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POPSStephen McIntyre: Portrait of a Climate Analyst 
--- it claimed the 1990s was the millennium's hottest decade " he's considered a denier by those who fear the planet is burning up. But the Toronto native won't stop asking the tough questions. "We shouldn't give any thanks whatsoever to people who obstruct efforts to show that their particular theory was wrong," said McIntyre, whose own work is derided as bunk by the tight-knit academics he monitors. Now, skeptics of climate change " and McIntyre is not alone " have new fodder to absorb from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit scandal. Hacked emails have been made public, suggesting scientists may have manipulated data to offer more dramatic interpretations of global warming. It's that kind of bad science, bolstered by peer-reviewed papers and protected by agenda-driven researchers, that McIntyre wants to expose. And no, he's not funded by the oil industry or big business " the Toronto native is unpaid, living off his savings
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POPSPanhandler Shot Dead A panhandler was recognized by police, he ran and fired at them; they fired back and killed him. Good. I am glad this looser is dead. You runaway from police instead of standing up like a man and face the charges that are forthcoming.
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POPSKeeping Extremisms Out of the U.S. Military
Consider the growing infiltration of neo-Nazi groups within the armed services. In 2006 and again in 2009, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which monitors racist and right-wing militia groups, concluded: A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization... The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members." That zero-tolerance policy was put in place in the aftermath of the devastating Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 Americans, the largest death toll from a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland before 9/11.
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POPSTouch Screen Back in 1998/99, myself and a co-worker were brainstorming on computing ideas. We came up with an idea for a computer screen that would act like a kiosk of sorts, for the elderly. Realizing that there was a need to keep in touch and up to date with technology, it 'felt right' to bring something like touch screen for the elderly or those that could not type, into age (pun intended). Our idea was to set up these kiosk style monitors in senior assisted/non-assisted homes; on campus clubhouses, etc so anyone could send email and play a few games. Easy stuff that would not be intimidating or difficult to learn. Idea blown away when presented to our employer as not 'marketable enough.' About 3 weeks ago, I walked into Sam's Club; the computer section. A round table was set up with HP Touchscreen monitors. Curios, I walked over to inspect and could not get close enough except to watch. Persons much older than myself standing around the table, playing games by touching the scre
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POPSBig Brother Monitoring Your Clipmarks, Blogs, Tweets "Visible", a very extensive and sophisticated CIA-based monitoring program is in effect watching online forums, blogs, twitters, and likely Clipmarks (where influential clips are easily tabulated). After all, it's all in the public domain, where whatever you post you must own. In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally ,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
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POPSReady to Revolt: Oath Keepers pledge to prevent dictatorship in U.S.
They are armed and promise to keep the oath they took to protect the Constitution. Founder Stece Rhoades: "We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you." That type of rhetoric has caught the attention of groups that track extremist activity in the United States. In a July report titled "Return of the Militias," the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center singled out Oath Keepers as "a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival." SPLC now monitors Oath Keepers on its Web site blog "Hatewatch." Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders. Group supporters compare President Obama's America to Adolf Hitler's Germany. They also liken Obama to England's King George III during the American Revolution. One member calls Obama "the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about."
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POPS Olympic Failure Obama + Michelle x Oprah = Zer0 But the president's pitch, along with the star power of First Lady Michelle Obama and TV queen Oprah Winfrey , couldn't sway enough votes.
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POPSStaff Who Emit Over CO2 Limit Have Pay Docked The maximum that an employee can earn or be fined has been capped at 100, but is likely to rise once staff have grown accustomed to the idea. WSP, the global engineering consultancy, has been conducting the rationing scheme among 80 of its British employees for almost two years. In the first year the overall carbon footprint of participants fell by 10 per cent. The company is discussing its scheme with several FTSE 100 companies. Related Links Passengers face new tax to halt rise in air travel Storing CO2 could be Britain’s next boom industry The idea of personal quotas for carbon emissions is being advocated by the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research. Everyone would be given a number of free “credits”, to buy gas and electricity for their homes, fuel for cars and plane tickets for holidays. Those who did not use all their credits could sell the excess to people who used more fossil fuels.Those who exceed their ration pay a fine for every . . .
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POPSHowl of the unhinged is scary voice of America's "culture war"
More: The report provides troubling context for the outrageous behavior that has attended the election of our first African-American president. When you call them on that behavior, Barack Obama's detractors love to accuse you of equating dissent with racism. It is a specious argument. I disagree with the president's use of signing statements… but it would never occur to me to carry a sign vowing death to him, his wife and their "two stupid kids" as a protester in Maryland did, or to pray that Obama dies of brain cancer as a "minister" in Arizona does, or to heckle him during a joint session of Congress as Rep. Joe Wilson infamously did. That's not dissent. It is the howl of the unhinged and the entitled. The same folks who were complacent as President Bush spent surplus into deficit, wasted $600 billion dollars and 4,000 American lives on the wrong war, and watched a major American city drown are morally outraged because the new guy wants to reform health care?
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POPSWhat the data miners are digging up about you They know how much we paid for our house, what magazines we subscribe to, which books we buy and what vacations we take. Microsoft has filed patents for technology that monitors the heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, facial expressions of office workers, and even their brain waves. The idea, the patents say, is to let managers know if workers are experiencing heightened frustration or stress. Given that the same technologies are used in lie detectors and to study human behavior, it seems unlikely many workforces would quietly accept their boss introducing such a system.
