments” takes place on Saturday, December 13, and the evening will include music scored by composer Geoff Gersh. Open to the public, the exhibition will be on view until December 31, 2008. David Stoupakis Preview (username: preview, password: preview25)...


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Every movie buff needs a library of classics to show off his HD system. These films reward repeat viewing with great stories, evocative soundtracks and dazzling visuals. Here are the movies hi-def was made for.

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And it had nothing to do with the fact that Zeitgeist was rubbish Overblown rock outfit Smashing Pumpkins have announced that they will no longer be releasing albums, and it's all because of Apple and its pesky iTunes store.

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The air seems to be coming out of the Web 2.0 bubble, squeezed by the economic downturn and the absence of many solid short-term business plans.

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Just another anti-atheist billboard in America, brought to you by a Rev. E. F. Briggs.

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Noah Shachtman over at WIRED's Danger Room blog has posted a pretty big exclusive. "A Defense Department project, supposedly designed to support U.S. troops, was used instead to channel millions of dollars to personal friends and allies of its chief," he tells Boing Boing. How much you wanna bet we see anything but impunity for the crooks in the outgoing administration responsible for this? Also, what are the underwear perverts doing in that photo above? No, not Rumsfeld, I mean the blue and red guys. Anyway: here's a snip from Noah's post: The "America Supports You," or ASY, program was led in a "questionable and unregulated manner," according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report, obtained by Danger Room. At least $9.2 million was "inappropriately transferred" by the project's managers. Much of that money served only to further promote ASY, instead of assisting servicemembers. In 2004, the office of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld set up ASY as a six-month effort to showcase the U.S. public's backing for the troops and their families. "If you're serving overseas, and you watch the mainstream media coverage, sometimes you can't tell if America knows you're there," one official overseeing the program says. America Supports You was seen as a way to counteract that sense. In time, however, the program grew. Pro-troop rallies were organized. Special wristband and dog-tags were made. Special-edition comic books were printed up. Processions were held on the National Mall, on the 9/11 anniversary. Sesame Street characters were enlisted to make DVDs that encouraged families with young children to talk about overseas deployments. America Supports You became a kind of umbrella group for all sorts of charity-related work for servicemembers and military families. Meanwhile, ASY began to spend millions -- not to help the troops, the Inspector General says, but to help itself. Exclusive: Pentagon Pro-Troop Group Misspent Millions, Report Says (WIRED Danger Room)...


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We will see whether business and governments are serious about sustainability, says Daniel Franklin.

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I've been reading Steven Johnson's Invention Of Air and I've got images of Joseph Priestley's tubes and pumps in my head. Priestley's experiments with mice and plants in the tubes led to the discovery of oxygen and the realization that...
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After a lull around Thanksgiving, December has seen some of the biggest layoffs in the tech industry yet since the economy entered its tailspin in the fall. Our Layoff Tracker is now past 100,000 lost jobs (109,629, as of this writing) across nearly 300 different technology and media companies both large and small. To put this in perspective, Citigroup alone announced 52,000 layoffs in November, and across the U.S. economy, just counting September and October, there were nearly 500,000 unemployment claims as a result of mass layoffs (data isn't in yet for November or December).
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I've seen a lot of Rally car close calls but this one may be he closest. That guy is so so lucky...

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What I'm about to say will anger a lot of CE manufacturers, but this has been the laziest year in consumer electronics to date and I'm recommending that rather than spending money on the boring stuff that has come out in 2008 we all spend our money on digital media - games, music, audiobooks, ebooks, and the like. And I don't mean digital Blu-Ray and game disks, either. I mean all bits, all season.
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It's Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that's worth showing you. This week's presentation comes from Duck Duck Go, a start-up that wants to make it easier for you to find what it is that you are looking for on the Internet. Duck Duck Go combines a search engine's algorithmic search technology with Wikipedia's user generated content. They argue that the combination of these two technologies makes it quicker and easier for people to find what they want on the Internet.
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Numbers can be mysterious.

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When it comes to educational software, the trick is to make kids think they're just playing a traditional escapist game, while they're really being surreptitiously fed facts and logic problems that put their brains to work. But while many games have done this for years, the technique hasn't really made the jump to online virtual worlds - most of the kid-friendly virtual worlds are more focused on socializing and having fun than learning. Now JumpStart, a best-selling educational software developer, is looking to fill this niche with its new JumpStart Virtual World, which launched this week in public beta. The game has high production values, with rich 3D graphics, customizable avatars, and a large world to explore. The game is browser-based, and works on both Mac and Windows with a small browser plugin.
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A bipartisan Senate report concluded that decisions by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a "direct cause" of inhumane treatment of POWs. The report, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years. The document also challenges assertions by senior Bush administration officials that the most egregious cases of prisoner mistreatment were isolated incidents of appalling conduct by U.S. troops. "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the report says. Instead, the document says, a series of high-level decisions in the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody." Of course, the only thing that will happen as a result of this report is that President Bush will give Rummy a medal. Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals...


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Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: User Ratings and Reviews: Join the Conversation; Citysearch Launches Application for iPhone; Google Chrome Out of Beta; and more.
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Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Paid Links: A Black Hat/White Hat Discussion; Look for SEO Opportunities in these Dire Economic Times; Yahoo Shareholder Wants Search Sold to Microsoft; and more.
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Tencent (700.HK) announced on Friday that it has recorded 1 million peak concurrent users (PCU) for its licensed side-scrolling casual game"Dungeon and Fighter" (DNF). DNF's PCU reached 900,000 on December 3.
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More games on the market also means there’s more horrible, misguided and just plain hideous box art to gawp at than ever before. True, it’s not as consistently horrible as boxes were in the old 8- and 16-bit days, but the torrent of low-end shovelware we’ve seen this year – particularly on the DS and Wii – has taught us to feel new kinds of pain.

