Category: News

Yahoo’s already had a busy Monday, what with that little $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, but the company had a few more announcements to make at a press conference Monday afternoon in New York. It’s revamping its photo-sharing service Flickr, which has largely been left to languish since Yahoo acquired it in 2005. “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

On an investor call on Monday morning, Mayer had noted that there are “obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr,” but that it’s too early to say what those opportunities will be.

The choice of location for the press conference — a hotel in Times Square — became clear as Mayer announced that Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street — the old New York Times building — and will be moving all 500 of its New York-based employees there. Tumblr’s employees, however, will stay downtown at their Union Square office.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to say the move reflects “what a big player New York has become in the tech industry,” with Yahoo becoming “one of the largest tech presences in the city.” He noted that Tumblr is a “New York-grown company” and that NYC was the first city government to have its own Tumblr.

“Twenty years ago, if you looked out the window, there were plenty of yahoos in Times Square,” he said. “Now the Yahoos here will make an honest living … and help us grow and make our economy stronger.”

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Disney’s research arm has solved a problem that you probably didn’t even know robots have — their inability to accept objects from people in a natural way. The Disney Research team, working with funding from the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT) at Carnegie Mellon and the University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), believe that robots who can’t naturally accept “handoffs” of objects from people are creepy. In a paper presented this month, Disney and its partners detailed how they used several motion-sensitive cameras, a database of gestures and some fancy algorithms to solve this handoff problem.

From the press release announcing the findings:

“If a robot just sticks out its hand blindly, or uses motions that look more robotic than human, a person might feel uneasy working with that robot or might question whether it is up to the task,” Katsu Yamane, Disney Research, Pittsburgh senior research scientist explained. “We assume human-like motions are more user-friendly because they are familiar.”

Despite the robot pictured on the Disney page touting this research looking like the mechanical, blue-haired skeleton that haunted my childhood nightmares, its attempts to grab the purse from the person do seem reactive to the human’s gestures, as opposed to the robot just sticking his arm out there and the person having to accommodate it. And that sort of naturalism will be important as we bring more robots into our homes and workplaces.

For example, an MIT group used a dancer’s motions to build a robotic bartender in a quest for naturalism — even though that robot doesn’t interact with people.

Today, designers try to endear robots to us with quirky noises (like R2D2) and maybe light displays or LED faces — anything to help anthropomorphize them. But as robots become more human-looking they can also become more sinister — achieving that same uncanny valley that Disney and other content companies have struggled with in animation. Remember the dead-eyed stars of the Polar Express that you probably couldn’t empathize with? The jerky movements of a home health robot might engender similar feelings — or worse — they may scare people.

Building the natural gestures of the Disney robot took the creation of a hierarchical gesture database that the robot can access as it detects the person passing something to it. In the Disney paper research, the robot is not only able to reach for the handbag, but when the human attempts a fake pass to the robot, the blue-haired monstrosity robot is able to adapt. From the release:

To enable a robot to access a library of human-to-human passing motions with the speed necessary for robot-human interaction, the researchers developed a hierarchical data structure. Using principal component analysis, the researchers first developed a rough estimate of the distribution of various motion samples. They then grouped samples of similar poses and organized them into a binary tree structure. With a series of “either/or” decisions, the robot can rapidly search this database, so it can recognize when the person initiates a handing motion and then refine its response as the person follows through.

Even if you don’t have an opinion on how naturally robots should move, this research brings home the awesome amount of work it takes to build computers and robots that mimic the capabilities of a person. Much like computer visualization, the science of robotic interaction takes a problem the size of a mountain and has to chip it down into grains of sand using a toothpick to find solutions. It’s a testament to human curiosity that people are willing to try.

Also, I expect Disney might be lured by the idea of natural-looking robots roaming its theme parks. My only question is would they be dressed up as characters or working the cash register at the gift stores.

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You no doubt know by now that Yahoo announced that it has agreed to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Right from the start, CEO Marissa Mayer has said that the company will be looking into putting more ads into the Tumblr experience.

