The US Secret Service is seeking a Twitter sarcasm detector.

The agency has put out a work tender looking for a software system to analyse social media data.

The software should have, among other things, the “ability to detect sarcasm and false positives”.

A spokesman for the service said it currently used the Federal Emergency Management … Read More → "US Secret Service seeks Twitter sarcasm detector"

The number of core factual errors in this guys rants leave the viewers more miss-informed than I would have thought possible.

First he frames wireline as industry created monopoly, when in fact it’s a regulatory created monopoly. EVERY city government grants a monopoly for utilities, so no competition is possible. And many/most of those cities ask for payments in return, in effect taxing their consituents for the privelege of no competition, and setting agreed rates with the government leaders.

Second he completely ignores the reality that bandwidth hogs doing high volume streaming video … Read More → "The number of core factual error"

In our search for extraterrestrial life, we must first figure out where to look. With so many new planets being discovered every day, we start with determining which ones are likely to have liquid water, that being the thing we believe that makes a planet likely to support life. We also have to look at the planet’s composition (liquid, solid or gas), along with its density and size. Finally, does that planet … Read More → "Milky Way may have 100 million planets that can sustain life"

In their mid-20th century heyday, chemistry sets inspired kids to grow up to be scientists. Intel founder Gordon Moore, for example, credits a chemistry set with sparking his lifelong interest in science (not to mention some pretty neat explosions along the way).

Chemistry sets seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years, but there’s a movement to bring them back—or at least recapture some of the unstructured experimentation … Read More → "Vintage chemistry sets show we used to be way more chill about chemicals"

Non-returning boomerangs have been used for at least 20,000-30,000 years, with the oldest known example carved from a mammoth’s tusk. These non-returning boomerangs were used for hunting and were carved for straight flight and to stay in the air as long as possible when thrown correctly. The hunter was then able to throw the primitive boomerang great distances and hit an animal … Read More → "How boomerangs work"

Photographer Josef Hoflehner and his son Jakob captured some impressive photographs of Maho Beach, which is located next to the runway of Princess Juliana International Airport on the Dutch side of the Caribbean island of Saint Maarten.

Taken over the course of four visits between 2009 and 2011, the photographs show planes descending thrillingly close over the heads of beach-goers and cars on roads. They are now compiled in a book … Read More → "Breathtaking photographs of planes descending thrillingly close to land"

Ed Yong has a great critique of the recent paper that suggests it’s because latent sexism leaves us assuming lady hurricanes will be kinder and gentler. In it, he mentions an alternate answer to the above question that made me smile in its simplicity.

via Boing Boin</ … Read More → "Why do hurricanes with female names have a higher death count?"

Picture Mildred, Agnes, Ethel and Blanche. Perhaps you imagine the Golden Girls or your grandmother’s poker game. These are names for women of age, wisdom and distinction. The median living Mildred in the United States is now 78 years old.

Now imagine Madison, Sydney, Alexa and Hailey. They sound like the starting midfield on a fourth-grade girls’ soccer team. And they might as well be: the median American females … Read More → "How to tell someone’s age by their name"

An employee uses hot air to stick outer panels on a soccer ball inside the factory that makes official match balls for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Image by Sara Farid/Reuters 

With the 2014 FIFA World Cup just days away from kick-off in Brazil, Reuters took the opportunity to tour the Pakistani factory that makes the official match balls for the tournament, in Sialkot, Punjab province. 

… Read More → "A fascinating look inside the factory that makes official World Cup match balls"

A group of citizen scientists has successfully established communication with an inactive NASA spacecraft in an attempt to breathe new scientific life into a more than 35-year-old agency mission.

NASA signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with Skycorp, Inc., in Los Gatos, California, on May 21 that allows the company to contact, and possibly command and control, NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft as … Read More → "Citizen scientists contact vintage spacecraft"