Now studies are finding that the insults can have health consequences, especially if people mutely accept the attitudes behind them, said Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University, who studies the health effects of such messages on elderly people.

Oh dear LORD! So we're destroyed the younger generation by coddling them, and now we have to do it to the elderly? "My feelings are hurt! It's a health condition! WAAAAA!"

In ‘Sweetie’ and ‘Dear,’ a Hurt for the Elderly

Allentown has plenty of low-wage jobs. Nancy Wood is an administrator in a cardiac care practice affiliated with the local hospital. Wood, in her mid-50s and divorced, earns $22,000 a year. She rents an apartment and has no savings. "They're spending billions on the fat cats. What a total waste," she says at the end of her eight-hour shift. "Poor people like me, we never get that kind of help. I'm kind of down and out myself. Why can't they provide normal people with affordable health care instead? I haven't been to the eye doctor in seven years."

You can say that again!

Main Street's Rage at the Financial Crisis

Customs and Border Patrol agents can grab your laptop, BlackBerry, or external hard drive without needing so much as a reason, but a new bill introduced last week to Congress would at least put some limits on how border searches could be done.

Was there ever an explanation given other than "security" as to why they are seizing these items?

New bill would tighten rules for DHS border laptop searches

A set of technical standards being developed behind closed doors by a United Nations agency that would potentially curb users’ ability to remain anonymous on the Internet has privacy advocates and technologists alarmed, according to a Friday report. The standards are proposed by the Chinese government and the US National Security Agency is also part of the IP Traceback drafting group, named Q6/17. Headed up the by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, the group is due to meet next week to work on the proposal, though the meeting will be closed to the media and public, the report suggests.

I've been groping around this for awhile, but it just hit me like a ton of bricks last week. Data is the Singularity. That is to say, that every "problem" we have as a society can be solved by more and more accessible data.

Disease control and eradication? Data.
Economic stability and growth? Data.
Safer and healthier food? Data.
More effective medications? Data.
Weather and environmental stability? Data.
Health and well being? Data.

You already see it. Informatics against large and complex data sets are yielding unprecedented gains in understanding, development, and refactoring. With the net now ubiquitous (ahem, telecom infrastructure investment notwithstanding), and people conditioned to contributing content to it, the cost of acquiring data is next to zero and moving closer all the time. Aggregating data is still a tricky thing, but that is getting cheaper and easier all the time as well. Put those two things together and you have the ability to divine incalculable knowledge for the benefit of society.

The price? Loss of anonymity, privacy, and the rising potential for abuse. But what do you want? To be omni-prescient or obscure?

Data is the new Singularity | Internet anonymity endangered by UN agency project

Accelerating decrepitude.

A brief history of all Internet memes ever

*
90% of users are lurkers who tend to read content but rarely, if ever, contribute anything whether creating original content or commenting on any content.
*
9% of users contribute occasionally by either writing original content or commenting on existing content, even though we now know that most tend to do the latter.
*
1% of users contribute the most by regularly creating new original content or commenting on existing content.

1% = possibly noteworthy.

VatorNews - The Opinions of the few

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

File under "bunk".

Bad guys really do get the most girls

Cyan Banister's Zivity seemed a natural choice to participate at the second Bay Area Girl Geek dinner, a networking event celebrating women in tech.

Nerdfight: Zivity sparks Girl Geek porn panic

"I had spent a lot of my time living a bachelor life. It was a lot of fun but I never seemed to meet the right woman. In my thirties, I dated a woman for four years but she didn't want a family. When we split up, it struck me that I was already 36 and that I couldn't spend my whole life partying.

"I do think that men have some form of biological clock. It's not the same as a woman's, obviously, but it really did feel that I'd reached that time of life when it was right to have a kid.

"But it took a traumatic experience to bring this home."

yep.

Father's Day: Single, male, broody?

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Best. Quote. Ever.

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital