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He was 19 years old, a scrawny six-four, and wanted nothing more than to join the Army. Just like so many other young men. But very few from Chinatown.
By Jennifer Gonnerman Published Jan 6, 2012
Private Chen’s bedroom on January 5.
(Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII Photo for New York Magazine)
On the evening of October 3, 2011, Su Zhen Chen heard a knock at the door. In the hallway outside her apartment on Avenue D stood three soldiers. Su Zhen doesn’t speak English, and none of the men spoke Taishanese. She couldn’t understand what they were telling her, but figured it must have something to do with her 19-year-old son, Danny, an Army private stationed in Afghanistan. She called her brother in Staten Island, and he handed the phone to his wife, Melissa, who speaks fluent English.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
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Saturday, January 7, 2012
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Michelle Obama’s Evolution as First Lady - NYTimes.com
Michelle Obama was privately fuming, not only at the president’s team, but also at her husband.
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Michelle Obama as Critic and Advocate
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Times Topic: Michelle Obama
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In the days after the Democrats lost Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in January 2010, Barack Obama was even-keeled as usual in meetings, refusing to dwell on the failure or lash out at his staff. The first lady, however, could not fathom how the White House had allowed the crucial seat, needed to help pass the president’s health care legislation and the rest of his agenda, to slip away, several current and former aides said. -
The top 5 CES trends that will matter in 2012 | VentureBeat
If you couldn’t tell by the avalanche of product news hitting VentureBeat over the past few weeks, the next Consumer Electronics Show is almost upon us. The annual trade show, which has been held in Las Vegas for more than a decade, is where many of the world’s biggest electronics companies debut their new products, announce major news, and desperately try to remind us that they exist.
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n 2010, Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings thought he would write a profile of Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It turned into a caustic expose of McChrystal’s buckwild command style, capturing the general’s staff disrespecting the Obama team. And it cost McChrystal his career.
And that was actually an accident. Overshadowed by the McChrystal controversy was the story Hastings really wanted to produce: an indictment of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which Hastings considers a deadly folly. And so Hastings has revised and extended his account in a new book, The Operators, published on Thursday. -
Why 2012 is starting to look like 1984
Between SOPA, NDAA, telecommunications surveillance, and people's willingness to share endlessly via social networking, will 2012 mark the year consumers irreversibly surrender their privacy and freedoms?
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The man does have a point... (i.imgur.com)submitted 4 hours ago by justwonderingbro to funny177 commentssharesavehidereport
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Vitamins B, C, D and E and Omega-3 Strengthen Older Brains - NYTimes.com
Higher blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D and vitamin E are associated with better mental functioning in the elderly, a new study has found.
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The Shame of Filling a Prescription - NYTimes.com
Amy, a single mother living in a middle-class suburb (she asked that only her middle name be used), is an educated professional who is reasonably savvy in most medical matters. But every month she goes through an arduous, prolonged and humiliating process: filling a Ritalin prescription for herself and her 11-year-old son.
Most physicians think little about prescriptions after they hand them off to their patients. Usually, the only time I hear about it is when a patient calls from the pharmacy because the insurance plan has changed which statin it covers or a medication is not covered by insurance and the price is simply astronomical — what could I substitute?
Friday, January 6, 2012
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US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law | TorrentFreak
In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.
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Boeing's free-market move is going to cost Kansas big-time - latimes.com
So, tired of high taxes? Want to see big federal budget cuts?
Congratulations. You're getting your wish.
And you just cost 2,160 people in Kansas their jobs.
That's because Boeing Co., bracing for cuts in the defense budget over the coming decade, decided that "we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto," announcing Wednesday that it will close its facility in Wichita.
A plant that it's operated just since, oh, the 1920s. -
Santorum: No One Has Ever Died Because They Didn’t Have Health Care | The New Civil Rights Movement
Rick Santorum continued his assault on the poor and minorities yesterday evening. While speaking to a group of about 100 students at a small Iowa Christian college, Santorum claimed that no one in America has ever died because they didn’t have health care coverage. This, in fact, is a lie, as proven by numerous studies.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
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"Time Cloak" Created; Can Make Events Disappear
Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.
The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.
The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.
Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second. -
So Much Fun. So Irrelevant. - NYTimes.com
Two things have struck me about the Republican presidential candidate debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. One is how entertaining they were. The other is how disconnected they were from the biggest trends shaping the job market of the 21st century. What if the 2012 campaign were actually about the world in which we’re living and how we adapt to it? What would the candidates be talking about?
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An Entrepreneur Reviews What Worked and What Didn't in 2011 - NYTimes.com
The beginning of the year is a great time for reflection, revelation, resolution and even a little celebration. We did do some things right last year, and the results are starting to show. I also did some things wrong, which I intend to rectify in the near future. Move out of the way, 2011.
