Dr. Mehmet Oz—of the The Dr. Oz Show fame—was hauled in front of a Senate panel today to answer for all the dubious benefits he claims certain weight loss products will provide. Products that he officially endorses with his name on the label. Products that he shills on his nationally-syndicated daytime television show.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the chairwoman of the Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, had Oz's number.

"I don't get why you say this stuff because you know it's not true," McCaskill said. "So why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, why would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?"

The panel was particularly pissed about Oz's endorsement of coffee beans that claimed incredible weight loss powers. From USA Today's report:

Lawmakers at Tuesday's hearing specifically took aim at Oz's promotion of Pure Green Coffee beans, which claims to help users lose 20 pounds in four weeks and 16 percent of body fat in three months. The FTC sued the product's Florida-based makers in May.

Oz attempted to defend himself.

"My job, I feel, on the show is to be a cheerleader for the audience when they don't think they have hope and they don't think they can make it happen," he told the panel. "It jump-starts you. It gives you the confidence to keep going.

McCaskill, however, was not having any of it.

"The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you call miracles," she told Oz. "When you call a product a miracle, and it's something you can buy and it's something that gives people false hope, I just don't understand why you need to go there."

And although he told the panel today that he does actually "believe" in the products he hawks on his show, and that he has even given them to his own family, Michael Specter's profile of him for The New Yorker last year would appear to directly contradict that:

Oz doesn't follow any of the miracle cures or fad diets that he trots out so regularly for his audience.

But are that many people duped by products claiming miracle weight loss? Apparently so: the panel today cited a 2011 FTC consumer fraud survey that found "more consumers were victims of bogus weight-loss products than any other frauds covered by the survey."

[Image via AP]

Silicon Valley has traditionally fought off questions about the diversity of its workers, even claiming the numbers were a "trade secret." But following Google's lead, Yahoo revealed for the first time ever that its global workforce is 37 percent female.

That's 7 percent more than Google, which acknowledged that 30 percent of its global employees were women only after Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up at a board meeting to pressure the $366 billion company.

However, Google came out ahead (by a hair) when it comes to technical employees: 15 percent of Yahoo's technical employees are women; at Google, it's 17 percent. Google has 46,170 workers to Yahoo's 12,400, so to be fair, it's like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges. (Here's Yahoo's full report.)

When it comes to race and ethnicity, both companies are about 90 percent White or Asian. Yahoo's U.S. workforce is 2 percent Black, 4 percent Hispanic, 39 percent Asian, and 50 percent White. Google's American employees were 2 percent Black, 3 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Asian, and 61 percent white.

Yahoo did offer one telling metric that Google skipped: 77 percent of its leaders (people who hold positions at the Vice President level or higher) are men.

Progress is incremental, but its happening. The fact that Yahoo and Google felt forced to share these numbers is a victory for advocates who argue that its in Silicon Valley's best financial interest to follow the same logic as their startups and adapt.

Yahoo also took another step toward equal opportunity. They didn't use Google's excuse that fewer women study computer science in college. I guess Marissa Mayer got the memo that multi-billion companies have the power to change that.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Getty]

Pitbull looks as happy as a human can be in this photo he posted to Twitter today. He is grinning so hard that the corners of his mouth are black caves as he flips his middle finger with one hand and holds a degree from Doral College in the other. So it's with great regret that we must rain on his parade: this is a fake degree from a fake college.

The degree itself is an honorary one, given to him earlier this month at a graduation ceremony. Said Anitere Flores, state senator and president of Doral College:

"Alongside his professional achievements, which are well known around the world, his tireless devotion to his community and to improving educational access warrants this unique recognition," said Flores. "It is our privilege to award this incredible artist, businessman and South Floridian with this prestigious honor."

Reasonable people may disagree on the level of prestige brought on by an honorary degree from Doral College, seeing as the school is not accredited. So says its website:

Doral College is a non-accredited institution. All stu­dents should be aware that due to its current status students will not be eligible for financial aid, transfer of credits to other institutions, or to sit for profes­sional exams in career related fields.

As you might expect from a non-accredited school offering an honorary degree to Pitbull, Doral College operates in a grey area of legality. The school is a joint venture between Doral Academy Preparatory—a charter high school in the South Florida area—and Academia, a for-profit education company. Local lawmakers are nonplussed by its existence. Via the Miami Herald:

Miami-Dade public schools officials, who have watched the charter industry claim a growing chunk of taxpayer dollars, are less than enthusiastic. They have refused to authorize dual enrollment courses and have criticized both the value of a Doral College degree and the institution's heavy reliance on public dollars intended for grade schools. A recent audit also scrutinized Academica's integral role in the college's creation, noting the for-profit company already reaps millions in management fees from Miami-Dade's publicly funded charter schools and now stands to benefit from students' college education.

In fact, Doral College only currently teaches high schoolers.

For now, there aren't any college students actually attending Doral College. The institution is licensed to provide a bachelor's degree — potentially opening it to tuition-paying outsiders — but Flores said the college has focused solely on high schoolers while trying to earn accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which can take years.

