What is Instagram for if not bragging oh so subtly about the stuff you're doing. It's true for rich kids on fancy vacations
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Wednesday, July 3, 2013
TSA Is Instagramming the Crazy Stuff It Confiscates at Checkpoints
Tech-Powered Financial Planning Platform SigFig Gets $15M In Series B Funding
SigFig, the startup that operates a web platform for tracking and analyzing your personal financial investments, has secured $15 million in a new funding round. The funding, which serves as SigFig's Series B, was led by Union Square Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures with the participation of SigFig's previous backers including DCM. This brings the total investment in SigFig to more than $20 million since it was founded.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/cT5tmHefKeM/
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Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Syrian rebels threaten to target Shi'ite villages in Aleppo
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian rebels in the northern province of Aleppo on Monday threatened to seize two Shi'ite Muslim villages that back President Bashar al-Assad unless they surrendered to the opposition.
Activists say both Nubl and Zahra villages had been reinforced by Assad's allies in the increasingly sectarian war, among them fighters from Iran and Lebanon's powerful Shi'ite guerrilla group, Hezbollah.
"We announce our intention to liberate Nubl and Zahra from the regime and its shabbiha (pro-Assad militia), and from the Hezbollah and Iranian elements," the rebels said in an Internet video.
The 27-month-old conflict, which pits mostly Sunni insurgents against Assad, from an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, has already killed more than 100,000 people and driven 1.7 million Syrians to seek refuge in neighboring countries.
Assad's forces, spearheaded by Hezbollah, have made a number of gains since they seized the border town of Qusair last month. There have also been heavy clashes in Aleppo and surrounding districts, fuelling expectations that Assad aims to re-establish control of Syria's largest city.
On Sunday rebels shot down a helicopter close to Nubl, which activists said had been carrying supplies to the villages. Authorities in Damascus said they were taking Education Ministry employees to supervise school exams. Seven employees and the helicopter crew were killed, they said.
A video released by activists a few weeks earlier showed an army officer apparently recruiting Shi'ite villagers in Zahra and Nubl to form fighting units to support the army against the rebels.
"PREVENT A SINGLE DROP OF BLOOD"
"In order to prevent a single drop of blood from being spilled and to find a peaceful solution, we have set the following conditions," the video statement by the rebels said.
Among the demands were the surrender of Assad's forces and their weapons, followed by a power sharing deal between the locals and the rebels.
"If there is no response (to rebel demands for surrender) there will be a major military operation on those two villages," the statement said.
The sectarian nature of the conflict has set regional Sunni Muslim powers - notably Gulf Arab states and Turkey - against Assad's Shi'ite Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a deepening proxy war on Syrian soil.
Deputy U.S. Secretary of State William Burns, speaking at the end of a visit to neighboring Lebanon, condemned Hezbollah's military intervention in Syria.
"Despite its membership in the Lebanese government, Hezbollah has decided to put its own interests and those of its foreign backers above those of the Lebanese people," Burns said.
"We condemn in the strongest terms Hezbollah's actions in Syria. They ... stand in direct violation of Lebanon's disassociation policy (from Syria) and place the future of Lebanon at risk."
Hezbollah's role in Syria, along with Sunni Islamist fighters smuggled over the border to fight for the Syrian rebels, has exacerbated sectarian tensions in Lebanon which is still scarred by its own 1975-1990 civil war.
Fighting has broken out in the Mediterranean cities of Tripoli and Sidon, while rockets have been fired at a Hezbollah district of southern Beirut and in the Bekaa Valley.
Saudi Arabia, which has accelerated armed support for the rebels according to Gulf sources, urged the European Union on Monday to arm Syrian rebels without delay.
Riyadh and its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council also called on the United Nations Security Council to meet to prevent a massacre in the central city of Homs, where Assad's forces have been waging an assault on rebel-held districts.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported heavy army bombardment and clashes with rebel fighters for a third day in the contested city, which sits on an axis connecting Damascus to the heartland of Assad's minority Alawite sect in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean.
It said neither side appeared to be gaining any ground.
(Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-rebels-threaten-target-shiite-villages-aleppo-093031635.html
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Microsoft's Xbox chief to leave to head Zynga
careers 
15 hours ago
GlobeNewswire / AP
Zynga's new CEO Don Mattrick, right, with Zynga's founding CEO Mark Pincus. Mattrick currently heads Microsoft's Xbox business.
Executive Don Mattrick, who unveiled the Xbox One in May, is leaving Microsoft to head Zynga, the struggling online social gaming company best known for FarmVille.
Mark Pincus, Zynga?s founding chief executive, announced in an effusive memo to employees Monday that Mattrick, 49, would replace him. Pincus, 47, controls a 61 percent voting stake in the gaming company, so the decision to hire Mattrick would have been his.