“In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love,” she said in the announcementl. “In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.”

On a conference call today, she said we could expect more ads like Yahoo’s “Yahoo Stream” ads on Tumblr, and that they would introduce a “very light ad load” on the dashboard, and might work with bloggers who want ads on their blogs. Ad units would be native.

Well, we might be seeing some new ads sooner rather than later. Tumblr will be launching a test of in-stream ads on desktop users’ dashboards as soon as tomorrow, according to Business Insider, who has obtained Tumblr’s ad sales pitch deck. Here’s the first of a handful of a slides, BI shared:

“With Tumblr’s newest ad product, brands finally are front and center, with the world’s greatest creators,” one of the slides says. “Welcome to the richest content stream in the world.”

According to the pitch deck, the ads will be delivered directly in the native dashboard streams of millions of users. The “Web In-Stream” product is in beta, and Tumblr is offering an exclusive launch partnership opportunity to a handful of select brands for the ad unit’s debut, according to the slides, which say that all Tumblr post types are supported. Partners are apparently being offered category-exclusivity.

For $200K, according to the slides, partners can get ten desktop Radar posts within a 30-day span (between May 21 and July 21), 24 hours each for 5% of all Dashboard page views, support from the Tumblr team, U.S. guaranteed impression serving only, over 25 million dashboard impressions ($8.00CPM on Radar impressions), and multi-week exposure as premier sponsor in Spotlight. They also get ninety-day access to Tumblr Analytics and three weeks as an exclusive beta in-stream launch sponsor partner with ten in-stream posts within a 21 day span (June 1 and June 21).

A lot of Tumblr users are already freaking out.

AT&T on Monday said it plans to more broadly enable the use of Apple’s FaceTime for users over its cellular network in the next few weeks, and by year’s end plans to allow video chat apps use over its network by all customers. This latest position on FaceTime and similar apps represents total shift from its position almost a year ago.

AT&T’s statement to the Verge on Monday notes that “by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from [Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry].” Besides FaceTime, Samsung and BlackBerry’s pre-installed video chat apps will also be included.

And more will be coming for all of its customers before the end of the year: “Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.”

When Apple updated its mobile video chat app to work over cellular last summer, AT&T came under fire when it announced subsequently that only customers who subscribed to one of its Mobile Share plans could use it. Several open internet groups threatened to file complaints with the FCC, calling the carrier’s policy a violation of net neutrality. Several months later, AT&T opened the service to anyone with an LTE device.

Based on broadness of the statement, it sounds like video chat apps like Google’s new Hangouts app, available for both iOS and Android, will also be free to operate over AT&T’s network later on this year.

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Before Yahoo announced their plans to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion, some analysts wondered if and to what end the fact that Tumblr is full of porn would affect that decision. Apparently, not too much, as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made the thing official this morning. Still, some Tumblr users worry that in an attempt to clean up their new acquisition, Yahoo may go to war on Tumblr’s vibrant adult community.

But just how much porn is on Tumblr? A lot. We know that. But until now, we’ve never had any real figures. Data from SimilarGroup, obtained by TechCrunch, suggests that more than 11% of Tumblr’s top 200,000 domains are very NSFW.

The analysis looked at the 200,000 most-popular blogs on Tumblr and found that 22,775 would be considered “adult.” That works out to 11.4%. Yes, Marissa Mayer just bought a network that’s more than 1/10th porn.

SimilarGroup also looked at traffic to said adult Tumblr blogs and found that they account for 16.6% of Tumblr’s traffic. Not only that, but just over 22% of referral traffic to Tumblr comes from adult websites. 8% of outbound Tumblr referrals lead straight to porn.

Tumblr has a porn empire. Is that going to be a problem for Yahoo?

Maybe, but Mayer isn’t suggesting that quite yet.

“The width and breadth of content on Tumblr is what’s exciting and has allowed it to reach more users,” said Mayer this morning when asked about Tumblr’s “not-brand-safe” content (read: porn).

In order to deal with it, Mayer said that Yahoo would need to have good targeting for ads. Maybe that will be the strategy going forward – smart ad targeting that will make sure that the porny bits stay away from the non-porny bits. But this study proves that adult content isn’t just a fringe element of Tumblr’s massive blog network – it’s a big part of it.

Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Andy Cavatorta performed with punk bands in the early 1990s, has worked with Bjork and is a graduate of MIT’s Media Lab. His counterintuitive resume has led him to create these gigantic, aural structures — both meditative and comforting — which you can see here in a video the Lincoln Motor Company partnered with TED to produce.

After an exciting night of design-themed talks at TED@250, we unveiled this series of videos that profiles three artists who came to TEDActive 2013 to show their work: Aurora Robson, Andy Cavatorta, and Gilberto Esparza. The artists’ time at TED and the resulting short documentaries are part of the newly launched Lincoln Reimagine Project, which supports pioneering thinkers in the arts, design and innovation.

Why these three? Because they turn upside down the traditional ways we imagine music, sculpture and even recycling. At TEDActive, Robson, Cavatorta and Esparza showcased original works that disrupt cultural and environmental paradigms. The videos highlight their unique artistic philosophies.

Cavatorta, as he introduced himself to the audience, aptly philosophized: “I believe new instruments will lead the way to fertile and innovative territory, challenging composers to find new voices within new expressive dimensions and constraints… Because in an ever-changing world, sometimes the only way to say something true is to say something new. Or to say something old in a new way.”

Watch the following videos to see how Robson and Esparza have combined contemporary technology with formal constraints to give unique voice and shape to their respective work.

Polluted Art: Gilberto Esparza’s Fuel Cell Symphony
Gilberto creates a futuristic symphony made from plastic tubes, an iPad and bacteria.

Recycling Plastic into Art with Aurora Robson
Robson asked TED attendees to give her the plastic packaging from their gift bags, which she used as a medium to create an ethereal, floating sculpture.

Often times, the best way to to get a sense of your data is to look at it. A bunch of of numbers or words might not mean anything sitting within a table, but they start to make a lot more sense when they’re turned into a chart. In fields like mass cytometry, though, where doctors might want to analyze dozens of biological markers for each of tends of thousands of cells in a tissue sample, creating an easy-to-understand chart is easier said than done.

That’s why a group of researchers from Columbia University and Stanford University developed an algorithm that can do just that, turning those cells into something that resembles your social graph. This lets researchers see how the various cells are related to each other so they know , for example, where to focus cancer treatment and what to track as that treatment progresses.

The idea of representing large or complex data as a graph is nothing new, but it has taken on more prominence thanks to the rise of social media and those ubiquitous social graphs that map out who’s connected to whom. As we highlighted recently, however, graph analysis is becoming more popular outside the realm of social networks, and is being applied to problems that are more complex than just figuring out simple relationships within a network. In cases such as medical research, especially, graphs can provide a very effective way of seeing how potentially hundreds of thousands of data points spanning perhaps hundreds of variables are similar to each other.

That’s exactly what the team at Columbia and Stanford has done with a new algorithm that they’ve demonstrated within the realm of mass cytometry. According to a press release announcing the research (which is available via paid download at Nature Biotechnology):

“The method, called viSNE (visual interactive Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), is based on a sophisticated algorithm that translates high-dimensional data (e.g., a dataset that includes many different simultaneous measurements from single cells) into visual representations similar to two-dimensional ‘scatter plots’ ….

“The viSNE software can analyze measurements of dozens of molecular markers. In the two-dimensional maps that result, the distance between points represents the degree of similarity between single cells. The maps can reveal clearly defined groups of cells with distinct behaviors (e.g., drug resistance) even if they are only a tiny fraction of the total population. This should enable the design of ways to physically isolate and study these cell subpopulations in the laboratory.”

I assume they say similar to scatter plots because the algorithm is analyzing data across more than two dimensions, although the resulting chart is essentially the same (i.e., data points with similar characteristics will form clusters).

Whether or not they’re technically similar, this research seems similar to what Ayasdi is doing with its new data-analysis software based on a technique called topological data analysis. In both cases, though, the algorithms aren’t necessarily concerned with how data points interact with one another (like in network graphs), but rather what similar characteristics the points share. Ayasdi’s software has been used in cancer research, too, including on datasets spanning hundreds of patients and tens of thousands of variables.

In theory — although not likely in practice considering the complexity of the datasets medical researchers are dealing with — these approaches are similar to clustering approaches that are also popular among data scientists working with web companies. In areas such as e-commerce or email management, for example, where there isn’t a strong social element, companies can broadly break customers into distinct groups based on their behavior or interests.

Of course, curing cancer is a slightly more compelling — and difficult — goal than targeted advertising. The algorithms have to be precise so as not to miss similarities hidden within the mass of data. In the case of viSNE, the researchers say they’ve been able to spot small groups of cells (like 20 out of tens of thousands) that might be able to survive chemotherapy and increase the likelihood of a recurring tumor.

But we probably shouldn’t bee too quick to discount the work that web companies do as somehow less valuable than that of cancers researchers, for example. The big data era arguably started with the web, and web companies have generated some of the most important data-analysis techniques and technologies around today (see, for example, Google’s Jeff Dean, with whom I’ll be speaking at our Structure conference next month). As medical researchers start generating more and more data via cytometry, genome sequencing and even electronic medical records, it will be critical for individuals in all fields to keep track of what data scientists in other fields are doing and figure out how that might apply to their own work.

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Today’s Google Webmaster Help video gets a little philosophical. Matt Cutts takes on the question:

How can Google be confident with their SERPs, when relying on inherently subjective signals that influence which sites display (i.e. using human ‘quality raters’ to evaluate entire domains without the context of the search query itself)?

Cutts notes that the quality raters do in fact see the search itself, so they’re not seeing the results out of context.

On the philosophy that there are subjective signals, Cutts says, “I would agree with that. I think people who think that search engines are completely objective ignore the fact that every search engine has its own philosophy. Every search engine has its own set of algorithms, and those algorithms encode the ranking philosophy of that search engine, and some algorithms will veer more towards diversity. Some might show Wikipedia more. Every search engine is going to have different ideas about what the ideal set of search results is. And there is no scientifically provable best way to rank websites, so it’s always going to be a little bit subjective.”

“I think on the bright side, what we do is we try to listen to outside feedback,” he continues. “We have people like Amit Singhal who have been ranking and dealing with information retrieval for longer than a lot of SEOs have been alive (if you’re a young SEO, you know). He got his PhD in information retrieval, and a lot of us have been working on it for a long time, and so I think we have a relatively fine-tuned sense of when people will get angry, [or] of when they’ll be unhappy.”

“For example, with Panda, we were actually working on trying to spot low-quality content – the sort of thing that’s in between the quality team and the webspam team, and the sort of low quality that’s not quite spam, but almost spam,” he says. “We were working on that for months, and thinking about that for months before we started to see the larger public get a little bit angry about that. So I think we do have to say to ourselves, like any engineering organization, it’s possible for people to be wrong. It’s possible for us to show not enough domain diversity or too much domain diversity. That’s why it’s important that we listen to what people say from outside Google, and hear that feedback as well.”

On the Panda front, Cutts did reveal recently that the algorithm might be a little more forgiving, going forward, than it has been in the past. So there’s that.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform hasn’t exactly been the catalyst PC makers were looking for as sales continue to slide, but the new operating system does seem to be making some progress. IHS-owned market research firm Displaybank says that of the 46 million notebook computers that shipped during the first quarter this year, 4.57 million of them included touchscreens, Digitimes reported. That figure is good for a 10% share of the global market and is up a healthy 51.8% from the fourth quarter last year. Displaybank is impressed by touchscreen laptops’ relatively quick penetration considering how young the market is, but it remains to be seen whether or not Microsoft’s new platform and the touchscreens that come along with it will help struggling PC makers rebound.

The very first fully 3D printed gun – The Liberator – is now out on the Internet despite the State Department having the original files removed. So naturally, people are going to start making their own variations of the 3D printed handgun to improve its efficiency.

Forbes’ Andy Greenberg reports that a Wisconsin engineer going by the name of “Joe” has created his own 3D printed gun called the Lulz Liberator. The name comes from the 3D printer it was made with – the $1,725 Lulzbot. One plastic barrel survived eight shots, and they were able to fire off one more from a new barrel before nightfall.

Here’s a short video showing the test firing:

What makes this particular model more interesting is that it was printed on a hobbyist 3D printer. The original Liberator from Defense Distributed was printed on an $8,000 industrial 3D printer. The eventual goal of The Liberator project was to make it possible for hobbyists to print their own guns, but it seems that “Joe” was able to beat them to the punch.

Of course, there are some differences between the Lulz Liberator and The Liberator that must be taken into account. For starters, the Lulz Liberator uses metal screws to hold the gun together instead of the plastic pins found in the original Liberator. That could explain the stability, but Joe has another idea in mind – the plastic he used is just better. He claims that the generic ABS plastic used in hobbyist 3D printers is stronger than the official name brand ABS plastic used in industrial Stratasys printers.

Whatever the case may be, “Joe” is continuing work on something that makes a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. He’s not the only one either. Over 100,000 people downloaded the original Liberator CAD files and even more are accessing it on sites like The Pirate Bay. These people are already more than happy to share their handiwork with the world.

The Seattle Times reported this week that Seattle Seahawks backup quarterback Josh Portis was arrested on May 5 for suspicion of DUI.

The NFL player was reportedly stopped on the evening of Cinco de Mayo for speeding. The state patrol officer who stopped the athlete stated that Portis smelled of alcohol. Portis was arrested, and at least one blood test later showed that he had a blood alcohol content (BAC) of .092, slightly higher than Washington State’s legal limit of .08.

Portis is scheduled to appear at a court hearing on May 28. The DUI charge is a misdemeanor. Neither Portis nor the Seahawks have officially commented on the arrest.

This is not Portis’ first run-in with the law. In 2010, while playing division II college football at California University of Pennsylvania, Portis was charged with theft by unlawful taking, receiving stolen proberty, forgery, and access device fraud for using a stolen credit card. He was caught after signing up for a mall-store rewards card using his real name.

Portis was signed by the Seahawks in 2011 as an undrafted free agent. He was cut from the team the following year, but as of April he has now been re-signed to a two-year contract with the team.

(Image courtesy Jeffrey Beall/Wikimedia Commons)

Christian Bale is sporting a new look these days, and while he’s the kind of actor who will lose massive amounts of weight for a role–think “The Machinist”, for which he lost 63 pounds–that doesn’t mean we’re used to his sudden changes.

Bale was spotted coming through LAX with his family recently and was almost unrecognizable with his shaved head and heavier physique. The actor has been filming scenes for the upcoming film “American Hustle”, which also stars Amy Adams and Robert De Niro.

The 39-year old has undergone several bodily changes over the years and will do pretty much anything necessary for the role, including gaining and losing weight rapidly and putting on lean muscle for films like “The Dark Knight”. He’s never speculated much on the health consequences for the extremes he goes to, however, saying of his weight loss for “The Machinist”, “I had what could be called a kind of stupid feeling of invincibility, like, ‘Oh I can do it. I can manage it.’ ”

Image: Splash News

Bale and Amy Adams in “American Hustle”

Bale in “The Machinist” and “Batman Begins”

The big day is almost here. Microsoft reveals the new Xbox at an event held on its Redmond, Wash.-based campus tomorrow, and speculation runs rampant around the web. We do not even know the name of this next-generation console, let alone what capabilities the device will come with.

