PJL: June 2014 (Part 2)

A European court in Amsterdam ruled Tuesday that Google must remove outdated or irrelevant personal information on individuals from its search results if requested, enshrining a right to be "forgotten." The court found that individuals have a right to control their private data and that they have the right to request that information be "forgotten" when the results show links information that is no longer accurate or relevant, the Associated Press reports. The advisory judgment stemmed from a Spanish case against Google, ruling that the search engine is responsible for the content that appears after a query, and that it is not just hosting it. It also found that Google must respond to legitimate requests to remove data, and that exceptions could be made when the information is relative to a public figure, especially a politician, and it would be deemed against the public interest to remove the information. The European Court of justice decision is a big setback for the U.S. tech giant, which just lost one of its landmark data privacy battles in Europe. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, welcomed the judgment. "Today's court judgement [sic] is a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans," she wrote on her Facebook page. "Big data need big rights."

Swiss artist H.R. Giger poses with two of his works at the art museum in Chur, Switzerland.

Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who haunted movie goers by creating Ridley Scott's Alien, died Monday at the age of 74. A representative from his museum told the Associated Press that he died from injuries sustained from a fall. Giger was born in Chur, Switzerland in 1940 and became famous for creating nightmarish landscapes and surreal creatures in Hollywood science fiction films. The sculptor, artist, and set designer began working in movies in 1975 on Alejandro Jodorowsky's uncompleted Dune remake, but came to prominence with the creation of the nightmarish creature in Alien (1979). Ridley Scott was inspired by Giger's book Necronomicon and hired the artist to work on the film. He later went on to work on films including Poltergeist II and Species. Here Giger is with his alien progeny: https://twitter.com/dantelechat/status/466132476415725568 He won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien and was named into the Science Fiction and Fantasy hall of Fame in 2013: [caption id="attachment_97331" align="alignnone" width="560"] PRESENTERS FARRAH FAWCETT AND HAROLD RUSSELL (R) WITH BEST VISUAL EFFECTS OSCAR WINNERS (2ND FROM L-R): H.R. GIGER, CARLO RAMBALDI, BRIAN JOHNSON, NICK ALLDER, DENYS AYLING ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images[/caption] Giger's work lived beyond the screen: [caption id="attachment_97326" align="alignnone" width="560"] Swiss artist H.R. Giger poses with two of his works at the art museum in Chur, Switzerland. AP[/caption] He even created monstrous microphone stands for the band Korn: [caption id="attachment_97328" align="alignnone" width="560"] Korn in Manchester, England. Shirlaine Forrest—Getty Images[/caption] Details on survivors and funeral arrangements haven't yet been released. [AP]

Visual artist H. R. Giger taking off face mask.