"If you?re not familiar with Don, he?s an entertainment and game industry innovator who?s been making products and scaling teams and businesses for the last 30 years," Pincus wrote in a memo posted to AllThingsD. "Don?s had major leadership roles at Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Distinctive Software, which he founded when he was 17 years old."
Zynga's business model, which relied heavily on selling virtual goods to gamers on Facebook, began to disintegrate a year ago as users tired of Facebook games. Pincus has been unable to turn around the company named after his pet bulldog, Zinga.
The company's shares have hovered at just 25 percent of its $10 price at the company's initial offering price in December 2011. Zynga shares closed up around 10.4 percent at $3.07 on the Nasdaq.
Mattrick joined Microsoft in 2007 after spending years at Electronic Arts. He helped turn the Xbox business into a profitable venture after years of losses, eventually propelling it into the No.1 selling console in the United States.
Mattrick's departure comes just as Microsoft gears up to launch the Xbox One, the third version of its console. Scheduled to hit stores later this year, the machine has already stirred up controversy.
Gamers attacked the high price tag, Microsoft's plan to require an Internet connection at least once a day and moves to limit sharing of used games. Last month, Microsoft reversed its position on the Internet connection and said it would allow game sharing.
Mattrick is joining a game maker that publishes social media-based titles and low production-value smartphone games -- a departure from the world of big-budget, traditional packaged games embodied by the Xbox.
Mattrick had been rumored to depart for months. After EA's CEO stepped down in March, industry sources have speculated that he was in the running to lead the top games publisher, where he previously held numerous leadership roles.
Reporting by Reuters'Malathi Nayak, Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Bill Rigby in Seattle.
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Monday, July 1, 2013
Teaching a computer to play concentration advances security, understanding of the mind
July 1, 2013 ? Computer science researchers have programmed a computer to play the game Concentration (also known as Memory). The work could help improve computer security -- and improve our understanding of how the human mind works.
The researchers developed a program to get the software system called ACT-R, a computer simulation that attempts to replicate human thought processes, to play Concentration. In the game, multiple matching pairs of cards are placed face down in a random order, and players are asked to flip over two cards, one at a time, to find the matching pairs. If a player flips over two cards that do not match, the cards are placed back face down. The player succeeds by remembering where the matching cards are located.
The researchers were able to either rush ACT-R's decision-making, which led it to play more quickly but make more mistakes, or allow ACT-R to take its time, which led to longer games with fewer mistakes.
As part of the study, 179 human participants played Concentration 20 times each -- 10 times for accuracy and 10 times for speed -- to give the researchers a point of comparison for their ACT-R model.
The findings will help the researchers distinguish between human players and automated "bots," ultimately helping them develop models to identify bots in a variety of applications. These bots pose security problems for online games, online voting and other Web applications.
"One way to approach the distinction between bot behavior and human behavior is to look at how bots behave," says Dr. Robert St. Amant, an associate professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "Another way is to look at what humans do. We're focusing on the latter."
"We're looking for distinctions so subtle that they'd be very difficult to replicate outside of a cognitive architecture like ACT-R," says Dr. David Roberts, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of the paper. "The level of sophistication needed to replicate those distinctions in a bot would be so expensive, in terms of time and money, that it would -- hopefully -- be cost-prohibitive."
The researchers were also able to modify the parameters of their Concentration model to determine which set of variables resulted in gameplay that most closely matched the gameplay of the human study participants.
This offers a plausible explanation of the cognitive processes taking place in the human mind when playing Concentration. For example, the Concentration model sometimes has a choice to make: remember a previous matching card and select it, or explore the board by selecting a new card. When playing for speed, the model takes the latter choice because it's faster than retrieving the information from memory. This may also be what's happening in the human brain when we play Concentration.
"This is information that moves us incrementally closer to understanding how cognitive function relates to the way we interact with computers," Roberts says. "Ultimately, this sort of information could one day be used to develop tools to help software designers identify how their design decisions affect the end users of their products. For example, do some design features confuse users? Which ones, and at what point? That would be useful information."
The paper, "Modeling the Concentration Game with ACT-R," will be presented at the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, being held July 11-14 in Ottawa. Lead author of the paper is Titus Barik, a Ph.D. student at NC State. Co-authors include St. Amant, Roberts, and NC State Ph.D. students Arpan Chakraborty and Brent Harrison. The research was supported by the National Security Agency.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/xe-No9svth8/130701100809.htm
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Investors Are Wont To Follow - Data From Seedrs Shows Equity-Based Crowdfunding Is No Different
In a blog post published today, Seedrs, the UK site that makes it easy to invest in early-stage startups, sheds some light on what it takes to reach the required tipping point to get funded through its equity-based crowdfunding platform.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hA_-izHxoUE/
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Texas lawmakers reconvene for new abortion fight
Pro-abortion rights supporters cheer during a rally outside the Texas capitol, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Pro-abortion rights supporters cheer during a rally outside the Texas capitol, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Sen. Wendy Davis, D- Fort Worth, speaks during a rally against abortion legislation, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
An anti-abortion supporter carries a cross as he enters the Texas capitol, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up a contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
A pro-life supporters wear tape with the message "life" as they stand in the rotunda of the Texas capitol, Monday, July 1, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up the contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, speaks at a pro-abortion rights rally at the state Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Monday July 1, 2013. The Texas Senate has convened for a new 30-day special session to take up contentious abortion restrictions bill and other issues. (AP Photo/Statesman.com, Jay Janner)
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) ? State troopers lined the halls of the Texas Capitol, and 5,000 protesters rallied outside against proposed abortion legislation, as lawmakers convened Monday for a second special session that Republican leaders pledged wouldn't descend into chaos like the first.