However, if you can not wait for the news stories to break then there is good news if you should happen to be a Windows Phone 8 user. The software giant announces a special app for its smartphone operating system that enables users to watch the event live right from wherever they happen to be — which will be the workplace for many. Sorry employers.

“If you have a @WindowsPhone 8 device, download this special app to watch the #XboxReveal event tomorrow”, announces Xbox Live chief Larry Hryb on Twitter.

The app, so far, is successful, with a five-star rating and positive comments such as Jeremy’s — “glorious idea! You should evolve this to be a standard live stream app that you can use for all of Microsoft’s various events in the future”. For the sake of the company, let us hope it is still this popular after the event.

So what do all of you expect to see tomorrow? Will it truly be an “always-on” device? What will Microsoft call its new entry into the gaming console market? When will the company release it? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Image Credit: Christos Georghiou/Shutterstock

Here’s a frustrating headline from Minneapolis/St Paul Business Journal:

Target goes tech-hunting in San Francisco

Why aren’t they looking in Minnesota? Here’s the news…

Target Corp. has opened an office in San Francisco, where it plans to scout for tech talent to build its e-commerce and mobile technology efforts.

Reuters reports that Target had hired David Newman to run its Technology Innovation Center, which will seek out other tech companies that can help Target’s tech ventures, like speeding up its website or improve the shopping experience for smartphone-wielding customers already in its stores.

A good friend and definite tech talent moved to San Francisco a couple of years ago. So I know why. He’s had more opportunities there – with established and startup companies. He moved there because he knew he’d learn more, earn more and have greater opportunities. (I’m not sure he realized that earning more might be offset by such a rising cost of living!) At the end of the day, he is a tech talent from Minnesota and he was drawn West. And his migration is part of why it makes sense that a company wanting to tap into such talent would look West. It’s where the talent goes.

I guess what I’m asking is how Minnesota can build the talent – and perhaps more importantly the reputation as a place to go for tech talent? I think programs like Thomson Reuters working with youth on programming skills helps. I think communities, such as Fergus Falls have done a good job marketing themselves as a great place to telework – but it seems like a concerted statewide effort to bolster efforts to improve and promote our local tech skills would help keep Minnesota companies from going to San Francisco to find tech talent.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is going before Congress on Tuesday to defend his company’s tax-paying practices. On Monday, the company published his planned testimony, including his recommendations for “a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax system.” Cook will argue that his general suggestions for an overhaul will benefit the economy by encouraging U.S.-based companies like his own to bring more of their foreign profits back to their accounts in the U.S.

Cook will call for a revenue-neutral reform of the corporate tax code that does away with all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and establishes a “reasonable” tax on companies’ earnings from overseas. It’s not in the planned testimony, but in an interview last week, Cook made it clear that he does not believe that a tax rate of zero is a reasonable number. In his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations, he will say that Apple supports this simplification of the tax code despite the likelihood that it will mean Apple’s overall corporate taxes will go up. The current corporate tax system “applies industrial era concepts to a digital economy” and “undermines U.S. competitiveness,” Apple believes.

Before Cook gets into his specific suggestions for fixing how U.S. businesses are taxed on foreign earnings, he’s going to spend most of his time going over why he’s being called to testify in the first place: Apple’s accounting methods. Apple keeps at least $100 billion in foreign earnings outside of the IRS’s grasp because it doesn’t wish to pay the 35 percent tax it would incur by bringing that money home. Many other businesses follow similar practices.

According to the published testimony, Cook will going into detail about how the company accounts for profits earned in the U.S., how investment in its foreign assets is taxed, how it shares R&D costs with an Irish subsidiary and more. (It’ll probably be a snoozefest for everyone except those who get a thrill out of spreadsheets.) Most of it is Cook on the defensive, explaining how what Apple does is within legal limits. Cook plans to assure the committee it’s not cheating on its taxes with any special tricks and “does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.”

