The Hajj and Eid al-Adha - The Big Picture - Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_hajj_and_eid_aladha.html

Give to 7th grade SS teachers for Islam unit

Thousands of Muslim pilgrims cast stones at a pillar, symbolising stoning Satan, in a ritual called "Jamarat," the last and most dangerous rite of the annual hajj, near the Saudi holy city of Mina on December 8, 2008. To complete the ritual, a pilgrim must throw 21 pebbles at each of three 25-meter (82-foot) pillars and this year the faithful are being given pebbles in pre-packed bags to spare them the effort of searching for the stones.

Funny Sheeit

Sarah Palin Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party betwe...

wow! is this the first wave of barack obama criticism? note: i don't know who 3/5ths of the people on this list are, but for everyone else, this tells it like it is. some very choice words.

A very engaging look at the current practices of male/female relationships. "Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually." I think the most interesting point is this idea about female expectations: "[Women] want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual." This last sentence is the major sticking point in my mind, though I've wondered since reading it if I'm just attracted to it because it justifies/reinforces my, shall we say, lack of aggression in dating.

"Earlier this year, I published an article in City Journal called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.” The piece elicited a roaring flood of mailed and blogged responses, mostly from young men who didn’t much care for its title (a reference to Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land) or its thesis: that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes."

Europeana - Connecting Cultural Heritage

Projekthomepage mit Systeminfos, Metadaten, Technisches, etc.

"I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate."

Minimalist satire on ordinary attitudes

60. The Brass Monkey at Little Star Pizza

L’Osteria del Forno

San Francisco.

Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently. It's the same with much of today's webcam video; most people still try to emulate TV and film. Only weirdos like MadV are really exploring its potential. A bigger leap will occur when we get better tools for archiving and searching video. Then we'll start using it the way we use paper or word processing: to take notes or mull over a problem, like Tom Cruise flipping through scenes at the beginning of Minority Report. We think of video as a way to communicate with others—but it's becoming a way to communicate with ourselves.

Article connecting YouTube with participatory culture.

"So here's my question: What exactly is this? What do you call MadV's project? It isn't quite a documentary; it isn't exactly a conversation or a commentary, either. It's some curious mongrel form. And it would have been inconceivable before the Internet and cheap webcams—prohibitively expensive and difficult to pull off."

Really nice discussion of the history of the ebook market.

A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've finally found something more stupid than Twitter.

It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity.

"Paying attention isn't a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we're living. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively. Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. "The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us," said Jackson. "But at the same time, that doesn't mean that nothing has changed. The question is, how do we confront our own challenges?" Wired.com talked to Jackson about attention and its loss."

yes

The other important thing is to discuss interruption as an environmental question and collective social issue. In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

Don't constrain your self by making too much part of your identity (reminds me of much of Tom Robbins's writing)

Paul Graham

At 8.40am on Monday 15 December, a new post appeared on an internet forum called the Darkside Release Group.

all about axxo, I wonder if they talk about his terrible taste in movies ha ha. To read later.

Some great questions about file sharing, the hypocrisy of pirates wanting credit for their rips, and the legend of the great aXXo

"Though the mainstream media ignored it, this was a landmark moment for millions of filesharers worldwide: the 1,000th movie uploaded by aXXo, the internet's most popular and enduring pirate. If you already know his name, chances are you've been doing something illegal."

What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right? Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.

More accurate title: Robert Proctor on how lying asshats dilute the truth.

DISCLAIMER - I am not endorsing anything here!

CNN에서

Like a lot of people, I grew up on Sesame Street and the Muppets. But did you ever stop to wonder where they came from?

Some of the characters we know and love were recycled from other TV shows and commercials Jim Henson worked on, while others were invented by using whatever materials were around. Be prepared for a little nostalgia, and I hope I didn't leave out your favorite -- not all of the characters have interesting background stories (sorry, Big Bird).

Animal

Some of the characters we know and love were recycled from other TV shows and commercials Jim Henson worked on,

I get this: "The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It's one thing to share intimacies person-to-person. But with a community? Creepy."

Erwischt!?

Wired magazine article ... another in the line of stories about social media burnout and why/if it is really worthwhile.

How the Amish live against tide of technology.

Amish Hackers - Adopting Technology

For the sake of proof-of-concept, I'm glad the Amish exist. "Ivan is an Amish alpha-geek. He is always the first to try a new gadget or technique. He gets in his head that the new flowbitzmodulator would be really useful. He comes up with a justification of how it fits into the Amish orientation. So he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others.""

Great article on the Amish community discernment process for adopting technology. Dispels a lot of myths, and gives a lot to think on.

Amish use the web at libraries (using but not owning). From cubicles in public libraries Amish sometimes set up a website for their business. So while Amish websites seem like a joke, there's quite a few of them. What about post-modern innovations like credit cards? A few Amish got them, presumably for their businesses at first. But over time the bishops noticed problems of overspending, and the resultant crippling interest rates. Farmers got into debt, which impacted not only them but the community since their families had to help them recover (that's what community and families are for). So, after a trial period, the elders ruled against credit cards. One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, "If I had a TV, I'd watch it."

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any.

A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises

Great charts.

"A global perspective on Americans’ religiosity offers a few surprises"

take this share

Incredible photographs of an incredible spider robot. Must see. Be sure to read the captions on this one. My favorite: "Huge special effects are used like something from a film but its right there in front of you." Amazing.

"As part of Liverpool's Capital of Culture year, the French group La Machine were commissioned to create a large piece of street theatre, on the scale of their earlier work, the Sultan's Elephant. Many were expecting to see something using the iconic Liverbirds, the symbol of the city but instead we got a spider."

A 50-foot mechanical spider, marauding through the streets of Liverpool...

save

The lolcats, the Internet's most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

"The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America's economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?"

Did you know that creativity is Man's Work?

# Do well on standardized tests Be able to read for pleasure Learn for the sake of learning

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

And so it goes, quite predictably too.... "As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?"

"people who have hundreds of millions or a billion in the bank are not going to change their lifestyles"

In 2009, we are celebrating curiosity and creativity with a dynamic look at the very best ideas that give us reason for optimism. Rethink your assumptions and pose better questions about the future: Welcome to The Universe in 2009.

The home page for SEED Magazine is inviting, making me want to click around and read a couple of articles.

Video on TED.com

Just cuz...

The hottest microblogging service, Twitter, is changing the way TV, literature and media operate.

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist. The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, & director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

うわぁ…

Paul should be on this list.

Big Picture

This shit is AMAZING.

It is Carnival Season in many countries around the world with a Roman Catholic heritage. Celebrations and parades put on just prior to the observance of Lent.

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

Here's The Economist article on FB. The best quote: ...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are "broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

'Oldest English words' identified

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Some of the oldest words in the English and other Indo-European languages have been identified, scientists believe.Reading University researchers say "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the oldest in use and date back as much as 40,000 years.

interesting perspective

"The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner" YEAH IT'S ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY

海外メディアは日本でiPhoneが嫌われてるような印象の記事が目立つな

Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone | Gadget Lab from Wired.comhttp://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/why-the-iphone.htm iPhone iphoneiphone iPhone iphoneiphone

How much do we colloborate or manage our weak and strong ties? This report suggests not as much as is often touted.

’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior

Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behaviorhttp://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/27/facebooks-in-house-sociologist-shares-stats-on-users-socia

Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-7% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men. “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says. - Tac Anderson

"...Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends."

internet time

Matt Jones talk at Webstock. Superb!

Fabulous slideshare presentation by Matt Jones about city magic drawing connections between urbanisation and digitalisation.

so cool

It's about technology and the city. Or if you'd like, the city as technology. The car changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I'd claim that mobiles will do the same in the 21st.

hackers are building sensors, bots and software into everything around them bottom-up, fast, cheap and out-of-control. They're creating environments that react, adapt and respond to us - and perhaps more importantly - each other: The Demon-Haunted World. Matt's session will be a whistlestop tour of those days of future past and pointers to some practical futures we can start building right now, together.

Matt Jones on "city magic"

"Archigram thought of behaviour as the raw material they were building with". They also used the term "social software" in 1972... motherfuck the fringe is hard to mine for valuables! :0

Visual Performance Research Lab Footage - hand gestures, tone of voice, facial/body expression

Conan hosts the comedian Louis CK who is talking of the spoiled generation worth watching!

UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Google Mapで、「消滅の危機にある言語」の使用地域が見られるページ （UNESCO website）

Agent Lathan gave out 2,000 high fives by standing next to a subway escalator during the morning rush. Five additional agents spread out along the adjacent stairs, holding signs that prepared commuters for the upcoming high five fun. […] The subway station at 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue can be a nightmare in the morning. Thousands of commuters make a daily transfer from the E or V train to the 6 train. The first part of the transfer involves taking one of two giant escalators, which both run up in the morning to accommodate the huge crowd. […] Everyone is generally in a pretty crappy mood when they’re making this transfer with a herd of other people at the crack of dawn. It was definitely a location in need of a bit of fun.

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places.

For our latest mission, Agent Lathan gave out 2,000 high fives by standing next to a subway escalator during the morning rush. Five additional agents spread out along the adjacent stairs, holding signs that prepared commuters for the upcoming high five fun

Oh very cute yes. Made me smile, anyway.

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.

reviews of every beatles song, from worst to best. i really like this.

Beatles

185 Beatles Songs, in order, from worst to best.

"When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s the language of Heaven."

Very long transcript of Bruce Sterling's talk at Webstock but well worth the effort.

We've got a web built on top of a collapsed economy. THAT's the black hole at the center of the solar system now. There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.

Cracked waxes downright philosophic. I love it. Mostly because they're right. We spend far too much time thinking about what we want, scared to admit that we don't know, worried that means we'll never get anywhere, when sitting and worrying about it all is doing less to help us than virtually any other activity except killing ourselves.

according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let's look at the five things we're most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure.

Innovation at Honda is fueled by a focus on engineering and problem solving and the proper levels of insight to enable spending and experimentation

Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

I'm saving this for the next time I get that open-a-coffee-house/Mac-tech-shop urge.

"I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home.

I want to read this article...it looks fascinating.

Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism; it seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion; it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from. Civilization has its problems but in almost every way it is better than the Unabomber’s shack.

I honestly can't believe this is real. Appalling, but true.

With all the recent talk about the decline of big media (eg. Seth Godin's article at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/when-newspapers.html), I thought it relevant to point to this piece about the shocking state of world slavery: "For four years, I saw dozens of people enslaved, several of whom traffickers actually offered to sell to me. I did not pay for a human life anywhere. And, with one exception, I always withheld action to save any one person, in the hope that my research would later help to save many more. At times, that still feels like an excuse for cowardice. But the hard work of real emancipation can’t be the burden of a select few." What place does four years worth of investigative journalism have in an internet driven meritocracy? Philanthropic endeavours? Streamlined news journals?Reportage is going to change and it is important we don't lose the power to expose issues like this.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

"Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. ... The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000."

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common.

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history

"Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy." It is true. We take for granted the miracles we get from technology, and complain when the miracles aren't perfect. This comedian's routine on the Conan O'Brien show is funny, mocking our ingratitude. I post it here because the rant is a cartoon version of a more serious argument that we become blind to progress. Enjoy:

at The Technium

Posted by Supybot

comedian Louis C.K. on conan o'brian talking about how people take our amazing technology for granted.

"Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy." It is true. We take for granted the miracles we get from technology, and complain when the miracles aren't perfect. This comedian's routine on the Conan O'Brien show is funny, mocking our ingratitude. I post it here because the rant is a cartoon version of a more serious argument that we become blind to progress.

Fantastic 4 minute skit. And very, very true.

Wow. Yeah, y'know. That's true.

Florian Kaps on a mission.

Love this.

Yay!

notables: Gambit, Ghost in the Shell, Green Lantern, .Hack/Slash, Old Boy, Tintin. They forgot Watchmen.

84 movies. 84? 84! Not even counting Scott Pilgrim!

Watch the people's reactions as a camera makes the rounds at a local sushi restaurant in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, Japan.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/01/sending-your-video-c.html

Ends up being a great story. Nice snapshot of people's lives.

oti na nai steadyCam

longer conveyor vidoe in sushi bar

windows theory

But what about a site's physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog's owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?

"Of 13 million tracks available, 52,000 - just 0.4 per cent - accounted for 80 per cent of downloads."

awesome read on the sociology of shopping

The long tail

do I agree? does this matter?

nt us towards more mainstream

A 25-year-old Caltech graduate student has developed a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

WSJ - Digits

Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.

Using facebook statistics to find correlation between intellegence and taste.

{no comment}

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm slowdeathofhandwriting handwritinghandwriting

the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds. PDF

No Fear joins the increasingly vigorous debate about the role and nature of childhood in the UK. Over the past 30 years activities that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabelled as troubling or dangerous, and the adults who permit them branded as irresponsible. No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds.

"Over the past 30 years activities that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabelled as troubling or dangerous, and the adults who permit them branded as irresponsible. No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives."

oldest lolcat

funny lolcat

This captioned cat picture postcard was found by Tracy Angulo in a Seattle antique store. Tracy tells us that the photograph is from 1905, which would make this officially the oldest cat picture with a caption, AKA lolcat, that we’ve seen.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

A good epitaph for the newspaper, by Clay Shirky. Now if only Elsevier would go bankrupt too.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it's been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it's been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it's you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can't be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Oh, newspapers, please stick around. The revolution of the printing press was only, what, a few decades ago?

save

urban camouflage

Hiding in plain sight in ikea

folks who try to hide their identity and humanity within an urban context. fabulous.

for invading spaces for guillermo

This might be the best thing ever.

dan tag ik 'm ook maar hé. URBAN CAMOUFLAGE

save

Good piece on network effects and history of social network sites by Danah Boyd.

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc.

Feb. 28, 2009 paper on Social Media to Microsoft.

Great overview (sampling plate) about 'social media'

The indispensable Michael Lewis reports from Reykjavík on the de facto bankruptcy of Iceland. An amazing story: the country's currency is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance. This was the result of a collective madness stunning even by US standards of financial insanity. Lewis asks how a 300,000 person fishing nation with one of the highest living standards in the world managed to turn itself into a national hedge fund? Lewis reports on an inbred country where, among other things, the men are largely nuts and the women seem to have completely given up on them, The result is the first lesbian head of state, an all-female political party, and the nation's only profitable bank run entirely by women. Like most of what Lewis writes about the intersection of people and large sums of money, this is another "drop whatever else you are doing and read this" article.

on the financial meltdown ef Iceland

Iceland's collapse. "One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it."

"Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown. "

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

125-page transcript from a week-long 1978 story conference between Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, where they hashed out Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Monday, March 09, 2009 The “Raiders” Story Conference Hey, guys, you’re going to love this (and thanks, Viktor). There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

JG: "Speaking of George Lucas, here’s an amazing find by Mystery Man on Film: a 125-page transcript from a week-long 1978 story conference between Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, where they hashed out Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Sure, there's a 125 page document on the interwebs now that transcribes the meetings that Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan had to plan out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but even better is this post chock-full of analysis (with examples) of that document, finding principles of storytelling, screenwriting, and collaboration. "7) No idea is a bad idea when you’re brainstorming. These guys were all over the place with ideas and there’s nothing wrong with that. As I mentioned earlier, many of the ideas discussed, like the plane crash sequence and mine cart chase, were used in the second film. So what helped determine which sequence should be kept and thrown away? Redundancies in concept. You already had a chase scene here, so why have another one here? Let’s come up with something different. You know? That kind of thing."

"There is a 125-page transcript of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark. There were about 10 Screenwriting Lessons I took away from this experience and thought they might be worth sharing."

"So then they go back to figure out when and how you can setup the snake joke in the opening sequence. A lot of screenwriting is backtracking, of setups and payoffs."

Man-oh-man, Spielberg and Lucas were idea machines. They could’ve sat there coming up with Indiana Smith ideas forever. There were enough ideas generated in these meetings for two films, which they actually used for two films. I must say, it’s rather unusual to have meetings with a producer and a director and be given so many ideas. Not that meetings with producers and directors wouldn’t have a lot of ideas but I’m not sure you would encounter such a volume as this. For screenwriters, it’s a goldmine. If you try to forget the finished film and put yourself into Kasdan’s shoes and you have all these ideas thrown at you, it can be a daunting task. What do you keep? What do you throw away? How do you make all this work?

[via Moltz]

ome very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and

...according to Esquire. Not such a bad list, actually; and surprisingly well-rounded and eclectic.

Kick off Esquire.com's Music Week with our unranked, incomplete, yet highly tasteful and informative list of the records your music collection requires. How many have you listened to?

Top album list... hope to own them all one day

Sprekende foto's over de financiele crisis

Another great entry from The Big Picture. #30: Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done. The loot was never found, but based on circumstantial evidence, Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years. Until now.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable... and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.

Compelling yarn, optioned for screen adaptation for obvious reasons.

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

A beautiful piece by Michael Lewis about the Iceland economy which went bankrupt in 2008.

beautiful pictures, beautiful color!!!

Sur le blog Big Picture

Last Wednesday (March 11th), people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. Holi is celebrated as a welcoming of Spring, and a celebration of the triumph of good over evil. What that translates to in action is an enthusiastic dropping of inhibitions, as people chase each other and playfully splash colorful paint, powder and water on each other. People also attend bonfires to commemorate the story of Prahlada, a Hindu figure and devout follower of Lord Vishnu who prevailed over his father and the demoness Holika with the power of his devotion. Collected here are photos from this year's Festival of Colors.

Forget Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day. THIS is the festival that I want to attend.

Photos of. I liked.

Must read. 210309

we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.

In writing an article, I know I’m done when I delete. The process leading to done is chaotic; it’s days, weeks, or months of aggregating writing where I collect and organize paragraphs and sentences. Over time, content creation becomes content shaping as I organize the thoughts into a pleasing coherence.

How to write a good tweet that puts a bit of you into it.

Say More with Less

the sense of tweeting

glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal al

Amazing bio piece on David Foster Wallace; actually chokes me up while reading; totally essential - must blog about this

David Foster Wallace

The Bygone Bureau is a journal of modern thought, specializing in travel writing and cultural criticism. We launched on June 25, 2007 and update every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

text/html; charset=UTF-8

Eh

interesting though probably incorrect in many ways. relationship from sat scores to music taste

very hot. 290309

Mexico's drug war - The Big Picture - Boston.com

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

Article on the writer David Foster Wallace who committed suicide on Sep 12th 2008. He battled with depression.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant

"Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"-dfw, dfw's writing after infinite jest, struggle with depression, portrait of older dfw, some biography

'One of the driving factors in Settlers—and one of the secrets to its success—is that nobody has reliable access to all five resources. This means players must swap cards to get what they need, creating a lively and dynamic market, which works like any other: If ore isn't rolled for several turns, it becomes more valuable. "Even in this tiny, tiny microcosm of life, scarcity leads to higher prices, and plenty leads to lower prices," says George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, who uses Settlers to teach his four children how free markets work. Wheeling and dealing turns out to be an elegant solution to one of the big problems plaguing Monopoly—sitting idle while other players take their turns. Since every roll of the dice in Settlers has the potential to reap a new harvest of resource cards, unleash a flurry of negotiations, and change the balance of the board, every turn engages all the players. "The secret of Catan is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine."'

In 1991, Klaus Teuber was well on his way to becoming one of the planet's hottest board game designers. Teuber (pronounced "TOY-burr"), a dental technician living with his wife and three kids in a white row house in Rossdorf, Germany, had created a game a few years earlier called Barbarossa and the Riddlemaster, a sort of ur-Cranium in which players mold figures out of modeling clay while their opponents try to guess what the sculptures represent. The game was a hit, and in 1988 it won the Spiel des Jahres prize—German board gaming's highest honor. Winning some obscure German award may not sound impressive, but in the board game world the Spiel des Jahres is, in fact, a very, very big deal. Germans, it turns out, are absolutely nuts about board games. More are sold per capita in Germany than anywhere else on earth.

Settlers of Catan, Siedlers

miscellaneous vocabularies explained in nytimes context

"Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note."

more schott on ny times

Webcomic

recurring dreams

All too true in my case...

Analisis de los mensajes que circulan en Twitter.

Everyone has annoying habits, and a sizable part of every successful marriage is learning to live with those things each other does that annoy you. I think it's safe to

Using "frak," or Klingon, or both, instead of regular swear words

"While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop. ... Individual diversity and cultural homogeneity coexisting in what we might call monopoly populism. A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database." + http://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2009/04/diverselessness.php

"A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture."

<cite>Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.</cite>

is online culture lest diverse

the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

Well written and interesting American culture study.

If it's too good to be true...

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Excellent Article on Dubai: "Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

for those who have nerd boyfriends

massa, ropas foda

lololol this is so totally adorable. also needs more Star Trek!

This is a unique story about Columbine that was basically the start of a new era and gave kids idea about killing that the shouldnt have

The real story?

The hackers knocked Rain down the list for moot! ...But it's still a sick hack.:B

In "the Time.com 100 Poll where millions have voted on who are the world’s most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts ... we find a Message embedded in the results ... Looking at the first letters of each of the top 21 leading names in the poll we find the message “marblecake, also the game”. The poll announces (perhaps subtly) to the world, that the most influential are not the Obamas, Britneys or the Rick Warrens of the world, the most influential are an extremely advanced intelligence: the hackers. ... At the core of the hack is the work of a dozen or so, backed by an army of a thousand who downloaded and ran the autovoters and also backed by an untold number of others that unwittingly fell prey to the spam url autovoters. So why do they do it? Why do they write code, build complex applications, publish graphs - why do they organize a team that is more effective than most startup companies? Says Zombocom: “For the lulz”."

