yostivanich

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RT @ibrahimbalic: This is definitely not an hack attack I have reported all the bugs @Nirgoldshlager @TechCrunch @ForbesTech @mashable

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A judge in the US state of Michigan has ordered the city of Detroit to withdraw its application for bankruptcy over its debts of $18bn (£12bn). Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said the petition, filed on Thursday, violated the state's laws and constitution because it threatened pension benefits. But the state's attorney general immediately appealed against the order. Earlier, Governor Rick Snyder said the move towards bankruptcy would reverse decades of decay. Bankruptcy would allow Detroit's state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, to liquidate the city's assets to satisfy creditors and pensioners.

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wow, don’t see ads for video games like this anymore

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A is for Array ABCs for future coders

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jQuery library for building bank account forms, formatting and validating inputs

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Who Owns Your Data When You're Dead?

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Three years after campaigning on a vow to "repeal and replace" President Barack Obama's health care law, House Republicans have yet to advance an alternative for the system they have voted more than three dozen times to abolish in whole or in part. Officially, the effort is "in progress" - and has been since Jan. 19, 2011, according to GOP.gov, a leadership-run website. But internal divisions, disagreement about political tactics and Obama's 2012 re-election add up to uncertainty over whether Republicans will vote on a plan of their own before the 2014 elections, or if not by then, perhaps before the president leaves office, more than six years after the original promise. Sixteen months before those elections, some Republicans cite no need to offer an alternative. "I don't think it's a matter of what we put on the floor right now," said Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, who heads the party's campaign committee. He added that what is important is "trying to delay Obamacare." Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, who leads a committee with jurisdiction over health care, said, "If we are successful in ultimately repealing this legislation, then yes, we will have a replacement bill ready to come back with." Divisions were evident earlier this year, when legislation to make it easier for high-risk individuals to purchase coverage died without a vote. It was sidetracked after conservatives, many of them elected with tea party support, objected to any attempt to improve the current law rather than scuttle it. With the rank and file growing more conservative, some Republicans acknowledge that without changes, they likely couldn't pass the alternative measure they backed when Democrats won approval for Obama's bill in 2010. Among other provisions, it encouraged employers to sign up their workers for health insurance automatically, so that employees would have to "opt out" of coverage if they didn't want it, and provided federal money for state-run high-risk pools for individuals and for reinsurance in the small group market. The current state of intentions contrasts sharply with the Pledge to America, the manifesto that Republicans campaigned on in 2010 when they took power away from the Democrats. That included a plan to "repeal and replace" what it termed a government takeover of health care. It promised "common-sense solutions focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs," including steps to overhaul medical malpractice laws and permit the sale of insurance across state lines. Republicans said they would "empower small businesses with greater purchasing power and create new incentives to save for future health care needs." They promised to "protect the doctor-patient relationship, and ensure that those with pre-existing conditions gain access to the coverage they need." But Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., said, "We never did see a repeal and replace bill last time," referring to the 2011-2012 two-year term that followed the Republican landslide. "I hope we can this time, and I'll keep fighting for it." Broun, running for the Senate from Georgia in 2014 as a conservatives' conservative, has drafted legislation of his own that relies on a series of tax breaks and regulatory changes such as permitting insurance companies to sell coverage across state lines to expand access to health care. Other Republicans are at work on different bills, in the House Energy and Commerce Committee headed by Upton, and elsewhere. Rep. Steven Scalise of Louisiana, who leads the conservative Republican Study Conference, said the organization is working on legislation to reduce health care costs "without the mandates and the taxes" in the current law. Like others involved with the issue, he provided no timetable and few specifics. At the same time, the other half of the 2010 pledge to "repeal and replace" is getting a workout. The House voted last week to delay two requirements, the 38th and 39th time they have gone on record in favor of repealing, reducing or otherwise neutering the system that bears Obama's name. In the case of one of the rules, a requirement for businesses to provide insurance to their workers, the administration announced a one-year delay earlier this month. Democrats and even some Republicans say the intense focus on repealing the health law is wide of the mark. "Every voter knows what Republicans are against. They don't know what they're for" on health care, said Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who heads House Democrats' campaign committee. He said the strategy would haunt Republicans next year among moderate and independent voters who want changes, not outright repeal. The fate of legislation to put more funds into high-risk pools demonstrated a belief among some Republicans that they should advance alternatives. Polling presentations make the same point but are not uniformly persuasive among the rank and file, according to officials, and lawmakers' speeches sometimes make it sound as if the health law is disintegrating on its own. Yet one prominent conservative, Ramesh Ponnuru, warned recently that it was a "perverse complacency" to do nothing while assuming the health law will implode. "We can be sure that the Left would respond to any such collapse by making the case for a `single payer' program in which the federal government directly provides everyone insurance," he wrote on May 30 in National Review Online. Ponnuru added that in some Republican circles, "the idea that an alternative is necessary is seen as a mark of wimpiness, a weakness for big-government programs that are just slightly" weaker than what Democrats possess.