He will underscore his point about Apple being on the up and up by laying out how much the company pays in taxes. Last year it paid $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. and this year, Cook has said it will pay $7 billion.

Tuesday’s testimony will be Cook’s first appearance before Congress. The company’s tax practices came to light a year ago when the New York Times highlighted some of the methods Apple has used to keep its overall taxes at a minimum.

Update 2:43 p.m. PT: Later on Monday the Senate released the results of its own investigation into the Apple’s tax-paying practices. It found that Apple’s convoluted system of subsidiaries has allowed it to avoid paying $44 billion in U.S. taxes over the last four years. However, it also noted that Apple did not break any U.S. law in doing so, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Expect many questions during Tuesday’s hearings about how the company uses its subsidiaries in Ireland to do this.

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Casting for Season 2 of Netflix’s breakout hit House of Cards is currently underway in Maryland.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley recently announced that the show had returned to production in the state, as producers take advantage of a tax credit it offers to film productions.

On Tuesday, O’Malley was hanging out on set:

On set at @houseofcards Season 2 – a great #Maryland film industry / @netflix production creating 5,700 jobs twitter.com/GovernorOMalle…

— Martin O’Malley (@GovernorOMalley) May 14, 2013

Great visit w/ Cast & Crew of @houseofcards – agree w/ @kevinspacey, MD is ‘without question, Hollywood East.’ twitter.com/GovernorOMalle…

— Martin O’Malley (@GovernorOMalley) May 14, 2013

Thanks for visiting the set @governoromalley. Informative @baltimoresun piece detailing Maryland’s film tax incentive bit.ly/19u8t0c

— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) May 15, 2013

He caught up with House of Cards star Kevin Spacey again on Saturday:

Great seeing @kevinspacey at the @preaknessstakes. Film & horses: two great economic boosts for MD. twitter.com/GovernorOMalle…

— Martin O’Malley (@GovernorOMalley) May 18, 2013

Spacey, by the way, apparently wore a ring from the show at Preakness:

If you’ve watched House of Cards you will know all about the ring I’m wearing at Preakness. If not – you should watch. Its Francis’s ring.

— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) May 19, 2013

On Saturday, according to the Baltimore Sun, about a thousand people showed up at the Bel Air Reckord Armory for a casting call for the show. David Anderson reports:

“It was a great cross section of people, I think, that will allow us to depict all walks of life in Washington, D.C.,” local casting director Kimberly Skyrme said.

Skyrme, who is the owner of Kimberly Skyrme Casting of University Park in Prince George’s County, and her staff took headshots and the resumes, and spent several minutes speaking with hundreds of men, women and children who came through the Armory gymnasium throughout the day Saturday.

While a release date for the second season has not yet been set, fans will be happy to know that the ball is indeed rolling. In the meantime, they can expect more good stuff coming from Netflix. Later this week, Arrested Development will finally make its long-awaited return as a Netflix-exclusive.

Meanwhile, fans of Netflix’s most recent original show, Hemlock Grove, are eagerly awaiting a second season.

House of Cards Season 1 will hit DVD on June 11th.

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This year, just before the Super Bowl, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco (the self-proclaimed best quarterback in the NFL) stated that holding the Super Bowl in non-domed venues where the weather is cold is “retarded.” He immediately took his words back, calling it “stupid” instead, but the word had been said.

Flacco issued a public apology on Super Bowl media day, saying it was “a bad choice of words.” This week, the Ravens’ starting quarterback is going even further.

The Special Olympics of Maryland this weekend held a “Casino Night” to promote the Special Olympics and related organizations. At the event, Flacco and his teammates Gino Gradkowski and Ed Dickson signed a pledge not to use the word retarded. The Facebook post:

The pledge is part of the “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign, which seeks raise awareness that the words retard and retarded are seen by many as “dehumanizing and hurtful.” The campaign is a joint effort by the Special Olympics and Best Buddies International.

(Image courtesy Keith Allison/Wikimedia Commons)