The Texas House and Senate each met for less than an hour before recessing for the week. That was just long enough to schedule new committee hearings for the proposed restrictions that would make Texas one of the toughest places in the nation for women to get abortions.
Less than one week earlier, Democrats scored a rare victory in the GOP-dominated Legislature by running out the clock on the first special session.
Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth was on her feet for more than 12 hours ? speaking most of that time ? during the Democratic filibuster. When Republicans used parliamentary technicalities to silence her, hundreds of protesters in the public gallery and surrounding Capitol corridors cheered so loudly that work on the bill couldn't be completed before the midnight deadline.
"You're going to see a completely different debate this time around," said Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican from The Woodlands. "We're not under that kind of timeline this time around."
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst took no chances with raucous protesters in the second special session on Monday. Security was much tighter than before, with troopers ? some of them in riot gear ? throughout the Capitol complex.
When protesters filed into the House and Senate galleries, pages provided them with copies of the rules warning them that if they disrupted the proceedings, they'd be ejected. There were no arrests or any incidents of violence reported.
And Dewhurst said the Senate would make one major procedural change as well. Rather than follow tradition and require a two-thirds vote to bring up a bill for consideration, he said it would take only a simple majority during this session. That could prove critical because Democrats hold 12 out of 31 seats and successfully blocked the abortion law during the regular legislative session.
On the House side, State Affairs Chairman Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, said he would only allow less than nine hours of public testimony on the bill. Public protests erupted two weeks ago when he cut off testimony during the last session after 12 hours and denied more than 260 women the chance to speak.
"A wise man once said, nothing good happens after midnight," Cook said, explaining why he was limiting testimony.
Although there would be no action on either floor during the Fourth of July week, committees were set to hold public hearings to consider the measure.
Cook said his committee could approve the bill early Wednesday morning. The soonest the bill could pass the full Legislature is July 10, unless the Republican majorities suspend the rules to move it sooner. Gov. Rick Perry could sign the bill into law almost immediately.
"The Texas Legislature is poised to finish its history-making work this year by passing legislation to protect the unborn and women's health," Perry said Monday in a statement.
Democrats can do little to stop the bill this time, only slow it down with parliamentary procedure. A late start gave Davis a chance to filibuster the bill on the last day of the session, but with 30 days in the new one, a repeat seems nearly impossible.
"We know where the votes are. We also know what the calendar is. We know how difficult that calendar can be when its working against you," said Austin Democratic Sen. Kirk Waston, suggesting the bill will likely end up in court. "If they win this battle ... I believe we will win the war."
Davis, whose filibuster helped catapult her into the national spotlight, told a crowd of some 5,000 opponents in orange T-shirts that their support helped her maintain the effort.
"You were at the crux of a turning point in Texas history," Davis said.
The rally on the Capitol's south steps was the largest seen in Austin for years. Although far outnumbered, a few hundred supporters of the bill wore blue and recited the Lord's Prayer outside the Senate chamber.
The legislative process now starts over, with lawmakers filing bills, committees holding public hearings on each, then passing them to both full chambers to consider. That means reviving the proposals Davis and the protesters killed: banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, requiring that the procedure be performed at ambulatory surgical centers, and mandating that doctors who perform abortions obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles.
Only five out of 42 clinics qualify as ambulatory surgical centers and they are located only in major metropolitan areas. Dewhurst has acknowledged that the ultimate goal is to shutter abortion clinics.
Lainie Duro sat on the Capitol floor at 8 a.m. Monday with a stack of feminist literature and sex education books.
"I'm always part of the unruly mob. We refuse to be ruled," she said. "Poor women, women of color, rural women. If they need abortion they will not be able to get an abortion. Health care in Texas is already difficult for people in poverty to access."
Outside the Capitol, Sean Ollech and another protester in blue held up a large photo of an aborted fetus.
"This is so they can see the face of abortion," said Ollech, 32, of Austin. "This is what's going on right now across Texas."
___
House Bill 2: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=832&Bill=HB2
___
Associated Press writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.
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