Following its brief appearance on the German Play Store, the LG G Watch has officially gone up for pre-order. The pre-order has surfaced at the website MobileFun.com, where the smartwatch is being offered in black and white versions for $254.99 USD. The smartwatch pre-order, spotted by the folks at AusDroid, is being offered to those located in a dozen countries: … Continue reading
Yesterday, the City of San Francisco cracked down on MonkeyParking, a mobile app that lets users post info about the parking spot they are about to leave for a price. According to City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who threatened MonkeyParking and two other startups with a lawsuit, selling access to public spaces (the parking spot) is illegal.
As a San Franciscan, I am outraged by the cost of parking tickets in the city, specifically when I think about people who earn low wages.
According to an article published on SFgate, San Francisco moved to the nation’s top spot for the most expensive parking tickets in June 2013, at $74 downtown and $64 outside.
I remember Edwin M. Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, at Web 2.0 Summit 2011, when he asked for the help of developers to innovate for the parking business, he did not get the applause he was looking for (minutes 4.44 to 5.36 in the video after the jump).
Even though I used to live in Paris, one of the most expensive cities in the world where the parking ticket price was only at 11 Euros for over 25 years (17 Euros / $24 since summer 2011), I was certainly not the only one in the room to be unhappy about the parking crisis in San Francisco.
As a matter of fact, the city of San Francisco made over $88 million with 1,549,518 parking citations last year (FY 2012-2013), according to David Labua article in 7×7. Pretty good money! Basically this is a hidden tax, with the difference that regular taxes are calculated according to one’s revenue.
I guess that MonkeyParking does not provide the help the mayor was looking for, however, we can wonder if a cease-and-desist letter is the correct answer, it looks pretty contradictory to ask for help and use legal threats later.
Some people can argue that auctioning parking spots might develop a counter productive solution, as many people looking to make a quick buck could hover for hours in the street holding parking spots and selling them, making that issue even bigger.
Thanks to other innovative startups who heard Edwin M. Lee’s plea, there might be alternative solutions. For example, CARMAnation application lets users offer their private parking space for free, for a fee or for a donation to a charity. Check the video demo here and see below our email interview with Ashley Cummings, founder& VP of Communications about CARMAnation:
When was CARMAnation started?
CARMAnation was founded in January 2013.
When was the service launched, is it still in beta?
We launched out of private beta in February 2014. It is now available at www.CARMAnation.com to the public and no longer in beta.
How does it works?
CARMAnation is a peer-to-peer sharing community that is making parking more convenient and affordable. There are 471,388 registered vehicles in San Francisco but only 441,541 public parking spaces available. Frustrated with cost and lack of parking in San Francisco, the company created a simple way to share private unused parking spaces.
The workings are simple: offer your spot free, name your own price, or offer it in exchange for a donation towards your favorite local charity organization. We’ve partnered with six local Bay Area charities for our users to give back to the community through parking (Make-a-Wish, Habitat for Humanity, Family House, Raphael House, Project Night Night and Guide Dogs for the Blind.)
There are three ways a user can offer their spot:
How many users so far?
We’ve had several thousand people become part of the CARMAnation community, who are both listing their spots and renting other people’s spots. We’ve had over 100 parking spots listed.
Who are the founders and the team?
Ilya Movshovich, Founder & CEO
Ashley Cummings, Founder & VP of Communications
CARMAnation a Good Solution For the Parking Crisis in San Francisco? , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Just the other day, BlackBerry announced a new handset in the form of the BlackBerry Passport. Based on what we can see, the Passport appears to be the handset that has also been known by its codename, Windermere. Now apart from its unique shape and design, what makes the Windermere so special was its keyboard which was rumored to allow gestures.
BlackBerry did not really touch on that feature too much, at least not until recently when they might have revealed the keyboard’s features a bit earlier than they had planned. BlackBerry recently posted onto their blog describing some of the features of its keyboard. The post has since been taken down, presumably because it was not meant to go up yet.
