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Lion tacos, anyone?

If that sounds weird to you, you’re not alone. A Florida restaurant is dealing with some major backlash this week after word got out about their exotic dishes…one in particular.

“Our whole thought process of bringing the exotic meats to the Tampa Bay area was to give people the opportunity to try different things that they normally wouldn’t get to try,” said manager Brad Barnett.

Taco Fusion also serves up meals made with bison, shark, ostrich, gator, gazelle, rabbit, duck, camel and kangaroo. Future menu items will include iguana, bear and zebra. But the lion meat is what has gotten so many people upset, with many sending threatening emails to the restaurant’s owner demanding that he stop selling the dish.

“We have as much right for everybody to try it as you have as much right to say that you don’t like it,” Barnett said. “If you guys are mad now, just wait till you see what we do next.”

With just one lion taco going for arond 35 bucks, one would think the demand would be low enough for the restaurant to discontinue the menu item, but the owner, Ryan Gougeon, says customers are clamoring for the meat. The restaurateurs want everyone to know that it comes from a vendor that raises the cats just for consumption.

“It is not like someone is pulling up in the back with a truck with a carcass from the Serengetti and saying, “Hey I got this meat! Do you want to buy it?” No, it is all from approved sources,” said Barnett.

Still, those in favor of protecting the big animals say it’s just not right. Jeff Kremer with Big Cat Rescue says, “We are hoping they make the humane decision and take it off the menu permanently they are still going to exploit other creatures or sell them for a novelty but you have to draw the line somewhere and the time to speak up is right now.”

KPLC 7 News, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Back in July, the GSM Association’s research arm Wireless Intelligence recorded only a measly 27 million LTE subscribers worldwide, most of them concentrated in the U.S., Japan and Korea. Well, a lot happened in nine months. Wireless Intelligence found that global LTE connections grew four times that number to 100 million in that timeframe.

Most of those connections are still in the U.S., Korea and Japan, but Australia joins the list of early LTE adopters. Those four countries account for 90 percent of LTE connections, and within their borders four out of five people are in LTE coverage area, WI found.

Today there are 160 LTE networks in 70 countries, but WI predicts that in 2017 that number will grow to 400 networks in 120 countries hosting a total of 900 million subscribers.

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The Arctic is rapidly changing. While the Arctic region has experienced warming and cooling cycles over millennia, the current warming trend is unlike anything previously recorded. As sea ice diminishes, ocean resources are more readily accessible. This accessibility, along with recent scientific estimates indicating the presence of significant energy and other resources, have inspired strong interest for new commercial initiatives in the region, including energy production, increased shipping, scientific research, tourism, and related infrastructure development. As an Arctic nation, the United States must be proactive and disciplined in addressing changing regional conditions and in developing adaptive strategies to protect its interests. An undisciplined approach to exploring new opportunities in this frontier could result in significant harm to the region, to our national security interests, and to the global good.

Today, we are releasing the National Strategy for the Artic Region. Through this strategy, we are setting the United States Government’s strategic priorities for the Arctic region. These priorities are intended to position the United States to respond effectively to emerging opportunities – while simultaneously pursuing efforts to protect and conserve this unique environment.

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The Obama administration’s open data mandate announced on Thursday was made all the better by the unveiling of the new ScraperWiki service on Friday. If you’re not familiar with ScraperWiki, it’s a web-scraping service that has been around for a while but has primarily focused on users with some coding chops or data journalists willing to pay to have someone scrape data sets for them. Its new service, though, currently in beta, also makes it possible for anyone to scrape Twitter to create a custom data set without having to write a single line of code.

Taken alone, ScraperWiki isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s part of a huge revolution that has been called the democratization of data. More data is becoming available all the time — whether from the government, corportations or even our own lives — only it’s not of much use unless you’re able to do something with it. ScraperWiki is now one of a growing list of tools dedicated to helping everyone, not just expert data analysts or coders, analyze — and, in its case, generate — the data that matters to them.