A representative for the school told Gawker that 22 high school students received a concurrent associate degree this year, though—again—it comes from a school without accreditation. That puts Pitbull comfortably within the first 25 people to ever (fake) graduate from Doral College. Dale!

A dog, Gawker's most powerful columnist, sings this week a haunting song of friendship, love, life and loyalty: "I love friends, I have friends, who's my best friend? Sissko kid! A friend of mine, he likes salted peanuts, eating them all, out the can."

A dog maintains a blog on Gawker at dog.gawker.com.

It is unquestionably insane to be angry at a television show. But check me into a padded room this week, I suppose. I am in a fight with Game of Thrones. (Beware to all who click here: I am about to seriously spoil anyone who hasn't read the books.)

Because, well: I really, really, really, really, really, do not agree with the elimination of Lady Stoneheart, the zombie resurrection of Catelyn Stark, from the season four finale.

For anyone to whom that is Greek: Catelyn is tossed in the river after the Red Wedding. Her body is found there by Beric Dondarrion's crew. Dondarrion, who as you may remember has survived a couple deaths of his own, gives his life to revive Catelyn. Resurrected Catelyn cannot speak because of her slit throat. But she remembers the wrong done to her family and works to avenge them under the name Lady Stoneheart.

On my Sunday nights, all I ask is that my fun D&D-derivative, quasi-serious-in-all-the-right-ways television show deliver on the thrills I expect it to. I read the books because I'm the kind of person who hates when a story ends, and I always want to know more. And mostly knowing what happens in the books never spoiled my enjoyment of the show. I have found most of the tweaks made by David Benioff, Dan Weiss and company pretty sound.

Until now. I have two basic reasons for wanting Lady Stoneheart on the show. The first is that I like zombies. Zombies, in my view, are superior to the wight-things that killed Jojen in the finale. They have emotional weight. They're not just ugly dead things, indistinguishable and easily dispatched. They're zombified forms of people—I mean character—that you've previously known and loved.

The second is that I like Michelle Fairley, the actress cast as Catelyn. The show has yet to top her anguished scream at the end of the Red Wedding for emotional oomph. (Lena Headey's upset at the Purple Wedding hardly competed, though to be fair the decks were stacked against her because everyone hated Joffrey.)

I am sure I could spin either of those reasons off into a long cultural studies-ish essay about the female body, Catelyn, women antiheroes, and the need for a rich tapestry of femininity on television. But instead I will be honest and say: I just really, really, want to watch a show which has Lady Stoneheart in it. As a fan, and someone who just wants to enjoy something.

Of course, at the moment, we don't know that Lady Stoneheart is gone from the show entirely. The season four finale director told Entertainment Weeklythat there were never any plans to film the character, and besides:

They [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] have such a challenge adapting the books into a really focused television experience. It's very hard, it's very complicated, it's much harder then they've been given credit for, I think — and they do a brilliant job. But to bring back Michelle Fairley, one of the greatest actresses around, to be a zombie for a little while — and just kill people? It is really sort of, what are we doing with that? How does it play into the whole story in a way that we're really going to like? It just didn't end up being a part of what was going to happen this season. And finally one [more] reason: In case you didn't notice, a lot happens this season … To add that in is something they opted out of. But what's funny is that it was never going to be in the season, yet it took off on the Internet like it was going to happen.

This is some awfully silly reasoning. First of all, why wouldn't you want one of the greatest actresses around on your television show playing an avenging zombie matriarch, even for just five minutes? And an avenging zombie matriarch that has some emotional gravitas and is woven into the central crime of the show, the gradual murder of the Starks — that's a plum role!

Second, I do not really buy that they could not fit it into the finale. If they needed five extra minutes of air time to do it I do not doubt that HBO would move heaven and earth to achieve that. Possibly there was a problem with getting Michelle Fairley to set to film those five minutes, but that is the only kind of logistical explanation I am prepared to accept. Assuming someone is asking me, which they aren't.

Though that director also adds, on the question of whether she's ever coming:

"As somebody who's worked deep inside the show, begged to have an answer and wants more than anybody, I have no idea," he said. "They won't tell me. They're very good at being secretive."

Well, I for one am simply going to believe they would never cut her from the show altogether. The alternative is too horrific to contemplate.

[image via Lena Headey's Instagram]

"In order for robots to work more productively, they must escape from their cages and be able to work alongside people," a robotics expert tells the New York Times. The main obstacle to freedom: human inadequacy at interfacing with robot labor ("A robot...pinned her head between itself and the part she was welding").

Today, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill that legalizes Charlotte's Web, a strain of cannabis that doesn't get you high, for treating conditions like cancer and epilepsy.

The low-THC strain was developed in 2011 to treat patients who want weed's medical benefits without nasty side effects like feeling awesome or laughing a lot. It's particularly promising for children with chronic conditions — whose parents, understandably, might be interested in easing their symptoms without getting them stoned.

Scott said in a statement:

As a father and grandfather, you never want to see kids suffer. The approval of Charlotte's Web will ensure that children in Florida who suffer from seizures and other debilitating illnesses will have the medication needed to improve their quality of life.

Patients will be allowed to vaporize Charlotte's Web but not smoke it. Amendment 2, an initiative slated to appear on Florida ballots in November, could legalize medical marijuana more broadly.

Incidentally, the same day that Scott legalized weed that doesn't get you high, he also banned a few substances that do: methylenedioxymethcathinone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, and methylmethcathinone — otherwise known as the stuff found in bath salts.

[Image via AP]

One of the best technological advances in the past year didn't involve any new technology at all — the advance is the result of an ingenious programming tweak developed by the National Weather Service. It will ultimately save thousands of lives over the coming years.

The programming tweak consists of two modifications called SAILS and AVSET. They are designed to dramatically cut down on the amount of time it takes a weather radar to perform a sweep of the skies, giving us more than double the coverage of the atmosphere just above the ground than we currently have.

Weather radar works by scanning the atmosphere at up to fourteen different levels, or "tilts," measured in degrees above the horizon relative to the radar itself. The lowest level it scans is 0.5°, which gives us the best look at what's going on closest to the ground. The highest level it scans is 19.6°, which lets us look inside storms that are practically sitting on top of the radar site. All fourteen radar tilts together give us a thorough look inside thunderstorms to see what they're doing.

For example, here's what a line of severe thunderstorms looked like as they were pushing through Grand Rapids, Michigan earlier this afternoon. This is the 0.5° tilt that we're all familiar with:

And this is the 19.5° tilt at the same time, showing the mid-levels of the thunderstorm immediately around the radar site:

When you look at a radar image online or on television, you're almost always looking at the 0.5° tilt. Since it's the level closest to the ground, it's obviously the most useful to us. It gives us the most representative look at what precipitation is actually reaching the ground, and it also lets us see rotation in a storm which could indicate the presence of a tornado.

How it works

Under normal circumstances, the weather radar will scan the 0.5° tilt first, then the 0.9° tilt, and so on up until it reaches 19.5°. Once it completes that scan, it will trace back down to 0.5° and start the process over again. This takes time — about 4 minutes and 10 seconds' worth, plus the time it takes to process the images and transmit them online.

This is an eternity in severe weather situations. As we've seen many times before, small tornadoes could form and dissipate in between these radar sweeps and we'd never know they were there until we hear reports of damage. Now, we have a way to hopefully stop that from happening.

AVSET

Weather radars measure precipitation in decibels (dBZ). When you look at the legend on the side of a radar image, the units of the numbers are in decibels. Higher decibels equate to stronger returns — heavy precipitation, debris, bugs, birds, airplanes, anything that reflects more of the radar beam back registers a higher number.

AVSET stands for Automated Volume Scan Evaluation and Termination. This programming tweak tells the radar to stop scanning the upper levels of the atmosphere once it stops detecting precipitation heavier than a set amount. We'll use the example of 20 dBZ, which is the equivalent of a light rain shower. The radar will continue scanning each tilt until it stops registering returns higher than 20 dBZ. Once the radar detects that the precipitation is lighter than the threshold, it will jump back down to the lower levels and start scanning again.

This cuts down the amount of time it takes to make a complete sweep of the atmosphere by a full minute.

SAILS

SAILS stands for Supplemental Adaptive Intra-volume Low-level Scans. When SAILS is activated, the code tells the radar to scan the lowest 0.5° tilt twice in one sweep, giving us a low-level scan about every 2 minutes and 20 seconds. The radar proceeds to scan the atmosphere as normal, but around the fourth tilt (usually on either side of 3.1°), the radar jumps back down and scans the lowest level again.

Since SAILS allows the radar to scan the 0.5° tilt twice, we get a low-level sweep about every 2 minutes and 20 seconds. This is extremely helpful in severe weather situations.

AVSET & SAILS

When both SAILS and AVSET are activated, it gives us a low-level sweep about every 1 minute and 45 seconds. This is a far cry from the almost 5 minutes we have to wait during normal operations.

How many more low-level scans do SAILS and AVSET provide us?

Under normal operations, we get a low-level scan 14 times per hour. When both AVSET and SAILS are activated, we can get more than double that number, clocking in between 24 and 32 low-level scans per hour. That is an incredible advance in the availability of low-level products, and it is already showing major success.

Examples

Just yesterday, a second round of major tornadoes struck northeastern Nebraska, and the weather radar in Sioux Falls, South Dakota had SAILS activated. With SAILS alone, the radar provided us with updates on the tornado's progress every couple of minutes. The results are immediately visible in the smooth, fluid animated radar image of the storm (it may take a moment to load).

The benefit of SAILS is also apparent in this animated radar image from Tulsa, Oklahoma at the beginning of this month, as a squall line approached the region. The radar updated the 0.5° tilt every two to three minutes, giving us a great view of the storms as they approached northeastern Oklahoma.

These two updates were a pretty clever way of utilizing existing radar technology to better serve its purpose of helping National Weather Service meteorologists issue warnings more quickly and effectively, saving thousands of lives in the process.

Offices across the country have rolled out the SAILS and AVSET updates en masse over the past month or two, and most (if not all) offices will have the update in place pretty soon.

What's next?

If you're wondering what is "the next big thing" in weather radar technology (because we all know you are), it's called phased array and it will provide us with full radar scans in about one minute. The research is promising — it's detecting more severe weather than the radars we currently use, and it can produce a complete 16-tilt sweep of the atmosphere in the time it takes our current radars to complete two. It'll be quite a few years before it rolls out operationally, but SAILS and AVSET are pretty great to have in the meantime.

[Top image by NOAA, radar images via Gibson Ridge, crappy illustrations by yours truly]

You can follow the author on Twitter and/or email him.

Louisiana Governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal issued several executive orders this afternoon to drop Common Core in Louisiana altogether. Jindal once supported the education standards, but when the Tea Party changed its mind about them, so did he.

Jindal is going against his own state legislature and education superintendent, as well as Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with this move. Education Superintendent John White and President of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Chas Roemer say Jindal doesn't have the authority to drop the standards without their consent. White told the Times-Picayune that this issue will likely end up in court.

Jindal, clearly, is willing to take his chances. In addition to issuing executive orders to withdraw from the standards and the federally-funded Common Core testing group, he's instructed the state legislature to come up with new education standards specific to Louisiana. In a press conference this afternoon, he called Common Core a "federal takeover." In an April op-ed for USA Today, he compared the program to the Soviet Union's totalitarian regime.

Duncan and White both say Jindal is only dropping Common Core because of recent conservative backlash to the standards. Duncan said on CBS This Morning, "Gov. Jindal was a passionate supporter before he was against it. In that situation it's about politics. It's not about education."

In addition to fighting against Common Core, Jindal remains a staunch advocate for Louisiana's private school voucher program, which the Department of Justice says may violate desegregation efforts.

[Image via AP]

Angie Martinez—show host, DJ and all-around defining figure at New York City rap station Hot 97—abruptly announced her resignation on Instagram today. They called her "The Voice of New York" for a reason. Her final show is this afternoon.

25-year-old One Direction fan Anna Todd just landed a six-figure advance when Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to her One Direction fan fiction. Excuse me, her erotic One Direction fan fiction.

Todd posted the story, titled After, on the fan fiction self-publishing site Wattpadd in 300 daily installments, spread out across three volumes. The story took off instantly, gaining more than 800 million reads, and leading to fan-generated art and playlists on Twitter and Instagram. Billboard reports that Todd's writing even led to an increase in popularity for other pieces of fiction:

When Todd mentioned "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering Heights" in "After," Wattpad had spikes in the reads (how the company counts clicks) on those novels on its site.

Hmm. Never heard of them! In an interview with Sugarscape, Todd explained how she began writing 1D fan fiction:

It really started when I was on instagram one day, and I saw these little mini stories people were writing about Harry Styles, which was crazy to me. Then one of the girls I had followed on instagram put her story on Wattpad. I had no idea what that was, but I followed the link and it was this whole world of 1D fan fiction. I started reading all kinds of it, and then decided that I wanted to give it a go myself. I didn't think anything would come of it though - it was just for fun!

And here is Wattpad's description of the work:

Tessa Young is an 18 year old college student with a simple life, excellent grades, and a sweet boyfriend. She always has things planned out ahead of time, until she meets a rude boy named Harry, with too many tattoos and piercings who shatters her plans.

MTV reports that—in case you were worried—After is also being shopped around to movie studios.

[image via Getty, h/t Uproxx]

Snickering car collector Jay Leno, America's foremost mediocrity merchant, was today named the recipient of the 17th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Perhaps there has been a mistake?

"The quality of humor," Mark Twain once said, "is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant."

Jay Leno once said, "I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, 'I'd like some fries.' The girl at the counter said, 'Would you like some fries with that?'"

From The Kennedy Center's abominable press release today:

"Like Mark Twain, Jay Leno has offered us a lifetime's worth of humorous commentary on American daily life," stated Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein. "For both men, no one was too high or too low to escape their wit, and we are all the better for it."

Upon learning he will receive the Mark Twain Prize, Jay Leno remarked, "What an honor! I'm a big fan of Mark Twain's. In fact, A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorite books!"

"Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any," Mark Twain wrote. "But this wrongs the jackass."

[Photo: Getty]

Under pressure, the Met Opera has canceled its simulcast of John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer. The Anti-Defamation League says "the opera itself is not anti-Semitic" but that it "could be used in foreign countries to stir up anti-Israel sentiments." Hitler's favorite operas are still OK, though.

An 89-year-old man was arrested at his house in North Philadelphia this week on charges of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities while working as a guard at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during World War II.

The investigation on Johann "Hans" Breyer has been ongoing for years. Born in Czechoslovakia but an American resident since 1952, the U.S. Justice Department had tried for years to strip Breyer of his citizenship and to deport him, to no avail.

The German government launched its own investigation into his alleged war crimes in 2012. From the Associated Press in September 2012:

The special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors charge him with accessory to murder and extradite him to Germany for trial on suspicion of involvement in the killing of at least 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.

When Breyer appeared in court this afternoon, his health reportedly seemed waning. From the New York Times:

Appearing pale and thin, he was stooped over and walked with difficulty with a cane. He looked around frequently and waved to his wife, Shirley, who was also in the courtroom.

He seemed puzzled at times, and his lawyer told Magistrate Judge Timothy R. Rice that he suffered from a number of health issues, including mild dementia.

In the event of Breyer's extradition to Germany, he will be charged with 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities. For his part, Breyer has insisted that his time at Auschwitz was involuntary.

[Image via AP]

A mother who blogged about her 5-year-old son's chronic illness is accused of murdering the child with a fatal dose of sodium, delivered while he was in the hospital.

Lacey Spears, 26, originally from Decatur, Ala., but currently living in Chestnut Ridge, N.Y., was charged Tuesday with depraved murder and manslaughter. Police say her alleged poisoning of her son, Garnett-Paul Spears, was a ploy for attention.

She had been documenting his persistent health problems—including ear infections, unexplained fevers, seizures and digestive ailments—on social media, and brought him to a Rockland County hospital with seizures.

There, doctors noticed that sodium levels in the boy's body were far higher than what he could produce on his own. Prosecutors said Tuesday that Spears injected high doses of sodium into Garnett's stomach tube while hospital staff were out of the room.

A neighbor also told police that on the day of Garnett's death from a sodium overdose, Lacey Spears asked her to help hide a fluid bag like the one attached to the child's tube. Police recovered the bag, which contained high amounts of sodium.

Garnett's health problems started when he was 5 days old. Notably, there was an incident at 10 weeks where he stopped breathing and his sodium levels shot up unexpectedly. Doctors couldn't explain it at the time.

Spears concocted an elaborate framework of lies online, according to the Daily Mail. She wrote of Garnett's hero father, a policeman named Blake who died in a car accident. But Garnett's real father, Chris Hill, is still alive—he says she texted him, confessing to making up stories on her blog.

Spears's former best friend also says that when she let Spears babysit her son, the mommyblogger started telling people online that the boy was Garnett's brother.

Authorities believe Spears suffers from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, an illness characterized by injuring a child or making him sick to bring attention and sympathy to the parent.

Spears claims she only used salt as a seasoning for Garnett's food, and that he sometimes played with his feeding syringe in the hospital, so he may have put something into the feeding bag himself.

[H/T WaPo, Photo: Facebook]

The folks behind Uniqlo are unveiling a new concept in Tokyo: Customers can try on clothes and then leave the store to see how they look in public.

Casual wear chain GU, which is run by the company behind Uniqlo, is opening a new shop in Tokyo's Shibuya today. Until the end of the month, the store is testing a new service called "GU Fitting." Apparently, it's the first of its kind.

Here's how it works: You pick out clothes that you like. You then go to the GU Fitting counter and put in a request to test drive the clothes. Then, you leave the store! You must return to the shop sometime during that same day, and you can decide to purchase the clothes or not. GU Fitting is restricted to thirty people per day and three items per shopper.

As with Uniqlo, GU clothes are not pricey: the most expensive item in the store is the equivalent of around twenty bucks, with many items costing under ten dollars. That's perhaps why GU isn't too worried about people making off with clothing.

What's more, the store will allow customers to wear the clothes to, for example, go eat or visit other shops, or whatever. As Nippon TV reports, those using the GU Fitting service need to only give their name and phone number. Photo i.d. is not necessary, as GU is putting trust in its shoppers.

Currently, Fast Retailing, the company that runs Uniqlo and GU, is waiting to see how this service does and is thinking about expanding it.

I'm not entirely convinced this would work outside of Japan and am curious to see how it does here. Because for some customers, it might not be a matter of deciding to buy or not to buy, but to ever return to the store.

試着したまま外出ＯＫ♪ジーユー新サービス [Nippon TV]

ジーユー、試着したまま街に出られる新サービス「GU Fitting」 を試験導入 ー 渋谷初出店の店舗で [ShoppingTribe]

ジーユーは6月18日、渋谷PARCO Part3地下1階に「ジーユー渋谷パルコ店」をオープンする [流通]

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

Missouri Republican State Rep. Mark Parkinson tweeted a fun erection joke this week and later deleted it, claiming he was out for a walk and "nowhere near" his computer when the tweet was sent. Tweets are only ever sent from computers, making his what we'd call a rock-solid alibi.

Here, Parkinson explains the issue to a constituent:

@eseider yes, it was somehow compromised. I'm out walking doors and nowhere near my computer!

— Rep. Mark Parkinson (@markparkinson) June 16, 2014

He also apologized in general.

Obviously, I need to change my twitter password. Random pics and tweets are being sent that I have never seen before. Apologies!

— Rep. Mark Parkinson (@markparkinson) June 16, 2014

The rest of his tweets are just FitBit updates, so the best recourse here is to delete Twitter. Parkinson still hasn't commented on whether or not he does, in fact, always have that problem in the morning.

[Image via Daily Dot]

True Blood's seventh and final season begins this Sunday on HBO, but don't say an eager goodbye to the show just yet: a True Blood musical might be on the way.

True Blood composer Nathan Barr spoke to the AP about the idea at the season premiere on Tuesday, saying he pitched it to HBO and the show's creator Alan Ball:

Barr said the musical will revolve around protagonist, telepath and waitress Sookie Stackhouse, portrayed in the series by Anna Paquin. But, Barr added, after seven seasons of twists, turns and characters for Sookie, it's proven a challenge to trim the saga down.

"I think we're really going to try to return to the roots of the show," Barr commented.

True Blood star Stephen Moyer, who starred in last year's live Sound of Music telecast on NBC, said that he helped Barr put together some True Blood: The Musical samples to be presented to HBO and Ball.

Barr warned (promised?) that there are no guarantees that the musical will actually happen, but that he thinks "the direction we're heading in is really exciting."

Don't vampire musicals have to be invited?

[image via Getty]

After posting "years of subpar results," three of Harvard University's top money managers are leaving. Despite "years of subpar results" from top money managers, Harvard University is still rich as hell.

The story of how a young programmer named Aaron Swartz convinced celebrated academic Lawrence Lessig that no political progress could be made without first reforming campaign finance is now part of Silicon Valley lore. In May, Lessig launched a radical initiative to address the issue: MAYDAY, a SuperPAC that secured funding from two Silicon Valley billionaires in order to curtail the influence of big money.

Those billionaire investors, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, only represent one tier of MAYDAY's donors. First $1.1 million was raised online, Kickstarter style, from ordinary voters. Then Lessig convinced tech industry insiders—including Kickstarter investors Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures—to match. MAYDAY's plan is to get pro-finance reform candidates elected in five key congressional races. After raising that first million in two weeks, Lessig thinks he can get to $12 million using the same combination of the disempowered and the powerful

Lessig, a Harvard Law professor and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, spoke with Valleywag earlier this week about why he has faith in Silicon Valley (for now), the problem with the tech industry's previous inroads into politics, and why there's nothing inconsistent about Thiel's approach to politics.

In the video on the MAYDAY homepage you mention combatting the influence of billionaires, but two of your big supporters from that tier are billionaires themselves.

What's deceptive about these billionaires is that they're spending their money—if we're successful—to reduce the influence that they have in our political system. If we can win, they'll be less powerful than they are right now. And I think that's an admirable thing for them and I hope to recruit more to exactly that ideal.

Thiel, for example, on OpenSecrets was ranked no. 9 in terms of individuals who spent their money to influence the 2012 election. He spent more than $4.7 million and for that election cycle he's closely associated with propping up Rand Paul's campaign. He said he did that with an eye to building a libertarian base for 2016. It's an odd choice for somebody to want to reduce the influence of people basically like himself.

I don't believe in unilateral disarmament. We live in a system where money has an extraordinary amount of influence and if you're trying to bring about certain political agendas, money is the means. There's nothing inconsistent with recognizing that and also wanting a political system where money wasn't a means. Tom Steyer [a billionaire hedge fund manager and environmentalist] is spending more than $50 million to bring about climate change legislation. He's doing that because he believes it's a necessary thing to do in order to get climate change legislation in a world where on the other side companies that are making $100 billion in profit every year are spending whatever they can to [derail] climate change legislation.

More and more people are seeing this—that they would rather live in the world where that wasn't the game. You can affect the world as it is and also kind of bring about a change to the world as it is.

You're saying MAYDAY is the voice of the people, but Thiel was backing a candidate who would not have otherwise succeeded by popular vote. That seems to be an inconsistency between the objectives of MAYDAY and Thiel's personal objectives.

I just don't see it. If you imagine what the new system for electing candidates would look like—it's not a system where there isn't any money in the system, it's just a system where the money to fuel the system comes differently. So, in a new world, who knows how Rand Paul does? I don't know. I mean, he wouldn't be my first choice.

In a new world, who knows how Rand Paul does? I don't know. I mean, he wouldn't be my first choice.

But I think one of the most important things is to talk about a movement where we can bring together people who have fundamentally different views about who their first choice for president should be. They just have a common view about existing corruption in the current system. It's kind of important to distinguish between the issue as it relates to the President and the issue as it relates to Congress, which is of course the primary policy making body.

It makes me sick to imagine the amount of time [presidential candidates] spend raising money, but the institutional [issue] we have to do something about quite dramatically is Congress. Because Congress is increasingly an institution that spends all of its time in the business of raising money as opposed to the business of trying to figure out what the right thing to do is.

You mentioned bringing together a diverse coalition. The other billionaire supporter of MAYDAY is Reid Hoffman, who like Thiel made money off of Facebook. If you look at his donations last year, for example, they all went to Cory Booker and Sean Eldridge who have direct ties to Facebook.

What's the mechanism you're imagining here? If MAYDAY PAC is successful at reducing the influence of money and politics then Reid and Facebook and the others don't have as much power as they have right now. So what's the self-interested motive that might be going on here?

Well, you said it's bringing together a diverse coalition and it seems like from the big supporters, it's a lot of Silicon Valley, it's a lot of tech players—Union Square Ventures. How do you prevent them from having an outsize influence in MAYDAY PAC?

That's a great question. So one of the most important things we've done is we've separated the board, which has the ultimate policy decisions, from the funders. It's a unique board opportunity—you're not allowed to be a funder. So none of the big funders are going to be board members, that's number one. Number two, MAYDAY PAC is not a political party. It's not a president, it's not a policy maker, it's got a very precise objective. Its objective is not to argue for H1-B Visas or different treatment for stock options, its single objective is to bring about in 2016 a Congress committed to fundamental reform.

They hate the way they're shaken down by politicians who come out to Silicon Valley and pretend they want to talk about patent policy, when they're really talking about their next fundraiser.

I saw this piece in The New Republic by Noam Scheiber about Silicon Valley and the MAYDAY PAC and it is true, I think. I spent nine years in Silicon Valley when I was teaching at Stanford and it is true that Silicon Valley has a distinctive view about the way that Washington works or, more precisely, the way that Washington doesn't work. Both liberals and conservatives, or libertarians out there, look at Washington and say it's a hotbed of crony capitalism or corruption and they hate the way the system works. They hate the way they're shaken down by politicians who come out to Silicon Valley and pretend they want to talk about patent policy, when they're really talking about their next fundraiser. Noam makes this point quite powerfully that there is this unique moment where Silicon Valley has both the means and the motive to try to bring about a change in the way that Washington works.

Right, but we've seen with FWD.us that there was a potential to wield their influence positively—like you said, they have the power and the money right now—but it seems, at least with FWD.us, to be fairly self-serving.

Absolutely. Let's be very clear about it. I think that's one of the most important criticisms of FWD.us. I actually know some of the people who were involved in pushing that and I know them to be genuine believers in what they were pushing, but they were not sensitive to the way it appeared to everybody: that what they were pushing was an agenda about benefitting them.

But, again, in the political system we've got right now that's not unusual. We got all sorts of examples of people pushing a political agenda that benefits them. On the left and the right.

I'm curious about the amount of money being funneled from Silicon Valley into politics. For example, Brigade Media, Sean Parker's venture, was recently in the press. They use some of the same rhetoric as MAYDAY in terms of "restoring" democracy. If you're used to tech companies, it's familiar. But it's hard to picture what Brigade is going to do.

Well I agree, I don't quite know what Brigade is going to do yet. I'm very much a believer in clear theories of change. Tell me what you're going to do that's going to change the way the system is actually going to work.

So with MAYDAY, we've been as clear as we could possibly be about this. We want to change the way elections are funded. If we had a world of small dollar-funded elections, the billionaires would have less influence.

I don't think it's an adequate theory of change to say we've got a better way for people to click through to their Congressman.

I haven't seen what the Brigade model is, but I don't think it's an adequate theory of change to say we've got a better way for people to click through to their Congressman and tell them their views about the latest legislation coming up. I'm a skeptic by training, that's my job.

As you said, there are certainly much larger, much scarier industries and companies who are trying to influence the American political system. But with the ascendance of tech, what you would tell other skeptics who are worried that it's going to end up the same way. Or do you have a sense of optimism that maybe Silicon Valley will bring about a change that's actually in line with this kind of vague rhetoric that they use?

Well I think its important to flesh out the vague rhetoric and I get frustrated with the vague rhetoric as well. And No. 2, I don't have faith in Silicon Valley because it's Silicon Valley. I have faith in Silicon Valley because of the stage they are at in the innovation cycle of any great industry or any great corporation.

I don't have faith in Silicon Valley because it's Silicon Valley. I have faith in Silicon Valley because of the stage they are at in the innovation cycle.

If you look at the history of companies in fields of innovation, in early stage they're all struggling to compete, then they become ascendant and they're interested in just building out their business in the most successful way. Once they crest, then the lobbyists come in and they say, "We can actually get you a higher percentage return if you give us the money to go get some special tax deals" or "Give us the money to get some special protection against competition."

The point is, eventually, I'm quite sure that these great successful corporations will behave like every other corporation in the history of corporate America. There's nothing in the water of Silicon Valley that guarantees that they remain virtuous. Right now they don't have the incentive because they don't have a business model that turns on controlling Washington. They have a business model that's about innovation.

One of the people that's kind of inspired me the most about this is Brad Burnham [from Union Square Ventures]. If you look at his portfolio of investments, they've all been about crowd-sourced or crowd-pushed bottom-up innovation in the context of social media and all sorts of other types of technologies. The thing that's striking when you listen to him about the problem innovators face: the problem is this non-neutral platform that our policy makers in Washington create.

It's kind of like net neutrality brought to politics. What they want is a kind of political system the way the Net is supposed to function, which is an open neutral network—to put ideas out there in a democratic way, as opposed to a special privilege from telecom operator way. You get to prove which ideas should win. When I talk to people like that about, 'What do you think it's going to be like in 20 years? Or even 10 years!'—since Internet speed is much quicker—nobody really believes that there's a reason why these people will behave in the right way going forever.

It's quite an astonishing display of market power muscle, which is not the image of ... this upstart Internet venture that makes it possible for people to get everything in one click.

Look at Amazon right now. I mean this whole fight with Hachette books. It's quite an astonishing display of market power muscle, which is not the image of what we would have thought of five years ago or 10 years ago—the way this upstart Internet venture that makes it possible for people to get everything in one click. But it kind of makes sense, given their dominant market power right now. I don't love these companies versus other companies. I love companies at the stage of their development where they're focused on innovation. In a large field, between cable operators and Silicon Valley, I'll take Silicon Valley.

I think you can see this in Union Square Ventures portfolio, certainly with companies like Kickstarter. But there is another stronger, very well-funded contingent like Uber and Airbnb. Uber was recently valued at $18 billion and it is going through the same trajectory of being innovative at first and now becoming a dominant player. They very much need regulation on their side.

Let's be very clear about what Uber needs. Uber needs the freedom to compete and they're up against regulatory structures which basically hand out the right to compete. I'm an Uber user, but I have no particular expertise here. The dynamic I've seen is they've gone into market where there's a regulated market and they're saying de-regulate. Give us the same right to compete as anybody else.

It's about building a regulatory environment which is open. They're not coming in and saying let only Uber compete. They can't (consistent with what they're doing) say anything other than: 'Just have a lot more competition here. The world has changed, we don't need to hand out taxi medallions to 12 people and expect that takes care of everything.'

Airbnb is the same thing. This is arguing that we ought to be moving to a less regulated, more open market, more flexible market, to make this type of resource available to consumers.

In Uber's case, however, they are dominating. They're already larger than a lot of the taxi companies. So if the deregulation they asked for happens, they would then be a monopolizing force.

How? How would they be monopolizing?

Well, they pushed out a number of their startup competitors, there are a number of city-regulated taxi drivers and taxi companies that are feeling the pinch because of them and they have more funding.

Let's be very clear about a distinction between beating people because you have a better product and beating people because you got the regulators to shut them down. Now if they're beating people because they're getting regulators to shut them down, then shame on them. I am the first to criticize them, I don't know the facts.

But if they're beating people because they have a better product, great! That's what we want! The fact that some 1950's taxi company goes out of business because they don't learn that you've got to take credit cards and be able to have reservations that work on time, I don't feel sorry for those people. This is the way that innovation works.

Right and I'm a regular Uber user myself. But, to me, it seems more like Amazon. They're winning because they can cut prices and sidestep regulations and then put the prices back up once they have pushed out other competitors. That's not the same to me as innovation.

Yeah, well, there's a lot in the theories you're offering here that I don't quite agree with. It's certainly possible that Amazon and people like that are abusing market power in a way that if we had an antitrust division in the Justice Department…

That would be amazing! I wish we did.

So do I. It's a huge stretch to get from what Amazon might be doing to get to what these other competitors might be doing.

From my skeptical perspective, I'm not committed to the fact that Uber is going to behave well or that Airbnb is going to behave well—or any of these companies is going to behave well. They're going to behave in a way that maximizes their profit in the current stage of their development and they need to be functioning within a well-structured market that avoids the bad behavior.

But one very important component of that bad behavior is using financial power to buy political protection. And it's that dynamic—independent of all the other bad things that they could be doing—its that particular dynamic which I hope we can, ideally, eliminate. Because then the only thing we can do is these other economic games, which, depending on your theory of competitive economics, either works or don't work.

How would you describe your own political point of view? Or maybe you don't consider yourself aligned with a particular party or ideology?

I think I'm confused. I started out life as a libertarian. But I definitely think of myself as voting as a liberal Democrat now. Within the law, to be a libertarian is to be like Justice Brennan or to be on the liberal side of the court. It's about protecting people's rights against government interference. So I'm happy to be libertarian in that sense.

The thing in which I'm not a traditional libertarian is equality and creating the conditions in which people can flourish as an essential role for government. So that puts me on the side of voting for Democrats, not typically for Republicans. There were some pretty important exceptions that it would have been exciting to get a chance to vote for as Republicans, but that's not where I am right now. That's my own personal political push.

The thing that's most important to me is not the particulars of the policies that I'm pushing for, it's imagining us getting to a system where the government could actually work, right? Regardless of who wins control. It could actually work. Because the defining feature of my life is three young children under the age of 10 for whom the next 50 years are going to be awful unless we find a way to fix this. That is the controlling political influence in my life.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke, original image via Getty]