Anon hacks Time's 100 Poll so hard

There’s a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of an extremely advanced intelligence that apparently manipulated one of the fundamental constants of the universe as a testament to their power as they wove space and time. I’m reminded of this scene by the Time.com 100 Poll where millions have voted on who are the world’s most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts. Just as Ellie found a Message embedded in PI, we find a Message embedded in the results of this poll. Looking at the first letters of each of the top 21 leading names in the poll we find the message “marblecake, also the game”. The poll announces (perhaps subtly) to the world, that the most influential are not the Obamas, Britneys or the Rick Warrens of the world, the most influential are an extremely advanced intelligence: the hackers. kg9kl At 4AM this mor

I'm not sure if the argument is right; many people die from heart disease, but I don't think we can say that better diet and exercise would have prevented 100% of these deaths.

Awesome social music tracking site.

We Are Hunted is the Online Music Chart. We aggregate social networks, forums, music blogs, Torrents, P2P Networks and Twitter to develop a daily chart of the 99 most popular songs online.

One of the 10,000 things I miss about living in Portland - HIPSTERGAZING.

Working remotely long-term

Avoiding failure involves asking four questions before they leave: 1. Do they have the personality? 2. Do they have the right job? 3. Does the culture support it? 4. Do you have a remote friction detection and resolution policy?

But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, “This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.” Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

we got it wrong

Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.

interesting analysis. I was entirely offline last weekend, so I pretty much came in at the waaaay tail end.

smart people being stupid

Open and honest account of jumping to conclusions.

We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.

Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone

kindle ebook e-book

数图研究

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Opened in April 2009

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and more. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

The global economy is being remade before our eyes. Here's what's on the horizon...

The global economy is being remade before our eyes. Here's what's on the horizon

Revista Time lista 10 idéias que estão mudando o mundo tipo agora.

Evaluation: Students will be graded on the RBBEAW* system, developed to assess and score students based on their own relative merit. A+ = 100–90 A = 89–80 A- = 79–70 A-- = 69–60 A--- = 59–50 A---- = 49–0

marvelous syllaubs for the post-print age.

ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert Lanham

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers. Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness.

"ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era"

ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

Get the latest in science news, including space, physics, planet earth, discoveries, NASA, satellites, and space travel from Wired.com

Stonehenge in Georgia

Fascinating, thanks Pam!

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern.

An interesting article justifying twittering as an activity

A great post concerning how there is nothing inherent to the banality of Twitter updates; this banality exists in "real" conversations as well. It's a good point and one that I've been trying to make recently with friends who "just don't get Twitter."

Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

"...Twitter is a note-taking technology, end of story. You take short-form notes with it, limited to 140 characters. [...] If I attend a public lecture but I start to jot things down in a Moleskine, it would seem that only a particularly virulent form of social fascism would ask me to put that notebook down and begin 'sharing ideas' with the people next to me. No thanks – I'd rather write, actually. [...] there seem to be quite a lot of assumptions at work [when people object to microblogging], with so many class, political, and even gender implications for who is allowed to speak, who we are meant to listen to, who can write, how they are permitted to do so, in what social contexts writing is meant to occur, and what topics can be legitimately addressed by others, that I'd hope a much longer discussion about this might someday take place."

"What very much bothers me about this attitude toward Twitter is something else: if you were to go around the United States reading the handwritten diaries of, say, high-school girls or adolescent boys or even well-read college students, you would find equally inane chattering: "I feel fat today." "Can't wait for summer in Boca! But I need new shorts." "My history professor is HOT." "I hate holidays. Christmas at home is so boring." Are you really going to tell me that the average contemporary, hand-written diary is any more interesting than that?...I fail to see any clear distinction between someone's boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else's equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good. Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed."

Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

With the caveat that this post doesn't have much to do with architecture, but with the further caveat that I will be speaking about media – specifically online media – next week at the Australian National Architecture Conference, I thought I'd offer a few thoughts here about Twitter.

It seems "Twitter" is code for "Please tell me how you think Twitter is stupid and useless." This article begs to differ.

haha/do we really need a 'significant other' to be a worthy person?

Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and more. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and more. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

Sammlung digitalisierter historischer Dokumente

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Das Digitalisierungsprojekt der UNESCO hat Material aus einer Vielzahl renommierter Bibliotheken, Schriftensammlungen und Archiven aus der ganzen Welt versammelt. "Das kollektive Gedächtnis der Menschheit bewahren und das interkulturelle Verständnis fördern" ist das Ziel dieses Projekts

Have you ever blurted out, "Wow, that guy is just so...so..." and then were left floundering with nothing to say? Well, it's not always your fault. English doesn't have words for every situation, or even the ones that happen every damned day. Fortunately, other languages usually do. And since we already borrow words from them (just recently we've taken "schadenfreude," the German word for pleasure in someone else's misfortune) here's a few that we need to pick up right away.

wow.

What would you have printed?

The Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait in 5 minutes

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one.

WebUrbanist has covered everything from abandoned wonders of the world to the illicit art of exploring deserted places. These thirty-three core articles cover hundreds of abandoned buildings, vehicles, towns and cities from around the world - highly organized, summarized and collected for the very first time. Consider this our must-bookmark essential guide to the world of haunting abandoned places and daring urban exploration. 7 Abandoned Wonders of America (Part Two - Part Three): Most Americans don’t realize just how close their nearest abandonment might be. Some of these remarkable abandoned buildings and places - from prisons and asylums to entire islands - may be closer than you think. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the European Union: While American abandonments are impressive, European ones can be even more so. Some of them have long pasts and beautiful spaces filled with intrigue and many played critical roles during pivotal points of world history. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former

i'm getting this because i keep searching for it on youtube and this should be faster. auto tune the news.

RT @AudioJungle: The Twitter Approval Matrix http://bit.ly/d3lqj

An infographic showing the best and worst Twitterers

Horifically unfunny, but the fact it includes Kurt Andersen makes it a black hole of irony http://tinyurl.com/cgrdda (via @eliztesch)

"Our deliberately oversimplified guide to whose tweets are worth following."

Our deliberately oversimplified guide to whose tweets are worth following.

これはすごい！世界史好きだったので、時々読みに来よう！

高校世界史授業を誌上公開。脱線話も含め、可能な限り再現。古代史、中世史、近代史、東洋史、西洋史。生徒達に世界史を語ります。歴史の面白さ、楽しさを、伝えることが出来れば幸いです。

An interactive view of the all the memes that swept across the internet and burrowed in our zeitgeist. Built from Wikipedia and Memelabs, open for you to add and maintain.

Timeline of internet memes

Dancing Baby, Susan Boyle, etc.

The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

According to the researchers, "short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days' work, and as a result, increased productivity." More importantly, "firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity." Someone should let them know their logic is flawed.

I’m a science fiction writer, and as I became more familiar with design, it struck me that the futuristic objects and services within science fiction are quite badly designed.

Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling

Many science fiction writers, believe it or not, were capable of understanding Wittgenstein. User experience design, however, was far beyond them. It was also beyond Wittgenstein, because there are things we might imagine and speak about that we do pass over in silence because we are writing in books.

financial crisis: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. "They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,"

ironische/sarcastische citaten van Mark Twain

Great quotes on design.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

ith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

In The Court Of The Crimson King

Eater's Coverage of Bruniocalypse Props to Eater for yesterday's coverage of Frank Bruni's impending departure as the New York Times restaurant critic, or, as they're calling it, the "Bruniocalypse." In contrast to the generic "here's the news, what do you think?" sort of post, Eater's coverage has been, by far, the most comprehensive — from tracking reactions on the twittersphere and boards, to asking the vital question if Bruni will crown one more four-star, to getting responses from William Tigertt and David Chang, to writing the ultimate Brunibetting on who'll replace King Brunz. Hats off.

because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to "

Charlie Brooker: I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only 'saddoes' dislike them.

Brooker is god and right about everything.

"Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable."

RT @timoreilly: Post by @dalepd about how people are actually starting to prefer the sound of Mp3 http://bit.ly/sn2Yw [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1331634656]

students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook

As we discussed in yesterday’s post, whether the United States and China like it or not, the economic futures of both countries are intertwined. Everyone knows that China’s got more people and that its importance as an economic superpower has escalated in recent years. What you might not understand is how the differences between our countries, in economic philosophy, in population, in geography and in how the military is built and paid for ultimately play into the entire economic relationship. For many China remains something of a mystery. In order to help compare and contrast the economic differences, we have simplified the data from the CIA World Factbook. For the exact numbers in any category, check here.

China vs United States

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

mmunal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikin

FOUR MORE YEARS.

When you reach 25, it's finally time to fully grow up and be an adult.

If you have reached the age of 25, I have a bit of bad news for you, to wit: it is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world. Past the quarter-century mark, you see, certain actions, attitudes, and behaviors will simply no longer do, and while it might seem unpleasant to feign a maturity and solicitousness towards others that you may not genuinely feel, it is not only appreciated by others but necessary for your continued survival. Continuing to insist past that point that good manners, thoughtfulness, and grooming oppress you in some way is inappropriate and irritating.

a classic. via Kottke

#p4smf microinformation can be both embarrassing & boring http://bit.ly/PDxP2 One Tweet Over the Line [from http://twitter.com/Doug_Caldwell/statuses/1928771953]

One Tweet Over the Line - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U Timothy B. Lee, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy Susan Mernit, former AOL vice president and blogger David E. Meyer psychology professor, University of Michigan

Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

There seems no part of public, private or commercial life that hasn’t been made more accessible through social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Hospitals are posting videos of surgeries on YouTube and doctors are sending tweets from operating rooms to educate the public and market their services. Those are just the latest examples of media-driven communication in places that used to be relatively private. Is there such a thing as overuse of social networking tools? In the online world, is the notion of a public/private divide simply not applicable? * Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U * Timothy B. Lee, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy * Susan Mernit, former AOL vice president and blogger * David E. Meyer psychology professor, University of Michigan

is the most comprehensive audio database for DJ and club culture on the internet. More than 12.000 DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions can be streamed free of charge and on-demand.

In 2001, Portugal officially abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, replacing punishment for therapy. Did it work? How many people reading this article have served jail time for drug use? How many know someone who has? It's an arbitrary system, and people don't seem to respond well to systems that rely on harsh but infrequently carried out punishments to regulate behavior--as anyone who has ever spent more than two hours with a toddler has probably already figured out.

In 2001, Portugal officially abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, replacing punishment for therapy. Did it work?

I'd like to see verification of this from someone other than the Cato Institute, and it's important to remember that the US =/= Portugal, but still... interesting. April 2009.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

Photography magazine

Deep Sleep is a quarterly online photography magazine founded by and featuring work from a small group of contributors who share the same office space in Shoreditch, London.

Don't let the cats get to your head.

Kevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn't hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.

holi pics

2 funny. and 2 true.

OMG. Even I was duly shocked

Politically incorrect classic ads

funny advert posters

Horrifying: LYSOL DOUCHING.

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

huge huge resource here

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses

Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He's Got a Computer and a Web Forum

Add Pentium processors, external storage drives and 17" screens to the gear list of the newly homeless. The Wall Street Journal reports.

Orwell v. Huxley

Or both right or both wrong.

Le pire étant de se rendre compte qu'ils ont tous deux raison...

huxley 2 orwell 1

いろんな意味で残念

「ウェブ進化論」から3年。梅田望夫さんは日本のWebが「米国とはずいぶん違うものになっちゃった」と残念がる。Twitterの“はてブコメント事件”についても聞いた。

Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture

Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

Top 10 Reasons Why Employees Leave in IT, must read for every manager!!

babysit

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

Fantastic article by Steven Johnson on Time.com

6/05/09

Lessig doceert recht aan de Stanford Law School en noemt zichzelf 'activist tegen het copyrightextremisme'. Dat klinkt behoorlijk radicaal maar in zijn boeken (zijn andere werken kun je desgewenst ook gratis inzien of downloaden) ontpopt de auteur zich juist als een genuanceerd mens met oog voor alle kanten van het verhaal. Dat maakt Lessig niet alleen geloofwaardiger, het bewijst ook dat Lessig terecht wordt beschouwd als een van de grote denkers op dit gebied. Lessig, ook een van de mensen die aan de wieg stond van Creative Commons, is niet alleen een tegenstander van piraterij; hij pleit er ook voor dat copyright blijft bestaan, zij het in een andere vorm dan we het nu kennen. In Remix voert Lessig ons mee door de geschiedenis van copyright. Hij gaat uitgebreid in op de ontwikkeling van een 'Read Only Web' naar een 'Read Write Web' en toont daarbij aan hoe ver de bestaande wetgeving staat van de manier waarop informatie en entertainment anno 2009 geconsumeerd en geproduceerd wordt.

レッシグのRemix 後で読む

'Lessig's proposals for revising copyright are compelling, because they rethink intellectual property rights without abandoning them.

Amsterdam - New York henryhudson400.com

This site was created to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's legendary voyage for the Dutch to the Hudson River and New York. The unique character of New York City, originally New Amsterdam, has been shaped by the legacy of the multiethnic and tolerant culture of 17th century Amsterdam. Besides celebrating the historic event with a series of special events in 2009, Henry Hudson 400 will promote future ties between these two great cities which are linked by their shared belief in the value of free, diverse, and entrepreneurial societies.

Henry Hudson 400 New York and Amsterdam were created in 2006 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's legendary voyage for the Dutch to the Hudson River and New York. The unique character of New York City, originally New Amsterdam, has been shaped by the legacy of the multiethnic and tolerant culture of 17th century Amsterdam. Besides celebrating the historic event with a series of special events in 2009, Henry Hudson 400 will promote future ties between these two great cities which are linked by their shared belief in the value of free, diverse, and entrepreneurial societies. (photo credit: View of New Amsterdam, Johannes Vingboons, around 1665, Nationaal Archief - National Archives of the Netherlands)

Henry Hudson 400 has taken a selection of rare maps and documents, and in collaboration with Google, overlaid them onto contemporary Google maps of the same areas. The site features 32 historical maps of the 17th-century Dutch trading empire and New Amsterdam. Users will find planning and survey maps of New York City and Amsterdam, historical world maps and illustrations, and charts tracing Hudson’s four voyages (1607–11) to the New World. Each of the maps and charts has a paragraph describing its origins and importance. The maps tell the story of 17th-century exploration and the history of the early Dutch settlement of New York. On Hudson’s third voyage (1609), ice storms near the North Pole forced a U-turn that led the explorer and the crew on his boat, the Half Moon, to drop anchor along “Manna hata,” or “Land of the Hills,” which led to the first Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. The overlay of the historic maps over Google allows users to follow Hudson on each of his journeys.

These beautiful historical maps, overlaid on Google contemporary maps of the same areas, will be part of a spectacular Rare Maps exhibition on the early history of New York, opening at the South St. Seaport Museum (NY) in September 2009. This date marks 400 years since captain Henry Hudson dropped anchor near what the natives called Manna Hata, or ‘Land of the Hills’.

(google) map vergelijking oud-nieuw New York

This is a Google maps mash up with historical maps overlays - of the sort you could previously only do in Google Earth. I'm not sure how they did this or if teachers can replicate it, but this is a great history resource in and of itself.

Looking for great cultural and educational video? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below, we have compiled a list of 40 sites that feature intelligent videos. This list was produced with the help of our faithful readers, and it will grow over time. If you find it useful, please share it as widely as you can. And if we’re missing good sites, please list them in the comments below.

But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like. I'm referring to the new kind of brand, the one is formed by the entire experience of a customer's interaction. That experience gets branded into his or her memory and leaks into the buzz of modern culture. via Caitlin

UX guy reprints email and then attempts to address corporate culture issue; strong opinions follow but most compelling part is the insight from the AA.com UX guy himself (known as Mr. X) "But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like."

complain about a corporate website then get surprised to hear about how design under corporate politics work? hm.

"There's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste."

Social media isn't really new. While it has only recently become part of mainstream culture and the business world, people have been using digital media for

Actually kicks some serious ass. Starts with phone phreaking.

digg_url = 'http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/how-self-defeating-corporate-design-process-one-designer-finds-ou'; digg_skin = 'compact'; Designer Dustin Curtis was so disgusted with the American Airlines Web site that he redesigned it, and posted the results as an open letter to the company.

well, this got me worked up, didn't it now?

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Thoughtful listing of key issues affecting the production and consumption of 'literature'

terrifying and exciting and wow

A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive.

Journalism schools aren\'t just incorporating computer skills into their curriculums -- they\'re recruiting techies with full-ride scholarships

Journaliste, changez de pratique, sinon direction Pôle emploi

"A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive." - To answer the question in the headline - "No." No one group of journalists/computer geeks are going to "save" journalism.

A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive. And the first batch of them has just emerged from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

For the "some things never change" file.

This pose, like many other poses featured on this site, is frequently used by everyone regardless of race. This gesture creates the word “OK” using your fingers. To create the “O”, join your index finger and thumb, such that it forms a circle. The “K” is created with your remaining fingers extended. The palm of your hand should be facing outwards and your hand can be brought near your face if you wish.

They forgot the 2 Aug 82 "Scarlet H" Herpes cover (but, then, Reason would, wouldn't it?) http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19820802,00.html

From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life.

As a service to future historians of the long, slow death of the newsweekly, Reason offers this Top 10 list of the most horrifying, silly, irresponsible, or downright ridiculous Time cover panics from the past 40 years.

"...no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time.." 10. June 19, 1972: The Occult Revival \ 9. April 5, 1976: The Porno Plague \ 8. August 6, 1984: The Population Curse \ 7. September 15, 1986: Drugs: The Enemy Within \ 6. May 7, 1990: Dirty Words \ 5. May 13, 1991: Crack Kids \ 4. July 3, 1995: Cyberporn: On a Screen Near You \ 3. Nov 22, 1999: Pokemon! \ 2. March 19, 2001: The Columbine Effect \ 1. June 7, 2004: Overcoming Obesity in America \

"This was preserved because the author had been Emperor. How much ancient wisdom was lost because the common Roman citizen lacked TCP/IP?"

"[by 1700 bc, the minoans were trading with spain, had big cities with flush toilets, a written language, and moderately sophisticated metalworking technology. had it not been for the eruption of thera (on santorini), it is quite possible that romans would have watched the assassination of julius caesar on television.]"

'This article, prepared to support a talk at Wordcamp 2009, discusses how writing itself has changed because of the availability of the Web and the Weblog.'

The joy of less.

Wow. This photographer took photos of what she imagined Disney and fairytale princesses would be like in the real world where happy endings don't exist. The Rapunzel one if particularly disturbing and intense.

Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but some awfully strange substances have been used for pharmaceutical purposes in the past -- and some might argue, continue to be used today. Here are some vintage advertisements touting items that we might balk at taking today.

Eye-opening. Great graphics.

referência de embalagens antigas

By Lera Boroditsky

ong time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered

Interesting recent work on Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis related ideas in cognitive linguistics

12 historiallista valokuvaa, jotka voivat olla järkyttäviäkin.

fantastic!

"Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: 'Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….' "

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. - The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honor Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

For some people it’s castles with their noble history and crumbling towers, for others it’s abandoned factories or lost cities. But for those who enjoy reading, a huge beautiful library is a place of endless pleasure. Meet 20 of the biggest and most beautiful libraries around the globe, as presented by Curious Expeditions.

flashy! fonty! browser resize-y! Great info and interactivity. From Emory U.

An intersting artical about "orphan" book. Those book out-of-print but still under copyright. Most of which it is impossible to find the appropraite rights holder.

Summary of the legal and commercial implications of Google book search by Pamela Samuelson.

"The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

article

Google and the Book Rights Registery

"Conclusion In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses. The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

Enjoy reading Comic

Twilight vs 4Chan

http://xkcd.com/591/

My favorite part of this chart is that they call the 00's the "Noughties".

From air steward uniforms to Corn Flakes cereal boxes...how has everyday design evolved over the last half-century?

I imagine you've seen this already, but on the off chance you haven't . . . bosh!

Article sobre beneficis dels estudis clàssics :)

Resulta que Tim O'rEilly estudió Clásicas.

"I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. "The control of the appetites by right reason," is how he defined it. My brother James once brilliantly reframed this as "Virtue is knowing what you really want," and then building the intellectual and moral muscle to go after it."

Roger Ebert discusses Bill O'Reily

Glenn Beck

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin. * Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence; * Glittering generalities -- the opposite of name calling; * Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths; * Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd; * Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people"; * Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and * Testimonials --

Scientology leader David Miscavige is the focus of this special report from the St. Petersburg Times. Former executives of the Church of Scientology, including two of the former top lieutenants to Miscavige, have come forward to describe a culture of intimidation and violence under David Miscavige. These former Scientology leaders served for years with Miscavige.

17 jun 09 / Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society.

Via James Graham

Economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have just released a new Harvard Business School working paper called File Sharing and Copyright that raises some important points about file sharing, copyright, and the net benefits to society. The paper, which includes a helpful survey of the prior economic studies on the impact of file sharing, includes the following:

This is awesome! like, Barney Stenson Awesome!

Posted by cz

Dresden Dolls - "why not tell people and do this in a warehouse instead of a hotel lobby or a blank studio? so i did. it cost me almost nothing. the fans were psyched." - prior exposure note the comments

Musicians making money really cool site

artists illustrations from a visit to Monticello

an important piece on Thomas Jefferson

a visit to Thomas Jefferson's residence

One artist blogs about the impact visiting Monticello had on her and her impressions of Jefferson.

A 13-year-old tries out a Walkman for a week.

via Cedric, hilarious! I remember my sister's first Walkman back in 1982 and mine in 1984.

"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Awesome review of an original Sony Walkman by a 13 year old kid.

A kid who's never used a Walkman takes one for a spin.

This one's all over teh internets today. I guess I'm not the only 30/40something parent having these conversations with their kids when they pull out the walkman / rotary phone / record player / original Game Boy / other outdated technology from the last 30 years.

Discussion of the migration of myspace users to facebook, explores the way class, race, and social lines are distributed across social networking sites

fascinating look at social networks and class structure

social networking

"...increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation 'choice' leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions."

hm...

May be the ultimate weekend killer.

http://sptnk.org/ ContemporaryCulture

prettymuch anything jonathan harris touches is pretty interesting.

“Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, Does any of this really matter?”

creepy quote: "More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it ‘Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.’"

Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points...

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA.

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we'd like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.

Persepolis 2.0 - great web comic. Must read!

Since the Revolution in 1979, Iranians have coped with an increasingly repressive regime. Attempts for greater social and political freedoms have resulted in brutal crackdowns by the hardline government. The ensuing apathy and significant boycott of the 2005 presidential elections led to the election of the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years later Iran has become increasingly alienated and its people more polarized than ever before. The campaign of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi galvanized voters hoping for change, especially among the youth – two thirds of Iran’s population is younger than 32. On June 12th 85% of eligible voters cast their ballots and what happened next changed Iran forever…

Images from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis were provided with new captions and dialogue to illustrate the day before and the first few days after the election in Iran.

The authors of Persopolis 2.0 were inspired by the work of Marjane Satrapi.

From everyone's favourite magazine editor...

Access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images

75,000 free pictures, mostly Art

http://worldimages.sjsu.edu

Presented entirely unironically, but these are hilarious (random caps make everything funnier, obviously). I especially like #2: When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered.

"Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. ... What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government."

This may be the most accurate description of my generation I've seen, ever

to read

Small is beautiful, at least in economy...

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government.

Yeah, good to the point article. It's nice to hear someone plea for the waning party's success. Whatever the faults with a two part system it's better than one and no matter the way you lean there had better be something to lean against

Noonan sends Palin off in style

an even better article on palin

in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know

Good WSJ article on Palin myths and the harm she did to the Republican party.

!!! [Palid is horrible, says Peggy Noonan] "She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

Anil Dash has an excellent piece about Google, about the potential differences in how the company (or those with in the company) see themselves and how those outside see the company. This is not one of those "Google is really evil" posts, but more a thoughtful commentary about how a now huge company can avoid becoming like every other huge tech company.

RT @timoreilly RT @anildash:Google has reached its "Microsoft moment" and is the last to realize: http://bit.ly/msmoment Interesting stuff [from http://twitter.com/theholodeck/statuses/2602344061]

PingWire is an (almost) live feed of images being posted to Twitpic. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to the full sized photo.

Live feed of twitpic posts

There is plenty of summer vacation season left on the calendar, and boredom may already be settling in around the house. So what are some fun, geeky places to take your geeklets? Even better, what are some fun, geeky places that kids and adults will all enjoy? I was sitting down making some plans for my geeklets this summer. The list of places we wanted to go kept getting longer, and eventually turned into a wishlist, which I then put up for the GeekDads to add to. But this list is by no means complete. Please feel free to add your favorite places in the comments, and we’ll try to add them to the map, too.

so true.

Huxley vs Orwell

Studies suggest that users of Facebook and MySpace are breaking down along class and racial lines.

"Is the social media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?" (NYT)

Alimentan las redes sociales las divisiones del mundo real? Articulo en el Nwe York Times, basado en la investigacion de Danah Boyd, investigadora del Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

(2009, NYTimes) Article about recent research suggesting there is classism in the use of social media. The quality of the reporting is very weak - hard to say if I agree with the conclusions.

It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history

Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."

Well written article... seems Social Networking has REALLY come of age. it was TMZ and Twitter that turned to for the "scoop." Just natural evolution of how things work these days. The loss of Michael Jackson is like the loss of Princess Diana, it seems we lost 2 super gems, and got a lesson about the loss (and mauling) of innocence as well as the seductive destructive aspect of acumulating fame and riches. sad sad sad.

Behaviour and customs vary greatly from country to country. We discuss the correct travel etiquette so that you won't be caught out.

jhkjhljkjlkj,.ml.m,mlm.knm.jnk.j

humorous

Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin?s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.

*howling with laughter*

"If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."

#12 Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.

From GeekDad | Wired.com

memories of times past t hough much of this we still know around here

"GeekDad Parents, Kids and the Stuff We Obsess About 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About * By Nathan Barry Email Author * July 22, 2009 | * 8:00 am | * Categories: Armchair Geek * There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks. That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …"

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

Interesting thoughts on why simple meetings blow the entire day's schedule for a programmer (via Justin Miller)

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.

If you can't actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true...

Paul Graham pitches 'flow' from a different perspective.

Next stop: Cholula!

Amazindly, the list misses China!!!

Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.

The oldest thriving cities, travel-porn pics.

Zappos email to customers & Amazon video about Amazon & acquisition. WOW!

Free shipping BOTH ways, 365-day return policy, 24/7 customer service. Millions of men's shoes, women's shoes, girl's shoes, boy's shoes, handbags, men's clothing, women's clothing, Uggs, Nike shoes!

business

A long but meaningful letter! I am so proud of them!

Belissimas fotos de nós, seres humanos em todo o mundo, profissionais e amadores, em movimento de todos os motivos acima e muito mais. Via RT @ritacao RT @Antropologias (twitter)

Gorgeous full-color photos of recent images of dance from around the world.

A collection of screen shots and captured images of movie title stills from classic and recent feature films and trailers

amazing read this

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value. ... That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets. That 's not an economy: it's just a game of musical chairs. Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.

No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There's no money left in anything else. That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

view on the future

from Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--in cartoon form

"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."

I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

A digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s.

advertising

free vintage ad video archive!

行ってみたい所ばかりなのでメモ。

読子・リードマンがいそうな風景だ

Are you on Manager or Maker time?

Topic for discussion in AP

Steven Pinker on how violence has declined over history.

Interesting, somewhat counterintuitive hypothesis here - mankind has been getting steadily LESS violent since pre-historic times - and a bunch of theories as to why.

Steven Pinker explains why he thinks humans have evolved to be more peaceful over time.

I just don't know why they put up with the way men look http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6727710.ece [from http://twitter.com/JacksonATL/statuses/2917669057]

Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

"The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern." In my opinion, nowhere did they say there were any kind of studies done to analyze images of women from ancient past (as if such images could even be considered to be accurate), compare them to images of modern women, and determine that modern women are objectively more beautiful. Not to mention that beauty is subjective anyway. The whole article is deeply unscientific.

Women are getting more beautifu

Just...yeah. Unfortunately.

Being male, as a programmer, means:

This is an interesting list --it sounds like it was written by a aging female developer who had trouble achieving her goals or had low esteem. I wish there wasn't continued reinforcement of gender roles. I think it's a privilege to be surrounded by such smart people and in my near decade of experience, have yet to "sleep my way to a bug fix", feel threatened, or be treated like a "secretary". I am aware of my surroundings and chose to be here, so...

Sur les relations entre les médias, le journalisme et les bloggeurs influents.

The News About the Internet By Michael Massing Books, blogs, Web sites, and essays discussed in this article: Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press by Eric Boehlert Free Press, 280 pp., $26.00 And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture by Bill Wasik Viking, 202 pp., $25.95

This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

Long survey of the pressures the internet is placing on traditional media

Retweeting @google: Here's Larry Page's UMich commencement address (May 2): http://bitly.com/ZhmDO [from http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal/statuses/1687741533]

From Larry Page's U. of Michigan Commencement Address: You never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. http://bit.ly/aAXWA [from http://twitter.com/chadwalker/statuses/1695847054]

La URL original ya no esta buena ya la modifique

"Consider this a supplement to my latest report on “How Companies Should Organize for Social Computing“. I continue to get questions from clients, and have spent time with more large brands are connecting with customers. Diving in further, I’ve noticed that there are five ways that companies allow employees to participate."

http://www.freeguide-berlin.de/ travel guide free blogs culture inspiration music Events nightlife berlin kostenlos germany party deutsch tourismus

the world in a window

At lunch last weekend I overheard someone at another table say that when she wanted a greater caffeine buzz, she chose a different roast. I can't remember whether she chose darker or lighter roast for the greater buzz, but it doesn't matter; both answers were wrong. The effect of coffee roasting on caffeine content is so negligible as to be immeasurable except under tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

どのようなことをして1日を過しているかの調査

Interactive Report which allows to filter by Age Group, Employment Status.

Twib(ツイブ!) とは、Twitter でつぶやかれたホームページのURLを集めて、 人気順に並べるサービスです。

Twitter でつぶやかれたホームページのURLを集めて、 人気順に並べるサービス

Twitterで話題のサイトをはてブ風に並べる「Twib（ツイブ!）」。

coyote

"Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. ... n his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s."

"On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming.... To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river."

Talks about employee retention, handling increasing complexity in the company, etc

Slide deck from Netflix outlines their employee strategy, how they do compensation, why they only aim for top performers, how their "vision statement" is different than Enron's, etc

looks like an interesting categorization

danah maps three models of social networks: 1. Sociological "personal" networks 2. Behavioral social networks 3. Publicly articulated social networks

e New York Ti

How Different Groups Spend Their Day. very nicely made infographic.

Interesting presentation on setting company culture...

Internal Netflix document detailing culture and practice that is *very* different to almost everyone else. Some amazing and inspiring stuff. I hope they walk the talk.

5% drop in 18-24 using social networking sites like facebook

Une belle histoire.

touching tribute from a woman who exchanged letters with Hughes in the 80s

This is a beautiful story.

detroit pics

Via ... someone's Twitter feed. The history of handwriting and the death of it. Does it matter that we are no longer tested for penmanship?

Don't blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

Don\'t blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive.

Sadly, @jasoncalacanis has it right. The whole ecosystem would be better if Apple opened their hardware/software. Not sure if it will keep the public at large from their move to MacBooks and iPhones.

They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

been thinking about this since moving back to sf — this quote is nice, and not just for guys: " 'And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.' So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like."

I wish I didn't appreciate this, but I can't help it.

An interesting article on how many 20-somethings see the world.

Tongue in cheek Beschreibung der Lebensverhältnisse junger PhD und schlimmerer Versager.

Definitely one to read if you're twenty-something and less than content.

!! digital information을 세번쩨 replicator로 규정. 그런데 그것이 copy,mutation,natural selection을 모두 충족하는가? 글쓴이에 의하면 현재의 컴퓨터들은 웹 상에서, 인간의 통제를 벗어나 스스로 복제하고, 정보를 수집하며, 편집하고, 뭐..그런말을 하는데.. / / mutation은 없고 summary만 있을뿐 아닌가? 그리고 natural selection은 혹시 virus에 의한것을 말하는가? 그렇다면 너무 유치하고.. 검색순위 상단에 오르는 것을 말한다면 그것은 인간에 의한것인데?

There's a new type of evolution going on and it may not be to our liking, says Susan Blackmore

Memes are a new kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages - copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology?

s thinking

"Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about." So, Bill Maher wants an aristocratic oligarchy. A pretty funny read except for that section. Some really pathetic statistics in there. Yet, the idea that while many accomplished economists and doctors argue against national healthcare, that the only people against it are retarded, is a complete fallacy, and seems to be the only way the Dems are fighting against criticism at the moment. It just makes them look bad.

I.Q. Tests for everyone! As I have stated before, your well thought out, chosen vote, usually gets negated by a fucking moron.

Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic "teens don't tweet" which was primarily kept in play all day yesterday with teens responding to the TT by saying "I'm a teen" or the equivalent of "you're all idiots... what am I, mashed potatoes?" I want to unpack some of what played out because I'm astonished by the misinterpretations in every which direction. We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young

Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?

"Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG

analysis of neilsen article

Two years ago, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world.

The online encyclopedia is about to hit 3m articles in English – but growth is stalling as 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists' fight for control

more on Wikipedia

The online encyclopedia is about to hit 3m articles in English ... Even when compressed, the files stretched to an enormous 8 terabytes ... when the group fed the data into their 60-machine computing cluster, they got some surprising results ... Chi's team discovered that the way the site operated had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone ... Today a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away

For display during Teen Tech Week

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know Existed http://is.gd/1JjlR [from http://twitter.com/teedubya/statuses/2805323472]

10 ting du ikke visste om emoticons: http://bit.ly/XXCGx [from http://twitter.com/MacGeeky/statuses/2279549190]

RT @florinpuscas: RT: @problogger: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Emoticons :) http://bit.ly/d6g7r [from http://twitter.com/Bleau/statuses/1846808254]

History of emoticons

Surely you've used emoticons before, or at least encountered them while surfing the Intertubes, but did you know that they've been around since the 1800s? Or that a computer scientist came up with the smiley emoticon? Here are 10 Things You Didn't Know About Emoticons:

Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

Nuovo progetto per parlare di cultura contemporanea

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous.

brain research and new social media

by Emily Yoffe. Summary of research by Jaak Panskeep and Kent Berridge into our desire for additional information. Speculates this desire is akin to addiction systems. "How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous."

"The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we'd be better off without." So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. "As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite," he explains. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

On a case study, and investigators discussings the difficulties

How modern information gathering technology complicates the lives of those who want to start a new life.

The urge to disappear, to shed one’s identity and reemerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It’s a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life’s daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply awaken one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had. And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life’s baggage, and start over as someone else?

a plan to escape

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008.

"It's exactly like a leaderboard in a game, where you want to have the bragging right of being on top, so you work harder at getting better," says Steffen Walz, a game theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Walz says governments worldwide are hiring designers to create games that encourage healthier behavior; he himself is creating one, where teenagers will run around their city with GPS-equipped mobile phones, unlocking prizes by visiting different locations.

using rewards & tracking to encourage everyday behaviours

"Games create drama and excitement," as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "We've done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life."

Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it'll get through. Sure enough, that's what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.

Blind kid & genius phone hacker

attention economy

Making something "free" is obviously an allocation strategy. "Free" attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn't sustainable, and that brief is underpriced. We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I hate the term 'assisted suicide'. I have witnessed the aftermath of two suicides, and as a journalist I attended far too many coroners' inquests, where I was amazed and appalled at the many ways that desperate people find to end their lives. Suicide is fear, shame, despair and grief. It is madness. Those brave souls lately seeking death abroad seem to me, on the other hand, to be gifted with a furious sanity. They have seen their future, and they don't want to be part of it.

Terry Pratchett's thoughts on assisted suicide.

Must make a copy of this.

Moving!

Sir Terry Pratchett has made an emotional plea for the right to take his own life, saying: 'I live in hope I can jump before I am pushed.'

What's wrong with America? Here's one thing...

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what&#39;s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Fantastic!!!!!

This explains the need and a lot of the trials of feminism (and also acknowledges commanalities with other kinds of discrimination). It's about trust and how so many men fail at being trustworthy.

"This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution. A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is." [Sometimes the worst isn't the asshole strangers. Sometimes the worst is a guy you care about casually, offhandedly acting like you're not a person. Making a rape joke, dismissing women as overemotional, telling you when you're offended and hurt that you have no sense of humor. The most damaging attacks are the ones from supposed friends. What can we do, but live in anticipation of the next betrayal?]

the everyday language of sexism and how much it hurts

"There is the perplexity at my fury that my life experience is not considered more relevant than the opinionated pronouncements of men who make a pastime of informal observation, like womanhood is an exotic locale which provides magnificent fodder for the amateur ethnographer. And there is the haughty dismissal of my assertion that being on the outside looking in doesn't make one more objective; it merely provides a different perspective."

English - A feminist about her feelings about men. [Warning: Page is huge and hard to load.]

Women sacrifice their rights to make men's lives easier. Beautifully written, and about all the little ways in which patriarchy is enforced. Use for teaching feminism 101.

If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu.

If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?”

In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified. In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Ikea Catalog from 1965 - awesome

Changing Corporate Culture

d culture, instead of making the

"You change a culture with stories

# Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it. # Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

Via http://tomewing.tumblr.com

Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.

But the experience taught Kaplan and Braunstein a lesson: Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway.

The low end has never been riding higher.

Although it's annoying when people tell you how you should act online, this article does have some good points. Esp. liked the "Facebook needs to have an eyeball roll function"

WSJ article.

I am proud to say, two of my friends have posted this piece on my facebook 'home' page. The msm can't deny there are many out there who pay attention and think.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

in remembrance of a time when journalism still had the balls to challenge gov't

Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which today's journalists insist they must never do.

In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

Suggests that high production values, high quality products are not where the mainstream market is. Looks at digital video cameras, legal services, health care, and Web content. Made me think about legal publishing, where increased costs are justified by "value added" content, which gets very little use. At some point the "good enough" plateau will be reached so that lawyers and librarians will not continue to pay for improvements that go beyond what is valued.

Interesting article on how goods are increasingly becoming just good enough as opposed to high quality

Interesting article but sorely mistaken about the novelty of 'good enough'. This is an old phychological framework.

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn't even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, says novelist Lev Grossman, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work - WSJ.com http://bit.ly/X9oM4 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/3680002494]

The world's first cocaine bar

ボリビアにある、世界初のコカインバーについて

where do i book?

The internet has wrought huge changes on our lives – both positive and negative – in the fifteen years since its use became widespread.

u.a.: 13) memory 14) dead time

We're gluttons for infographics, and a team at Kansas State just served up a feast: maps of sin created by plotting per-capita stats on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust). Christian clergy, likely noting the Bible Belt's status as Wrath Central, question the "science." Valid point—or maybe it's just the pride talking.

"Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage"

"Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans."

The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both.

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

a good article for class. talk about the two equal sides to every issue myth.

We'll never have affective healthcare in this country because crazy is a preexisting condition.

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

Infographic: Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

Visualisation of distraction in the digital age. All far too true!

Excellent carto :-)

herrlich - kann ich voll bestätigen (via nerdcore.de)

A challenge to journalism

An astoundingly, uncannily accurate description of how IT professionals think

Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. IT pros do not squander this currency. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. Gaining respect is not a matter of being the boss and has nothing to do with being likeable or sociable; whether you talk, eat or smell right; or any measure that isn't directly related to the work. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.

On managaging geeks and IT departments. This should be mandatory reading for every manager.

The stereotypes that lump IT professionals together are misguided. It's actually the conditions that surround the IT pros that are stereotypical, and the geeks are just reacting to those conditions the way they always react -- logically.

Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring.

Men and women have very different ways of arguing. So, in a better effort to help couples understand each other (which, really, is what we're all about here at Maxim), we decided to break down the thought process of both a man and woman, during an argument.

Sometimes it's hard to understand where your boyfriend or girlfriend is coming from in an argument, and why they're saying what they're saying.  Let us be your guide on this journey...

Sometimes it's hard to understand where your boyfriend or girlfriend is coming from in an argument, and why they're saying what they're saying. Let us be your guide on this journey...

Why some Facebook members are moving on.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

make dinner at home. You shove the bowl across the table and you throw a fork and you drop the napkin.(Laughs.) You make due. I don't know if it's all cosmetic. I guess you can tell when something is primarily cosmetic and lacks the structu

n gear. It was pretty cold out there. It's hard to compete with the natural elements. It's captured better in a theater. I'm probably a little old fashioned and a little backward.

Beck + famous people

Beck interviewing Will Ferrell is pretty awesome http://beck.com/irrelevant_topics [from http://twitter.com/hamsandwich/statuses/3294233170]

Beck is doing so many awesome things with his re-designed website. Irrelevant Topics is one of my favorites. The interview with Will Ferrell is amazing.

Could I stick to this? Wow. Could you?

Franklin’s plan is an inspiration to me because it reminds me why I went down the tough road of being an indie developer in the first place: to live a more balanced, reflective life.

A photo of the daily schedule that Benjamin Franklin tried to follow, from his Autobiography. He claims that, alas, he could not keep to it :)

Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis

«Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis»

Wasn't going to post this b/c I try to avoid lame gossip/People Mag stuff, but the audio is so clear. Those little digital voice recorders are amazing.

Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated weekdays.

As a letter writer myself, I approve! (via Laughing Squid)

Unresolvable

A new study suggests that people from different cultures might read facial expressions differently.

A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face. In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.

HMS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, EMOTIONS As I was reading Lewis, et al., I remembered this recent study report on facial expressions. This study directly refutes the claims of Ekman reported on pp 39-40 and points up a bias in the Lewis text against cultural explanations. Obviously as an anthropologist, I am not sympathetic to a pure biology approach to love, but I still find Lewis et al. compelling. Does it matter than one small piece of their evidence has been proven empirically to be false?

东方人和西方人表达感情时候都差别──西方人用整张脸。而东方人都眼神更为精妙

Цитаты, афоризмы, высказывания

At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Using data from Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t. Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

'guessing' whether someone is gay via FB

Deux étudiants du MIT ont imaginé un outil capable de repérer sur la toile les personnes homosexuelles. Leur outil parcours les sites sociaux à la recherche d'indices comme les goûts musicaux, les choix politiques, les types d'amis, les réactions à l'information... afin de déterminer si les personnes ont une forte proportion de chance ou pas d'être homosexuelles. Leur propos, montrer comment on peut détourner le traitement de l'information que les internautes déversent sur le net.

Article covering some projects analysing how revealing your Facebook friend list can be

very well-written article by Tim Kreider on using alternate life paths as a way of gauging and judging the choices we have made.

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

on how people judge others out of jealousy or fear, and on the different choices we all make, and on how one choice cancels out other choices and on how that's hard. See comments for great discussion.

We toss around references to different burger styles on this site all the time, but it occurred to me that we've never really set them out all in one place for easy reference. I'm doing that now. Here's a list of all the burger styles we could think of. If there's something here we're missing, chime in with a comment. Here goes, in no particular order our guide to hamburger and cheeseburger styles...

via beijingboyce (twitter) .... foodie blog in hamburger niche

From celebrity foodies you'll recognize from TV to professional chefs, bloggers, and restaurant critics, many food lovers are tapping into Twitter's real-time network.

For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now.

Here are some of the most controversial magazine covers of all time.

Using data on movie-rating patterns, new Wharton research challenges current thinking on the Long Tail effect

Using data on movie-rating patterns, new Wharton research challenges current thinking on the Long Tail effect ...

unread

Controversy about the long tail theory

Knowledge@Wharton

One side effect of $1mil Netflix prize was the treasure of data that was made public. Researches at Wharton use it to find out how valid is the Long Tail theory.

