Juicero began in secret. The startup, a sort of Keurig for cold-pressed plant-water—which made headlines for the $120 million in venture capital it secured from the likes of Google and Kleiner-Perkins between 2013 and 2015, and again when it announced its wi-fi-connected countertop appliance would cost a jaw-dropping $700 on launch—intended to keep its business free from prying eyes, either because it feared corporate espionage, mockery, or both. Was it the future of convenient health food, or an overfunded subscription service for bags of chopped up plants?

Founded in 2013 by Doug Evans, erstwhile CEO of New York juice company Organic Avenue, Juicero coupled a bizarre set of interests: a curdled, monopolized tech industry which has run dry on useful new ideas; the medically-vague but burgeoning wellness industry’s promise to fill a physical and spiritual void, stripped away at least in part by tech itself. Two types of snake oil, expertly blended to suit their flavor profiles—and true to the spirit of both industries, accessible only to the wealthy...

...Evans’ micromanaging style and refusal to defer to his own employees’ expertise caused the company to hemorrhage talent. One former employee watched Juicero churn through three top executives—a CFO, a COO, and a VP of Operations—in under a year. In spite of tremendous funding and an impressive talent pool in its early days, disagreements, especially with Evans led to a “legendary” volume of exits or firings. Evans bragged before launch of having 12 PhDs on staff. Several have since departed according to their Linkedin profiles, and a source claimed around a quarter of those PhDs remain today.

And what Evans wants, allegedly, can range from impractical to humiliating. Several employees related an anecdote in which flies had begun cropping up in the company’s San Francisco office. Evans—a vegan who at one point only allowed his employees to expense vegan meals on business trips—refused to implement a solution that would kill them. “I had to interview companies and ask if they had a catch-and-release program,” an employee recounted. “I went through links to help him understand that even that is not humane. It’s actually more stressful on the pests for you to catch them and relocate them.” Gizmodo could not confirm how or if the issue was resolved, and Juicero declined to make Evans available for an interview...

(CNN) Chicago marked 2016 as the deadliest year in nearly two decades, data released by the Chicago Police Department shows.

The city saw a surge in gun violence in 2016: 762 murders, 3,550 shooting incidents, and 4,331 shooting victims, according to a statement released by the department on Sunday.

Chicago, the only city among the nation's 20 largest to see population loss in 2015, could be overtaken in a decade by Houston as the third-most-populous city if the trend continues, experts said.

The city of Chicago lost about 2,890 residents between 2014 and 2015, bringing the city's population down to 2,720,546, according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Numbers made available in March showed the greater Chicago area, which includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana, lost an estimated 6,263 residents — the greatest loss of any metropolitan area in the country.

By the end of September 2016, Houston already had counted 235 murders, putting the city on pace to reach 345 murders by Dec. 31 — an unlucky 13 percent jump from the previous year.

That did not happen.

Last year’s murder tally will hold steady at 302 murders, according to preliminary Houston Police Department data. That’s one fewer murder than in 2015, though it still exceeds the five-year average by more than a quarter.

Houston city, Texas

Population, 2015: 2,296,224

The tragedy of the 2016 election is connected closely, at least for me, to the larger tragedy of the industrial midwest. It was in the ruined industrial city of Cleveland that the Republican Party came together in convention last July, and it was the deindustrialized, addiction-harrowed precincts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that switched sides in November and delivered Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

I am a Midwesterner too, and I like to think I share the values and outlook of that part of the country. I have spent many of the last 15 years trying to understand my region’s gradual drift to the political right. And I have spent the last three weeks driving around the deindustrialized Midwest, visiting 13 different cities to talk about the appeal of Donald Trump and what ails the Democratic Party. I met labor leaders and progressive politicians; average people and rank-and-file union members; senior citizens and Millennials; sages and cranks...

And what I am here to say is that the Midwest is not an exotic place. It isn’t a benighted region of unknowable people and mysterious urges. It isn’t backward or hopelessly superstitious or hostile to learning. It is solid, familiar, ordinary America, and Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November.

