Taylor Swift Vs. Justin Bieber - Is There an End in Sight for Their Ongoing Feud?

"Taylor Swift is no fan of Justin Bieber, or his off-again/on-again relationship with her pal, Selena Gomez. But is there an end in sight for Taylor's ongoing feud with the Biebs?

According to a Hollywood Life source, Swifty has decided not to bad-mouth Justin anymore.

"She's not saying anything to Selena at the moment about Justin. Taylor knows that Selena knows how she feels, so it's not worth wasting her breath. She still thinks he's not right for Selena, but it's not her place to alienate a friend."

More than anything, it sounds like they've agreed to disagree.

Not a Belieber

There is no love lost between Selena's BFF and her not quite ex-boyfriend.

Back in February, Taylor seemed quite vocal about wanting SelGo to move on. Sources reported that she was "encouraging her best friend to move on because she doesn't think the 18-year-old Canadian pop star is right for her," and suggesting that she needed to cut off all ties with him in order to facilitate the healing process.

Around that time, a particularly insidious rumor surfaced, suggesting that Taylor had tried to break up "Jelena" because she wanted him for herself.

"Taylor feels Justin is fair game now. She has had a crush on him for years...Taylor says that as a superstar himself, Justin is the one person who knows what her life is like. She says Justin just 'gets her,' and she finds that incredibly romantic. Taylor is the most fickle girl in the world."

There's no evidence that she was ever interested in him that way, and she just doesn't seem like someone who would betray a friend that way.

If anything, she has been nothing but supportive of the former Disney Channel star since the breakup. According to reports, Swifty "dropped everything" to be by her side, even calling her up to 10 times a day, and setting her up with other girlfriends while she was away on tour.

Still, Taylor has found other ways to express her disdain for the "Boyfriend" singer. Back in May, at the Billboard Music Awards, the "I Knew You Were Trouble" singer conspicuously avoided the question when a reporter asked her how she felt about him winning the fan-voted Milestone Award. "Can we have another question?"

Screen caps of Taylor grimacing when Selena and Justin kissed backstage also went viral.

Avoiding Potential Conflict

Although the country cutie seems to be keeping mum about Justin from now on, we're not expecting them to become BFFs anytime soon. Rumor has it that Taylor decided against attending Selena's 21st birthday party last month in order to avoid running into him.

"Taylor was talking about how she'll be on a super tight schedule on Saturday night because she has a show and she wants to get to Selena's birthday party. She was talking about flying out right after her show. She's not going to want to be there if Justin is there, it's so awkward between them now."

Taylor may be making a wise decision to keep her mouth shut from now on. She's already made her opinions quite clear, and it doesn't look like she'll be able to change her friend's mind.

The "22" singer is in an unenviable position of having to bite her tongue. I wouldn't blame her for wanting to avoid him, in order to prevent potential conflict with her pal.

Could Taylor and Justin ever learn to get along? Should Taylor stay out of Selena's relationship with Justin? Is she making a smart move to stop talking about him? Or is her beef with the Biebs justified?

More From This Contributor:

VMA Nominations 2013: Taylor Swift Subtly Disses Kanye West - Was It Necessary?

Is Taylor Swift Experiencing a Media Fallout? 4 Ways This Could Actually Benefit Her

Note:This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Join the Yahoo! Contributor Network here to start publishing your own articles. "

Lisa Kudrow to Join Scandal Cast as Politician in Recurring Role

"Looks like there's room for one more Friend in Washington D.C.! Lisa Kudrow is the latest familiar face to join the cast of Scandal in a recurring role as a politician on the smash ABC show, Deadline.com reports. Further details about her character are under wraps.

The 50-year-old actress has been keeping busy as a producer for Showtime comedy Web Therapy and TLC's Who Do You Think You Are? since the end of her 10-year run on Friends, and created and starred in short-lived HBO series The Comeback in 2005.

Last season's recurring cast member, Scott Foley, will be promoted to series regular for season three.

In July, Kudrow and fellow Friends alum Matthew Perry sat down together on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight and reflected on their time on the smash 90s sitcom, for which they were paid a staggering $1 million per episode by the series' final season in 2004.

"If it were up to us, like individually, oh, I would keep going," Kudrow said of wishing the show hadn't ended. "There would have come a time anyway when someone would have said, 'We've had enough.' But why not have fun until they do?"

And, Kudrow told Us during a TCA press day last month, she still finds herself cracking up at the characters' crazy antics whenever she catches the series airing on TV.

"First I get over the shock because I see the episodes and am so surprised that I don't remember it ever happening!" she said. "Then I relax and say, 'Oh, how funny is this? That David Schwimmer is so funny!'"

This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Lisa Kudrow to Join Scandal Cast as Politician in Recurring Role"

Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Kids Is Just for the Children

" Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 tablet might come in three models already but now the company is adding one more version for its youngest customers -- the Galaxy Tab 3 Kids.

"We saw an opportunity to create a device for kids that provides them with an intuitive, fun and kid-friendly user-experience," JK Shin, the CEO of Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. "Filled with rich, interactive and educational content that parents will love."

The Galaxy Tab 3 Kids looks like the baby of a Samsung phone and a Fisher Price toy. In addition to the primary color scheme that would be at home in an elementary school classroom, Samsung also made an easy-to-hold kids' case and stylus.

In terms of technical specs, the device has an 7-inch screen and will run Android 4.1, or Jelly Bean. The front and rear facing cameras are considerably lower in quality than its previous products, down to 3-megapixels and 1.3-megapixels respectively. Then again, kids probably don't feel the need to take selfies. At least not at that age.

Amazon Looks to Make Kindle Fire HD Top Kids' Tablet

While it's a tablet meant for kids, mom and dad still have the ultimate say. The tablet comes with parental control settings as well as a timer. When time runs out, parents can input a passcode that will extend their kids time with the tablet.

The Tab 3 Kids, of course, isn't the only children's tablet available. The $179 Nabi 2 Android tablet is aimed at kids and is sold at retailers including Target and Walmart. And Toys R Us has even released its own tablet for kids.

However, many parents have stuck with "adult" tablets, including the Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7 and iPad for their kids. With the Kindle Fire HD and the Nexus 7, Amazon and Google, respectively, have added children-friendly features, including parental controls and different user accounts. During the holiday season, Nielsen reported that kids aged 6-12 were more interested in the iPad than any other consumer electronics and gaming device.

Samsung's device will join those others soon. It will debut in Korea in early September and eventually roll out to other countries, including the United States. Though no price was announced, Samsung's current Galaxy Tabs start at $199.99. "

What is 'Big Data,' anyway? Authors of a new book try to explain

""Big data" has become a really big buzz-phrase — tossed around in conversations about everything from business to surveillance; cited as a tool to improve driving, hiring, understanding dogs, and everything else; and, inevitably, dismissed as a bunch of hype.

But what exactly is big data, anyway? Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, offers an answer. Their book is a wide-ranging assessment of "the ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value." And while they acknowledge that the term itself has become amorphous, they frame their subject pretty clearly: "Big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationship between citizens and governments, and more."

That (not to mention the book's subtitle) might sound a little hype-y, but Big Data is fairly even-handed: Early chapters explore the hope and potential around the way massive information sets are being created and mined, but later ones are clear about risks, pitfalls, and dangers. Mayer-Schönberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University; Cukier is "data editor" for The Economist. Their book raised a few questions for me — so I asked the authors. Here's what they said.

I'd like to start toward the end: One of your later chapters examines "the dark side of big data," and among other things you note concerns about privacy and the possibility of using "big-data predictions" to in effect penalize people for behavior they seem likely to engage in, but haven't. You even mention the NSA at one point. So I wonder what you've made of the debate about more recent surveillance revelations related to the agency: There's a lot of focus on the collection of the data, for instance, but should we be talking about how it's analyzed?

Kenneth Cukier: The question draws an excellent distinction — one that's sadly missing from the debate. The disclosures have been mostly about the collection and not the use of the data. And when intelligence agencies explain how they work with the data, the method seems oddly old-school: targeted surveillance, not too different from the days of alligator-clips atop copper wires. Of course we're probably not told the whole story and they're actually running massive statistical regressions across all the data to hunt for patterns that they didn't know to look for in advance. That's what Facebook and LinkedIn data-scientists would do with it. But we haven't yet seen evidence that this is what the NSA is doing.

That said, the collection alone is troubling because it is happening with insufficient oversight. And the goal of intelligence is to prevent bad things from happening — it's about prediction. As we lay out in the book, this may be troubling when people are penalized for what they only have propensity to do, not for what they've done. So we have to be very careful using this ability, as it improves to the degree that it becomes more established.

You make a compelling case about the limitations of sampling (as opposed to more comprehensive big data approaches) and how we've come to accept it perhaps more than we should. But among the examples you mention is voter intent. It's not like there's a comprehensive database of who everyone intends to vote for, is there? How does big data actually provide an alternative here? Isn't there a distinction between what we want to measure and what we can measure?

Cukier: Actually, there is a database of every voter and their intentions. Both major parties contract with different data providers that are loosely affiliated with the parties, to tap databases of all Americans. The first variable is if the person is registered to vote and if he or she actually cast a ballot in the most recent election. The Democrats in 2012 had an internal database of every voter in America and asked three questions of it: Do you support Obama; are you likely to vote; and if you are undecided, are you persuadable? By ranking people based on that last measure, the Dems could know where to best spend their advertising budget for maximum impact.

Big data was critical: sampling works well for basic questions like what candidate a person supports. But it's less useful when you want to drill down into the granular — like what candidate Asian-American women with college degrees support. To do that, you may need to give up your sample and go for it all.

Yet the broader point is correct: there is a difference between what we want to measure and what we can measure. And we need to be on guard that we don't confuse the two. For example, in the Vietnam War, the Pentagon used the metric of the body count as a way to measure progress, when that data wasn't really meaningful to what they wanted to depict. Sadly, I fret this fallibility is something that we'll just have to learn to live with, as we have in so many other domains.

Many of your examples involve scrutinizing data that already exists (including instances where it's mined for reasons that have nothing to do with why it was gathered), but I was very interested to learn about "datafication" that involves setting out to collect new information in new ways: For instance, UPS "datifying" its vehicle fleet by gathering mechanical information that predicts and minimizes breakdowns. This almost seem like a distinct category to me. Do you think of it as a fundamentally different form of big data?

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: It is tempting to be dazzled by the many new types of data that are being collected — from engine sensors in UPS vehicles, to heart rates in

premature babies, to human posture. But that is how datafication works in practice: at first we think it is impossible to render something in data form, then somebody comes up with a nifty and cost-efficient idea to do so, and we are amazed by the applications that this will enable, and then we come to accept it as the new normal. A few years ago, this happened with geo-location data, and before it was with web browsing data (gleaned through cookies). It is a sign of the continuing progress of datafication.

You're right that dataficiation is fundamentally different than big data. For example, the 19th century American navigator Commodore Maury, who invented tidal maps, datafied the logbooks of past sea voyages by extracting information about the wind and waves at a given location. But we can get the most of big data today because so many new elements of our lives are being rendered into a data form, which was extremely hard to do in the past.

You emphasize that making the most of big data means we have to "shed some of [our] obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what." This means breaking from the tradition of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it: It doesn't matter whether we can explain a correlation that big data reveals, we should just act on it. That's a big shift! I'm curious if when you're out talking about the book whether you get a lot of resistance to that idea, because it seems crucial to what you call the "big data mindset."

Mayer-Schönberger: Yes, we do encounter resistance on this point, but intriguingly, it's rarely from the real experts in their field. They often know how tentative their causal conclusions are, or how much they are actually based on correlations rather than truly comprehending the exact causality of things. Also, we often get mischaracterized as either suggesting that theories don't matter or causality is not important. We don't argue either. In fact, theories will continue to matter very much, but the concrete hypothesis derived from a theory less so.

Take Google Flu Trends. The theory that what people search for could correlate with human health in a given location was crucial for Google Flu Trends to happen. But none of Google's engineers could ever have guessed the exact hypothesis to test — that is, the exact search terms that best predict the spread of the flu. After all, the company handles around 3 billion searches every day. So big data analysis did that for them.

Causal connections are really valuable where and if one can find them. But looking for them at great cost and coming up empty is less useful, we suggest, than looking for correlations — not least because such correlations can help identify what potential connections between two phenomena should be investigated for a possible causal link. In that very sense, big data analysis actually helps causal investigations as well.

Finally, I was struck by how many examples in the book involved businesses that have amassed incredible data sets and learned to use them to boost sales or improve marketing. You have the story of how Wal Mart mined its past data and figured out that people preparing for a hurricane by purchasing flashlights and the like also tended to buy Pop-Tarts — so it put Pop-Tarts at the front of the store during hurricane season, and sales increased. Is there any concern about how much big data is in effect owned by business, and deployed largely in the service of the profit motive? I think one thing that makes people nervous about the big data idea is that it's so often opaque. But do the benefits outweigh those concerns? Should we stop worrying and just be thankful for the conveniently placed Pop-Tarts?

Mayer-Schönberger: There is a value in having conveniently placed Pop-Tarts, and it isn't just that Wal Mart is making more money. It is also that shoppers find faster what they are likely looking for. Sometimes big data gets badly mischaracterized as just a tool to create more targeted advertising online. But UPS uses big data to save millions of gallons of fuel — and thus improve both its bottom line and the environment. Google aiding public health agencies in predicting the spread of the flu, or Decide.com helping consumers save a bundle has nothing to do with targeted advertising, and create positive effects beyond a single company's quarterly profit. We need to cast our gaze wider when we want to understand big data's upside (and incidentally, also its "dark sides").