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Though some of EA’s risks didn’t take off like they’d hoped, CEO John Riccitiello said on a conference call this week he was proud of the 17 games that scored at least an 80 on Metacritic. Riccitiello didn’t name the 17 games that made the cut, so we decided to search through Metacritic’s archives and find out. Mirror's Edge didn't make the cut.

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The drive to save the world's forests aims to pay people in developing countries to live among the trees rather than cut them down.

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A small company claims it can make heat by changing the stable state of hydrogen atoms, a claim that many dispute. But company founder Randell Mills says it's making progress.

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A man's genetic make-up may play a role in whether he has sons or daughters, a study of hundreds of years of family trees suggests. Newcastle University researchers found men were more likely to have sons if they had more brothers and vice versa if they had more sisters. A man's genetic make-up may play a role in whether he has sons or daughters.

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25 NPCs we'd love to get our hands on... in a (mostly) non-sexual way, of course

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The mysterious Director of surrealist thinktank and clothier Imaginary Foundation has a gallery show of oil paintings and sculptures opening tomorrow night, December 13, at SURU in Los Angeles. The opening night festivities will include music by DJ Nitedog and Darkhorse and a special live appearance by the Cosmic Drummer featured on the Imaginary Foundation's "Space Is The Place" t-shirt. The show is titled "I Dream, Therefore I Become," and will be the subject of Monday's episode of BBtv. Tune in, and turn on. Imaginary Foundation gallery show Previously: Imaginary Foundation's new dresses - Boing Boing Imaginary Foundation show at Stussy San Francisco - Boing Boing Nick Philip and Imaginary Foundation in RES Magazine - Boing Boing Imaginary Foundation's "Medium" Is The Message t-shirt - Boing Boing...
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GM hired experts to help it explore bankruptcy protection as allies in the Senate sought to muster support for the stalled bailout package.

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Now we know why Formula One team bosses were surprised by how much progress they made at cost-cutting talks in Monte Carlo this week. The reductions announced by the teams and the governing body, the FIA, today are startling.

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Some of the best, the worst, and the weirdest. 8 megabytes of JPEGs after the jump!

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Even though it may seem like Hockenberry’s “Dear Steve” letter is focused around the marketing problems some have faced with their apps, the underlying issues revolve around Apple’s entire policies with the way they manage the App Store. Something all too familiar to anyone that spends time inside the app store.

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Christmas Cards

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There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector. Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact).
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An exotic carbon structure could explain why astronomers have seen very little diamond dust in the universe. Since the 1980s, researchers have puzzled over origin of "nanodiamonds", tiny diamond deposits preserved in meteorites, such as the Allende meteorite that landed in Mexico in 1969.These tiny diamonds make up roughly 3% of the carbon in rocks

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Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks. It is famously difficult to teach people to program, and CS lore says that there are simply people who get it and people who don't. Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, two computer instructors at Middlesex University in the UK, put that idea to the test, and ended up not with two kinds of people, but three. They devised a basic aptitude test for first year students of computer programming, and then administered it on the first day of class, before the students had learned anything. (One of them maintains this was a mistake, the other claims it was planned.) The result was an almost perfect correlation between the results of the test and the student's subsequent performance. The test asked simple questions about assignments (example shown in the image above.) The group tested broke down into three camps: people who answered the questions using different mental models for different questions, people who answered using a consistent model, and people who didn't answer the questions at all: Told that there were three groups and how they were distinguished, but not told their relative sizes, we have found that computer scientists and other programmers have almost all predicted that the blank group would be more successful in the course exam than the others: “they had the sense to refuse to answer questions which they couldn’t understand” is a typical explanation. Non-programming social scientists, mathematicians and historians, given the same information, almost all pick the inconsistent group: “they show intelligence by picking methods to suit the problem” is the sort of thing they say. Very few, so far, have predicted that the consistent group would be the most successful. Remarkably, it is the consistent group, and almost exclusively the consistent group, that is successful. Interestingly, this correlation is unrelated to correctness -- being consistently wrong in your mental model of how a computer works is better than being inconsistently right, because if you are consistently wrong, you only have to learn one thing to start being consistently right. Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness: To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it. (It will be interesting to see how long it will be in the comments before someone chimes in with the snake oil of the industry: "But method X/language Y is so intuitive that it solves this problem!" Dehnadi and Bornat's literature review should be required reading for this group.) Dehnadi and Bornat's programming aptitude research UPDATE: In the comments, Greebo points to research trying and failing to replicate the salience of consistency as a predictor, in a paper suggesting that "...the consistent group may actually contain two distinct subgroups, one that does much better than the inconsistent group, and one that does much worse." That paper is also interesting for its engagement with the larger issue of replication of experiments involving humans, as they were not able to fully replicate the research (self-selecting group, not given on first day of class, etc...) and use those issues as a platform for illustrating the difficulties with this kind of research generally. On the Difficulty of Replicating Human Subjects Studies in Software Engineering...


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Awesome collection of the best tutorials from Lifehacker .......many got Digg homepages

