"aid organizations are driven primarily by normative goals rather than material organizational ones"

Is anyone really surprised about this? "Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse."

Fascinating story of journalistic collaboration

"The room—tucked away on a floor used by The Guardian’s advertising staff, deliberately out of view of curious newsroom eyes—featured two rows of a half-dozen or so desks, facing each other. A floor to ceiling window looked across The Guardian’s office building.

Davies was having further discussions with Assange in Stockholm, and, until Monday when he joined the staff in the bunker, was somewhat out of touch with the effort he had kicked off in London."

"They first met in Philadelphia in 1974. Teller was a high school Latin teacher who did magic in his spare time. It had gripped him with the force of an obsession since, as a five year-old laid up at home with a heart ailment, he had sent away “15 cents and three Mars bar wrappers” for a magic kit advertised on television. Penn was a student and a juggler with a fierce distaste for magicians. “Early on, Teller said to me that magic was essentially an intellectual art form which, when you picture the kind of dips---s that do magic, sounds like an insane thing to say,” he says. “Can you do magic without insulting the audience? Can you do magic that is intellectually satisfying? It is those questions, rather than the magic itself, that fascinates me. Those are the question that we have been playing with for 35 years.”"

"Both kiwis and bananas are shipped long-distance. But what is being grown—and the inputs (fertilizer, pesticide, heat) needed to grow it—often matters as much as where the growing happens. The point: Carbon footprints for food are, unfortunately, not terribly intuitive. To me, this is why we need some standardized system of carbon labeling. Right now, it's all but impossible for individuals to make decisions about the carbon footprint of the things they buy. You shouldn't have to be an expert, or tote a calculator and the proper formulas around with you."

Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has just posted a review of Adrian John's monumental, 500-page Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, a thoroughgoing and well-researched history that draws compelling conclusions about the need to view piracy as a business-model crisis, not a moral one

Sign languages tend to spontaneously emerge when the deaf people of a country or region first start coming together to form a community, usually based around a school. It's happening right now in Nicaragua, where special education schools opened in the 1970s. Over the past 30 years, Nicaraguan Sign Language has evolved from simple gestures between friends, to a full and complete language. That recent evolution makes Nicaraguan Sign Language the enticing blue bug zapper to linguists' and cognitive scientists' curious moths. Case in point: The study of the way language and learning interact. The structure and composition of the language you speak has a big impact on how you think and perceive the world.