Furl http://www.furl.net/ http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.furl.net/member/sociate.rss Furl archive. Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:24:11 GMT http://www.furl.net/item/2341103/forward http://www.furl.net/item/2341103 Wow, found this during a conversation with Asao in Japan. China's having enormous riots. Sat, 19 Mar 2005 00:09:58 GMT China Development "The unrest has been deeper and more longstanding than we've been led to believe," says Mr. Becquelin. "The problem has been keeping track of all the incidents." The Chinese magazine Outlook put the 2003 figure of local disturbances about 58,000, involving an estimated 3 million persons. The unrest is still isolated and uncoordinated, such as a Nov. 15 incident in Guangdong where a woman angry at toll fees sparked a riot involving thousands, including one dead. But evidence shows more Chinese awareness of protests across provincial lines than in times past, largely due to cellphones and text messages, and despite official news blackouts. 4 http://www.furl.net/item/2092477/forward http://www.furl.net/item/2092477 Cracks appearing in the security curtain. Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:30:19 GMT Technology In fact, Ms. Hilton's data woes were one of two privacy scandals that hit the media last week. The other involved ChoicePoint Inc., one of the largest buyers and sellers of personal data. The company, which is based in Alpharetta, Ga., announced that criminals posing as legitimate buyers of data had purchased sensitive financial information on about 145,000 people. Hundreds of cases of identity theft have already been documented, and law enforcement officials have made at least one arrest in the case. The flood of illicit data is especially embarrassing for ChoicePoint, which happens to offer other companies services to help determine whether potential business partners are legitimate. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/2030319/forward http://www.furl.net/item/2030319 Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:39:42 GMT Science No one on Earth directly saw the flare because most of the light was gamma rays, photons that are more energetic than X-rays and are blocked by the atmosphere. But the Dec. 27 pulse registered on instruments aboard 15 spacecraft, including NASA's new Swift satellite, which was designed to record cosmic gamma rays and had been turned on just the week before. Dr. Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist for the Swift satellite, said flares of that magnitude could be expected just once in a millennium. "That seems so improbable it's a puzzle right now," Dr. Gehrels said. "There's something going on here that we don't understand." The radiation even temporarily compressed Earth's ionosphere, an envelope of charged gas at the top of the atmosphere, and distorted long-wavelength radio signals. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/2030283/forward http://www.furl.net/item/2030283 So we should make sure to cripple any ability PCs have to route one audio stream to another place, where it might just be recorded again. Yeah. Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:35:29 GMT Business Entertainment Technology Ethics Glenn Shannon, a programmer in Tucson, first publicized the technique several weeks ago on the Web site CDFreaks.com. From there, the method moved to blogs and news sites. Napster responded on Wednesday by posting a message from its chief technical officer, Bill Pence, that played down the problem, saying the method "can be likened to the way people used to record songs from the radio onto cassette tapes." 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1974324/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1974324 Dang! I just don't see how to get to NYC in the next two weeks! Mon, 14 Feb 2005 15:11:52 GMT Entertainment Design There are no bad locales for seeing them. But there are some spots at which the work looks best: around the Heckscher ball fields, where the gates are dense and lines of them swarm in many directions at once; at the base of Strawberry Fields, where two parallel rows march in tight syncopation; at Harlem Meer, where they cluster up to the shore and then clamber, helter-skelter, up the rocks. Also at Great Hill, near West 106th Street, where they encircle the crescent field, then descend a flight of steep steps. And at North Meadow, a wide-open vista, where the gates wander off toward the horizon, separating earth and sky with an undulating saffron band. People preened under the unfurled gates, watching the fabric sway. Now one no longer ambles through the park, but rather saunters below the flapping nylon. Paths have become like processionals, boulevards decked out as if with flags for a holiday. Everyone is suddenly a dignitary on parade. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1960187/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1960187 Sat, 12 Feb 2005 16:38:56 GMT Entertainment Residential stoves here produce about 10,000 B.T.U.'s, but restaurant stoves in Hong Kong, where the chefs use compressed gas to create a more intense heat, can produce as much as 200,000. At that level of heat, and with the intense activity of a restaurant kitchen, even top-quality woks warp instantly and have to be hammered back into shape after each night's cooking. While a home wok can last a lifetime, the legendary wok warriors of top Hong Kong restaurants must buy new woks every 7 to 10 days. The best chefs buy their woks from artisans who hammer each one from a single piece of carbon steel, positioning each strike of the hammer to create a perfectly smooth cooking surface. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1956159/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1956159 Weird. Sat, 12 Feb 2005 05:59:21 GMT General So will Mr. Koizumi worship at Yasukuni this year? Mr. Nambu says he does not know, and is not pressing the prime minister. Instead, he says he is wrapped up in his daily duties as chief priest, and in tackling a long-term threat: the declining numbers of veterans and relatives of the war dead, the shrine's strongest supporters. "It is the biggest problem," Mr. Nambu said in a lengthy interview at the shrine here, dressed in a white and gray robe. "So we have to think of ways to get young people to visit." To that end, it is not surprising that, for the first time in Yasukuni's history, its new chief priest is not only a salaryman but a former advertising man as well. "I cannot take advantage of my experience on issues such as China's opposition to the prime minister's visit to Yasukuni," Mr. Nambu said of his time at Dentsu. "That is a matter for the country to deal with. But I can help in making efforts to promote awareness among young people." 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1855860/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1855860 Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:43:33 GMT Business Ethics The document, known widely as the Webb report, paints a vivid picture of a stock exchange board packed with Wall Street chief executives and close associates of Mr. Grasso that was in many ways asleep at the switch, standing by as Mr. Grasso, who worked his entire career at the exchange, came to be paid at levels that equaled and in some cases exceeded his peers at large financial companies. It documents a culture of excessive pay at the exchange, whereby Mr. Grasso's executive assistant was paid $240,000 a year and his two drivers $130,000. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1855849/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1855849 The sweet sound of smart educational decisions. Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:41:18 GMT Development Ms. Munera reports steady academic progress. "Assessment, all the way down to the youngest classrooms, exhibits a record of success," she says, citing improvements in scores on city and state tests, especially in English language arts. The turnover rate has dropped to 5 percent. A visitor to Siobhan Conz's Elementary 1 classroom, for 6- to 9-year-olds, observes A'kala pensively locating New York on a United States puzzle map. Joseph and Rosa kneel at low tables nearby, matching sound-alike words. Alexander reads "Lyle the Crocodile." Sheyla works with a square grid of tiles numbered 1 to 100. Periodically, without prompting, a child puts one activity away and selects another. The visitor goes unnoticed. Ms. Conz moves purposefully from area to area. At one table, she shows Chris, an 8-year-old, how to demonstrate "word dominoes," a language game, to Monique and Elizabeth, both 7. "You present like I usually do, so pull your chair to this side of the table," she tells Chris. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/1791147/forward http://www.furl.net/item/1791147 Fast Food Nation convinced me. OSHA and the FDA have no teeth, none at all. Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:03:43 GMT Business Politics Ethics For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that the nation's meat packing industry has such bad working conditions that it violates basic human and worker rights. In a report issued today, Human Rights Watch, often echoing Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," found that jobs in many beef, pork and poultry plants were so dangerous that the industry violated international agreements promising a safe workplace. 3