News of Note
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Occupy Foreclosed Homes
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2 min read
Looking for another way to fight back against big banks? OccupyOurHomes.org is calling for a national day of action on December 6, 2011. “Everyone deserves to have a roof over their head and a place to call home. Millions of Americans have worked hard for years for the opportunity to own their own home; for…
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For-Profit Private Prisons
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2 min read
News of Note: Private Prison Charges Inmates $5 a Minute for Phone Calls While They Work for $1 a Day Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night…
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It’s nice to see an industry leader such as Google step out front on this important issue. Google’s stance will make it easier for other companies to follow suit and offer similar benefits, and, as a matter of competition, make it harder for other companies to refuse to do so. When employers in the same…
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Is Sex For Pleasure Uniquely Human?
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2 min read
Talk Nerdy To Me: Is Sex For Pleasure Uniquely Human? “We have a lot of sex. In human culture, sex is so much more than a means of reproduction. Sex is emotional. Sex is communicative. Sex is fun. And when it comes down to it, for most of us, sex just feels good. We have…
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What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex
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2 min read
What Mind Reading: What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex “Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch. What are they doing right that we’re not?… “Coming out…
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What’s Hot Right Now (11/7/11)
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7 min read
Williams Institute, DC Hate Crimes Hearing, Think Progress/lgbt, OLB Research, The Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project, plus We have long been grateful to the Williams Institute, a University of California Los Angeles think tank advancing sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. In DC we are particularly indebted to the Institute for its involvement…
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What’s Hot Right Now (10-11-11)
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4 min read
Arse Electronic Wrap-up, Occupy Everything, New National Campaigns, plus We’re back from 2 weeks on the road, participating in and filing blogs on Atlanta’s Southern Comfort Conference and then from San Francisco for Arse Elektronika. Arse Elektronika is a production by Monochrom, an Austrian collective of futurist artists describing themselves as “an art-technology-philosophy group” and “an unpeculiar mixture of…
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Earlier this month Whitehouse.gov (the official site of the White House) launched “We the People”: “Welcome to We the People on WhiteHouse.gov. This tool provides you with a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. If a petition gets enough support, White House…
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Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle
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1 min read
“Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists” There is this website, Fold.it. People go there to play a video game about Protein Folding. Players can contribute to science by solving these puzzles. Wikipedia sums up the news nicely: “. . . online gamers used Foldit to decipher the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease, which…