Apple's made strides in recent years toward making iOS kid-friendlier, but any parent who's handed their iPad or iPhone to their toddler, even for a few minutes, knows how touch and go things still are. One minute the child's happily dropping letters into words or words into sentences, the next they're clicking through Settings, enabling or disabling things they have no concept of, or maybe poking around your social networks, inadvertently deploying strings of gibberish. Give "8 Ways to Toddler-Proof Your iPhone or iPad" a read if you want a rundown of all your lockdown options in iOS 7 today, then see if you don't agree with these toddler-proofing feature requests. They needn't be implemented exactly as listed here -- Apple's supposed to be the genius-level design outfit after all, not me -- but I'd love to see someone at Cupertino take them seriously. I could see an entire numerical iOS iteration devoted to child-proofing features. Speaking as a parent, it's that big a deal to me. Fast-Swap User Profiles I get it: Apple wants to make the iPad as obvious and uncluttered as possible. Profiles sound like something you'd do with a PC, everything shoved into walled columns. iOS is supposed to be post-PC -- as simple as reading a book. Books don't have profiles, you just pick them up and start reading. But that assumes you're an adult, not a little kid, and Apple's assumptions about who's using its devices make iOS a problematic environment to regulate, whether you're trying to keep your wee one from unintentionally calling your boss, or simply ensuring they're not being distracted by ancillary iOS features they don't know how to control or dismiss. Fast-swap user profiles would provide the foundation for the sort of curated play-space a toddler needs. Make the swap itself a gesture that prompts for a passcode, or put a button in the Control Center -- whatever works best. But at least give parents the option. There's no magical child-adult interface that works for everyone. Not yet. And while we're waiting for something smart and semantic enough to get the job done, profiles would help parents better navigate that fact. Stricter Restrictions Why can't I lock access to Settings at the Home screen level, to prevent my child from throwing switches iOS won't let me hide (like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) with restrictions fully enabled? Why can icons on the Home screen be locked in place (or just certain ones) so they can't be dragged around or accidentally dropped into containers? Why can't I disable the Messages, Mail and Music icons, or all the other front page apps I wouldn't want a child poking around in (Calendar, Photos, Contacts, Maps, Videos, etc.)? Why can't I turn off Control Center and/or Notification Center entirely? Restrictions that Remember What You Picked Profiles would solve this, in theory, assuming restrictions followed each profile. But assuming we won't see profiles soon... Restrictions are already pretty granular, which is great if you want to micromanage iOS usage scenarios. However, they're bad if you're in a hurry and need to reenable five or six things, but you can't be bothered to hunt them down. Most days, I just tap Disable Restrictions. The problem's that when I reenable Restrictions, all the settings are back to defaults. Never mind profiles, just allow Restrictions to remember your settings, and put a "reset" button somewhere for users who want the reset-to-defaults option. Guided Access that's Multi-App Inclusive Guided Access -- a very cool iOS feature if you're not already using it -- currently lets you lock your iPad or iPhone to a single app, then control which features are accessible. It's a firewall that can temporarily turn an iOS device into a singular experience, protecting the rest of your workspace from accidental input and keeping your little one focused by eliminating accidentally invoked dialogue-panel-related distractions. Trouble is, Guided Access is limited to one app at a time, so your child can’t switch between it and others when boredom kicks in. I'd love to see Apple offer the option to navigate between multiple approved apps, all regulated by Guided Access, allowing you to craft your own custom play-spaces. Time Limits For some reason, I assumed iOS already had this, probably because everything else does. OS X has Parental Controls, for instance: elaborate profile-based strictures that include the option to limit apps, allow access to only specific websites, dictate who the user can interact with and set time limits for weekdays, weekends and bedtimes. iOS really needs all of the above, but minimally a time limits option, so parents can restrict how many minutes or hours in a day the device is available.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $289,000 after a court convicted him of accepting bribes during his time in office as mayor of Jerusalem. Olmert was convicted of accepting $161,000 from realtors who sought approval for a contentious luxury housing development in Jerusalem called Holyland. He served as mayor of the city from 1993 to 2003. Judge David Rozen compared Olmert to a "traitor" during the sentencing, the New York Times reports, and railed against the wider corruption of political and business elites. “The cancer must be uprooted,” Rozen said. Olmert's defense team had requested a commutation of the sentence to community service, but Rozen matched the prosecution's request for jail time. Olmert maintains his innocence and vowed to appeal the decision in a statement on Tuesday, calling it "severe and unjust." [NYT]

The network's big news for next season is a plan to cut back the once-huge singing show's hours. What will take its place? "Events," lots of "events."

The former residents of the Tarabis neighborhood in the Old City of Homs in Syria ought to be forgiven if they start asking the value of peace. Three days after the successful conclusion of a ceasefire between the government of President Bashar Assad and the rebels who had holed up in the neighborhood for nearly two years, residents were allowed back into the sealed off enclave to salvage what they could from their former homes. It’s miraculous that there was anything left to reclaim. Hospitals and mid-rise apartment buildings in the city had pancaked under the barrage of the bombs dropped during the siege, spewing their contents into the streets below with the force of their fall. Their tar-lined roofs have become the city’s new sidewalks. A trickle of dazed residents walked over the street-level rooftops trying to make sense of their former homes, trailing baby strollers and bicycles packed with their rescued belongings. What was left standing had been chewed by mortar fire. The facades of some buildings had been sheared off, exposing dining rooms complete with wall paintings, chandeliers and mahogany tables. Homs was once a bustling city, home to over a million Syrians. It is now in ruins, and hundreds of thousands of its residents have fled. A hundred miles north of Damascus, Homs has seen perhaps more violence in an extraordinarily violent war than any other part of Syria. Some of the earliest fighting of the war was here. Under the terms of the ceasefire it is now almost completely under government control. The rebels who once considered it a stronghold have left all but one neighborhood of Homs. “Take a picture, take a picture!” a woman named Umm Hamed, 65, shouted at a pair of TIME journalists roaming the ruins. “See what this war has brought us.” She opened a tattered shopping bag stuffed with a red velvet cushion and brightly patterned curtains she had ripped from the windows of her old kitchen. Her daughter in-law clutched a blue vacuum cleaner. It was all that was left of a house that had been in her husband’s family for generations. Umm Hamed, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family’s identity, had returned hoping to find at least a mattress or a sofa, as some of the other returning families had, but everything was either crushed under the weight of collapsed walls, or looted. Rebuilding, she said, was out of the question. “With what money?” She was wrapped in the black headscarf and loose cloak of conservative Sunni Muslims who tend to support the opposition, but said she wanted nothing to do with the rebels who claimed to fight for her freedoms. She was angry, she said, with those who launched the uprising, and the government that shelled her town in retaliation. “They were asking for freedom, and now we are asking for food,” she said. What was once a vibrant middle class boulevard of dress shops, cafes and ice cream parlors has been reduced to dusty rubble. Even the Syrian flag draping listlessly from a military checkpoint is coated in dust. TIME’s photographer, Yuri Kozyrev, has covered wars for decades, including the brutal wars in Chechnya. He was amazed at the extent of the level of destruction he witnessed on Monday in Homs. “It’s worse than Grozny,” he said, as we walked through a post-apocalyptic landscape, broken teacups and eyeglasses crunching under our feet. Former residents trickled out of the side streets onto what was left of the boulevard to make their way home to whatever temporary accommodations they had arranged during the worst of the fighting. Mustapha, an engineer who would only give his first name, pushed an old bicycle laden with books in French, English and Arabic. His house, he said, had been looted. All that remained were his books, he said with scorn, as if he would have had more respect for the looters had they taken his treasured philosophy tracts and engineering tomes. Asked if he ever planned to return to the Old City to regain his life, he just shrugged at the destruction around him. “I am an old man, and an engineer. Return to what? I will be dead before this city can be rebuilt. This is the end of our history here.” The ceasefire, like those conducted elsewhere in Syria, follows the government’s template for a possible way to conclude the war, which Assad says will happen by the end of the year. This is the government strategy, as it was used in Homs: a rebel-held area is encircled by government troops and bombed and starved into capitulation. Sometimes civilians are allowed to leave, but usually they are forced to suffer alongside the fighters. The Homs ceasefire, brokered by the U.N. and Iranian diplomats, came at the end of a nearly two-year siege. Fighters were allowed to leave with their weapons for rebel-held areas in the north, in exchange for the release of hostages and access to two pro-government towns near Aleppo that had been under siege by the rebels. The government controls all of Homs now, except for Waer, another rebel-held enclave about three miles from the Old City. On Monday, negotiations for a Waer ceasefire were underway, but seem to have broken down; we could hear mortar attacks and explosions coming from that direction throughout the afternoon. Two middle age women, walking arm and arm for stability as much as for comfort down the Old City’s main street, had trouble holding back tears. They gave only their ages, 40 and 50, for fear of a government backlash for speaking their minds. The ceasefire in Homs was meaningless, the 40-year-old said. “This is not a peace. It is not even the beginning of peace, only the beginning of more destruction.” As she spoke, another explosion in Waer could be heard. “The rebels may have left Homs, but still the shelling goes on, and the bombing goes on.” Her companion, looking around her former neighborhood, sighed. “It’s sad to say that this is what Assad calls a victory, when the bombings were against his own people.”

[time-gallery id="96206"] On a sunny, windy morning in the rolling hills outside San Francisco, a pickup truck parks on what was once a missile site for the U.S. military. In the bed of the truck is a big white crate holding a little sea lion pup, an animal about half the size he should be, shaking with weakness. Pacheco—named for the road that runs by the stretch of nearby Ocean Beach where members of the public found the animal stranded—is the newest “patient” at the Marine Mammal Center. But, like nearly half of the other animals who arrive there, he might not be at the center long. “You can see his backbone,” says Shawn Johnson, director of veterinary science. “He’s not surviving.” The Marine Mammal Center, situated in part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is the largest rehabilitation facility of its kind, and Pacheco is the latest in a record number of patients who have been delivered to their door this year. “It was like hitting a wall,” Executive Director Jeff Boehm says of the swell that started this spring. “The animals hit us fast and furious.” The influx of nearly 500 ailing sea lions, elephant seals and harbor seals is straining the resources of the non-profit Center. But it’s also providing opportunities to learn more about diseases that affect seals, sea lions—and land animals like humans. Many of the patients currently in the care of the center’s 50 staff members and 1,100-member volunteer network are pups like Pacheco. In a normal year, the veterinarians might see 20 California sea lion pups who are malnourished and undersized. Since the beginning of this year, they’ve already treated around 100. “There’s a disturbance in the ocean right now,” says Johnson. “For some reason, they’re being abandoned by their moms.” Each summer, such pups are born in the Channel Islands, a string off the southern coast of California, where they're reared for nearly a year. The islands are hundreds of miles from San Francisco, which is why pups like Pacheco “shouldn’t be here,” as Johnson puts it. His best theory is that something is causing a food shortage, and so the mothers, unable to feed themselves, are deserting their offspring in search of food elsewhere. The pups then set out on their own, but they're too inexperienced and weak to reach foraging grounds, eventually getting swept off course and washing up in places like Ocean Beach, sick and starving. That's just a theory for now, but the center is piloting a project that could help provide answers. The Marine Mammal Health Map will standardize data from all the marine mammal rehab facilities that care for stranded animals along America’s coasts—cataloging where the animals appear and how they’re diagnosed—and then overlay that information with oceanographic data already being collected by the government. That could allow experts to link patterns in strandings to temperature changes or ocean swells or the spread of toxins in the sea. The Marine Mammal Center is part of a national stranding network set up by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The legislation was passed in 1972 after marine animal populations had been decimated by human hunters. Elephant seals, who fill the air at the center with their signature bleats and who can weigh more than 5,000 lbs. (2,267 kg) when fully grown, were once killed for fat that was used perfume and candles. Sea lions, who traipse around the center’s pens on their rotating front fins, were once fed to pigs because they were high in fat and easy to catch. The center was established nearly 40 years ago by a few volunteers who first tried to rehabilitate stranded marine mammals in kiddie pools. It has since grown to inhabit a $32 million complex with high-tech water filtration systems and on-site labs; veterinarians and students from around the world come there to learn about the animals. On the day Pacheco arrived, medical staff from New Zealand and Chile helped perform a procedure on a sea lion named Coco Max, whose rear flipper had swollen to twice its normal size after a bite became infected. Sometimes that research can lead to surprising breakthroughs for humans. One toxin Johnson and his team have identified among their current patients is domoic acid. This toxin, a naturally occurring one found in algae, causes seizures among marine animals who have eaten small fish that have eaten algae blooms. In humans, domoic acid causes amnesic shellfish poisoning. Mussels filter the contaminated water through their systems, and when people eat the shellfish, the toxin can cause brain damage and memory loss. But government officials and researchers didn’t start scouring West Coast waters for domoic acid until scientists at the Marine Mammal Center identified it as a cause of a mysterious seizure outbreak among California sea lions in the late 1990s. Their discovery "led to a huge amount of research about how [amnesic shellfish poisoning] occurs, how to protect humans, a whole new department of public health," says Johnson. The vast majority of the center's animal patients can’t eat or are so young they never learned how to swallow a fish whole. Volunteers blend “fish milkshakes”—made of high-fat herring, fish oil and water—that medical staff pump into the stomachs of the animals until they can be trained in “fish school” to chase and eat herring on their own. With their pens full, the Marine Mammal Center is currently grinding through 1,000 lbs. of fish per day, at a cost of $1 per pound. And many of the patients won't make it. Last year, about 60% of the animals admitted to the Marine Mammal Center were eventually released back into the wild. Many of the lost had cancer, or were simply too far gone from starvation by the time they were found. Even the success stories can be colored by tragedy. A sea lion named Silent Knight was found listless on a beach in Sausalito four years ago; when he was brought to the center, the veterinarians determined that he had been shot in the head, a too common practice among fisherman frustrated by the animals interfering with their catches or simply bored shooters on the beach. Though the wounds didn't kill Silver Knight, they did blind him, and the animal couldn’t be released back into the wild. Happily, the San Francisco Zoo made a home for him instead. That’s the kind of salvation story that employees try to impress on the 100,000 people, many of them school children, who visit each year—and whom the center might eventually depend on for donations in busy times. Right now, staff are anticipating that they might be grappling later this year of a possible El Nino, a period of abnormally warm ocean temperatures that can affect weather around the world. That could mean more storms that separate mothers from their young and less fish for marine mammals to eat. Altogether, that means busy times in the Marin Headlands. But the staff is hoping that as their research advances, they’ll be able to figure out a way to that keep sea lions and seals from becoming patients in the first place. “That’s the goal,” says wildlife veterinarian Glenna McGregor. “To put this place out of business.”  

A European court in Amsterdam ruled Tuesday that Google must remove outdated or irrelevant personal information on individuals from its search results if requested, enshrining a right to be "forgotten." The European Union Court of Justice found that individuals have a right to control their private data and that they have the right to request that information be "forgotten" when the results show links to information that is no longer accurate or relevant, the Associated Press reports. The advisory judgment stemmed from a Spanish case against Google, ruling that the search engine is responsible for the content that appears after a query, and that it is not just hosting it. It also found that Google must respond to legitimate requests to remove data, and that exceptions could be made when the information is relative to a public figure, especially a politician, and it would be deemed against the public interest to remove the information. Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, welcomed the judgment. "Today's court judgement [sic] is a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans," she wrote on her Facebook page. "Big data need big rights."

A new survey of state-funded pre-kindergarten programs finds a wide disparity in the availability of early education nationwide, as enrollment figures fell for the first time in over a decade. The Education Department study showed some shining examples of enrollment and some veritable black holes, depending on where toddlers live. Among the District of Columbia's 4-year-olds, for example, state-funded pre-K enrollment rates exceeded 90 percent in 2012-2013. In Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont the rates topped 70 percent. Then there are 10 states with no program at all. The finding that took policymakers aback, however, was a slight contraction in the total number of children enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs. Despite a year of widespread campaigning on the issue and increased funding per pupil, enrollment across the country fell by 9,200 students in the 2012 to 2013 school year, the first contraction in more than a decade. Overall, about 28% of 4-year-olds in the U.S. attended public pre-school last year. "We were very surprised," said Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, who conducted the study in collaboration with the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the data a "reminder of how much work we still have to do to ensure that every child gets a running start." President Obama proposed working with states to make pre-K education available to every child in the U.S. in his State of the Union speech last year, but Congress has yet to act on the proposals.