Kathleen Deveny questions our squeamishness about the C word: [A]s the proud owner of the anatomical bit derided by the word in question, I have begun to wonder why we ever got so worked up about it in the first place. Why has it retained the power to outrage when other coarse language has found its way onto the playground? The C word has been in use since at least 1230, according to the Oxford English Dictionary online, when it referred to a street name, Gropecuntelane (bet I can guess what went...

Farhad Manjoo marshal’s the evidence that browsing at work makes us more productive: Indeed, there’s no empirical evidence that unfettered access to the Internet turns people into slackers at work. The research shows just the opposite. Brent Corker, a professor of marketing at the University of Melbourne, recently tested how two sets of workers—one group that was blocked from using the Web and another that had free access—perform various tasks. Corker found that those who could use...

In Vanity Fair: CNN changed the nature of politics and political reporting by compressing the time it took for something to happen, for it to become widely known, and for newsmakers and the public to react to it (i.e., the news cycle) to half a day—whereas the newspaper news cycle, from next-day publication to day-after reaction, was 48 hours, and network television’s news cycle, from one day’s evening news to the next day’s evening news, was 24 hours. Politico brings the news cycle down...

His Vanity Fair pieces were a guilty pleasure for me. From his CNN obit: Called “Nick” by his friends, Dunne was putting the finishing touches on his final novel, which he said he planned to call “Too Much Money,” when his health took a turn for the worse. He flew to Germany earlier this month for another round of stem cell treatments at the same Bavarian clinic where the late Farrah Fawcett was treated. He was hospitalized upon his return to New York, then sent home. As a...

And in other news…. Microsoft apologized Tuesday for using photo editing techniques to change the race of a person depicted on the company’s Web site. In a photo on the company’s U.S. Web site, three businesspeople–one black, one white and one Asian are shown as part of a pitch for Microsoft’s business productivity software. In the same photo on the site of Microsoft’s Polish subsidiary, a white head is placed over the black person’s body, although the hand...

WaPo: Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths — more than double the number that occur in an average flu season, according to an estimate from a presidential panel released Monday. That panel, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), released both a massive report assessing H1N1 preparations and recommendations. Ezra Klein on our health care system: We have...

Ted Talks: Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity [Wikipedia entry] — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker. Endgadget: What started out as an MIT project two years ago has now progressed into a full-fledged company — ladies and gentlemen, meet WiTricity Corp [link]… Based on magnetic induction, the...

Jonah Lehrer is a fascinating fellow. A contributing editor at Wired, he’s the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide. I became familiar with him through his work on WNYC’s Radio Lab. Today he got to thinking about mirror neurons: Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that’s so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They’re an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost...

Noam Cohen, writing in the NYTimes, reports that when Wikipedia’s volunteer editors gather in Buenos Aires for their annual Wikimania conference this week, a hot topic will be a new editing procedure: Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit...

In the wake of Lutheran acceptance of gay and lesbian pastors who are “living in committed relationships” and their approval of a resolution to “recognize, support and hold publicly accountable life-long, monogamous, same gender relationships,” comes the inevitable… What does monogamy mean? First of all, there are gay theologians whose definition of this term is very traditional, arguing that gay unions are forever and that those taking vows must remain sexually faithful...

All thanks to Big Government. Thomas J. Sugrue writing in the WSJ: In 1934, F.D.R. created the Federal Housing Administration, which set standards for home construction, instituted 25- and 30-year mortgages, and cut interest rates. And in 1938, his administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) which created the secondary market in mortgages. In 1944, the federal government extended generous mortgage assistance to returning veterans, most of whom could not have otherwise...

Obama Foodorama: Presidenti-Ale will be served for the first time this afternoon at the award-winning Offshore Ale Co., an Oak Bluffs restaurant and microbrewery, and perhaps it’ll become the beer of choice at the Summer White House. The amber pale “Ale To The Chief” is made of all American ingredients, and was created by Neil Atkins, who’s been the head brewer at Offshore for a little more than a year. Mr. Atkins and Offshore owner Phil McAndrews came up with the idea...

Moore — “the most feared filmmaker in America” — is up to his same old schtick. This time capitalism is in the bull’s eye. I don’t always agree with him, but I am always entertained by him. This target is ripe; the film looks to be particularly engaging: “It’s a crime story. But it’s also a war story about class warfare. And a vampire movie, with the upper 1 percent feeding off the rest of us. And, of course, it’s also a love story. Only...

I’m late to this story, via TechCrunch: Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon. Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old college student Firas Alkhateeb while “bored over winter school break.” It was also later...

Stewart kicked off The Daily Show last night with Barney Frank’s confrontation of a Nazi name-calling protester at a health care reform town-hall meeting before moving quickly on to Fox mimicking those winy liberals…

Better than DEET and less toxic, too: A chemical that resembles natural products from black pepper can deter mosquitoes four times longer than DEET, the world’s most widely used bug repellent. The new substance could be used to protect people who live in the developing world, or to shield soldiers from insects when they deploy to countries with pest problems. “Our goal is to reduce disease transmission,” said USDA synthetic chemist Maia Tsikolia, here at the American Chemical Society meeting....

Years ago I threw my lot in with those who argued we shouldn’t get into the Hitler argument. Now here we are, at it again. It’s a problem Joe took up in his quote of the day on Tuesday. In that same vein, Leonard Pitts devotes his column today to a history lesson about Nazis: it was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy’s throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see...

Technology Review on a robot experiment that shows how “deceptive” behavior can emerge from simple rules: Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results are detailed in a PNAS study published today. The team programmed small, wheeled robots...

It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. John Battelle: True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It’s not a shift in *how* we communicate, it’s a step function in our *ability* to communicate. There’s an important difference there. One could argue that means a fundamental shift, but such a statement can be easily misinterpreted as meaning “something totally new in how humans think/work/communicate”,...

News that scientists have demonstrated the possibility of fabricating DNA is bound to be fodder for the conspiracy theorists among us. “You can just engineer a crime scene,” said the lead author of the new study. Oh, swell! Ars Technica has previously reported that there’s not a lot of science to the rest of forensic science. Thankfully, their read of this study suggests all is not lost: Fortunately, in identifying the problem, the researchers have come up with a solution. DNA inside human...

Two British academics, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, set out to find why health within a population gets progressively worse the further down the social scale you go. What they found instead is stunning in its implications: almost every modern social and environmental problem — ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, teen pregnancy, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations — is more likely to occur in a less equal society. They have published...

Alex Blaze says that America is still paying for the sin of slavery and quotes Nathan Glazer from this paper to explain why working class whites are really worried about a big government takeover of healthcare: AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that “opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition....

The DOJ announced an indictment today in what looks to be the biggest credit card data breach of all time. Ars Technica: Indeed, before today, the former high score was represented by the scarlet letter on TJX’s forehead, parent company of retailer T.J. Maxx. That data breach involved “at least” 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers that occurred between mid-2005 and early 2007, as well as various points in 2003 and 2004. The theft of such a massive amount of data occurred,...

That according to a new Human Rights Watch report, “They Want Us Exterminated”: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq. The report was released today. WaPo: Although the scope of the problem remains unclear, hundreds of gay men may have been killed this year in predominantly Shiite Muslim areas, the report’s authors said, basing their conclusion on interviews with gay Iraqi men, hospital officials and an unnamed United Nations official in Baghdad. “The government...

AJC: The high court ordered a federal judge to “receive testimony and findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis’s] innocence.” Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a dissent, saying the federal judge assigned to hear the case will not be able to grant Davis relief. “It becomes stranger still when one realizes that the allegedly new evidence we shunt off to be examined by the district...