Hasta La Gadget!

We live in a global village these days, what with air travel getting insanely affordable for just about anyone and everyone, not to mention how the Internet has brought together many different people. Verizon FiOS has just gone global by providing international TV packages alongside 300 minutes of international calling, all without requiring you to fork out a single cent more, now how about that?

Imagine being able to take your pick of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi or Punjabi programming whenever you sign up for a FiOS Triple Play in addition to a custom TV. Arturo Picicci, director of consumer marketing for Verizon mentioned, “Our individual cultures helped shape who we are, and for many of us staying connected to that culture is as important as keeping in touch with friends and family. These new options offer more choice and flexibility, while meeting the needs of our customers with free international calling and International TV programming.”

For those who decide to settle for a two-year term agreement for a new FiOS triple-play bundle — which comprises of Internet, TV (including the Custom TV, Extreme HD and other bundles) and phone service, you will end up with a dilemma, and a good one at that. Choose from a $300 Visa gift card; or 2 years of the Spanish Language TV Package; or both the World Plan 300 international calling plan for 12 months and one of the many TV programing packages made available. Just try not to use more than 7TB each month, all right? [Press Release]

Verizon FiOS Goes Global , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Now these are a couple of torture tests that all smartphones should never have to go through in their lifetime – being dropped on purpose just to see if anything will break or crack, as well as to have a torch pointed at its direction. Definitely not for the faint hearted. The first test would be pretty simple – to drop it from the middle of the chest, and as the video above depicts, the HTC One M9 did pick up some damage at the bottom of the handset.

The next fall simulated dropping the handset by removing the surface that the smartphone was resting on, and this would mean the One M9 taking a fall, backside first. Minor scratches were the outcome of this fall, and while the camera lens looked intact, the camera app did not want to fire up.

The heat test saw the HTC One M9 being subjected to temperatures of 700 degrees centigrade, and this is punishing to say the least. While none of all that heat was derived from the Snapdragon 810 SoC that worked underneath the hood, the conditions eventually proved too much for the HTC One M9, so much so that it stopped working outright. This doesn’t say much, as any other phone out there, too, would most probably cave in after being subjected to such a punishing routine.

HTC One M9 Gets Dropped And Burned , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

For some time, I’ve thought of Jeb Bush as the smarter, more moderate Bush son, the obvious point of reference being his brother, former President George W. Bush. The last few weeks of Jeb’s “pre-campaign” Presidential campaign have proven me wrong. Very, very wrong.

To set the stage, don’t forget that Jeb Bush has some very, very serious questions about cronyism and corruption to be asked. An investigation revealed that, while Governor of Florida, he funneled $2 billion to George W. Bush’s biggest donors:

As his speeches got rolling, it became clear that Jeb knows very little about many things, like foreign policy. Check out what happened when he tried talking about it:

His discussions about economics have raised some huge red flags, like when he said eliminating the federal minimum wage was a good idea:

While for many of us, the topic of George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion is a done deal, clearly one of the worst foreign policy decisions by an American President in decades, Jeb wasn’t so sure, getting himself confused with 4 different answers on Iraq in 4 days:

When discussing healthcare, Jeb Bush continued his “repeal Obamacare” rhetoric with a suggestion that electronics such as Apple watches might be a good way to replace Obamacare. $500 watches for people who can’t afford healthcare?

To preview the latest debacle around gay rights, Jeb did recently applaud Indiana’s so-called “religious freedom” law, allowing for discrimination by businesses on the basis of sexual orientation:

The cherry on top: Most recently, Jeb Bush, during an interview with a Christian channel, said that only heterosexual parents are able to provide what poor children need, a true insult to all same-sex parents (and to all clear thinking people):

Whether Jeb is smarter than George may not be a question we can answer precisely at this time. What we can be sure of is that his increasingly unhinged, discriminatory, and corporatist rhetoric and actions should be circulated far and wide for all to know about.

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A seemingly groundbreaking and widely publicized study reported in Science magazine this past December may be a fake.

The study appeared to show that openly gay activists in California had persuaded conservative voters to change their minds in a lasting way by engaging the voters in “heartfelt, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations” about being gay during door-to-door advocacy campaigns. It was co-authored by Michael J. LaCour, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald P. Green, a professor at Columbia University.

For the gay rights movement, this was good news. It suggested that the country’s shift on gay rights was, at least in part, the movement’s doing, and it provided a template for advocacy going forward. Gay rights advocates in Ireland reportedly based their strategy before a national vote on same-sex marriage this week on LaCour and Green’s results.

But according to a report issued Tuesday by two University of California, Berkeley, graduate students and a Yale professor, there are enough questions about the data to warrant retracting the study. Retraction Watch broke the story Wednesday about what students David Broockman (soon to be an assistant professor at Stanford) and Joshua Kalla and Yale professor Peter Aronow found.

The LaCour-Green study had examined the work of activists with the Los Angeles LGBT Center. After California’s gay marriage ban passed in 2008, activists at the center had more than 12,000 one-on-one conversations in Los Angeles neighborhoods with people who overwhelmingly supported the ban. LaCour’s idea was to see if those conversations produced any lasting change. He purportedly designed a randomized experiment to replicate those conversations, with a series of follow-up surveys online to test how the anti-gay voters felt about gay rights and gay marriage over time. Those who were contacted by the openly gay canvassers showed substantially more positive attitudes toward gay marriage as much as nine months later.

At least, that’s what the published study said in December. But now it appears those critical follow-up surveys may not have been conducted as described.

After the LaCour-Green study was published, Broockman and Kalla were impressed by its findings and wanted to extend the research. In January 2015, they found some patterns in the data that seemed to be too perfect — statistically speaking, there was less variance in the results than there should have been. Some social scientists had noticed this when the study was first published.

As Broockman and Kalla continued their work, they wrote in their report, they uncovered more irregularities. When the pair noticed that their own study had a much lower response rate (the proportion of people contacted who actually respond to a survey), they asked the survey firm that allegedly gathered data for LaCour, Qualtrics, how it achieved such a high response rate. They said the firm replied that it had no record of the project.

This is what happened next according to their report and Green’s letter to Science: The statistical irregularities continued to mount, and the pair recruited Aronow to help with their analysis. Last weekend, Broockman and Kalla contacted Green. Green said that he had joined the study after the data had been collected and thought that the irregularities Broockman and Kalla had uncovered were, indeed, highly suspicious. Green reached out to LaCour’s adviser at UCLA, professor Lynn Vavreck, and the two of them decided that Vavreck would confront LaCour and ask him to provide his data. Initially, LaCour claimed he had accidentally deleted the file with the necessary information, but again Qualtrics said it could not verify that the data had been deleted or that the study took place. It seemed increasingly clear to Green that no follow-up surveys had ever been conducted and that LaCour may have taken data from existing studies and manipulated the numbers to achieve the results he wanted.

Green told The Huffington Post that he was shocked and dismayed by the revelations about the data set. “There was a mountain of fabrication,” he said. “Graphs and charts and anecdotes and stories of every possible sort about these surveys. So it didn’t occur to me that the whole thing was fabricated because every time I had a question, it seemed as though [LaCour] had an answer.”

Green has since issued a retraction of the study.

LaCour, for his part, declined a request for an interview from The Huffington Post. “I’m gathering evidence and relevant information so I can provide a single comprehensive response. I will do so at my earliest opportunity,” he wrote in an email.

How did this happen? Science is a highly regarded, peer-reviewed publication, meaning that other experts review research before it is published to evaluate its quality and contribution to the field.

The Huffington Post confirmed with Science editors that the article in question did go through the magazine’s in-depth review process. This requires at least two people unconnected to the research to read the paper and return comments within a week or two.

“In general, reviewers for Science look at the data presented in submitted manuscripts,” said Monica Bradford, Science executive editor. “Some reviewers might redo analyses to see if they obtain the same results as described by authors. In some rarer cases, referees may also ask for the raw underlying data, which Science obtains and provides for them.”

Bradford said, however, that reviewers aren’t likely to go to the lengths Broockman and Kalla did: “Even if the reviewers had asked for the raw survey data underlying these results, it is unlikely they would have contacted the survey company to confirm it had carried out the surveys and supplied LaCour with the data.”

So while peer review aims to prevent bad research from being published, it is not a perfect safeguard against all possible fraud. Reviewers, editors and even co-authors tend to trust that researchers wouldn’t fake data. However, Science’s requirements for data to be made available ultimately helped uncover the alleged fraud — others were able to access the data and identify major issues.

In a statement Wednesday, Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science Journals, said, “At this time, our Editorial staff is assessing the report. Given the fact that the [co-author] Dr. Green has requested retraction, Science will move swiftly and take any necessary action at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, Science is publishing an Editorial Expression of Concern to alert our readers to the fact that serious questions have been raised about the validity of findings in this study.”

