“Patrick D. Jones is an assistant professor of history in the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. His new book is called The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee, and it’s published by Harvard University Press. He spoke to us from the studios of Nebraska Public Radio in Lincoln. His book examines the legacy of the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, and how it relates to the broader national movement.”

“Designer Sung Bae Chang invented a toaster that can burn virtually anything onto your morning slice. The Scan Toaster connects to a PC over USB and downloads everything from local weather conditions and the current time to the morning’s news headlines, all of which is burned into the bread with heated modules. The appliance is a finalist in a design competition held by manufacturer Electrolux; designer Sung Bae Chang said he got the idea while, well, making toast. “

It’s like the Sunlight Home in the Talisman, but in PA instead of IN, and, unfortunately, real.

“Waguespack and Flores introduced a resolution and ordinance that would force the city to make TIF documents – from weekly payroll records to annual reports – easy to find and track online.

“The ordinance simply prescribes a process for making the TIF redevelopment agreements, sub agreements, reports, and other related public documents readily accessible to all interested stakeholders,” a press release about the ordinance noted.”

“This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.”

“So basically, the government can’t add social media to the rulemaking process because of a 63-year-old law (that was subsequently amended in 1966). In 1946, computers were the size of entire rooms. In 1966, computers recorded their data on punchcards. Social media to someone in 1946 probably meant sitting around with friends while reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would not be born for another 38 years.”

‘a whopping 94 percent of school districts in the lone star state teach only abstinence, according to a new report. Worse yet, the review by two professors at Texas State University found that “sexuality education materials” used in the state “regularly contain factual errors and perpetuate lies and distortions about condoms and STDs.” They also found that classes promoted gender stereotypes, sexual orientation biases, shame and fear. Oh, what fun!’

‘”Research suggested that the communication center in women’s brains was more developed, leading [the advertising agency's president] to infer that women could process ads with more complexity and more pieces of information.” She also concluded that because the hippocampus, the brain’s memory and emotional center, is proportionally larger in women, they “would look for characters they could empathize with.” But most appealing for the advertisers was a piece of research suggesting that the decision-making area of the brain, which is larger in women, is also somehow related to feelings of guilt. Instead of selling the idea that their products are “guilt-free,” the agency, ostensibly, claim to have created a campaign that avoids triggering guilt, instead reminding women that they’re making a healthy choice when they eat, say, Baked Lays.’

“As our database has grown, we have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. We did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as we grew, scaling our existing features to accomodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.
…
“After some deliberation, we decided to implement a “schema-less” storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This post attempts to describe the high-level details of the system. We are curious how other large sites have tackled these problems, and we thought some of the design work we have done might be useful to other developers.”