However according to those who were quick enough to catch a glimpse at it, here’s a description of the keyboard as per BlackBerry’s post. “Ever been annoyed by your fingers obscuring, or worse, smudging, your touchscreen? Or had difficulty getting the cursor to just the right spot? Passport’s efficient design makes those problems things of the past. You’ll be able to navigate web pages, apps and e-mails by lightly brushing your fingers over the keys.”
The post goes on to elaborate on features like scrolling, cursor control and text selection, contextual virtual keys, character deletion, accented character input, and more. It certainly sounds like a unique feature although we guess we’d have to try it out in real life to see it performs as well as BlackBerry claims it will. In the meantime if you’d like to learn more, pop on over to the CrackBerry forums for the details.
BlackBerry Passport Keyboard Gestures Revealed , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
During WWDC 2014, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook did not hold back when he took jabs at competing smartphone platforms, like Android. For example he referred to Android as a “toxic hell stew of vulnerabilities”. Now with Google I/O kicking off tomorrow, we have to wonder if Google has anything to say about that.
Well maybe they already have. Speaking to Bloomberg, Google’s head of Android, Sundar Pichai, made some comments about Apple that felt more like a compliment rather than an insult. Perhaps he’s saving the good stuff for tomorrow, but during the interview he basically called Apple’s iOS a $100,000 Mercedes car.
While it does sound like a compliment, it does seem like a backhanded compliment at the same time. “You have to be careful when you make a $100,000 Mercedes car not to look at the rest of automotive industry and make comments on it. … We serve the entire breadth of the market, globally across all form factors, et cetera.”
He goes on to compliment Apple and claims that they are making a great product, but at the same time believes Google will still win the long-run. “I think of it almost … like two types of government. Some [forms of] governments will be able to do things faster because they are opinionated and get things done. Than you can have a noisy, cacophonous, cantankerous democracy, which is often better in the long run. So you have two different worldviews being presented.”
Interesting comments by Pichai, but what do you guys think? Do you agree with his assessment of Apple, and that Google might just prevail in the long-run?
Android’s Sundar Pichai Likens iOS To A $100,000 Mercedes , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Police said there was no way they could have known a baby was inside a home they stormed with a “no-knock” drug warrant at 3 a.m.
But a “flash grenade” tossed by a SWAT team officer landed in Bounkham Phonesavanh’s crib, badly burning the 19-month-old and leaving holes in his face and chest that exposed his ribs. Today, weeks after the May 28 raid on the house outside Atlanta, it’s not clear whether the child his family calls “Baby Bou Bou” will survive. Sheriff Joey Terrell of Habersham County, Georgia, called the incident “a terrible accident that was never supposed to happen.”
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union Tuesday said such botched raids are increasingly likely because police are bulking up on military-style gear and pressing SWAT teams into service more often.
“Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies,” the report said. “However, the ACLU encountered this type of story over and over when studying the militarization of state and local law enforcement agencies.”
The report said 62 percent of police SWAT team deployments in 2011 and 2012 were for drug searches. In the same two years, 79 percent of SWAT deployments involved executing a search warrant.
Previous research by Peter Kraska, a criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University, found that police SWAT teams conducted 45,000 raids in 2005, up from around 3,000 in 1980.
The sheriff’s office in Georgia said there were “no clothes, no toys, nothing to indicate” there were children in the home they raided last month. The ACLU said there were toys in the front lawn.
“My three little girls are terrified of the police now,” Alecia Phonesavanh, the toddler’s mother, told the ACLU, according to the report. “They don’t want to go to sleep because they’re afraid the cops will kill them or their family.”
Police went to the house looking for 30-year-old Wanis Thometheva, Phonesavanh’s cousin, who was suspected of making a $50 drug sale. He was not at the house during the raid and was arrested later, allegedly with a “small amount of drugs” in his possession, the report said.
“SWAT teams were created in the 1960s for a very specific set of scenarios like hostage-taking, active shooter scenes and true emergencies,” the ACLU’s Kara Dansky told The Huffington Post previously. “We’re seeing increasingly that police are using SWAT teams to do raids of people’s homes often in low-level drug cases. This sometimes causes an escalated risk of violence, as we saw in this case.”
Only 7 percent of SWAT deployments in 2011 and 2012 were for situations involving a hostage, barricaded person, or active shooter, according to the report.
Law enforcement justified the raid that injured the baby by saying the home was known to have guns. The ACLU report found that a firearm was found at the scene in 35 percent of SWAT raids.
“Given that almost half of American households have guns, use of a SWAT team could almost always be justified if the ‘presence of a firearm’ was the sole factor determining whether to deploy,” the report said.
The report also found that race often factors into SWAT team deployments. “When paramilitary tactics were used in drug searches, the primary targets were people of color, whereas when paramilitary tactics were used in hostage or barricade scenarios, the primary targets were white,” the report said.
Overall, 42 percent of people affected by SWAT raids were black, and 12 percent were Hispanic, according to the report.
“This is about race,” Alecia Phonesavanh told the ACLU. “You don’t see SWAT teams going into a white collar community, throwing grenades into their homes.”
Kevin E. Wilkinson, the police chief in Neenah, Wisconsin, explained to The New York Times why police rely on military tactics and gear. “I don’t like it. I wish it were the way it was when I was a kid,” he said. But he said the possibility of violence, however remote, required taking precautions. “We’re not going to go out there as Officer Friendly with no body armor and just a handgun and say ‘Good enough.’”
The ACLU’s Dansky said she hopes the report will spur government at every level to hold police departments accountable. She said Congress should restrict military equipment the State Department provides to police and state legislatures should establish strict guidelines on when paramilitary tactics can be used.
In general, Dansky said, SWAT teams should only be used “when they’re truly needed.”
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. military advisers and special operations forces expected to go to Iraq are now in Baghdad and have begun to assess Iraqi forces in the fight against Sunni militants, the Defense Department said Tuesday as the U.S. ramped up aid to the besieged country.
On Capitol Hill, senators who left a closed briefing with senior Obama administration officials expressed hope Iraq could soon form a new government, perhaps in the next week, facilitating greater U.S. military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who attended that meeting, backed what he described as an advancing American strategy. At the Pentagon, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters the troops in Baghdad included two teams of special forces and about 90 advisers, intelligence analysts, commandos and some other support personnel needed to set up a joint operations center in the Iraqi capital. Another four teams of special forces would arrive in the next few days, Kirby said.
Those troops, added to the approximately 360 other U.S. forces that are in and around the embassy in Baghdad to perform security, would bring the total U.S military presence in Iraq to about 560.
Kirby also said the U.S. was conducting up to 35 surveillance missions over Iraq daily to provide intelligence on the situation on the ground as Iraqi troops battle the aggressive and fast-moving insurgency.
President Barack Obama last week announced he would send as many as 300 advisers into Iraq to assess and advise Iraqi security forces. Part of that plan involved setting up two joint operating centers — one in Baghdad and the other in northern Iraq, where a lot of the fighting has taken place.
The teams, largely made up of Army Green Berets, will evaluate the readiness of the Iraqi troops and their senior headquarters commanders in an effort to determine how best the U.S. can bolster the security force and where other additional advisers might be needed.
Kirby said the initial assessments from the teams could be completed in the next two weeks to three weeks, but he said there was no timeline for how long the troops would be in Iraq.
“I don’t have a fixed date for you as a deadline or an end date, but it’s very clear this will be a limited, short-term mission,” he said.
He said the insurgency was well organized and aided by foreign fighters and Sunni sympathizers in the country.
The briefing for all senators Tuesday evening was led by Anne Patterson, the top U.S. diplomat for the Mideast, and included military and intelligence officials.
“There is some hope that a new government can be formed fairly soon,” Graham told reporters afterward. He said U.S. airstrikes probably would be necessary at some point, but accepted the Obama administration’s rationale that first a more inclusive Iraqi government must be formed that peels off moderate Sunnis. Graham said the U.S. could start hitting the Sunni extremists at their bases in Syria, however.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., similarly urged U.S. action against the rebels’ commanders and supply lines.
“This is not about saving Iraq or saving the government of Iraq or about building a country in Iraq,” Rubio said. “That’s a long-term goal for the Iraqi people. This is an urgent counterterrorism situation that our country faces. It grows more dire by the moment. Our options become more limited by the moment.”
Both senators stressed the need for the U.S. to help defend Jordan. Graham said the threat of extremists extending their efforts from Syria and Iraq into Jordan was made very clear by the administration.
The question of whether humans are alone in the universe may have an answer sooner rather than later.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has always been a needle-in-a-haystack effort, utilizing radio and optical telescopes to seek out alien signals from deep space. In the past few years, thanks to NASA’s extraordinary Kepler spacecraft, many extrasolar planets have been discovered, expanding the potential for finding habitable worlds.
“Unfortunately, it’s probably still a needle-in-a-haystack because we don’t know how many needles are out there,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California.
“What we do know that we didn’t know, even a year ago, is what fraction of stars have planets that might be habitable,” Shostak told The Huffington Post. “And these days, the answer is maybe one in five. That’s a preliminary analysis of Kepler data. We now know that there are going to be lots of worlds out there where you could have life.
“The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven’t even talked about the moons. You know, moons can be habitable, too. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion. So 100 billion times 10 billion is a thousand billion billion [habitable planets] in the visible universe,” he said.
Shostak is featured in Tuesday night’s episode of Science Channel’s “Alien Encounters” series, which explores the idea that an alien presence on Earth has spawned a generation of human-alien hybrids who eventually connect with a powerful quantum super computer. So far, he noted, the concept of one species breeding with another is just the stuff of sci-fi.
“It’s science fiction, of course, that they’re coming here to breed with us, to make hybrids. We don’t do that with other species of our own planet very often. We might crossbreed a couple species, but nobody here has got experiments to crossbreed humans with mayflies or something like that,” Shostak said.
“Maybe with parrots — that would be good because then maybe we would live longer, and we’d still be able to talk. We don’t do that kind of thing because it doesn’t make any sense biologically.”
Given the staggering number of potentially habitable planets now thought to exist by astronomers, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology was interested enough to invite Shostak and Dan Werthimer, director of SETI’s research center at the University of California, Berkeley, to testify before the committee last month. Shostak and Werthimer told lawmakers that more funding would increase SETI’s chances of finding that elusive proof of ET’s existence.
“I told them it would be a couple of decades,” Shostak said, “and explained to the committee why I thought that was the right time scale to find some sort of life. You might find it in the solar system. You might finally build a telescope that could find oxygen and methane in the atmosphere of nearby planets around other stars — we could build that today except for the fact that there’s no budget, but there may be budget within 20 years to do that. And the third approach, of course, is SETI.”
“Each of these has a decent chance of succeeding,” he added, “and I also think that one of them will.”
Watch the full congressional hearing here.
“Alien Encounters” airs Tuesdays on Science Channel at 10 p.m. Check your local listings for more information.
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A band of birds of different species set out on a perilous journey through the unknown, in search of their king. That is the story of The Conference of the Birds, the twelfth century masterpiece of Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it offers an amalgam of myths and vignettes of daily life, tales of courage and divine inspiration and silly, telling stories. It is a parable for humankind’s spiritual quest and life’s journey.
The annual Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, which celebrated its twentieth birthday this year, took the Conference of the Birds as its centerpiece. The idea was to explore religious and cultural diversity through the allegory of the journey of the birds. Each member of the band of birds represents a different human type, saintly and querulous, brave and foolish. They travel through a series of seven valleys (in the poem, searching, love, understanding, independence and detachment, unity, astonishment, and finally poverty and nothingness). These valleys, in the festival’s opening operatic spectacle, each represent one of the world’s great religious and cultural traditions. When the brave survivors reach the Simorgh, the king they have been seeking, they look and see, as in a mirror, themselves. The search for truth, for God, for a king, and for the answer to living together must begin with a searching exploration of the self. Only there can the answers be found.
The Fes Festival was launched in Morocco not long after the 1991 Gulf War, as a deliberate effort to bridge the divides that threatened to polarize “the West” and “Islam.” Drawing on the history of Fes, a city that describes itself as Morocco’s spiritual capital and prides itself on ancient Muslim and Jewish populations living side by side, the festival brings together music and other art forms from all parts of the world. It is an expression of tolerance, but, still more, a celebration of difference.
The Fes Festival has grown into a renowned world music event, drawing exuberant crowds from Europe and beyond. The theme is sacred music and classic Christian, Jewish, and Sufi music is part of the program. But so are performances, like that of South African Johnny Clegg and Senegalese Youssou N’dour and a delightful Irish group, the Atlan Ensemble, that bring audiences to their feet, clapping, shouting, and dancing. Diversity is of the essence, both in the artistic expression and in the dress and comportment of the audience.
That is the living expression of the festival’s message: a love of difference and a faith that together different melodies and rhythms can bring harmony without compromising the essence of any part. In less poetic language, the hope is that by coming to know and enjoy the musical expressions of different religions and cultures people will understand and appreciate each other. And stop fighting.
Beyond the music, films, art exhibits, and craft workshops, a further part of the festival is a five day intellectual Forum. The goal is framed as “giving globalization a soul”, one that might be termed bold, visionary, or fanciful. Each morning a group that includes politicians, religious leaders, businessmen, journalists, artists, and so forth, tackles a different topic. This year the menu included Mandela’s legacy, pluralism as a challenge for Morocco and Europe, and the Israel Palestine conflict. The hope is that in the setting of Fes, softened by music, inspired by the tangible beauty of artistic expression, tired ideas and stale debates will fade and new ideas and true dialogue will emerge.
The Forum has yet to achieve its ambitious goal of resetting the tone of global encounters and generating ideas that truly promise to address the world’s problems. The ambition is bold but not unattainable: in a setting outside cold conference halls, alongside artistic genius and beauty, in a country between tradition and modernity, between Africa and Europe, miracles might be achieved, though the inspiration of sufi mysticism, a spiritual backdrop, and artistic genius could also do with some fairly rigorous planning and adequate resources. As a Forum veteran I live in hopes.
The festival, the poem, the Conference of the Birds, and the open discussions at the Fes Forum offer an antidote to poisonous, violent images of conflict in the Middle East and beyond, and of extremist Islam. At one level there was an eerie quality in hearing repeated expressions of Islam as love (then seeing images of Iraq and Syria on a computer screen), and to see the “Valley of Islam” equated with unity, when Sunni Shia divides seem deeper than ever. Yet the lived experience of Sufi and moderate Islam are a reality for a great majority of Muslims. The messages of diversity, tolerance, and appreciation of difference are both ancient and modern. They are a balm and they are real. The notion of living together is not a danger to be managed nor an unattainable dream. It is within reach.
By David Lawder
WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) – Cost estimates of up to $50 billion a year for a veterans emergency medical care bill drew sharp criticism on Tuesday from lawmakers who said they were grossly inflated and would complicate negotiations over final details of the legislation.
The measure, with slightly differing versions passed by both the Senate and House of Representatives, would allow veterans a two-year period to seek private care at the Department of Veteran Affairs’ expense if forced to endure long waits at the agency’s facilities or if they live more than 40 miles away.
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller said Republicans on a negotiating panel want to find savings to offset the costs of the measure, but they believe the Congressional Budget Office estimates are unrealistic.
The non-partisan CBO issued a preliminary estimate that these provisions would cost the Department of Veterans Affairs $35 billion through 2016, and if left in place therafter would about $50 billion a year.
A CBO spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment on the estimate. The agency had previously said the bill’s budgetary effects were “highly uncertain” because of difficulty in predicting behavioral changes among veterans due to increased access to private care.
With fresh government reports detailing deeper problems with VA mismanagement this week, lawmakers want to pass a final version of the VA legislation as quickly as possible. But disputes over money could slow things down.
Several lawmakers at an initial meeting of House and Senate negotiators said the estimate improperly assumed that about 8 million eligible veterans not yet enrolled in the system would seek VA care, nearly doubling its patient population.
“Is the CBO product that they’ve produced reflective of anything sane?” asked Senator Richard Burr, the top Republican on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
“This is ludicrous. This is impossible for us even to start an intelligent discussion on what we put in legislation when we’ve got numbers that are just so grossly out of line,” he said.
Miller said he would press CBO for a “realistic” cost estimate and anticipates a new one that is significantly lower.
“We want to try to find the offsets necessary to pay for the legislation. That’s not going to be an easy task, but it’s one we’re committed to looking fully at over the next several days,” Miller told reporters.
Finding more than $35 billion in budget savings would be a difficult task at any time, but could especially be problematic this summer, as lawmakers are already scrounging for savings to fund highway projects.
Miller declined to estimate a timeframe for a funding deal, but said he hoped to reach consensus on broad parameters of the measure before Congress leaves for a July 4 break on Friday. The measure also provides the VA with greater authority to fire poor performing employees. (Reporting By David Lawder; Editing by Diane Craft)
Whether exotic or invisible, hypersexual or dehumanized, athletic or angry, the one thing black women apparently are not is scientific. Well, that’s not totally true: Apparently we’re not sexy and scientific. At least this is the takeaway someone would have after examining the Business Insider post titled “The Sexiest Scientists Alive!“
This is why Kyla McMullen created her own list, “Goddamn It, There Are Sexy Black Female Scientists Out There!” OK, that’s not what she called it, but considering the profiles of the 73 sexy scientific sistas who make up this list, this easily could have been the name of Kyla’s attempt at refuting the notion that black women are not present at the intersection of science and sexiness.
While misleading by commission is often thought to be the most treacherous offense in the realm of deceit, in my view, misleading by omission is much more noxious. The omission in this instance, rendering someone (or a group of someones) imperceptible, whether deliberately or not, is an affront to their dignity, triumphs, capabilities and sensualities. And in this case — the case of being black, female, scientific (a proxy for smart), and sexy — the omission sheds light on a narrative that many black women know all too well.
Simply put: blacks = black men. And (sexy) women = white women. With this arithmetic, black women often fail to be thought of as fully black or fully female. It’s a fact that I first realized in graduate school when a dumbfounded colleague audibly pondered why I had won an award for women in science (and I silently uttered to myself, “Ain’t I a woman?”). It’s a narrative that came up so often in graduate school that I actually incorporated this concept of intersectionality into my dissertation. And it’s a narrative that undoubtedly hit home for Kyla, prompting her to devise her list.
This omission of smart, sexy black women from Business Insider’s original list is hardly an idiosyncratic occurrence. Instead, the invisibility of black women who are smart, sophisticated, and sexy is a silent part of the Zeitgeist, an unspoken reality that has only recently been deemed real enough to be recognized by the mainstream social-scientific research community. But unlike most folks who simply complain and moan, Kyla acted, along with 72 other women (including yours truly, No. 38), to create a counternarrative. I’m glad she did, because by taking steps like this, slowly but surely we can reshape the “expected” and shed light on the beauty and complexity of smart, black women.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