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a teacher in Austin who threatened to report a local free-Linux-machines charity to the police because "there's no such thing as free software" and they had therefore deceived the student she caught distributing Linux disks in class. The teacher has since had a long conversation with the gentleman from the free Linux project, which is called HeliOS, and he's published a long, mature, and insightful note about the peace he's made with her (in particular, he posted a graceful and heartful apology for some out-of-line remarks he made about the teaching profession and the US teachers' union). It's worth a read: Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she's learned in five years. That's because she's trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are. I have contacted the technology department of AISD and have discovered it has a rich technology environment that uses open source software in all aspects of instruction, operation, and administration. The District has over 36,000 desktop and laptop computers. While about 24,000 of those computers run some version of Windows, AISD is anything but a Windows shop. Their current standard teacher/student image includes both Open Office and Firefox on all Windows computers, and recently has added Open Office to the Apple OS image. Other open source software on both images include audacity and lame, and other Free Software such as Google Earth, iTunes, Adobe and many plug-ins. They also are members of the world community grid; their 36,000 computers are providing many hours of spare processing time (during the work day) to organizations trying to solve major world problems such as energy, cancer, and AIDS. Additionally, they are running more than 100 Linux servers. Character-Assasinations-Ain't-Us (via /.) Previously: Austin teacher threatens to sic cops on Linux group because "No ......
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If you get a chance, check out tonight's full moon. It will be closer to Earth than it's been since 1993 - 221,560 miles away, making it look 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than 2008's other full moons. The composite NASA photo above shows how different the size of the moon appears at perigee, the moon's closest point to the Earth, and apogee, its furthest position from us. From National Geographic: "Typically we don't have the full moon phase and perigee (the position of an object at its least distance from Earth), coinciding at the same time, so that makes this event particularly special," said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California... "While high tides happen each month when the sun, Earth, and the moon are aligned, there is going to be an enhanced effect, with the moon being the closest it's been in more than a decade," said Ben Burress, staff astronomer at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. Sky Show Tonight: Bigges, Brightest Full Moon of 2008...


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Dr. M. Russell Stein was a dentist in New York city who built models of human jaws, bridges, and ferris wheels out of toothpicks. The Feb 1940 issue of Popular Science has an article about his remarkable creations. Toothpick engineering is dentist's hobby...


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A Hello Kitty-themed maternity and pediatric hospital has opened in Yuanlin, Taiwan. The small 30-bed facility is authorized by Sanrio. From Reuters (Christine Lu photo): Director Tsai Tsung-chi said he hopes the white, mouthless cat that is one of the world's most recognisable characters will ease the pain and fear associated with childbirth and being admitted into hospital. "I wish that everyone who comes here, mothers who suffer while giving birth and children who suffer from an illness, can get medical care while seeing these kitties and bring a smile to their faces, helping forget about discomfort and recover faster," he told Reuters. "Hello baby! Hello Kitty welcomes Taiwan newborns" and photos (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)...


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Boston's GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects) is an experimental art gallery co-founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, an incredible Afro-Cuban artist whose rich work ranges from paintings to mixed media to large-scale Polaroid photography. Opening tomorrow, December 13, at GASP is an exhibition of self-taught emerging artists, including Consuelo Isaacson (who also curated the show), Michael Padnos, Alejandro Lazo, and my brother Mark Pescovitz. Besides being a fine art photographer, Mark moonlights as a transplant surgeon and professor of microbiology and immunology. As Isaacson says, Mark "travels extensively around the world for his medical practice. Along the way he takes pictures that capture the inner strength of the people that he meets, the beauty of the landscape that he encounters and the the essences of locality in the scenes he passes by." Above is Mark's "Blue Depth: Catedral de sal de Zipaquira," taken in Zipaquira, Colombia. Regarding Mystery and Beauty (GASP Gallery) Previously: Mark Pescovitz photo show in Indianapolis - Boing Boing Mark Pescovitz photo - Boing Boing Ladybug group shot - Boing Boing...


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Scientists discovered a brain in northern England that is at least 2,000 years old. The brain was found inside the, er, skull of its owner at an archaeological site at York University. They believe the skull, which was found on its own in a muddy pit, may have been a ritual offering. Rachel Cubitt, who was taking part in the dig, described how she felt something move inside the cranium as she cleaned the soil-covered skull's outer surface. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance. "Britan's oldest human brain unearthed"...


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HarperCollins and Nintendo struck a deal to make your Nintendo DS a simple E-book reader. The 100 Classic Books Collection software loads up the game device with Project Gutenberg books. Brownlee has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. E-books come to the Nintendo DS...


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Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Federal Reserve on November 7 to find out who is getting the $2 trillion in bailout money. The Federal Reserve told them to shove it. The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. ... “Notwithstanding calls for enhanced transparency, the Board must protect against the substantial, multiple harms that might result from disclosure,” Jennifer J. Johnson, the secretary for the Fed’s Board of Governors, said in a letter e-mailed to Bloomberg News. “In its considered judgment and in view of current circumstances, it would be a dangerous step to release this otherwise confidential information,” she wrote. You think Madoff's $50 billion fraud was something? He's a patzer compared to these guys. Federal Reserve refuses to disclose the recipients of $2 trillion in emergency loans...


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Surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick's birthday is December 16. In celebration. Total Dick-Head blogger Dave Gill will be doing a two-hour radio tribute tonight, from 10pm-midnight PT, on Pirate Cat Radio. Tune in to 87.9 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or listen online. Dave says: The show's called Psionic Dehiscence and I'll be playing some interviews with PKD - old ones - not from beyond the grave, some John Dowland, hopefully the VALIS opera (if you have a copy of this please email me), some Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, and other strange rock 'n rollers influenced by PKD. I even hope to have some interviews with some of PKD's friends and family (no names just yet). Maybe even some of PKD's old radio plays will find their way on the show. I promise lots of rarities, so fire up your satellite recorders, or load the transmission into your data player for later rebroadcast, but don't miss the satellite firing. Somebody's Got a Birthday Coming (Total Dick-Head), Pirate Cat Radio (piratecatradio.com) Previously: Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut - Boing Boing David Gill interviews Jonathan Lethem about Philip K. Dick - Boing ... Philip K. Dick 1977 video interview - Boing Boing Philip K. Dick blog: Erik Davis and Three Stigmata - Boing Boing Philip K. Dick robot - Boing Boing...


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A new research study suggests that women are more likely to give their phone number to a man they don't know when they are most fertile. Psychologist Nicolas Guéguen of the University of South Brittany and his colleagues report their results in the scientific journal Biological Psychology. From New Scientist: Guéguen is cautious in his interpretations, but the study seems to offer real-world behavioural support for studies showing that women are most receptive to advances when they are likely to get pregnant. Hormones could play a role, as estradiol (a form of oestrogen) and progesterone levels wax and wane during a woman's cycle, and most birth control pills contain progesterone. But Guéguen worries that a woman's relationship status will confound such associations, since single women could be less likely to be on birth control. Fertile women more open to corny chat-up lines...


