It’s important not to group together policies relating to childcare or flexible working as ‘women’s issues’, says Women’s Equality party leader Sophie Walker.Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images I t was his confidence that irritated me. The successful male journalist telling me – then a…
I was raised to play chess in the most boring way imaginable , with both sides developing their pieces into a big symmetrical knot before anything even gets taken. Worse, most chess books basically imagine you to play like a master, preparing your openings and exulting them on the basis of their…
Scientists have created a body map, showing exactly where people do and don’t like to be touched. More than 1,300 people responded to Oxford university and Finland’s Aalto university survey that asked where they were comfortable being touched and by whom. The results, compiled into a “ body map…
There’s a rumor that Paul Graham, the founder of the world’s most successful incubator, once invested in someone because he looked like Mark Zuckerberg . But being young isn’t a prerequisite for starting a successful company. Don’t believe me? Here are 10 entrepreneurs who had accomplished nothing…
This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change. This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change. By Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m.…
[NB: The graphs and source data in this article has been updated in " These US States Have Higher Incomes than Nearly Every European Country " published in June 2018.] The battle over the assumed success of European socialism continues. Many European countries like Sweden have gained a reputation as…
Story highlights China's huge censorship apparatus is getting bigger, and stronger Experts warn that they may be running out of "technical solutions" in the fight against the censors Activists at home and abroad have been targeted by police and government-linked hackers (CNN) In April, the police…
Notebook The Thrift Books warehouse in Auburn, Wash. Credit Thrift Books Ever since a university gave me a literature degree certifying that I have read Chaucer in the original Middle English, my taste in books has reverted to very specific, lowbrow stuff. I like murder mysteries, heist books and…
The November/December issue of acmqueue is out now Subscribers and ACM Professional members login here Privacy and Rights PDF October 25, 2015 Volume 13, issue 8 How to De-identify Your Data Balancing statistical accuracy and subject privacy in large social-science data sets Olivia Angiuli, Joe…
Residents transfer money using M-Pesa at a store in Nairobi, Kenya. In the six years since the service brought banking-by-phone to Africa, it has grown from a novelty to a bonafide payment network.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images T he US has fallen behind some developing countries when it comes to…
Amid a documented rise in the number of homeless in New York City, many of those without homes may be effectively invisible - going about seemingly normal routines and even work without a place to live. Walking through Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's trendy East Village, Mark Reay recalls a…
Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock / Fotolia / Paul Spella / The Atlantic Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but the sociologist Erving Goffman added that most of the interesting stuff lies behind the scenes, in what he called the “backstage” areas of everyday life. Having spent the past eight…
I’m not important enough to have what the rich and powerful call “people.” Most of us aren’t. The average personal assistant is paid about $31,000 a year, while the average wage for the U.S. job market is roughly $5,000 less than that. In other words, for a majority of Americans, it would be a…
urbit Oct 26, 2015 Some of us remember when the Internet was a social network. Today, the Internet is a modem. It’s a wonderful modem. It connects you to all kinds of great online services. Some of which are social “networks,” but only networks in the MBA sense. Really they’re social servers : giant…
MAGDEBURG, Germany—Each day, trucks roll into this city filled with the latest hot import from the streets of Manchester, England: garbage. The destination is a power plant that makes a business of turning trash into electricity, or as it touts in a brochure, “spinning straw into gold.” The straw in…
effects of marriage on health. To reap the health benefits of marriage, is it enough to just be married? Or how much does the quality of the marriage, such as the level of support, warmth, negativity or con
Credit: Izhar Cohen One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or…
Slate The Vault Historical Treasures, Oddities, And Delights In his 1919 manual for screenwriters, Ten Million Photoplay Plots , Wycliff Aber Hill provided this taxonomy of possible types of dramatic "situations," first running them down in outline form, then describing each more completely and…
Her request, which the teacher approved, represented one small step for a movement slowly gaining momentum in schools in the Pennsylvania suburbs, New Jersey, and around the country: questioning, scaling back, or, in a handful of schools, even eliminating the nightly homework ritual once thought as…