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prog21: A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of
While this is easy to explain and give examples of, it's not simple to implement. All we want is an operation that looks like idiom(Function1, Function2), so we could write the "open a file..." example above as idiom(Open, Read). The catch is that there needs to be a programmatic way to determine that the inverse of "open" is "close." Is there a programming languages where functions have inverses?
Surprisingly, yes: J. And this idiom I keep talking about is even a built-in function in J, called under. In English, and not J's terse syntax, the open file example is stated as "read under open." -
Deobfuscating malicious code layer by layer | PandaLabs Blog
This post explains how to analyze the malicious code used in current Exploit Kits.
There are many ways to analyze this type of code, and you can find tools that do most of the job automatically. However, as researchers who like to understand how things work, we are going to analyze it with no other tools than a text editor and a Web browser.
My goal is to lay the basis for you to learn how to remove the different obfuscation layers that a malicious JavaScript code may employ. I will teach you how to remove those layers step by until you get to the last layer where the logic that exploits the relevant vulnerability is found. -
“English is Tough Stuff” is a poem intended to point out, satirize, or exaggerate the inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation. It is particularly popular on websites and online forums intended for people learning English. The introduction typically appended to the poem says that “a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud.”
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Outlook Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths. -
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf
Debunking myths is problematic. Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct. To avoid these “backfire effects”, an effective debunking requires three major elements. First, the refutation must focus on core facts rather than the myth to avoid the misinformation becoming more familiar. Second, any mention of a myth should be preceded by explicit warnings to notify the reader that the upcoming information is false. Finally, the refutation should include an alternative explanation that accounts for important qualities in the original misinformation
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WTF PayPal DESTROYS a $2,500 violin and gives the owner nothing : WTF
WTF PayPal DESTROYS a $2,500 violin and gives the owner nothing (regretsy.com)
submitted 10 hours ago by jazz631
1347 commentssharesavehidereport -
As you know, I have had my share of issues with Paypal recently, and while I appreciate the effort they made to do the right thing in our case, I still have a lot of misgivings about them as a company.
This e-mail didn’t help. -
BBC News - Reaction to Stephen Lawrence murder verdict
Two men have been convicted of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence - 18 years after the attack in Eltham, south London.
Gary Dobson, 36, and David Norris, 35, were found guilty by a jury at the Old Bailey after a trial focused on forensic evidence held since 1993.
Reaction has been flooding in to the verdict from those close to the case.
Stephen Lawrence's mothe
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
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FPC New Features 2.6.0 - Lazarus wiki
Free Pascal Compiler 2.6.0 has been released and adds many post-Delphi 7 language features and adds or improves the support for various platforms. (wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org)submitted 3 hours ago by mariuz10 commentssharesavehidereport
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http://faculty.up.edu/lulay/failure/vasacasestudy.pdf
Why The Vasa Sank: 10 Lessons Learned Introduction
Around 4:00 PM on August 10th, 1628 the warship Vasa set sail in Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage as the newest ship in the Royal Swedish Navy. After sailing about 1300 meters, a light gust of wind caused the Vasa to heel over on its side. Water poured in through the gun portals and the ship sank with a loss of 53 lives. The Vasa lay in shallow waters of Stockholm harbor (at 32 meters depth) and after initial attempts to salvage it failed, was largely forgotten until it was located by Anders Franzen in 1956 [1]. In 1961, 333 years after it sank, the Vasa was raised and was so well preserved that it could float after the gun portals were sealed and water and mud were pumped from it. Today it is housed in a museum specially built for it, near the site where it foundered [6]. -
Hit French movie 'Intouchables' has some crying 'racism' - latimes.com
But the reaction from some U.S. critics has many French scratching their heads.
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Although the courts have recognized the relationship between the protection of reputation and the concern for personal privacy, it appears that in deciding whether a court will "unmask" anonymous bloggers for allegations of defamation, the court will assess whether the public interest favoring disclosure outweighs the legitimate interests of freedom of expression and right to privacy of the persons sought to be identified.
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Technology News: Emerging Tech: Will 2012 See the Last Big, Bold CES?
I was on the advisory council for Comdex the year it failed, and the reasons were similar to what now plagues CES. The show was ill timed, it had become too broad, and the major players just didn't see the point anymore. Microsoft's pullout from CES after this year indicates the show is trending down and will likely need to be rethought for this century if it is to survive and prosper.
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Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies - Salon.com
As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.
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Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
One of the more famous suppressed films of recent years is Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an early work by writer/director Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven). Filmed in 1987, the short film -- which relates the rise and fall of Karen Carpenter with a cast of Barbie dolls -- barely got a year's worth of festival time in 1989 before the twin iron boots of A&M Records and Richard Carpenter came down on Haynes.* [more inside]posted by Trurl at 7:51 PM - 25 comments
Monday, January 2, 2012
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2011, a Year of Me-Firsts in Business — Fair Game - NYTimes.com
LIVE and learn. And well we should, given that 2011 was packed with teachable moments.