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Vitra's "Workbay" looks like my kind of chair. At first glance, it appears to have been designed for top-heavy aliens who have evolved giant brains that make them resemble lollipop-headed Blythe-doll uberman -- which is pretty darned cool. Then it becomes apparent that this chair will effectively shield you from visual and auditory distractions, so that you can buckle down in a truly obsessive, single-minded focused way in front of your screen, and that's even cooler. Workbay protects its users visually and acoustically thanks to the shape of its high backrest. It opens the possibility for users to distance themselves, even in busy environments, so as to be able to concentrate better with fewer disruptions. Workbay (via Core77)...


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This not a fox but rather a rare albino raccoon that lives in the woods of Rockledge, Florida. A local woman has been lobbying for the zoo to capture it for its own protection. Michelle Smurl, Brevard Zoo's director of animal programs, said the zoo is not at liberty to trap an adult animal that is thriving in the wild. She viewed photos of the animal and confirmed that it is a white raccoon. "The raccoon looks healthy, and it looks like it's doing well," Smurl said. "I grew up with white squirrels up in New York, and I was worried that someone was going to shoot them." Woman fears for albino raccoon's safety (via Fortean Times)...


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Kimberley sez, "XKCD is selling a number of the strips as signed prints for whatever amount you want to throw his way. Default is $15. He's calling it 'Radiohead style'". Note on price: we get a lot of emails asking about donations. We like to send people something tangible for their money, so we're offering these prints Radiohead-style -- you can choose what to pay for them (above the default $15). If you want to donate money to the site but don't want a bunch of merch, just order a print or two and set your own price. Thanks! A webstore of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. (Thanks, Kimberley!)...


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In 1961, a Cambridge don who'd taught navigation to cadets in WWII published an homage to Alice in Wonderland that used the book to illustrate concepts in navigation and geometry. The book, called "Navigation with Alice," was illustrated with fantastic replicas of the original Tenniel illos, recast to accompany the lessons (Anne Scarisbrick, the illustrator, was only 16 when she drew them!). Frank Debenham was a Cambridge don who, during World War II found himself teaching navigation to young cadets, eager to learn but frustrated that the lack of materials meant that they could only learn principles in abstract terms without being able to properly put them into practice. To this end Debenham began to relate many of his teaching practises back to the varied characters in Alice in Wonderland, something he could be reasonably sure that cadets would have heard of, and if not, that they would be more likely to engage with, hence the book where we find Alice dancing Latitude Quadrilles with the Mock-Turtle, debating the markings on globes with the Dodo and learning about the use of altitude and horizons in a protracted smoking session with the Caterpillar. Alice's Many Adventures - Part the Second (Thanks, Erik!) Previously: Mary Blair's Alice in Wonderland - Boing Boing Tim Burton to direct Alice in Wonderland - Boing Boing Alice in Wonderland temporary tatts - Boing Boing Alice in Wonderland journal - Boing Boing Free reading of Alice in Wonderland - Boing Boing Neuroscience of Alice in Wonderland - Boing Boing Alice in Wonderland dishes - Boing Boing Disney launches Alice in Wonderland couture line - Boing Boing Lewis Carroll's scrapbook online, courtesy of the LoC - Boing Boing Alice in Sunderland: the weirdest graphic novel I've ever enjoyed ... Alice, a song and video composed from the Disney movie's audiobits ... High-quality reproductions of Tenniel's colored Alice ... Celebrating Alice Day with the finest Wonderland edition I've seen ... Buffy vows to make American McGee's Alice movie - Boing Boing...


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We have two special gifts for all you today. The Blu-Ray packs have been sent out but if you added me in Twitter you'll have discovered a super secret Blu-Ray pack that I won't mention here. Luckily, we have two great prizes today so get cracking.
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As is often the case, a startup comes up with one idea and then quickly realises there is a better model. UK startup Skimbit started out with a decision-making tool with affiliate links, but has now realised the method used to aggregate those affiliates could be offered to other publishers. Similar schemes leave little room for editorial control, but it's new Skimlinks off-shoot aggregates 11 affiliate networks and puts publishers - blogs, forums, web apps - in full control, in return for a revenue share.
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Any US publisher with a domain name he or she isn't using (yet) can now squeeze a couple of extra dollars out of it by using Google AdSense For Domains, another way for the search giant to make more money from online real estate and give some of it back to people with parked domains. The company is opening up to 'English-language AdSense publishers located in North America' in phases, but says it will soon expand to other regions and languages as well. If I remember correctly, Google AdSense for Domains has been around for many years under the name 'Domain Park', but the program was previously reserved exclusively for owners of domain names wielding in a lot of traffic (1M+ monthly pageviews), up until yesterday. GAFD received a lot of criticism for returning advertisers poor quality traffic in the past, and yesterday's launch won't exactly reduce that criticism.
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A former Nasdaq chairman has been arrested for stealing over $50 billion through an elaborate Ponzi scheme run through his private investment fund -- he allegedly ripped off some clients to pay other clients, then recruited (and robbed) new clients to pay off the last round of losers. The Wall Street Journal says he was turned in by his sons. In a separate criminal complaint, Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Theodore Cacioppi said Mr. Madoff's investment advisory business had "deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars..." The 70-year-old Mr. Madoff is the founder and primary owner of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. The firm is primarily known for its business in market-making, or serving as the middleman between buyers and sellers of shares. But Mr. Madoff also oversaw an investment-advisory business that managed money for high-net-worth individuals, hedge funds and other institutions... Both complaints say Mr. Madoff told his sons he believed losses from his fraud exceeded $50 billion. That figure couldn't be confirmed. But such a loss is plausible, had money been flowing in and out for years: At the beginning of 2008, according to the SEC filing, his operation had more than $17 billion under management. Such a scheme would dwarf past Ponzi schemes. It would also be nearly five times larger than the accounting fraud that drove telecom company WorldCom into bankruptcy proceedings in 2002. Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud (via Taplin) (Image: Madoff.com)...


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American Toy & Invention is selling a construction kit that's really a destruction kit. The goal at the end is to implode the building you make. And then repeat. Brilliance. Joel has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Advanced Engineering build implosion toy set"...


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Actor Daniel Hoevels was seriously injured on stage during a suicide scene in Friedrich Schiller's play Mary Stuart at Vienna's Burgtheater. The prop knife he used to slit his throat turned out to be real. Police are investigating whether it was an error or something more nefarious. The photo seen here is from a different performance. From The Guardian: Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the "special effect". Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests.... The knife was reportedly bought at a local shop; one possibility is that the props staff forgot to blunt its blade. "The knife even still had the price tag on it," an investigator said. "Actor slits his own throat as knife switch turns fiction into reality"...


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Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
[Case study] How record producer Bill Moriarty uses Highrise to keep track of album projects
“Despite living in the same city we rarely see each other in person, we barely have meetings, we don’t have conference calls, we don’t do IM… Highrise is where everything goes. It’s how Chris & I stay in sync with what was said, what was promised, potential projects, and where I’m currently in an album’s progress. If we worked only in email all these vital communications would just be lost in the email noise. Using Highrise makes us focus just on what’s important to making records and running our company.”

Using Highrise export as an offline backup
“We were recently talking to a customer who occasionally needs to access information in Highrise while he’s offline. His solution: He exports all his data from Highrise every few weeks so he’s got an offline backup on his hard drive.”

Basecamp
How Ice-Qube Preparedness System founder relies on Basecamp
“Basecamp has enabled me to function like a big company, makes the most effecient use of my time, gives me the most information I could want to supervise and access my teams participation, serves as the ultimate back up and makes sense of my wild mind and ultimately grows my business.”

[Case Study] The Vianova Group President on “the ‘less is more’ streamlined eloquence that is Basecamp”
“Reluctantly I set up my first project which was a large-scale fundraising event involving a large and diverse committee of staff and volunteers.  Much to my surprise the entire group began using Basecamp immediately. More importantly, there are significant intangible team benefits to the “less is more” streamlined eloquence that is Basecamp.  My clients frequently tell me how much they appreciate us giving them a highly effective tool that is so easy to use.”

“New Journal of Physics” article mentions Basecamp
Scientist Darran Edmundson, of EDM Studio, Inc., wrote an article for “New Journal of Physics” that includes a couple of mentions of Basecamp.

Multiple products
Backpack and Highrise at Wall Street Journal site
“Tips for ‘Getting Things Done’” is a video at The Wall Street Journal that includes a discussion of Backpack (and screenshots of Highrise) as tools that help you be more productive.

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The Pink Tentacle blog writes (update: currently getting a quota exceeded message there): Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep. The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a function ...
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Free Flash game "Minotaur China Shop" is exactly what you think it is: You're the minotaur and if you break it, you buy it. Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. "Minotaur China Shop, happiness in shattery"...


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Perhaps you missed an episode or two of Boing Boing's daily original video programming this week? Here's a recap, so you can watch while you pretend to be productive at work for what's left of this fine Friday. ♦ MONDAY: In our Weekly Update, we caught up with the people behind the BB post "Donate Your Used Digital Camera to LA's Skid Row Photo Club. BB readers donated used gadgets to the Skid Row Photo Club, and project participants join us from the heart of Skid Row. Then, we LOLled as Mark's chickens dance to Yakety Sax, and watched some gory splatterpunk claymation videos from Japan. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 Link. ♦ TUESDAY: In our weekly Boing Boing Gadgets Video feature, Joel reviewed the Philips Norelco Bodygroom ($50) a shaver for men. Strategic kitteh were deployed as figleafs to shield our viewers' eyes from inadvertently exposed people-parts. WATCH IT. Here's a direct MP4 link. ♦ WEDNESDAY: Brandon Boyer, editor of Boing Boing Offworld, updated us on iPhone games and arty Wii avatars. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link. ♦ Also on Wednesday, we began a three-day commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in partnership with WITNESS. First episode: this video about the treatment of mentally disabled youth at a hospital in Paraguay, and proof of the power in video to stop human rights abuses. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link. ♦ THURSDAY: I interviewed WITNESS digital archivist Grace Lile, and she spoke about the importance of preserving and making available video that documents human rights abuses -- here in the US, and around the world. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link. ♦ Also on Thursday, we aired a WITNESS video feature about the lives of child soldiers in the Congo, and a man who works to demobilize, rehabilitate, and protect them. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link. ♦ FRIDAY, today -- we aired our final WITNESS feature in this week's series. This video told the story of a Mayan man who witnessed the Rio Negro Massacre in Guatemala. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link. ♦ And finally, today -- we ended the week with a Unicorn Chaser at a music festival, featuring our old pal from London, Russell Porter. WATCH IT. Here's a Direct MP4 Link....


