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Saturday, June 22, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Edward Snowden Charged With Espionage Over NSA Leaks
WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. government has filed sealed criminal charges against former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who admitted leaking secrets about classified U.S. surveillance programs, U.S. sources said on Friday.
A U.S. Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a criminal complaint had been filed against Snowden, who disclosed documents detailing U.S. telephone and internet surveillance efforts.
Another U.S. source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States was preparing to seek Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong, where he is believed to be in hiding.
Earlier, the Washington Post reported that U.S. prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage, theft and conversion of government property. The Post also reported that the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden on a provisional arrest warrant.
The criminal complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Snowden's former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is located, the Post reported.
Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that U.S. security services had monitored data about phone calls from Verizon and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook as part of counterterrorism efforts.
U.S. federal prosecutors, by filing a criminal complaint, lay claim to a legal basis to make the request of the authorities in Hong Kong, the Post reported. The prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment and can then take steps to secure Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong for a criminal trial in the United States, the newspaper reported.
Snowden would be able to challenge the U.S. request for his extradition in court in Hong Kong, the Post reported.
The newspaper noted the U.S. extradition treaty with Hong Kong has an exception for political offenses, and that espionage has been viewed as a political offense.
An Icelandic businessman linked to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Thursday he had readied a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland if Iceland's government would grant asylum.
Iceland refused on Friday to say whether it would grant asylum to Snowden. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Jim Loney and Will Dunham)
Also on HuffPost:
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/edward-snowden-charged_n_3480984.html
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Summer Video Game Series: The Best Of Minecraft Architecture
Minecraft is one of the most successful independently developed video games of all time, and it is now available for computers, Xbox, and some mobile devices. Perhaps what makes it so powerful is that it allows users to create entire worlds based on their own designs: Players can dig deep into virtual earth to discover caves and mine precious materials, they can build structures that stretch far into the sky, and they can explore a map that is virtually infinite.
Everything in Minecraft is based on 1-cubic-meter blocks that can be stacked according to a three-dimensional grid. Each block is wrapped in a low-res texture that suggests material properties such as stone, wood, gold, or even fire, though the fact that the game is independently produced means that there is much opportunity for modifying these textures and other aspects of the game?opportunities that have certainly been taken advantage of by the game?s hardcore fanbase.
King?s Landing from Game of Thrones by Westeroscraft
There are two main modes of gameplay: survival mode and creative mode. In survival mode, players must fend off hunger, falls, and monsters that lurk in the woods while mining, processing, and placing materials carefully, making it much more of a game with objectives. Creative mode is more of an open sandbox experience, allowing players infinite resources and making them invincible.
These examples of Minecraft architecture could have been made in either mode, though obviously creating these things in survival mode is much more difficult. It is readily apparent just how much this game allows players to experiment, despite the pixilation arising from the grid limitation. Some have even gone so far as to attempt to recreate the entire world of Game of Thrones in Minecraft, an effort which thus far 4,000 users in collaboration have not been able to complete (although their rendition of King?s Landing is awe-inspiring). Be sure to check out the full list at Architizer.
Neo-Charlotte, North Carolina, by Armchair Hacker
Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings by Cornbass
American suburbia by nobodysharp
Source: http://architizer.kinja.com/summer-video-game-series-the-best-of-minecraft-archite-520259566
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North Carolina governor signs law aimed at restarting executions
Rob Taylor / AP
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory speaks during a National Day of Prayer observance at the Pitt County courthouse in Greenville, NC.
By Colleen Jenkins, Reuters
WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina ? North Carolina's governor, hoping to resume executions in his state, on Wednesday signed the repeal of a law that has allowed death row inmates to seek a reduced sentence if they could prove racial bias affected their punishment
The Racial Justice Act, the only law of its kind in the United States, had led to four inmates getting their sentences changed to life in prison without parole after taking effect in 2009.
Supporters said the historic measure addressed the state's long record of racial injustice in its capital punishment system, while critics said it caused unnecessary costs and delays after nearly all death-row inmates, including whites, sought relief under the act.
Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, said repealing the law would remove the "procedural roadblocks" that had kept North Carolina from executing anyone since 2006 despite there being 152 people on death row.
"The state's district attorneys are nearly unanimous in their bipartisan conclusion that the Racial Justice Act created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice," McCrory said.
Republican lawmakers gutted the Racial Justice Act, passed when Democrats controlled the legislature and governor's office, after winning the majority in the state's General Assembly.
The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina criticized the repeal on Wednesday and accused state leaders of ignoring widespread evidence of systemic racial bias.
Statistics show that of the 152 people on death row in North Carolina, 80 are black, 62 are white and the remainder fall into other racial categories in a state where African Americans overall make up around a fifth of the population.
The repeal applies retroactively to cases with pending Racial Justice Act claims, a factor certain to result in additional legal wrangling, one death penalty expert said.
