Meet The 13-year-old Who Just Built A Cheap Braille Printer Out Of Legos 

Santa Connects With Child Using Sign Language

Not measured by money but by positive influence :) respect.

Breathtaking Images of Underwater Life Captured by Freediving Photographers Alex Voyer and Alex Roubaud

For more on the Fermi Paradox and why alien life hasn’t found us yet. (Infographic via futurism)

Citizen Maths: free/open adult math education for practical real-world numeracy

Without scientific understanding, we don’t run the government, the government runs us” -Carl Sagan, in his final interview.

Last week we released a big batch of new CC-BY licensed content for Citizen Maths a free online course for adults who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not).

(Image: Jonathan Worth, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The new course content covers the powerful ideas in maths of “uncertainty” and “representation”. It sits alongside the content for “proportion” which was published last year.

Learning about each idea is supported by a mix of short video tutorials, practical exercises, and quizzes. The practical exercises use a range of approaches including:

* tools like spreadsheets;

* purpose-built self-standing “apps” of various kinds;

* coding in Scratch.

Each powerful idea is shown in action in several different contexts. For example, “uncertainty” involves the following situations:

* Making decisions — value of insurance, risk comparisons;

* Judging — the meaning of cancer screening results;

* Gaming — appreciating odds in roulette, dice, horse-racing;

* Modelling — the uncertain prediction of the weather.

The powerful ideas and the situations in which they are shown in action have been selected in consultation with maths teachers, and with organisations familiar with the learning needs of adults.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/03/citizen-maths-freeopen-math.html

What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.” I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue

Well! This is interesting. 

(via jillianpms)

Oh my god this is exactly what I try to explain to my husband and he never gets it. 

(via magesmagesmages)

And even if you have a good partner who is supportive, it doesn’t help as much as you might think. This sort of thing is baked into the cultural expectations of being female. 

(via gothiccharmschool)

Car accidents aren't accidents

The use of the term “accident” gives cops and courts the cover to excuse murder. In a brutal editorial, Hsi-Pei Liao talks about his daughter, who was killed by a driver when she was three. The driver got a ticket for failure to yeild and failure to use due care, and those tickets were eventually thrown out by a DMV judge who considered the case for 47 seconds.

I was nearly killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver when I was 21, who was caught and then given a $1,000 fine and a six month license suspension (when he hit me, he was already driving without a license, having had his license pulled for a previous DUI). The Ontario prosecutor didn’t give me notice of the hearing and I wasn’t allowed to testify or give a victim impact statement.

Big city cops, especially the NYPD and SFPD, are notorious for excusing people who kill with their cars, especially when the victims are cyclists. An activist group called Families for Safe Streets is campaigning to replace the term “accident” – which implies that the incident was a kind of unpredictable, unavoidable effect of the universe’s uncooperative inanimate objects – with “crash.”

In New York City, they campaigned for the Right of Way Law, which came into effect in June 2014, which allows “police to bring a misdemeanor charge if a driver kills or seriously injures someone who has the right of way in a crosswalk or a bike lane.” It’s pretty amazing that a new law was needed for this – but even more amazing was the city bus drivers’ campaign against the law, because they didn’t want to “criminalize accidents.”

Read the rest

Next-Gen Pelamis Wave Energy Converter Successfully Passes Initial Tests

Pew Research Center analyzed 1,041,336 apps in the Google Play Store as of September 2014 to determine the specific permissions requested by each app. We found that across all Android apps, 165 permissions allowed access to device hardware and 70 allowed access to various types of user information.

Apps Permissions in the Google Play Store

“We are not facing a future without work. We are facing a future without jobs.“

READ MORE: Jobs, Work, and Universal Basic Income