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We've reviewed a lot of home audio solutions, and they all offer different benefits and drawbacks. The big trend is "music everywhere", whether through powerline networking or wirelessly. Most of these products require a specific music source to feed into the system. Sonos brings something rather more complete to the goal of "music everywhere". Read on for the complete review of the Sonos solution.
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I just uploaded a video made a while ago showing the progress of the Mutating Pictures experiment over several generations. To recap, in the experiment a pool of 1000 random symmetric polygon images was created, and everyone could then vote on how much an individual image looked like a face -- with high-rated polygon mixes prod ...
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Sung by Amanda Palmer on August 11 2008, with words by Neil Gaiman. [Hat tip to Kevin!]
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Two kings, one throne My world is likely to be bisected by two kings. Microsoft controls my real life with Windows, Office and Xbox360, while Google rules the online part with iGoogle, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar and Google Reader. It would be hard for people like me to live without either...
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Chinese online financial information and listed-company data provider China Finance Online Co. Limited (Nasdaq: JRJC) announced on Friday that it would cancel "TopView" products, which were added to its offerings earlier this year, effective January 1, 2009 due to notice from Shanghai Stock Exchange...
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This is a guest post by Angela Benton, Founder & Publisher of Black Web 2.0, a site that covers the internet industry from an African-American perspective. It was co-written by Black Web 2.0 General Manager Markus Robinson. The release of Blackbird, an African American focused web browser sparked quite a bit of controversy this past week. The TechCrunch post about it elicited reactions from both sides of the aisle (it has 275 comments and counting). Some argued for the value of niche audiences while others debated that the idea of a Black browser is in and of itself separatism, racist even. But catering to niche audiences online is nothing new. In fact, browsers that focus on a specific market segment isn't all that new either.
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Glyn sez, The UK Big Brother Awards are to recognise some of the people who have been trying to keep the monsters of state and corporate mass surveillance , snooping and control at bay. The 2008 UK Big Brother Awards Roll of Honour * Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP - one of the Liberal Democrat Members of the European Parliament whose Human Rights Committee has been trying to stem the onslaught of necessarily repressive legislation in the past few years. * Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the cross political party NO2ID Campaign -against the Database State. Phil was recently described as the "hardest man in NGO-world". * Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, who did so much to help educate politicians and lawyers and the media about the counterproductive evil policy of keeping innocent people's DNA tissue samples and DNA profiles, seemingly for ever, This has been overturned in the very recent European Court of Human Rights judgement in the Marper case. * Gareth Crossman - retiring Director of Policy at Liberty Human Rights * Becky Hogge - retiring Executive Director of the Open Rights Group * Rt. Hon. David Davis MP, the fomer Conservative Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, who was re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Haltemprice and Howden, on the principles of freedom and liberty. The evil Big Brother Award was awarded simply to New Labour. UK Big Brother Awards - boos for NuLabour, hurrahs for Sarah Ludford, Phil Booth, Helen Wallace, Gareth Crossman, Becky Hogge and David Davis (Thanks, Glyn!)...


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Kudos to Rob on Boing Boing Gadgets for spotting this flip-up bust of William Shakespeare that has a hidden switch inside that you can wire into your lights, garage door -- or alligator pit. This is a bust of William Shakespeare which tilts back to reveal a remote control switch. See if you can remember where it came from—and hence why the makers believe they can get $315 a copy—before visiting the link! This is not William Shakespeare's head Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets...


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The Shanghai Composite Index sank 3.81% to close at 1,954.22, while the Shenzhen Composite Index dropped 3.95% to close at 584.74 on Friday. Trading volume on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges reached RMB 73.38 billion and RMB 34.5 billion, respectively. Shares of China Merchants Bank (600036.SH,...
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Beijing-based online game operator Guangyu Huaxia exceeded 200,000 peak concurrent users (PCU) in its licensed 2D casual game "Xi You Q Ji" on December 12. The game recorded 180,000 PCU on December 5.
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Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) announced on Friday that Shenzhen-based download software provider Xunlei.com has joined the Baidu Union advertising alliance, reports Sohu. A Baidu Union executive said Xunlei signed a contract involving all Xunlei products in early November. Rumors that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) invested...
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Oak Pacific Interactive's outgoing vice president and chief marketing officer Wang Xiujuan said on Friday that she plans to establish an interactive marketing company, reports Sina. Preparations for the company began in September, said Wang. MySpace China contacted Wang after she left Oak Pacific at...
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Former Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) China product director and product manager Zhou Jie has launched an online advertising platform, "Lang Tao Jin," reports 163.com. The platform offers purchasing inquiries and collects advertising revenue based on successful orders, said the report. Former Baidu senior...
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(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.)Today is the final installment of Boing Boing tv's three-day special series in partnership with the video network WITNESS commemorating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In this episode: the story of Jesus Tecu Osorio, a Maya Achí man who witnessed one of the most horrific massacres of Guatemala's 36-year internal conflict, when he was a child -- and what he is doing to preserve the memory of victims, and the rights of survivors. Here is a snip from the Wikipedia article about that massacre: In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extra-judicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities. This video is narrated by REM frontman Michael Stipe, and is presented with the music of composer Philip Glass. For more on WITNESS, and how they are using video to draw world attention to human rights abuses throughout the globe, visit the recently launched Witness HUB website. Related: earlier here on Boing Boing, I shared a report I filed for National Public Radio about the group that conducted the exhumations mentioned in this WITNESS video. The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) are technologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists who unearth these mass graves. They work to identify the dead and return the remains to their families for dignified reburial. The process begins with the hard work of the exhumation itself, but they also use DNA forensics and software they develop themselves, so they can identify a greater portion of the remains, and preserve evidence that could be used in criminal trials. FAFG staff routinely deal with death threats from those who do not support their work. Listen to "Group Works to Identify Remains in Guatemala ," and here is the entire NPR special series, "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." (Image below: Xeni Jardin) Previous BBtv + WITNESS episodes on video and human rights: (BBtv + WITNESS) A Duty to Protect: Child Soldiers in the Congo ... BBtv WORLD + WITNESS.org: 60 Years of Declaration of Human Rights ... BBtv: Xeni interviews WITNESS.org digital archivist Grace Lile......