This site will not so much pull back the curtains of the comic book industry, as give you a series of upskirt shots. But as well as news, rumours and gossip, there will be reviews, previews, features, interviews, videos and columns.

全米のマクドナルド分布図。

To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide. So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and… Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!

"Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out? [...] To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s"

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia. For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.

A visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s

"As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia. For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer."

Talks and keynotes

ou are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like

Gutsy: "I skipped the ticket counter altogether, walked straight into first class, and announced that I'd give anyone twenty dollars for his seat. There was some laughter, some nervous ass shifting, and just when I figured no one would bite, a big guy with a beltful of pagers and cell phones took the deal... The FAA would shit their pants if everyone could do that... One of the guys flagging cabs pointed me to the back of the line. That's when I grabbed him by the elbow, pulled him close, and shook his hand, passing the next twenty... As we pulled away, someone in the line threw a half-empty cup of coffee against my window... At 3:00 that very morning, I had called an Eighth Avenue bodega and told them I'd give them twenty dollars for a pint of milk and a Hustler magazine.... I got my shoes resoled in twenty minutes instead of two weeks..."

...Then I realized something else: Most people aren't willing to lose their job for twenty bucks, but if they have something they already take for granted--a place in line, a seat, a ticket to a show they've already seen--they'll jump on a twenty like a possum on a wet bag of groceries. How to Grease a Palm IT'S ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE AND NEED. You have to have the attitude. You must discern the need. If you are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like a flag, when you're after more favors, more fealty. In this case, use the fingertips. Either way, it's really just a sort of greeting. Treat it like a how-do-you-do and nothing more.

Unorthodox excercise regiment based around new media addiction.

CW

Patrick Moberg

love it! (via @radiohead022)

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH

People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species. Edward Carr tracks some down ... &nbsp;read&nbsp;more&nbsp;&raquo;

That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says. “It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species.

“Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity."

"People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species..."

wow .... this spectacle will be better then Olympics opening

Fantastic photos as always.

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

e that a lot of people go through that starts when people go a little crazy as a result of all that, gradually realize that it's all a little illusory and that what they have instead of friends is a lot of the same awkward party conversations over and over, start working a little too hard to recapture the former glory, and end up burnt out and jaded. I'm not saying all of this can't be avoided, but to do so, I think you have to come in with more skepticism and awareness than the typical wide-eyed SF hipster-techie transplant does. Perhaps if I had come to SF with Caroline's wariness and your advice, I would have had a better time.

I don't think the world should look like San Francisco, nor do I think that it should be home for everyone. But if you're going to come here, even if it's only for a year, you should make the most of it. And to do that (and this really goes for anywhere) you need to embrace what's unique about it.

http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2009/07/are-you-going-to-san-francisco.html

How to make the most of living in SF. Wouldn't that be very lovely? Anyway, I think these could probably be generalised as to how to enjoy any city. (via Kottke)

This is quite a treat. Someone got ahold of some scripts from The Wire and posted them online.

original pitch doc in the middle of the page

Exchange ideas with the world’s leading scientists, educators, policymakers, artists, and authors. Presented by WGBH Boston with PBS, NPR, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and The Lowell Institute.

Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess.

giant marionettes

This is amazing.

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

RT @dannynic Ramadan photos for RE teaching http://bit.ly/oqsfj [from http://twitter.com/FelipeMorales/statuses/3649382785]

In Muslim nations and regions around the globe, this is the first week of the holy month of Ramadan, a time for followers to abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and sexual activity during the day, breaking their fast each sunset, with traditional meals and sweets.

In Muslim nations and regions around the globe, this is the first week of the holy month of Ramadan, a time for followers to abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and sexual activity during the day, breaking their fast each sunset, with traditional meals and sweets. During this time, Muslims are also encouraged to read the entire Quran, to give freely to those in need, and strengthen their ties to God through prayer. The goal of the fast is to teach humility, patience and sacrifice, and to ask forgiveness, practice self-restraint, and pray for guidance in the future. This year, Ramadan will continue until Saturday, September 19th

pictures illustrating ramadan

Wow. Perfect.

"If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem."

I set my own risk tolerance. you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. Learn to understand and respect women’s communication to you. If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem. Don’t rape. Nor should you commit these similar but less severe offenses: don’t assault. Don’t grope. Don’t constrain. Don’t brandish. Don’t expose yourself. Don’t threaten with physical violence. Don’t threaten with sexual violence. Shouldn’t this go without saying? Of course it should. Sadly, that’s not the world I live in. You may be beginning to realize that it’s not the world you live in, either.

a man's guide to talking to strange women without seeming crazy/serial rapist by Phaedra Starling

Shouldn’t this go without saying? Of course it should. Sadly, that’s not the world I live in. You may be beginning to realize that it’s not the world you live in, either.

Newsflash, Mr. Nice Guy: Being pushy or creepy tends to set off alarm bells.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Geeks, as a general rule, are pretty easy-going. We like to think things through, so passionate confrontations aren't commonplace for us. When we get well and

“Mac, Windows, or Linux? Does it really make a difference?”

Geeks, as a general rule, are pretty easy-going. We like to think things through, so passionate confrontations aren't commonplace for us. When we get well and properly provoked, though, watch out! We won't stop talking until every last point that we can think of has been made at least twice. So, what do you say to provoke a geek? Glad you asked!

Top ten ways to provoke a geek argument: http://cli.gs/hBUzX9 (via @JinniDotCom) [from http://twitter.com/mkeagle/statuses/2118079070]

not so productive argument.....

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

2009-10-06

a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

Fuck Ralph Lauren - I'm drinking, no more insight

high priority

It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward.

Reference Guide on ourFreedom &amp; Responsibility Culture <br />These slides are meant for reading,<br />rather than pr

What we find particularly intriguing is the section on hiring and firing. They want every manager to ask themselves: “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving in two months for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?” Anybody who doesn’t make that list should be offered a severance package right now so we can open a slot to find a star performer for that role. Another highlight: Netflix has no vacation policy! They don’t have a “rule” about 9 – 5 work - their rule is simpler: get your job done, and do it well. They realized if they didn’t track the hours employees worked, why would they track the hours they DON’T work? There is also no policy on clothing, but as of yet, no one has come to work naked (Patty McCord, 2004). The lesson: You don’t need detailed policies for everything. Here’s the part where they devalue training (you should probably stop reading here. . .)

This makes me want to work for Netfilx. No, wait. It makes me want to built the same values into meta4 so I never have to leave.

When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and built trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

Companies that can't talk about anything other than their products, or don't respond to their customers online are hurting their social-media efforts, Amy Mengel writes. Companies also need to make sure that their internal processes are in line with the technology and that the company culture is cut out for social media

“It’s not rocket surgery.” That malapropism became a bit of a mantra at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit. Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your custo

for presentation

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.

The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible.

เวทีแลกเปลี่ยน

E se a internet desaparecesse hoje?

<zarathos> http://www.cracked.com/photoshop_90_the-world-tomorrow-if-internet-disappeared-today/

Love #19

Loved it... Really funny!

e se internet non ci fosse...

Ahahahahahahahahaha

500 Internal Server Error

The next time you’re thinking about engaging in a technical discussion, run through these questions before you hit the “post” button: 1. Are you responding to facts? With facts? 2. Have you read any primary source materials on the issue you’re discussing? 3. Do you have any first-hand experience with the technologies or ideas involved? 4. Do you have any first-hand experience with those technologies operating at the scale being discussed? 5. Have you contacted the individuals involved in the discussion for further information before making assumptions about their findings? 6. Are you falsely comparing technologies or ideas as if there was a zero-sum competition between them? 7. Are you addressing your peers with respect, courtesy, and humility? 8. Are you sure that what you’re posting is the best way to promote your self, product, project, or idea? Does it demonstrate you at your best?

Don’t waste your life screaming into the void. Make things, measure them, have reasonable and respectful conversations about them, improve them, and teach others how to do the same.

"...why is something you can measure controversial? Are we not engineers?"

Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

The internet has matured into a world of its own, and like the real world, it obeys certain immutable laws. Here are 10 of the most important.

Not Enough Work

Our pages are now haiku compliant

I'm almost up to my old typing speed in Dvorak / Our servers now support Gopher, just in case / Our pages are now HTML, XHTML-Strict, and Haiku-compliant / Hey! Have you guys seen this webcomic?

I always make sure my HTML is haiku-compliant (HTML humor FTW!)

danah boyd discusses the differences in Twitter and Facebook status updates in relation to the social graph.

awesomeness, people holding snapshots from the past onto settings from today :-)

explore the world through associative thinking

Code Release: Language Detection and Translation

The Web Ecology Project is an interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, Massachusetts focusing on using large scale data mining to analyze the system-wide flows of culture and community online. In addition to the task of understanding culture on the web through quantitative research and rigorous experimentation, we are attempting to build a science around community management and social media. To that end, we are building tools and conducting research that enable planners to launch data-driven campaigns backed by network science. twitter archive.

Researching Quantized Social Interaction

If you're worthy of entry, they'll give you an intro to someone else they deem cool.

Introductory service for geeks

Louis Menand outlines the changes afoot with regard to graduate education (and education in general?) and notes the danger of losing academia's contributions to social criticism and reflection.

The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society.

Quote: "A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out"

development then? (Tony whispers) Oh, I see. He's not very good at magic either – his repertoire is extremely limited. Basically he's a one trick pony.

A few reasons why writing software is hard

How young is too young for kids to be on facebook - the minimum age is 13 - but they have no way to verify how old kids who sign up actually are

Important article to read about children of all ages creating profiles. I believe this supports our driving need to incorporate instruction and discussion on this topic in schools. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2009%2FTECH%2F11%2F02%2Fkids.social.networks

Researchers say a growing number of children are flouting age requirements on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, or using social-networking sites designed just for them. Facebook and MySpace require users to be at least 13. But they have no practical way to verify ages, and many young users pretend to be older when signing up. Some scientists worry that pre-adolescent use of the sites, which some therapists have linked to Internet addiction among adults, could be damaging to children's relationships and brains.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

his report adds new insights to an ongoing debate about the extent of social isolation in America. A widely-reported 2006 study argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased. In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often

An interesting report on the changing landscape of social connections.

Can we get on Pew's press release list so we don't have to read about their studies in NY times?

Since he’s a Pisces and I’m a Virgo, Chris and I of course think the Zodiac is total bullshit, and it was very gratifying to have the data bear this out. Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

data mining of how people describe themselves on a dating sight

a provocative argument against the stand-by-and-watch version of citizen journalism. I'd argue, though, that those who stand by and watch are in the minority among the Twitter population.

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick. Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view. Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

Jonathan Chait, 09/14/09, The New Republic takes AR seriously in a long art (c. 5,000 words?), ostensibly a review of Burns and Heller's books. Lousy article, but Chait gets some imp things right: says AR is different in regarding redistribution wrong, not in practical terms, but moral terms. But stresses that the moral issue is the virtuous and productive being sacrificed to the lazy and immoral. Says she has been very influential among the right.

On Ayn Rand's legacy and the American right: "Ayn Rand's novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives... The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk."

Hi-Res photo version: Watch human bodies twirl and flail down a steep hill chasing after a near-70 mph bouncing cheese wheel.

These photos are just so surreal!

Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling

Internet Manifesto

Mercedes Bunz: Its 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide

l exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media: when in doubt, the "generation Wikipedia" is capable of appraising the credibility of a source, tracking news back to its original source, researching it, checking it and assessing it — alone or as part of a group effort. Journalists who snub this and are unwilling to respect these skills are not taken seriously by internet users.

Livro colaborativo composto de capítulos escritos diversos autores sobre a arte em rede. Os comentários em um capítulo ou em cada parágrafo pode sugerir a atualização do conteúdo.

A networked book about networked art

“A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book We invite you to comment, revise and translate these chapters. Networked has been designed to incorporate your ideas into the existing chapters. Patrick Lichty’s chapter, Art in the Age of DataFlow: Narrative, Authorship, and Indeterminacy, is a wiki. If you want to change or add to it, simply click on the “Edit Page” link at the top/bottom of every page. The text will appear in an editable window. When you save your changes, the page will immediately reflect them. Readers can then compare the various versions of each page, as one can on Wikipedia.

A networked book about networked art “A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book

A bit of http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=144

2012 el FIN?

A lovely visual analysis of the "Mayan calendar" issue.

""in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures. A very clear image of the universe existed in the Middle Ages, and there were lists. A new worldview based on astronomy predominated in the Renaissance and the Baroque era. And there were lists. And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic. … We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die. … we believe that we are able to see more in them. A person contemplating a painting feels a need to open the frame and see what things look like to the left and to the right of the painting. This sort of painting is truly like a list, a cutout of infinity.""

via damon/jeff s

"The Vertigo of Lists"

Italian polymath Umberto Eco: "I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia."

"...how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries."

Manifiesto por la liberación de la cultura | Cultura libre

Reivindican que acorde a los tiempos, se garantice el acceso universal y la distribución masiva, de forma libre y gratuita de todos los contenidos culturales propiedad del estado en sus fondos, bibliotecas o almacenes de depósito legal.

Esta página es para la revindicación para una reflexión por una cultura libre

cultura libre

Página de copyleft, cultura libre

top post exploring the implications of 'social-ness' on interaction design - must read for anyone designing sites for participation & collaboration

Good article on how Apple has got it all wrong re: the app store and more generally comments on software development versus hardware.

I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.

"I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil…"

"Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would."

Paul Graham explains why Apple's hostility towards iPhone developers is harming them in the long run.

And everybody else's mistake is to think that Apple is in software publishing.

project pages have an interesting horizontal slideshow navigation

Great comic strip on "normal" people.

Cool comic about how there is no such thing as "normal".

people are weird

The rise of overparenting. Insightful and amusing.

The literature on overparenting raises a number of sticky questions. For example, is it really wrong for us to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented?

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” The article reviews books about the new "crisis" of overparenting. There are some helpful comments, but it is nice that the author acknowledges the pendulum swings in pop psychology and in parenting. Would be nice to follow some of the implications of these movements. The article briefly touches on the implications of the selfishness of current parents, but it is only hypothesis. I'd be intersted in a thorough analysis of implications from a historical perspective. Every generation seems to believe the next generation is spoiled and lazy, which seems to be the real critique behind the overparenting books.

The rise of overparenting.

How to disappear completely...

Is it possible to disappear when the entire internet is looking for you? One guy finds out.

Ratliff goes off the radar to see if he can live without being found in the modern age. After 28 days, someone did. See how it happened and what can be learned from it.

A Site For Serious & Aspiring Foodies

My colleagues aren't that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren't used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it's utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging. I'm 31 years old. I've been online since I was a teen. I've grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always. There's no doubt that I'm not mainstream. But I also feel really badly for the info-driven teens and college students out there being told that learning can only happen when they pay attention to an audio-driven lecture in a classroom setting. I read books during my classroom (blatantly not paying attention).

None of my colleagues brings a laptop. I do. And occasionally my interns do (although they often feel like they're misbehaving when they do so they often don't... I'm more stubborn than they are). My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he's more interested in talking to the speaker than listening... he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing... let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I'm inspired, I ask questions. When I'm not, I zone out, computer or not.

"danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently completed her PhD in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley."

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

Danah Boyd on the discussion of using a notebook in a conference (or lecture)

"I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process. I have become a "bad student." I can no longer wander an art museum without asking a bazillion questions that the docent doesn't know or won't answer or desperately wanting access to information that goes beyond what's on the brochure (like did you know that Rafael died from having too much sex!?!?!). I can't pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. And, in my world, every meeting and talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication."

Danah blogs about who "began his question by highlight that, unlike most of the audience who seemed more invested in the internet than scholarly conversations, HE had been paying attention. It's not very often that I feel like I've been publicly bitchslapped but boy did that sting. .... Of course, I haven't become that much of an adult because here I am blogging the details of said encounter. There's no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers' papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.

Had multiple conversations about iPhones / laptops in meetings last week. Agree that it's helpful to be connected during a meeting / presentation, but I wonder sometimes if we could cut meeting time in half if everyone was paying attention for the entire thing. Half of the onus is on the presenters IMHO: get better at presentations.

As a child, the actor regularly saw his father hit his mother. Here he describes how the horrors of his childhood remained with him in his adult life

As a child, the actor regularly saw his father hit his mother...

An eloquent and personal appeal for greater awareness and proactive confrontation of the scourge of domestic violence from Captain Jean Luc Picard himself.

In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down. For those who struggle to comprehend these feelings in a child, imagine living in an environment of emotional unpredictability, danger and humiliation week after week, year after year, from the age of seven. My childish instinct was to protect my mother, but the man hurting her was my father, whom I respected, admired and feared.

Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, extends his purview to motion pictures with this week’s release of Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, an inspirational holiday pastiche based on one of his paintings.

the painter of trite

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

One reason might be that Kinkade, a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set, instructed the crew to adhere to an aesthetic code that wouldn’t have flown in a first-year film class. The list of 16 “guidelines” on how to create “The Thomas Kinkade Look” on film, which was circulated to crew members in memo form, has been obtained exclusively by VF Daily.

http://xkcd.com/503/

I Agree

A few weeks ago I had the miserable experience of reading Twilight. A friend bought it for me and I took it with me to read on a long flight from Seattle to Houston. I knew it was going to be crappy, but I thought it would be a guilty pleasure kind of crappy - where you know it's bad but you still get enjoyment out of it. I actually managed to power through around 400 pages until I gave up and started reading Sky Mall. I've been seeing Twilight everywhere lately, especially with Vampire Teens II New Moon's release, so I thought I'd break down why chicks go apeshit for it.

"If you're male and you like Twilight, you're gay. I don't mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the "you want to put your testicles against another man's testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair" kind of way." /via @seldo

"If you're male and you like Twilight, you're gay. I don't mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the 'you want to put your testicles against another man's testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair' kind of way."

Edict on Maximum Prices issued by Diocletian in 301 A.D.

prices of common goods in ancient rome

Edict of Prices

When studying Ancient Rome, it is only natural to wonder what the price of everyday items might have been. In order to fully understand the price of an item, you must also consider the wages workers received at the time the item was purchased.

What things cost in Ancient Rome

"Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs. But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks. After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs."

A very cool study, and a well-written article.

via http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/can-culture-be-genetically-encoded-new-research-says-yes.html

GReader: Culture May Be Encoded in DNA [feedly] http://ow.ly/58hy [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1700727055]

Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way. Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations.

Grade 5 LEAP

cool walking tours

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

Die Ideen des Jahres 2009 aus den Bereichen, Kunst, Business, Kultur, Design, Gesundheit, Wissenschaft, Politik, Sport und Technologie, ausgesucht von der New York Times

Hard Candy

fter effects of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia that escalated to include the UK. Th

You’d almost certainly be a better person to not watch all of these selections.

Coming up on five years (and many teams) at Microsoft, there are a few things I’ve picked up along the way that I definitely didn’t know about when I left college. Call them core values, things I’ve learned, lessons learned, things I scream at my friends to do more of, whatever - they’ve served me well. Some of these are Microsoft-specific but most will apply to any team/corporate environment. Some of these are tricky - they can get you fired (or worse) if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Study on 5000 people across China. “Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Dr Thomas Pollet, the Newcastle University psychologist behind the research. [...] The study is certain to prove controversial, suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers." Replicated in Germany and USA.

gest lifestyle studies. The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partne

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance.

Hilarious! Now I understand why my wife has a constant smile :-)

g abo

Different names for the many variations of pasta Pasta is architecture designed for the taste buds. Every single shape is a brick, different in form, consistency and color, to create an extraordinary construction, both physical and mental, a true expression of taste...

"Illustration of over 150 different Italian pasta shapes"

Brilliant. Now I shall keep this for reference when I want to make my own pasta.

Illustration of over 150 different Italian pasta shapes

"You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country."

Brilliant take on AT

Fake Steve Jobs has a fake conversation with AT&T's CEO, hitting close to home in a real way.

A glorious FSJ rant: "And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country." (via @gruber)

Worth reading from A-Z.

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas.

las mejores ideas de '09 ordenadas alfabéticamente por NYTimes

A pictorial essay about food in America.

By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.

ohno! Joe Ades, the peeler salesman of Manhattan has died. RIP. http://bit.ly/ib6Z http://bit.ly/LHCF

great article.

Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1)

"To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more."

Han van Meegeren

Long OpEd piece on a fake Vermeer and Nazi ties in Amsterdam

WSJ.com

Winds of change: Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading.

To truly appreciate a good scotch, a man must have an understanding of its rich history and the process that transforms ordinary barley into an extraordinary drink.

Glenmorangie is favorite among the Scottish RT @msaleem: The Art of Manliness Guide to Scotch Whisky - http://tinyurl.com/ck54og [from http://twitter.com/jhelmus/statuses/1460956520]

IT'S LIKE BESPIN OUT THERE.

At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors--targeting U.S. businesses and residents.

The Smoking Gun: Telephone Terrorist

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Outing An Online Outlaw A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Compilation des listes des années 2000 (Kottke)

Creativity, Innovation, Team Building, Leadership, Brainstorming, Idea Champions

Good Ideas to create a atmosphere for innovation

It is difficult to sympathize with these people, their comments laced with snobbery and petulance. But you can understand their shock: Their world has been turned on its head. After years of enjoying favorable tax rates, they are facing an administration that wants to redistribute their wealth. Their industry is being reordered—no one knows what Wall Street will look like in a few years. They are anxious, and their anxiety is making them mad.

Wall Street people are not moral idiots (most of them, anyway)—it’s not as if they’ve never pondered the fairness of their enormous salaries. “One of my relatives is a doctor, we’re both well-educated, hardworking people. And he certainly didn’t make the amount of money I made,” a former Bear Stearns senior managing director tells me. “I would be the first person to tell you his value to society, to humanity, is far greater than anything that went on in the Bear Stearns building.”

In a witch hunt, the witches have feelings, too. As populist rage has erupted around the country, stoked by canny politicians, an opposite rage has built on Wall Street and other arenas where the wealthy hold sway. Its expression is more furtive and it’s often mixed with a kind of sublimated shame, but it can be every bit as vitriolic.

IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street.

It was the culture of what some called IBG-YBG: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone,”

8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism. Wait, the Internet can be useful?

“Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author.” Might not have linked to this, except she has me pegged. (I’m a boy and I don’t read.)

via brandon

"Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author."

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

A little art game about alienation and refusal of labour. Made in 6 days for the Experimental Gameplay Project

GR: SmutOnRails: Shared by robinhowlett Martin Flower's POV on smut-gate (yes, I know, I hate the unoriginali.. http://tinyurl.com/cframh [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/1663151187]

I have a different vision - one that sticks it to the suits so hard it will make their eyes water. How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin? How about a community that edgily pushes new boundaries without reinforcing long running evils? Perhaps even a community where women reach equal numbers? Such a community would hand the suits the defeat in the long battle women have been fighting for centuries. I'd love to be part of that.

A couple of weeks ago there was a Ruby conference in San Francisco called GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference). This conference has grabbed attention due to a talk at which the presenter illustrated a discussion of CouchDB by using sexually suggestive pictures of women. Unsurprisingly the result has been a fair bit of heated, and occasionally offensive, debate.

You always wondered and now you know.

Sasha Frere-Jones (via Kottke): people who are just back from a really awesome run, people who are involved with “computers,” DJs, DJs at the airport, DJs who are drunk, people who don’t have anyone’s email address, people who are mad at television

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

about Avatar, District 9, & Dune

A story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

"When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group."

Like Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, and even Dune, tis a story about white guilt.

io9?

"Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers... Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?"

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers. The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation.

ht: @STRtweets -- interestingly, dig into the really small percentage of atheists.

Cathy Lynn Grossman 3/17/09

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds

One of the best, most compelling, incisive, pithy graphics I have ever seen.

Great picture chart 10 years of history

Robert Harris', Twenty Pieces of Music That Changed the World

One of the most popular features on The Sunday Edition this past year and a half has been, 20 Pieces of Music that Changed the World. The Sunday Edition's very own musical guru, Robert Harris took us on a cultural journey -- discussing the importance of music from Beethoven to Disco, and from Depression-era classics to rap. The entire series is soon to be released as a boxed set of CDs. In the meantime, click here and have and listen!

"You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding... Looking for something and being surprised by what you find - even if it's not what you set out looking for - is one of life's great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience." I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the "binding.") Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture.

I'm with ya Steven. People (myself included) usually want to find *more* meaning in their lives, not less. To suggest I need more distractions, more tangental, accidental experiences, and a further lack of focus, meaning, and clarity, is insane.

Serendipity isn't dead online.

Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you. The web is much better at capturing that mix of surprise and relevance than book stacks or print encyclopedias. Does everyone use the web this way? Of course not. But it's much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring encyclopedias or library stacks ever was. That's the irony of the debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to a much more commonplace one in the culture. Boingboing has a million readers, for crissakes! Right now, on their front door, we have a study of monkey drinking habits, a roadsite alert sign hacking project, a "news of the weird" story about a German would-be suicide, a re-writing of Robinson Crusoe, a collection of vintage cartoons, a digital mapmaking tool, and so on and so on. And this eclecticism is what you get every day there -- which is precisely why it is the most linked-to blog

Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you. The web is much better at capturing that mix of surprise and relevance than book stacks or print encyclopedias.

Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books.

I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the "binding.") Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books.

How far does copyright go over the Internet? From this site it goes as far as copyrighting phrases of the English language. Few everyday words drawn together to make a normal phrase with some unhappy campers trying to get them to credit them back for 'stealing' their book title name without permission. Yeah, good one.

article about trademarking of common phrases- what happens when commonly used phrases are copyrighted and you are charged for them? Especially when word of mouth and word of twitter speed up their momentum of use.

b&w photos of models without makeup

Guest Post -

this post by Teresa really hit the nail on the head in illustrating why Gen Y plays the game differently in the workplace. I can honestly say that I agree with all 6 of her points.

As Gen Y enters the professional world, we bring a whole new set of rules. We’re often criticized for our restless job-jumping or our sense of entitlement. The truth is, we might play the game differently, but that doesn’t mean we’re not every bit as bright, innovative, and hardworking. Here’s why.

This is a guest post by Teresa Wu As Gen Y enters the professional world, we bring a whole new set of rules. We're often criticized for our restless

too pretty!

Thank you Maira Kalman http://tinyurl.com/ceabnu [from http://twitter.com/mintonmorris/statuses/1164471814]

"The angels are singing on this glorious day."

pretty pretty.

instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

Good article on the rising rate of obesity in the US and around the world.

"The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.” "

A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.” Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs:

"Early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes. In America today, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the 'mismatch paradigm.' The human body is 'mismatched' to the human situation. 'We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,' Power and Schulkin write. 'We now live in Candyland.'"

One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

In Search of The Infogasm

Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.

got mugged on Christmas Eve. I was in front of my Brooklyn apartment house taking out the trash when a man pulled a gun and told me to empty my pockets. I gave him my money, wallet, and cell phone. But then—remembering something I’d seen in a movie about a hostage negotiator—I begged him to let me keep my medical- insurance card. If I could humanize myself in his perception, I figured, he’d be less likely to kill me. He accepted my argument about how hard it would be for me to get “care” without it, and handed me back the card. Now it was us two against the establishment, and we made something of a deal: in exchange for his mercy, I wasn’t to report him—even though I had plainly seen his face. I agreed, and he ran off down the street. I foolishly but steadfastly stood by my side of the bargain, however coerced it may have been, for a few hours. As if I could have actually entered into a binding contract at gunpoint.

How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

By: Douglas Rushkoff

Certainly has for me in 2009.

Arthur, Charles (The Guardian, 24 de junio 2009)

The popularity of blogging seems to be fading as people turn to the easier aspects of social media: status updates and tweeting

Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning. Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives.

Artigo do editor de tecnologia do Guardian.

| Technology | The Guardian

Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning. Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

Fascinating photo slideshow of one the Netflix distribution centers, where the snazzy online service meets labor intensive bricks-and-mortar.

35 Tip Jars Designed to Make You Give More http://ocrgo.tk (these r hilarious—i'd tip more!) [via @pixel_jockey] [from http://twitter.com/koka_sexton/statuses/2573900041]

What is the hardest language?

n all dem anglophones

Frankly it's amazing that anyone learns any language. Maybe Esperanto wasn't such a bad idea after all.

In search of the world's hardest language

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

Cory Doctorow answers some standard objections against social media

Cory Doctorow erklärt uns im britischen Guardian, wieso Kritik an Social Media nicht immer den Kern der Sache trifft.

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media. They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.

Go Cory! Go Cory! How to say stupid things about social media | Technology | guardian.co.uk

I don't call my parents in Canada and recount the latest additions to my daughter's vocabulary because they need to know that the kid can say "elephant" and "potty" now; I call them up to say, "all is well with your son and his family", and "you are in my heart", and "I love you". Criticizing the "banality" of Facebook conversation is as trite and ignorant as criticising people who talk about the weather. There's a reason we say "Did you sleep well?" at breakfast and "How was your weekend?" when we turn up to the office on Monday (and it's not that we care about the weekend or the rest).

Why you should stick to the sciences.

"If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault."

"As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities: [1] You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.... It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning."

Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen social media galvanize thousands over politics, create as many industries as it has destroyed, and offer an abundance of visual and audio entertainment. But has all this incredible change actually changed us, or just the world we live in? ...

Below are some areas in which social media has had lasting, and arguably permanent effects on the ways in which we live. The question is, are these changes all for the better?

Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen social media galvanize thousands over politics, create as many industries as it has destroyed, and offer an abundance of visual and audio entertainment. But has all this incredible change actually changed us, or just the world we live in? Below are some areas in which social media has had lasting, and arguably permanent effects on the ways in which we live. The question is, are these changes all for the better? Child Literacy

They say there are no original ideas out there, and we can believe that. Storytelling themes are universal and we understand when a character or scene gets "borrowed" here and there. But it's hard not to feel betrayed when you find out that some of the stories around which your entire childhood revolved were, for the most part, copied and pasted in with a cavalier attitude of, "the little bastards will never know the difference!" We're talking about...

6 Famous Characters You Didn't Know Were Shameless Rip Offs. This article originally written by CNN.

visualisation of rentals of films from netflix. be nice to correlate this to income levels and general demographic data

Examine maps of Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities across the nation.

The most important music of the '00s as chosen by more than 100 artists, critics and industry insiders

Examine maps of Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities across the nation.

Visual depiction of datamining Netflix queues by New York City districts.

#infografico Os filmes mais alugados na Netflix de acordo com o CEP em 12 cidades dos EUA http://bit.ly/6yQ7LD /by NYTimes.com

Netflix queues by location. Interesting, although only for certain areas (I find it cool cause I can look around Seattle).

The most interesting and unexpected facts can emerge from the daily news stories and the regular Magazine documents some of them in its weekly feature, ten things we did not know last week. To kick off 2010, here's an almanac of the best from the past year.

The most interesting and crazy facts can emerge from the daily news stories and the regular Magazine documents a few of them inside its weekly feature, 10 things we did not know last week. To kick off 2010, here's an almanac of the best from the past year.

The French newborns cried with a rising "accent" while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection.

cool facts

Just so you know it now

Hochinteressante Einblicke in Facebook.

Interview, mostly about privacy, with an anonymous Facebook employee: http://bit.ly/6Zrsq1 Worth reading. (via @johnbattelle on FB) – Tim O'Reilly (timoreilly) http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/7673198122

Cyfweliad dienw gyda boi yn gweithio i Facebook. Son am HyperPHP

Roger Ebert's poignant piece on what he misses about eating, now that he no longer can.

": Isn't it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on. What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss."

Roger Ebert talks about no longer being able to eat, drink, or speak.

Really great analysis.

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

Very good but doesn't *really* propose that strong of sol'ns. I think we need to try to infuse competition into the government. I also think that we need to cut military spending, my god how did he not mention this!

thoughtful - build on this to make the argument that our best way to change the system is by changing the people within it. If people in government were operating more altruistically, it wouldn't matter what system they operated within, good things would happen.

The New York Times took on Portland on a budget and discovered all sort of local favorites and that the city is very affordable.

How does the Internet change the way we think?

each year this site asks major thinkers to answer a question, here, "How is the Internet changing your way of thinking?" A great question with lots of respondents' short essays--enough to keep me reading for a week.

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

"We will end up with one and a half cities in America -- Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not a really good piece of fiction" -- Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. -- two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry."

—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper's Magazine) An obit of the way we used to get news and for the public record keeper.

Twilight of the American newspaper tells the story of San Francisco and its newspapers. And in that tale, a glimpse that we might be losing our sense of place along with the newspaper.

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

from a book on the same topic, describes how the "symptom repertoire" of mental illness is becoming standardized around the world, which is quite different from times past. "we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

An unemployed porno addict, sitting in his parents’ basement, playing video games, eating Lucky Charms out of the box with one hand while he lazily scratches his balls with the other. A dread-lock having, patchouli oil smelling, tie-die wearing, Phish listening, hula-hoop twirling space cadet. A burger flipping, acne having, socially inept, friendless loser… These are the common stereotypes associated with the term ‘pothead’. In a recent piece we published on pot farms, a debate erupted in the comments section, with some arguing that if you smoke pot, you’ll be poor, gay, and “washing dishes until you’re dead.”

Time to shatter the baseless and idiotic stereotyopes

recordar pa traducir

Sir Richard Branson While the ‘Sir’ in front of this guy’s name puts him in some very elite company, it doesn’t automatically get him on this list. What does earn him a spot is the fact that he’s the 236th richest person in the world, founder of the Virgin empire, which encompasses everything from airlines to record stores to cell phones, and made his entire multi-billion dollar fortune from absolutely nothing. Not only does this man smoke weed, he gets high with his 21-year-old son. He has publicly stated that there’s nothing wrong with smoking pot, has petitioned for the legalization of pot, and even said that if it were legal, he’d sell it.

lists

ow awesome the Louvre is. And yet here’s Rick Steves, author of 27 top selling European travel guides, host of his own TV show and radio show, and a very outspoken pothead. He’s a member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and credits pot for turning him into a better travel writer by opening his mind to new things.

Ich lebe online. Alle Texte, die ich seit 1983 geschrieben habe, sind auf dem Computer geschrieben worden. Sie liegen auf einem halben Dutzend Rechnern im Netz verstreut. Seit 1986 achte ich darauf, portable Formate zu verwenden, um auch bei einer Migration auf neue Systeme keine Daten zu verlieren. Seit 20 Jahren lese ich laufend meine Mail, ich bin jeden Tag in fünf verschiedenen IM-Systemen zu erreichen.

Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp

Überlegungen von Kristian Köhntopp zum "Leben online" und Politikern

Obras do George Orwelll grátis pra download.

An excellent piece of writing.

Struggling with this article...

A reminder why I don't always feel guilty about coming off as a little bit arrogant

digitized manuscripts, japanese woodcuts, medieval books, old photos

Exploration of Beatles music through infographics

Graphic designer Michael Deal's infographics of Beatles statistics both obvious (songwriting credits) and unusual (metareferences).

Exploration of Beatles music through infographics (ongoing project) These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording sesion notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings. Join this project here.

Bruce Sterling's Manifesto for a new Millennium

Let me start by saying that I like newspapers. And let me say further that, no matter how much I like them, they just might not have a future.The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.

Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium

the future of media, opera, poetry, cory doctorow of boing-boing

To the people of the world, from OK Go: This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you'll like it and comment on it and pass the link along to your friends and do that wonderful thing that that you do when you’re fond of something, share it. We want you to stick it on your web page, post it on your wall, and embed it everywhere you can think of.

Awesome post by the guys whose treadmill jumping video has been viewed 40 million times on the current state of the music industry on the internet.

Their record label has made their YouTube videos unembeddable. A thoughtful look at all sides of the issue - man, I kind of love these guys.

s*ebano stanje muzičke industrije...

"If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me. People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?"

When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Danah Boyd : “Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control."

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

They look like a breed apart. I moved to Moscow with my family last year and was startled to see so many stray dogs. Watching them over time, I realised that, despite some variation in colour – some were black, others yellowish white or russet – they all shared a certain look. They were medium-sized with thick fur, wedge-shaped heads and almond eyes. Their tails were long and their ears erect.

2-year-old

Moscow’s stray dogs

Teen pregnancy. October/November 2008.

Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Anton LaVey

Pattie Boyd

Teens and media use.

"And one day, a ladder appeared. Julien climbed with guarded optimism; could this be the way out for which he’d been searching all these weeks?"

It's lonely in the modern world: http://j.mp/dxLDDc

Repurposed from Dwell magazine.

It's lonely in the modern world.

This is pretty funny, and true.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078529

"This article presents some common behaviors I've observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people. For brevity, I will simply use the term "geek" throughout this article as a catch-all term for such people. I don't mean to pass any value judgments on people who exhibit such behaviors; these are simply my observations and personal theories for why these behaviors occur."

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs.

Jobs, Hoffman, LSD

Hardware is becoming much more like software.

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.

“In the age of democratized industry, every garage is a potential micro-factory, every citizen a potential micro-entrepreneur 1) INVENT dream up your own. Pro tip: Check the PTO first 2) DESIGN Use free tools like Blender or Google’s SketchUp to create a 3-D digital model of your invention. Or download someone else’s design and incorporate your groundbreaking tweaks. 3) PROTOTYPE desktop 3-D printers like MakerBot are available for under $1,000. Just upload a file and watch the machine render your vision in layered ABS plastic. 4) MANUFACTURE The garage is fine for limited production, to go big, global — outsource. Factories in China are standing by; sites like Alibaba.com can help you find the right partner. 5) SELL Market your product directly to customers via an online store like SparkFun — or set up your own ecommerce outfit through a company like Yahoo or Web Studio. Then haul your golden goose to Maker Faire and become the poster child for the DIY industrial revolution.”

Chris Andersen's latest book outline http://bit.ly/6ty5BX [from http://twitter.com/jamescrabtree/statuses/8357654578]

Excellent post on Old World computing vs New World computing. Love it.

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.

Many people assume that marijuana was made illegal through some kind of process involving scientific, medical, and government hearings; that it was to protect the citizens from what was determined to be a dangerous drug. The actual story shows a much different picture. Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers. You'll see below that the very first federal vote to prohibit marijuana was based entirely on a documented lie on the floor of the Senate. You'll also see that the history of marijuana's criminalization is filled with: * Racism * Fear * Protection of Corporate Profits * Yellow Journalism * Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or Corrupt Legislators * Personal Career Advancement and Greed These are the actual reasons marijuana is illegal.

important and relevant history everyone should know

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking. Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. Thomas Frank Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different: "You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. / They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters. On BBC News.

28 Jan 2010. "The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine."

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write.

For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what comes after the Personal Computer as we’ve known it. Yesterday, in Apple’s iPad, we caught a glimpse. If I had to pick one predominant emotion in reaction, it would be “disturbed”. The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity. As just one component of several in a person’s digital life, perhaps that’s acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle. The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-f

Short stories by J. D. Salinger published in The New Yorker

Salinger in the New Yorker.

links to all Salinger stories published in The New Yorker

It's not an intranet, it's a VPN. It's not an extranet, it's a VPN. Hahahaha, I remember PointCast! (But push is back, at least on certain mobile devices that don't let you run background processes ...)

This list is useful for 20-somethings, too. Now when the senior person in the office uses one of these terms, you'll know what he's talking about.

i'm gonna use these as much as possible from now on.

Article on challenges of living/working in a world that is full of distractions and the impact that this has on us as individuals - both in terms of productivity and sense of well being

Review of Gallagher's 'Rapt'

April 2009: Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book [Winifred Gallagher's "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life"] explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.

Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better. By Laura Miller

lessig lays out various problems and plans w/ copyrighting culture, in GREAT detail. i wonder if his ideas would work...

I love the fact that after 15 years of being a recluse Watterson gives an interview only by email and then is charmingly flippant throughout.

This marks the 15th year since "Calvin and Hobbes" said goodbye to the comics pages. Creator Bill Watterson, who grew up in Chagrin Falls and still makes Greater Cleveland his home, recently answered some questions via e-mail from Plain Dealer reporter John Campanelli. It's believed to be the first interview with the reclusive artist since 1989. With almost 15 years of separation and reflection, what do you think it was about "Calvin and Hobbes" that went beyond just capturing readers' attention, but their hearts as well? The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of i

The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.

His first interview in 15 years.

Cleveland Ohio living section: Get lifestyle, food, religion, home and garden news and more. Comment on the articles and join the forums at cleveland.com

There can be more than one bad thing in the world

'what-aboutery'

The extended take is a cinematic hire-wire act that pushes the director, actors, cinematographer, art department, sound design, and every other department to their limits.  They take a very long time to set-up, and are very easy to mess up.  The longer the take, the more pressure is added to get it right.

The extended take is a cinematic hire-wire act that pushes the director, actors, cinematographer, art department, sound design, and every other department to their limits. They take a very long time to set-up, and are very easy to mess up. The longer the take, the more pressure is added to get it right.

20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History

This national survey of children about their media use was released at an event in Washington, D.C. featuring the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. A webcast is available.

The report about childrens and youngsters use of media

Finally read this NYT Mag article. Western individualism bad for mental health treatment?

To blog about later. "For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

Doug Bowman leaves Google: Comment

another ex-designer from google, a more tempered view of the politics

g heavily on the Google design process which, as he puts it, frequently puts data-driven design ahead of expert opinion.

Dear Google engineers and PMs: […] Please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface.

Kevin Fox responds to Douglas Bowman's post regarding his reasons for leaving Google.

シンプルではなくエンプティネス。

In Wal-Mart's Image The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.

"The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing."

"Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent."

from New York Magazine

“Put a lot of information out there. People can handle it. It’s okay to use big words. You don’t need to dumb stuff down! You don’t need to make stuff simple and repetitive for people. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way.” She might not be saving the world, but she is intent on making it a little smarter.

Maddow first came on MSNBC’s radar in 2005, when she auditioned as a foil for the conservative Tucker Carlson’s show. Bill Wolff, Carlson’s producer at the time, was immediately smitten. “She was unbelievably prepared,” he said. “And she just killed him.” She bobbed around as a guest commentator for three years, appearing as a regular guest on Carlson’s show, but also on Paula Zahn’s and Larry King’s. At one point, she filmed a pilot for a weekend political show with CNN. “She seemed really constrained there,” says a person involved in the program. “It was like they didn’t know what to do with her.” The pilot never went anywhere. CNN president Jon Klein says it was because having an “obviously liberal” host didn’t fit with the mission of the network: “It’s like, you wouldn’t put The Sopranos on Comedy Central.”

5/27/09

article on Rachel Maddow

“I do worry if being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be,” she says. “Yeah, I’m the unlikely cable news host. But before that I was the unlikely Rhodes scholar. And before that I was the unlikely kid who got into Stanford. And then I was the unlikely lifeguard. You can always cast yourself as unlikely when you’re fundamentally alienated in your worldview. It’s a healthy approach for a commentator.”

The secret to the success of a wonky lesbian pundit with no TV experience? A Ph.D. from Oxford, a dry sense of humor, and the ability to be nice to Pat Buchanan.

via http://slashdot.org/story/10/02/04/210238/How-Infighting-Hampers-Innovation-At-Microsoft + http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ay7zf/microsofts_creative_destruction_by_former_vp_dick/

"Some people take joy in Microsoft’s struggles, as the popular view in recent years paints the company as an unrepentant intentional monopolist. Good riddance if it fails. But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist. It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets."

AS they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation.

Microsoft no longer brings us the future.

By DICK BRASS Published: February 4, 2010 Why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, has failed to bring us the future.

The goal of the project is to one day shoot the last remaining van on the final frame of photographic film in existence. Then the project will be finished.

皮膚感覚を読者に合わせるためにはここまでやるということ。＞貧しい生活をするのがわたしの役割だと思っています。

太陽の光を見ないでお酒を飲んだりしている

小悪魔agehaインタビュー

"Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks. Stewart's interview of Cliff May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. 'Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere,' May told Stewart."

A look on why conservatives like to go on Jon's show

8/9/09 at 9:10 PM

John Bolton, William Kristol, and others explain why 'The Daily Show' is the best place to get their views heard.

"Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks...Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Stewart has interviewed more conservative pundits than liberal ones. It may be because it's simply easier to tangle with an ideological adversary than to needle a compatriot...When he's interviewing a liberal politician or pundit, he comes from a weaker position. His offensive instincts are blurred — notwithstanding his on-air indictment of Jim Cramer — and occasionally he fawns."

Google Buzz

Building burning at the end

An incredible series of photographs, with a spectacular, stunning conclusion: "Marking the end of the Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival takes place on the 15th day of the year - during the first full moon. People across Mainland China and Taiwan celebrate the festival in many colorful ways, from fiery folk traditions to firework displays and laser shows. Unfortunately, this year's festival ended on a somewhat sour note as an unauthorized fireworks show set an unoccupied skyscraper on fire in downtown Beijing, and one firefighter lost his life fighting the blaze. Collected here are 27 photos of the festival, and a handful from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire in Beijing."

Marking the end of the Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival takes place on the 15th day of the year - during the first full moon.

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that. Read more: Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/media/63663/index2.html#ixzz0fcTHDklh

microinteraction!

"Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible."

Oxo

How to make a useful measuring cup

alex lee of smart design (oxo's external design firm) on their work. highlights: recognizing pet peeves and making obvious solutions for unnoticed problems. helping people without the stigma of letting them know they're being helped. simply needing keen observation to solve some types of problems.

Oxo measuring cup

A conversation on the design of OXO's measuring cups, plus a link to GEL conference.

The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs. Such is the zeitgeist.

Brain Gain ?

using mind enhancing drugs to improve performance

The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

The more friends you have, the more you earn, says a study. But modern life can allow little time to maintain meaningful relationships, so what's the optimum number of friends?

The element of secrecy that's been required to maintain Apple's mystique has incurred an increasingly costly price.

Apple is justifiably revered in the worlds of technology and culture for creating one of the most powerful brands in the world based on the combination of some key elements: Great user experience and design, and an extraordinary secrecy punctuated by surprising reveals.

But the element of secrecy that's been required to maintain Apple's mystique has incurred an increasingly costly price. Apple must transform itself and leave its history of secrecy behind, not just to continue being innovative and to protect the fundamentals of its business, but because the cost of keeping these secrets has become morally and ethically untenable.

It would also help if institutions stopped relying on old, useless systems. ::coughwebctcoughgroupwisecough::

Inside Higher Ed article looking at the subject of the digital native. The student who is "born digital" and technologically engaging these students in the classroom.

Business literature is packed with advice about worker motivation—but sometimes managers are the problem, not the inspiration. Here are seven practices to fire up the troops. From Harvard Management Update.

Business literature is packed with advice about worker motivation—but sometimes managers are the problem, not the inspiration. Here are seven practices to fire up the troops.

It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.

Evolution of the Household - by decade from the 1950s thru 2000

Pesquisa sobre potencial de consumo da mulher

dados sobre hábitos familiares ao longo do tempo

Great article on facebook past, present and future.

Great overview of Facebook and MySpace. Interesting how the US military bans MySpace (where enlisted men hang out) but is OK with Facebook (officer country online)

Most movie posters are boring as hell. It's always some Photoshop of the stars, and maybe an explosion thrown in if it's an action movie. Or at least, that's the way they are in America. Go to Eastern Europe, or Japan, and you'll find posters that have absolutely nothing to do with the film, and everything to do with melting a hole in your brain.

Lost In Translation: 20 Baffling Foreign Movie Posters. Weekend at Hand Monster.

Most movie posters are boring as hell. It's always some Photoshop of the stars, and maybe an explosion thrown in if it's an action movie. Or at least, that's the way they are in America. Go to Eastern Europe, or Japan, and you'll find posters that have absolutely nothing to do with the film, and everything to do with melting a hole in your brain.

"Choke slamming a shark and "Mega Sound"? This is how you sell a freaking movie, kids. " (Via Mr. Splendidtimwah)

Information on the digs at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History - Newsweek.com

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization

"Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization"

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

Experts and stakeholders discuss predictions about the future of the internet. Update: <a href="http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Future-of-the-Internet-IV.aspx">Correction</a>.

In this report, PEW researchers cover experts' thoughts on the following issues: Will Google make us stupid? Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge? Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”? Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information? Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

Get New Orleans, Louisiana latest news. Find photos and videos, comment on the news, and join the forum discussions at NOLA.com

"As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules -- disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular."

Interesting blog about Professor Myers' research and paper on MMO rules vs MMO social norms

David Myers, a Loyola professor and computer game scholar, looks at his computer screen with his "City of Heroes" online computer game character "Twixt" reflected in his glasses at his home in Slidell Friday, July 3, 2009. "Twixt" became perhaps the game's most reviled, abused player because his playing methods were unpopular.

Phone calls, movies, music, TV – Stockholm has emerged as the epicentre of an online revolution, giving us all what we want, instantly, for free. Tim Walker reports from the world's new digital capital

Ek acknowledges that, without the far-reaching effects of The Pirate Bay and its ilk, Spotify could never have come to fruition. "There is a big file-sharing community here in Sweden," he says. "It's how people want to consume content. They don't want to be illegal, but they want to have everything at their fingertips instantly, which is what The Pirate Bay facilitated. The best way to compete with that is to come up with a better product. Spotify exists because of piracy."

Phone calls, movies, music, TV – Stockholm has emerged as the epicentre of an online revolution, giving us all what we want, instantly, for free

1950年代電車中吊り広告 　この中吊り広告（なかづりこうこく）は、1950（昭和25）年から1954（昭和29）年頃にかけて、京阪神を走る国鉄列車内で実際に使用されていたもので、当時大阪の宮原電車区などで働いていた親戚の国鉄職員（故人）から譲り受けたものです。戦後物資難の時代にあって、裏面が白く、子供の絵書き用紙として使えるということで、電車区で使用済みとなった広告を自宅に持ち帰ったものが、今こうして残っています。 　実物サイズはＢ3規格（横515mm×縦364mm）、印刷技術が向上してカラフルになりつつある頃で、戦後復興期の庶民の生活や終戦後の日本の政治・経済・社会情勢をうかがうことができます。当ページでは、所蔵約280枚の中から、236枚を公開しています。 　これらのうちの一部は、2005年度日本アカデミー賞受賞映画「ALWAYS 三丁目の夕日」、及び2007年度「ALWAYS 続・三丁目の夕日」に資料提供（美術協力）し、集団就職列車、都電（路面電車）、東京駅のシーンに登場しています。（ 映画では商号や商品名を東京地区用に加工されています ）

なかなかどうして、素敵です。マスコミ関連はあんまり変わっていないような気もする。不二家の中刷りのペコが、どう見ても異常。怖えぇ。

あー、こういうの好きです。そして勉強になります。ありがとうございます。

広告の歴史

"In 1936, the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had "developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker" and described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds."

Slate Magazine

A useful historical look at the anxiety of technology and information overload.

This article from the Slate looks at a "history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook." It gives a fine perspective on how whilst the technology evolves, the essence of prophets of doom railing against the technology remain basically the same.

Now it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends. My reaction to them... What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names.

yes.

Very off topic: Why I won't be at my high school reunion

Ironing out the little problems can make it so companies can avoid big disasters. At 24:14

pixar guy talks about their process

Very nice talk, lot's of agile aspects in this story about what went wrong at the succefull Pixar company

Fantastique vidéo de Ed Catmull sur les méthodologies de travail des films chez Pixar et sur les processus de Pixar en tant que compagnie.

how pixar builds high performance teams - codinghorror.com

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

Ironing out the little problems can make it so companies can avoid big disasters. Recorded: January 31, 2007Related Article: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/ne...

撮影対象から探す日本古写真集

Hahahahaha... now THIS made my day! Read it. You'll laugh.

re-Colu

@sulaimansaif in reality, the native americans did own land: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/08/06/cahokia/index.html [from http://twitter.com/ZainabA/statuses/3161344492]

Timothy Pauketat's "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi" MCPL has on order Aug09

Dude. We did this EXACT experiment last night!

a movie about chat roulette.

a movie about chat roulette. i don't know what really know what else could be said. a movie by casey neistat NaSA Entertainment 2010

410 financial institutions

Researchers hijack botnet, score 56,000 passwords in an hour - Ars Technica http://ow.ly/5eyt [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1706638693]

“The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections. ” – via nelson

please visit his profile page at Monitor Talent

Received this link a week ago, and still I'm sending it to ppl... it's an AWESOME read. http://is.gd/n4MY [from http://twitter.com/dc0de/statuses/1434156624]

In this presentation I give some examples of heavy weight methods and their implications on your project. Then I give a quick overview of Agile methods, the rationale behind it, its origin, its values and principles. I move on to

This is supposed to be an introductory presentation on Agile. In this presentation I give some examples of heavy weight methods and their implications on your project. Then I give a quick overview of Agile methods, the rationale behind it, its origin, its values and principles. I move on to describe that what I see happening today in the industry is really waterfall in the name of Agile. I give some reasons why this is happening and then I give some pointers to move away from this flawed thinking. Bottom line, Agile is not a Silver Bullet and don’t fall pray to marketing gimmicks. Question dogmatic claims. Adapt Agile to your needs and take baby steps.

Aguas Calient

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

The Colorado-based Love Hope Strength foundation hosted an event recently called "Peru Rocks", where 63 travelers - including musicians from The Fixx, Fastball, The Alarm and more - along with cancer survivors, and their supporters from around the world joined together to raise funds and awareness of cancer-related issues in Peru. The trip took the trekkers from Cuzco, Peru to the heights of Machu Picchu, back down to Lima, where they met with patients and doctors of INEN, Peru's main cancer center. The travelers finished their trip with a concert in Lima on October 15th. Funds raised on the trip were donated to INEN, and will be used to establish a fully staffed and equipped medical bus that will serve rural Peru, screening residents for cancer.

まあ、外国から見たら不思議だろうな。僕だって、あれでよく儲かっているとときどき思うもの…

Bosley's recommendations (for coffee!) from Tokyo

Vending machines in Japan are as commonplace as temples, bicycles, and karaoke booths. It's not uncommon to see a street lined with a dozen or more machines selling products ranging from cold and hot drinks to flowers or rice. And almost none of these vending machines are vandalized or non-functional. According to the Vending Machine Manufacturers Association, Japan has one vending machine for every 23 people.

We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later. Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. ... Ephemeral conversation is dying. Cardinal Richelieu:If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

"Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed. This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later."

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

"When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record."

But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation.

"The younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. ... until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers -- we aren't fully an information age society." (via Oblinks)

hat tip to Leonardo Souza

“What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.”

"“What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future."

The problem with this line of questioning is that technology predated our humanness. Many other animals used tools millions of years before humans. Chimpanzees made (and of course still make) hunting tools from thin sticks to extract termites from mounds, or slam rocks to break nuts. Even termites themselves construct vast towering shells of mud for their homes. Ants herd aphids and farm fungi in gardens. Birds weave elaborate twiggy fabrics for their nests. The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of your body is a billion year old trick at least.

Kevin Kelly on technology-and-humanity's coevolution. "Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. In the same period we domesticated the dog (all those breeds) from wolves, and cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors. We, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink, our muscles thin out, our hair disappear, our molecular digestion adjust to new foods. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are co-evolving with our technology, so that we have become deeply co-dependent on it. Sapiens can no longer survive biologically without some kind of tools. Nor can our humanity continue without the technium. In a world without technology, we would not be living, and we would not be human."

the evolution of humans is the evolution of our abilities to analyze and abstract patterns. Languagem, the ultimate pattern abstraction, was crucial to this. (math is just rigorously formal language)

Life before language and before technology

We are co-evolving with our technology, so that we have become deeply co-dependent on it. Sapiens can no longer survive biologically without some kind of tools. Nor can our humanity continue without the technium. In a world without technology, we would not be living, and we would not be human

...Og andre baglæns-film-versioner...

MELBOURNE (Reuters Life!) – Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It'll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity. The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

Makes sense to me: "Facebook, YouTube at work make better employees: study" ( http://tinyurl.com/cxm63m ) [from http://twitter.com/nikiblack/statuses/1445740510]

# We can articulate the company vision in 140 characters or less # We are willing to give credit to cool, innovative, or thought-provoking ideas # We are willing to challenge a potentially destructive position . # We are willing to listen to and engage with others # We will not get carried away # We will dedicate time each week to reading what others have to say and promise to retweet # We will never include in a press release, speech, or annual report # We actually have something meaningful to say. # If we don't have something to say, we'll find the person in the organization # If we cannot live up to these commandments we will reflect on whether corporate marketing is the right role for us. # We will use our Twitter channel not just to bump out cheery news, but to keep customers informed in the event of bad news.

From The Big Money

Last week, the Department of Defense issued its social-media policy, an admirably permissive guide for military personnel governing their use of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, and YouTube. The upshot? It's all good, the Pentagon says.

Kirjojen ja julkaisemisen tulevaisuus

Espresso Book Machine

"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends."

Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse.

About the future of books

New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

camera isometrica

Calendar met leuke animatie filmpjes

まとめ。

最近、「オープンソース」という言葉の意味を巡る論争が再燃したようだ。混乱が生じるのは、「オープンソース」という概念自体に、性格の異なる二つの要素が詰め込まれているからではないだろうか。

mhattaさんの．

さもなくば、私たちは、緩やかに「1984年」の世界へと戻っていくことになるだろう。ジョージ・オーウェルが描き出した幻想の1984年ではない。リチャード・ストールマンが広がりゆく「荒野」に絶望してGNUプロジェクトを立ち上げ、フリーソフトウェアを世に送り始めた、実際の1984年にである。

Die Welt Verbessern durch Spiele. Interessante Idee, muss ich mir aber beizeiten mal ansehen.

The Insider

List is bound to be a bit odd, but well worth working your way through.

Let me just say this: any New Yorker that drinks bottled water is a fucking disgrace.

Goemon 2

長期日本在住の外国人のブログ　てか長いなー

AmericanDad blogs about how lunatics and hypocrites in high places have hijacked the Republican party, and he calls for true conservatives to boot them out and take their party back. Tons of links and references.

Crazy amount of links about how the repubs are crazy

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006). While this will come as no

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006)...

PsyBlog | As a result of the strict hierarchies, huge pay differentials, poor decision-making, greasy-pole climbing and feeling powerless to change huge bureaucracies, followers naturally develop feelings of alienation, and alienation kills motivation and productivity, along with any hope of job satisfaction.

The Beauty of #India 50 Amazing Photos http://bit.ly/adCOon

What are the wages of relationship inflation? Three cancers eating away at the vitality of today's web. First, attention isn't allocated efficiently; people discover less what they value than what everyone else likes, right this second. Second, people invest in low-quality content. Farmville ain't exactly Casablanca. Third, and most damaging, is the ongoing weakening of the Internet as a force for good. Not only is Farmville not Casablanca, it's not Kiva either. One of the seminal examples of the promise of social media, Kiva allocates micro-credit more meaningfully. By contrast, Farmville is largely socially useless. It doesn't make kids tangibly better off; it just makes advertisers better off.

The Social Media Bubble http://j.mp/apBH1F

scientology article

But L. Ron Hubbard says the intelligence scale doesn't necessarily line up with the sanity scale. Adolf Hitler was brilliant. Stalin was brilliant. They were geniuses. But they were also on a certain level stark, staring mad."

Recommended by Digby

組織やシステムの不備や怠慢を、個人個人の優れた能力と自己犠牲で切りまわしてきた、世界にも稀に見る“個人プレイ”が得意な民族なのではあるまいか

> アメリカ人は、互いに異質でバラバラのやつらが、まとまればまとまるほど賢く強くなってゆき、日本人は、個々人は優れている均質なやつらが、集まれば集まるほどアホになり弱くなってゆく。

# The Big Picture - Boston Globe # Big Shots - Sports photography from the Boston Globe # Captured - Denver Post # The Frame - Sacramento Bee # Photo Journal - WSJ.com # Picture Show - NPR (fullscreen) # Pixcetera - AOL News (fullscreen)

What is neoliberalism, and what's it done to our universities?

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

a good description of commodity-based thinking

As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics, 1960): “The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?” If the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.

Well defined article analyzing the disjointed humanism taught at institutes of higher education. NeoLiberalism.

"If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Questions: of all the video and audio footage there, no footage? And also, really? They wanted to enjoy a spring day during a protest. Absolutely logical. Seems politicians never tire of the "Look there! A (racist, bigot, socialist, etc.)"

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance

Michael practices proximity management. Every month he meets informally with each employee group. No agenda. No speeches. Just conversation. That helps him solve problems: for example, the time guest check-in was being mysteriously delayed.

«It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.»

"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males." Good point.

an graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to a

Holy Week - The Big Picture

Christian communities around the world are currently celebrating Holy Week - both the last week of Lent and the week before Easter. Holy Week commemorates the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ culminating in his crucifixion on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Observances range from the elaborate and fanciful to simple and reverential, and vary a great deal between communities, regions, countries, and churches. Collected here are a small sample of photographs from Holy Week observances around the world

astonishing easter images

religious photos

holy shit

A few good ideas sprinkled in this article.

The key is closing the gap between theory and practice. Words are cheap. It's easy to wax poetic about "culture change." It's quite another thing to make it happen. Still, the effort is worth it.

I hear a lot of talk these days about how important it is for organizations to establish a culture of innovation. Yup. True. So what else is new? The key is closing the gap between theory and practice. Words are cheap. It's easy to wax poetic about "culture change." It's quite another thing to make it happen.

I hear a lot of talk these days about how important it is for organizations to establish a culture of innovation. Yup. True. So what else is new? The key is closing the gap between theory and practice. Words are cheap. It's easy to wax poetic about "culture change." It's quite another thing to make it happen. Still, the effort is worth it. And so, to help you on your way, here's Idea Champions' list of 50 things you can do to foster a culture of innovation.

By O.S. Card

Funny but so close to the real.

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.

Concise and spot on. Splendid

Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out or he brings in management types who end up driving him out or else he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control.

How Software Companies Die - Orson Scott Card

i think the cory doctorow argument against the iPad is perhaps the dumbest thing I've read in years. http://bit.ly/cGD98l – chris dixon (cdixon) http://twitter.com/cdixon/statuses/11508479609

Point. As pretty and shiny as it is, I'll probably end up with a Kohjinsha

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boingboing.net%2F2010%2F04%2F02%2Fwhy-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html

RT @cdixon: i think the cory doctorow argument against the iPad is perhaps the dumbest thing I've read in years. http://bit.ly/cGD98l

via http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/blnz5/cory_doctorow_if_you_want_to_live_in_the_creative/

GReader: The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown [feedly] http://ow.ly/3ipE [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1563319028]

Much of this country's geography is remote, and beyond the reach of cellphone coverage, making American satellites an ideal, if illegal, communications option.

An article on how Brazilian satellite hackers use high-performance antennas and homebrew gear to turn U.S. Navy satellites into their personal CB radios.

Brazilian satellite hackers use high-performance antennas and homebrew gear to turn U.S. Navy satellites into their personal CB radios.

Do We Need a New Internet?

Do We Need a New Internet? http://tinyurl.com/cdgwv4 via NYT [from http://twitter.com/bibliothekarin/statuses/1218288148]

THIS IS REALLY REALLY GOOD.

The wrong policy? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/20/pot-alcohol ).

'nuff said

Sam Harris - brilliant!

A good insight about a classic board game, and why video games are getting better at more than just entertaining.

What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.

Attempting to command, as well as deal with, the on the internet status has become increasingly hard.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more. And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way. At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

by Michael Arrington, TechCrucnh - March 28, 2010

Trying to manage, or even control, the on the web status has become progressively difficult.

Trying to handle, or maybe deal with, ones on-line popularity has become significantly hard.

Attempting to command, and even manage, the on-line popularity is now increasingly tough.

Trying to command, or even manage, the online standing is now more and more challenging.

Great article

Must read: excellent post on "the media hologram" and existence

A bit naive in his discussion of free markets, but otherwise a great article.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Psychology and what it might be good for considering the state of the world

"You can see that most of these spikes in zombie popularity do seem weirdly close to periods of historical trauma like wars or the AIDS epidemic. Is there a causal connection, or is it just coincidence? You be the judge."

SHARED USING: http://www.tagle.it

Here are 15 things everyone should know about Fred Rogers:

ermany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.

#zensursula #hadopi #loppsi version allemande http://2mm52.tk [from http://twitter.com/mazenovi/statuses/2193045872]

German politicians already seem to be lining up with their wish-list of content to be censored in future – the suggestions ranging form gambling sites, islamist web pages, first person shooters, and the music industry cheering up with the thought of finally banning pirate bay and p2p.

bandeiras

flags. where did they come from? how did they get here?

bandeiras, simbolismo etc

Courtesy of Ting, I bring you really fun improv. (make sure to read the comment about the pay phone girl XD)

This work is at once a heroic call to solidarity and a hopeful ode to the future. The diverse collection of pipes, flocking together chaotically from all across the platform, can only burst through the wall once they’ve banded together.

A unique behind-the-scenes visit of the crafstmen who hammer out the best and most expensive kitchen knives in the world in the city of Sakai, Japan

Picture essay from a tour of Sakai, knifemaker central.

Wonderful image by image guide to Japanese Knife creation.

Sparsely kept up, but a funny blog by a good writer at a University in Indiana.

