Archive for April 2009

Facebook has launched an API for its activity stream, making it possible for third parties to create software and services that allow users to directly interact with their streams without visiting Facebook. The Facebook Open Stream API will not only allow client applications to display a user’s stream, it will also allow them to filter, mix, and even post comments to various feed items.

For those of you who aren’t addicted to Facebook, the activity stream is the Twitter-like list of feed items that displays on your Facebook home page, made up of updates from all of your Facebook friends. Things that they are doing, groups they have joined, relationships they have entered or left, events they are attending, photos they have posted, and more are all part of this stream that will be incorporated into the Open Stream API.

As part of the announcement, Facebook also said that the Open Stream API would comply with the new Activity Streams standard, which is an extension of the Atom feed format. The decision to go with Activity Streams instead of its own format is significant, as Facebook’s adoption of the developing standard will help give it the boost it needs to make it to the bigtime.

“Over the last several months, we’ve been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack,” Facebook said in a statement. “We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We’ll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.”
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A new admissions policy set to take effect at the University of California system in three years is raising fears among Asian-Americans that it will reduce their numbers on campus, where they account for a remarkable 40 percent of all undergraduates.

University officials say the new standards—the biggest change in UC admissions since 1960—are intended to widen the pool of high school applicants and make the process more fair.

{snip}

[Asian-American advocates, parents and lawmakers] point to a UC projection that said the new standards would sharply reduce Asian-American admissions while resulting in little change for blacks and Hispanics, and a big gain for white students.

“I like to call it affirmative action for whites,” said Ling-chi Wang, a retired professor at UC Berkeley. “I think it’s extremely unfair to Asian-Americans on the one hand and underrepresented minorities on the other.”

Asian-Americans are the single largest ethnic group among UC’s 173,000 undergraduates. In 2008, they accounted for 40 percent at UCLA and 43 percent at UC Berkeley—the two most selective campuses in the UC system—as well as 50 percent at UC San Diego and 54 percent at UC Irvine.

Asian-Americans are about 12 percent of California’s population and 4 percent of the U.S. population overall.
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Re: Joe Guzzardi’s Column: Whoopee! Immigrants Have Same Old DREAM Act To Kick Around

Why are Mexican politicians so much smarter than American politicians?

First, they can afford to be. Mexico is a rich country with a $4 billion tourist industry with vast oil reserves as well as being the world’s one exporter of silver.

Let’s look at the record.

Mexican politicians convinced Bill Clinton to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Because of NAFTA, the United States exported three million high paying manufacturing jobs to Mexico while Mexico, in turn, exports tens of millions of its poor, uneducated citizens to America.

Then American politicians forced American taxpayers to provide Mexican illegal aliens with free education, health care and food stamps, to list only a few of their benefits.

The DREAM Act is just the latest scheme that our leadership wants to impose upon already overburdened Americans.
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I’m tired of people who are busy losing this world war because they are still obsessed with the previous one, which ended generations ago. Anti-Nazism has mutated into a permanent witch-hunt on an imaginary enemy. The notion that “neo-Nazis” constitute a prominent group today is nonsense. The most dangerous people by far are those running the European Union, who are busy dismantling European civilization and enlarging the borders of the EU to include the Middle East and North Africa, those flooding their own countries with tens of millions of Muslims and other hostile aliens without consulting the native population. This makes the EU the largest criminal entity on the planet, preoccupied with destroying an entire continent, dismantling the greatest civilization that has ever existed and replacing the native population with others. I have described this in my book Defeating Eurabia, which is available online.

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut thinks that “Europe does not love itself.” He says that it’s not forces from outside that are threatening Europe as much as the voluntary renunciation of European identity, its wish of freeing itself from its own history and traditions, only replaced by human rights. The EU isn’t just post-national; it’s post-European.

Next to the EU, the most dangerous people are the Leftists all over the Western world who are waging a Jihad to destroy their own civilization and have teamed up with Muslims to achieve this goal. Unlike neo-Nazis, these people are not only far more numerous but socially accepted and disproportionately represented in the media and the education system, where they systematically silence “racist” dissenters by destroying their livelihoods and reputations. They use an imaginary “far-Right” threat to crush people they don’t like.
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When Harry Pangemanan of the Avenel section of Woodbridge was taken into federal custody Jan. 12, and faced the prospect of immediate deportation to his native Indonesia, he had himself to blame for making his presence in the United States known.

Pangemanan and his wife Yana are two of an estimated 11.9 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, according a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center published this month.

They became known to authorities when they began the process of seeking citizenship. They have been repeatedly denied, making them subject to the possibility of immediate deportation.

Undocumented immigrants make up about 4 percent of the population and 5.4 percent of the workforce. An estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants live New Jersey, the fifth highest in the nation, trailing only California, Texas, Florida and New York, according to the Pew survey.

That means, if authorities walk into the average supermarket in the United States, where 200 people are shopping for groceries, odds are eight shoppers would be undocumented immigrants.
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Reverend Robert West

The following letter has just been published in a leading Church of England newspaper:

Sir,

As a member of the British National Party and as their lead candidate for the European Community elections for the East Midlands, due to take place on 4th June this year, I feel that I can endorse — from a Christian viewpoint — the BNP’s stance on race, immigration, ethnicity and voluntary repatriation.

Whilst the BNP is a secular and not a religious party, its views generally agree with the Bible’s own teaching that we are to live as nations, in our nations, and not to submit to a “resurrection” of the Babel thesis of one undifferentiated mass under some form of, probably dictatorial and very unstable, world governance.

The BNP undoubtedly accept that all mankind are equally human and, therefore, equally imperfect; so the worst traits of Darwinism are rejected by the party.

The BNP would also have no truck with any form of national or racial hegemony of any group over another. As far as the BNP is concerned supremacism — whether white, black, or multi-racial — is out of the question. One of their key principles is, in fact, national independence for all, including our own people. They would not, however, see racial differences as superficial, or as simply a matter of physical appearance: rather, every racial or ethnic group does have a collective and distinctive character, which is to be both valued and critiqued, making up the rich diversity of humankind.

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PROVIDENCE — Brown University researchers have developed a way to slowly draw an individual strand of DNA through a microscopic pore so its genetic code can be read quickly.

The discovery could pave the way for sequencing a person’s code in as little as an hour.

The first time human DNA was analyzed, a project begun in 1990, it took 13 years and cost $3 billion. The hope is that if you know your DNA profile, doctors will be able to predict — and possibly help you avoid — important health problems.

The work is a step closer to making that practical, according to Brown physicist Xinsheng Sean Ling, one of the authors of the new study.

Even though the genetic code consists of only four letters, known as base pairs, the challenge of reading one’s DNA is immense. Humans have 3.3 billion base pairs.

In theory, one way to rapidly read the code is to use an electric field to draw a DNA strand through a tiny pore. At the pore, telltale electrical changes around the pore tell researchers which of the four base pairs is passing through at any particular instant.
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So gargantuan is America’s post-1965 immigration disaster that there is now an immigration dimension to every public issue. Nowhere is this more so than in employment—and nowhere is the phenomenon more pressing, given that unemployment has now reached a level (8.5 percent) not seen since 1983—and is projected to reach double digits by year end.

As usual, the federal government’s statistics on immigration’s impact of on employment are so fragmentary that it almost appears someone doesn’t want to know. Specifically, it does not release monthly data on immigrant vs. native-born American employment.

Because of this malfeasance, in 2004 we unveiled our proprietary effort to track American worker displacement: the VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI). We tracked monthly growth of Hispanic versus non-Hispanic employment, expressing both as an index number of 100 as of the start of the Bush Administration in January 2001. We used Hispanics as a proxy for immigrant employment because such a high fraction of working age Hispancs (54 percent) a are immigrants.

VDAWDI rose dramatically from January 2001 to late 2007, when it reached 124.1.. Then it stalled and finally declined when employment collapsed in late 2008.

But despite the recent decline, Hispanic (= immigrant) employment is still (as of March 2009) up a whopping 22 percent. In contrast, non-Hispanic (= American) employment was actually lower than it was at the start of the Bush administration.
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Community activists and well wishers gathered to witness Councilmember Charles Barron and other members of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus award proclamations to four courageous Olympic athletes who, during the 1968 Olympics raised their fists in the defiant Black Power pose.

They were a group of new-thinking athletes who highlighted social and racial injustices in the 1960s and 1970s.

As the proclamations issued by New York’s City Hall elaborated, in 1968, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith stunned the world not only with their athletic achievements, but with one of the most memorable acts of civil disobedience.
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