links for 2009-11-29

"Rates of the three most common sexually transmitted infections in the U.S. — chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis — continue to increase, especially among teenagers, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Monday, Reuters reports. The study reported that the number of reported chlamydia cases increased from 1.1 million in 2007 to 1.2 million in 2008. There were nearly 337,000 cases of gonorrhea reported in 2008, according to the study. There were about 13,500 syphilis cases reported, nearly an 18% increase from 2007."

"Determining which prospects you want to work with is often considered a luxury. Don’t think of it that way. Even if the economy is in the tank and you absolutely need the gig, you should be very critical of the prospects you’re considering working with. These are the people who will become part of your immediate and potentially long-term future, and you want to make sure you don’t spend that time drinking schnapps to get through the day or grinding your teeth at night."

"F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ ” according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department." From the article it sounds like the FBI wasn't happy with the liberties the CIA was taking.

"There has never been so much choice in entertainment. Last year 610 films were released in America, up from 471 in 1999. Cable and satellite television are growing quickly, supplying more channels to more people across the world. More than half of all pay-television subscribers now live in the Asia-Pacific region. Online video is exploding: every minute about 20 hours’ worth of content is added to YouTube. The internet has greatly expanded choice in music and books. Yet the ever-increasing supply of content tailored to every taste seems not to have dented the appeal of the blockbuster. Quite the opposite."

"I’m fairly happy with this method. When I’ve skipped parts, I’ve ended up with bad hires who eventually had to be let go. But when I’ve followed it, I’ve ended up with people I like so much so that I actually feel bad I don’t get to work with them anymore. I’m amazed that so many companies use such silly hiring methods instead." Pretty decent system.

"By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves."

"Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that's no way to look at data! It's confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation."

"This is what happens when white people are considered people and black people are considered a special kind of people, black people. “Flesh-colored” becomes the skin color associated with whites and darker-skinned peoples are left out of the picture altogether. We see this all the time. Bandaids, for example, are typically light beige (though they rarely call them “flesh-colored” anymore), as are things like ace bandages."

"The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt."

"An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."

"Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine."

"the number of people without health insurance grew from 38.4 million people in 2000 to 46.3 million in 2008."

Just what it says.

How to end a conversation.

"The Capitol Building in Washington state isn’t allowing atheist displays or Nativity scenes or anything else… How *dare* the state government treat all groups equally?!"

"But not everything is measured as easily as lying down a few hundred times in a row. In much the same way as baseball now uses the WHIP statistic, or NBA analysts are so interested in quantifying defensive play, we at GeekDad feel it’s our duty to introduce some new and pass on some existing ways of quantifying your world. Think of us as the Bill James of nerdiness. This is by no means an exhaustive list; they’re just some of my favorites."

"Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web." Neat.