The blogging platform allows users to add content including images, videos, links, and audio to short-form blog posts.

In a post on its developer blog, Facebook noted Tumblr’s use of open graph action verbs posted, reblogged, liked, and replied, and its aggregations of most recent post, likes, recent likes, recent posts, and recent reblogs. The blog post continued:

Tumblr associates a photo with each post published to timeline and news feed, creating more attractive stories for friends.

Tumblr uses the message property for personal messages on the post, reblog, and reply actions to show more relevant content to friends.

Tumblr provides clear messaging about what activity is posted to timeline and simple controls to help users determine what is shared on Facebook.

AllFacebook

It’s called the Nopalea and it is one of the most interesting and exciting drinks on the market today.  Without going into too much detail, all I will say is that it helps inflammation to a major degree.  If you’re someone who suffers from inflation on a daily basis, you really need to make sure and take care of this problem because it can lead to cancer and other sorts of autoimmune diseases.  Without proper care, inflammationcan really take control of your life and grind it to a halt in a matter of weeks.  Simply Give it a try and you will see exactly how well it works for you and your family.  It doesn’t even take too much effort, just drink it down and you’ll see the effects happen in just a matter of minutes.

When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

“The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.

Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug as well.

In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But, when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.

One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face said: “About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating.”

The police chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is colorblind. Other officials elsewhere have said similar things.

A wave of such attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal justice system.

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.

Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame the hoodlums.

These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser known people in the media, in educational institutions and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing a favor to blacks. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.

These others extend beyond whites. Asian American school children in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when Asian American youngsters are beaten up by their black classmates.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

President Obama continued his call for taxpayer-funded student loan breaks this week, while conservative lawmakers questioned expansion of the federal government’s role in subsidizing loans for higher education. The two main issues on the table are an extension of the interest rate cap on existing loans and the much larger Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, otherwise known as H.R. 4170. The reasoning behind both issues is that student loan debt is too high and the debt is bad for the debtors and for the economy at large. But before constituents support either proposal, lawmakers should answer how the measures will be funded.

How much will the measures cost?

While it is true that the debt owed by students and parents is extraordinarily large at this time, most citizens understand that debt is not just some bad thing that we can magically make disappear. Just as in a bankruptcy, when debt is absolved the creditor loses. In this case, the creditors are private lenders and the American taxpayers.

Extending the artificially low interest rate for an extra year, a measure both Obama and Romney support, will cost the government approximately $ 6 billion. The Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, which would allow many debtors to escape their student loans without ever paying a dime, will cost untold billions, perhaps trillions of dollars.

Whose responsibility is student debt?

Rep. Hansen Clarke (D) made his case for H.R. 4170 last week, arguing that we have an implied social contract that says, “If you study hard and work hard, you’ll have a steady middle-class income and a stable career.” On the contrary, the student loan crisis does not come down to an implied social contract. It actually all revolves around very real legal contracts, the kind that people sign when they agree to borrow money to purchase a product and pay back that money with interest over a period of time. Student loans are issued for the purchase of an education, not to guarantee a good job or a great salary.

H.R. 4170 is a bailout for people who financed their education through government backed loans and no longer wish to pay. Students may have chosen their major poorly or invested in an overpriced university, but they got the education they chose. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) of North Carolina recently said, “I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $ 200,000 of debt or even $ 80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.”

How does this bill affect future students?

Besides imposing the debts of today’s students on future taxpayers, the proposed student loan relief measures could also have the scary effect of freezing the future student loan market. That could spell disaster for higher education and the next generation of students. If, by any chance, student loans are still available in the future, why would any students choose to pay their tuition and fees upfront? Under the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, students who already worked their way through college, paying as they went, are essentially penalized by being held responsible for the cost of their education while people who chose loans are not. This does little to encourage responsibility and frugality in tomorrow’s students.