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POPSHacker Infects School Video Systems with Socialism Virus "They're trying to force our kids to stay in school so they won't be able to go to work. Who's going to get the jobs at McDonald's if our kids are forced to stay in school? I'll tell you-Mexicans, that's who." A Fox Fruitcake monitor said schoolchildren were particularly vulnerable to the virus. "They're very impressionable," the monitor said. "If they're exposed to radical socialist ideas that brainwash them, they may come to believe that slacking off isn't the way to succeed. The results would be catastrophic." Other parents feared the virus would have even more severe long-term consequences. "It's insidious," said Watt A. Nutt of Memphis. "Once it's in the schools' video systems, it can take over the whole curriculum and start indoctrinating our kids in hard-core Communist ideas, like the world isn't flat, and 2 + 2 isn't 5."
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POPSInternet Plagiarism Cops I remember the first time I deliberately plagiarized a paper for school. In the pre-Internet 5th grade I copied word for word out of the World Book Encyclopedia and turned it in as a report on Abraham Lincoln. I did not get caught and I have felt guilty ever since. Looking back (way back), I think the reason I copied the content instead of doing the creative work myself is because the subject was just flat out boring. I had Lincoln overload. "Teach me about something I don't already know...already," I thought. When I did it, I KNEW it was wrong. See, "back then" we had a larger sense of social conscience. Wrong was wrong, not "if you get caught it's wrong." My daughter is a full time college student. We spend many hours a week on the phone together "doing homework" and writing papers together. I listen and make suggestions and my daughter researches until her keyboard fingers are numb. When the paper is finished we run it through the "plagiarism checker" online.
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POPSA tribute to the Man,beyond just the Mouse THE DEATH OF DISNEY Disney succumbed to lung cancer on Dec. 15, 1966, and Gallery 10, back on the ground floor, registers the world's reaction, with a television playing a broadcast by Eric Sevareid of CBS News and 36 commemorative editorial cartoons. (This one was drawn by Karl Hubenthal of The Los Angeles Herald Examiner.)
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POPSSelf Proclaimed Multitaskers Aren't that Good at Multitasking
Anyone who claims they can multitask is LYING. The human brain cannot multitask, PERIOD. You might think you're multitasking, but you are really switching between tasks in your brain. Every time you switch tasks, your brain has to reload the context of what it was last doing on that task. This is not a big deal for small tasks, as the state information is not that much. But the bigger (conceptually) a task is, the longer it takes to reload all the state information into your brain, and the bigger the efficiency hit against you is. If you find that you can do things no problem by switching tasks, it most likely means that what you're doing is not that mentally demanding, or you are not being effective in what you're doing. A perfect example is if you are surfing the web, watching TV, and twittering at the same time. You might be able to do all 3 of those tasks at once, but no one can argue that any of those things requires more than a sliver of brainpower.
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POPSSurgical Strike: Surgeons' Group Blasts Obama (Applause.) Nothing against surgeons. I want surgeons -- I don't want to be getting a bunch of letters from surgeons now. I'm not dissing surgeons here. (Laughter.) He probably wasn't going to get many letters at that point, but in his next statement, he guaranteed a groundswell of well-deserved outrage: All I'm saying is let's take the example of something like diabetes, one of --- a disease that's skyrocketing, partly because of obesity, partly because it's not treated as effectively as it could be. Right now if we paid a family -- if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they're taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that's $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 -- immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we're also reimbursing the care that prevents
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POPSWonderful Wallpapers/Pictures "The temperature is rising across the country, and while you may not be able to get yourself to a cool and breezy locale, you can at least plaster your monitor with soothing reminders of one. Our roundup today is a selection of backgrounds themed in cool blue: oceans, waves, and abstract creations. Each image can be previewed here in the gallery and then downloaded via the source link to the right of the image. Every wallpaper here is available in a full compliment of standard and widescreen monitor resolutions and many of them are available for dual monitors too. Note: The "Full Size" link directly under the picture only shows you the full size of the sample image we uploaded for this gallery. You need to click on the name of the particular wallpaper in the right hand column to access the full range of sizes at the source site."
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POPSPicPick Tools - All-in-one Design Tools Features Captures - Full Screen (Support for Dual Monitors) - Active Window - Window Control (Scroll a page automatically) - Region, Fixed Region - FreeHand - Repeat Last Capture Image Editor - It's very similar to Microsoft Paint, but you can do more. - It provides an effect like selection opacity, blur, sharpen, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, flip, rotate and etc. Color Picker Color Palette Magnifier Pixel Ruler Protractor Crosshair Whiteboard Freeware, Windows 2000-Vista including 64 bit, installed version 1.3MB, portable version 0.9MB. http://picpick.wiziple.net/ http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/PicPick-Review-49842.shtml Gizmo’s Freeware Reviews http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/free-multi-function-screen-capture-image-editor-impresses.htm
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POPSAre Our Markets Being Manipulated By "Rogues" Or Firms?
“Sergey Aleynikov, an ex-Goldman Sachs computer programmer, was arrested July 3 after arriving at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey, U.S. officials said. Aleynikov, 39, who has dual American and Russian citizenship, is charged in a criminal complaint with stealing the trading software. At a court appearance July 4 in Manhattan, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal judge that Aleynikov’s alleged theft poses a risk to U.S. markets. Aleynikov transferred the code, which is worth millions of dollars, to a computer server in Germany, and others may have had access to it, Facciponti said, adding that New York-based Goldman Sachs may be harmed if the software is disseminated.” The next sentence is particularly eye-opening: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways,” Facciponti said.” J.S. Kim who runs an independent investment research
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