"To me, it's a violation of due process," said Mark Rabil, director of Wake Forest University law school's Innocence and Justice Clinic in Winston-Salem. "I don't really know what the legislature thinks they've done with our money other than buy a lot more litigation."
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Prepare now for the next round of MLR rebates ? Business ...
Group health insurers that don?t spend between 80 and 85 cents of every premium dollar on medical care and health care quality improvement must make medical loss ratio (MLR) rebates to employees. This year?s rebates are due by Aug. 1. Take these steps now to prepare.
Taxes and pretax contributions
Insurers don?t have to pay rebates in cash; they may lower employees? premium contributions for the remainder of the year. Last year, the IRS clarified that rebates that are attributable to employees? pretax contributions are taxable wages. And this is true regardless of whether employees receive cash rebates or their share of contributions is lowered. Rebates are also taxable to new employees who weren?t on the plan last year if their current year?s contribution is lowered.
PAYROLL PRACTICE TIP: Since rebates attributable to employees? pretax contributions are fully taxable, good coordination with the Benefits department and the insurer are essential. What to avoid: You don?t want the insurer to issue cash rebates directly to employees. Should that happen, you will have to make up the withholding from other payments to employees.
Terminated employees
Employees on COBRA are entitled to the same treatment as active employees, so their premiums would be reduced, as well. Reach out now to your COBRA administrator for the names and addresses of COBRA-covered employees. Watch it: COBRA-covered employees who pay with? pretax dollars (for example, out of severance) will have more income to report on their W-2s.
If you can?t find your COBRA-covered employees, and you determine that the cost of distributing their rebates equals their rebates, you may allocate their rebates to active employees using a reasonable, fair and objective allocation method. Again, good coordination with your Benefits department is key.
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What?s So Hard about Research?
We are told that the students that we teach are ?digital natives.??This term implies that from the time they were born, technology has played such a large part in students??lives that they know no other way. Also, it has been noted that digital natives have an aptitude for technology that is significantly different from the older generations (who have been dubbed ?digital immigrants?); the joke goes that if you give a digital native and a digital immigrant a new digital camera, the native will be taking pictures before the immigrant has finished reading page two of the manual. The assumption is that this new generation is simply better than us at technology.
However, as we wrote about in another article for Scientific American, just because students are digital natives, does not mean that they have skills to figure out all technology, or to use technology in a purposeful way. We ?noticed that, though these digital natives have the world of information at their fingertips, for some reason they are often unable to take basic problem-solving skills and apply them to simple online research. They had no problem figuring out how to work the newest update to Facebook, but when asked to find out any information that required the smallest amount of critical thinking, students were hampered. The best example we have of this is when we asked students what the most important causes of the Revolutionary War were?we heard a student ask Siri: ?What are the most important causes of the Revolutionary War?? When Siri did not know the answer, the student said, ?I don?t know, I can?t find it.?
Students can find out basic names, dates, and facts through online research. If we ask them what year the Declaration of Independence was signed, they will Google that exact question, and most of the time, produce the right answer. But when asked to research a question that does not have one ?right??answer, the room quickly dissolves into a chorus of ?I don?t get it??and ?I need help??and ?I can?t find it.?
In this article we will attempt to answer this question that we have posed and discussed often here at Scientific American:
What about online research is challenging to students?
Through observation of our students, we have come up with five hypotheses as to why this may be:
? Students today are accustomed to instant gratification, and therefore can be overwhelmed by tasks that require time-consuming research.
There are very few things in life that our students have to wait for today. Information they need to know is posted instantly online, they can connect with their friends through social media without needing to wait for school the next day, and Googling a question will give them a quick answer to any fact they want to know. However, research isn?t actually easy?in fact, it?s quite deceptive how the Internet makes it seem easy. In reality, research requires students to read, interpret, and analyze new information, reshape their research question, and start again. This kind of sustained focus on a challenging task is very hard for most students to hold. Here is an exchange that exemplifies this facet of the issue:
Student: ?I can?t find anything about the buildings of the South during Reconstruction.?
Teacher: ?Ok, show me what sites you?ve used.?
(Student pulls up an article from the History Channel)
Teacher: ?Well, I see a good starting place right here. It says that much of the South was destroyed during Sherman?s March to the Sea during the Civil War. Why don?t you find out what areas his march destroyed, and then look up those cities to see what kind of destruction they faced??
Student: (while pouting and walking back to his desk) ?But that?s going to take forever!?
What the student meant to tell the teacher was, ?? I can?t find anything easily about the buildings of the South during Reconstruction.? It isn?t true that, as a whole, these students have a difficult time with sustained attention. They do not stop researching and begin another activity because they got distracted; ?in our experience, they are more likely to spin themselves in circles making no progress for an entire class period because they do not want to go through a cognitive process that will take ?forever.?