Keith Starky, »leading researcher in the field of Advanced Sparse-Tree Social Networking Systems from Washington Polytechnical Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana« (wer da noch nicht grinst, ist selber schuld) spießt im unnachahmlichen pseudo-wissenschaftlichen Duktus die Absurditäten aus der Tweet-Masse. Sehr, sehr (sagte ich schon: sehr?) lesenswert.

"This 'weblog' is part of his ongoing research in humor propagation and fluid reputation dynamics."

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place.

"Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons...Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford, argues that this model is wrong, and discusses seven habits observed in terrorist groups that contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers...Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity."

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States. The evidence supports this. [[Some of the comments are very intriguing as well. —Ed.]]

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place—by Bruce Schneier

as awesome as dimensional analysis is, it's still a pain in the ass

xkcd - A Webcomic - #563: Fermirotica

Statistics...

yup.

A timetly takeaway: "You don’t get rich feedback when communicating over a phone, email, or text chat."

There is a clear pattern at play: Once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber, Heather, and Stephanie started out as high-end names. For every high-end baby given those names, however, another five lower-income girls received those names within 10 years.

unit 1

unite 1

UNITONE

Virginity rates among students by major

I have no idea the source or validity of this, but I somehow found it randomly amusing, so I feel like keeping track of it.

About the creative (descriptive) use of language

An interesting discuss on language and how images have different meaning to different people and cultures

Lera Boroditsky's take on how language transmit culture. I'd also love to read her essay, "How Does Language Shape the Way We Think" in the anthology What's Next (Vintage Books, June 2009)

Through Juliet's lips, Shakespeare said "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But the Bard may have been wrong &mdash; names do matter. Language researchers say your sense of the rose depends on what you call it.

Lera Boroditsky asks us to describe a bridge - "What explains the difference? Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German — die brucke — is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish — el puente — is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender" (wikipedia notes that "For the Burning Man festival, she once built a banana vehicle" ;)

It's Hunch.com for those who've seen too many Bruckheimer films.

Most Awesomest Thing Ever http://bit.ly/cTozJW

"The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people."

Interesting read on social gaming, e.g. FarmVille: http://bit.ly/bLPIEK – Jacob Bøtter (boetter) http://twitter.com/boetter/statuses/12443260031

Cultivated Play: Farmville liszkiewicz's picture

Incl. list of bookmarks to "Best of Naggum" usenet articles

Some essays, flames and other stuff by Erik Naggum

日本文化って基本的にサブカルなんだよね、というのは、自分も常々感じていた。

サブカルチャーとして捉えてるものがやたらポップな件

良考察

@jorgeortiz85: "For @jasonpjason: hobo code 2.0 http://bit.ly/isjrA (via @awans)" (from http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/status/2841001877)

also http://www.cockeyed.com/archive/candy_code/candy_code.html for Hallowe'en code for kids

***Modern Hobo Code The legendary "hobo code"was a set of covert markings used to warn other hobos about danger or to clue them into good situations. As times have changed, a new set of code symbols have emerged to alert other hobos to circumstances in modern America. Perhaps you have seen them on your own city streets.

The legendary "hobo code"was a set of covert markings used to warn other hobos about danger or to clue them into good situations. As times have changed, a new set of code symbols have emerged to alert other hobos to circumstances in modern America. Perhaps you have seen them on your own city streets.

No. 2: Used frying oil available for biodiessel. Might come in useful during the 2nd Great Depression.

acquire

In Seed Magazine, Jonathan Gottschall, a leading Literary Darwinist, reviews Geoffrey Miller's latest book, Spent, which argues that most of what we do, especially what we buy, is a kind of marketing designed to signal our power and secure our (genetic) place in the social hierarchy. That's all well and good, but it seems awful reductive.

In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

If you've ever been curious about Jughead's hat, this is just the thing for you. It's really in depth and interesting.

The other night, while attending a small dinner party, the conversation turned suddenly to the subject of Jughead's trademark; his goofy, crown-like hat.

"Um, more like, uh, a kind of beanie - - ? You can see them in old movies, old comics and stuff, so surely people must have actually worn them. I guess they were popular with kids in the 1930s or '40s, during the depression. Homemade from, uh, felt or - - leather, maybe? Encrusted with buttons or bottle caps or other bling. Think of 'The Little Rascals'. Kids shining shoes on street corners, or - - y'know, teen-age delinquents riding around in jalopies."

On the origins of Jughead's hat.

what the heck is Jughead wearing on his head?

this is the coolest bit of pop-culture history I've seen in a while

The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.

Must read! RT@amcafee: Cannot recommend highly enough this interview with Pixar's Ed Catmull: http://bit.ly/cYGtLY - (via @jmcaddell)

mindblowing interview with the CEO of pixar. all on leading a top-creative company and managing creavity.

Awesome insights. "The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things." "That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle."

RT @AnnaOBrien The Difference between Nerd, Dork & Geek explained by a Venn Diagram http://bit.ly/dx83eU

RT @GreatWhiteSnark FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram http://bit.ly/9jBINr

To all of you nerds and geeks who–like me–have been unfairly and inaccurately labeled “dorks,” only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: You’re welcome. This nerd/dork/geek/dweeb Venn diagram should save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

Visual explanation of the difference between geeks, nerds and dorks

This nerd/dork/geek/dweeb Venn diagram should save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

RT @aljoannes: Postures web: différences entre les geeks, les nerds et les dorks (dessin) http://j.mp/aJxb9w

<<higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.>>

"Except in a few private wealthy universities, the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past."

a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it).

via marisaolson

Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don't count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 - sorry.

website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television

RT @topfloorstudio: Colours relating to emotion in different Cultures: http://bit.ly/955GxM

I'll up the ante. What if they were Muslim? @laughingwoman Tim Wise: What if Tea Partiers were black? http://bit.ly/cZzE8K

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

RT @CarriBugbee: Ephphatha Poetry: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise ""Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise" htt ...

"Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. . . . // And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis." (avoid the comments)

Excellent article on white privilege

"In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?" Via Debbie.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan. Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Great article about misuse of powerpoint!

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander

bullets create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control...not to mention the huge waste of time in creating the things in the first place

The tumblelog of Garrett Murray.

"This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down."

Bad reviews in appstore and no way to respond

A piece on how the approval process stops developers from being responsive to users, by delaying necessary fixes and cutting the lines of communication.

when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app

Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps

This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down.

"Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down." Sad, really.

One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

Neanderthals? Oh yeah. Humans totally ate them and made their teeth into jewelry - http://tr.im/lLZN [from http://twitter.com/s_m_i/statuses/1848014151]

>One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert. Mmmm neanderthal burgers.

One of prehistory’s great mysteries is, what happened to the Neanderthals? Here’s an answer: we ate them.

Where in the world do people feel most content with their lives? According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries. In Depth: See All 10 of the World's Happiest Places Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The United States did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.

World&#39;s Happiest Places http://tinyurl.com/omxf5u [from http://twitter.com/fullfilth/statuses/1751512594]

Today, the meaning is the message. The "message" of the Internet's social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization.

More useful (albeit heavily sprinkled with marketing buzz words and phrases) on the best way of using social media as part of an organisation.

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

“‘I say, “It’s spelled ‘crap,’ as in crap,”’ said Mr. Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Devon, for decades.”

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Ask the residents of Titty Ho, North Piddle, Spanker Lane or Penistone.

Penistone...Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire...Crapstone. You gotta love the brits.

Rob Thomas's slightly conflated argument for marriage equality

50 discursos históricos disponibles online http://bit.ly/9rfeOi – Juan Diego Polo (wwwhatsnew) http://twitter.com/wwwhatsnew/statuses/13120160646

Algunas lecciones clasicas de la revista Guitar World.

Los 50 mejores sólos de guitarra según Guitar World.

Guitar World give their run-down of the 50 greatest guitar solos ever. Opinions usually run high on this type of list - I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are on the final 10.

A revista "Guitar World" publica uma lista do que considerm sejam os 50 melhores solos de guitarra da história do rock.

A funny mid-20th century newsreel featuring amazingly accurate predictions of the year 2000:

Excellent sendup of mid-20th century technocratic utopianism / futurism (a la GM at 1939 world's fair). Via Steve Duncombe's collection

Reading is declining, what's lost, and what we might do about it.

"There’s a real difference between watching a talk and reading a transcript. A transcript doesn’t convey the tone of voice, the pauses and gestures that punctuate an argument.""And yet people still read articles and essays, and they still demand transcripts. Why?" "The informational density of writing is only half the story. The other half is in the unique ability of the written word to construct and convey complex intellectual ideas.""Reading is not simply a faster form of listening; it is a qualitatively different process that involves completely different pathways in the brain. The field of language acquisition is a messy and contentious one, but few would disagree with the statement that it is much easier - for whatever reason - for children to learn how to talk than to read."

Great post from Seth Godin on the myth of $50m salaries http://bit.ly/1o5EYK [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/1418127934]

The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing) /Seth's Blog/ - The failed bankers on Wall Street have been ... http://tinyurl.com/chkazp [from http://twitter.com/jorgefsb/statuses/1374768795]

Excellent post that lifts the lid on the nonsense of self-justified bib money salaries

Seth Godin has posted a great post 'The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)' on his BLOG.

The failed bankers on Wall Street have been whining that if they have to cut bonuses and salaries dramatically, they'll be unable to recruit great talent, and they need great talent to fix the situation. And for years, boards have...

Elements Of Twitter Style - http://goo.gl/d5yK

"Red Sweater Blog – Elements Of Twitter Style" http://j.mp/dwInoi

Advice on writing tweets and using Twitter.

They enjoy TV, but watch it a lot less!

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

via Lifehacker. "But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy."

All of this is just saying that the gender roles were both an intellectual and personal interest of mine because the ideals about - I'm a human being and I've been poured into this body, so who am I? Am I really wired differently? Why do I have such different expectations for my life than a woman has? Why should I? Why should I have a different expectation? I shouldn’t. I feel like we're back in college and we could have a rap session about this. You know, are you born this way? Is it nature/nurture?...

Long interview with Matthew Weiner of Mad Men; lots of new details about how he shapes the series

A Q&A with the creator of Mad Men: "What I’ve tried to do is have some honesty about it, show the jobs that they were in and show my world, which is white. It’s the story of the show. And these people are not glorified but (I’ve tried to) show the parallel universe of it all. And the idea of following one of those characters home is a possibility. I’ve slowly been trying to integrate these worlds together the way it actually happened. There’s no enmity. There’s no blatant racism. You never hear anybody say anything about black people that’s like Jim Crow or anything. It’s New York City. But it was segregated and it was two parallel universes and rather than do the television thing of “Hey they’re best buddies”... Don is a fair person but "Everybody's good buddies and here's my black friend" was not the world of the '60s."

Long interview with the creator of Mad Men - but too many spoilers to read now.

long interview with Matthew Weiner of Mad Men; lots of new details about how he shapes the series

Mega matéria na Wired

Awesome article in Wired "As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On" http://bit.ly/doLFq0 via @dougmeacham

"The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils' self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned."

We've been telling children they are unique and special for over a decade.

"Craftsmanship is a preservation method That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness."

"One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time."

really interesting article on the "trough of no value": you buy something it decreases in value until it has no value, but then after a while it has valuer as an antique

【鎧を着ている以上盾は必要なかった】 日本では非常に古くから全身鎧が用いられるようになりました。 大鎧（大鎧は板金に漆を塗った積層装甲である小冊を重層構造にしたもので一種のチョバムアーマーでした）が用いられていた当初、例えばヨーロッパはまだ板金鎧を実用化出来ていません。 ちなみに当時の彼らが着ていたのは柔らかい鉄を延ばした針金で作った鎖帷子でした。 【外国人と日本人の体格差について】 ここではヨーロッパとの比較についてですが結論から言いますと戦国以前の日本人と当時同時代のヨーロッパ人とでは体格差はありません。 ヨーロッパでは１９世紀以前はゲルマンなど一部の地域を除き160センチあれば大男でした。一方日本では東国部者などは170センチ台がごろごろいました。

へー！！！

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.

Heather Havrilesky, fantastic article and reader responses. God, I love Heather.

Nov. 7, 2008 | Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously.

"Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it... When we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment. We heard the voice of a man who can inspire with his words, who's unashamed of his own intelligence, who's willing to treat the citizens of this country like smart, capable people, worthy of respect. For the first time in some of our lifetimes, we believed."

FOTOGRAFIAS GUERRA VIETNAM

Vietnam, 35 ans après http://bit.ly/aGRgMe

leaders

Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers -- and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.

Inspirational leadership from the question of "Why?"

lady gaga

that title above pretty much says it all ;)

RT @mikeymo1741: Lady Gaga is no lady, methinks.... #idol <<< fascinating NYM article on her - http://ow.ly/1Hz0i

i would read this, except i'd have to IP each page or put up with ridiculous characters that pop up in the clickability link. boooo

Meet a woman with the perfect amount of freedom and rights

All The Sex, None of The Nagging! Are you tired of wondering if she’s cheating on you? Do you love to leave the toilet seat up? Want to enjoy freedom on the weekend and watch a little football with your buddies, rather than work on your “honey do” list? Well, now you don’t have to worry any of that with the latest craze in adult dating, dating and marrying inmates for conjugal visits. With a conjugal marriage, you will finally have a wife with the perfect amount of freedoms and rights, and more importantly, you will finally start enjoying your own.

http://www.conjugalharmony.com/

"Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur... Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship. His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing and cheating."

Calcanis destroys Zuckerberg

Jason Calacanis' analysis of Zuckerberg as a throat-slitting sleazeball

Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat. I knew this because I watched Zuckerberg screw over his users again and again in terms of privacy, and I heard about the stories of him screwing over his former employers at ConnectU and his early partners at Facebook. The money quote from Business Insider’s scoop comes from Zuckerberg himself: “they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.” He stalled and sandbagged ConnectU–then Zuckerpunched them! Of course, the person he said this to was his partner–Eduardo Saverin–who he reportedly screwed as well.

By helping each other we can make more informed buying decisions, influence business behavior and, with enough of us involved, make the world a better place - one brand at a time. Social media with a motive and it makes every1 an activist with a small "a". We believe in action – we're what we do

Sito dove le persone possono dare un rating al "karma" dei brand in ambito: planet, customers, employees, suppliers, investors

Brandkarma’s mission – ‘to help everyone make better brand choices and influence brand behavior for good’. Make the world better, one brand at a time.

let the collective speak out and make a difference. stand up and speak out!

Wish could try some of this at work, not really room though.

I want a writing space like this. Free of all visual distractions. While it would be impossible for my entire office to operate like this, managing legal documents, my creative endeavors could certainly be fruitful in this environment. I love it Mr. Ferriss.

Interpolis - unconventional but damn effective. (photo: jsigharas) Through simple redesign of workspaces, Interpolis of Holland increased productivity 20%, and ...

I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

hanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.

DOMMUNE | THE FINAL MEDIA - DOMMUNE | ライブストリーミングサイト＆スタジオ 「DOMMUNE」

TED Talks About Leadership

Video about the first follower

I still remember that person... http://tinyurl.com/c67zl6 [from http://twitter.com/mrdoubleb/statuses/1380242864]

Yeah, but he really knows his stuff... /Seth's Blog/ - Every organization worth its salt has at least one ... http://tinyurl.com/d3x8pl [from http://twitter.com/jorgefsb/statuses/1365156152]

Deep technical competency is overrated compared with the ability to make excellent decisions and to create a culture where forward motion is valued and personal initiative is rewarded. The good news is that the bully knows this, and the only reason he gets away with being a bully is that he thinks he's got you bluffed. Call his bluff and odds are you'll have a much more cooperative team, top to bottom.

Deep technical competency is overrated compared with the ability to make excellent decisions and to create a culture where forward motion is valued and personal initiative is rewarded.

Every organization worth its salt has at least one guy like this. Someone who knows every technical detail, or has vast expertise in the parliamentary procedure. Perhaps he's the coot who knows every verse of the Bible or is the...

A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old rideNew York City&rsquo;s subway by himself. In a new book, she explains why she has no

This lady is NOT the worst mom in america: http://bit.ly/v6g1i [from http://twitter.com/medwardsmusic/statuses/1808843388]

A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old rideNew York City’s subway by himself. In a new book, she explains why she has no regrets.

Skenazy NY New York subway

Advice from the world's worst mom who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone.

This is an excellent takedown of family-values homophobia.

RT @stephenfry: The best letter I've read for a long time. http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/000504.html Not ashamed to say it made ...

A great empathetic responce to the religious morality police attacks on homosexuals

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people. I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny. My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

hiphop samples

Love this! Too much good stuff.

RT @draenews: Del Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live? - ReadWriteWeb: http://bit.ly/bVtDrm

RT: thanks @sarahintampa Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live? http://ff.im/-Ict0 [from http://twitter.com/jcookaz/statuses/1139811040]

the balancing act of using technology so much and missing the real life moments.

An easily indexed and searchable website featuring all of those comments that find their way onto social networking sites and come back to bite you in the ass. If you

via oso

Proof positive people are too stupid to deal with the Digital Age.

神秘的な写真が多い．日本では政治的でダークなニュースばかりに触れているからわからないが，とても美しい．

Belezas naturais do Líbano (!)

"Switzerland" comparison does not exactly come to mind when you consider how war-torn and miserable this nation has been in the recent years. But cast a longer look around you while visiting this incredible spot in the Middle East - and the ancient, spectacular beauty of the place will start to haunt you, bless you, and lift you above political agendas and human strife.

Tea is Booming in Silicon Valley

...say interweb chieftains

High tech hipsters, including Kevin Rose and Timothy Ferriss, love expensive teas.

Your favorite Facebook meme is older than anyone guessed! Here it is, something I just dug up at the library: the First Folio edition of... Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me

Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

[New York Times]

“Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

Interactive visualization from the NY Times

enter a word - track reader responses over time

The word train on the financial crisis

これは良いなー。

a group of artists, designers and projecteers, have created these amazing series of sculptures and films commissioned by 42Below Vodka where they've created chair rainbows on the frozen tundra, a curb-side wrap party, gratuitous nudie pictures for airplanes passing by, a house of crates, and a blow-up doll's vacation paradise.

matéria da revista hi-fructose onde mostra um grupo que faz intervenções urbanas.... graffiti... colagens... pirações

Our Australian friendsThe Glue Society, a group of artists, designers and projecteers, have created these amazing series of sculptures and films commissioned by 42Below Vodka where they've created chair rainbows on the frozen tundra, a curb-side wrap party, gratuitous nudie pictures for airplanes passing by, a house of crates, and a blow-up doll's vacation paradise.

Our Australian friendsThe Glue Society, a group of artists, designers and projecteers, have created these amazing series of sculptures and films commissioned by 42Below Vodka where they've created chair rainbows on the frozen tundra, a curb-side wrap party, gratuitous nudie pictures for airplanes passing by, a house of crates, and a blow-up doll's vacation paradise. The Glue Society's past projects include a very chilling series of "God's Eye View" Google Earth's shots of classic biblical scenes (scroll and see down below) and their "Hot With the Chance of Late Storm" melting ice cream truck which we're featuring in the upcoming Hi-fructose Collected Edition. See the new videos and the other Glue Society's projects and much more below.

Rainbow of chairs in the tundra, nudie photos for passing airplanes, blow-up dolls a la plage, gift-wrapped curbside parking, and more

very cool art. check out the god's eye view

Col·lecció de "xapes" per a la campanya presidencial de Barack Obama

That's a whole lotta Barack 'n' Roll

An exhaustive collection of Obama buttons. It's certainly believable that it's a complete collection. Lots of good/interesting design here

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle ... There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. ... "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle

In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Occupy, resist, produce

"Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.""

team structure

The bureaucratic organizational model thrived during the 20th Century. But is it the right model for advertising agencies in the 21st Century? Could an adhocratic model be better suited for these challenging times?

Search technologies are too important for a single company to dominate

"Search is volatile and we'd be nuts to think that Google owned the last word in organising all human knowledge."

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world's knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

good quotes about dewey and the internet

It may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs publicly controlled search

From Pedro on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/pedrobeltrao/ee8c9d29/seventh-graders-describe-scientists-before

[Found via Pedro Beltrão] "Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab."

percepcion de los científicos

Scientists - they CAN be col. Sweet before and after drawings of what kids think scientists are about

Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. Lovely.

"Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab" AWESOME

Jim Carrey profile

cool article on the existential nature of jim carrey's comedy

To quote Martin Buber: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."

article about jim carey

jim carrey, the existential clown!

Why Jim Carrey makes us uncomfortable

The obvious explanation for the mysterious Voynich Manuscript that has defied linguists and cryptographers.

xkcd - A Webcomic - #593: Voynich Manuscript

maps with the actual names translated

Photo Gallery: An Etymologist's View of the World

WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

Honest Tea

The rug is still there, as are the presidential portraits Mr. Bush selected — one of Washington, one of Lincoln — and a collection of decorative green and white plates. During a meeting last week with retired military officials, before he signed an executive order shutting down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama surveyed his new environs with a critical eye. “He looked around,” said one of his guests, retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, “and said, ‘I’ve got to do something about these plates. I’m not really a plates kind of guy.’ ”

Interview with 4chan's creator

An Interview With The Founder of 4chan

moot of 4chan

I like to think that I've grown as a person, but at the same time I think a little piece of me continues to die every year.

interesting interview with moot of 4chan

Moot interview

Rex Sorgatz' website, feeding on internet culture.

The Tone Generation is Ian`s continuing radio series exploring electronic music; a personal selection drawn from his records and cds, looking at different themes and compositions in the era of analogue tape and early synthesizer technology. Within the limitations of his collection and the available time slot, the programmes will hopefully act as an entertaining and enlightening overview of electronic music as it developed in many different areas, and will be of special interest to enthusiasts and students studying the history of analogue electronics, from the formative days up to the 1970s.

The Tone Generation is Ian`s continuing radio series exploring electronic music; looking at different themes or composers in the era of analogue tape and early synthesizer technology.