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AFTER we die, our bodies are reduced to dust or ash, through burial or cremation. The fate of the digital corpuses we leave behind is rather more complicated. Before the advent of internet-hosted storage and services, your digital remains would have been accessible only to those with physical access to your computers, and only then if you had not applied encryption or password protection. But these days many people leave traces of their lives spread across the internet. Facebook knows who we love and hate, Google knows what we are interested in, Amazon knows what we buy, and so on. Specialist services may even store information about your genetic makeup (23andme) or archives of your files (Dropbox, CrashPlan, and many others). Who owns your data when you're dead? No one, not even a probate lawyer, will tell you that the process of transferring property by writing a will—or dealing with the absence of one—is a simple matter. But when it comes to financial assets, physical goods or property, thousands of years of tradition and many hundreds of years of legal precedent provide a basis on which to proceed in even the most esoteric cases. Digital assets that are stored on shared servers in the cloud, by contrast, are so new that legal systems have not yet caught up. Five American states have passed legislation to provide executors and other parties with a legal basis on which to assert authority over digital assets, and others are considering similar rules, but these laws vary widely in what they cover (the oldest of them covers only e-mail). There are no federal laws. The same is true in other countries. To complicate matters further, internet firms may be based in different countries from their users and may store data in servers in many countries, making it unclear whose laws would apply. A paper by Maria Perrone in the journal CommLaw Conspectus explains how internet firms and digital service-providers sit in final judgment when it comes to deciding the fate of data belonging to the dead. Some firms cite an American law from 1986, the Stored Communications Act, as clearly prohibiting many forms of data handover to heirs or estates, even with verified written instructions asking for data to be released. The law provides no exemptions and involves hefty prison sentences for violators. But every company seems to have its own set of rules, procedures and terms of service. Some require a legal executor to make a request, while others honour requests from anyone who can prove a family connection or even a link to an online obituary. Facebook limits valid parties to requesting either that an account be removed or be turned into a memorial site. Twitter says bluntly that it can deactivate an account on presentation of several bits of information, but it is "unable to provide account access to anyone regardless of his or her relationship to the deceased." Some firms delete accounts after inactivity; others refuse to allow renewals to keep the data alive; others won't allow any changes, and leave a user's data frozen in time, to the distress of those left behind. Several companies, such as Cirrus Legacy and LegacyLocker, offer digital safes for passwords and documents, releasing them only to authorised parties in the event of the owner's death. But such firms state clearly that their contract is not legally binding in two regards: a judge or executor might compel them to release information to people other than those specific by the owner, and the passwords may be useless if they relate to an account that has been separately deactivated or shut down. All this can be maddening for those dealing with grief. But there are signs of progress. In April, Google released the Inactive Account Manager, which in effect allows users of its service to set up a digital will. When enabled, it activates a dead-man's switch, and if the account is not used for a specified period (between three and 18 months) an e-mail can be sent to a trusted contact, and there is an option to delete the account automatically. The trusted contact can then follow a procedure to gain access to the account. Other internet giants may follow suit and offer similar features. More broadly, America's Uniform Law Commission, a non-partisan group that creates model legislation that is then adopted unchanged by many American states, has a "Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets" committee working on amendments to existing ULC laws that would give executors many of the same powers over digital assets that they have over financial and physical ones, while absolving service providers of any liability. These adjustments could be incorporated into some states' laws as soon as 2015, though some federal fiddles may be required as well. In her paper, Ms Perrone notes that such uniformity would mean that "people would no longer have to rely on companies' varying terms of use to determine how to manage digital assets." When dealing with death, a little certainty can be a great comfort.