A spokesman for the Los Angeles LGBT Center said the center was dismayed by the news that the study results may have been fabricated. “We sought external and independent evaluation of our voter canvassing project to determine the efficacy of the work through unbiased analysis,” said David Fleischer. “We are not in a position to fully interpret or assess the apparent irregularities in the research as we do not have access to the full body of information and, by design, have maintained an arms-length relationship with the evaluation of the project.”

Last December, Green told The Huffington Post that the results of the study were a revelation for him. “I’m more excited about these results than I have been about anything in a long time,” he said. “I used to think that attitudes were stable.”

Green said Wednesday that he is more determined than ever to find out whether the types of conversations conducted by the Los Angeles advocates could indeed produce lasting change in anti-gay voters.

“An actual experiment was conducted, a very nicely designed and elegant experiment, and the irony is that we don’t know what effects the experiment had because the outcomes were never measured,” Green said. “I am determined to do this study again, this time for real.”

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In acting, the first rule of improvisation is to say, “Yes, AND”, the idea behind it being that a scene can only move forward if you first accept the circumstances around you, and then add to them. “Yes, AND” allows for collaboration. “Yes, AND” fosters imagination. “Yes, AND” instigates progress.

For a long time, my life felt like one “No” after another. I wanted to be an actor but couldn’t even get an audition, never mind an actual role. I was working four jobs and just barely getting by. I was definitely more “starving” than “artist”.

I was losing the “game” that is getting work as an actor. The truth is that I wasn’t trying very hard to play it. I didn’t like the rules. As a woman, I felt like I was expected to live up to an imaginary ideal perpetuated by the oversimplified narrative most female characters are placed into. I remember one particularly painful audition that required all the actresses to bring bikinis with them. Usually I would have fled from kind of request, but it was for a reputable graduate film program so, (against my better judgement) I went. I made it to the “please put your bathing suit on” phase and was then given a scene that required me to violently assault my scene partner. I asked if we could practice once or twice, just to make sure no one got hurt. Or perhaps I could just show my half-naked rage through my words? I was dismissed and received an email a few days later saying that I was “too aristocratic” for the part. I was tempted to reply “Are you sure you didn’t mean ‘too smart’?”

I thought getting an agent would help my situation, but was told again and again that I was not a “type” and therefore un-castable. It would be more accurate to say that I am not a “type” that fits into the mainstream representation of women. Where were the stories and roles that I identified with? I was stuck.

But then I got a text from my good friend, Will Sullivan. It read:

“I want to shoot a movie this summer. All improv. For zero budget. Will you produce and star in it?”

In that moment, the answer seemed obvious to me. YES. Had I ever produced a film before? No. Did I have any idea what this movie was going to be about? Of course not. But what did I have to lose?

So I said Yes. And it was in my power to make it happen. It was time to choose my own narrative.

We decided to make a film about relationships – not about falling in love, but about what it takes to make love last. Will and our cinematographer, Derek Dodge, wrote the story outline, but there was never a set script. It was up to the actors to create their own dialogue and define the arc of each scene. I had the freedom to craft a character who was in a state of change and therefore undefined by any mold. The experience was transformative for me, not only as an actor and first time producer, but as a young woman who felt like she needed to re-define her sense of self. It scared me, so I knew it was important.

My greatest obstacle has always been fear. Fear of imperfection, fear of being wrong, fear of failing. This project taught me that there is no better cure for fear than action. As we hurtled towards production, I oscillated between thrill and absolute terror. I had no idea what I was doing but I had to do it anyway. Everyday I woke up feeling like I was in full relevé on the edge of a cliff. The only way to forward was to jump. There were moments of soaring and moments of falling hard on my face. I learned, though, that even if I fell, at least I had found the ground. I could get up and keep going. Three days before our shoot started, I cut off all my hair. I did it for the part, but I also did it for me. While the deed itself was superficial, it symbolized the letting go of an image I felt I was expected to fit into. I was released from who I thought I should be, and free to figure out who I could be.

What started as a text message is now a feature film, That’s Not Us, set to be released later this year. Making it was a gift of self-discovery – as a leader, as a woman, as an artist, and as an imperfect being who still has much to learn. I had the privilege of being able to make mistakes and learn by doing. To me, that is the true essence of independent film. It’s about creating work on your own terms, exploding the mold, and saying “yes, and” to the opportunities that come with attempting the unknown.

That’s Not Us premieres at the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto on May 23rd, 2015. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, or visit their website at www.thatsnotus.com

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.