Interesting article on how Twitter delivers disproportionate attention/audiences to recommended users, and why that flies in the face of fair Web practice.

Why it's time to break out of Twitter

"Why it's time to break out of Twitter" - Dave Winer (Scripting News) http://tr.im/hjy4 [from http://twitter.com/kenmat/statuses/1319637185]

Why it's time to break out of Twitter First, so there are no misunderstandings, I am using Twitter, I will continue to use Twitter and I will recommend Twitter to others, as I have been for 2 or so years. This is not me slamming the door on the way out, something I dislike intensely. If you're leaving just go. But I'm not leaving. Permalink to this paragraph There was an event a few weeks back that convinced me that it's time to break out, like jailbreaking an iPhone. I don't like the relationship Twitter-the-service has with Twitter-the-company. Yesterday I was talking with a Twitter board member, Bijan Sabet, someone who is becoming a personal friend, and said that it was good that the phone company wasn't part of the conversation. That's exactly how I feel about the company he is on the board of. Yet they are very much part of the conversation. Permalink to this paragraph

Carr om Googles och Wikipedias symbios och informationssamhällets misslyckande

Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

Wikipedia has come to dominate Google web search results. It often ranks #1 for searches on common topics like Internet and Evolution. Is it true that Wikipedia articles are the very best source of information for all of these topics? Or are we witnessing the effects of a popularity feedback loop, fueled by the principles of least effort, and our tendency to stick with the first and obvious answers? The web link graph is fundamentally a product of socialization, and Google is fundamentally a social search engine. A popularity bias in inherent in all social information systems, leading us all down the same well-trod path. Could it be that, counter to our expectations, the natural dynamic of the web will lead to less diversity in information sources rather than more?

Nicholas Carr questions the internet power of wikipedia & google.

(1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

WSJ.com | Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds

Look at This Article. It's One of Our Most Popular Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds

another piece about "stupidity of crowds"

Popularity is, unfortunately, still all the rage.

These online rankings are public, creating a positive-feedback loop. The more popular something becomes, even if just from a random burst of interest, the more likely it is to grow ever more popular. And that has troubling implications about the effects of all sorts of popularity rankings, from bestseller charts to election polls. Frequently, popularity rankings speak less to the merits of what's being observed and more to the fact that crowds are observing it. In other words, peer pressure.

This used to be called the "lowest common denominator." Now it is called "the wisdom of crowds" or "the democratization of X." Anyway upshot: "Frequently, popularity rankings speak less to the merits of what's being observed and more to the fact that crowds are observing it."

"Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds"

"...the study showed that popularity is both unstable and malleable ... Deducing merit from popularity 'can lead to self-reinforcing snowballs of popularity, which can become decoupled from the underlying reality," says [the] study co-author."

8 I was a drug mule and got busted on my first trip. My first time, but the amount (marijuana) was enormous and I got 4 years. First two years out, I had some bad

"So, I was homeless for about 4 years until the manager of a car dealership took a chance on me and now I am the manager of our detailing department. Okay, so what are the things that I really appreciate?"

"Light switches: In a shelter, lights come on, lights come off and you have no say. The ability to control your own lighting is a big deal. ... Weather: I don't pay much attention to weather anymore. On the streets, weather is your life. A homeless guy rummaging for newspapers only wants one section, the weather report. If you can read, and you know the weather, you will have every dude you know asking what is coming. ... Health Care Fear: Did you hear about that Bumfights video? It's BS! No homeless guys are going to fight. We never fight each other because everyone is afraid of getting hurt. You hear about guys who sprain their ankle and then die because they couldn't move for two weeks. Or, you hear about a guy who cuts his arm and his arm swells up the size of his leg. Little injuries kill. I was always terrified of getting hurt because of that."

"Light switches: In a shelter, lights come on, lights come off and you have no say. The ability to control your own lighting is a big deal."

8% wereldwijd is econoom; de meerderheid jurist

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

ter, Wen Jiabao, specialised in g

Economist article on the prevalence of lawyers in U.S. and U.K. politics.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored. The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

Scientists say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information from e-mail and other interruptions.

We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies. It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.

So... does the internet make us smarter? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

Ty lidi nikdy neslyseli treba o LEMovi?

Christakis: "Creo que formamos redes sociales porque los beneficios de una vida conectada son superiores a los costos. Si siempre soy violento contigo o te doy información errónea o te pongo triste o te infecto con gérmenes mortales tú cortarías los lazos conmigo y la red se desintegraría."

Mind Over Mass Media http://ping.fm/Y9SGX

Steven Pinker - Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.

Mind Over Mass Media http://nyti.ms/b4IVOC | Twitter, e-mail and PowerPoint are far from making us stupid — they are keeping us smart.

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.”

RT @kenanmalik: The Internet does not make you stupid any more than an encyclopaedia makes you smart: http://nyti.ms/d3LP6f

Funny review of SATC2

SATC2 review

the BEST SATC2 review EVAR http://bit.ly/dfu2zB [thanks @doclorraine @doctorcdf @BangsandaBun]

sex and the city review

Via http://silentwordsspeakloudest.blogspot.com/

A delightfully snakry and scathing review of the latest entry into Carrie Bradshaw's episodic stretch-mark-ridden monster series...

Kermode on SATC2 http://bit.ly/bstWN7 The Stranger piece http://bit.ly/beslgb and VC for good measure http://bit.ly/bOV89A

Smile, Breathe and go slowly

RT @draenews: Del the tao of productivity | Zen Habits: http://bit.ly/cshRLw

In this age of digital communication, we’re busier than ever. And yet, in all of our sound and fury, we seem to have no time for focus, for what’s important, for thinking.

read it

It's not just a matter of just "picking Theora" to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper! The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs! Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It's not just a matter of just "picking Theora" to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper! The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs! Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

This is an alarming notice about the licensing fine print of "open" video codec for h.264. It's open, but only under certain circumstances. Use it commercially? Pay money.

This is F*CKING UN-BE-LIEV-ABLE!! How the MPEG-LA has a foot in the door to ALL our self-filmed documents...

"We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends. It's not just a matter of just "picking Theora" to export a video to Youtube and be clear of any litigation. MPEG-LA's trick runs way deeper!..."

zappos culture

"social experiments"

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

Why I Sold Zappos Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.

Which country leads the pack for social networking? How do people spend their time online? It's all here.

How The World Spends Its Time Online (infographics) http://ow.ly/208cV via @Larryferlazzo

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.

Does anybody really believe that long hours at a desk are a vocational ideal?

Gary Wolf, of Wired and The Quantified Self, describes personal data collection and analysis in NYT magazine.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Sick Systems

sick systems, sick workplaces

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you'll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you'll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn't, you'll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there's a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It's the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people. How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy: Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises.

Creating sick systems to ensnare unwitting lovers and/or employees.

This blog is about the business aspects of running Bingo Card Creator, a small software company. A brief summary of the last few years is available here. If you like what you see, I encourage you to sign up for the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none.

Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing

"And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”" this is beautiful

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

Daughters preferred over sons, women more successful

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women&#8217;s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn&#8217;t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way&#8212; and its vast cultural consequences

"Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences"

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away.

As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, women begin to have the advantage.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.” But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia. http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D12295

NYT article about the singularity movement

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system. The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

"I like the internet, but I don't want to become its love slave." Well said, @ebertchicago http://cwu.me/dnrbvv (thx for @ cx, @digiphile) [from http://twitter.com/MacDivaONA/statuses/16081979732]

Roger Ebert-"I vowed I would never become a Twit. I have been humbled...": http://bit.ly/ddJQyE /via @SocialMedia411

RT @SocialMedia411: Roger Ebert - "I vowed I would never become a Twit. I have been humbled...": http://bit.ly/ddJQyE ★★★

Everyone could learn a thing or two from Roger Ebert: http://bit.ly/ddJQyE

RT @florencedesruol: @Kriisiis tu as lu son billet sur l'addiction je l'avais tweeté il y a qq temps ? http://is.gd/cXxfC

Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! by @ebertchicago http://spncr.me/b7 (awesome)

"I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct." Roger Ebert discusses the benefits of Twitter.

Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) on how he became a convert to #twitter http://bit.ly/bWReQo #eventprofs

Pioneer One is the latest project from Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith whose previous indie feature The Lionshare, became VODO's biggest success to date with over 450,000 downloads since its release. The success of the project inspired the writer/director duo to develop this quality drama in collaboration with VODO and its distribution partners. With a successful distribution of the pilot they're hunting for the donors and sponsors that will make the continuation of the show possible.

Fan-funded sci-fi torrent download

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: "Existence is elsewhere." — André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto | http://ow.ly/21xM1 [from http://twitter.com/avivao/statuses/16753976754]

The Anosognostic's Dilemma. Errol Morris, Dunning

Dunning

This made me wonder if story telling (or writing) is just helping others get as much out of your imagination as you do.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger."

"First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds."

The Pleasures of Imagination - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education http://goo.gl/c7t8 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/16164664745]

The beauty of writing systems is that each has something unique from which to draw inspiration. Two weeks ago, in the first part of this article, we covered Arabic and East-Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) and a few Indic scripts (Devanagari, Thai and Tibetan).

Money quote: "The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them."

"The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned." This is a very interesting look at the frequency with which this show (that I have never seen) addresses copyright issues without actually addressing copyright issues. And it's dead-on about the potential for a television show or other media of this popularity to effect social change in the realm of copyright perception.

Glee Club apparent disregard for copyright

Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture http://bit.ly/cB8z8x

TED video

the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected.

“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

is it good or bad?

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading. Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.

http://www.youtube.com/play #YouTube, #HP, #Intel y la Fundación #Guggenheim unidos para mostrarnos los mejores videos del mundo

i mean play button in stone

グッゲンハイム美術館がYouTubeとコラボして、映像コンテストやっている！

A collaboration between YouTube and Guggenheim Museum. To recognise and showcase the most remarkable online videos from around the world. The work will be judged by experts that will decide which 200 leading videos that will be shown at the Guggenheim museum in New York. The firs biannual Event.

Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn; but their story is both plausible and sobering. Plausible, because it brings so many aspects of the culture wars into sharper focus. Sobering, because the economic and cultural forces battering traditional family norms show no signs of abating -- but the new, education-centered pathway to adulthood is often least accessible to those who need it most.

In red America, families form adults

"New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until marriage, it enjoins: Don't form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility. In other words, *adults form families*. Family life marks the end of the transition to adulthood, not the beginning. Red America still prefers the traditional model."

RT @brainpicker: Do "family values" weaken families? Very compelling read from National Journal http://is.gd/c3p5t [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/13765341391]

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

Web Services as Governments http://bit.ly/dcQn3M via @VenessaMiemis | Related: War http://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/ [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/16160255165]

As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don't make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time and energy to create useful services. The value of Twitter is not in the software that runs on their servers; it is in the content that 180 million people contribute to their network - same with Facebook. Many would argue that Apple makes things, but even there, the full experience of the iPhone has a lot to do with the 200,000 applications that others created to run on the device. A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.

Apple, Facebook, Craigslist, et all as governments (totalitarian, state economies, libertarians?)

Social networks act as governments with their APIs.

"They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook's failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits."

"Facebook's imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model..."

Privacy. Seemingly altruistic companies screwing over their users for monetization and business models

What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flameup? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.

AJ Jacobs: My colossal task burden - loved this article! http://bit.ly/bcwvQx

Is multi-tasking bad for you? As somebody who suffers from a chronic butterfly mind, I do wonder whether becoming a a 'uni-tasker' wouldn't be a bad idea. A thought provoking and amusing read.

As a counterpoint to the NYTimes article, AJ Jacobs on his experiment living life with no multitasking http://bit.ly/bhMVL9

When AJ Jacobs learned multitasking was bad for you, he decided to kick his chronic addiction to mental juggling. Get ready for Operation Focus…

RT @openofficespace: RT @JasonSpector: Why did so many successful entrepreneurs & start-ups come out of PayPal? Answered by Insiders - h ...

RT @hackernewsbot: Why did so many successful startups come out of PayPal? Answered by Insiders... http://bit.ly/9uRk73

RT @eni_kao: [Sochol] La génération sans pudeur apprend à se préserver en ligne et à s'auto-censurer. http://nyti.ms/cPWLZ8 (via @palpitt)

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

LETTER FROM MOSCOW about Chatroulette. Andrey Ternovskiy, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout from Moscow, has a variety of explanations for why he created the Web site Chatroulette. The most reliable version, however, centers on a shop called Russian Souvenirs, where Ternovskiy started working in 2008, selling Soviet paraphernalia…

ndrey Ternovskiy, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout from Moscow, has a variety of explanations for why he cr

perfil do criador do chat roulette

#10. Google Has a Company Dinosaur.

Zehn nette Fakten über Google. Manche werden sich vielleicht noch erinnern, wie das war, damals... ;-)

N paar Google Fakten wie der erste Google Rechner... aus LEGO! :D

Google is not your average company and it's fitting that they have a history chock full of quirk. Here are 10 facts you may not have known about Google.

i agree 100% on the following One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

A brief post by Alain de Botton about fasting from cultural consumption.

... @ City Journal. "Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting."

Curiously, boldly short comment on distraction: "The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting."

The obsession with current events is relentless. Our minds need to go on a diet - by Alain de Botton

@ale_benevides Yes, we probably need to go on a "diet" and change our relation to knowledge, people, and ideas http://ow.ly/1Zjzc

the first cyborg is now the first infected cyborg. TOI esque headline on BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10158517.stm [from http://twitter.com/madguy000/statuses/14764804819]

Everybody on TV has been reading the same newspaper for years.

Os personagens de TV só leem notícia velha: http://migre.me/PxeK Observação muito sagaz :P

diario falso que aparece en un montón de series y películas

They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture.

To be uncharacteristically serious for half a nanosecond, yes, Woot has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon...

Wishing all CEOs were like this

(The funniest letter ever to announce a takeover) We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because...every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July... we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.

It's already legendary, and it's quite possible there will never be another internal email from a CEO as good as this: http://bit.ly/ckni1o – dick costolo (dickc) http://twitter.com/dickc/statuses/17474430910

picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner.

All Joy and No Fun | Why parents hate parenting (parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their... http://ff.im/-nq6wU

read this when I have time...

particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with.

Via Ben. Fascinating analysis of parenting, expectations, happiness, the history of parenting, etc.

"From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines."

Why parents hate parenting.

oh dear,

All Joy and No Fun

STILL NEED TO READ

"She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, 'I am not a brand' ... Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation."

Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation. They think the message only goes one way—out. Things must be shouted. Things must be thrust in your face. Things must be sold.

The Internet is about conversation, not about branding or selling.

RT @peteashton The most important thing you will read about Social Media this week: http://bit.ly/ckRInQ – Andrew Dubber (dubber) http://twitter.com/dubber/statuses/16814698958

Author on social media.

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone.

anti-branding manifesto

// I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to *commodify* everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird. // i cry with laughter and i love her ♥♥♥

RT @mbanzi: All of Tarkovsky's films now available free online: http://bit.ly/bdrXsl via @timo

RT @sixtus: WOW! "All Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online" http://bit.ly/acHIUh

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) firmly positioned himself as the finest Soviet director of the post-War period. But his influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union.  The Cahiers du cinéma consistently ranked his films on their top ten annual l

Red social para compartir citas, ordenadas por categorías

Recommended by Lifehacker

"All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure" -Qwoted from Mark Twain, mcdavis /Qwotebook" ( http://bit.ly/c1OfTL )

Quote-sharing Site for famous and everyday quotes. Youtube for quotes.

#WEB2.0 - #QWOTEBOOK - http://ow.ly/1VAfV - Quote y/ friends, attribute quotes to them and even provide context and #feeds . Cool!

para guardar las citas o frases celebres que te parezcan

RT @biomatushiq: pity for us, evening owls :) Morning people rule the world http://bit.ly/9Ov9Er [from http://twitter.com/matushiq/statuses/18620682631]

사진이..ㅎ RT @bookedit: "아침형 인간이 세계를 지배하는 이유"를 밝힌 연구 결과가 나왔네요. 현재의 사회환경에서 저녁형 인간보다 좀더 주도적으로 상황을 이끌어갈 수 있기 때문이라네요. http://bit.ly/dh5Mw8

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia...

ein im Ausland lebender Amerikaner liest s. Landsleuten die Leviten, lesenswert (English) http://bit.ly/9mcDsE ich fand es spannend #vfbb – Vera F. Birkenbihl (VeraFBirkenbihl) http://twitter.com/VeraFBirkenbihl/statuses/18785239408

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia...

ein im Ausland lebender Amerikaner liest s. Landsleuten die Leviten, lesenswert (English) http://bit.ly/9mcDsE ich fand es spannend #vfbb – Vera F. Birkenbihl (VeraFBirkenbihl) http://twitter.com/VeraFBirkenbihl/statuses/18785239408

Via Ida: "everything_is_in_real_life" :P

"IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as 'real life,' it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century."

Why are we ashamed of our online lives? It is part of our lives. http://ow.ly/2dlxy – baldy7 (baldy7) http://twitter.com/baldy7/statuses/18914126930

Why are we ashamed of our online lives? It is part of our lives. http://ow.ly/2dlxy

"It's time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline. Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet's transformative potential opens up..."

There's no denying the differences between life online and off. In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that "reality" includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

What if we stopped all the hand wringing and really honored our online lives? http://j.mp/dcifHx #wrbm #life_online

RT @MichaelSurtees: RT @Malbonnington: 2 sides to a story: The bliss found in switching off: http://j.mp/dyvrSc; & the joys of being onl ...

I liked this video for it's story and editing. It tells it all in ~2min.

Guy who lives in a 89 sq ft house...awesome!

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Make the most out of every day with helpful info that's all about you. What are you waiting for? Go check out Vitality today from the experts at Yahoo! Better yourself and better your life at http://vitality.yahoo.com/

via jared / ida

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

Via Ida: "everything_is_in_real_life" :P

"IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as 'real life,' it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century."

Updated: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/new-york-times-tweet/

RT @romenesko NYT tells staff: "Tweet" has yet to achieve the status of standard English -- so don't use it. http://is.gd/cK7JX – Steve Rubel (steverubel) http://twitter.com/steverubel/statuses/15850485557

Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet'

Ceci n'est pas une tweet. http://slate.me/breHfL The treachery of editorial standards, via @stevesilberman @hangingnoodles [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/15857259604]

Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went out, asking writers to abstain from the invented past-tense and other weird iterations of the magical noun-verb "Twitter." His case isn't terrible, actually—and he offers this terrifying vision: "Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail.'" Oh dear. Well, read for yourself and decide.

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet' http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/new-york-times-bans-the-word-tweet – coryhaik (coryhaik) http://twitter.com/coryhaik/statuses/16169371772

New York Times Bans the word 'tweet' - out of spite? http://bit.ly/ah1f12 #NYT /via @hectorlima – naomi covacs (laconics) http://twitter.com/laconics/statuses/15928417052

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet' - The Awl http://bit.ly/aJB49T

Current (July 2010) stats on mobile use and how we are communicating, sharing pictures, email, vids and more... good stats for presentations and/or instruction.

Stats on mobile access and use in 2010

Parisians call it a gruyère. For hundreds of years, the catacombs under the city have been a conduit, sanctuary, and birthplace for its secrets. The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels, striking students descended in 1968, as did patriots during the Second World War. The Nazis visited too, building a bunker in the maze below the 6th arrondissement. Honeycombed across 1,900 acres of the city, the vast majority of the tunnels are not strictly speaking “catacombs.” They house no bones. Limestone (and, to the north of the city, gypsum) quarries, these are the mines that built Paris. The oldest date back two thousand years to Roman settlers, but most were excavated in the construction boom of the late Middle Ages. Riddling the Left Bank, these tunnels were at first beyond the city’s southern limits. But as Paris’s population grew, so did the city—and soon whole neighbourhoods were built on this infirm ground.

this is really, really cool. On August 23, 2004, they discovered a cinema sixty feet beneath Paris.

RT @ebertchicago: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock: The Secret City Beneath Paris. http://bit.ly/93gYTB

crazy french secret society does cool things in the catacombs, doesn't want publicity, fame, attention

Does language profoundly influence the way people see the world? http://bit.ly/cAtxU8 (via @SteveAkinsSEO @lindahollier)

This is an interesting article describing the differences of understanding in different languages.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

Add: http://bit.ly/aRLx4F @nedkumar: ..how language influences the way people see the world. Lost in Translation http://bit.ly/ba7GUV

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871

Nick Yee, (year?)

Almost 3 decades ago, in 1978, Elaine Hatfield wrote a seminal book on the topic of love - teasing apart passionate and companionate love. She defined passionate love as "a state of intense longing for union with another" and companionate love as "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". Around the same time, Dorothy Tennov was trying to answer the same question in her book "Love and Limerence" and, similar to Hatfield, quickly differentiated between the “love” that is sincere concern and caring as opposed to the “love” that is fiery, euphoric and ephemeral. ... Tennov coined the term “limerence” for the latter so as to be able to discuss it as a concept separate from “love”. She noted that “love” is an emotion that is acted on, while “limerence” is more of a transformed state that people go into (the difference in the proverbial “I love you, but I’m not in love with you”).

Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love? - http://j.mp/98a0ua

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

Paul Graham.

"Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption."

"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago." "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US... You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly." "We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."

as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363.

This is just delightful.

I don't know whether it's going to come in the form of a more successful movie franchise about librarians than that TV thing Noah Wyle does, or a basic-cable drama about a crime-fighting librarian (kinda like the one in the comic Rex Libris), or that reality show I was speculating about, but mark my words, once you've got Old Spicy on your side and you can sell a couple of YouTube parodies in a couple of months, you're standing on the edge of your pop-culture moment. Librarians: prepare.

A quick reminder from NPR.

RT @SterlingBooks: From @NPR Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries http://n.pr/bva1RY