After noticing a particularly large numbers of tweets in my stream about flight delays yesterday, I thought I’d test out ScraperWiki’s new Twitter search function by gathering a bunch of tweets directed to @United. The results — from 1,697 tweets dating back to May 3 — are pretty fun to play with, if not that surprising. (Also, I have no idea how far back the tweet search will go or how long it will take using the free account, which is limited to 30 minutes of compute time a day. I just stopped at some point so I could start digging in.)

First things first, I ran my query. Here’s what the data looks like viewed in a table in the ScraperWiki app.

Next, it’s a matter of analyzing it. ScraperWiki lets you view it in a table (like above), export it to Excel or query it using SQL, and will also summarize it for you. This being Twitter data, the natural thing to do seemed to be analyzing it for sentiment. One simple way to do this right inside the ScraperWiki table is to search for a particular term that might suggest joy or anger. I chose a certain four-letter word that begins with f.

Surprisingly, I only found eight instances. Here’s my favorite: “Your Customer Service is better than a hooker. I paid a bunch of money and you’re still…” (You probably get the idea.)

But if you read my “data for dummies” post from January, you know that we mere mortals have tools at our disposal for dealing with text data in a more refined way. IBM’s Many Eyes service won’t let me score tweets for sentiment, but I can get a pretty good idea overall by looking at how words are used. For this job, though, a simple word cloud won’t work, even after filtering out common words, @united and other obvious terms. Think of how “thanks” can be used sarcastically and you can see why.

Using the customized word tree, you can see that “thanks” sometimes means “thanks.” Other times, not so much. I know it’s easy to dwell on the negative, but consider this: “worst” had 28 hits while “best” had 15. One of those was referring to Tito’s vodka and at least three were referring to skyline views. (Click here to access it and search by whatever word you want.)

Here’s a phrase net filtering the results by phrases where the word “for” connects two words.

Anyhow, this was just a fast, simple and fairly crude example of what ScraperWiki now allows users to do, and how that resulting data can be combined with other tools to analyze and visualize it. Obviously, it’s more powerful if you can code, but new tools are supposedly on the way (remember, this is just a beta version) that should make it easier to scrape data from even more sources.

In the long term, though, services like ScraperWiki should become a lot more valuable as tools for helping us generate and analyze data rather than just believe what we’re told. Want to improve your small business, put your life in context or perhaps just write the best book report your teacher has ever seen? It’s getting easier every day.

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Justin Bieber may be a youngster here in the states, but in South Africa he’s of legal drinking age…and he’s just fine with that.

The 19-year old “Believe” singer posted a photo of himself on Instagram earlier this week while he was enjoying a frosty beer with a friend, and the pic is now making its way around the web as fans get hold of it.

Bieber has spoken about his behavior being dissected by the media before, saying, “I’m young and I make mistakes. That’s part of growing up. I mess up sometimes. It’s part of growing up. I’m young and I want to have fun. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.”

Amid the sea of iPhone cases, camera mounts and iPad styluses that have flooded various crowd-funding sites in recent years, an interesting new project emerges. It’s name is Earl. Seattle, Wash.-based startup Sqigle is on a mission to build an Android tablet designed to keep users alive while the roam off the beaten path. It will feature a ruggedized exterior, an E Ink display, an integrated solar charger, 20-hour battery life, GPS and highly detailed topographic maps that will help users navigate various terrains while hiking, climbing and wandering. Squigle is seeking an ambitious $250,000 to fund the project, and it hopes to launch by August 2013. If the project meets its funding goal, the Earl will be available starting at $249 including 100k resolution topographic maps or $299 with both 100k and 24k resolution topographic maps. Earl can be preordered on the project’s site, which is linked below.

Watch this video on YouTube

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, President Obama today spoke to a group of women – including many moms – about the ways the Affordable Care Act is already helping millions of Americans like them.

"Women in particular now have more control over their own care than ever before," the President said. "And I’m pleased to be joined today by many women who wrote in to tell us what the Affordable Care Act means to them."