Another thing that is inexcusable from Democrats: surprise at the economic disasters that have befallen the midwestern cities and states that they used to represent.

Operation Northwoods was a proposed false flag operation against the Cuban government, that originated within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other U.S. government operatives to commit acts of terrorism against American civilians and military targets, blaming it on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba. The plans detailed in the document included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.[2] The proposals were rejected by the Kennedy administration.[3]

At the time of the proposal, communists led by Fidel Castro had recently taken power in Cuba. The operation proposed creating public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts that would actually be perpetrated by the U.S. Government.[4] To this end, Operation Northwoods proposals recommended hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government. It stated:

The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.

Several other proposals were included within Operation Northwoods, including real or simulated actions against various U.S. military and civilian targets. The operation recommended developing a "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington".

The plan was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and sent to the Secretary of Defense. Although part of the U.S. government's anti-communist Cuban Project, Operation Northwoods was never officially accepted; it was authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then rejected by President John F. Kennedy. According to currently released documentation, none of the operations became active under the auspices of the Operation Northwoods proposals.

There is widespread interest among teachers in the use of neuroscientific research findings in educational practice. However, there are also misconceptions and myths that are supposedly based on sound neuroscience that are prevalent in our schools. We wish to draw attention to this problem by focusing on an educational practice supposedly based on neuroscience that lacks sufficient evidence and so we believe should not be promoted or supported.

Generally known as “learning styles”, it is the belief that individuals can benefit from receiving information in their preferred format, based on a self-report questionnaire. This belief has much intuitive appeal because individuals are better at some things than others and ultimately there may be a brain basis for these differences. Learning styles promises to optimise education by tailoring materials to match the individual’s preferred mode of sensory information processing.

There are, however, a number of problems with the learning styles approach. First, there is no coherent framework of preferred learning styles. Usually, individuals are categorised into one of three preferred styles of auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners based on self-reports. One study found that there were more than 70 different models of learning styles including among others, “left v right brain,” “holistic v serialists,” “verbalisers v visualisers” and so on. The second problem is that categorising individuals can lead to the assumption of fixed or rigid learning style, which can impair motivation to apply oneself or adapt.

Finally, and most damning, is that there have been systematic studies of the effectiveness of learning styles that have consistently found either no evidence or very weak evidence to support the hypothesis that matching or “meshing” material in the appropriate format to an individual’s learning style is selectively more effective for educational attainment. Students will improve if they think about how they learn but not because material is matched to their supposed learning style. The Educational Endowment Foundation in the UK has concluded that learning styles is “Low impact for very low cost, based on limited evidence”....


Professor Bruce Hood
Chair of developmental psychology in society, University of Bristol, founder of Speakezee
Professor Paul Howard-Jones
Chair of neuroscience and education, University of Bristol
Professor Diana Laurillard
Professor of learning with digital technology, UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London
Professor Dorothy Bishop
Professor of developmental neuropsychology, University of Oxford
Professor Frank Coffield
Emeritus professor of education, University College Institute of Education, University of London
Professor Dame Uta Frith
Emeritus Professor, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London
Professor Steven Pinker
Johnstone family professor of psychology, Harvard University
Sir Colin Blakemore
Professor of neuroscience and philosophy, director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses, University College London
Professor Hal Pashler
Distinguished professor of psychology, UC San Diego
Dr Peter Etchells
Senior lecturer in biological psychology, Bath Spa University
Dr Nathalia Gjersoe
Senior lecturer in developmental psychology, University of Bath
Professor Gaia Scerif
Professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience, University of Oxford
Dr Sara Baker
Lecturer in psychology and education, University of Cambridge
Dr Matthew Wall
Division of brain sciences, Imperial College London
Dr Jon Simons
Reader in cognitive neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Dr Michelle Ellefson
Senior lecturer in psychology and education, University of Cambridge
Dr Ashok Jansari
Lecturer in cognitive neuropsychology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Molly Crockett
Associate professor of experimental psychology, University of Oxford
Professor Kate Nation
Professor of experimental psychology, University of Oxford
Professor Michael Thomas
Director, University of London Centre for Educational Neuroscience, professor of cognitive neuroscience, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Nikhil Sharma
Honorary consultant neurologist and senior clinical researcher (MRC),
the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
Dr David Whitebread
PEDAL research centre, University of Cambridge
Professor Mark Sabbagh
Professor of psychology and neuroscience, Queen’s University, Canada
Dr Cristine Legare
Associate professor of psychology, University of Texas at Austin
Dr Joseph T Devlin
Head of experimental psychology, University College London
Professor Peter Gordon
Program director, neuroscience and education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Professor David Poeppel
Director, department of neuroscience, Max-Planck-Institute, Frankfurt
Professor Brian Butterworth
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Centre for Educational Neuroscience,
University College London
Professor Anil Seth
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex
Dr Tom Foulsham
Reader in psychology, University of Essex