Earlier this summer, the world watched Greece try to resist a disastrous neoliberal diktat and get a painful thrashing in the process. When Greece’s left government decided to hold a national referendum on the troika-imposed austerity program, the European Central Bank retaliated by restricting…
“The Reliance connection is very patchy,” said Shoaib Khan at his perfume and cellphone shop in Mumbai, India. “I would really have to sell the customer on it.” Credit Asmita Parelkar for The New York Times MUMBAI, India — If Mark Zuckerberg hopes to deliver on his vision of bringing the Internet to…
When Toshifumi Wada received a picture of an odd-looking squid from Japanese aquarium staff, he knew he was onto something. The marine biologist requested the frozen specimen to be sent to him, and discovered that he was looking at the world's first recorded giant squid baby. "The fisherman who…
Ants were sheared in a rheometer, a machine used to test the solid-like and liquid-like response of materials such as food, hand cream or melted plastic.The researchers found that the behavior of live ants was similar to that of dead ants: when the aggregation is forced to flow, live ants let go and…
A comment on CNET regarding Top Secret recently caught my attention. It’s worth quoting in full: “This sounds like an interesting concept, but I’d be afraid to play a game like this using real email. How many gamers playing this are going to be flagged as terrorists or spies by the NSA? How many are…
While the House of Representatives garnered all of the media attention last week — with the GOP’s pursuit of Paul Ryan and the Benghazi committee’s pursuit of Hillary Clinton — Senators just across the Capitol rotunda were making decisions that could have much deeper implications for United States…
The Crystal Fairy The idea that parents can transmit environmentally acquired traits to their offspring has been intuitively attractive ever since Lamarck proposed it in 1801. It had to go underground as evidence continuously piled up supporting Darwin's theory of natural selection, but it seems to…
An armed police officer stands outside the Houses of Parliament in London. On Thursday, October 22, David Frum participated in a discussion on liberty and security at the Oxford Union, the famous English debating society, where he spoke in opposition to the resolution: “This House believes the U.K.…
The distance between the Earth and Mars depends on their relative positions in their orbits and varies quite a bit over time. This post will show how to compute the approximate distance over time. We’re primarily interested in Earth and Mars, though this shows how to calculate the distance between…
October 2015 Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what youwrite: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They writein a different language than they'd use if they were talking to afriend. The sentence structure and even the words are…
Double salary for you, and you, and you … Photo by Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images This post originally appeared in Inc. Before Dan Price caused a media firestorm by establishing a $70,000 minimum wage at his Seattle company, Gravity Payments … before Hollywood agents, reality-show producers, and book…
Energywise Energy Nuclear 23 Oct 2015 | 18:00 GMT A Gen II Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, designed over a quarter century ago, will go online by the end of the year By Photo: Mark Zaleski/AP Photo In this 29 April 2015 photo, a worker walks past Unit 2 at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near…
Ouarzazate solar plant will create enough electricity to power a million homes once it is finished.Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian T he Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara desert and the centre of the north African country’s “Ouallywood”…
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s…
Nazar s against the evil eye in an Azerbaijani gift shop, from the Wikipedia entry Nazar The threat of the evil eye is well known across the Mediterranean, as well as its antidote, the eye-shaped talisman that reflects the malefic look back onto the evil eye. The talisman can take many forms. In…
Wang Dan (L) and Xu Yi at their funeral services shop, The Other Shore, in Beijing.Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix W ang Dan is a genial 34-year-old man with a soft, bulldog-like face and a quiet enthusiasm for the next thing coming. His heroes were forged in garages, dorm rooms and cheap flats.…
Dagny Taggart spends her time traveling the globe, meeting new people and learning new things. She speaks more than 15 languages, including Latin, Russian and Chinese. In the past year, she has written a new book at the rate of about one every five days: 84 books in total . All of them have gotten…
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein Papers Related Works Partners About How To News Advanced Search Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1879–1902 Volume 1: The Early Years, 1879-1902 Short Title: Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1879–1902 Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1879–1902 (English translation supplement) Volume…
We've seen big, bulky Anti-UAV Defense Systems radio-jamming drones out of the sky before, but it looks like the Army also has a much smaller version on its hands. At this year's Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting and Exposition (AUSA 2015), the Army Cyber Institute at West Point…
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