? When researching online, students unsuccessfully scan pages of text as opposed to reading those pages of text for comprehension. Therefore, they cannot tell whether or not the source they are looking at is applicable to their research question.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There are many techniques one can use to quickly locate information on an Internet page. For example, CTRL + F will bring up a ?find??tool that will allow you to highlight all instances of a particular word or phrase on a page. Students use this tool quite frequently; when one student needed to find out what President Polk thought about U.S. expansion, she found an article about expansion, hit CTRL + F, and searched for ?Polk.??All of the results on the page linked Polk to legislation that was passed, and land that was acquired during his term, but nowhere on the page could she find a sentence that said that President Polk thought that expansion was ________. Instead of reading the article and using inductive reasoning to figure out that President Polk was probably in favor of expansion, she told us that she couldn?t find the answer.
There are a few factors that we believe are at work here. It is faster to CRTL + F a keyword than it is to read an article, so perhaps some of hypothesis number 1 is at work, here: students want to take the fastest and quickest route. However, there are also issues of monitoring reading comprehension. The problem is not necessarily that the language of the article was too sophisticated for this student; the real problem is that she never stopped to ask herself the question, ?Do I understand what this means??
? When students are given a research prompt by their teacher, students often do not care enough about the topic to really persevere. Therefore, when they find that answers are not immediately apparent, they do not have the motivation necessary to fuel their sustained attention.
We have noticed that when students look up information we tell them to look up, they ask us many questions during a class period. Most are interested in making sure they have the ?right answers?, and checking that their assignment is ?long enough?. When students conduct research about a topic they have interest in, they have a much stronger sense of purpose. While some do still ask us questions in which they seek our approval, it is more often for approval about their thoughts pertaining to content than for approval of the length of their assignment. They seem to take more ownership of the material, and think about it on a higher level.
? Because there is so much information online, and not all of it is credible, Internet search results can be overwhelming to students. Therefore, the amount of information paralyzes rather than empowers students.
It seems counter-intuitive that a student could pull up 500,000 search results and still tell her teacher that she can?t find anything (just like flipping through a billion channels on cable, but finding that nothing is on)? but students do often feel that way. The best way to illustrate this is to describe the difference in student responses when they were researching using a search engine other than Google.
Dulcinea Media came up with a search engine designed for students called SweetSearch. It works similarly to Google, in that there is a database of files that one can search by typing keywords into a search bar. What is different about SweetSearch is that the database only contains 30,000 documents, all of which have been previously vetted for academic reliability. For a particular project, the only Internet search engine we allowed the students to use was SweetSearch.
When they researched in class using Google, five to ten students per class period would say they were unable to find what they needed. When they researched in class using SweetSearch, there was not a single student who told us that they could not find any information about their topic. So whether students liked using SweetSearch or not, it is clear that it helped them be more successful when conducting their research.
? Developmentally, middle school students are just beginning to be able to think critically, but they seem programmed to look for ?the? answer, and do not have a strong sense of self-efficacy when presented with open-ended questions.
Some of our unit assessments are structured in the style of Project Based Learning where students can present their findings in any form, as long as it answers the inquiry-based prompt. Many students were very uncomfortable with the idea that they would be making the decision about what form their project will take, and continually tried to get a stamp of approval. Questions like, ?Do you think it will be okay if we make a movie???Or ?Will it be good if we make a poster???were all answered with some version of, ?It doesn?t matter what we think. What do you think?? We could see the frustration in their faces when they did not get the answer they wanted, but our goal here was for them to realize that their opinions were the ones that mattered.
Students also asked for their teachers??opinions about their research findings. Students felt unsure about their authority, and wanted us to tell them that they had found the right answer. It takes the responsibility off of them; however, we wanted the students to take ownership of the information, and unless they were historically inaccurate in their findings (which almost never happened), we answered all of these questions in the same manner as the questions about their projects: ?It doesn?t matter what I think. What do you think??
So what?
Now that we know students struggle with research, now that we?ve discussed why that might be so, what steps can we take to help improve the situation? The next frontier for us will be to design curricular interventions that help students overcome some of these challenges they face, and to provide opportunities?like our Project Based Learning research unit assessment? for students to research in more productive ways. SweetSearch and critical thinking are just the beginning. This question of research will only be more acute in the coming years as information in this age is becoming even more accessible and available to students. It is our job as their teachers to help students understand and be able to use this information that they discover.
Source: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/06/19/whats-so-hard-about-research/
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Thursday, June 20, 2013
Yodeling Country Star Slim Whitman Dead At 90 (VIDEO)
Yodeling Country Star Slim Whitman Dead At 90 (VIDEO)
Country singer Slim Whitman, the high-pitched yodeler whose career spanned decades, passed away at a Florida hospital on Wednesday of heart failure. He was 90. The singer appeared in many television ads in 1980s and 1990s, also known for his song saving the world from aliens in the comedy “Mars Attacks!”. Slim Whitman, born Ottis ...
Yodeling Country Star Slim Whitman Dead At 90 (VIDEO) Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News
Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/06/yodeling-country-star-slim-whitman-dead-at-90-video/
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