Carol was one of the women who wrote to the President, and today, she introduced him in the East Room. Carol's son, a 22-year-old college grad and traumatic brain injury survivor with a rare genetic lung disease, was able to stay on his family’s health insurance policy instead of being kicked off the plan this year. Finding coverage on his own would have been nearly impossible, as Carol wrote to the President: “Given his history, he would be virtually uninsurable under the old set of ‘rules.’  Instead of contemplating law school, all of his resources would have been channeled into somehow, somewhere, finding health insurance.”

Carol and her son are why the Affordable Care Act lets young people stay on their parent’s plan until they turn 26, President Obama said.

Alycia was also standing behind the President today.

"Alycia is the mother of Avey, who is a beautiful, sweet, 3-year-old girl who also happens to have Leukemia," he explained. "Imagine what that’s like for a parent. While you’re just figuring out how to take care of a baby, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to pay for expensive treatment that could save your baby’s life. 

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Researchers at the University of Tokyo have figured out that they can hook up moths to robotic vehicles, and get the flying insects to drive them. Not only did they get the moths to drive the vehicles, but they got them to drive the vehicles to the intended targets.

NPR ran a story on the paper about the experiment. Its abstract goes like this:

The reconstruction of mechanisms behind odour-tracking behaviours of animals is expected to enable the development of biomimetic robots capable of adaptive behaviour and effectively locating odour sources. However, because the behavioural mechanisms of animals have not been extensively studied, their behavioural capabilities cannot be verified.

In this study, we have employed a mobile robot driven by a genuine insect (insect-controlled robot) to evaluate the behavioural capabilities of a biological system implemented in an artificial system. We used a male silkmoth as the ‘driver’ and investigated its behavioural capabilities to imposed perturbations during odour tracking. When we manipulated the robot to induce the turning bias, it located the odour source by compensatory turning of the on-board moth. Shifting of the orientation paths to the odour plume boundaries and decreased orientation ability caused by covering the visual field suggested that the moth steered with bilateral olfaction and vision to overcome the bias. An evaluation of the time delays of the moth and robot movements suggested an acceptable range for sensory-motor processing when the insect system was directly applied to artificial systems. Further evaluations of the insect-controlled robot will provide a ‘blueprint’ for biomimetic robots and strongly promote the field of biomimetics.

The story received a bit of attention back in February, when the video was released, but is receiving some more this week, thanks to the NPR report.

[via NPR]

If I ever run into New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (unlikely as it might be) I will sure as hell let her know that she is absolutely right to be excited about what her paper did with Snow Fall, which in my opinion was one of the first truly post-tablet storytelling experiences. At the Wired Business conference in New York earlier this week, Abramson said:

“Snow Fall” is now a verb.  “Everyone wants to snowfall now, every day, all desks,” she said. Reporters are waiting for time to “Snow Fall” their bigger story.  She said that the story originated from the sports desk — and took “months and months and months” of time —  but Snow Fall-type projects can come from anywhere.

Snow Fall, in case you missed it, was a multimedia project that included a gripping six-part story by John Branch, one of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writers who was intrigued by the growing number of skiing fatalities. The stories were presented with interactive graphics, videos and bios of various snowboarders and skiers. It is brilliance personified and was rewarded with 2.9 million visits and 3.5 million page views within the first six days after publication. (The Times doesn’t reveal the total traffic it received since its release in December 2012.)

Snow Fall (and other such attempts) represent a great opportunity and the future for news organizations like The New York Times, especially as they are right now in a losing battle for attention with upstart competitors that include everyone from BuzzFeed to The Huffington Post. If you are the New York Times management, it is time to take a gamble: spend $25 million on creating 100 Snow Fall-like projects.

Money for something and clicks for free

In fact, it is important that our media brethren at the Times think even bigger than that, eventhough it would also mean taking a more prosaic, mercantile and business-like perspective to what they do.

They need to NOT think about Snow Fall as an add-on — as something that makes traditional content more web- or mobile/tablet-friendly — and instead treat it as a brand-new kind of media product that is created especially for the multiple device/many-screen world.

