Thousands march against French gay marriage law

PARIS (AP) ? Thousands of people are protesting in central Paris against France's new gay marriage law.

The law came into force over a week ago, but organizers decided to go forward with Sunday's long-planned demonstration to show their continued opposition as well as their frustration with President Francois Hollande, who had made legalizing gay marriage one of his keynote campaign pledges in last year's election.

Marchers set off from three separate points across Paris, and by late afternoon they were beginning to fill the Invalides esplanade just across the Seine River from the Champs Elysees.

Around 5,000 police were on duty because of the demonstration. Previous anti- gay marriage protests have seen clashes between far-right protesters and the police.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-march-against-french-gay-marriage-law-142651871.html

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Brewer Follows Through on Threat to Block All Legislation (Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/308281158?client_source=feed&format=rss

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How to Make Your Own Self-Destructing Laptop That Blows Up

When a laptop or a phone blows up it's usually because of some dangerous exploding battery. But what if you want to make a laptop self destruct and blow up on its own? You'll have to make something that Q from James Bond would invent, basically. The genius Caleb Kraft did just that.

Caleb from Hack a Day used thermite to make the laptop catch on fire to destroy the hard drive. Burnt up hard drive means all your files are secure, right? Right! Caleb's system has its own self destruct mechanism to catch on fire. But because thermite is really hard to light, he had to get creative. He says:

What I finally landed on was an ignition system that uses model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to light the thermite. The model rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer. However, it isn?t hot enough to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A small amount of gun powder would get hot enough to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot enough to light the thermite. I had to be careful though, because too much gunpowder would cause a rapid expansion, blowing the thermite everywhere instead of lighting it. You can actually see some red thermite being blown out of the external hard drive and the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.

Caleb also made the awesome fire breathing Piranha Plant from Super Mario Bros so we should trust him on all things fire or explosions or explosive fire. [Hack a Day via BoingBoing]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-to-make-your-own-self-destructing-laptop-that-blows-509828075

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Happy Birthday, Kingston! His Fashionable Life in Photos

As Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale's little rocker turns 7 on May 26, look back at his cutest (and most stylish!) moments.

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/kingston-rossdale-stylish-moments/1-b-352775?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Akingston-rossdale-stylish-moments-352775

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Communications satellite launched into space

A Delta IV heavy lift rocket launches an Air Force satellite into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.? A new military communications satellite has been launched into space.

An unmanned Delta IV rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Friday evening. The satellite was the fifth Wideband Global satcom spacecraft to be launched.

The satellite, which is being sent into an orbit that follows the earth's rotation 22,000 miles above the equator, will serve the U.S. military with the highest capacity communications currently available.

It will take several months for the satellite to settle into the proper orbit.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2c61135f/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A50C240C1847620A0A0Ecommunications0Esatellite0Elaunched0Einto0Espace0Dlite/story01.htm

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How One Artist Makes Hypnotic GIFs From Cloned Video Loops

Sometimes we use GIFs for reactions, sometimes they're a punchline, and in some cases, they're art. That's certainly true of the ones made by Istanbul-based artist Erdal Inci, who masterfully creates mesmerizing GIFs using cloned pieces of videos.

In many cases, Inci, who usually works alone, is the subject. He takes slices of footage to create the illusion of an endless flock of men siding down a railing or jogging on a path. Speaking over email, Inci told Gizmodo a bit about how he turns one subject into a giant animated army:

In my GIFS the figure is a performer performing with the street itself or the space. He or she will pass in front of the camera for 20 seconds, for example. So what you see in a GIF is made from a 20 second video recording. When you clone that motion at sequence times, it turns out a motion pattern. So you eventually see all that 20 seconds in a single second. Or even shorter like five frames. This idea pops up all these repetitions. I started to think about "time" mainly and how I can perform in the street to make them not only somehow beautiful visual loops but ones that can feel you indescribable or indistinct. I also use different kinds of instruments like flashlights, leds, big portions of styrofoam to vary those feelings.

Inci's GIFs don't just exist inside the internet, although you can check out more of them on his blog. They'll also be on display in real life at Action Gallery in Milan on May 25 and its other location in Naples on May 30. [Erdal Inci via ThisIsColossal]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-one-artist-makes-hypnotic-gifs-from-cloned-video-lo-509487061

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How We Train Employees to Analyze the Business - NYTimes.com

?Be direct.?

