SharpAx
If the ax is dull and its edge unsharpened more strength is needed, but skill will bring success.
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Photo reblogged from The Economist
Daily chart: which country consumes the most trees? The average American uses the paper equivalent of almost six 40-foot (12-metre) trees a year. In Belgium paper consumption is pushed up by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels.
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Post reblogged from NBC Latino
The 1940 census was officially released today. (Photo/Getty Images)
While you might have listed yourself as “Puerto Rican,” or “Mexican,” or “Hispanic,” in the 2010 census, this is not how you are going to find your bisabuela or your abuela if she was in the U.S. and counted in the newly released records of the 1940 census.
“The terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” were not used then,” says Mark Hugo López, of the Pew Hispanic Center. It was not until the 1970 census that Hispanics could identify themselves as such.
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Photo reblogged from The New Yorker
One of the most felicitous uses of Twitter is to promote long-form nonfiction by circulating a blurb leading to the full text. Since the practice started, people have shared current long magazine and newspaper pieces and dusted off archival ones. Now organizations like @longform and @longreads and @TheByliner work specifically to find and share excellent pieces that stretch up to three thousand words and beyond. Before Twitter, I was reading half as much extended nonfiction and fiction as I do now on the iPhone or iPad, using apps like Readability and Instapaper.
Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitter—and, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyes—are that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internet—hyperlinks, GIFs, chat, comments—have enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goods—the new forms will never push out older ones because they’re insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read “Freedom,” but unicorn GIFs will never replace “Freedom.”
- Sasha Frere-Jones on the good things about Twitter: http://nyr.kr/GG6KH6 -
Photo reblogged from
Our Movement Director, Zachary Barrows, discusses some of the questions surrounding our organization and points to the true focus of the KONY 2012 film:
“Whether you’re criticizing Invisible Children or not, it’s not about us. I think that everyone can agree that this violence needs to stop and children should not be forced to fight.”
View the news clip here.
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Photo reblogged from The New Yorker
The smartest solution, or at least framework, that I’ve read comes from Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. According to an essay that he published last year, titled “Databuse,” we should let certain things that we now consider privacy abuses slide. It doesn’t matter, in and of itself, that we have oceans of personal information floating around in government databases, or that advertisers know ever more about our lives. It’s disconcerting, but not harmful. Companies should tell the truth about what they’re doing, and consumers should have control over the data that’s collected. But don’t fret that marketers have collected keywords on everything you’ve tweeted about, or that the running-shoe ad on Facebook appears to know the size of your feet.
- Nick Thompson on how to get privacy right: http://nyr.kr/zzyuuv -
Photo reblogged from The Economist
Daily chart: all the phones in China. China is about to sign up its billionth mobile subscription; India is not far behind with over 900m. The Chinese numbering system theoretically allows for 100 billion mobile numbers, and India’s 10 billion, so neither is likely to run out of numbers anytime soon.
Rounded to the nearest billion… 1 Billion Phones in China, 0 in the U.S.
