Link roundup

1. Gawker on Newt Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter followers:

About 80 percent of those accountsare inactive or are dummy accounts created by various "follow agencies," another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt's profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn't follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich.

2. NBC is claiming that its new show The Playboy Club is about female empowerment.

3. A little less corporate-funded propaganda in schools:

In response to pressure from parents, educators and grassroots advocates, Scholastic Inc. will drastically limit its practice of partnering with corporations to produce classroom material, the company announced last week.

The publisher had been under fire since May, when it was forced to stop distributing a fourth-grade curriculum called “The United States of Energy” that had been paid for by the coal industry and distributed to classrooms across the country.

Via.

Link roundup

1. "Nineteen years ago three men had the idea of a regular lunch club for crime experts that would try to solve some of the United States' most baffling homicides. The Vidocq Society has now been instrumental in solving hundreds of crimes." Via.

2. On set photographs of Bane will dull your enthusiasm for The Dark Knight Rises.

3. "Inspections by New York's Department of Consumer Affairs found that two-thirds of the supermarkets they visited were overcharging customers at the checkout counter."

*Buy Batman Lego minifigs at eBay.

Link roundup

1. No pictures on the web?:

Focus and LAIKA were on hand at Comic-Con today to show concept art, puppets and props used for the family-friendly comedy thriller [ParaNorman], including Norman's room, which is peppered with zombie posters and a coffin alarm clock, and a room from the house of Mr. Prendergast (John Goodman), the town crazy guy who has a great trucker hat featuring a beaver with a wrench.

2. If this is real, I don't see why it's not fraudulent.

3. The BBTS has available for preorder the Batman Legacy series 2 figures I previously posted (Batgirl etc).

Link roundup

1. For other Blogger users, here's a useful comment by a Blogger employee from Ann Althouse's blog:

While our export tools may have been somewhat unreliable when handling blogs this large (Althouse is one of the largest Blogger blogs!), along the way helping Ann we discovered ways to improve them and moving forward Blogger will be much better equipped to handle cases like this.

So Ann while I'm personally sad to see you go (if that is indeed the decision), I wanted to let you know that you will always have a home on Blogger and a team who cares about your experience with Blogger. That also (of course) goes for everyone. We love hearing from users, and anyone can bug me directly on Twitter (@electrobutter) if something is on their mind, or hit up the team via @blogger.

It seems like such a typical Google thing to do to make such outreach efforts only when it was too late to keep her on the platform. Her entire Blogger blog was deleted, possibly by error, possibly by a rogue Google employee, last month.

2. "An investigation into Atlanta’s public school system has uncovered evidence that teachers and principals have been secretly erasing and correcting answers on students’ tests for as long as a decade."

3. "For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns."