NEW YORK ? Some were confused, others offended by Nicki Minaj's over-the-top performance at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, but the singer-rapper doesn't understand what all the hubbub is about.
"I don't know what is the big issue?" she asked.
The 29-year-old said her five-minute live rendition of her songs "Roman's Revenge" and "Roman Holiday," which included dancing priests, an exorcism and levitation, was just a part of a movie she's writing.
"You know how people write plays and movies? That's what I did. I wrote that and I gave the world a tiny little preview of what was to come. And so I have to perform it on the set in which it would be in the movie, right?" she said.
Minaj made the comments Wednesday night at an event for Viva Glam MAC cosmetics, for which she is an ambassador with fellow singer Ricky Martin. Proceeds from the sale of the special edition MAC products benefit HIV/AIDS programs worldwide.
Minaj, who is known for her outrageous style, walked the Grammy red carpet in an oversized red robe with a man dressed as a pope at her side. She said her performance, which featured a film clip, was partly inspired by the 1973 movie "The Exorcist."
Her sophomore album, "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded," will be released on April 3 and features Minaj rapping as her male alter ego, Roman. It's the follow-up to her platinum debut, "Pink Friday," which was nominated for three Grammys, though she walked away with zero trophies.
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Online: http://mypinkfriday.com
http://www.macaidsfund.org
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Nicole Evatt covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NicoleEvatt
BRUSSELS ? Networking company Cisco said Wednesday it is challenging Microsoft's $8.5 billion takeover of Skype at the European Union's top court to ensure Microsoft won't block other video conferencing services.
The European Commission, the EU's competition regulator, cleared the takeover in October and the merger was completed later that month. Microsoft Corp. hopes that owning Skype will allow it to better compete across platforms with other tech giants like Apple Inc. or Google Inc.
But for Cisco Systems Inc., the world's largest maker of computer networking equipment, the Skype deal creates a serious challenger to its WebEx service, one of the most popular teleconferencing platforms.
"Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability," Marthin De Beer, the head of Cisco's video conferencing division, wrote in a blog post.
Cisco wants the General Court of the EU to check whether the Commission was right in clearing the Skype takeover without any concessions. It argues that the Commission should have required Microsoft to guarantee open standards for video conferencing, similar to what exists for mobile phone calls.
Such standards would eventually allow WebEx users to make calls to users of Skype and other services like Google Voice.
De Beer said that without these standards, Microsoft could "seek to control the future of video communications."
"Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number," De Beer wrote. "Today, however, you can't make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike."
But Cisco fears that Microsoft will end up blocking Skype for users of other services, especially if it starts charging businesses for teleconferencing.
Skype, with roughly 170 million users, is by far the most popular voice-over-Internet service.
Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for the European Commission, said the Commission takes not of the appeal. "We will defend our decision in court," he added.
It?s hard to imagine we still have to tell employers this today, but here goes: Pregnancy discrimination is illegal. While it may sound obvious to some, blatant pregnancy bias is still alive and well in the workplace.
A study by scientists from the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, published online in the scientific journal Tropical medicine and International Health, shows that it is still possible to provide a good level of public health if one is prepared to reinforce the public health care system. The authors state that this applies even in times of severe crisis when the Gross National Product collapses, saying: "Look for instance to Cuba in the nineties...
OLYMPIA, Wash (Reuters) ? Washington state became the seventh in the nation to put a law on its books recognizing same-sex marriage on Monday, as opponents of the measure signed by Governor Christine Gregoire vowed to try to prevent it from ever taking effect.
The measure, which won final approval from state lawmakers last Wednesday, remains essentially on hold until at least early June, following a standard enactment period that runs until 90 days after Washington's legislative session ends.
Opponents launched their own campaign on Monday to seek the statute's repeal at the polls in November through a ballot measure that could delay enactment further or halt it entirely.
Still, the bill-signing marked another key victory for gay rights advocates after a federal appeals court declared a voter-approved gay marriage ban in California unconstitutional last week, and the New Jersey state Senate approved a same-sex marriage bill earlier on Monday.
Gregoire, a Democrat and a Catholic, signed Washington's measure to raucous applause during a ceremony in the ornate reception room of the Olympia statehouse, declaring, "This is a very proud moment. ... I'm proud of who and what we are as a state."
Anticipating a repeal campaign that lies ahead, she added, "I ask all Washingtonians to look into your hearts and ask yourselves -- isn't it time? ... We in this state stand proud for equality."
Several dozen protesters, including members of the group Knights of Columbus, stood silently in the Capitol Rotunda overlooking the reception hall holding signs with slogans espousing marriages of "one man, one woman."
The issue is also likely to figure in the state's Republican presidential politics. Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum, a staunch conservative and outspoken foe of same-sex marriage, was making two stops in Washington state on Monday in advance of the Republican caucuses there on March 3.
He was to meet with Republican lawmakers in Olympia in the afternoon, then give a speech in Tacoma on Monday night.
Democrats, who control both legislative bodies in Olympia, accounted for the lion's share of support for the gay-marriage bill, which gained momentum after Gregoire, who is in her last term of office, said last month she would endorse such a law.
Several prominent Washington-based companies employing tens of thousands of workers in the state have supported the bill, including Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. Opponents were led by Roman Catholic bishops and other religious conservatives.
"Marriage is society's way of bringing men and women together so that children can be raised by, and cared for by, their mother and father," said Joseph Backholm, head of the Family Policy Institute of Washington.
"It is the most-important, child-focused institution of society, and we will fight to preserve it. Voters will have the opportunity to define marriage in our state."
SIMILAR EFFORTS ELSEWHERE
Supporters of same-sex marriage are pushing similar statutes in Maryland and New Jersey, whose Democratic-controlled state Senate in Trenton approved a gay marriage bill earlier on Monday. Republican Governor Chris Christie has vowed to veto it if it reaches his desk.
A referendum to legalize gay marriage in Maine has qualified for the November ballot there. Six other states already recognize gay marriage -- New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Iowa -- as does the District of Columbia.
Two of Washington state's leading proponents of gay marriage, state Representative Jamie Pedersen and state Senator Ed Murray, hailed the work of Olympia's legislature.
"Years from now, our kids will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about," said Pedersen, who has four young children with his partner of 10 years. Murray, who has said he will marry his companion of nearly 20 years, added, "My friends, welcome to the other side of the rainbow."
In the meantime, opponents of same-sex matrimony have said they would seek to overturn the legislation via one of two ballot measures -- a referendum for repeal or an initiative defining marriage as the exclusive domain of heterosexual couples.
If a repeal referendum qualifies for the November ballot, the gay marriage law would be suspended until the outcome of the election is certified in December. At that point, the statute would either be repealed or go into effect.
A new coalition of gay marriage opponents, called Preserve Marriage Washington, has filed referendum papers with the Washington secretary of state's office to begin the process of presenting the issue to voters in November.
They will have until June 6 to amass at least 120,577 voter signatures to qualify a proposed repeal for the ballot. But it generally takes about three weeks for referendum petition language to be reviewed and approved by the state before signature collection can begin.
About twice as many signatures are needed by July 6 to earn a place on the ballot for an initiative defining matrimony as between one man and one woman. But unlike a referendum, qualifying an initiative would not prevent gay marriages from proceeding under the newly passed statute starting on June 7.
It remains unclear whether gay weddings performed in the interim would be nullified if an initiative were to pass in November.
(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
Another weekend, another few steps towards a normal house/life!
I?ll get more into what post tornado progress we made, after the recipe? but one thing we did this weekend was clear everything out from the fridge, completely wash it out, and then re-organize everything back into it. In doing so, I came across some veggies that were getting to the end of their life span? so I decided to cobble together a dish to use them up.
Of particular concern was a very old bag of radishes, a bag of baby carrots that had obviously seen better days, and some kale. I?d heard about roasting radishes fairly recently, but hadn?t gotten around to trying it. I decided to sort of base the dish around a salad I?d had at a food blogger event a couple months ago? but rough composition and kale are really the only common threads. Completely different veggies, nuts, and dressing.