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(Flash video embedded above, MP4 Link here.) BBtv presents this week's Friday "Unicorn Chaser" -- the goofy truth behind Xeni and BBtv's UK music correspondent Russell Porter's reports from the SF Outside Lands music festival. Summer concert season is long gone, and the gaffer tape that once spelled "Boing Boing tv" on our tour bus has long since faded, along with our concert sunburns. So we figure it's safe to reveal how much dorking out took place between story tapings and band sessions. Besotted joyrides on stolen Segways, the snatching of sunglasses from complete strangers, and improvised pickup lines like "I'm the drummer from Radiohead. Really." Russell? You really are "special." We love you, man, and we miss "working" with you. BBtv Reports from the 2008 Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival: Carney at Outside Lands - a "Boing Boing tv Bus Session." - Boing ... BBtv: Steel Pulse founder David Hinds at Outside Lands (music ... BBtv: Andy Gould, rock band manager, dances on the labels' graves ... Carney at Outside Lands - a "Boing Boing tv Bus Session." - Boing ... Boing Boing tv backstage at Outside Lands: (Xeni + Russell Porter ... Boing Boing tv: Cafe Tacvba -- Interview and Performance (Music ... Interview with Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett (music ... BBtv - Kaki King, guitar hero: performance, interview with Xeni ... BBtv - Primus: Xeni interviews Les and Ler (music) - Boing Boing BBtv: Roots Reggae Legends Toots and the Maytals (music) - Boing Boing BBtv: Broken Social Scene interview and live performance (music ... BBtv: Galactic's "Modern New Orleans Funk" with Xeni and Russell ......
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Online book, music and movie review site Douban.com's revenue source is the commission it earns from its price comparisons of e-commerce products, reports Securities Daily. Douban.com offers price comparison services between Amazon's China subsidiary Joyo and e-commerce site Dangdang.com and charges...
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Shanghai-based online game company Nineyou plans to start closed beta testing of its licensed 3D martial arts MMORPG "Chinese Paladin Online" on December 22. Nineyou will give away 20,000 free CD keys and will not delete gamer data after testing. The company said in late October that it plans to sell...
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Rumors, seemingly originating from Seeking Alpha, that Suntech (NYSE:STP) may be acquired by either Sharp or First Solar (Nasdaq:FSLR) have been disseminated by several online Chinese media, including solar...
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People's Bank of China plans to introduce a license for third-party payment companies, which it will only offer to ten companies, reports China Securities News quoting unnamed sources. More than 40 related enterprises have applied for the license, said the report. A public relations department chief...
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China Mobile (NYSE: CHL, 941.HK) had recorded a total of 337,000 TD-SCDMA users - 4,000 free trial users, 105,000 Olympic users and 78,000 TD-SCDMA handset users subscribing to the GSM network - by December 5, reports cww.net.cn quoting Mobile chairman and CEO Wang Jianzhou. By December 3, the telecom...
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Shanghai-based out-of-home advertiser iMedia China (www.imedia-cn.com) has 170,000 in-building screens and nearly 1,000 advertising employees, reports iresearch.cn quoting company marketing director Jin Shengjun. In September, iMedia China announced that it had 140,000 screens in 56 domestic cities and...
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A 12-year-old gymnast named Gao Shuai sued his training school yesterday, demanding 150,000 yuan in compensation for being subject to physical abuse and having training withheld.

The photo on the front page of The Beijing News shows Gao's mother displaying video evidence to the court. The school, Beijing's Xiannongtan Sports School, denied all the charges.

Gao started gymnastics training when he was three and won many titles, including national champion in his age group. But when he left the school after a year and seven months, Gao could not perform some of the basic moves he was once able to accomplish easily. The reason, according to his mother, is that his training was withheld: the school does not have any records of his training for the last four months he attended.

Even worse, Gao was diagnosed with depression and is receiving medical treatment. Gao wrote in his diary that the bigger boys used to beat him and threatened him so he would not tell his parents. Gao's mother believes that her son's mental condition is related to the beatings and corporal punishment he received.

The training school retorted that the the alleged "corporal punishment", including lengthy head stands and kneeling for hours, was all part of training. Gao's coach explained that he simply forgot to record the boy's training for four months, and another coach who originally admitted that he received instructions not to teach Gao reversed his testimony in court.

Speaking of kneeling for hours, today's newspaper has a report about a teacher in Fuzhou who is under fire after a photo of seven kneeling students apparently serving out a punishment surfaced on the Internet. The teacher explained that the students, all of whom had broken school rules, weren't actually kneeling. Instead, he was using training he learned in the military to have them stand for one class period, and then sit in a "frog position" for another period.

The Fuzhou Education Bureau called the teacher's methods "improper."

Tags: gymnastics, sport, The Beijing News

This article is from Danwei.org

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Dinah Balk submits:

Sellers warned him. Don't open Pandora's Box! But did eBay's (EBAY) John Donahoe listen? No, he ignored the combined voices of thousands of sellers. Now one of his disruptive innovations has come full circle and sellers are fighting back – in the courtroom.

Yes it's true. Another buyer reported being sued by a seller over feedback this week.

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The idea behind Leverage was simple and had some potential: it offered an advanced management system for gift cards, hugely popular worldwide especially this time of year, so you could register all of them and keep track of how much you have left or stored on each one. You were also able to buy gift cards, or swap them with others. The service also let you manage all of your loyalty reward programs, such as frequent-flyer or frequent-stay plans. Leverage, which was founded in May 2005 and had raised $2 million in angel funding, planned to generate revenue by reselling gift cards (see our launch coverage for more). It turns out the business model wasn't solid enough to keep the company afloat during tough times. It appears the entire staff has been laid off (right before the holidays, which is supposed to be a key period for this type of company) last week.
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The beginning of what promises to be a fascinating story (and possibly a Hollywood movie) around the rise and fall of Denmark's IT Factory is starting to emerge. In late November celebrated CEO Stein Bagger went missing in Dubai - it later turned out he abandoned his wife and child and fled to New York as his company fell apart. He then borrowed a friend's car and credit card and took embarked on quite a road trip to California, where he promptly turned himself in to local police. Danish media tracked him down for an interview (translated version is here). Among the first questions they asked: Why did you perpetuate a four year fraud that involved $170 million or so in fraudulent revenues (90% of IT Factory's revenues may have been nothing but lies)?