I have been involved with online publishing for a very long time — 18 years to be exact. And in that time I have seen the incumbent media make the same mistake again and again. They’ve often tried to adapt the content they’ve created for newspapers and magazines to the online world. And when they did embrace online, even then the online reporters were asked to do the same thing they did for the newspapers or the magazines.  (The Times, to its credit, published Snow Fall first online, and then in print three days later, which suggests it had a pretty clear understanding of the digital potential of a project like this.)

Yes Dorothy, the Internet is different

The internet is and will always be an immersive, interactive and communal platform. Many publishers continue to treat it like the old two-dimensional medium. Every time we have some major news events, such as the recent Boston tragedy, the social web brings the consumers of content into our newsrooms and makes them part of the process. It is one of the reasons why most of the big media still don’t get blogs. Sure, some writers like David Carr or Paul Krugman are an exception, but look at some of the Times blogs and you see they are just news stories (or features) retrofitted for the blog medium.

Blogging is a way of editing the world and presenting it to my community, and that means everything from photos, links, tweets and videos, in addition to sharing my raw thoughts and fully packaged features, scoops and even basic news. Every act of sharing tells you what I am interested in and what I am willing to learn and talk about.

There is a failture in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. It was one of the many reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily failed to impress me. It didn’t really invent a new form of storytelling for the tablet.

Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism — one that doesn’t sacrifice the best of our profession, but takes it by the scruff of its neck, and drags its bloated, aging body into the new world and revives it with a shot of adrenaline.

Mr. Excel meets Ms. Editor

However, that is only part of the story. The trick is not to get married to just the oohs-and-aahs of the Snow Fall, but to think of it as a business opportunity, much like the way Hollywood studios creatively monetize their blockbusters. My question is why can’t newspapers and magazine companies take the same approach and build a business model that actually factors in various opportunities that something like Snow Fall can offer?

So instead of starting with a newspaper story and adapting it to different formats, the Times should start with the Snow Fall. If you look at Snow Fall closely, you can see a cohesive approach to content, one that adapts and morphs to not only the medium of access, but to diverse business models — much like the movies.

From my own experience at magazines, I can tell you producing features isn’t cheap and can easily cost tens of thousand dollars, depending on the publication. The longer the lead time and higher the profile of the story, the bigger the costs. So from that perspective, spending some more on the post-tablet version of the feature shouldn’t break the bank.

The current editorial effort is to create something for a day or two of attention in the newspaper and hopefully for tens of thousands of pageviews. Why not start with the apps and e-readers (both paid), then follow up with the web version and then get to the newspaper. While apps and selling e-reader-oriented content might involve the Times learning new tricks, the company doesn’t need to change much for the latter two channels.

Blame my enteprenurial tendencies, but when I was experiencing Snow Fall, all I could see was stunning brand-advertising opportunities, that went beyond the dumb, commoditized advertising the Times is forced to put on its website. Why not embed a tasteful Land Rover ad or throw in one for Moncler? That is native advertising that actually allows organziations like the Times to live by their ethos and maintain the fidelity of their brand.

Hollywood, Baby

Now, let me explain why the Times can do it. And for that I will point to Hollywood again. One of the reasons why Hollywood studios succeed with the multi-tier approach to their “product” is because they do their best to ensure that they create an optimum experience. And they can do that with the right story, the right stars, the right production values and, most importantly, they have distribution. And gobs of money.

The Times and other big media companies have a lot of those same capabilities. They have great stars (real people, for god sake, are better stars than anything Hollywood can produce — see the Cleveland samaritan), they have great storytellers (editors and reporters, whose Pulitzers are testimony enough) and they have the ability to create the right production values (photographers, visual artists and designers). The Times also has a big audience – 35 million monthly visitors to their website in the U.S. alone, according to comScore – which means it has a lot of attention, which can be channeled effectively to promote new concepts.

Distribution Matters

Just as blockbuster movies get a lot of attention from media, Snow Fall got a lot of attention from the rest of the media community. Those millions of monthly visitors and lots of advertising space on print means distribution isn’t really a problem. And despite the financial headwinds, many of them — including the Times — still have a lot of money to try and finance a few dozen Snow Falls.