This turned out amazing. It all worked so well together, and it was really pretty as well!
Roasting radishes gets rid of all of the bite, leaving a tender, almost sweet vegetable. It worked really well with the sweetness of the carrots, earthiness of the squash, and heft of the kale. The toasted walnuts brought some crunch to the party, and the dressing ended up perfect. I?ve never come across a vinaigrette that I REALLY liked- so I wrote my own.
I swear, my husband was grinning and *glowing* as he ate this. It was sort of a funny scene, we were both in our grubbies, exhausted after a whole weekend of repair/rebuild/cleanup, feeling totally beat up. This meal felt really ?fancypants?, so we had to laugh at the contrast.
Wash the radishes, chop into quarters. Cut the squash in half, scoop out all of the seeds and gunk. Slice the halves into sections (I just followed the sections of the squash itself), carefully cut off the rind, and cut into 1/4? pieces.
Arrange baby carrots, radishes, and squash onto a baking sheet lined with foil or parchment paper. Drizzle with olive oil, toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so.
While vegetables are roasting, chop kale into thin ribbons. (?Chiffonade?, but you know how I feel about invoking French!). Place in a LARGE pan or wok. Drizzle with olive oil, splash a little fresh lemon juice over it, and season with salt and pepper. Cook over medium-high heat until wilted down and starting to brown / crisp up.
To serve, place a mound of kale on the plate, top with a generous amount of roasted vegetables. Sprinkle with walnuts, drizzle with vinaigrette, serve hot.
By the way? crumbled goat cheese would also work really well on this. Also? crispy bacon. (We didn?t have either on hand!)
Maple Dijon Vinaigrette
1/4 cup maple syrup 1 Tbsp Dijon mustard 2 Tbsp Lemon 1/4 cup vegetable oil 1 tsp minced garlic 1/4 tsp salt 1/2 tsp pepper
Measure all ingredients into a blender, blitz until well combined. Refrigerate til use.
So, tornado progress?
This week, we reached a huge milestone for us ? with enough shelving finished, we were able to move all of our glassware from their ?safe keeping? storage ? our dishwasher ? and into the partially finished cabinetry. We ran out first dishwasher load since the tornado (almost 9 months ago!), and have been drinking out of glasses. Glasses! They feel almost like a luxury now, after so many months of plastic cups.
We?re still stuck with paper plates and plastic cutlery for another week, as my husband works on more shelves. I can?t *wait* to unpack the dishes and cutlery. It?s been far too long. The tornado made us go a bit feral, but re-domestication feels good!
For my part, I spent WAY too much time getting sawdust and random construction/tornado debris out of our couch fabric, which has sort of a faux suede texture to it. Unbelievably difficult task, but it?s done! Every last bit of boxing, supplies, and temporary food storage has been removed from the living room, and it feels proper and huge now. Because we weren?t unpacked by the time the tornado hit, this is the cleanest and most organized we?ve ever had the living room!
Also, the spice rack situation.
Since we?ve had periods here and there of having a somewhat functional kitchen (a stove and a fridge, sometimes a sink, but NO cabinets or counters), I?d slowly compiled a ?bare bones, survivalist? spice ? tub. Just a little IKEA tub with unlabeled plastic baggies of dried herbs and spices. It was a far cry from my pre-tornado 72 piece, custom made spice rack, but it kept us sane in the times I was able to cook in there.
Well, this weekend I complete the move to an interim spice rack situation. We bought two identical 18 piece spice rack sets that look sort of like test tubes. 3 rows of 6, each row a little higher than the row in front of it. I dumped the spices out of one set, refilling them with herbs and spices not represented in the set. So, now I have a 36 piece spice set, which will make cooking a LOT easier and more fun.
I?m still a ways off from our final solution ? find another matching set, empty and refill/re-label them with remaining ?necessity? spices, then have a pull out spice rack beside the oven, which will house my (much larger) 72 spice jars, which will house spices that don?t fit in my counter top set. The tubes don?t hold a ton of volume, so this will be a storage solution more than anything ? the counter top set will be convenient for daily use, I?ll refill as needed from the pull out set. YES!
Slowly but surely. It?s been a LONG journey since May 22, but we?ve learned a lot, DONE a lot, and our house is going to be really awesome as a result of all this forced renovation. We?re just exhausted from the ?marathon?? looking forward to RELAXING this summer!
This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2012 at 8:49 am and is filed under Condiments, Farmer's Market, Gluten Free, Healthy, Main Dishes, Recipes, Side Dishes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Contact: Catalina Toma ctoma@wisc.edu 608-262-8760 University of Wisconsin-Madison
MADISON -- Online daters intent on fudging their personal information have a big advantage: most people are terrible at identifying a liar. But new research is turning the tables on deceivers using their own words.
"Generally, people don't want to admit they've lied," says Catalina Toma, communication science professor at the University of WisconsinMadison. "But we don't have to rely on the liars to tell us about their lies. We can read their handiwork."
Using personal descriptions written for Internet dating profiles, Toma and Jeffrey Hancock, communication professor at Cornell University, have identified clues as to whether the author was being deceptive.
The researchers compared the actual height, weight and age of 78 online daters to their profile information and photos on four matchmaking websites. A linguistic analysis of the group's written self-descriptions published in the February issue of the Journal of Communication revealed patterns in the liars' writing.
The more deceptive a dater's profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun "I."
"Liars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements," Toma says.
The liars often employed negation, a flip of the language that would restate "happy" as "not sad" or "exciting" as "not boring." And the fabricators tended to write shorter self-descriptions in their profiles a hedge, Toma expects, against weaving a more tangled web of deception.
"They don't want to say too much," Toma says. "Liars experience a lot of cognitive load. They have a lot to think about. They less they write, the fewer untrue things they may have to remember and support later."
Liars were also careful to skirt their own deception. Daters who had lied about their age, height or weight or had included a photo the researchers found to be less than representative of reality, were likely to avoid discussing their appearance in their written descriptions, choosing instead to talk about work or life achievements.
The toolkit of language clues gave the researchers a distinct advantage when they re-examined their pool of 78 online daters.
"The more deceptive the self-description, the fewer times you see 'I,' the more negation, the fewer words total using those indicators, we were able to correctly identify the liars about 65 percent of the time," Toma says.
A success rate of nearly two-thirds is a commanding lead over the untrained eye. In a second leg of their study, Toma and Hancock asked volunteers to judge the daters' trustworthiness based solely on the written self-descriptions posted on their online profiles.
"We asked them to tell us how trustworthy the person who wrote each profile was. And, as we expected, people are just bad at this," Toma says. "They might as well have flipped a coin ... They're looking at the wrong things."
About 80 percent of the 78 profiles in the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, strayed from the truth on some level.
"Almost everybody lied about something, but the magnitude was often small," Toma says.
Weight was the most frequent transgression, with women off by an average of 8.5 pounds and men missing by 1.5 pounds on average. Half lied about their height, and nearly 20 percent changed their age.
Studying lying through online communication such as dating profiles opens a door on a medium in which the liar has more room to maneuver.
"Online dating is different. It's not a traditional interaction," Toma says.
For one, it's asynchronous. The back-and-forth of an in-person conversation is missing, giving a liar the opportunity to respond at their leisure or not at all. And it's editable, so the first telling of the story can come out exactly like the profile-writer would like.
"You have all the time in the world to say whatever you want," Toma says. "You're not expected to be spontaneous. You can write and rewrite as many times as you want before you post, and then in many cases return and edit yourself."
Toma says the findings are not out of line with what we know about liars in face-to-face situations.
"Online daters' motivations to lie are pretty much the same as traditional daters'," she says. "It's not like a deceptive online profile is a new beast, and that helps us apply what we can learn to all manners of communication"
But don't go looking just yet for the dating site that employs Toma's linguistic analysis as a built-in lie detector.
"Someday there may be software to tell you how likely it is that the cute person whose profile you're looking at is lying to you, or even that someone is being deceptive in an e-mail," Toma says. "But that may take a while."
###
Chris Barncard, 608-890-0465, barncard@wisc.edu
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Catalina Toma ctoma@wisc.edu 608-262-8760 University of Wisconsin-Madison
MADISON -- Online daters intent on fudging their personal information have a big advantage: most people are terrible at identifying a liar. But new research is turning the tables on deceivers using their own words.
"Generally, people don't want to admit they've lied," says Catalina Toma, communication science professor at the University of WisconsinMadison. "But we don't have to rely on the liars to tell us about their lies. We can read their handiwork."
Using personal descriptions written for Internet dating profiles, Toma and Jeffrey Hancock, communication professor at Cornell University, have identified clues as to whether the author was being deceptive.
The researchers compared the actual height, weight and age of 78 online daters to their profile information and photos on four matchmaking websites. A linguistic analysis of the group's written self-descriptions published in the February issue of the Journal of Communication revealed patterns in the liars' writing.
The more deceptive a dater's profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun "I."
"Liars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements," Toma says.
The liars often employed negation, a flip of the language that would restate "happy" as "not sad" or "exciting" as "not boring." And the fabricators tended to write shorter self-descriptions in their profiles a hedge, Toma expects, against weaving a more tangled web of deception.
"They don't want to say too much," Toma says. "Liars experience a lot of cognitive load. They have a lot to think about. They less they write, the fewer untrue things they may have to remember and support later."
Liars were also careful to skirt their own deception. Daters who had lied about their age, height or weight or had included a photo the researchers found to be less than representative of reality, were likely to avoid discussing their appearance in their written descriptions, choosing instead to talk about work or life achievements.
The toolkit of language clues gave the researchers a distinct advantage when they re-examined their pool of 78 online daters.
"The more deceptive the self-description, the fewer times you see 'I,' the more negation, the fewer words total using those indicators, we were able to correctly identify the liars about 65 percent of the time," Toma says.
A success rate of nearly two-thirds is a commanding lead over the untrained eye. In a second leg of their study, Toma and Hancock asked volunteers to judge the daters' trustworthiness based solely on the written self-descriptions posted on their online profiles.
"We asked them to tell us how trustworthy the person who wrote each profile was. And, as we expected, people are just bad at this," Toma says. "They might as well have flipped a coin ... They're looking at the wrong things."
About 80 percent of the 78 profiles in the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, strayed from the truth on some level.
"Almost everybody lied about something, but the magnitude was often small," Toma says.
Weight was the most frequent transgression, with women off by an average of 8.5 pounds and men missing by 1.5 pounds on average. Half lied about their height, and nearly 20 percent changed their age.
Studying lying through online communication such as dating profiles opens a door on a medium in which the liar has more room to maneuver.
"Online dating is different. It's not a traditional interaction," Toma says.
For one, it's asynchronous. The back-and-forth of an in-person conversation is missing, giving a liar the opportunity to respond at their leisure or not at all. And it's editable, so the first telling of the story can come out exactly like the profile-writer would like.
"You have all the time in the world to say whatever you want," Toma says. "You're not expected to be spontaneous. You can write and rewrite as many times as you want before you post, and then in many cases return and edit yourself."
Toma says the findings are not out of line with what we know about liars in face-to-face situations.
"Online daters' motivations to lie are pretty much the same as traditional daters'," she says. "It's not like a deceptive online profile is a new beast, and that helps us apply what we can learn to all manners of communication"
But don't go looking just yet for the dating site that employs Toma's linguistic analysis as a built-in lie detector.
"Someday there may be software to tell you how likely it is that the cute person whose profile you're looking at is lying to you, or even that someone is being deceptive in an e-mail," Toma says. "But that may take a while."
###
Chris Barncard, 608-890-0465, barncard@wisc.edu
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 13-Feb-2012
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