Related
Times Topic: Gretchen Morgenson
Some of this stuff we already knew. Like the fact that banks love the perks that come with being too big to fail. They will lobby shamelessly to hang on to their riskiest businesses and stay perilously large. No surprise, really. A heads-we-win, tails-the-taxpayers-lose model has a lot going for it, at least for executives atop these institutions. -
H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software - NYTimes.com
The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year’s biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple’s iPad, lasted just seven weeks on the market before H.P. killed it, citing weak sales.
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Unknown Knowns - Avoiding the Truth - NYTimes.com
COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.”
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A Hmong Generation Finds Its Voice in Writing - NYTimes.com
FRESNO, Calif. — In many ways, the preoccupations of the young writers who gather every week here over supermarket cheese and crackers are those of young people everywhere. They grapple with loneliness, the mystifying behavior of siblings, being gay, the parents who do not understand them.
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For Multitaskers, 2012 May Be a Year of Revenge - NYTimes.com
IT’S a far different work world today than it was even 10 years ago. Technology and the economy have converged to create a set of priorities and preoccupations that are unique to our times. Here are just a few workplace and employment issues that are likely to stir debate, frustration and a search for solutions this year.
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The Piano Player Confessions
I recently received a message from an accomplished piano player. Let’s call him Jeremy.
This is someone who majored in piano performance at music school, where he was one of the top two students in the major. He won state-level competitions throughout his college career.
Jeremy wrote in response to my recent article on the surprisingly relaxed lives of elite musicians. He told me that post agreed with his experience. -
From 6 Economists, 6 Ways to Face 2012 — Economic View - NYTimes.com
BELIEVE it or not, times are getting better.
Related in Opinion
Editorial: As Good as It Gets? (January 1, 2012)
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Joshua Lott/Bloomberg News
Some homebuilding picked up, but no fix emerged for the housing crisis.
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Thierry Roge/Reuters
Strikers in Europe protested pension reforms.
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Fed, led by Ben Bernanke, kept interest rates at rock-bottom.
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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Occupy protesters in Manhattan highlighted many workers' plight.
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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Aiming to corral health costs, companies offered in-house fitness plans.
At least that’s what the dry statistics keep telling us. Industrial production, G.D.P. — the kind of figures that Washington and Wall Street sweat over — suggest that the economy is on the mend. -
Syrian activists dying to tell their story - Telegraph
During more than nine months of protest against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, it is Syria's media activists who have ensured that the outside world knows what is really going on.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
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mushroomman | Accounts of a busted entheogen distributor
On October 22, 2011 I was arrested by the DEA for cultivation and distribution of psilocybin mushrooms. The Feds conducted a two year investigation that included an informant, interception of my email, phone taps and surveillance in three states. I was incarcerated for 14 days at the SeaTac Federal Detention Center. Upon arrival, at SeaTac FDC I was greeted by a group of guys watching the evening news who shouted: ”There he is, Mushroom Man!” I have adopted that moniker for this blog. Currently, I am on house arrest pending further legal negotiations. This blog describes my encounters with law enforcement as a case study of the misguided and ineffective drug policy our country is pursuing. Later, I’ll describe life inside prison and the story of how I got into the entheogen distribution business. My goal is to bring intelligence, compassion and common sense to bear on the reform of the unscientific and unfair Uniform Drug Control Act of 1970, DEA Schedule I classification, and other misguided drug laws. Toward that goal, check out the Drug War Clock below, courtesy the good folks at DrugSense.org (http://www.drugsense.org), to see just how much money is being thrown at a “war” that can never be won.
For the benefit of all concerned,
Michael Maki -
The Best and Worst Products at Trader Joe's | The Daily Meal
What's good at Trader Joe's? What's not? These are questions that fans and detractors of the store are very passionate about. Last August, Nathan Rodgers, his wife Sonia, and their friend Russ Shelly and his wife Sandy decided to systematically review every product to find out.
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The Urban Possum: The Godfather's Spaghetti Sauce
"Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; ya make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs; heh…? And a little bit o' wine. An' a little bit o' sugar, and that's my trick."
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Recently was in the hospital and this was beside my bed... (imgur.com)submitted 10 hours ago by bubbasmi307 commentssharesavehidereport
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NEW HAVEN (CN) - The Vietnam Veterans of America says the Pentagon has "systematically and wrongfully discharged" more than 22,000 veterans since 2001 "on the basis of so-called 'personality disorder'" - rather than post-traumatic stress disorder - to deny them medical care and save the Pentagon $12.5 billion in medical and disability payments.