- Finding that great, insightful tweet that made your day
two weeks ago just became easier. Twitter is overhauling its search engine to
include e
tweets more than a week old. The company explained that the expansion of the
search engine will help users more easily access older content. Paul Burstein,
an engineer who works on Twitter's search infrastructure, explained in a
company blog post that in the next few days, searches will return "a
fairly small percentage of total tweets ever sent,” but those results will
steadily increase over time. "We look at a variety of types of engagement,
like favorites, retweets, and clicks, to determine which tweets to show,"
Burstein wrote. "We'll be steadily increasing this percentage over time,
and ultimately, aim to surface the best content for your query." It has
been a busy week for the popular microblogging site, which on Tuesday updated
the search function in its iOS and Android mobile applications to return a mixture
of tweets, photos, and people in a single stream of results, rather than having
tweets and people listed on separate tabs. Twitter also tweaked its mobile apps
in an attempt to streamline them by unifying content from the
"Discover" tab, including tweets, activity notices, trending topics,
and suggestions of new people to follow, in a single stream. The changes also
include revisions to how users interact with links to websites, with people now
allowed to go directly to a linked website without having to open the tweet so
they can save a crucial 1.5 seconds………
- Think a four-month lockout and having half of the NHL
season wiped out did anything to reduce the animosity between Phoenix Coyotes
enforcer Raffi Torres and the Chicago Blackhawks? Think again. Torres, who
missed the first eight games of the season to finish up the
21-game suspension he received for his devastating hit to the head on Blackhawks
forward Marian Hossa during the 2012 playoffs, faced Chicago for the first time
since the hit when the Coyotes hosted the Blackhawks Thursday night. He was on
the ice for all of 30 seconds before he was turning his rings around and
fighting with Chicago’s Jamal Mayers. Mayers had barely clearly the boards and
hit the ice when Torres dropped his gloves and looked to swing on him. Both
players received a five-minute major penalty for fighting, but it was the
Blackhawks who landed the biggest shots of the night en route to a 6-2 win to
extend their strong start to the season and keep themselves as the only team in
the league with a loss in regulation. At 9-0-2, Chicago is off to a great start
and Hossa was able to get a measure of retribution, recording an assist on
Jonathan Toews’ second-period goal that put his team up 5-1. Hossa attempted to
downplay any drama surrounding his first encounter with Torres since the hit,
but teammate Patrick Kane said there was extra energy on the ice during the
game. “If that doesn’t get you pumped,
I don’t know what will,” Kane said. That extra energy could account for the
straight-up curb-stomping the Blackhawks dropped on the Coyotes in their own
house, outshooting them 33-24 in a game where the only edge Phoenix had was in
penalty minutes……..
- Fighting against uptight squares and sticking it to The
Man is not an exclusively American concept. Skateboarders know this truth as
well as anyone and one of their own is staring down some legal trouble in South
Africa over
a video posted on YouTube of him careering down a Cape Town street at a
professed 68 mph to set off a speed camera. Decio Lourenco is one of South
Africa's top skateboarders and he has gone viral in his "Spoofing the Traffic Camera" video, which has notched
up more than 200,000 YouTube hits. In the video, Lourenco hurtles down the mountain road in fading
light with his hands folded behind his back to decrease wind resistance.
Vehicles on the opposite side of the road pass by with their headlights on and
near the bottom of the hill and the end of his run, Lourenco can be seen throwing
up his hands in jubilation after a GPS system strapped to his foot showed he
had clocked up 68 mph in a 37 mph zone. It’s an impressive performance…unless
you’re a stick-in-the-mud law enforcement officer, in which case the video is a
reason to go. Cape Town city officials said on Thursday that Lourenco faces
arrest for the video and they definitely do not sound like they are joking. "We
have handed over the matter to traffic officials and want him arrested," said
JP Smith, the Cape Town official in charge of safety and security. "The
speed limit is irrelevant. He is seen careering down the road in a reckless and
dangerous manner." The road Lourenco used for the video, Kloof Nek, is one
of Cape Town's steepest and has hosted several extreme skateboarding events,
although only when closed to traffic. Cape Town bans skateboarding on public
road, but the always-tight skateboarding community is in an uproar over one of
their own facing arrest. The National Skate Collective Facebook page called for
“mass action” and warned the city is “trying to shut us down.” Fight The Man,
dudes, fight The Man……..
- Sooooo…..who has a gun, a strobe light to stick on top of
their car and some free time in Lorenzo, Tex.? Anyone fitting that description
may want to contact city officials because Lorenzo is one month into an awkward
stretch in which it is very literally without a police department. The local
police department went into mothballs when its two officers resigned to take new jobs. According to Lorenzo City
Manager Rusty Forbes, the city’s chief of police resigned back in December to
take a job with the Crosby County Sheriff's Department, while the other officer
resigned on January 11th to move to the big-city atmosphere that is Garza
County. With no one around to serve and protect, other law enforcement agencies
are helping to pick up the slack while the city tries to figure out what to do.
Citizens have expressed concerns about the response time to emergencies without
a local police force. Two officers who have been responding to calls are
stationed eight miles away and Crosby County sheriff’s deputies have also been
patrolling the city, giving at least one man a sense of assurance in this
difficult time. "Actually, we've had a pretty good presence from our county
department in Lorenzo right now," Forbes said. "I want to reassure
them at this point the sheriff is covering the city very well in my
opinion." Fixing the problem isn't as simple as posting an ad on a job
site seeking police officers; according to Forbes, the town's dwindling
population and its über-small-town aesthetic make keeping officers difficult. "Small
towns kind of seem to be the stepping stone," Forbes said. The city
council must now decide whether to hire another police chief or contract their
law enforcement out to the county. In the latter case, the city would pay for a
new deputy to be hired and that deputy would live in and cover the town of
Lorenzo. Using this option would save the city the most money of any of its
choices……
- If French alt-rockers Phoenix bomb out with their
forthcoming album “Bankrupt,” it won't be because of the equipment used to
record the project. The band has revealed that to help enrich the sound of the
recording process, they purchased and used the same console as Michael Jackson used
for his iconic 1982 album “Thriller.” Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz bought the
Harrison 4032 console on eBay for $17,000 and the band admitted the purchased
the console because they "liked the idea of working with a consecrated
artifact, as well as having something strange upon which to fixate between
albums." In an incredibly ironic twist given Jackson’s status as one of
the biggest (alleged) celebrity pedophiles to never have actually been
convicted, Brancowitz bought the console from Clayton Rose, who owns a
Christian music studio in California. Lead singer Thomas Mars expressed
surprise that there was no major bidding war for the console. "The most
mysterious part to me was that no one else - no nerd or music engineer or
memorabilia freak - seemed to want it. There was something a little spooky
about him [Clayton Rose]. He was very pushy. It seemed like a scam,” Mars said.
The console was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, where Phoenix recorded
the follow-up to 2009's “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.” The new album is set for
release in April and the band said they originally kicked around the idea of
tongue-in-cheekedly calling it “Alternative Thriller.” Going with “Bankrupt”
seems like a solid backup plan………
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