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Did you think only Fox News talking heads were freaking out about the rise of female breadwinners and the apocalypse their arrival foretells? Fear not! Lou Dobbs and his team of misogynists have plenty of company–including, as of this weekend, the New York Times. In the wake of last week’s Pew announcement that women are now the primary earners for nearly half of American families with children, yesterday’s paper included an essay from Richard Thaler, who teaches at the University of Chicago’s business school. He writes: [Recent] developments should encourage aspiring young women to believe that social norms are changing, and that barriers to success are dropping. But a new study reveals that women’s gains on the economic front may be contributing to a decline in the formation and stability of marriages… The paper’s findings support the anecdotal complaints of many highly educated, high-earning women who say they can’t find suitable husbands. And as women continue to outperform men in school, these problems are likely to grow. To Thaler’s credit, he recognizes the role that outdated, misogynistic expectations play in this supposed conflict, suggesting that “problems arising from tradition-bound notions of gender identity will keep taking a toll on our economy and our families” until men get comfortable with wives who make more money than they do. However, despite this acknowledgement, Thaler’s big proposal is not a radical challenge to our collective sexism: he seems to hope certain gender roles will dissolve naturally but doesn’t consider the possibility that we could speed the process. Rather, Thaler pushes for the expansion of part-time, at-home work “to hire the millions of talented but underemployed mothers in our economy.” I absolutely support flexible work schedules that allow both moms and dads to care for kids while making a living. That argument, though, has no place in a discussion about how sexist notions of the “male provider” hurt families. There are many reasons to support flexible work schedules, but preserving male egos by offering women less ambitious paths isn’t one of them. Part-time work shouldn’t be a strategy for wives to assuage their husbands’ insecurities: We need to demolish gendered expectations, not accommodate them. Designing policy to ensure the comfort of misogynists only further entrenches the same fixed roles on which Thaler blames this alleged problem. Besides, Thaler cites a deeply flawed paper to establish a connection between women’s professional success and unhappy marriages. Even before yesterday’s essay was published, one of my favorite academic bloggers, Philip Cohen, had thoroughly discredited the researchers’ conclusions. As he points out, the data is old, the methodology is dubious, and many have previously exposed similar mistakes in nearly identical studies. Given the empirical weakness of the Feminist Breadwinner Apocalypse theory, it’s curious that reputable professors and publications are so eager to claim a connection between wives making bank and problems at home. Thaler might be worried about financially independent women’s marriages, but right now I’m more concerned by the popular assumption that they must be failing.

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New paper from the Harvard Law Review by Daniel Solove: "Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma": Privacy self-management takes refuge in consent. It attempts to be neutral about substance -- whether certain forms of collecting, using, or disclosing personal data are good or bad -- and instead focuses on whether people consent to various privacy practices. Consent legitimizes nearly any form of collection, use, or disclosure of personal data. Although privacy self-management is certainly a laudable and necessary component of any regulatory regime, I contend that it is being tasked with doing work beyond its capabilities. Privacy self-management does not provide people with meaningful control over their data. First, empirical and social science research demonstrates that there are severe cognitive problems that undermine privacy self-management. These cognitive problems impair individuals' ability to make informed, rational choices about the costs and benefits of consenting to the collection, use, and disclosure of their personal data. Second, and more troubling, even well-informed and rational individuals cannot appropriately self-manage their privacy due to several structural problems. There are too many entities collecting and using personal data to make it feasible for people to manage their privacy separately with each entity. Moreover, many privacy harms are the result of an aggregation of pieces of data over a period of time by different entities. It is virtually impossible for people to weigh the costs and benefits of revealing information or permitting its use or transfer without an understanding of the potential downstream uses, further limiting the effectiveness of the privacy self-management framework.

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We’ve seen interracial couples on television for decades but corporate companies have largely stayed away from including them in advertising. The sitcom “I Love Lucy,” which premiered in 1951, was the first television program to feature an interracial couple starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. In 1975, “The Jeffersons” also featured one of the first black and white couples on TV with Tom and Helen Willis (Franklin Cover and Roxie Roker), neighbors of George and Louise Jefferson. More recently shows like “Boy Meets World,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” have featured interracial couples in leading roles. Earlier this week Cheerios released a commercial featuring an interracial couple and their daughter and you’d think it would be no big deal since we’ve seen interracial couples on TV for decades. Not so. The ad, posted to YouTube on Tuesday, received such a negative response that Cheerios had to close the comments section on the video sharing site. The ad also made it to Reddit where the discussion thread is still thriving with bigoted comments. Cord Jefferson at Gawker highlited the following racist comment on Reddit: “Shoving multi-culturism down our throats when we know it fails.. awesome.” It’s been 46-years since the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that prohibiting marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored” was unconstitutional. The case, Loving vs. Virginia, led to a decision that ruled all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States were unconstitutional. Despite the court ruling and more than half a century of interracial couples on TV, the bigotry (at least online) is still alive and thriving. Tim Nudd at Ad Age points out that the controversy may stem from people just not being used to seeing interracial couples in ads that are lobbying for their dollars. “The problem is that TV ads have always lagged TV programming in this regard, as so many brands are clearly scared of being perceived as making a political statement with the casting of their commercials,” Nudd write at AdAge. ”Thus, the Cheerios ad, despite its characters being representative of tens of thousands of actual couples in America, sticks out like a sore thumb.” The good news is that there are some people complaining the ad doesn’t go far enough. “Every commercial with an interracial family show a black man and white woman. You never see Asians or Native Americans or Mexicans or even a white man with a black woman,” wrote one user on Reddit. “I’m not satisfied with the family, they need to be more interracial.”

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The New York Times has a short documentary up exploring the construction of the “crack baby” epidemic – an epidemic that was largely built on racist media hype and flimsy science. This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers) lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500 percent increase in damaged babies — was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. And the shocking symptoms — like tremors and low birth weight — are not particular to cocaine-exposed babies, pediatric researchers say; they can be seen in many premature newborns. What was just a very preliminary observational study turned into a widespread social panic about “crack babies,” children who would supposedly suffer extreme physical and cognitive deficiencies as a direct result of the use of crack cocaine. Ultimately, this was found not to be the case at all – rather, other issues correlated with drug use (such as lack of access to healthy foods, for example) were the main culprit in the health complications these babies faced. But the story fed into the racialized narrative of the war on drugs, and because crack use was most prevalent in urban communities of color, the media, legislators, and the general public quickly demonized low-income mothers of color struggling with substance abuse. Legislators enacted some of the harshest penalties for low-level drug offenses for crack, and to this day there is a huge disparity between sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine – a drug much more prevalent with wealthy white users. Though the Fair Sentencing Act reduced this disparity and eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of crack in 2010, the fact that there is a disparity at all is indicative of the ways that class and race play out in the drug sentencing and the criminal justice system. Today, the legacy of these policies remains. Recent studies reveal the ways that these narratives, along with anti-choice policies such as fetal personhood initiatives, have resulted in widespread arrests and forced interventions among pregnant women – disproportionately low-income women, women in the South, and black women. Drug use still largely remains in the public imagination as an issue to be treated with punishment rather than health care, and harm reduction policies are controversial despite clear clinical evidence of their success as public health initiatives. Go take a look at the ten-minute documentary, and stay updated on the work of organizations like National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who are working on the issues faced by drug-addicted pregnant women.