There is widespread interest among teachers in the use of neuroscientific research findings in educational practice. However, there are also misconceptions and myths that are supposedly based on sound neuroscience that are prevalent in our schools. We wish to draw attention to this problem by focusing on an educational practice supposedly based on neuroscience that lacks sufficient evidence and so we believe should not be promoted or supported.

Generally known as “learning styles”, it is the belief that individuals can benefit from receiving information in their preferred format, based on a self-report questionnaire. This belief has much intuitive appeal because individuals are better at some things than others and ultimately there may be a brain basis for these differences. Learning styles promises to optimise education by tailoring materials to match the individual’s preferred mode of sensory information processing.

There are, however, a number of problems with the learning styles approach. First, there is no coherent framework of preferred learning styles. Usually, individuals are categorised into one of three preferred styles of auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners based on self-reports. One study found that there were more than 70 different models of learning styles including among others, “left v right brain,” “holistic v serialists,” “verbalisers v visualisers” and so on. The second problem is that categorising individuals can lead to the assumption of fixed or rigid learning style, which can impair motivation to apply oneself or adapt.

Finally, and most damning, is that there have been systematic studies of the effectiveness of learning styles that have consistently found either no evidence or very weak evidence to support the hypothesis that matching or “meshing” material in the appropriate format to an individual’s learning style is selectively more effective for educational attainment. Students will improve if they think about how they learn but not because material is matched to their supposed learning style. The Educational Endowment Foundation in the UK has concluded that learning styles is “Low impact for very low cost, based on limited evidence”....


Professor Bruce Hood
Chair of developmental psychology in society, University of Bristol, founder of Speakezee
Professor Paul Howard-Jones
Chair of neuroscience and education, University of Bristol
Professor Diana Laurillard
Professor of learning with digital technology, UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London
Professor Dorothy Bishop
Professor of developmental neuropsychology, University of Oxford
Professor Frank Coffield
Emeritus professor of education, University College Institute of Education, University of London
Professor Dame Uta Frith
Emeritus Professor, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London
Professor Steven Pinker
Johnstone family professor of psychology, Harvard University
Sir Colin Blakemore
Professor of neuroscience and philosophy, director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses, University College London
Professor Hal Pashler
Distinguished professor of psychology, UC San Diego
Dr Peter Etchells
Senior lecturer in biological psychology, Bath Spa University
Dr Nathalia Gjersoe
Senior lecturer in developmental psychology, University of Bath
Professor Gaia Scerif
Professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience, University of Oxford
Dr Sara Baker
Lecturer in psychology and education, University of Cambridge
Dr Matthew Wall
Division of brain sciences, Imperial College London
Dr Jon Simons
Reader in cognitive neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Dr Michelle Ellefson
Senior lecturer in psychology and education, University of Cambridge
Dr Ashok Jansari
Lecturer in cognitive neuropsychology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Molly Crockett
Associate professor of experimental psychology, University of Oxford
Professor Kate Nation
Professor of experimental psychology, University of Oxford
Professor Michael Thomas
Director, University of London Centre for Educational Neuroscience, professor of cognitive neuroscience, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Nikhil Sharma
Honorary consultant neurologist and senior clinical researcher (MRC),
the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
Dr David Whitebread
PEDAL research centre, University of Cambridge
Professor Mark Sabbagh
Professor of psychology and neuroscience, Queen’s University, Canada
Dr Cristine Legare
Associate professor of psychology, University of Texas at Austin
Dr Joseph T Devlin
Head of experimental psychology, University College London
Professor Peter Gordon
Program director, neuroscience and education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Professor David Poeppel
Director, department of neuroscience, Max-Planck-Institute, Frankfurt
Professor Brian Butterworth
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Centre for Educational Neuroscience,
University College London
Professor Anil Seth
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex
Dr Tom Foulsham
Reader in psychology, University of Essex

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just updated its 2011 guide to Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border with an all new edition that covers the law, administrative rules, technological options and potential repercussions of crossing the US border while not undergoing the warrantless seizure and indefinite retention of all of your sensitive data -- in a guide that breaks out the different risks for US citizens, US permanent residents, and visitors to the USA.

As I've previously noted, the law regarding what protections you have at the border is frustratingly unsettled, with grey zones on everything from being compelled to unlock a device to being compelled to turn over your passwords for social media and cloud services, and since the big online platforms are not designed with this threat-model in mind, you're really fighting against the tech when you try to minimize the amount of data you can access at a border crossing.

EFF's guide provides essential nuance on this, looking at recent court decisions and administrative rules, and offering its view of what Constitutional protections you should have, once more cases make their way to court and get ruled on.

But it's also an eminently practical guide to the legal and technological choices you can make, based on the sensitivity of your data, your risk tolerance, and your personal beliefs.

February 24, 2017

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union is launching PeoplePower.org, a major new grassroots mobilization platform, to help organize the mass resistance to President Trump’s threats to civil rights and civil liberties. The program comes as unprecedented public support of the ACLU continues in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration and his unconstitutional Muslim ban executive order.

“The ACLU will continue to challenge President Trump’s unconstitutional actions in court and with PeoplePower.org, we will take that fight to the streets,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. “We are in the fight of our lives right now, and what we have learned since Donald Trump’s inauguration is that there is a growing army of people out there who want to be asked to do something big and important in response. We intend to activate these people to defend our Constitution, our shared American values and our future.”

...

On March 11, the ACLU will hold a “Resistance Training” townhall in Miami, Florida. An email ask went out today to the organization’s over 2.5 million members to organize grassroots events in communities across the country to watch the ACLU townhall. Full details on the training are forthcoming.

PeoplePower.org will use digital tools to communicate with and help train volunteers to resist President Trump’s unlawful policies across the country. The ACLU will promote ideas for action to defend sanctuary cities, resist deportation raids, oppose the Muslim Ban, maintain Planned Parenthood funding and support other organizational priorities. The program will also seek to amplify organic, bottom-up grassroots actions. PeoplePower.org will be a one-stop hub for all organizers seeking to influence the national debate.

Massive 2013 oil spill in North Dakota still not cleaned up
Associated Press

BISMARCK, N.D. -- Three years and three months later, a massive oil spill in North Dakota still isn't fully cleaned up. The company responsible hasn't even set a date for completion.

Though crews have been working around the clock to deal with the Tesoro Corp. pipeline break, which happened in a wheat field in September 2013, less than a third of the 840,000 gallons that spilled has been recovered - or ever will be, North Dakota Health Department environmental scientist Bill Suess said.

A farmer, Steve Jenkins, who'd smelled the crude oil for days, discovered the spill in his northwestern North Dakota field near Tioga - his combines' tires were covered in it.

While the nearest home was a half-mile away and the state said no water sources were contaminated and no wildlife hurt, one of the largest onshore oil spills recorded in the U.S. serves for some as a cautionary example, especially given a recent pipeline break about 150 miles south and ongoing debates over the four-state Dakota Access pipeline.