Other solutions to consider

Some better ideas for the long term are to innovatively work to lower the cost of higher education, encourage low-interest refinancing opportunities to those with good payment histories, refuse loans to students attending bogus for-profit colleges and offer flexible college programs so students can work while attending school, thus reducing their dependency on student loans. These solutions could help turn around the student loan crisis without more bailouts piled on the taxpayers of tomorrow.

More by Tavia:
How Moms Can Have it All through Student Loan Forgiveness
Conservatives aim to lower tuition without raising taxes
College football spending: How much is too much?

Most Recent – Education – Voices from Yahoo!

The phones will be in a case equipped with a barcode scanner, similar to the Linea Pro cases that Apple uses at its retail stores. The phones will scan barcodes on paper tickets, as well as digital barcodes on smartphones. The MBTA commuter rail in Boston is adopting a similar system for smartphone ticketing.

By late summer, 1,700 conductors will be using the devices on Amtrak trains across the country, the company said.

With the new system, passengers will be able to print tickets or load a special bar code on their smartphone screens for conductors to scan, and conductors will be able to keep track of passengers on board, Amtrak said.

“You don’t even need to print the document and bring it with you,” said Matt Hardison, chief of sales distribution at Amtrak, who helped plan the iPhone program. “We’ve made a number of important improvements for both our customers and Amtrak, all in one fell swoop.”

The Times notes that Amtrak’s ticketing system is long overdue for an upgrade. The prior ticketing process involved punching a hole in a paper ticket and physically transporting those tickets to a central location where the information was entered in a database. Among other things, conductors couldn’t keep track of how many empty seats were on a train and customers needed to get their paper tickets cancelled and reissued if they wanted to change to a different train.

Amtrak does have an iPhone app that allows riders to book tickets, check train status and schedules, and more. Amtrak eTickets can currently be purchased within the app for 4 routes, with the entire Amtrak system rolling out the ticketing scheme during 2012.

Amtrak for iPhone is available free on the App Store. [Direct Link]

MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors – Front Page

By KATHY MATHESON

The Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — If the world ends on Dec. 21, 2012 — as some believe the Maya predicted — that leaves plenty of opportunity to see a new exhibit that examines the civilization’s ancient kingdoms, intricate calendar systems and current culture.

Experts at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia apparently give little credence to the apocalypse myth, considering the show runs through early 2013. But they say the legend, which has been perpetuated in pop culture through disaster movies and sensational tabloid headlines, offers a chance to engage people about ancient and modern Maya society.

“Maya 2012: Lords of Time” features artifacts excavated from the historic Maya ruins of Copan in Honduras, including burial jewelry, food vessels and ceramic figures. Honduras President Porfirio Lobo Sosa is scheduled to cut the ribbon when the exhibit opens on Saturday.

The show also uses interactive displays to explain the culture’s glyph writing and sophisticated timetables. The upshot is that while it’s human nature to seek ancient insight into the current world, people should not interpret the Maya calendar as predicting a cataclysmic event.

“It’s just a turn of a cycle,” said curator Loa Traxler.

Regarded as one of the world’s greatest early societies, the Maya lived for centuries in parts of Mexico and Central America. Many of their iconic pyramids and other city remnants still stand in places like Copan, where 16 Maya kings ruled for about 400 years.

As early astronomers, the Maya devised various types of calendars by observing celestial movements. Their “Long Count” calendar begins in 3114 B.C. and marks time in roughly 394-year periods known as baktuns. Thirteen was a sacred number for the Maya, and some scholars believe the 13th baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

Penn Museum experts say it ends Dec. 23, but that then another calendar cycle will begin — not Armageddon.

Traxler said while it’s hard to trace the origin of the apocalypse prophecy, she described it as “a conflation of a lot of different ideas,” including Aztec lore, Judeo-Christian end-of-days rhetoric and millennial hype. (Remember Y2K?)

Honduran officials don’t seem concerned. Norma Cerrato, minister counselor of legal affairs for the country’s U.S. embassy, said during a recent exhibit preview that she hopes it encourages people to visit the actual ruins. The show includes replicas of large stone carvings too delicate or unwieldy to leave Copan, designated a world heritage site by the United Nations’ cultural agency.

“Regardless of what some may say about the December 2012 phenomenon, the people of Honduras are certain that this year provides us a unique opportunity to share a part of our history and culture with the world,” Cerrato said.

Mexico, too, has designed a tourism campaign around the 2012 date. It’s expected to bring an extra 12 million visitors to the country, possibly boosting tourism revenue by $ 14.6 billion, according to officials there.

Though the last independent Maya city was conquered by the Spanish in 1697, Traxler said about 7 million people currently identify as Maya. The exhibit ends with translated video interviews with a half-dozen Maya, some of whom are bemused by the hype.

Jose Huchim Herrera, a Yucatec Maya and archaeologist, said in a video that anyone talking about a 2012 catastrophe is clearly an outsider.

“The Maya say nothing,” he said. “The Maya are very peaceful. They are not worried.”

___

If You Go…

MAYA 2012 EXHIBIT: Through Jan. 13, 2013 at Penn Museum, 3260 South St., Philadelphia, http://www.penn.museum/sites/2012/. Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. Adults, $ 22.50, children 6-12, $ 16.50.

___

Follow Kathy Matheson at www.twitter.com/kmatheson

___

May 04, 2012 01:01 PM EDT

Copyright 2012, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Travel News

Goodreads.com is a website for book lovers everywhere. If you love to read, and if you love social networking, you should check out Goodreads. The website marries social networking and books in such a way that makes your friends’ reading progress easy to follow and makes it simpler than ever to find your next reading material.

What is Goodreads?

Goodreads is a social network for readers. Like Facebook or Twitter, it allows you to update statuses and share information. Unlike most popular social networks, Goodreads also allows you to show your friends your progress on the book you are reading and to write reviews for everything you’ve ever read. You can see and comment on your friends’ reading progress, as well as create or find a book club group page in your area.

How do you use Goodreads?

Goodreads is simple and intuitive to use. When you sign up for an account, you will be able to find your friends by their email addresses or other social network accounts. Once you have some friends, every time you log in, you will see a timeline of their updates. You can see when they’ve added a book to a list, or when they’ve finished or reviewed a book. As soon as you have an account, you can also start looking for books you’ve read or that you want to read and add them to your lists. Once you finish reading a book, you can go to the book page and review it by giving it any number out of five stars. If you wish to write a longer review, you can do that, too.

Finding Books

If you have ever finished a book and needed a recommendation for what to read next, Goodreads has the answer. Finding your next book has never been easier. Now, not only can you search for individual books you know you want to read and add them to your “to read” list, but you can also easily see what your friends have recently read. When you search through friends’ reviews, you can also see who liked what books, making your selection process even easier. Adding books to your “to read” list can help you keep track of what you want to read next, and seeing what books your friends enjoyed – or didn’t enjoy – can help you populate your list of books to read next.

Goodreads on the Go

Like all good social networks, Goodreads has apps for mobile phones and ways to connect to your other social networks. You can get Goodreads for iPhone and Android by downloading them from the App Store or Android Market. You can also connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts so all of your networks know what you’re reading. Furthermore, you can connect your Amazon Kindle to automatically update your progress on your e-books. Last but not least, you can set up Goodreads to auto-publish book reviews to your WordPress or Blogger blog. Sharing your favorite books has never been easier.

Book Clubs

If you are looking for a book club that meets in your area, or one that meets virtually, you can search for that on Goodreads, too. Similarly, if you want to create a web space for your own book club, you can do that easily; just start a new group on Goodreads and update the page to show what books you’re reading. You can also create events to easily share with members where and when book club meetings and author readings are taking place.

Buzzle: Arts & Literature

Tech Support Guy Forums – Hardware

Have you ever had an experience where your dog starts barking and growling at what looks like nothing at all? Have you ever heard of this happening to one of your friends or family members? Have you ever seen other animals, perhaps wild ones, act erratically at certain times of the day or night? While scientific evidence of animals being able to sense supernatural activity is inconclusive, anecdotal evidence would suggest that animals can, in fact, see or sense ghosts.

Sensitivity in Dogs

Most anecdotal evidence will tell you that dogs are more sensitive to supernatural activity than other animals. In her 2009 book, Tails of the Afterlife, Peggy Schmidt details several stories of dogs and their owners who have experienced actions they cannot explain, save for the presence of the paranormal. This collection of stories is not only eerie and enough to get your spine tingling, they are also true. What accounts for dogs’ heightened sense of the strange and ghostly? Some say that, because dogs are able to hear and smell better than most other animals, they are more likely to detect a change in their surroundings. Others believe that, since dogs are social animals and were, at one point, bread to protect their owners, they may be more likely to react to a paranormal entity in order to signal or warn their human counterparts. Whatever the reason, many dog owners report irregular behavior that can be attributed to a haunted house or room.

Sensitivity in Other Animals

While dogs are by far the most sensitive to supernatural activity, or are by far most likely to vocally warn of a change in the atmosphere, cats are also very sensitive to changes in electromagnetic activity – a change in which can signal a ghostly presence – though they may be more likely to hide rather than make noise or otherwise warn their owners. Cats may also sit and watch something move across a room that you cannot see with your human eyes. As far as wild animals go, you may notice that birds start chirping uncontrollably or begin to fly in crazy patterns at certain times of the night. This can signal the presence of ghosts.

The Haunted on Animal Planet

If you have not experienced this yourself, but want to learn more, The Haunted is a television series on Animal Planet that shows the accounts of real people with pets who have sensed paranormal activity. On the show, you will first see interviews with the family or inhabitants of a house that is believed to be haunted. They will always talk about how their pet had started acting strangely upon moving into the house, and then they will detail other strange things that happened that could only be attributed to a haunting. Then, a team of ghost hunters comes into the house and you see their footage as they look for an explanation.

What to Do if Your Animals Act Erratically

Whether you believe it is due to paranormal activity or not, if your pet starts to act differently than normal, you should definitely consult a veterinarian. They are the only ones that can truly diagnose what is going on. Before you freak yourself out thinking your house has an unwelcome resident, talk to your vet and see if there could be another cause. If you have recently moved, it can take your pet some time to get used to the new noises and surroundings. If the behavior continues and you suspect an otherworldly culprit, though, there are plenty of books and websites to consult.

Buzzle: Animals & Pets

By JUAN ZAMORANO

The Associated Press

RIO HATO, Panama — Three Panamanian men were on their way home after a night of fishing, happy with their success, when the motor on their small open boat rattled and quit, leaving them adrift in sight of land, but too far out for their cell phones to work.

With nothing left to eat but the fish they caught and a few gallons of water, they drifted for 16 days, more than 100 miles from home, before they thought they must be saved.

Adrian Vasquez, 18, saw a huge white ship coming toward them. He waved a red sweater to get their attention, reaching high over his head, and dropping it low to his knees. Though he was near death, the skipper of the little panga, Elvis Oropeza Betancourt, 31, joined in, waving an orange life jacket.

“Tio, look what’s coming over there,” Vasquez recalled saying in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. “We felt happy, because we thought they were coming to rescue us.”

The ship didn’t stop, and the fishing boat drifted another two weeks before it was found. By then, Vasquez’s two friends had died.

“I said, ‘God will not forgive them,’” Vasquez recalled. “Today, I still feel rage when I remember that.”

That same day, March 10, birdwatchers with powerful spotting scopes on the promenade deck of the luxury cruise ship Star Princess saw a little boat adrift miles away. They told ship staff about the man desperately waving a red cloth.

On Thursday, Princess Cruises, based in Santa Clarita, Calif., said a preliminary investigation showed that passengers’ reports that they had spotted a boat in distress never made it to Capt. Edward Perrin or the officer on duty.

If it did, the company said, the captain and crew would have altered course to rescue the men, just as the cruise line has done more than 30 times in the last 10 years. The company expressed sympathy for the men and their families.

The fishermen had set out for a night of fishing Feb. 24 from Rio Hato, a small fishing and farming town on the Pacific coast of Panama that was once the site of a U.S. Army base guarding the Panama Canal. There are plans for a new airport to bring in tourists. Vasquez had lost his job as a gardener at a local hotel, and Oropeza invited him to come fishing to make a little money. The night before, they had no luck, so they were very happy to have a load of fish to sell, Vasquez said.

By the time they started to drift, Adrian had eaten his lunch of rice and beef. They only had five gallons of water to start with, and much of that was gone. There was raw fish to eat, but no one liked it very much, and it soon rotted after the ice melted in the coolers. Sometimes Vasquez went over the side to probe passing rafts of debris, and sometimes came up with coconuts for them to eat. At one point, they caught a turtle, but decided they couldn’t eat it and put it back in the water. As they were, they found a jug of water that they drank “with tremendous anxiety.”

One night they saw a ship far in the distance, and lit a rag on a stick that they waved, but the ship didn’t come for them.

On the Star Princess, birdwatcher Jeff Gilligan from Portland, Ore., was the first to spot the boat, something white that looked like a house.

When Judy Meredith of Bend, Ore., looked through the scopes, she could plainly see it was a small open boat, like the kinds they had seen off Ecuador. And she could see a man waving what looked like a dark red T-shirt.

“You don’t wave a shirt like that just to be friendly,” Meredith said. “He was desperate to get our attention.”

Barred from going to the bridge herself to notify the ship’s officers, Meredith said she told a Princess Cruises sales representative what they had seen, and he assured her he passed the news on to crew.

The birdwatchers said they even put the representative on one of the spotting scopes so he could see for himself.

Meredith went to her cabin and noted their coordinates from a TV feed from the ship, booted up her laptop and emailed the U.S. Coast Guard what she had seen. She said she hoped someone would get the message and help.

She sent a copy to her son. When she returned to the promenade deck, she could still see the boat.

But nothing happened. The ship kept going. And the little boat with the waving men disappeared.

“We were kind of freaking out, thinking we don’t see anything else happening,” Meredith said.

Gilligan could no longer bear to watch.

“It was very disturbing,” he said. “We asked other people, ‘What do you think we should do?’ Their reaction was: ‘Well, you’ve done what you could do.’ Whether something else could have been done, that’s a bit frustrating to think about.”

After Oropeza and Fernando Osario died, Vasquez was eventually picked up by a fishing boat off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, more than 600 miles from where they had set out.

Vasquez said he slipped their bodies into the sea after they began to rot in the heat. Before he was rescued, a rainstorm gave him fresh water to drink, helping him survive. Throughout the ordeal, the thought about his eight brothers, and never gave up hope.

Safe at home, Vasquez said he recognized their boat, the Fifty Cents, from the photos Gilligan had taken with his 300 mm lens.

“Yes, that’s it. That’s it. That is us,” he said. “You can see there, the red sweater I’m waving and, above it is the sheet that we put up to protect us from the sun.”

Vasquez mentioned the ship in his first statement to Panamanian authorities when he returned to his country.

Back at home in Oregon, Meredith couldn’t sleep, wondering what happened to the men. Reading a news story about a Panamanian rescued off Ecuador after 28 days in an open boat, she figured that was the boat they had seen. She pestered Princess Cruises, the Coast Guard, and even the Panamanian embassy.

“We were all just sick about it, and just wanted to believe the ship notified someone,” she said.

__

Barnard contributed to this report from Grants Pass, Ore.

___

April 20, 2012 03:46 PM EDT

Copyright 2012, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Travel News