This is one of our core values at H.Bloom. It stems from another one of our values, which is to care deeply about our colleagues, and from the shared ambition to become as good as we can possibly be in this business. The only way to achieve this is to be direct with each other about areas of improvement. Otherwise, how will any of us know what to improve?

In my last two posts, I have written about the importance of practice, the formal training that we have set up, and shared the details of a specific management class that I led recently on data-driven decision-making. In this post, I want to walk through some of the projects our managers presented as part of the assignment from that class, and the direct feedback that I gave them so that they could work on the continued development of their skills.

After the training class, I gave the following assignment to our market managers and sales managers:

1. Identify a problem or opportunity in your market.
2. Analyze any available data about that problem or opportunity.
3. Use the evaluation of data to draw a conclusion.
4. Present your findings to the group.

The class participants could work on this assignment individually, or in teams, and they were given two weeks to complete the project. Here are four examples of what the participants presented, and how we used the presentations as an opportunity to give direct feedback on the skills they had learned.

Automate a Process

One of our market managers presented the need for a new piece of software that would automate the process of fulfilling same-day orders. Today, these orders are guided to completion in a relatively manual way. There is no question this process needs to be automated. However, as a three-year-old start-up, almost everything we do still needs to be automated. The presentation skipped over the data analysis and jumped right to the conclusion. While the conclusion was sound, the presentation missed the mark because of the lack of supporting data.

In our company, there is tremendous opportunity to derive competitive advantage by automating manual processes, but the trick is in deciding which processes to automate first. I gave this market manager direct feedback: First, when the assignment is data-driven decision-making, don?t forget the data! Second, and the important lesson in this interaction, was that because everything needs to be automated, the only way to determine what to do next is to compare the potential return of one project to that of another. With this filter, we work on the highest-value projects first, and eventually, we will get to everything. I asked this market manager to redo the presentation.

Buy Some Equipment

Another presentation, this time from a current SEED participant, suggested that we purchase a piece of equipment to deliver a particular corporate service in a more efficient manner. The numbers were sound: the presentation showed cost, a detailed potential return, and months to break-even. The return on investment was compelling, except for one other piece of data ? this new business, one we had just introduced, was not yet profitable. I suggested to the presenter that we should drive the business to profitability first ? which was only a couple of months away ? before investing further in the line. While the presentation analyzed data, I thought it missed the analysis of contextual data (in this case, the profit and loss of the business line itself). The presentation provided a good opportunity to share with this future market manager my philosophies on investing limited capital, introducing new lines of business, and investing in those businesses for scale and efficiency.

Eliminate Wasted Effort

Two sales managers presented a detailed analysis of our sales pipeline. They enumerated activities by account executive, conversion rate and closed deals. They conducted an in-depth survey with current account executives, and identified a situation in which our sales people were duplicating efforts by entering the same data into two different systems. They calculated the potential uplift in sales if this wasted effort were removed and concluded that our engineering team should build the required functionality. My reaction was not what they expected. In the process of presenting their findings, they highlighted the number of activities that our account executives complete on average per day. When I asked the sales managers if they thought it was conceivable that our account managers could do more activities per day, the answer was a resounding, ?Yes.?

In fact, these sales managers believed that our sales people could execute twice the number of activities per day even without implementing their suggestion. When I then asked them to compare the potential value of a) increasing the number of activities per account executive per day to b) removing the duplicative process, they saw that the former would provide a much larger return. My feedback to them was simple ? if the data is there, make sure to draw the most rewarding conclusion. As a result of the presentation, the sales managers met as a group and instituted a new minimum number of activities a day, supported by our incentive program, and that has now been introduced to our entire sales force.

Try a Loyalty Program

One of our most seasoned sales managers analyzed our corporate subscription business. She proposed the introduction of a customer loyalty program, whereby we would systematically deliver something extraordinary to our customers as a thank-you for their loyalty during the previous year. This program could do two things: 1) surprise and delight our customers and 2) help ensure that they continue their subscription. The team compared the cost of this program to the potential benefit and proposed a pilot program that would contain our costs while enabling us to see any positive results in just two months. I gave the sales manager my feedback: it was a great presentation; a thorough analysis of the data; and a thoughtful decision to propose a pilot program. As a result of the presentation, I approved the program, which is in process right now. We will be able to assess the results in a couple of months.

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/how-we-train-employees-to-analyze-the-business/

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