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Last week, Katie posted about #FBrape, a campaign to pressure companies whose ads were displayed next to violently misogynistic photos (trigger warning) on Facebook to pull their support until the social media company changes its posting policy. While Facebook still hasn’t responded, #FBrape’s success over the last week shows advertisers shouldn’t mess with the feminist internet. As of this morning, #FBrape has received 50,000 mentions on Twitter, 4,500 emails have been sent to advertisers, and more than a dozen companies have pulled their ads. Campaign co-founder Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) is asking supporters to redouble their efforts to pressure advertisers who refuse to act, including American Express and faux-feminist Dove. If they don’t remove their ads from the misogynistic site, we won’t buy their product. True victory, of course, will require Facebook to change its policies. WAM! Executive Director Jaclyn Friedman has confirmed that Facebook is in discussions with the #FBrape organizers, but the only public action Mr. Zuckerberg’s empire has taken thus far is the deletion of some of the specific sexist pages highlighted by the campaign. That isn’t good enough. Without a substantive policy shift, the burden of policing the huge social media network will fall on feminist activists–and there’s no reason to think their efforts will successfully rid the site of misogynistic photos. Facebook has a full team hired for the sole purpose of responding to users who report “offensive” material, but it has regularly determined gender-based hate speech–unlike other forms of bigotry actively censored on the network–doesn’t violate community standards. A clear policy banning such photos is necessary if we want Facebook to continue responding to complaints once media scrutiny has turned elsewhere. The fight for policy change is also an important opportunity to articulate why such sexism is destructive. Pictures like those highlighted by #FBrape don’t just offend and hurt feelings; they promote violence through glorification and trivialization. Of course, Mark Zukerberg didn’t invent misogyny. Facebook’s current policies reflect a culture in which sexual violence is a joke and breastfeeding is judged more troubling than rape. But the network’s overwhelmingly male leadership solidifies the acceptability of gender-based violence by codifying sexism into its community standards, restricting some speech while granting misogynists free reign. Facebook’s idealistic mission has always been to build a “more open and connected” world in its virtual reflection of users’ everyday lives. Implicit in this promise is the recognition that the website will both shape and be shaped by our off-line lives. It is not surprising that violence–antithetical to the freedom and community-building Zuckerberg seeks–has worked its way into this crowdsourced society. Right now Facebook is actively reflecting this misogyny back in magnified form, like a funhouse of distorted mirrors: gender-based violence is amplified in its online expression, promoting more violence in our lives off the screen, which in turn manifests itself in online hate speech. It would be so easy for Facebook to stop this cycle. If our complaints can’t, #FBrape shows, perhaps the threat of our dollars will.

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Five days after my procedure, I returned to work. I continued to work at the clinic part time for another three years. I did my job. But I was changed. I don’t think anyone noticed. I did not comment upon it, nor did I understand it at first, but ultimately I believe I became a better counselor. Unlike the women we see at the clinic, I had never been pregnant unexpectedly. Every pregnancy I had – and there were only two – I wanted. Occasionally, I’d meet a patient who would ask if I had ever had an abortion. I knew she wasn’t really curious about my life experience; she just didn’t want to feel alone. My answer was always the same: I had witnessed hundreds of abortions and I could report that it was generally simple and safe and women came through just fine. Most women don’t talk about their abortions and miscarriages. Virtually none go through the experience with a loved one at their side. The greatest gift an abortion counselor can give is to bear witness, to be with a woman as she goes through this private journey, to witness her strength and weakness, her grief, her relief, her pain. For the first time I understood what a tremendous gift it is, because for the first and only time in my life, I had been in a position to receive. I am grateful. And sad: we were never able to conceive again. I was changed in another way, too. The protective shield I so carefully constructed around myself, that kept me a safe distance from my patients, was compromised. Most of the time, I could retain my professionalism, but there were those rare days when I’d meet another Theresa, or, perhaps more difficult for me, a woman my age who, for what ever compelling reason, chose to abort a health pregnancy. My job was to support a woman in whatever decision she felt was best for her, and I did. And there were times when I would go to the back parking lot, sit on the crumbling concrete steps, stare out at the extinct volcanoes, and bear quiet witness to all that has been lost.

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RT @bbcdoctorwho: #DW50

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RT @bbcdoctorwho: #DW50

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RT @rands: It takes five to twenty seconds for positive experiences to even register in the brain: