David Lidsky's Blog, page 4748

Labor Activist Charles Kernaghan: Microsoft Must Have Known of Supplier's Worker Abuses

This week, the National Labor Committee's report into the scandalous conditions at the KYE plant in Dongguan City, China, revealed that 16- and 17-year-old workers, often students on their three-month summer break, endure 82-hour work weeks, $.52-an-hour pay, atrocious working conditions, and, often, sexual harassment. KYE makes the Basic Optical Mouse for Microsoft and has used the plant since 2003.

Microsoft was swift to react to the report by the non-profit NLC, which has exposed sweat...

Sony Amps Up the Sexiness for Milan

An exhibition of concept products intended to sell the brand to a hyper-cool audience of design snobs.

Infographic of the Day: The Mountains of Salt in Processed Food

You already know that salt intake is highly correlated with high blood pressure and heart disease. And you probably have a vague sense that processed foods contain a lot of salt. But the specifics are truly terrifying, as this graphic by Next Generation Food shows.

It's not exactly the most legible graph--I mean, triangles aren't exactly a case study in information clarity. But the point comes through. Check out, for example, that fact that a single Burger King Whopper with cheese has 75% of...

How CAA Plans to Liberate Game Designers

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WELL POSITIONED Jenova Chen, left, and Kellee Santiago called on CAA researchers for advice on broadening the audience for their PlayStation 3 game. | Photograph by Jason O'Dell

One CAA agent wants the video-game business to be more like the movies. The first step? Set the talent free.

What Seamus Blackley remembers most about his childhood outside of Santa Fe is rockets. Not flimsy out-of-the-box rockets -- these were built by the children of scientists at Los Alamos National Lab, and like...

Organic Wine Is Badly Labeled but Often a Bargain

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Pop quiz: What's the one product on store shelves that decreases in price when it has a label marking it as organic? As most wine snobs know, the answer is organic wine. Next100 points us to a study (PDF) from researchers at the University of California claiming that wines with an eco-label sell for 20% less than similar vintage bottles. Oddly enough, organic wines without an eco-label cost 13% more than wines from the same year, grape variety, and appellation. So what do consumers have...

LCD Soundsystem's Anti-Piracy Plea to Fans Goes Unheeded

LCD Soundsystem played a secret gig in New York the other day, and the band used the event as an opportunity to make an unusual plea, direct to their fans: Please don't leak our upcoming album on the Web. It fell on deaf ears.

After playing some old favorites, dancepunk act LCD Soundsystem launched into a few new numbers to promote their upcoming "This is Happening" album, due out on May 17th. And then the band's frontman, James Murphy made his request, in honest terms. "We spent two years...

Left Out of the iPad Party, Intel Bad-Mouths Tablet PCs

Intel's execs have just been bad-mouthing tablet PCs and voice-control on cellphones--neither is particularly promising tech, say the boys from the big chip-maker. What's their motivation for saying this? Sour grapes it would seem.

The head of Intel's architecture group, David Perlmutter, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing this week, is responsible for the gloomy words about tablet PCs. The thrust of his argument is that "these new categories are hard to predict" and that when...

A Friends and Family Cell Phone Sharing Plan for Developing Countries

We take for granted that our friends and family have easy access to cell phones, but what if handsets were too expensive for many of us to afford? And what if cell phone networks were our only means of easy communication? That's the case for many rural communities in developing countries, where the cell phone infrastructure is set up but few people actually own a handset. Enter Movirtu, a start-up that hopes to provide easy and safe ways for residents of Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia to...

HP Executives Under Investigation for Russian Bribery Charges

HP is currently under investigation by both Russian and German authorities for bribery. Allegedly, HP paid a bribe of about $10.9 million to the Russian office of the prosecutor general to ensure a $47.8 million contract. The Germans involved themselves due to the suggestion that the equipment was sold through one of HP's German subsidiaries.

The office of the prosecutor general is assigned criminal prosecution in Russia, and the Wall Street Journal is quick to point out that many of those...

Some of the Best Twitter Apps Are Made by Google

First, Replay. Twitter's already integrated with Google search, but that only nets you real-time results. What if you want to read chatter during the last State of the Union address, or right after Shaun White nailed that Double McTwist 1260 in Vancouver? Replay lets you zoom back to any day and any time to find out what people were Tweeting about--think of it as a Wayback Machine for Twitter. You'll see a chart showing the frequency of Tweets on the subject you searched over time. To use...