My thanks to Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier for taking the time to answer these questions. Their book is: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. "

Demi Lovato to Play Naya Rivera's Lesbian Love Interest on Glee

"While Demi Lovato is getting closer with on-again, off-again boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama off screen, she's starting a new romance on screen. For her upcoming guest role on the fifth season of Glee, Lovato will playing the lesbian love interest to Naya Rivera's character Santana Lopez.

"She's playing my love interest, so I'm very, very excited about that," Rivera, 26, told MTV News on Sunday, Aug. 25 about the 21-year-old singer joining the Fox musical series. "We get to sing a song together. It's gonna be good. I'm excited to work with her. We're bringing her to the dark side. Well, she comes in in a Beatles episode, so [we're singing] a Beatles song. I'm excited." (Rivera's character has previously been in a romantic relationship with Heather Morris' Brittany Pierce on the show.)

Lovato also tweeted her excitement about joining Glee on Monday, Aug. 26, writing, "Wayyyyy too excited to be starting @GLEE this week!!!!!!! Asjfkdjshdk. I can't believe I'm going back to acting but the best part about it is that I get to act/sing with some of my really great friends . . ."

Getting back to work on a new season of Glee is bittersweet for Rivera. Costar Cory Monteith died from a heroin and alcohol overdose on July 13. While mourning his death, the cast has been working on filming a special tribute episode, airing October 10. At the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, Rivera told Us Weekly the mood on set has been "terrible."

The actress also told MTV News, "It's horrible. So many, so many [memories]. He was an amazing guy and I definitely miss him."

This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Demi Lovato to Play Naya Rivera's Lesbian Love Interest on Glee "

New Windows operating system sent to computer makers

"Microsoft on Tuesday began sending a revamped version of Windows to makers of computers, smartphones or tablets powered by the software.

"We've hit an important milestone for Microsoft," Windows team executive Antoine Leblond said in a blog post.

"In many ways, this marks a new day for Microsoft, reflecting a number of rapid-release firsts."

Developers of applications tailored to run on Windows devices were irked, however, to find out that they will not get their hands on the finished version of Windows 8.1 until it hits the market in October.

In the past, developers had early access to new versions of Windows to allow time to make sure their applications work with the software.

"Seriously, has Microsoft fallen off its rocker?" a developer asked rhetorically in a chat forum below Leblond's blog post.

"This decision is yet another that leaves me questioning the judgment of Microsoft's current management."

Microsoft in June provided developers with a preview version of the "re-blended" Windows 8 operating system released late last year.

Windows 8.1 incorporated feedback from users and developers, and came with the promise that the US software giant was speeding up its release cycle to adapt to the dizzying pace of innovation in consumer technology.

"Windows 8.1 is a significant update," Leblond said.

"As we consider the code we just handed off, and the new intuitive and fluid computing experience it provides -- anytime, anywhere, across all devices -- we're confident we made the right bet."

Windows 8.1 remains true to the vision of an operating system tuned for touch-screen controls and multi-gadget lifestyles increasingly revolving around tablets and smartphones, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft is under pressure to adapt to a huge shift in how people engage with computers.

Smartphones and tablets have vanquished the days when people devoted the bulk of computer time to Windows-powered desktop or laptop machines.

The overhauled Windows 8 operating system released in November was designed to power the array Internet-linked devices.

Better adapting to the shifting Internet landscape is believed to be among the reasons behind the unexpected announcement last week that Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer will retire within 12 months.

"There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time," Ballmer said Friday in a written release.

"My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company's transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction."

Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000 from co-founder Bill Gates, a classmate and friend from their days at Harvard University in the 1970s.

While its Windows software is used on the vast majority of personal computers, Microsoft has had little impact in the fast-growing segments of tablets and smartphones."

Exclusive…’Crazy, Absurd!’ Go Behind the Scenes of Avril Lavigne’s ‘Rock N Roll’ Video!

"If you haven't already seen Avril Lavigne's video for "Rock 'N' Roll," just be forewarned that the clip basically defies a cohesive description. Between the pop singer's warrior-military garb, the car driven by a dog, the famous guest stars (including a smooch with "Wonder Years" actress Danica McKellar!), the blade-adorned guitar...oh yeah, and the bearshark...this is one heck of a sensational visual journey.

In fact, as the director of the clip himself puts it, it's crazy, absurd, and badass, which is just the way rock 'n' roll should be, right? Yahoo! Music is excited to present this exclusive behind-the-scenes video detailing the making of this opus, with more director's commentary, as well as Lavigne herself weighing in on the action.

Meet the dog! See Sid from Slipknot chuck a baby doll! Get the inside scoop and a closeup on that kiss with "Winnie!" Watch the bearshark twerk! (Well, okay, maybe that's taking it a bit far, but he does do a little dance. ) It's all here."