Hasta La Gadget!

 Another day, another Arduino project. This time it’s something called SuperDuino, a tiny touchscreen powered by a coin cell battery and backed up by a tiny Arduino-Like processor.
The kit can be used to build smartwatches and other mini devices and costs about $25 for the entire system. You can add microSD readers, Bluetooth, and wireless connectivity to the SuperDuino, as well. Read More

I was 10 years old, enjoying a scoop of ice cream, when my dad, a marketing director, pointed at a poster on the wall, and said: “did you know that the ice cream in that picture is really mashed potatoes?” I sat there, spoon in my mouth, noticing that the image of the fake stuff looked better than the cup of ice cream in my hand.

Things aren’t always what they seem, and what you see isn’t always what you get. Some bakeries release a fresh baked cookie scent to attract customers, and the cakes on display are decorated Styrofoam. Perhaps it is the imitation of something that leads to the desire for the real thing.

When people see a fur coat, it is unclear if it was made of processed and dyed polymeric fibers, or 20 dogs. Trends go viral because people copy what they see, and fashion relies on trends. In his NY Times article published in September 2007, Eric Wilson explained how “clothing manufacturers believe that copying is the business model of the industry, where what becomes fashionable relies on the mass dissemination of trends.”

Fur, was once used for survival. As humans advanced, so did technology, and an abundance of materials were developed to protect us from the elements. Clothing evolved from function to fashion, and the dilemma of ethics arose. The 60s brought the film 101 Dalmatians, where the evil Cruella De Vil attempted to kill puppies for a diabolic fashion statement, (which at the time seemed outrageous). Animal Rights groups emerged in the 70’s with models claiming they’d “rather be naked than wear fur.” Fur was something you might have found in your grandmas closet; and by the late 80’s it was considered “taboo.” In fact, women were scared that they’d get paint thrown at them by animal rights activists if they wore it.

“Faux” fur, made of synthetic fibers, allowed the mass-market to get the same look without compromising lives and ethics. Animal rights organizations, helped promote the synthetic trend, hosting faux-fur competitions in fashion schools and encouraging designers to use the material in their collections. For a while, it was working. But then things got confusing.

In her article for the New York Times, Julie Creswell documents cases of real fur disguised as faux. Dan Matthews, vice president of PETA explains how “the lines between real and fake fur have blurred. Fur farms in China raise dogs for clothing and label it as “faux” in the U.S. because that’s what the market best responds to.”

“Investigations found that dog fur is still slipping into the country on unlabeled and falsely advertised jackets.”- The Humane Society of the United States

According to the Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the 111th Congress, on Wednesday July 28, 2010, a labeling loophole allowed any piece of clothing with less than $150 of fur to be labeled without mentioning that it included fur, even if it contained as many as thirty rabbits, three foxes or a wolf.

Now, fur is everywhere. Over 500 designers are using it proudly. The global fur trade is expected to rise exponentially, currently at an all time high, valued at 40 billion, according to the International Fur Federation. This season, the widely promoted “Fur Now” Campaign, portrays men and women covered in fur, hiding the ugly truth behind a facade of glamour and luxury.

I wonder if the wearing and promotion of the “faux,” normalized the style, causing the explosive resurgence of real fur back to the center of our culture. I believe that wearing anything that looks like fur advertises the trend and encourages others to dress that way. Keith Kaplan, of the Fur Information Council of America, explains: “People are still buying fur. If people were not buying it, stores wouldn’t want to sell it.” A loss of market demand will slow the needless suffering, and I believe that eliminating the “faux” could help lead to the trend’s extinction.

It is a tremendous responsibility to know that what we buy and wear has an influence on the kind of world we have. Trends are contagious. We inspire others through the choices we make. If you care about our planet and its beautiful creatures, distance your wardrobe from anything that looks like it was taken from an animal. They need their fur more than you and I do.

For more information on what you can do to help end the trend, go to www.EveyClothing.com, and please stay in touch on Facebook.

An 18-year-old girl arrested for narcotics possession this past weekend wanted to make sure her Twitter followers were aware of one thing: “My mugshot’s cute.”

When Chicago Police Detective Dante Servin heads to court next January for the fatal shooting of Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old unarmed black woman, he will be the first CPD officer in more than 17 years to be tried for a shooting death.

Servin appeared Wednesday in a Cook County court, where his case was delayed until Jan. 21, 2015 — more than a year after his indictment on charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct in connection with Boyd’s death. Earlier this year, the city paid Boyd’s family a $4.5 million wrongful death settlement.

A police officer facing trial over a fatal shooting is historically rare in Chicago — or the rest of the country, for that matter. Servin’s case bucks the trend of police ducking indictment for the deaths of civilians, especially blacks.

Also on Wednesday, a grand jury declined to indict a New York City Police Department officer in the death of 45-year-old Eric Garner, a black man who died after being placed in a chokehold. A little more than a week earlier, on Nov. 24, a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, chose not to indict the police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown.

‘AN EXTREME DOUBLE STANDARD’

In July 1995, Joseph Gould, a black 36-year-old homeless Chicago newspaper vendor, was shot and killed by Gregory Becker, a white, off-duty Chicago police officer. Becker served four years in jail after a jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter and armed violence in 1997, though an Illinois appellate court later overturned the conviction, claiming the two charges were inconsistent.

That was the last time a Chicago police officer was tried over a shooting.

“It’s a systemic problem that the prosecutors are part of the justice system which does not value African-American or other people of color’s lives when they’re taken by the police,” Attorney Flint Taylor of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office told The Huffington Post. “There’s an extreme double standard when it comes to prosecution of police officers regarding murder, torture or anything like that.”

Taylor, whose office specializes in cases related to police violence and civil rights, said it’s rare for police officers to face trial for shootings deaths because prosecutors are often closely aligned with the police.

“In essence, they don’t want to prosecute. They rely on police for testimony, so it’s difficult to get a prosecution,” Taylor said. “There’s an old saying lawyers have that ‘a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich,’ meaning if [prosecutors] want an indictment, they can get it.”

“But it’s very unequal in who they prosecute and why they prosecute,” he added. “At the very bottom of the ladder is police who kill poor people of color.”

A ‘PERFECT VICTIM’

Though the officers connected to the deaths of Garner and Brown were not indicted, Taylor said there are three key factors at play that distinguish Servin’s case from other police-involved killings of unarmed black citizens.

“Boyd was a ‘perfect victim’: She had no gun, she wasn’t threatening cops and they didn’t think she had a weapon,” Taylor said. “It’s hard for cops to make a bad story [about her] out of that.”

Boyd was shot in the back of the head in March 2012 while she was with a group of friends near a park in Chicago’s South Side.

Witnesses said Servin and a man from Boyd’s group got into a verbal altercation over noise. From his unmarked car, Servin then turned the wrong way on a one-way street and fired five rounds over his left shoulder out the window; one struck a man in the hand, while the other struck Boyd in the back of the head. She would die less than 24 hours later.

Police initially claimed a man in the group approached Servin with a weapon, which prompted Servin to fire, “fearing for his life.” The Independent Police Review Authority later stated they found no weapon at the scene and that the man was reportedly holding only a cell phone.

In the case of both Becker and Servin, both detectives were off-duty at the time of the shootings, something Taylor said is a second important factor.

“An off-duty nature doesn’t implicate police activity,” Taylor said. “Therefore, the prosecutor may be more apt to pursue a case if the cop was off-duty.”

The third factor distinguishing the Servin case, according to Taylor, is alcohol.

Witness Antonio Cross, the man Servin shot in the hand, claimed the off-duty detective was drunk when he fired on the group.

“Sometimes they don’t do an alcohol blood level test on cops,” Taylor said. “If a cop wasn’t arrested on the scene, he may just go home. And then there’s only testimony. They may only face an administrative investigation.”

Taylor warned that despite the fact that Servin faces a trial sometime in 2015, “when they do bring charges, they often undercharge.”

In Illinois, involuntary manslaughter is a class-three felony. If convicted of this offense, Servin could be sentenced to two to five years in prison.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, said Wednesday that he was shocked by a grand jury’s decision not to indict a New York City police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, describing Garner’s death as “criminally negligent homicide.”

“I think it is clearly a case for criminally negligent homicide,” Napolitano said during a Wednesday segment of “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“This is not Ferguson, Missouri,” Napolitano continued. “This is not somebody wrestling for your gun, this is not where you shoot or be shot at. This is choking to death a mentally impaired, grossly obese person whose only crime was selling cigarettes without collecting taxes on them. This does not call for deadly force by any stretch of the imagination.” (It was not clear why Napolitano described Garner as “mentally impaired.”)

Napolitano said he was taken aback by the grand jury’s decision, which was made public on Wednesday. He added that the decision suggests Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan never wanted an indictment to happen.

“If any DA wants an indictment, he can get one,” Napolitano said. “The cliche is that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.”

Garner, 43, died July 17 in Staten Island, New York while he was being arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes. A bystander’s video of the arrest shows New York City police Officer Daniel Pantaleo appearing to put Garner in a chokehold, a move that is prohibited under NYPD policy. In the video, Garner screams “I can’t breathe!” multiple times before his body goes limp. A medical examiner later ruled his death a homicide.

This is the second recent high-profile case in which a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the killing of an unarmed black civilian, following last week’s decision in the case of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

A nationwide series of protests erupted immediately following the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot an unarmed Brown on Aug. 9. New York officials braced for similar protests on Wednesday.

While the reaction to the Ferguson grand jury decision largely broke down along party lines, with many conservatives agreeing that Wilson should not have faced trial, Napolitano, a libertarian, is one of a number of conservatives who have expressed outrage at the grand jury’s decision in the Garner case, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly reports.

Garner’s family plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the city seeking $75 million in damages.

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