i could go take a picture of the seagram’s building or the chrysler building, but i figure i’d rather search out something a little bit weirder. and today’s building is one of my favorite odd-ball buildings in nyc. it’s tribeca’s synagogue for the arts
, as designed by William Breger (who was a student of Walter Gropius, the bauhaus bigwig) — via moby los angeles architecture
Internet forums often use reader moderation to determine which comments are the best, but new research suggests that tallying up and down votes for online comments is a poor measure of those comments’ actual quality.
Oh, you may think you know who’s brilliant and who’s a troll in our forums, dear Reg reader — but according to a paper published in the journal Science on Friday, the so-called wisdom of crowds can often be misleading.
When you rate things online, you are often exposed to others’ ratings (either aggregated or listed individually),
Sean Taylor, one of the paper’s authors, wrote in a blog post describing the research. “It turns out that this does impact rating decisions and creates path dependence in ratings.”
Specifically, forum comments that receive positive votes are disproportionately more likely to be up-voted again, while comments that receive negative votes usually have those votes negated by positive ones shortly thereafter.
In other words, when people see that a comment has been up-voted, they tend to go along with the moderation in a herd-like
fashion. When a comment has been down-voted, on the other hand, they tend to want to correct
the moderation, producing an asymmetrically skewed snapshot of opinion — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Caretakers at Five Sisters Zoo in Scotland weren’t expecting any baby Skunks — but one turned up in their Skunk exhibit on 4 June. Later that day they found an even bigger surprise: the second kit to appear was an albino. They believe that the parents are Stella, one of two regular black and white females, and the father is Strachan, an albino. The albino kit has been examined and identified as a female; the other kit has been a bit more elusive and hasn’t been checked out yet. The kits are pictured here at three weeks old — via ZooBorns
I was inspired to make a crochet Locutus. My Locutus has a working laser on the side of his head and his arm prosthetic has a small motor that spins a claw — via Instructables
An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden has shut down abruptly, amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,
Lavabit owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter posted on the Texas-based company’s website.
Mr Levison said he has decided to suspend operations
but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.
That matches the period since Snowden went public as the source of media reports detailing secret electronic spying operations by the US National Security Agency.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States,
Mr Levison wrote — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via deviantART
Cybercrooks are running a wide-ranging password-guessing attack against some of the most widely used blogging and content management systems on the net.
The so-called Fort Disco cracking campaign began in late May this year and is still ongoing, DDoS mitigation firm Arbor Networks warns. Arbor has identified six command-and-control (C&C) systems associated with Fort Disco that collectively control a botnet of over 25,000 infected Windows servers. More than 6,000 Joomla, WordPress, and Datalife Engine installations have been the victims of password guessing.
Four strains of Windows malware are associated with the campaign, each of which caused infected machines to phone home to a hard-coded command and control domain — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Dublin – Trinity College Library, originally uploaded by Irish Welcome Tours.
A pair of incredibly adorable octopus earrings! Grimpoteuthis, also known as the dumbo octopus, have fins on their head which look like floppy little ears. This is a detail which makes them much more endearing to you. Made from translucent polymer clay these earrings catch the light and look candy-like with their cotton candy colouring. Each octopus sits at 1 cm tall — via Etsy
Hunter Street Crime Scene, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Police Tape, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Gathering, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Riot Squad, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Riot Squad, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Damp Construction Site, originally uploaded by Red Wolf.
Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding a crash and alleged shooting incident in Sydney’s west.
About 7.50pm yesterday (Wednesday 7 August 2013), emergency services received reports of a multi-vehicle crash and shots being fired at the intersection of Hunter and Marsden Streets, Parramatta.
Officers arrived a short time later and found two vehicles had collided, with two men trapped in one of the vehicles.
A 22 year-old male pedestrian was also injured as a result being struck by the vehicles involved in the crash — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The blink
element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox.
The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C even went so far as to add a Blink-killing requirement to its web accessibility guidelines.
Your correspondent has fond memories of using blink in Front Page 95, and may therefore join other blink nostalgia freaks by downloading this Chrome extension that restores its functions to Google’s browser. Or perhaps this code on GitHub that does the same job is a better choice — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The use of CAPTCHA to combat spam bots is also blocking people with disabilities and the feature should be removed from websites, argues a group of disability organisations.
The completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, abbreviated as CAPTCHA, is a popular measure deployed by webmasters around the world to prevent spammers from automatically sending unsolicited commercial messages to sites and users. It requires people to interpret characters and numbers that are difficult for machines to parse, and enter these as part of logging in to a site, for instance.
However, the dark side of CAPTCHA is that it hinders people with vision impairments to the point that they cannot use sites. Screen readers and other accessibility tools used by blind people often fail on distorted and illegible CAPTCHA text.
Now, disability groups such as Blind Citizens Australia, Able Australia, Media Access Australia and the Australian Deaf-Blind Council are calling on organisations to stop using CAPTCHA, setting up a petition with the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Invisible Bread
Dapper is a tool that enables users to create update feeds for their favourite sites and website owners to optimise and distribute their content in new ways
The first call came in at two minutes past seven on Monday morning. The ABC’s Sydney radio station, 702, wanted to know what I thought about The Daily Telegraph’s front page.
Virtually all of it was devoted to one sentence: On the war path: Rupert Murdoch.
On the war path: Rupert Murdoch. Photo: Getty Images
Finally, you now have the chance to KICK THIS MOB OUT.
No one who has even been glancing at The Daily Telegraph over the past year or so could have been surprised. Ever since Paul ”Boris” Whittaker took over as editor, the Tele has been going for the Gillard government boots and all.
But what’s in it for Rupert? What deals has he cut with Tony Abbott, in return for his newspapers’ support? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In late May, Kristiansand Zoo in Norway welcomed two Eurasian Lynx cubs. One of them, shown in the photographs on a 4 July checkup, is a little male weighing about 1.54kg. The other cub, whose sex isn’t yet known, was hiding at the time and didn’t want to come out for a checkup. These little additions bring the zoo’s Lynx count up to six — via ZooBorns
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