It isn’t clear how much money the Times spent on Snow Fall, but let’s just assume it was a small fortune. (Yes, I asked them and got this response: “We can’t disclose details about costs. Really, this is a newsroom effort. The business side works with the newsroom, of course, to provide the infrastructure and technology they need to tell stories in innovative ways.”)

And in exchange, it got a few million page views, but I am guessing they also built a nice backend infrastructure to create more such projects. As a result, the next Snow Fall is going to cost less, with most future spending going to the creative: words, photos, other multimedia elements and design.

So what will the Times (or someone like them) need to get it done? Simply put, a departure from the incumbent thinking, embracing today’s reality and re-imagining the work flow of a big city newspaper. In other words:

• Re-imagining its business model to factor in the reality of today’s world and forget the legacy of newsprint.
• Create a new breed of “producer” who can switch between Excel and content.
• Create a whole new breed of a journalist — one who has old-school values but also the ability to tell a story that works in many mediums of today.
• Build an editorial creative machine that works differently from a print-centric editorial group.

Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is their stock and trade. If the New York Times management were feeling bold, it would put $25 million to work on creating 100 other Snow Falls and basically change the reader’s expectations of what long-form digital content and journalism are in the new century.

So if you want to fight BuzzFeed and HuffPo, there you go, Jill!

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Amanda Bynes is now on probation.

According to a TMZ report, Bynes plead no contest to a charge of driving on a suspended license and received three years probation. She has also received a $300 fine for the offense.

The sentencing was the culmination of an entire year of driving-related offenses from the former Nickelodeon child actress. Her legal troubles began in March 2012, when she was cited for talking on her phone while driving. She followed that up with a D.U.I charge in April after rear-ending a police car in L.A. Later that year, Bynes was charged for two separate hit-and-run incidents and had her license revoked. She was caught driving on her suspended license just weeks later, the offense for which she is now on probation.

Bynes’ legal and personal troubles led to her representatives dropping her, with one of them calling her “uncontrollable.”

Since that time, Bynes has moved to New York on her own and is pursuing a career in fashion. She has been using her Twitter feed for self-promotion, tweeting out bizarre experiments with hair and makeup. Bynes even went so far as to tweet out topless pics of herself last week.

PNNL’s Sriram Krishnamoorthy is one of many scientists reaching for the next step in supercomputer evolution, the exascale computer. DOE has awarded him $2.5 million over five years to explore ways to advance exascale computing through their Early Career Research Program.

The top supercomputers nowadays work at the petascale level, performing in one hour what would take a typical laptop more than roughly 20 years to do. But as computer programs that help solve energy and environmental problems get more useful, they also get much bigger. Exascale computing seeks to solve problems that are about one thousand times bigger than what the top computers can do today.

That magnitude requires supercomputers to perform different parts of calculations simultaneously, sometimes on different kinds of computer hardware, and then put all the pieces back together on the fly. This computational style is called parallel computing and its complexity creates challenges such as making sure all the parts of the system are working as well as they can be. In addition, complex, multi-component calculations have more chances to err and crash. Krishnamoorthy has been studying ways to make computers better deal with these issues.

Currently, computational scientists must translate equations that work on conventional machines into computer language and a style that can be used by a parallel computer. Krishnamoorthy has begun to automate parts of this process. He has also created a set of tools that allows programmers to write code in modules that can be automatically matched to different computing platforms, making it easier to customize programs to different systems.

He has also improved how supercomputers handle errors that could make them crash. When a fault crops up, supercomputers return to the last good checkpoint. By creating programs that identify just the work lost due to a fault and only redo that portion, Krishnamoorthy has narrowed the amount of work that a supercomputer has to repeat. This can greatly improve the speed of science on supercomputers.

He will be using the new support from DOE to delve deeper into how parallel computing solves problems and making sure that the different pieces of the full calculation are working as efficiently as possible. After understanding when and where certain approaches work best in different programs and platforms, he will be testing how they will perform on the computer systems of the future.

When Mariah Carey teamed up with Miguel for the song “#Beautiful”, fans rejoiced. The video has swept the web, but whether that’s because everyone loves the song or because they want to catch a glimpse of the alleged “upskirt” shot remains to be seen.

We’re sure she’s just wearing nude undies. Well, pretty sure. I mean, it’s possible. Right?

Judge for yourself:

 

The latest update for Angry Birds Seasons will be available next week and will be called Abra-Ca-Bacon, Rovio announced today. The game will feature 30 new levels for players to conquer, as well as six additional levels that will be unlockable as players progress through the game. The biggest change with Abra-Ca-Bacon will be the introduction of a new gameplay mechanic called Portals. Just as the name suggests, Portals are secret entrances that can suck objects in at one end, and spit them out at the other end. The Portals aren’t just limited to your Angry Birds, as they can also propel Bad Piggies, blocks and other environmental objects.

The update will be available for download on May 16. You can see the portals in action in Rovio’s promo trailer after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: Angry Birds Seasons update called Abra-Ca-Bacon, coming next week

Gameloft replenished its massive fleet of games today by releasing Blitz Brigade to the Google Play Store, an online FPS.  The game is reminiscent of popular multiplayer games like Battlefield Heroes and Team Fortress, as users move about a map with other players, working together or against one another in a battle to the death.

Check out some more game details after the break, as well as the link to the Google Play Store and trailer video.

GIVE AN ONLINE BEATDOWN!

• Up to 12 players can battle online in multiplayer games
• 5 classes: Soldier, Gunner, Medic, Sniper, Stealth
• Control the battlefield in Domination mode
• Frag everyone from the opposing army in Deathmatch games
• Use 3 different vehicles for a tactical advantage in battle
• Fight with over 100 weapons, each made for a specific class
• Unique taunts and kill phrases for each character in the game
• Voice Chat to create your game plan in the heat of the action

HONE YOUR KILLER SKILLS IN TRAINING MISSIONS

• Complete 120 unique action-packed missions
• Learn to master each class’s specialized battle skills
• Pilot a Helicopter and rain death from above
• Hop into a Tank to steamroll the enemy army

It looks like this exciting, action-packed game is going to be a hit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Gameloft adds ‘Blitz Brigade’ FPS to Play Store, action-packed and fun-filled excitement

All Things D is reporting that Google has decided not to move forward with their own physical credit card. According to their sources, Google had planned to update Google Wallet with a physical card next week at Google I/O, but now sources are saying that those plans have changed a little and even though they do plan to update Google Wallet with new features, there are no plans for the debut of a Google credit card along with it.

Sources close to the matter said Google’s CEO Larry Page put an end to the project last week after a lackluster demo performance didn’t show any innovation.Those who had seen the card described it as a usual credit card, with the Google Wallet “W” in rainbow colors on top of a black background.  Google had hoped to use the credit card to gain more information about its customers spending habits, which would improve their ability to push ads to their customers.

This isn’t the first time Google has lost faith in a card. Back in October of last year they put the kibosh on the prepaid Google Wallet program.  So this is just one more thing to delete from Google I/O expectations.

Source: All Things D

Come comment on this article: Google cancels plans to unveil Google Wallet credit card at next week’s I/O

Microsoft has come out with a new attack-on-Google ad. You’re shocked right?

This time it’s an Office ad called “Google Docs isn’t worth the gamble,” where Google Docs (which you might know better these days as Google Drive) is somehow equated with a shady casino game in which Rob Schneider is the swindler. Yes, that Rob Schneider:

Now here’s Microsoft’s ad as hosted on Google’s YouTube:

Good timing, as Google Drive experienced a brief service disruption today.

As an added bonus, Pete Rose makes an appearance at the end to say that Google Docs is too big of a gamble for him. Get it?

It’s always nice to see Pete Rose in ads, but it’s hard to top this one:

Update: This one exists too:

Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s Kid.

So far the YouTube comments on that one consist of:

“Not realliy funny,” “Maybe why I identify with Google Docs so much,” and “racist”.