I have been threatened on my own and my family's life, and I have been threatened with firearms between 25 and 30 times. He would not say who threatened him, but told that they would have money from him.

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Shenzhen-based download software provider Xunlei released a new online game ranking based on client-end downloads made on Xunlei site gougou.com on December 12. The top ten online games are: Kart Rider (operator: Shiji Tiancheng, developer: Nexon) World of Warcraft (The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY), Blizzard)...
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The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY) plans to start closed beta testing of its licensed soccer game "FIFA Online 2" on December 22. Applications for active accounts will be available beginning December 12. Electronic Arts (EA) (Nasdaq: ERTS) and Korean game company Neowiz developed the game, which was in alpha testing...
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Tencent (0700.HK) released a Christmas version, v2.0.9, of its online music and roller skating game "R2Beat" on December 10. The version added new songs, virtual pets and tools to the game.
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China Telecom's (NYSE: CHA, 728.HK) parent company China Telecommunications Corporation, China Mobile's (NYSE: CHL, 941.HK) parent company China Mobile Communications Corporation and China Unicom (NYSE: CHU, 762.HK, 600050.SH) signed a framework agreement to jointly construct and share telecom infrastructure...
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Fault finding is my full-time job and unnecessarily gloomy economic reports have kept me quite busy recently. A China Economics report released December 10 by Merrill Lynch lamenting the "bust" in China's real estate market is a case in point. In light of a 0.5% month-on-month drop in nationwide...
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Shanghai-based peer-to-peer streaming media provider PPS.TV announced that it has entered the webgame industry with its co-operation of Three Kingdoms webgame "San Guo--Qun Xiong Jue Qi" with the game's developer, reports Shanghai Morning Post. PPS.TV has taken charge of the game's promotion and charging...
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Land transaction volume in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, has reached RMB 11.77 billion so far this year, accounting for less than 40% of 2007's transaction volume, reports China Business News quoting Nanjing Bureau of Land Resources statistics. In 2008, 29.21 hectares of land have been sold in Nanjing,...
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JA Solar (Nasdaq: JASO) parent Jinglong Group has developed a new method to cut 180um solar wafers with a 100um steel wire to produce 8 additional solar wafers and generate additional revenue of RMB 500 from each kilogram of monocrystalline silicon, reports xtxcm.com. The method also saves 40 kilometers...
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Shanghai-based online game developer Goldcool is currently developing an MMORPG, "Magic World Online II," that will be released in Europe and the United States, reports 17173.com. "Magic World Online" was released in September 2006. Chengdu-based online game company Gaeasoft, which Goldcool acquired...
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BYD Company Limited (1211.HK), an IT parts and automotive business operator, began construction of a solar cell project with a total investment of RMB 2.5 billion in Shangluo, Shanxi province on December 10, reports Shangluo Daily. BYD will invest RMB 500 million in the project's first phase, which has...
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Chinese solar companies are among enterprises hardest hit by recent stock market turmoil. Almost all of the public companies have seen their stock prices fall more than 80%. On Dec 11th, Suntech (NYSE:STP) was trading at seven-times its trailing P/E while JA Solar (Nasdaq:JASO) was at 7.35x, and Yingli...
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Third Party Feed: Media Tech Analyst submits:

VistaPrint (VPRT) has seen its shares clobbered for missing estimates on prior earnings calls and concerns about the effect of a recession on its key customers – small and home office businesses. The shares dipped towards $11 from $45 earlier in the year but have since rebounded toward $17.

There was also an abrupt change in CFOs, the second since becoming a public company just a few years ago. Jeffries' analyst Youssef Squali thinks the stock has largely discounted much of the risks and maintains his buy rating after the company’s analyst day on Wednesday. He maintains his $30 price target on the stock, which represents a whopping 75% return, and was pleased that the company maintained their guidance.

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The pink slips were passed out on Thursday throughout the various business duchies that make up CBS Interactive—CNET, CBS.com, CBSNews,com, CBSSports.com, BNET, GameSpot, TV.com, last.fm, and CHOW. While CBS confirmed to me and other reporters that layoffs did happen across the board, it refused to talk about how many total people are losing their jobs. That left us scrambling about gathering piecemeal information. There were about 20 layoffs at Last.fm; 8 editors, we hear, at CBSNews.com are out of a job; another set of "redundancies" were eliminated at CBSSports.com. But how big exactly were the layoffs, especially at Cnet, where most of the employees reside? CBS, which is at heart a news organization, doesn't want the public to know how many layoffs just occurred at CBS Interactive. As of this writing, Cnet didn't even report the fact that there were layoffs on Thursday. Neither did CBSNews.com. And it's not because they didn't get the memo (from CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith, reprinted below).
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The city of Chengdu in China's Sichuan province has stayed in national media headlines since the May 12 earthquake. Central government support for reconstruction has been pouring into the region in the form of more aggressive rate cuts, admission into a three-city pilot program for rural land reform...
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MovingCities is a Beijing-based think-tank investigating how architecture and urbanism shape the future of cities. They introduce an online documentary in 5 chapters, which profile five leading Chinese architects on the topic of "China’s current situation and history."

The online documentary is filmed by Diego Grass Puga of 0300TV, a site that specializes in "interviews, news, articles, videocast" about architecture. The video segments are listed under the titles "What is exactly happening here?” "Speed," "Agrilculture," "Education" and "Architecture: 2008, China."

Featuring Ai Weiwei (FAKE design), Jiang Jun (Urban China), Yu Kongjian (Turenscape), Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) and Ma Qingyun (MADA s.p.a.m.).

Here is MovingCities' introduction to the series of short online films, and the link for all the films here.

MovingCities homepage

0300TV homepage